Snail_Commando

I'd imagine I'm pretty similar to grandparent post in this respect. If I find something interesting, I save it. Even if it's seemingly arbitrary or not immediately useful. With powerful search and tagging it's nice to run a query/update to a personal archive to refresh my memory, browse when bored, catalogue sources, wishfully think about future study, notice patterns in my interests over time, meta-analysis, etc.

More cynically, I've noticed that it's a relatively benign form of hoarding. i.e. I get the quick dopamine rush of "oh this is interesting, now I have it" without, say, crowding up my living space with trinkets. With an abundance of storage that is essentially invisible to me when I don't want to think about it, I can keep what I want, when I want; often while fully aware that I'll never look at most items individually again. I think of it as a kludgey form of external memory / internet butterfly collecting. The only downsides I've thought of are: time frittered revisiting archives, the (small) transaction cost of tagging and placing items into the archive, and the externalized costs of maintaining the hardware.

I was more trying to explain the intuition of why single nucleotide mutations (resulting in non-viability or undesired effects) are probably more likely in a strand of DNA with regions removed versus a strand of DNA left as-is.

Basically, trying to give an example of the grandparent's point. (i.e. fewer nucleotides to be flipped -> more likely that an important one will be). I agree that it was a poorly executed analogy. The metaphor I was trying to make is that on the 'vast field' a random single point mutation is probably going to land on an individually unimportant nucleotide, and in the 'narrow beach' (the smaller strand/higher geninfo density) an individually important nucleotide is more likely to be hit. I'm still probably not articulating my point well, sorry.

But I think your analogy is better for a subtly different point; describing how DNA replication works in a system, where stands can be selected out, errors corrected, and genetic information can be preserved at a systemic level.

Imagine a general with a finite amount of artillery shells and a Howitzer on the fritz (i.e. the intended trajectory of the shots are somewhat off the mark today). Given the choice of where to deploy the artillery, the general may choose to concentrate their fire on the narrow beachhead landing instead of upon a widely scattered formation of units approaching across a vast plain.

The artillery that lands on the plain may strike an advancing unit, or it may fall (possibly harmlessly) between a set of advancing units. The artillery that lands on the narrow beachhead is more likely to hit a unit.

This analogy is far from perfect: sometimes mutations are good, which is one primary driver of evolution. Non-coding regions and/or "baggage to be refactored" (paraphrased great-great-gp comment) in DNA (the regions of the plain/beach not occupied by an advancing unit) can absorb "errors". Also, there are other types of mutations (insertions, deletions, ...), aside from the single point mutations that this analogy was attempting to help convey.

The point is: it's like bunching up a lot of important things over a few points of failure. If you increase "the genetic surface area", you lower the chance of the important thing getting hit.

On evolutionary scales, viable DNA has been selected with a lot of non-coding (and sometimes useful) regions, we know that if we reduce that down, we are more likely to be susceptible to fatal mutations on coding regions (e.g. a region that codes for a vital protein).

This actually kind of reinforces (or at least points to) one of the central ideas of the essay, that we cannot know what it is to be a bat--we would always contextualize or speculate about the bat experience in human terms of experience.

If you accept this, no matter how great We make this simulation (of objective physical phenomena and our best theorized non-human perceptions of these phenomena), this game is always false.

(For what it's worth, I'm not sure yet if I hold any firm viewpoints on this. The essay (at least partially) is an argument against reductionism, but I'm no philosopher; to be honest I'm still wrapping my head around the entire argument. I just think it's interesting to think about.)

For what it's worth [], I'm pretty sure CERN(/LHC), ESRF, SLAC Nat. Accelerator Labs, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Bekeley, Sandia, Princeton Plasma Phys. Lab, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Argonne Nat. Lab, TRIUMF, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, Oak Ridge, Research Triangle Park, various institutions within the Max Planck Society, Institute for Advanced Study, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, RAND Corporation, (and likely many others...), all have/had facilities within (at most) 100 km of a city with a population of at least 150,000 people. Several of these institutions are within commuting distance of major world cities.

In the set of nation state funded research facilities (e.g. funded by US Dept. of Energy, European Research Council, etc.) I'm willing to bet that most of the facilities are more often relatively near cities (greater than 150K pop). Many (high energy / high capital cost) facilities, employ on the orders of 1-10K staff alone.

[] (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science, Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)

I also disagree with the 'firsts' argument, to a certain extent. I didn't articulate my point well enough.

I was responding to the 'I'll trade this time now, for more time later' line of reasoning (which I believe is a false transaction). Not only should one recognize that each epoch is unique (in a child's life, in a relationship, in a career, etc.) and therefore not interchangeable with later epochs; but one should also recognize that "selfish" (OP's word choice) actions now are usually not offset by generous actions later.

I suppose one can recognize those tradeoffs and traverse "borrowing time" reasoning with a bit more self awareness, though not many do. Especially those that subscribe to the 'compress your 40 year career into a 4-10 year startup' meme without reading the fine print.

> But selfish in a good, weird way - working 80 hours a week so someday I don't have to work 40, so I can take my wife and kids to Hawaii for the summer someday, or whatever.

Epochs are not fungible, especially when raising children. Missing a toddler play at the beach for the first time cannot be reclaimed by sharing their first scuba lesson.