This is clearly an idealistic approach. A materialistic view is better explained in Fernand Braudel's "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century".
Armchair philosopher - From my reading, it appears that the corporation structure really took stronghold in Europe, giving huge incentives to tinkers and risk takers.
That, and the collapse of Dutch East India outposts to British East India company opened up access to new trade. Resources from the new world also jumpstarted the process. It was the perfect combo of corporate incentives and unrestricted access to global resources that propelled people to wealthier lives and thus, higher level of productivity (you can spend years researching on steam engines if you don't have to spend your life farming). This is exactly the state of America since after WW2, if you were to compare.
In comparison, China was not handed any colonies, lacked the corporation structure and was caught up in dynastic infighting. There was no new world to extract resources from and almost certainly wasn't united the way it is today.
No systemic incentive structure and inability to access global resources left people in poverty or produced little in the way of innovation.
though Hero’s engine is a steam engine, it is practically useless as anything besides a curiosity and certainly could not have powered an industrial revolution
Yes, but I am confident if there would have been demand, they would have improved on it. It can open temple doors so I do not think it is too far away from a useful machine.
There’s an argument to be made that the Black Death broke Europe (or especially Britain) out of a local minimum, by killing off labor. This reduced the necessary rate of return to physical capital and innovation. (Why invest in an iron plow, when you can just set more serfs to the task with wooden ones?) and ultimately this planted the seeds of the industrial revolution.
I'd recommend guns germs and steel by Diamond if you're interested in such thoughts. He doesn't cover china, but the book is basically about this topic. Nice easy read, recommended if you've got time to kill over the holidays.
Same. I have a sucralose energy drink every day after lunch. I generally don’t add sugar and buy low-sugar products. The joy this drink gives me sometimes feels like a drug trip.
Make sure to focus on the aspartame section, which doesn't show the same insulin effects as other sweeteners
It is hard to understand how aspartame influences the gut microbiota because this NNS is rapidly hydrolyzed in the small intestine. In fact, even with the ingestion of very high doses of aspartame (>200 mg/kg), no aspartame is found in the blood because of its rapid breakdown (29).
"it’s surely better than the light of consciousness vanishing entirely when the sun eats the Earth in 7.5 billion years, no?"
The Earth will lose its oxygen in about 1 billion years and undergo runaway warming in about 1.4 billion years. By the time the Earth is eaten by the Sun (if it is; mass loss by the Sun might prevent this), the Earth will have been sterilized for longer than it has currently existed.
Also, thankful that (despite the timescale for O(1) changes to O2 in the atmosphere being ~10 million years) not once since the Precambrian did O2 levels fall low enough to wipe out vertebrate life.
Although I'm not sure it's really correct to be thankful for effects of observer selection bias.
>That even though the turn humans made from hunter-gatherer bands into agriculture pretty clearly made life worse, it eventually led to the industrial revolution
Which also made life worse to begin with. Without the enclosure movement depriving peasants of their land and pushing them to work in the factories in horrendous conditions for pitiful pay it likely wouldnt have happened.
Though I'm pretty thankful for the workers' movement that followed that led to innovations like the weekend and criminalization of child labor.
I would like to see evidence, that people were pushed into the factories. I was under the impression, that many went into the factories, because working in agriculture was not easy, as machines were not common.
And once factories were there, humans improved working conditions there. While in agriculture, well, way more difficult to do, as the work had to be done.
In seeing what has recently happened in China, I would agree. A gigantic migration has occurred in the past few decades where Chinese peasants moved from rural areas to the cities to work in factories. I thought for a long time "Why would so many people do this? This factory conditions are quite horrible, or at least the definition of soul-crushing monotony.
I watched a pretty good documentary about this, and the answer pretty clearly seemed to be opportunity. It's kinda similar to how legions of people move to LA to be actors. 99% of them will be worse off for the experience, many of them much more so, but even the chance to escape the conditions of their situation is a powerful draw for a lot of people.
I also have seen friends from east europe leaving their home countries for opportunity in the west, even when judging from my warm, cosy, settled place, i thought, that their jobs were crappy. But it was opportunity for them.
And now they also judge from their warm, cosy, settled place. and try to make working conditions better for for their fellows.
> 99% of them will be worse off for the experience, many of them much more so
Chinese migrant workers aren't comparable to aspiring LA actors. 99% of people aren't stupid or easily deluded by dreams. You don't decide to move into a factory because you think you'll become the next Andrew Carnegie. You do so you can send money to your family in case if the harvest isn't good or they need to see a doctor. People have it so good here that they have completely forgotten all the hardships of preindustrial life.
> "Why would so many people do this? This factory conditions are quite horrible, or at least the definition of soul-crushing monotony.
Because, as horrible as the factory conditions might seem to modern eyes, they weren't, in general, as horrible as being an agricultural stoop labor peasant (either in the west in premodern or Victorian times, or in China today).
Serfs were running away to the cities way back in the Middle Ages, long before any Enclosure Acts.
The expected payoff wasn't nearly as low as it is for acting. While life in the cities wasn't a bed of roses by any means (deaths from infectious diseases were at a horrific level, to name just one downside), the one big advantage was that you no longer had a "master" or "lord of the manor" who essentially had the power of life and death over you. Yes, a factory might have a cruel foreman, and many did, but the workers were allowed to change jobs. Serfs didn't have that privilege.
But on the other hand, the Enclosures provoked a number riots[1], so I don't think everyone agreed with you that "free" city life was better than rural serfdom, with common rights intact.
Of course everyone didn't agree. People don't work that way. Even today, there are people who prefer living in cabins without electricity or running water somewhere out in the Brooks Range of Alaska. However, most people don't do that (though a large number claim to aspire to something like that, few actually do it, and of the ones who actually do it, even fewer stick it out once the realities set in).
The point is that the migration to the cities was in progress long before the Enclosure Acts came on the scene.
I'm not sure that is the point. I personally don't think we can treat the choice made by such large numbers of people as comparable to the choices of a few modern cabin-dwelling weirdos. I think we should take seriously what appears to have seemed preferable for large numbers of people at the time, given the information they had, and lacking the benefit of centuries of hindsight.
> Why would so many people do this? This factory conditions are quite horrible, or at least the definition of soul-crushing monotony.
