Sarah Constantin writes:

The mental motion of “I didn’t really parse that paragraph, but sure, whatever, I’ll take the author’s word for it” is, in my introspective experience, absolutely identical to “I didn’t really parse that paragraph because it was bot-generated and didn’t make any sense so I couldn’t possibly have parsed it”, except that in the first case, I assume that the error lies with me rather than the text. This is not a safe assumption in a post-GPT2 world. Instead of “default to humility” (assume that when you don’t understand a passage, the passage is true and you’re just missing something) the ideal mental action in a world full of bots is “default to null” (if you don’t understand a passage, assume you’re in the same epistemic state as if you’d never read it at all.)

—srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/

A 21st-century Nullius in verba, and more important than ever… can you not make a Gears-level understanding, then don't even try to meet the text halfway. Don't retain propositions you cannot explain.

The day women feel just as safe going out at night as men, that's when we might be able to say that feminism is "done".

The day a white person doesn't feel slightly more on-guard when passing a black person (or vice versa) on the street, that's when you'll know racial integration is "done".

"I, Carl, shall describe everything"

• Systema naturae
• Complete, consistent and hierarchic classification
• Reactions in Paris
• Can systematizing be scientific?
  • Yes, if open for revisions

Three kingdoms: Rocks, plants, animals. Classify every object that exists, not just life. Stuff not to be in two kingdoms at once.

Never visited tropical areas. Did not know how rich biodiversity was.

Reactions mixed. Old-school to want to "put everything in boxes". Others adulated him.

Is systematizing really good science? Sure, if it's open for revisions, because you can learn about little-known members by inferring from the class they belong to. Also he revised his own work multiple times.

Whale? He never saw one. But it was found they belonged better in mammals, so Linnaeus moved them there.

• What is life? 1944
• Question of entropy
• Life = retained order
• Order is upheld by information (memory) plus energy

• Life stabilizes itself, far from any thermodynamical equilibrium

  Building block of life must be terribly complicated. Protein discovered, must be it! Not quite correct, actually DNA, but he had the right idea.

Life retains order: when entropy increases e.g. a room gets more chaotic, you clean up, put stuff in their proper place. Everything you do, such as standing straight, is an instance of reversing entropy.

When you die, you no longer reverse entropy. Come back to your corpse in three weeks and it smells: entropy has done its work, which was blocked while you were alive.

Universal entropy is universal deadness.

The Enigma machine. How to use the concept of entropy to decode messages.

Other important results

• All life is cellular (modular)
• No current ongoing creation of life
• Photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation
• The details of sexual reproduction
• The complementary structure of DNA
• All life functions basically the same – "The Central Dogma"

Final summary

• Life is not any longer a deep problem for physico-logical scientific analysis
• There are, however, still plenty of interesting problems. For example: How do complex organisms manage with such few genes?