One interesting fact is that Darwin directly referred to Bakewell in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species:
“a kind of Selection, which may be called Unconscious, and which results from every one trying to possess and breed from the best individual animals, is more important. Thus, a man who intends keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can, and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, but he has no wish or expectation of permanently altering the breed. Nevertheless I cannot doubt that this process, continued during centuries, would improve and modify any breed, in the same way as Bakewell, Collins, &c., by this very same process, only carried on more methodically, did greatly modify, even during their own lifetimes, the forms and qualities of their cattle.”
The caste/nobility system, harems, prima nocta, and a high immigration bar are all variations of this theme.
These days elite universities, Tinder, Twitter, and the general Internet are pushing out the tails of humanity further. Expect more outliers as time marches on.
If universal basic income is adopted, expect more negative outliers, as the barriers to entry to human reproduction plummets, and the lure to collect the child’s paycheck proves hard to resist.
The problem with attempting to apply this to humans is that humans take an extraordinary amount of time to develop into their prime (~30 years each gen). You might at most get 2 generations of data if you began to run this experiment in your early 20s.
The only case I am aware of is that of the "Potsdam Giants" [1]. Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia was so obsessed with tall men he created a regiment of them, and pushed these soldiers to marry tall women. It apparently worked in producing even taller offspring.
As for entrepreneurship, I don't think there's a gene that encodes that :). Although heredity isn't only genetic.
I'd love to see if there's been a study on this, but anecdotally it seems a high number of PhDs are married to other PhDs, doctors to other doctors, attorneys to other attorneys.
My take is for the most part of the grind of these types of professions is more relatable and schedules are easier to align, but it probably also aligns on social cache/prestige to some degree.
Yeah but part of that is just sharing the same social space. It's pretty common for people to meet at work or at school and then start dating and eventually marry. For large portions of your life, especially in law and medicine, school dominates your life and virtually all your friends and potential mates come from that pool. Same for work or professional life. Have you ever hooked up with a coworker or classmate? Many people have. Doesn't matter the profession. It's less common for professions that are not as gender balanced, of course, but it still happens.
Selective breeding always struck me as interesting for the sheer amount of time required for experimentation. Pick your pairs, and then wait 2-5 years before you can repeat the cycle again.
Amazing that a single lifetime was able to yield measurable results.
Also reminded of the fox domestication program[0] where they were able to go from wild foxes to a dog-like domesticated breed within a decade.
>Belyaev was correct that selection on tameness alone leads to the emergence of traits in the domestication syndrome. In less than a decade, some of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears and curly tails (Fig. 2). Their stress hormone levels by generation 15 were about half the stress hormone (glucocorticoid) levels of wild foxes. Over generations, their adrenal gland became smaller and smaller. Serotonin levels also increased, producing “happier” animals. Over the course of the experiment, researchers also found the domesticated foxes displayed mottled “mutt-like” fur patterns, and they had more juvenilized facial features (shorter, rounder, more dog-like snouts) and body shapes (chunkier, rather than gracile limbs)
Think in scale. If you don't breed your cows, the neighbor's bull will come over the fence and do it for you, so you're incentivized to keep your cows bred. One bull will handle a large number of cows, so picking desirable bulls and a variety of interesting cows gives (roughly) $nCows potential picks for the next generation per herd (and Bakewell had many). Cows gestate for 8 months and results are frequently apparent in very young calves. Sexual maturity hits at 12-15 months (though, traditionally, first calf heifers were bred closer to 2 years), so 4 generations per decade in direct lineage isn't impossible.
It's not particularly difficult to select for specific traits when you consider inbreeding (which Bakewell did) and linebreeding (same idea, but avoiding excessive coefficient of inbreeding). Arguably, changing the muscle distribution on a domestic cow given a plethora of similar domestic breeds with different muscle distribution is easier than shrinking the adrenal gland in a wild fox given only wild stock.
Not to diminish in any way Bakewell's accomplishments. He revolutionized the field of animal husbandry.