Another part of the answer is that their lives in agriculture were not all that great either. Many of them could have moved back, but they did not, because as bad as this was, it was still better or comparable. The factories made them earn more money and regular money.
People tend to romanticize the agricultural or even hunters-gatherers lifestyle. In ideal conditions, it can be good. But conditions are not always ideal.
I was going to argue about the dangers of factory work, then I remembered just how dangerous a scythe can be. Work, in general, was a dangerous thing back then.
It depends on your definition of "pushed" or "forced". People often migrated from country to city for economic reasons. It was the only way to make a living for many. Others simply wanted to make more money or take advantage of other opportunities. You might say economic circumstances forced them to give up agriculture for factory work.
Google "The Enclosures". In Britain people had their right to subsist off common land removed by Parliament[1].
You can argue that the move from agriculture to industry, from countryside to city, would have happened anyway. What is indisputable is that for many people, the possibility of subsisting in the ways they had before were systematically removed by the state (at the time under the complete control of the property-owning classes).
Would enclosures not have happened if industrialization didn't? IMO this was inevitable because peasants simply lost the leverage that they had received after the black plague. Countries like the US had no such laws, yet they all went through the same industrialization occurred all the same.
I don't know. Impossible to tell, I guess. I'm just pointing out that choice didn't come into it for many people. What choices they would have made had history gone differently, I can't say.
Whatever might, hypothetically have happened in another timeline, as a matter of historical fact it was not a peaceful, free-market process of people voting with their feet.
The story is complex. There aren't really no "gimme evidence" answers to these kinds of issues. A lot of people over centuries in many countries give you a lot if stories.
One major factor was population growth. This was due to the coming of American crops (corn, potatoes, etc) and the green revolution (fertilizers, machinery, etc.).
Another major factor (say in Ireland, where I'm from) was a change in the social-political system. There was a shift from old the old lordship order to a more modern landlord order. Relationships (rights, obligations) between lords/landlords and the landed an unlanded peasantry... Today we might call it rural unemployment and/or a small farm debt crisis. The latter half of this change is known in Ireland as "the land wars."
There were also "pull" factors. These are more complicated, because they do involve choice. Cities offered a lot of hope. You might do very well in a city. Many did poorly though, and food/sanitation was often worse. A lot of the migration was (for example) adolescents sent to work as domestic servants... so thinking in terms of "homo economicus" is best tempered with some visualisations... say Oliver Twist.
Similar things happen today in developing economies. Rural unemployment and stagnation. Cities that offer shiny opportunities in a game with few winners and many losers. Hence urban slums, 80 hr workweeks, etc.
Working conditions in factories was also a 200+ year process. Unions played a big role. Politics played a big role. Revolutions and fear of revolutions played a big role. In Ireland, Soviet and pre-soviet revolutions were the threat that catalyzed land and labour reforma immediately before independence from the UK and after it. The Irish independence war was contemporary to the Russian Revolution, so the politics were naturally intertwined.
For the most part, material conditions for the poor were a lot worse in the cities for most of the industrial era(s). Education was better and people became more worldly in cities. Rural peasantry tends to be culturally stagnant by default. Marx, in his day, saw this migration as the preceding factor to revolution. He was snobbishly dismissive of peasants' ability to evolve culturally, so revolution had to wait until a generation or two was seasoned by city life.
Theres been some research in modern day Bangladesh that seems to suggest that a presence of a garment factory in a village (aka sweatshop to some people) is associated with higher educational attainment for women and school completion rates.
Basically, garment factory work requires some level of literacy and numeracy. Having a factory in your village which provides jobs and independence vs farm labor work provides people an incentive to complete a certain level of schooling.
I'm thankful that I was born in the late 20th century, in a country where working in a factory paid well, farming isn't done with slave labor, where wars are limited (unless you live where the war is) and my middle class standard of living and lifespan would be the envy of kings in the not so distant past. It's an amazing time to be alive, and so easy to see the negative. The truth is, for many of us, we're living a life that our ancestors couldn't imagine. Let's keep striving to make life better on earth for everyone.
Hunter gatherers routinely starved to death, and had violent confrontations with other tribes. This is evidenced by the different propagation of Y chromosomes vs mitochondrial DNA, as well as other evidence.
It was not better. It was just different, and ultimately less safe than living in agricultural communities.
The unibomber's manifesto goes into a lot of detail on the merits of nativeist life, and many modern anarchists subscribe to this philosophy and co-opt it into a neo-socialist dogma, but it is entirely without scientific merit.
I like this more unusual list of things to be grateful for, as it complements well what one is usually reminded to be grateful for. I'd like a more fundamental point there, though:
Gratefulness seems to be primarily a ternary operator: "<SOMEONE> is grateful to <SOMEONE> for <SOMETHING>." (like "a ? b : c" in C).
That second SOMEONE is the one that the being grateful is directed at, as they are responsible for things being the way they are. (Being grateful to anyone not causally connected to what one is grateful about seems most weird.)
Does that not mean that every grateful person acknowledges God's existence, at least implicitly?
Unless gratefulness is actually binary (x is grateful for y), and directing this gratefulness towards someone is completely optional. (One might argue that the object of gratefulness is optional as well, and you can be grateful simpliciter, in an unqualified way. But to them I'd say there's an implied, general, object: the world, life, existence, or something like this.)
> Does that not mean that every grateful person acknowledges God's existence, at least implicitly?
No. It means that the emotion of gratefulness isn't always a simple reduction to what you have there. Similarly, I think thwave who replied to you is also wrong. The emotion doesn't have to always follow such a simplified framework or be legibly caused. Of course it has to have some causal chain, but I think the legibility could be as opaque as "X is grateful for Y because Z suggested that maybe they should be" where Z didn't have anything to do with Y, Y doesn't necessarily do much for X, and so on. It doesn't make the emotion of gratefulness any less valid. I expect the ways the emotion could come about is varied enough to avoid these simplifications.
> That second SOMEONE is the one that the being grateful is directed at, as they are responsible for things being the way they are. (Being grateful to anyone not causally connected to what one is grateful about seems most weird.)
How does one go about (accurately) decomposing causality in a system this complex and poorly understood though?
