Koko is a great example! I should clarify that when I say evidence, I mean the collected body of scientific evidence, of which Koko would be one data point. I will also clarify that I was talking about weak evidence for sapience in dogs, not animals in general. Different species are different. We have much more evidence for sapience in animals such as simians like gorillas, as well as dolphins. Just because gorillas are sapient doesn’t mean Koalas are likely to be. But heck Cows may well be more intelligent and closer to sapience than dogs.

None of this is to put a downer on how folks may perceive dogs and it certainly doesn’t shut the door on their possible sapience. I project all of the sapience into my dog. I just think it’s important to understand and acknowledge where scientific knowledge is at as we rely heavily on it for policy, if not individual beliefs.

You are right to think through this question, and as you imply, there are different forms of knowledge, i.e. epistemologies. Science geneologically derives from empiricism, the epistemological idea that true knowledge comes from sensory experience and observation–philosophy has moved on from this idea. But accepting empirocism, the default is necessarily no knowledge, as absence of knowledge precedes knowledge from observation. Science applies empirical methods and deductive/inductive reasoning to generate new knowledge; while you may reason a theory, that theory must ultimately be tested against observation. So empirically, we cannot conclude/know sapience exists somewhere without observing it. Now the idea of “null hypothesis” can be thought of as a formalization of this. It comes from statistics in the 1920s when they were trying to determine a relationship between two data sets. As per empiricism, the null hypothesis is always that there is no relationship and therefore observations are due to random chance. And the purpose of the tests are to see if this null hypothesis should be rejected/disproven.

Another dated, but still helpful approach to thinking of the scientific question is Karl Popper’s falsifiability. It is possible to falsify the theory that “dogs cannot possess sapience by” observing one instance (not due to random chance) of sapience in a dog. However you cannot falsify the theory that “dogs can possess sapience” unless you can observe all dogs throughout space and time and show they don’t possess sapience.

You bring up some great points! Indeed it is very difficult to determine scientifically what kinds of reasoning occurs within animals’ experiences and behaviours. My post was more to clarify the classic distinction between sentience and sapience going with the assumption that dogs aren’t sapient. But as you indicate, it’s absolutely an ongoing question we’re actively interrogating. Sure, sapience is a bit of a floppy term, but we can choose more operational definitions around meta-cognition and the like. I leave it to the experts to refine terms and conduct research. We have very strong collective evidence that animals are sentient and very weak evidence (so far) to indicate sapience (however you define it). Epistemologically, we are limited in that we can only ever approach this question from the human perspective.

Your dog may well ponder their life as a dog, but the evidence for it is nil. So scientifically we cannot conclude it and assume the null hypothesis of non-sapience.

Philosophically we can consider how we approach the possibility of it though. Metaphysically, we can consider whether dogs’ consciousness resemble humans re: perception, free will, or self. Ethically, we can consider if it’s better to treat them as if they are sapient or not, I can imagine arguments either way. And an example of where we would is with humans who are extremely cognitively impaired.

Emotionally, we can also decide for ourselves what is the appropriately meaningful relationship we have with our pets in how we relate to them.

The distinction being made when we talk about “understanding” and “choices” I about the distinction between sentience and sapience.

Dogs are sentient, meaning they have a conscious experience involving emotions and works with memory and instincts to determine motivated actions. This is a complex system that results in complex behaviour like preferring one food over another, stubbornly ignoring your commands, or recognizing when you’re upset and coming up to you to comfort you. It’s beautiful.

Sapience is related to the capacity to be meta/self-aware. This is what is normally meant by “understand” and “choice” when talking about how “special” humans are. As far as we can tell in experiments, dogs do not have the capacity to understand themselves like “I’m a dog who really enjoys walking” or “Good dogs take care of people, so I’m going to choose to take extra care of human because I want to be good.” This is what you might call “wisdom” or “rational” behaviour, and some animals to exhibit sapience to an extent. Both can be involve what we think of as “choices” e.g. selecting one of several options, but they’re distinct behaviours.

Humans engage in both, making it extra confusing. I’m not being particularly meta-aware and rational when I choose to cut off a piece of my steak and eat it. I am being more meta-aware when I choose to slow down my eating because I want to be respectful of my friend who cooked it for me, and I want to savour the moment, appreciating the flavours, texture, and effort that went into its preparation.

My dog knows that I prepare her food and she expresses her emotions and desires to me and she responds to my behaviour/communication. But she doesn’t understand that I chose to rescue her or that we are two people living our short and shorter lives together.

I will always recommend Into The Breach to everyone. Perfect mechanics, easy to jump in and out of, satisfying aesthetics, balanced difficulty

Yes, we are in agreement on the outlook. As they’ve been saying in Ukraine, “The situation is grim”. My point was more about continuing to fight on all fronts, including the political/legislative fronts.

