Always a little annoyed at articles like this; “strength” doesn’t tell me anything. If this is 5x more resistant than steel to deformation, but then shatters catastrophically, that limits its use cases substantially. Likewise, compressive, tensile and shear strength are all different properties, only one of which is referenced at all. Still very cool, and I look forward to seeing how it develops and learning more details about its capabilities (when I have more time I’ll read the paper), but vague terminology like this has a bad habit of making stuff sound way more revolutionary than it actually is. /shurg

IIRC, there is a bit more complexity than that to the Pirahã understanding of numeracy. Relative quantity is something they’re just fine at understanding, (with words for single/less, plural/more and same) it’s abstraction of quantities to tokenized values where they struggle. Which, I suppose, also interestingly lines up with the study results; the initial training period resulted in nodes associated with quantity, but those nodes were separate/unrelated to numeracy systems that developed with additional training.

It got more questionable the further I scrolled. /shurg Perhaps it’s just marketing (thumbnails decrying feminism/diversity/etc) but bare minimum he gives off vibes like he’s trying to cater to a far-right crowd.

“Right” is “capitalism is a good economic system” (degree of acknowledgement of current problems variable), and “traditional values have value, so care and caution should be taken before change is made.” IE, the modus operandi of most (American) parties that brand themselves as left wing. :P It shouldn’t be fucking screaming about things being “woke” or too feminine or too diverse. As soon as it’s about hate, instead of policy, it’s alt-right. The problem is that nowadays, that’s all there seems to be.

I’m not terribly keen on watching any of the vids on his second channel; maybe the titles and thumbnails are just click bait and the actual content is more level-headed, but I’ve got better things to do. /shurg