This is also good point.
Maybe the following paragraph can help.
"causes is the two things coming together or being together, which is called ‘association;’ they suppose the two things cause one another. Also, since the non-existence of one thing is the cause of a bounty’s non-existence, they suppose that the thing’s existence is also the cause of the bounty’s existence. They offer their thanks and gratitude to the thing and fall into error. For a bounty’s existence results from all the bounty’s conditions and preliminaries. Whereas the bounty’s non-existence occurs through the non-existence of only a single condition.
For example, someone who does not open the canal to water the garden is the reason and cause of the garden drying up and the non-existence of bounties. But the existence of the garden’s bounties is dependent on hundreds of conditions besides the man’s duty and the bounties come into being through dominical will and power, which are the true cause.
Yes, ‘association’ is one thing and the cause is another. You receive a bounty, but the intention of a person to bestow it on you was the ‘associate’
of the bounty, not the cause. The cause was divine mercy. If the man had not intended to give you the bounty, you would not have received it and it would have been the cause of the bounty’s non-existence. But in consequence of the above rule, the desire to bestow cannot be the cause of the bounty; it can only be one out of hundreds of conditions.... from meaning of Quran "
> That second SOMEONE is the one that the being grateful is directed at, as they are responsible for things being the way they are. (Being grateful to anyone not causally connected to what one is grateful about seems most weird.)
It is also common to be grateful to <SOMEONE> for <ATTRIBUTE>. For example, I'm grateful to various people for who they are, by which I mean their worldview, their values, and their personality. Generally speaking, these aspects are not under full control of the individual -- they are the result of a complex interaction of their genetics, their experiences, their intentions, their opportunities, their choices, their habits, and much more.
Happier that water freezes at a pretty tolerable temperature and happens to be our main source of sustenance. Makes adding water ice to things a very refreshing experience!
how about: Ice is less dense than liquid water, so it floats. That means bodies of water don't freeze solid in the winter, which would have precluded life anywhere colder than the tropics.
I'm thankful for my kiddos, single dad full time for years and after the alternative i wouldn't have it any other way. I've got a shock of white now because of them though :D I couldn't be more thankful. And I'm gonna stay single until they grow up so they know beyond a doubt how important they are.
If we have something like #2, would that debunk the idea that backing things up exclusively on magnetic media (HDD, tape) is sufficient for restoration? I've never found optical media to be particularly reliable, but it might be a decent hedge against a huge magnetic event.
I know optical media deteriorates over time, so in order to be a hedge, you would need to record it over and over again periodically, preparing for an event you are not sure when it might come. Poses a problem with waste and needed resources.
Nothing concrete I can point to of course, I'm just wary of being actively grateful for it... it seems to me that some of the subtle and/or knock-on effects may not be fully understood, and there could also be better alternative sweeteners that didn't make this list.
> it seems to me that some of the subtle and/or knock-on effects may not be fully understood
There have probably had hundreds of studies done by people who were actively trying to prove something and wrote that they fully believe that there are bad side effects yet not one states they proved something.
I've found that aspartame gives me really bad insomnia. Almost every time this happens I'll go through what I ate that day and it's always something containing aspartame that was not in my normal diet. This is how I learned that those flavor packets that are mixed into water bottles and some zero-calorie flavorings used at coffee shops contain aspartame.
That even though we evolved as ruthless replication machines, we’ve somehow risen out of the muck and we currently find ourselves running cultural software that’s way out of sync with what game theory would dictate, and perhaps we can seize the moment and build a civilization that can tame the brutal dynamics that created us.
This. Our scientific understanding on how humans cooperate to not simply feed each other, but prosper with endless creative opportunities of cultivation, demonstrates we are at a tipping point to potentially permanently limit the recurrence of violence inter-generationally. Think of it as reversing unjust hereditary trauma. So many humans being born now see a path to their own prosperity, this century will be remembered as leaving the Planet of the Apes behind.
I feel quite the opposite. Game theory helps understand why people act, & it let's you reverse engineer what they really value, as opposed to what they claim to value
It's like saying physics has been conquered because airplanes should fall out of the sky. No, your existing notion was flawed, but reality didn't change
People don't act towards incentives because of game theory, it's that game theory models their incentives. If you're acting differently, it means you've built a different incentive system
This is important because it means game theory can be used to construct incentives to guide corporate behavior (ie we can avoid tragedy of the commons by forcing externalities to be accounted for, rather than left for the people), but pleas that corporations will act for the incentive of moral goodness is only a method to fool public debate into letting the tragedy go on. Because it's in the corporate interest to not pay for their externalities
Maybe we're getting at the same thing, & I'm just picking up too much of a "shed thy mathematical yolk" vibe
I look at things from our universal cellular life substrate which ends up ordering ourselves to such civilized dynamics. That natural substance is still propelling ourselves, beyond contract laws - it is not up to profit motivation to end inter generational violence. If anything, there is profit motivation to keep being brutal! It requires simply the technological possibility - now becoming realized - to enlighten the human race on what is proper accordance with natural motion.
I am grateful for the ignorant. I think we are heavily misguied yowards violence being the problem and not violence lead by greed. Greed leads to violence. We are just conditioned/tamed to believe what gets repeated 24/7 on the screen. I am grateful for the plug. I see we wont have a choice to unplug from our Utopic visionaries soon enough.
Realized after reading this that it's American Thanksgiving today. Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends. I'm thankful for a lovely forum where we can read and share articles like this one.
Agreed. The tone of the HN comments section is occasionally somewhat more contentious now than a few years ago, but it has not generally devolved into the sort of partisan pissing match/bad-faith clusterfuck seen elsewhere in the interwebs. To some extent I attribute that to the fact that valuing science and reason can be a helpful quality in moderating the tone of interaction, even among anons. Which is really a lucky thing.
Another more plausible explanation is that it's psychological. It's common among many who believe aspartame is unhealthy that it gives them migraines or headaches, but in a double-blind study, every single person who self-reported adverse reactions to aspartame were unable to do so over the course of the study. On the other hand, those who claimed sensitivity rated very high on various psychological metrics such as perceived stress and anxiety:
This is not to say that you don't genuinely feel something and are just making it up, but that it's not a consequence of aspartame and is rooted in an entirely different phenomenon that you've associated with aspartame for one reason or another.