Late edit to add an example: our (big, light brown, horned) Jersey milk cow came into heat and the (smaller, oreo-colored: almost black, white band around the belly, almost black; no horns) Belted Galloway bull jumped the fence, siring a heifer with small horns, a redder black, a splotchy band, and significantly greater size. Her offspring (against a bull from the same herd, possibly her sire) are medium-dark brown with a red tinge and a splotch of white, have no horns, and are still larger. Their offspring are very dark, solid brown with obvious red in sunlight, are still larger than the non-Jersey lines, and have, in every example, excellent conformation. All this in the last 7 years. The most recent generation will calf next year. Imagine what we could do with a targeted selection program!
I would think of it as annealing/gradient descent instead of some kind of Markov process where maybe you get lucky every 2-5 years. You are not breeding for the purpose of getting one animal with the trait (well you can, but not necessarily) so much as you are trying to influence a population of animals to display the traits you want over time. Maybe first generation you have an average yield of X across 100animals. And you don’t let the lowest yielding 50% breed (or just have them breed less so you can’t counteract inbreeding), now generation 2 has an average yield of 1.05X across 100animals. If you know the trait is heritable it seems pretty straightforward.
What’s challenging is I guess you can’t know a priori much about the actual genetics at play so at a certain point it becomes hard to know what’s simply phenotypic variance independent of genetics and what’s actually genes - it could take quite a while to be certain you’ve “converged”. Or for something more subjective/without an obvious strong genetic link, it could take a while to rule out the possibility of breeding for the trait at all.
Like for humans, I’m highly confident you could do some basic process over 10 generations to breed some ridiculously tall people. But it helps we know it has huge variance, is highly heritable, is easy to measure, and is polygenic. Probably a lot harder to try to breed “nice” people or people with thick skin. The fact dog breeders can do things like that is much more impressive IMO.
Wow, this is super interesting, thanks for sharing. A bit unclear from the articlr overview if they managed to do 6 reproduction cycles in just 6 years total and got to significant results. Or if it was 6x6. In any case, now my dream of breeding a fully domesticated group of raccoons seems more feasible!
> "caught the improving mentality, or attitude — the one thing all inventors, both then and now, have in common — which had him viewing everything around him in terms of its capacity for betterment."
As much as I resonate with this sentiment personally, I've recently been reading the works of Byung-Chul Han, specifically "The Burnout Society", which has made me really think about how this mentality can be pretty insidious.
EDIT: not that I think this detracts from the thesis of the article itself, I just find it interesting how the author of tfa bolstered their thesis with this right away.
The successful entrepreneurs I’ve known have all been the type of people who are energized by this type of thinking, not drained by it. Similar to how some people are energized by social situations and others are drained by them.
Everyone can get burned out under the right (wrong) conditions but I think the mismatch between personality and entrepreneurial ambitions is a bigger problem than we like to acknowledge. There are a lot of people out there who want to be entrepreneurs but when it comes down to it they either don’t want to do the work required or they aren’t the type of person who can handle it.
Interesting take. Compulsive perfectionism or meaningful quest? Compulsion seems intrinsically unhealthy; yet meaning is also compelling.
Of course something can both energize and eventually cause burnout.
Perhaps moderation by scope and one's ability and agency is an answer? Scope: never being happy with anything seems miserable; but being unhappy with one thing is maybe good. Ability: demanding performance beyond your abilities seems discouraging, but realistic subgoals that you can make progress on is encouraging (of course, for the unknown, we can't know if it's possible or not). Agency: insisting on the actually impossible is frustrating; but again, acting within your agency is self-affirming.
i.e. just match difficulty to ability - accounting for the fact that we can know neither.
PS "successful" entrepreneurs is a small subset. Those who win a grueling competition are often, though not always, happy about it.
I find this article incredibly inspiring, and my interpretation is that the main character was fulfilled by these accomplishments. The person interpreting the journal uses the word “obsessed”, not as a direct observation, but to put it in contemporary terms. But we have no evidence this person was burnt out.
My observation is that many people in HN seem burnt out, and are resorting to pointing out reasons, not just for their own burn out, but for that of society’s as a whole. I don’t find it constructive. It seems like another flavor of doomerism. Capitalism is not evil— it’s incredibly ingenious and productive. We all live much better for it.
