Scientists, What's The Craziest Thing You Suspect To Be True? - AskReddit

in tribal hunter societies someone with adhd who is able to react more quickly would likely be the best hunter in the group scientists what's the craziest thing in your field that you suspect to be true without having evidence the americas were inhabited by humans at least 30 000 years ago possibly up to 60 000 years ago or more lots of archaeologists whisper this in hushed voices but there are so many entrenched detractors that there's no way for this to become accepted until the current older generation is gone imagine you are 60 you have spent your career talking about how clovis culture came first you have written books about this everyone has spent 40 years agreeing with you every time you talk about this you are on a lot of funding boards and a very well respected archaeologist you will retire in five years or so how would you feel about some guy coming along and saying what you know and have spent that person's whole lifetime teaching is wrong there is a reasonable chance that within the next 10 years computers that analyze large bodies of data and make statistical predictions will be able to make much better routine strategic decisions at almost every layer of society than actual humans this means many of the decisions that pertain to economics politics etc at some point this will likely start having a major impact on the structure of society as there won't be all that much room for argument when the computer says that some decision is or is not optimal some current signs that point to this for example are the story about an automated target marketing campaign that detected that a teenage girl was pregnant before her own father knew about it automated data analysis when data is available is simply better at predicting common events than real people why then would a corporation for example rely on human executives to make decisions about acquisitions and mergers why would a politician use human strategists to choose policy positions and if a politician makes decisions by computer why do we need the politician this will raise some interesting questions should we still use human juries and judges when computers can determine guilt or innocence with much greater accuracy what happens when a human jury convicts a man and the innocence project makes an appeal on the basis that the judge-o-matic predicts that the man's chance of having actually committed the crime is 0.0001 percent should we have politicians set the tax rate when computers can do it better to optimize both economic growth and government performance i would emphasize that this has little to do with ai it's not intelligence just prediction and we'll have to contend with this issue long before computers become intelligent in the conventional sense it also doesn't apply to rare unprecedented events so a computer won't tell you whether we'll invent cold fusion but it will very much apply to events that have happened before recessions political unrest effective taxation on the economy etc there is a fringe theory regarding the origin of adhd that i find really fascinating and think probably has something to it it says that adhd like many other disorders is possibly an evolutionary adaptation that certain people have which provides a pro in addition to a con you see lots of sometimes terrible genetic disorders to have an upside sickle cell anemia patients for example are more resistant to malaria cystic fibrosis patients are more resistant to salmonella so what would adhd's upside be awesome hunting abilities in tribal hunter societies someone with a looser attention span who is able to react more quickly to moving stimuli would likely be the best hunter in the group and would get showered with riches and women now all it gets you is frustration and medication by the way one of the coolest pieces of evidence for this theory albeit anecdotal is that kids with adhd tend to be abnormally good at first-person shooter video games that you can figure out the routes illegal immigrants will take in crossing borders on foot based on hill slopes initial data seems to confirm it but there's so little work done on it out there basically as far as we can tell human beings will avoid steep stuff at all costs the problem is that most studies are done on concrete with established pedestrian areas and you can't just ask an illegal immigrant to tell you what route he took on foot because most of them actually don't know epilepsy in severe cases patients have all connections to one half of their brain severed to control seizures no input no output and no communication with the rest of the brain but that half remains active for the rest of their lives for these people aspects of their personality and memories disappear forever on the day of their surgery because their neuroanatomical substrates resided in that hemisphere if that half has no input but continues to fire what is it doing wondering who turned the lights out remembering the good times slowly spiraling into senseless patterns of neural firing akin to dementia i'd love to find out in the near future we will probably start storing all our information not on hard drives and such as we do now but we'll store it on a form of dna that will use the atcg base in the same sort of way as binary is used this synthetic dna will be able to store absolutely enormous amounts of data on a very small space with little to no deterioration after all dna can survive for millions of years in ideal lab conditions researchers are attempting to make this a reality so that they can store data on dna research on other dna a number of unpopular experiments from the 1970s onward demonstrated that some kind of impermanent evolution in plants was occurring this would present a significant challenge to our understanding of biological evolution a good example is that you can stun specific species of trees for three generations by violently shaking the predecessor or exposing it to high winds then after three generations the progeny returned to normal size i was quietly collecting evidence of experiments along these lines when they discovered epigenetics a few years ago we haven't made the direct connections yet but genetic packaging would explain it it'd be awesome to settle the arguments about the theropod origin of modern birds once and for all it's frustrating because of how far back in the evolutionary timeline we have to look in order to get a picture of when birds first emerged i mean we don't even know for sure how birds developed flight did they climb and glide or jump and flap for short distances really the only way us wildlife biologists will get some answers is if some nice geneticist or paleontologist makes a breakthrough discovery we are going to find a biological recipe for creating self-assembled tissues from scratch developmental biological processes can turn a single-celled zygote into an adult human it's pretty damn incredible when you think about it somewhere buried in the complexity of metazoan biology are a set of origami-like rules that allow growing tissues to self-assemble into larger tissues and organs if we can model and manipulate these programs with precision we can engineer just about any tissue we like a lot of people are familiar with 3d organ printing as a route to organ manufacturing but i think it's a dead end without more knowledge of biological self-assembly if we can't control how tissues develop the organs will fall apart as soon as they are printed the missing pieces of tissue self-assembly are quantitative