Diet sodas to me taste awful, but lately I've been putting a single packet of Equal in my coffee with some vanilla and it tastes great. Lord knows I can cut out the sugar wherever possible.
I'm thankful for existence itself. Sure, it's not always pleasant, but the mere fact that we perceive reality as we do is a fascinating rabbit hole, one that I wish I had discovered decades ago. The subjective experience of existence is one of the big unknowns left in this world, one that I don't think we'll ever truly understand. That's good though, because human curiosity is one of the wonderful, amazing things we have the capability to do (if other Earth-native, non-human sentient beings have similar curiosities, they don't have nearly the ability to explore them, that we know).
I hope everyone who reads this is having a good day today. May you all have fortune and blessing in your lives.
I wish more people were aware that we are likely the only radio-using sapients in a 4'ish light year sphere around us [1] (4.4 ly for a 1MW broadcast, where the most powerful radio transmitter in the world is at 2MW). And that we're roughly in the center of the KBC Void [2], about a billion light years from the nearest "normal" baryonic density of the currently-known universe.
We might not be alone inside the KBC Void, but if we aren't, they and us are on a pretty isolated island of sapients in the currently-known universe.
Sapience is astronomically, vanishingly rare as far as we can tell so far. Some of us treasure it and are thankful for it accordingly. Perceiving reality at the level we do, with the understanding we only scratched an atom of the total surface so far, is both inspiring and humbling at the same time.
My current personal belief is that the universe is currently rife with life on a number of planets, but they're all so far apart that they might as well be the only ones from the perspective of each planet. I feel that it's highly arrogant of humans to presume that "there is no other life in the entire universe, except for Earth".
I am thankful haemoglobin can carry so much oxygen without the iron in it turning to rust. Otherwise we wouldnt be able to breathe.
Well described here,and i have no affiliation
https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102010332
> Due to some [reason], an overpopulation calamity hasn’t yet happened and we might coincidentally stabilize at a level that’s somewhat close to what maximizes average utility...
Given the birthrate trends in developed countries, it's more likely the population will peak and then decline as prosperity spreads. The cause isn't hard to discern - child labor laws - they turn children from potential assets into guaranteed liabilities.
A declining population will be a bad thing; our modern way of life is built on systems that depend on growth (from Wall Street to our tax structures to the various Social Security safety nets countries have in place); take that away and we will have real problems.
7, 23, 24 were driven by the common unusual political occurrence of fair economic opportunity. These rare times where a balance of power occurs, by special circumstances, between the former autocratic rulers and everyone else.
In Britain (7), domestic Royal monopolies were abolished etc creating an economic and legal environment where entrepreneurs would be rewarded. So people started investing their very expensive free time tinkering because it might lead to profit.
Ancient Greece (23) developed the Solonian Constitution which similarly protected the property rights of ‘citizens’ like never before, so Athens became a cultural center of tinkerers, hustlers, thought leaders, influencers etc, and the ideas are what we still have today. Because unlike with Ancient Phoenicia, the Greeks wrote on clay, not on perishable papyrus.
(24) Obviously the US Constitution managed to establish unusual property rights for its European male citizens, and again we see hustlers, thought leaders, influencers etc, because their efforts are far more likely to be rewarded. But this time we see what this political environment looks like close up and we see regular people’s bright ideas materialize in society because the law protects them.
I am thankful that we still today, I mean 11/26/2021 today, still maintain the balance of power that enables our egalitarian laws to stand, and hope that some new technology won’t kill that balance.
To be picky, the timescale/locations of #23 is way off:
Socrates (Athens= 470–399 BC
Plato (Athens) 423-348 BC
Aristotles (Athens) 384–322 BC
Archimedes (of Syracuse) some 2-3 centuries later 287-212 BC
Euclid (of Alexandria) was active in Alexandria around 300-270 BC
Hyppocrates (of Kos) 470-360 BC
Pytagoras (of Samos) 570–495 BC
Thucydides (Athens) 460-400 BC
Herodotus (of Halicarnassus) 484-425 BC
Aesop (?) 620-564 BC
Solon (Athens) 630-570 BC
Pericles (Athens) 495–429 BC
Aristophanes (Athens) 446-386 BC
Sophocles (Athens) 497-406
the:
>That some unknown miracle blend of circumstances happened to arrive in Athens in 500 BC leading a tiny city of 250k people to produce Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aesop, Solon, Pericles, Aristophanes, and Sophocles, and that it might be possible to intentionally recreate such conditions today around the world and spur incredible human flourishing, and why aren’t we working on this?
is more accurately something like:
In the course of several centuries over a vast territory comprising almost all inhabited mediterranean countries some 10-15 people excelled in their fields and many of them happened to live in the main city (and cultural capital) of the area.
Sounds a lot less a miracle, between 630 and 300 BC is three centuries.
Also, the capital of a major economic/military power will usually attract the ambitious people from the surrounding regions. Its equivalent to saying "wow, so many famous actors lived in Hollywood!"
Some of those haven't been reported to sit foot or have much to do with Athens!! At least Archimedes and Pythagoras.. Even Aristotle was a foreigner to Athens, although he learned a lot from his Athenian counterparts! Herodotus wasn't Athenian either!!
> In the course of several centuries over a vast territory comprising almost all inhabited mediterranean countries some 10-15 people excelled in their fields and many of them happened to live in the main city (and cultural capital) of the area.
Your restatement excluded what I think is the most interesting part:
>> and that it might be possible to intentionally recreate such conditions today around the world and spur incredible human flourishing, and why aren’t we working on this?
"Why aren't we working on this" seems like a very good question, one that you don't hear very often - "Why don't we even encounter these sorts of questions more often?" might be an interesting sibling question.
Because recreating such conditions isn't possible, basically because such conditions never existed and the idilliac setup the article seems to describe never happened.
The article seemingly conveys (at least to me) the idea that "by miracle" all those famous philosophers, writers and mathematicians were in the same place at the same time (and possibly had coffee or dinner together), this simply never happened.
