> Coalition and Conservative governments in office from 2010 to 2019 used the term, and it was applied again by many observers to describe Conservative Party policies from 2021 to 2024, during the cost of living crisis.
People use terms, they're often wrong. The last few years since 2019 we've been breaking ever greater records on state spending and borrowing, this is not austerity.
This is a fallacy. There are many things we can accomplish through medicine, or technology more generally, that evolution never could. There are reasons other than it being a net disadvantage that evolution may not have produced something; for example, a particular chemical may not have an easy and cost-effective way to be created in the body (particularly when food was much harder to come by), but be easy enough for us now to synthesise.
Your argument doesn't make sense to me. If the chemical is harder to synthesize, then the receptors could be more sensitive, or bind longer. Why would our bodies evolve to use a messenger molecule that was so prohibitively expensive to make that we couldn't make enough of it?
These drugs are just changing the balances of existing pathways in our brains. They aren't creating new pathways. Either they are causing a substance that your body naturally limits to exist in higher quantities or lower quantities, keeping a messenger molecule from being removed as fast as it would be normally, or removed faster than normal.
So I agree with the parent, it is likely we can choose the tradeoffs, maybe needing to avoid predators and scavenge for food is not our priority anymore and we can turn off some of that so we can think more deeply. But chemically I doubt we can improve ourselves without any drawbacks.
But yes, technology in general, physical things, can have a more pure benefit, and we are already reaping the rewards of those benefits. A new macbook pro is likely to make me more productive while not interfering with my sleep :)
A net benefit is when we can synthesize drugs to allow us to adapt to externalities, which produce fewer side effects than benefits. Vaccines are a net positive in the presence of Polio. It could be argued that stimulants are a net positive in the presence of having to stare at a glowing rectangle and think in abstractions all day.
The Algernon argument is concerned with our inability to make simple, tradeoff free improvements to performance. It says that if you find an improvement, you should be able to explain why it isn't a free lunch. None of those examples make it a fallacy - there's a reason I ended with "The other dodges are less relevant here, but a fascinating read if you check the article."
Gwern outlines three general ways to work around the Algernon rule:
1. We can live under different conditions than evolution prepared us for
2. We can optimize for different goals than evolution rewarded
3. We can make major/multifactor changes unavailable to an local-maximization algorithm.
Condition two is easiest: caffeine is a sensible response to electric lighting, while staying awake long after dark was largely unhelpful in our evolutionary past.
Condition one is sometimes rewarding: piracetam shows efficacy with choline supplements, because we can massively overload a relatively scarce chemical. Other kludges may exist, like boosting immune response by simulating a summer day/night cycle to signal "safe conditions, energy is cheap now".
Condition three is incredibly hard wrt to the brain. It's obvious for the body - eye surgery can improve on 20/20 vision - but I don't know of any drastic better-than-well interventions for the mind.
I think what CryptoPunk refers to is that (allegedly) Metro is the only "high street", i.e. with many physical branches, bank created in the UK in the last 100+ years.
Given we're in a thread talking about ICOs and tech startups, I would side with you and say this is an irrelevant classification and the claim is wrong. :-P
Still interesting though, but given the veritable plethora of recently founded remote-only banks of various innovativenesses, I wouldn't say excessive regulation is to blame, if we think this is a Bad Thing.
Well, having physical branches it really not that important these days. If they give you a way to do usual tasks (change address etc) online or via phone there can be massive savings and increases in efficiency by getting rid of all physical branches.
All that real estate that is now occupied by bank branches can be give to some other businesses that actually need physical space (fashion/clothes, sports, restaurant, gyms etc) to use it more efficiently.
The only reason I had to go to a physical branch this year was to change my address and that is only because my old bank where my main account is doesn't have a way to do this online (seriously I don't understand why is it so difficult to make this a feature of online banking...).
I am using Monzo as my secondary bank and once they give me current account later this year, if it works smoothly and there are no issues I might get rid of my old bank account.
Could you elaborate on what you consider to be Nintendo's Blue Ocean strategy? I mean, I get that they've often tried to be first movers with e.g. motion control, is that what you're referring to?
Specifically, it's that they do stuff qualitatively that their competitors don't, to the point where they're not so much competing as they are the sole player in a brand new market.
I remember when the seventh generation came out, Microsoft did Nintendo's PR work for them by telling people that they can buy both a 360 and a Wii for the price of a PS3. That's right, they got Microsoft of all people to tell consumers to buy a Wii! Why did MS do it? Because the Wii is so qualitatively different from the 360 that they weren't directly competing.
Nintendo set things up such that nobody would ever ask "should I get a 360 or a Wii?" the way people would ask "should I get a 360 or a PS3?". Instead, they made it so a large amount of gamers wanted to get both a "normal" console and a Wii in the same way that people own both a console and a PC. On top of that, they also attracted people who would never buy a normal console because normal consoles don't appeal to them at all.
> On top of that, they also attracted people who would never buy a normal console because normal consoles don't appeal to them at all.
Sounds like me. I don't buy a gaming system to play games generally, I buy one to play the kind of games Nintendo makes and attracts to its hardware. That's why I still pull my Gamecube out to play SSBM from time to time, but have never owned a Playstation or X-Box, and have barely touched either of them. I haven't had a new system since GBA and Gamecube, but I think I'd enjoy the newer Nintendo systems more than the systems they were released next to.
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