it's a few hundred miles up instead of 22,300. this means that it's not geostationary and you gotta switch your dish between satellites often as they go overhead, but latency is far lower.
Ok, that would make a huge difference. the biggest argument I"ve made against this with people is simply that the latency would be terrible (and it's still not great), but it's a helluva lot better than 22.3k.
Actually, current starlink latency is 20-40 msec, which isn't bad compared to DSL or fibre internet. Its usually better than 4g or 5g internet.
When starlink sats are fully using laser interconnects then their long-distance (london-NY or further) latency should be considerably less than anything else available. The speed of light in fibre is about 1/2 the speed of light in a vacuum.
The actual latency starlink customers are getting is on par with wired ISPs, and has the potential to be lower than ground based links once they add satellite to satellite laser links.
Maybe one person has more delicate finger dexterity, or better hearing. Maybe another person is more easily distractable. Of course the genes would not be "a golf gene" or "a harsichord gene" but all of the various factors which go in to being successful could have a genetic component (including practice and discipline.)
You are not wrong that there are many people on the Left / spat out by the university ecosystem who have little integrity. The Right is, in my experience, on average worse. In many cases figures on the Right are only amenable to discourse because they are on the losing end and find it personally valuable, not as a matter of principle.
Or, you could say that if the Right were on top, those in the Right who say opposing viewpoints are communism / a fifth column / danger to America / should be suppressed would have the advantage.
I'd argue using the 18th century French right/left dichotomy isn't a mental model with meaningful predictive power, and the real forces at play today only leverage people wasting time re-litigating positions based on them.
The war isn't on dissent, dissent is only an early skirmish. Like previous ones, perhaps we will only be able to piece it together in hindsight.
If you're motivated enough to believe something, you'll find a way to believe it regardless. If there are smart arguments in favor of what you want to believe, you'll go for them. If those don't exist, you'll seek the next best.
What if: Neuroplasticity allows you to build new base cognitive tools from sensory information, or dump/change existing tools. If you build sufficiently numerous, broad, and adaptive tools when you are young, you will be able to do many, many things when you are older.
Still might have challenges learning new languages, or say to dance if you never learned how to dance at all, at the same rate as a toddler, tho.
Maybe compared to a toddler, but this person I am talking about became a programmer at 65 after being a physicist and then a biologist. I know more old people like that from the university. I really don't think age is so much of an issue that it should us stop from prolonging life. I really want these brilliant people to have more time on Earth. And I want more time too, even if I can't learn anything new at all past 125. Life is beautiful.
I had a really tough time taking MDMA for the first time, much tougher than the last times I took psychedelics. I think it came down to expectations, though.
I really like this answer, because it has a spark that isn't in the groupthink.
What if conditioning is designed to shape someone in a society or circumstances which no longer exist, or if someone realizes that they would like to be part of a different society than they were conditioned for?
There are quite a few ways conditioning can go very wrong, and leave someone frozen in an exceptionally painful state, wedged halfway through a door so to speak, which is good for nobody. It seems like a tool to get them unstuck could be pretty valuable.
On the other hand, remaining conditioning can keep the old spirit alive during temporary hick-ups in a society.
Point in case - USSR/satellites and restoring after the regime went down. The regime was working hard to remove the old conditioning and replace with the new conditioning. The communities did revert to the old ways in no time. Be it Catholicism in Poland, ethnic question in Baltic states, Tsarist Russia sentiments in Russia-proper, all sorts of separatists movements that were only silenced during the regime (Chechnya, Crimea ownership, Nagorno Karabach...). And capitalist/private property setup all around.
I think the scariest thing about MDMA is that it's not really the pill that can do that, the pill is just a shortcut to the type of high-intensity scenario in your brain which can lead to that sort of change. There are plenty of both good and bad other scenarios that could lead to a similar result. Falling in love, meditation, near-death experiences. Where does your brain go when you take the bumpers off?
I think the biggest problem with how many people see MDMA and psychedelics is uncritically accepting the first things that come to mind after taking them, that feel oh-so-true, or that they "give" you insight. It's still you, you're not God, you just have a whole lot more feelings for a bit. (But, depending on what walls you have up intellectually or emotionally, having those feelings take them down for a bit can be very productive.)
I don't think you're likely to get blame shamed for suggesting that opioids (especially heroin!) or crack or meth are likely to lead to a bad time. There are, though, quite a few people who reduce a whole wide range of totally different substances down to the single term "drugs" and portray everybody involved using junkie stereotypes.
I don't mean to say that any substance is completely innocent: in fact, I believe that pretty much any action significant enough to have a positive result can be used in some way to create a negative one. Volatility is dangerous, and drugs often cause volatility. But total reductionism is going to get pushback.