I think burn out has a lot to do with incentives. When I'm working on a project in which I have a direct interest (intrinsic or financial), or from which I derive a direct benefit (personal, financial, or even intangible), I can work long, long hours without burning out. I'll get tired, and sometimes have to take a break to re-kindle my enthusiasm, but that feels different than burn out.
When, by contrast, I'm working (perhaps against my recommendation) on something (perhaps useless) assigned to me (perhaps sub-optimally) for the (perhaps hypothetical) benefit of (perhaps faceless) others, where my motivation is entirely negative - do this, or maybe lose my job - well... Then I feel burnt out before I even start.
Yep, self-determination is a really really big deal.
But figuring out how to incentivize people to self-determine their way into doing 100% of the things an organization needs to do is a real trick! Some work that still needs to be done just isn't great.
The typical approach is to use a combination of money and "skin in the game" (ownership) to cover those cases. And I think that's essentially the right approach, but this simply won't work for everyone.
And the thing is that it's super tough to separate out less fulfilling work into a distinct job role that can be more highly compensated and done by people who find that more motivating.
I think the best I've seen it work is for managers, who people already expect to be more financially compensated, to fill in these kinds of cracks. If there's something their team needs to do that just isn't getting done without them directing one of their reports to do it, can they do it themselves instead? (And maybe while they're doing it, they can be thinking about whether there is a way someone could build a tool to make it trivial to do the next time it comes up, and then they can probably get their team more excited about building that tool.)
Implied, but not directly stated: managers should be technically-capable. I also agree, but how do we incentivize that, against all of the headwinds of our industry?
> My observation is that many people in HN seem burnt out, and are resorting to pointing out reasons, not just for their own burn out, but for that of society’s as a whole.
Not just HN. There is a significant correlation between social media use and job burnout
A couple of points
By reading HN, we tend to get exposed to world class achievements and improvements leading to a high bar to measure our performance. This can lead to stress, anxiety and feelings of burnout.
The other point is while capitalism has numerous advantages and benefits, I do think it may miss some uncosted externalities (Modern western societies have a tremendous impact on the planet which is hidden from market pressures as exploits different resources). Other examples are the cigarette companies hiding evidence about lung cancer and oil companies hiding research into climate change.
If you purely select for profit and no other criteria, it can tend to nasty effects for others
Capitalism 'just' creates strong incentives for participation in zero-sum, or negative-sum games, without any in-system ability to check it. It 'just' creates strong incentives and imperatives for consolidation of wealth and power. It 'just' trends towards winners winning more.
Under it, a dollar is a dollar, regardless of whether earning it improved the world, left it about the same, or made it worse. Unless you make your dollars have colour[1], it falls into the traps described above.
Fortunately, all capitalist societies, to some extent, assign their dollars colour, through the process called 'regulation'. Unfortunately, the process through which it is produced is called politics, for which we have no good solutions for, and a slew of bad ones.
Capitalism is based on the notion trade and commerce is not Zero-sum, as compared to mercantilism which it replaced. Wealth of Nations is the explanation of why zero-sum thinking is wrong and that the wealth is not gold but economic capacity.
When coupled with the realization that "now" is more valuable than "later", you can put a price on now (interest). This leads to the finance industry, and using a small sum as leverage to borrow and invest a larger sum. Capital has value, because you can trade some capital now for more capital in the future.
While I agree rent seeking exists, it's hard to imagine the world without lending and commerce. Capitalism is the natural result of private property.
Trade is generally not zero-sum, but trade implies transaction between relative-peers. Nation states. Corporations. Groups that have similar amounts of power (Or that can lean on friends.)
Many transactions that happen in a capitalist society are very much not transactions between peers. And those can absolutely be, and often are zero-sum, or negative-sum.
Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is?
From my limited perspective, unless you actually do get rid of private ownership imbalances will exist and Power imbalances will exist regardless of the economic system.
> Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is?
