In the future (probably in the next couple years) after a company I with with release their product, I've learned of the stupidest use for diamonds you've never heard of, I'll drop it here in whatever announcement package they release.
Diamonds actually get their value because a single entity (DeBeers) owns something like 80% of all diamonds in the market.
They dictate the price by throttling supply and naming a price. People are willing to pay as a flex but you are right in that DeBeers markets "real" diamonds and "lab grown".
It's mostly done to capture different market segments, and to keep up the value of their stockpile of nearly unlimited diamonds already mined by people who are essentially slaves.
That being said, if there was a market for diamonds soaking in vials of oppressed orphan blood (with provenance of course) DeBeers would absolutely sell it.
If lab grown diamonds became significantly cheaper than slave mined diamonds, DeBeers would still likely keep their mines open to maintain control of the market. Even if they successfully moved consumers on to lab diamonds - can't have someone else get diamond market share.
There was a study done a while back that looked at what happens when fake contraband (rhino horn in this case) is mixed in with real ones. They found that killing of rhinos went up because people wanted the real horn. The goal of pushing out fakes was to decrease the demand and it ended up with the opposite effect.
I imagine that diamonds will be similar.
Until there comes a point where anyone can grow a diamond in their home, DeBeers is going to continue to exploit people.
It is impossible to tell natural from man made diamonds. If it becomes cheaper to make them then EvilCorp will switch to doing that and probably not tell anyone.
That was an enjoyable read. At the end I couldn't help thinking about Penrose' cyclic conformal cosmology, in that a universe with only massless photons, distance becomes meaningless.
In the end you would need to do the math to really get a deeper understanding of what's going on. There's a lot of handwaving and analogies in popular science explanations, that isn't the full or real story, just a way to get the gist of things.
I would also stay away from the whole concept of gravitons, our best understanding right now is that gravity is due to the shape of spacetime and thus isn't a traditional force and has therefor no carrier. There is no such thing as a graviton as far as we know it (except for sci-fi where they are the carrier for the plot in many cases).
He's been focusing on it for like 20 years... And not on his own, he's been working with psychologists and anesthesiologists. Dude is pretty much the only physicist working at understanding consciousness, he's literally the expert
And that's not even getting into how physics is technically outside his expertise. Dudes a mathematician, he just applied that to physics, then applied physics to brains.
He doesn't claim to understand all of it, just like Einstein died before his shit was proven. Then Penrose showed up and worked with Hawking to prove a lot of Einstein's theories.
Penrose 100% accepts he won't live long enough to see his stuff finished. But he's confident it's in the right direction and if future generations keep working, some day we'll actually understand what consciousness is.
Penrose is a physicist. Thats where his expertise lies. He is not a neuroscientist, psychologist or any other profession that is relevant. He is NOT an expert in the area he has barged into. Being competent in one field DOES NOT translate into competence in others.
You may as well ask a very good plumber about how they think the brain works.
Yeah, and I would too. Wouldn't ask you for advice though. What did Penrose do to you, anyway? Nobody should be barred from learning new fields just because they already know one. Biochemists benefit massively from AI but they're backgrounds aren't traditionally computer science
Biochemists arent claiming that they know AI better than AI researchers do. If you dont understand why it is dangerous to be talking about things outside of your wheelhouse then there is no arguing with you.
Okay but you can probably ask someone that is not a biologist to learn about certain aspects of the brain and how it works. While you can't ask a plumber how the brain works for example, you can probably get his perspective on things related to blood flow (to some extent). Maybe you ask a chemist about certain chemicals in the brain and so on.
It might not be the best idea however to claim as a plumber that consciousmess is a series of pipes, but it's fine to give a view of something through a different lens.
Hell, neither me or you are experts in any of this, or experts in something to do with debating scientists or socials in gneeral, but here we are giving perspectives anyway.
My perspective is that someones' opinion isnt worth anything unless they actually have relevant expertise in what they are talking about. I do not need a degree in neuroscience to point that out.
Some opinions are worth more than others. Opinions based on facts and relevant expertise matter more than ones that arent. Penrose DOES NOT have the expertise needed to be taken seriously when it comes to consciousness.
My perspective is that someone's opinion is to be heard even if they have no expertise in a field. I am not saying their opinion should be more valued than one of an expert's, but i am not going to criticise or disregard them completely just because their field is something else.
What I am saying is we might simply miss out on some things if not for an opinion from someone in a different field. Even if that opinion is insane 90%, it might give us a push in a direction we haven't considered before. A biologist, a chemist, a physicist can look at a table and say different things about said table that hold true, without having an expertise in making tables.
That's not how any of this works. You see in science you have to actually do the work needed to support your hypothesis. And that hypothesis needs to be based on you understanding all the material that went into that hypothesis. Penrose hasn't done any of that. He doesn't have the expertise needed to form a good model for consciousness and he hasn't done the work to support that model.
In science, ideas that aren't supported by evidence are thrown in the trash not treated as worthy of further discussion. That's why we don't give astrology or young earth creationism the time of day. Because there is nothing to support them and a mountain of evidence against them. Just like there is nothing to support Penrose's ideas about consciousness.
Science is not a safe space. You have to actually defend your ideas against scrutiny.
There are dozens of ideas. It's ok if a researcher says, "I don't know."
Besides, Penrose has no idea either. He only adds an extra "quantum did it" layer between "this is what we know" and "this is how consciousness works."
Claiming a brain is a quantum computer doesn't answer any questions about consciousness.
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