models for tissue morphogenesis which are being filled in as we speak by advances in in vitro tissue culturing and molecular biology internet communication is turning a lot of us into violent radicals people who actively participate in public forums like credit tend to accept more extreme interpretations as fact while rejecting rational interpretations and it slowly drives them to political polls first you join in a relatively mild conversation on reddit about privacy rights before long you're on infowars or stormfront advertising venus project and calling for violent revolution there's plenty of psychological and sociological literature to support the hypothesis that this happens but actually collecting accurate enough data on people that are by nature extremely paranoid is difficult and the internet hasn't been around long enough to produce enough data points on such a small population as people who comment on the internet about one percent of reddit users for example to be conclusive that it actually does if you ever have to ask yourself why doesn't everyone see the government slash corporations illuminati type group is out to get us take a deep breath and slowly read through wikipedia's list of logical fallacies also gods forbid if you ever find yourself thinking the word sheeple please enroll yourself in a university-level political science course asap i am studying in a relatively new field of science called astrobiology and just finished my first internship of all my studies this is what caught my attention in 2004 the spectral signature of methane was detected in the martian atmosphere by both earth-based telescopes as well as by the mars express probe because of solar radiation and cosmic radiation methane is predicted to disappear from the martian atmosphere within several years so the gas must be actively replenished in order to maintain the present concentration in short i truly believe we will have confirmation of life outside of planet earth in the next two to three generations when personal genomic sequencing becomes readily accessible even as a routine medical service much like a physical we should be able to place the data into a controlled anonymized database and use statistical analysis to essentially link most disease states and predispositions to their genotypic bases there are loads of combinatoric black holes in the genome data right now since we haven't been able to collect large-scale high-throughput disease or genotype relationships on a genomic scale yet due to the expense have a look at the company 23 and me for an example of a smaller scale version of this they represent a good first step towards breaking the cost down and making personal genomics accessible regardless of socioeconomic status psychology biology this is kind of out there but i believe hormonal birth control plays a role in a subset of divorces and in the birth of children with poor immune systems i think most people are familiar with the t-shirt study that found women were attracted to the smell of men with dissimilar immune systems and that they felt t-shirts with similar immune systems smelled like their father or brother women on hormonal birth control did not perform well in that study they often picked similar immune systems as more attractive a massive percentage of women are on birth control during their dating years and when they meet their husbands after marriage another percentage of those women will stop taking hormonal birth control in order to have children what happens then if you have a woman who marries a man who is a poor genetic match someone she may not have wanted to be with if she wasn't on birth control when she goes off of her birth control it stands to reason that her perception of her husband may change given that her body and personality will be going through a change while her hormones are re-regulated her husband's view of her may change as well it would not surprise me if this subconscious change contributes to divorce rates in addition should those hypothetical people have children the child may have a poor immune system due to the lack of genetic variants between its parents darwin's dilemma refers to the absence of known macroscopic fossils excluding microbial stuff from beneath the base of the cambrian period older than 541 million years when he was first describing his theory of evolution everyone including darwin expected that when fossils were found from before the cambrian period that they would be the ancestors of modern animals then when those fossils were found idiosaria biota we call them they were enthusiastically classified as ancient jellyfish ancient worms etc but it turns out that's a load of bs consensus is growing that almost none of those classifications were accurate instead most idiocar and organisms seem to have belonged to extinct groups unrelated to anything alive today and they lived in a world that was so different from the following 540 million years they had modes of life distinct from any living macroscopic organisms we were so eager to make everything fit into our neat little evolutionary narrative that for decades we basically glossed over these crazy alien sort of ecosystems that could be critical to understanding the origins of complex life on other planets as well as our own we are still just beginning to really understand it though it's a very controversial field of paleontology neuroscience here paraplegia and quadriplegia are solved problems we are already very good at recognizing patterns of activity measured through eeg or other non-invasive recording methods in real time and using this data to control various simple machines the next step is expanding the scale so that instead of controlling a computer mouse a paralyzed individual controls legs or arms fluidly currently the most well-known researcher adapting this technology to allowing paralyzed people to walk and move is miguel nicholas who plans to construct an exoskeleton to allow a paralyzed person to kick a soccer ball at the world cup soon very soon we will be able to make this feasible for real world application beyond that the entire field of brain machine interface is booming it is a natural adaptation of where neuroscience is because you simply it is not simple but relatively so need to be able to recognize recurring patterns you observe when an individual thinks or does something to be able to use those patterns to control machines it's a fancy trick to allow thought control without really understanding why or how those thoughts exist in the first place i am a student in meteorology this is more of a technological advance than something that needs to be proven within the next 10 to 20 years most cars or cell phones will have microchips in them whose sole purpose is to record the current data such as temp wind etc this will allow for millions upon millions of data points which in turn will greatly increase the grid spacing for forecast models in layman's terms forecast accuracy and forecast personalization will be near pristine down to the seconds microchips are already cheap enough we just need the proper computing power to process all of that data in real time super computers to the rescue thanks for listening to radio tts hit the subscribe button and activate the notification bell to become the best hunter of the tribe click the right box for the existential crisis playlist let us know in the comments what you think about these theories

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Id: w2V627XQyHM

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021