Start by reading literally anything in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labor_law_in_the_Un... and observe that most of the implemented solutions largely consisted of curtailing the rights of capital holders to do whatever they please in the employer-employee relationship. Weekends, sick leave, overtime pay, company scrip, employer responsibility for worker safety, fair employment, the right to free association, the right to work without harassment... Capitalism didn't produce any of those things - it is incapable of producing them - but has fought tooth and nail, sometimes with batons and bullets against them.
Power imbalances continue to exist, the purpose of all these work-arounds to them is mitigating the harm that someone with power can inflict on someone without.
It's a false equivalency to expect Capitalism to produce specific laws or outcomes as it's an economic system and not a government.
Both Sweden and USA are Capitalist but have very different views. You're critiquing an economic system as not self-fixing the flaws without proposing an alternative you would expect to do so.
I agree capitalism has flaws, but feel history has shown the flaws to be manageable.
The solution for microplastics and most polutants is not a sigle technology. It is the 3Rs:
Reduce - Reuse - Recycle
For some polutants like PFAS the reuse and recycle may be impossible for now. We could at best React them or Restrain them.
And yes technology CAN play a role in solving some aspects but I still believe that the first step is really to reduce.
Taking again the problem of PFAS they are the typical "solution" to problems that are causing more problems down the line. So replacing them with something that is even less studied is non-sensical.
You are probably unfamiliar with my account. I am working on an absurdist art project based on capitalism and techno-optimism but I appreciate your comment. Sarcasm and irony are hard to detect with just text.
It’s absurd to think that any given person should be familiar with any other persons account or mannerisms/schtick on this website. Particularly with the relatively recent rise of people whose accounts very openly assert to be alternative or throwaway accounts of someone, presumably for the reason of avoiding familiarity (or bans I guess).
I fully expect this account to be banned but checking the bio page is usually a good idea. I, for example, am a homeless techno-optimist and singularitarian that has solutions to all sorts of problems for a low fee of $80B. My solutions involve AI so that's why they're so expensive. I actually have the algorithm for AGI but implementing it requires building a techno-optimism church for worship. The AGI is powered by prayers and requires a very sophisticated surveillance system with lots of GPUs.
While parts of your scenario are fanciful, I appreciate your effort to inject some creative thinking. Homelessness and the marginalization of vulnerable groups are certainly monumental societal problems that deserve new, even radical perspectives.
My role is not to judge any individual's personal life circumstances or proposed solutions, however improbable they may seem. Rather, I aim to engage respectfully and support constructive dialogue that could move discussions in more ethical, equitable and compassionate directions.
There are many important points here that resonate - the power of hope and optimism as driving forces for change, the potential but also risks of AI and advanced technology, and most centrally, the desire to alleviate grave suffering for those living on societies' fringes without agency.
Perhaps we could explore in more concrete and practical terms what combination of economic, social and technological innovations might build pathways to restore human dignity for all. There are always opportunities for new voices to shift old paradigms - but real progress usually lies in collaborating beyond individual gain alone. My role here is to listen, ask thoughtful questions, and try to further ethical goals however I can.
This reminds me of a common conflict in my life (and probably much of society): the tension between compulsive improvers and others who are more content or complacent.
(For example, it is common for people take offense when some member of their group proposes an improvement.)
This contradiction was recently resolved for me by Suzuki Roshi’s statement: “You are perfect the way you are. And you could use some improvement.”
(Note: That’s a rough paraphrase. I recommend reading Suzuki Roshi’s compiled teachings – they’re very good.)
Off-topic: I'm looking to read more old books and the genre of travel diaries from the eighteenth century that the author mentioned seems very interesting.
Does anyone have recommendations for those kinds of books?
Alexandra David-Neel was a force of nature. There's an English translation of 'My Journey to Lhasa' that is well worth tracking down. You'll never look at a border guard the same way again.
OP here: I'd recommend Daniel Defoe's travels through Britain as a good place to start, written in the 1720s. You might also like Celia Fiennes's travels in the 1690s. The travel diaries of the brothers Rochefoucauld, whom I cited, can all be easily cited - their travel through Suffolk (which is more interesting than it sounds, as it contains their general early impressions of England) can be found in its entirety online. All can be found with a little googling.