So, if the idea is about creating brand new conditions (which ones?) capable to create a city/location where - over three centuries - a handful of people, excelling in their field lived, this has already been done, let's say Rome 200 BC - 100 AD, London 1600-1900, i.e. more or less the capitals (administrative and/or cultural) of large empires that lasted several centuries.
What about saying that such conditions exists right now in contemporary world. We have great amount of thinkers and scientists and technologists and populists and cult leaders.
All of them producing and moving world forward. It is crowded competition, actually.
I wonder if it would be possible for these people and others to produce in a more collaborative manner, perhaps with a shared roadmap, strategy, etc. To me, it seems at least plausible, what's your take?
Socrates was not particularly collaborative. Lived through dictatorship+revolution led by his students and got killed after. The resentments were real. Quite a few people were tortured and killed in that story of betrayal, revolution, contrarevolution, amnesty and broken amnesty.
Like seriously, it was way more violent and bloody then your average western society now. And we don't even go to regular wars against other cities and don't keep slaves. Neither of those two are collaboration.
And now you can actually become citizen without being born from citizen father.
Yep, the cynic in me thinks that actually creating the conditions where a dozen people's speculation on stuff dominates discourse for a couple of millenia like the Greek philosophers is less about the quality of speculation, and more about ensuring that not much else of note is written down...
Lots of stuff gets written down nowadays, but so much of it is crap, and most of everything kind of vanishes into the ether of old forum posts as time marches on.
(7) was driven by the invention of patent law. Expressly royal monopolies on inventing stuff.
(23) is because it's not independent random events. First, Plato literally taught Aristotle and was taught by Socrates. Second, Athens was the capital of an empire (okay, technically a league) so of course the best and brightest descended on Athens.
So, literally like Hollywood attracting actors or SV attracting startups, it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
I’m thankful for yeast. It’s so, so convenient that we have a non-pathogenic bacteria which will eat pretty much any simple sugar, can be found on the surfaces of most fruits, and is essentially effortless to cultivate, which also does a bunch of useful things like leaven bread and make a bunch of delicious short chain fatty acids (both in bread and on their own, like in marmite) and make alcohol (although that one maybe does more harm than good)!
I had this same exact thought the last time i was making bagels. What an absolute miracle it is! And whoever came up with using it to fluff and soften bread through some natural symbiotic reliance of raw nature is just such an incredible step it seems utterly designed from above.
Yes, I’m saying maybe a god exists and loves us because they gave us bread.
Looks like he actually said something similar about wine though:
We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana, as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy! (from a 1779 letter from France to his friend André Morellet)
Also, consider how many flights went smoothly because of alcohol.. I mean, outing myself as British here but (every flight) without a stuff gin or three, that woman in-front of me would have had a stern talking to I can tell you! :}
I wonder if British are more reserved because they’ve evolved to have about a unit or two of alcohol in the blood stream at all times at which point it’s the sweet spot. I jest of course. Also I’m a Brit.
Well, we certainly developed an effective preventative against malaria... And that's before we get to the ballmer peak [0], which I think many of us experienced at one point ;)
Fungi, like plants and animals, are eukaryotes. However, eukaryotes and bacteria occupy the same rung in the taxonomic divisions (they are domains), so it's the more appropriate correction. The third domain is prokaryotes.
I'm thankful for wikipedia which has probably taught me more biology than my professors ever did. So many detailed articles, and it's actually fun to read them because they contain so many details that never seem to get mentioned in school. The abundance of links lead to a fun exploration of the subject and a massive respect for nature and its designs.
Well to be fair the poster was referring to starters for bread which contain natural populations of both yeast and bacteria. So really we should be thankful for both yeast and bacteria. :)
That said, just as the other poster I'm also thankful for pedants like yourself. This is a mistake I probably make myself all the time.
I'm thankful for oxygen because we can breathe it! And it can be found pretty much everywhere in the atmosphere of planet Earth. And I'm thankful for all the other elements that I'm composed of. They can even be used to do other miraculous things. Wonderful!
I'm thankful for mitochondria which allows us to use the oxygen to perform aerobic respiration, enabling more complex forms of life. It seems they were once bacteria which were somehow absorbed by eukaryote cells and turned into an organelle, an hydro-eletro-chemical power plant. Thanks bacteria!
Edward Slingerland Haha written about a hypothesis that beer was the major reason for inventing agriculture. I don’t know how well received that theory is, but it was an interesting and unique take
Only true in dense cities and perhaps onboard seafaring vessels. Most of humanity could find unpolluted sources of water.
You could also say that, without the crutch that was small beer, humanity might have been motivated to learn and implement water treatment/purification techniques and proper sanitation systems centuries earlier.
I like this and totally agree! I baked two naturally leavened loaves of bread this morning for thanksgiving and am currently drinking a beer. On a regular day I would eat some form of yogurt as well. It really is an amazing little part of life. :)
Also yeast is used frequently in medical and biological scientific studies, and helps us learn more about the role of DNA, aging , and certain kinds of cancer.
If it really would set power lines alight, there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do aside from going off the grid and having a small warehouse full of electrical wiring.
Emergency and catastrophe planning has to happen at the national level. I would like to see more leaders (especially these days) come into office with ideas about how to recover from catastrophic events quickly.
By what mechanism do they set power lines on fire in a way that it wouldn't set the lines in my house on fire? Is it the power lines themselves or is it just vicious currents being induced in the lines that cause devices plugged on the other end of the power lines to go up in smoke?
If the grid just shut off power for 24 hours until the CME passed would that solve the problem?
I can easily go 24 hours without power, but not months.
My understanding is that the flare will induce currents in the sub-station transformers, and this is the big problem. Not sure if disconnecting them helps to prevent damage.
> Emergency and catastrophe planning has to happen at the national level. I would like to see more leaders (especially these days) come into office with ideas about how to recover from catastrophic events quickly.
Me too. I'm hoping we'll get lucky and a relatively small-scale catastrophic event will occur, demonstrating to us how ill prepared we are both materially and socially/culturally/cognitively/etc, and that lesson will provide the incentive for us to launch a serious project to get our act cleaned up.
And in the event that no political leaders rise to the occasion, I am hoping that normal civilians realize there is a problem and begin seriously discussing the risks we are running, perhaps eventually leading to some sort of a plan that our leaders do not have the ability to formulate, or perhaps even realize we need.