There are people in Congress who want that and are exactly working towards that. It isn’t lost yet, and they are not giving it up without a fight.

I don’t want to shake the ruling class, I want to take away their power to exploit people. I want insurance companies reigned in. Getting Obamacare passed did more than what a thousand vigilantes could, and that was after the Republicans and lobbyists gutted it.

If people really want to stick it to the man (conservatives and liberals alike), then they can vote in representatives and Senators who will actually legislate for the people, rather than ones who will enrich themselves off their backs.

You can revolt, you can eat the rich, it feels great. But what matters is how the system gets changed or doesn’t change. Plenty of revolutions have replaced the system was something worse, with these heros who took down the ruling class in their place. Keep a close eye on Syria, here’s hoping for the best.

He’s not dead.

Lol that’s some serious cherry picking my dude. One is one of the best action movies of the last 20 years and launched a franchise. The other is a middling coming of age story made for streaming. There are plenty of bland action movies just as bad as Damsel and without an ounce of activism that come out every year. Try comparing it to Get Out, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Mad Max Fury Road, hell even Inglorious Basterds might be considered activism now that fascism is back in fashion.

My friend, the messages that only uneducated people can be pro-fascist and educated people are immune to propaganda is propagandistic. It’s reductive and misleading. Evil does not limit itself to the ignorant. Still,I think we have different meanings of “educated”

Sure we can quibble about the median quality of a college education in the US, you you have to draw the line somewhere. But the issue I’m pointing at is people get lazy conflating education with social progressiveness and egalitarianism and dismiss people with different worldviews as “uneducated”. There are plenty of intelligent well-educated people who are morally bankrupt or deeply mistaken. After all, eugenics came from some of the most “educated” minds in the world.

Several states use cloud seeding to deal with drought among other things. It’s not used in Florida currently, but it might be a useful tool to deal with the effects of climate change in the future.

Yeah… that’s the uneducated citizens part dude…

Yes and no. Yes, it is true that more uneducated people voted for Trump, and lack of education means people do not understand the risks and negative implications of voting for Trump over Harros for themselves. No, that argument doesn’t explain the whole picture. It is also true that educated people who understand the implications voted for him anyway because they saw it as benefiting them/their worldviews. Keep in mind half of college educated male voters and over a third of college educated female voters went for Trump.

Sometimes you’re just craving something specific or need something a bit smaller scale instead of a massive AAA. After finishing Cyberpunk 2077, I bounced around from God of War to Assassin’s Creed Origins to Spiderman, and on and on, all great titles but just stopped after a few hours… the game that finally grabbed me was an indie from a few years ago called Crying Suns.

If you want a small game with killer mechanics and that you won’t feel like you’re abandoning after a few hours, try Into The Breach

There are people willing to pay $80 for your game, $60, $40, $20, $10, and $5. You might be able get someone willing to pay $10 to pay $15 with good marketing, but you will never get them to pay $60. So when you’ve gone through most people willing to pay $60 and $40, you might as well go through the rest of the market. It doesn’t cost you that much more than you’re already spending on servers, so why not make that extra money.

Great question! The reason why I was using the 2017 report is that the Guardian arrival you originally referred to was from 2017, so I looked at the report they were working off of. While the article is still misleading (shame Guardian) the notion that a small proportion of companies, both state and private owned (100-200), are responsible for the majority (>50%) of global emissions.

Looking at the updated graph of annual emissions, it seems like this is still true, though I haven’t counted the companies. Again I agree the 72% figure is misleading, but I am pushing back on the alternative implication that relatively few companies are not actually making up the majority of annual emissions.

Yes and no. The Carbon Majors Report provides two ways of looking at global emissions: Cumulative and Annual. The table you showed reflects the Cumulative Emissions Since Industrial Revolution (1751-2022)

While not reported in the Guardian article, the same 2017 report stated 72% (p5) of global industrial GHGs in 2015 came from 224 companies, with the sample breakdown in the 2017 report, Appendix II (p15). As you can see, pretty much all of those producers are private/state-owned companies and much closer to the current picture of annual emissions. I’m not sure what counts as “industrial”, but crunching the raw numbers of 30565/46073 Mt (Global Emissions, statcan) it works out to about 66% of global emissions in 2015.

I think there’s probably something wrong with the math around per-response water consumption, but it is true that evaporative cooling consumes potable water, in that the water cannot be reused until it cycles through the atmosphere and is recaptured from precipitation, same way you consume water by drinking and pissing it out, or agriculture consumes it for growing things. Fresh water usage is a major concern and bottleneck, especially with climate change. With the average data centre using 300k gallons of water per day, and Google’s entire portfolio using 5bn gallons per day, it’s not nothing.

EV never has to be recharged… Because it recharges on the way downhill.

“World’s largest EV never has to be plugged in” is sufficiently click-baity without being so dumbly self contradicting