"doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks."
I believe reading books and playing musical instruments are examples of cognitive task that make you better at other cognitive tasks. Also learning other languages comes to mind. I think I'm reiterating your point. It's, "not a wall but a steep slope." Cheers mate.
> We have been optimized very hard by evolution to be good at running, so there shouldn’t be any “easy” technologies that would make us dramatically faster or more efficient.
I wonder if these new shoes have the same affect on natural (i.e., non-paved) surfaces? Plus, they all look quite high off the ground (probably all those plates and foam need space) and that doesn't help with stability when running over rocks, etc.
Yes. The top marathon racing shoes are optimized for road-running & hard surfaces like asphalt. Definitely not good for trails. They are indeed very tall (though there's limits for official competitions.) Excellent lateral stability is essentially a non-goal so they are not a good choice for volleyball or tennis either. So yeah, we run in a very different world than the one where our ancestors evolved...
> In general, that argument is that there shouldn’t be any simple technology that would make humans dramatically smarter, since if there was, then evolution would have already found it.
With technology we have massively extended lifespan, so does this argument really hold valid ?
On average. But it wasn't that uncommon to have people reach 100 years of age even 500 years ago. The biggest impact on lifespans was hygiene not medicine (except for maybe anti-biotics).
I dig your style. I had a thought:
"doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks."
I believe reading books and playing musical instruments are examples of cognitive task that make you better at other cognitive tasks. Also learning other languages comes to mind. I think I'm reiterating your point. It's, "not a wall but a steep slope." Cheers mate.
Pre-chatgpt blogposts on well-known topics used to be far better motivated or layman-oriented
https://ace-pt.org/ace-physical-therapy-and-sports-medicine-...
which hints that the low 2.7% improvement should not be unexpected of commercializable interventions targeting this joint
(unlike, say, of obviously illegal (powered or not) exoskeletons)
https://medium.com/the-bronze-age/the-ships-of-the-sea-peopl...
Otoh, bona fide connections between Pangaea, Sea Peoples & modern day Turkiye are still discussed on OpenAI-resistant YouTube today
https://youtu.be/a0LWFt78n7k
On the first hand, the automaton reminds me that "modern-day philistines settled in the Gaza Strip after their defeat"
> But there doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks.
This seems wrong. Doesn't practicing cognitive tasks often lead to improvement in other cognitive tasks?
> We have been optimized very hard by evolution to be good at running, so there shouldn’t be any “easy” technologies that would make us dramatically faster or more efficient.
I wonder if these new shoes have the same affect on natural (i.e., non-paved) surfaces? Plus, they all look quite high off the ground (probably all those plates and foam need space) and that doesn't help with stability when running over rocks, etc.
Yes. The top marathon racing shoes are optimized for road-running & hard surfaces like asphalt. Definitely not good for trails. They are indeed very tall (though there's limits for official competitions.) Excellent lateral stability is essentially a non-goal so they are not a good choice for volleyball or tennis either. So yeah, we run in a very different world than the one where our ancestors evolved...
> In general, that argument is that there shouldn’t be any simple technology that would make humans dramatically smarter, since if there was, then evolution would have already found it.
With technology we have massively extended lifespan, so does this argument really hold valid ?
On average. But it wasn't that uncommon to have people reach 100 years of age even 500 years ago. The biggest impact on lifespans was hygiene not medicine (except for maybe anti-biotics).
The word simple does a lot of work here.