> I'm hoping we'll get lucky and a relatively small-scale catastrophic event will occur ... and that lesson will provide the incentive for us to launch a serious project to get our act cleaned up.
The current pandemic makes me pessimistic regarding this. There is basically no wake up and preparations for a 10%+ mortality virus. And that without discussing where the virus came from...
Hopefully our satellites are there to detect it and hopefully the world reacts quick enough to shut down the power grid. Would still be horrible, but there are mitigations.
I can't tell if this article is tongue-in-cheek or not. These are all just excruciatingly detailed versions of "I'm thankful the human species came out on the positive side of a lot of dice rolls".
> Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”
> A short horror manga story by Junji Ito. A boy named Owaki, and a girl, Yoshida, meet on Amigara Mountain, where an unsettling discovery has been made. An earthquake has created a huge fault in the mountain, and human-shaped holes are scattered across the face of the fault line. It soon becomes clear that the holes are "calling" to the people they are shaped like. So what happens when they enter the hole? Well, you can be sure that massive amounts of claustrophobia and Nightmare Fuel are involved.
348 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadDoes anybody know other theories about this?
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2017/03/book3.htm
That, and the collapse of Dutch East India outposts to British East India company opened up access to new trade. Resources from the new world also jumpstarted the process. It was the perfect combo of corporate incentives and unrestricted access to global resources that propelled people to wealthier lives and thus, higher level of productivity (you can spend years researching on steam engines if you don't have to spend your life farming). This is exactly the state of America since after WW2, if you were to compare.
In comparison, China was not handed any colonies, lacked the corporation structure and was caught up in dynastic infighting. There was no new world to extract resources from and almost certainly wasn't united the way it is today.
No systemic incentive structure and inability to access global resources left people in poverty or produced little in the way of innovation.
Thanks!
Shameless plug: https://www.alaninu.com/products/energy-drinks-12pk-cosmic-s...
Caffeine is a drug so saying "it feels like" is rather understating it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363527/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7014832/
It is hard to understand how aspartame influences the gut microbiota because this NNS is rapidly hydrolyzed in the small intestine. In fact, even with the ingestion of very high doses of aspartame (>200 mg/kg), no aspartame is found in the blood because of its rapid breakdown (29).
The Earth will lose its oxygen in about 1 billion years and undergo runaway warming in about 1.4 billion years. By the time the Earth is eaten by the Sun (if it is; mass loss by the Sun might prevent this), the Earth will have been sterilized for longer than it has currently existed.
Although I'm not sure it's really correct to be thankful for effects of observer selection bias.
Great article nometheless; it seems like we just got really, really lucky.
Which also made life worse to begin with. Without the enclosure movement depriving peasants of their land and pushing them to work in the factories in horrendous conditions for pitiful pay it likely wouldnt have happened.
Though I'm pretty thankful for the workers' movement that followed that led to innovations like the weekend and criminalization of child labor.
And once factories were there, humans improved working conditions there. While in agriculture, well, way more difficult to do, as the work had to be done.
I watched a pretty good documentary about this, and the answer pretty clearly seemed to be opportunity. It's kinda similar to how legions of people move to LA to be actors. 99% of them will be worse off for the experience, many of them much more so, but even the chance to escape the conditions of their situation is a powerful draw for a lot of people.
I also have seen friends from east europe leaving their home countries for opportunity in the west, even when judging from my warm, cosy, settled place, i thought, that their jobs were crappy. But it was opportunity for them.
And now they also judge from their warm, cosy, settled place. and try to make working conditions better for for their fellows.
Chinese migrant workers aren't comparable to aspiring LA actors. 99% of people aren't stupid or easily deluded by dreams. You don't decide to move into a factory because you think you'll become the next Andrew Carnegie. You do so you can send money to your family in case if the harvest isn't good or they need to see a doctor. People have it so good here that they have completely forgotten all the hardships of preindustrial life.
Because, as horrible as the factory conditions might seem to modern eyes, they weren't, in general, as horrible as being an agricultural stoop labor peasant (either in the west in premodern or Victorian times, or in China today).
Serfs were running away to the cities way back in the Middle Ages, long before any Enclosure Acts.
The expected payoff wasn't nearly as low as it is for acting. While life in the cities wasn't a bed of roses by any means (deaths from infectious diseases were at a horrific level, to name just one downside), the one big advantage was that you no longer had a "master" or "lord of the manor" who essentially had the power of life and death over you. Yes, a factory might have a cruel foreman, and many did, but the workers were allowed to change jobs. Serfs didn't have that privilege.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure#Enclosure_riots
The point is that the migration to the cities was in progress long before the Enclosure Acts came on the scene.
Another part of the answer is that their lives in agriculture were not all that great either. Many of them could have moved back, but they did not, because as bad as this was, it was still better or comparable. The factories made them earn more money and regular money.
People tend to romanticize the agricultural or even hunters-gatherers lifestyle. In ideal conditions, it can be good. But conditions are not always ideal.
You can argue that the move from agriculture to industry, from countryside to city, would have happened anyway. What is indisputable is that for many people, the possibility of subsisting in the ways they had before were systematically removed by the state (at the time under the complete control of the property-owning classes).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure#Parliamentary_Inclos...
Whatever might, hypothetically have happened in another timeline, as a matter of historical fact it was not a peaceful, free-market process of people voting with their feet.
One major factor was population growth. This was due to the coming of American crops (corn, potatoes, etc) and the green revolution (fertilizers, machinery, etc.).
Another major factor (say in Ireland, where I'm from) was a change in the social-political system. There was a shift from old the old lordship order to a more modern landlord order. Relationships (rights, obligations) between lords/landlords and the landed an unlanded peasantry... Today we might call it rural unemployment and/or a small farm debt crisis. The latter half of this change is known in Ireland as "the land wars."
There were also "pull" factors. These are more complicated, because they do involve choice. Cities offered a lot of hope. You might do very well in a city. Many did poorly though, and food/sanitation was often worse. A lot of the migration was (for example) adolescents sent to work as domestic servants... so thinking in terms of "homo economicus" is best tempered with some visualisations... say Oliver Twist.
