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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Well, you’re both right. IQ means something, but it’s only a predictor for outcomes. Many high-IQ people have led very mediocre lives and many low-IQ people have had very successful lives. Certainly, a high IQ can make life easier for you, as can being born in a prosperous country, having a wealthy family, knowing the right people, or getting lucky. The other half of that equation is hard work.

    From what you’ve said, you don’t have good family connections, high IQ or know the right people. You haven’t said where you live. There may be resources there to help you, or not. Either way, accessing those resources or getting ahead without them will be hard work. If you decide to go down that path, there will be pretty menial jobs, long hours, and not much money. There will be a lot of hard work in your down time to see what you can do to improve your abilities so you can improve your prospects in the future. Likely you will find none of this fun. There’s no guarantee it will succeed. But, like with many people, those are typically the only options before you to get someplace better.









  • In 1990, they started to sequence the human genome. About a decade later, the shotgun sequencing technique was advanced enough to be used on the human genome. A few years later, it was declared complete. In 2022, it was considered to be gapless, almost 2 decades later.

    All of this, plus some other discoveries, led to CRISPR and the ability to edit genes in fully formed beings rather than just a few cells. After decades of research in a number of fields.

    One of the things DNA does is make protein. (If you want to look at it a certain way, all it does is determine where and when to make protein.) Part of what makes protein do the thing it does is the shape it takes. (For instance, prions are misfolded proteins that cause other proteins to misfold, and then other weird things happen, like holes in your brain.)

    So we have this massively complicated process that makes slightly less complicated things that behave in a variety of ways depending on their shape, which is dependent on the myriad ways they can fold, at the molecular level. And you wonder why they haven’t done a lot when we’re still to a large degree in the data-collecting and validation portion of this massive undertaking. As for what it can lead to, I expect it will be no less revolutionary than CRISPR is and will be, but that could still be decades away.






  • NASA spent more than that on the Shuttle program alone, and we got 135 launches and a dozen dead astronauts, so that is demonstrably false.

    NASA is great, and did a lot of great things. We also got a lot of great technology (and some questionable shoes) because of it. But NASA suffers from the same thing Blue Origin does, bureaucracy and a top-down attitude with respect to developing technology. (They also suffered from a lot of government pork.) It’s a good system for developing new things from scratch with a clear goal, but it rarely works well for taking existing technology and wringing the most effectiveness you can out of it.

    Besides all this, the shuttle program suffered from ties to the military, which put in expensive requirements that didn’t help the whole thing, either.

    If NASA got out of the rocket launching business and contracted out that part of their mandate to others, they would have a lot more money to spend on other things, such as research, both pure and practical.