Posts To Write

A notebook of ideas I might write about someday.

Comments are open to everyone on this post, so you can recommend me more good ideas or point out anyone who’s already covered one of these topics.

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🧬 Biology

Is drinking heavy water the key to eternal life?

If you replace the hydrogen atoms in a drug with deuterium (hydrogen-2) atoms, you get a drug that lasts longer. So if you replace the hydrogen atoms in an organism…

Is starving yourself the key to eternal life?

If you eat more calories than you need, bad things happen. The more calories you eat, the more bad it is. But what if this relationship is symmetric, at least to some point? Caloric restriction, eating fewer calories than one needs, promises all sorts of improvements, namely slower aging. Studies from the longest-lived cohorts of humanity suggest that’s exactly how they do it. Studies on some animals are incredibly promising, while studies on primates are less so (though debatable). I think one of the longitudinal human studies just released a paper, which I should really check out.

Should you buy a third kidney from Iran?

Data from Iran suggests that donating a kidney results in lifelong negative health effects. People who receive a donor kidney get it implanted in the front. So what if you got a supernumerary kidney? Would your health get even better?

🖥️ Computer Science

Is ternary logic really more efficient?

Caught this on its Wikipedia article ages ago and it always stuck with me. But if binary logic is just an inferior paradigm that just happened to catch on, surely someone in our (glorious) capitalist society would be seizing on all this free alpha by now? Samsung seems to have noticed.

💰 Economics

🏛️ Government

Is Social Security really a Ponzi scheme?

What are the average annual returns? What are they, compared to index funds? How much money will the average worker lose or gain over their lifetime, if they could take the money they’re forced to pay into the SSA and pay it into index funds instead?

Why is New York City so safe?

Should we get out the vote?

Why do we treat voting like a responsibility when study after study shows that the best predictor for not voting is a lack of political knowledge? Surely more uninformed voters is bad, right? Is it really? Do certain people stand to gain from having more uninformed people voting? Are they the ones behind “get out the vote”?

Why is anime still legal?

Despite being explicitly proscribed by virtually all major world religions as well as condemned by both Republicans and Democrats, a complete absence of government action on the matter has resulted in anime remaining one of the leading causes of antisocial behavior in modern society.

North Korea’s progress in tackling the growing issue of K-Pop stans shows that effective measures can be taken, so why isn’t it happening? Is Creepy Joe blocking Congress from taking action? I always suspected he had a thing for anime girls…

HE CAN’T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT

📜 History

What happened to China’s advantage?

Gunpowder, the compass, the printing press — the Chinese did it all long before Europe. Then…nothing. Europe gradually caught up. Historical Per capita GDP figures are notoriously unreliable, but by the end of the Qing Dynasty they lost their status as the world’s largest economy to the UK— an archipelago about one-third the size of Texas.

Any answer to this question would also apply to India, mutatis mutandis, and likely the decline of many other great civiliations — so I might be waiting until Burja solves the cliodynamic equation for an immortal society before I can get to the bottom of this one.

Why didn’t Charlemagne marry Empress Irene?

Please. There’s like, a million different branches of Christianity. Every day I learn about a new one. Half of them don’t even make any sense. Arianism? Copticism? Jewish Christianity? Why didn’t you just marry her and save me all this trouble?

Did Papyrus create human civilization?

Nyeh heh heh! The Egyptians are notable for long-lived and early civilization, being the second to exist in human history. I can’t help but notice that places that never developed writing (or only proto-writing) all had to carve on heavy, unwieldy stones, while Egyptians had an abundance of light papyrus to write on.

Could this one plant have made all the difference in the world?

Who really was the Achaemenid king overthrown by Darius The Great?

I have never before heard of a king being replaced by an impostor. And the idea that Darius The Great played The Elder Scrolls I in real life sounds made up (like most of history) — a post ex facto addition to the record made to legitimize the new regime.

But it’s curious that it’s only happened once.

🧠 Neurology

What will Neuralink do?

Musk’s Neuralink BCI is groundbreaking tech, but I’m skeptical of many of the wilder predictions due to one simple fact: you can’t read/write to the entire brain from the outer cortex alone. So how far will the implanted threads go, what can they do, and which parts of the brain can they access?

The answer to this question determines whether Neuralink will give us fully automated luxury gay space communism or just a cool HUD.

Why is meth addictive when it shouldn’t be?

Biologically, there is (as far as we know, anyway) no difference in mechanism of action between AMPH and METH. Yet conventional wisdom as well as single-blind studies shows that, ceteris paribus, METH yields far higher scores of “drug liking” and “want drug” — basically, meth is fucking addictive. But why?

Where does Trait Openness come from?

All other Big 5 traits have obvious neural correlates, and studies confirm this But Trait Openness remains elusive.

It is, allegedly, the only g-loaded Big 5 trait. Perhaps this is related?

Why do we listen to music?

Is it wanting or liking? Or something else? In other words: what exactly is going on in our heads when we listen to music, and why does it make us want to listen to it?

Ψ Psychology

Given the IQ of two parents, what is the probability distribution of their children’s IQ?

Considering IQ is determined at at least 200 genetic loci and is roughly 80% genetic, shouldn’t children’s IQs be tightly distributed around the mean of their parents’ (see: Law of Large Numbers)?

Why is it, then, that there is so much variance? A friend suggests multiplicative effects of pleiotropy make the distribution lognormal, which sounds about right to me but I should check the literature.

👥 Sociology

Why does wealth cause progressivism?

Why do the morals and beliefs of societies tend to trend one way as per-capita income increases? This applies for societies throughout history, cultures within societies, and even individuals within cultures. I think there are a variety of factors at play here, depending on the exact belief being considered.

What led to the epidemic of wokeness?

I think you can trace the spread from Tumblr to the universities to the media to the government. But what makes such an absurd meme so infectious?

What exactly causes the demographic shift?

I think I remember something that said that living in unsafe societies causes people to have more children to compensate?

Does height really matter?

Height, at least in men, is positively correlated with just about everything. Income, health, life satisfaction, attractiveness. Virtually all Fortune 500 CEOs are above average height, with remarkably few being even average height, and a whopping 0% being below average height. Clearly height belongs up there with IQ and Trait Conscientiousness when it comes to overall life success.

Or does it? Other studies suggest no correlation after controlling for height at age 15, but this only raises more questions.

Why can’t white people say the n-word?

When and where did this rule come from?

Why are there so many Jews in New York?

Why is British food so bad?

❓ Miscellany

If simpler harmonic ratios sound better, then shouldn’t the diminished 5th (6/12 semitones) sound less awful?

who the fuck is this guy

I think he was a giant meme way back in the day or something and he got busted for intentionally misfiling some ATF form

Why is Mark Zuckerberg so robotic?

A cursory examination of his life and achievements suggests he’s eminently brilliant and probably more than a little autistic — is this why?

Why does everyone hate Ohio?

I have literally never heard an American say anything good about Ohio

Why do electricians hate these so much?

I remember reading once about a million good reasons as to why these really should not exist.