Similar things happen today in developing economies. Rural unemployment and stagnation. Cities that offer shiny opportunities in a game with few winners and many losers. Hence urban slums, 80 hr workweeks, etc.
Working conditions in factories was also a 200+ year process. Unions played a big role. Politics played a big role. Revolutions and fear of revolutions played a big role. In Ireland, Soviet and pre-soviet revolutions were the threat that catalyzed land and labour reforma immediately before independence from the UK and after it. The Irish independence war was contemporary to the Russian Revolution, so the politics were naturally intertwined.
For the most part, material conditions for the poor were a lot worse in the cities for most of the industrial era(s). Education was better and people became more worldly in cities. Rural peasantry tends to be culturally stagnant by default. Marx, in his day, saw this migration as the preceding factor to revolution. He was snobbishly dismissive of peasants' ability to evolve culturally, so revolution had to wait until a generation or two was seasoned by city life.
Basically, garment factory work requires some level of literacy and numeracy. Having a factory in your village which provides jobs and independence vs farm labor work provides people an incentive to complete a certain level of schooling.
It was not better. It was just different, and ultimately less safe than living in agricultural communities.
The unibomber's manifesto goes into a lot of detail on the merits of nativeist life, and many modern anarchists subscribe to this philosophy and co-opt it into a neo-socialist dogma, but it is entirely without scientific merit.
Gratefulness seems to be primarily a ternary operator: "<SOMEONE> is grateful to <SOMEONE> for <SOMETHING>." (like "a ? b : c" in C).
That second SOMEONE is the one that the being grateful is directed at, as they are responsible for things being the way they are. (Being grateful to anyone not causally connected to what one is grateful about seems most weird.)
Does that not mean that every grateful person acknowledges God's existence, at least implicitly?
No. It means that the emotion of gratefulness isn't always a simple reduction to what you have there. Similarly, I think thwave who replied to you is also wrong. The emotion doesn't have to always follow such a simplified framework or be legibly caused. Of course it has to have some causal chain, but I think the legibility could be as opaque as "X is grateful for Y because Z suggested that maybe they should be" where Z didn't have anything to do with Y, Y doesn't necessarily do much for X, and so on. It doesn't make the emotion of gratefulness any less valid. I expect the ways the emotion could come about is varied enough to avoid these simplifications.
How does one go about (accurately) decomposing causality in a system this complex and poorly understood though?
For example, someone who does not open the canal to water the garden is the reason and cause of the garden drying up and the non-existence of bounties. But the existence of the garden’s bounties is dependent on hundreds of conditions besides the man’s duty and the bounties come into being through dominical will and power, which are the true cause.
Yes, ‘association’ is one thing and the cause is another. You receive a bounty, but the intention of a person to bestow it on you was the ‘associate’ of the bounty, not the cause. The cause was divine mercy. If the man had not intended to give you the bounty, you would not have received it and it would have been the cause of the bounty’s non-existence. But in consequence of the above rule, the desire to bestow cannot be the cause of the bounty; it can only be one out of hundreds of conditions.... from meaning of Quran "
I'm not following.
It is also common to be grateful to <SOMEONE> for <ATTRIBUTE>. For example, I'm grateful to various people for who they are, by which I mean their worldview, their values, and their personality. Generally speaking, these aspects are not under full control of the individual -- they are the result of a complex interaction of their genetics, their experiences, their intentions, their opportunities, their choices, their habits, and much more.
There have probably had hundreds of studies done by people who were actively trying to prove something and wrote that they fully believe that there are bad side effects yet not one states they proved something.
This. Our scientific understanding on how humans cooperate to not simply feed each other, but prosper with endless creative opportunities of cultivation, demonstrates we are at a tipping point to potentially permanently limit the recurrence of violence inter-generationally. Think of it as reversing unjust hereditary trauma. So many humans being born now see a path to their own prosperity, this century will be remembered as leaving the Planet of the Apes behind.
I feel quite the opposite. Game theory helps understand why people act, & it let's you reverse engineer what they really value, as opposed to what they claim to value
It's like saying physics has been conquered because airplanes should fall out of the sky. No, your existing notion was flawed, but reality didn't change
People don't act towards incentives because of game theory, it's that game theory models their incentives. If you're acting differently, it means you've built a different incentive system
This is important because it means game theory can be used to construct incentives to guide corporate behavior (ie we can avoid tragedy of the commons by forcing externalities to be accounted for, rather than left for the people), but pleas that corporations will act for the incentive of moral goodness is only a method to fool public debate into letting the tragedy go on. Because it's in the corporate interest to not pay for their externalities
Maybe we're getting at the same thing, & I'm just picking up too much of a "shed thy mathematical yolk" vibe
Aspartame tastes so awful I can't see how that's going to make me thankful.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4364783/
This is not to say that you don't genuinely feel something and are just making it up, but that it's not a consequence of aspartame and is rooted in an entirely different phenomenon that you've associated with aspartame for one reason or another.
I hope everyone who reads this is having a good day today. May you all have fortune and blessing in your lives.
We might not be alone inside the KBC Void, but if we aren't, they and us are on a pretty isolated island of sapients in the currently-known universe.
Sapience is astronomically, vanishingly rare as far as we can tell so far. Some of us treasure it and are thankful for it accordingly. Perceiving reality at the level we do, with the understanding we only scratched an atom of the total surface so far, is both inspiring and humbling at the same time.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-far-do-radio-signals-travel-into-s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBC_Void
Given the birthrate trends in developed countries, it's more likely the population will peak and then decline as prosperity spreads. The cause isn't hard to discern - child labor laws - they turn children from potential assets into guaranteed liabilities.
A declining population will be a bad thing; our modern way of life is built on systems that depend on growth (from Wall Street to our tax structures to the various Social Security safety nets countries have in place); take that away and we will have real problems.
7, 23, 24 were driven by the common unusual political occurrence of fair economic opportunity. These rare times where a balance of power occurs, by special circumstances, between the former autocratic rulers and everyone else.
In Britain (7), domestic Royal monopolies were abolished etc creating an economic and legal environment where entrepreneurs would be rewarded. So people started investing their very expensive free time tinkering because it might lead to profit.