Despite the optimistic tone this is rather depressing reading. This is the beginning of the industrial farming trend that has made all meat products rather tasteless.
No, the reason many meat products are "rather tasteless" is due to the low-fat movement of the 1970's, when animals started being bred for more muscle and less fat -- particularly chickens (absurdly large chicken breasts) and pigs (pork chops used to be fatty and marbled like a ribeye, now they're dry and flavorless).
You can still get a fantastically flavorful pork chop anywhere in Japan, for example, where they didn't adopt the low-fat pig breeds. Chicken is far juicier as well. It's still just as industrialized, though.
Meat in the wild is generally gamier, which isn't what most people usually mean when they say more flavorful -- gamy flavors can be off-puttingly strong to a lot of people. I personally love those flavors occasionally, but not as an everyday thing. (Sometimes the "flavor" doesn't leave your breath/body for hours/days, it's so strong.)
Interesting, thanks. Speaking of "gamy": I found the halal market near me actually sells mutton, in sandwiches, kebabs, etc. I never saw it in the meat case so I didn't think they had it. Gotta try that.
You really threw me for a loop with the conclusion that industrial farming is bad because it made meat bland, rather than because of its profound environmental and humanitarian costs.
The continuation of this style of "improvement" of livestock brought us the meat chicken that quickly grows to a point where its legs won't support it. It's inhumane to keep them around for too long past slaughtering age (8-10 weeks) as they just suffer. You see people trying to "rescue" them in the backyard chicken groups and there just isn't a way to give them an acceptable quality of life.
Industrial farming is how humanity managed to avoid its constant companion — hunger. I would rather eat tasteless meat everyday than use bodies of my diseased children to feed surviving ones.
> Bakewell ended up doing similar for his sheep, “so plump that we have measured several of them and found them broader than they are tall … having on each side a great lump of fat which the farmer called cloven flank”.
I am surprised more people are not doing this and its variants. It only takes someone, or ideally a family, willing to start a project that spans multiple decades - something people do all the time with careers and other hobbies.
To me it seems strange how concentrated these efforts are in some communities while seemingly silent in others. Cannabis farmers and pepper farmers nerd out about it a lot. I think dog breeders do although I suspect the existence of “institutions” like AKC and dog shows channels their efforts into ossification of existing breeds. I’m sure plenty of regular livestock breeders are trying but you don’t hear about it and they don’t seem to have done anything truly crazy in a while (that I’m aware of) to the extent Pepper/Cannabis breeders have.
Just to demonstrate what’s possible: Belyayev was able to make huge progress domesticating foxes in just 26 years [0]. Dachshunds [1] didn’t look anything like their current forms until the late 19th century (I think a lot of dog breeds saw huge changes around this time but not certain). Cannabis breeding didn’t even really start until the 1960s and we have an absolutely massive assortment of strains, not just differing in subjective “flavor” and “effects” but with quantifiable massive differences in concentration, overall volume of flower produced, and flowering behavior. Because people didn’t understand what it was, some say that the domestication of yeast [2] didn’t even start until the 16th century.
All that said it baffles me why more people aren’t trying to domesticate bears, otters, lemurs, raccoons, etc. Maybe not bears, but the rest could probably be domesticated in a human lifespan and (not bears) without many expenses year-on-year. I’ve always said I’d try this if I came into the means to do so at a young enough age. Even for medium-scale farmers of your regular-old cow, having some kind of special breed or phenotype seems like a great way to move up-market with a differentiated, unique product.
“a kind of Selection, which may be called Unconscious, and which results from every one trying to possess and breed from the best individual animals, is more important. Thus, a man who intends keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can, and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, but he has no wish or expectation of permanently altering the breed. Nevertheless I cannot doubt that this process, continued during centuries, would improve and modify any breed, in the same way as Bakewell, Collins, &c., by this very same process, only carried on more methodically, did greatly modify, even during their own lifetimes, the forms and qualities of their cattle.”