Hopefully Interesting

I'd  previously written  about year end charitable giving.  This year I'm giving money to a new organization, though I'm giving a lot to Givewell too.  The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, or ALLFED , is researching ways to rapidly scale up food production in the case that traditional means might suddenly become less viable.  Say a super-volcano erupts, or a huge meteor strikes, or a nuclear winter happens, or something along those lines.  Humanity would have to get through years of reduced sunlight that would make growing plants very hard. Crop failures would naturally lead to massive starvation but ALLFED is looking into ways to turn biomass we might have laying around into edibles via routes such as fungus or methane eating bacteria.  Food produced this way wouldn't be especially tasty but it would hopefully be enough to keep people alive until the dust settles out of the atmosphere and normal farming can start back up. The idea here is to research the te

So, imagine someone is walking along, down a street.  They see the store their going to and they enter through the shop door.  So, when you were imagining this, did you see it?  Which direction was the person walking, relative to your mind's eye?  Did they turn to the left or right to enter the store?  What color was everything? When someone first did this exercise with me they were walking away from me and turned to the left.  I could still see them inside the shop through the wall because nothing in my visualization had any color.  For other people they might be imagining it more like a video where things have color and you can't see people after they move behind walls.  Some people don't form mental images of the scene at all,  here's  a widely shared Facebook post by someone who was surprised to discover that other people actually did form mental images in their minds.  Francis Galton was the first person to study this in 1880. A related topic is the notion of

Every year people climb up Mount Everest.  Generally the number keeps growing.  Not everybody makes it up.  Some people turn back.  Other people die on the mountain.  Generally  around 1 in 100  of the people who attempt to climb it.  K2 is another mountain nearby.  For a little bit people thought it might be taller than Everest.  It isn't taller, but it is deadlier and about 1 in 10 of the people who try to climb it die. Why do people climb dangerous mountains?  To test themselves.  For the sense of achievement.  And despite the danger nobody is seriously proposing that we stop people from attempting these summits.  If they want to risk their lives they can.  They know the risks.  We should stop people who don't know what they're doing but you'll never even get to base camp without serious dedication and preparation. If we allow mountain climbers to face severe dangers for the sake of achieving something few others have why don't we allow this with astronauts?