Ancient Greece (23) developed the Solonian Constitution which similarly protected the property rights of ‘citizens’ like never before, so Athens became a cultural center of tinkerers, hustlers, thought leaders, influencers etc, and the ideas are what we still have today. Because unlike with Ancient Phoenicia, the Greeks wrote on clay, not on perishable papyrus.
(24) Obviously the US Constitution managed to establish unusual property rights for its European male citizens, and again we see hustlers, thought leaders, influencers etc, because their efforts are far more likely to be rewarded. But this time we see what this political environment looks like close up and we see regular people’s bright ideas materialize in society because the law protects them.
I am thankful that we still today, I mean 11/26/2021 today, still maintain the balance of power that enables our egalitarian laws to stand, and hope that some new technology won’t kill that balance.
Socrates (Athens= 470–399 BC
Plato (Athens) 423-348 BC
Aristotles (Athens) 384–322 BC
Archimedes (of Syracuse) some 2-3 centuries later 287-212 BC
Euclid (of Alexandria) was active in Alexandria around 300-270 BC
Hyppocrates (of Kos) 470-360 BC
Pytagoras (of Samos) 570–495 BC
Thucydides (Athens) 460-400 BC
Herodotus (of Halicarnassus) 484-425 BC
Aesop (?) 620-564 BC
Solon (Athens) 630-570 BC
Pericles (Athens) 495–429 BC
Aristophanes (Athens) 446-386 BC
Sophocles (Athens) 497-406
the:
>That some unknown miracle blend of circumstances happened to arrive in Athens in 500 BC leading a tiny city of 250k people to produce Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aesop, Solon, Pericles, Aristophanes, and Sophocles, and that it might be possible to intentionally recreate such conditions today around the world and spur incredible human flourishing, and why aren’t we working on this?
is more accurately something like:
In the course of several centuries over a vast territory comprising almost all inhabited mediterranean countries some 10-15 people excelled in their fields and many of them happened to live in the main city (and cultural capital) of the area.
Sounds a lot less a miracle, between 630 and 300 BC is three centuries.
> In the course of several centuries over a vast territory comprising almost all inhabited mediterranean countries some 10-15 people excelled in their fields and many of them happened to live in the main city (and cultural capital) of the area.
Your restatement excluded what I think is the most interesting part:
>> and that it might be possible to intentionally recreate such conditions today around the world and spur incredible human flourishing, and why aren’t we working on this?
"Why aren't we working on this" seems like a very good question, one that you don't hear very often - "Why don't we even encounter these sorts of questions more often?" might be an interesting sibling question.
The article seemingly conveys (at least to me) the idea that "by miracle" all those famous philosophers, writers and mathematicians were in the same place at the same time (and possibly had coffee or dinner together), this simply never happened.
So, if the idea is about creating brand new conditions (which ones?) capable to create a city/location where - over three centuries - a handful of people, excelling in their field lived, this has already been done, let's say Rome 200 BC - 100 AD, London 1600-1900, i.e. more or less the capitals (administrative and/or cultural) of large empires that lasted several centuries.
If you reconsider the idea under this reframing, does it seem like more of a reasonable, "maybe worth a try"-class idea?
[1] where "such conditions" ~= "of the kind, character, quality, or extent"
All of them producing and moving world forward. It is crowded competition, actually.
Like seriously, it was way more violent and bloody then your average western society now. And we don't even go to regular wars against other cities and don't keep slaves. Neither of those two are collaboration.
And now you can actually become citizen without being born from citizen father.
Socrates was even refusing to write at all. All we know is what Plato wrote for his own reasons.
(23) is because it's not independent random events. First, Plato literally taught Aristotle and was taught by Socrates. Second, Athens was the capital of an empire (okay, technically a league) so of course the best and brightest descended on Athens.
So, literally like Hollywood attracting actors or SV attracting startups, it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
Yes, I’m saying maybe a god exists and loves us because they gave us bread.
He never said that.
Looks like he actually said something similar about wine though:
We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana, as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy! (from a 1779 letter from France to his friend André Morellet)
— Benjamin Franklin
0: https://xkcd.com/323/
Pretty cool, huh? :)
Belongs under the Eurkaryote heading, no?
Would love to hear more about this!
That said, just as the other poster I'm also thankful for pedants like yourself. This is a mistake I probably make myself all the time.
In the future, be thankful with your wallet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_bar
Only true in dense cities and perhaps onboard seafaring vessels. Most of humanity could find unpolluted sources of water.
You could also say that, without the crutch that was small beer, humanity might have been motivated to learn and implement water treatment/purification techniques and proper sanitation systems centuries earlier.
Alcohol in the medical field is critical in doing good. A lot of harm has been prevented by alcohol.
Is anyone thinking about what to do? It's only a matter of time before we have another flare 2X or 3X the magnitude of the Carrington event.
Emergency and catastrophe planning has to happen at the national level. I would like to see more leaders (especially these days) come into office with ideas about how to recover from catastrophic events quickly.
If the grid just shut off power for 24 hours until the CME passed would that solve the problem?
I can easily go 24 hours without power, but not months.
Me too. I'm hoping we'll get lucky and a relatively small-scale catastrophic event will occur, demonstrating to us how ill prepared we are both materially and socially/culturally/cognitively/etc, and that lesson will provide the incentive for us to launch a serious project to get our act cleaned up.
And in the event that no political leaders rise to the occasion, I am hoping that normal civilians realize there is a problem and begin seriously discussing the risks we are running, perhaps eventually leading to some sort of a plan that our leaders do not have the ability to formulate, or perhaps even realize we need.
The current pandemic makes me pessimistic regarding this. There is basically no wake up and preparations for a 10%+ mortality virus. And that without discussing where the virus came from...
Just say you're happy to be alive and move on.
> "This hole...! It was made for me!"
> A short horror manga story by Junji Ito. A boy named Owaki, and a girl, Yoshida, meet on Amigara Mountain, where an unsettling discovery has been made. An earthquake has created a huge fault in the mountain, and human-shaped holes are scattered across the face of the fault line. It soon becomes clear that the holes are "calling" to the people they are shaped like. So what happens when they enter the hole? Well, you can be sure that massive amounts of claustrophobia and Nightmare Fuel are involved.