"Why do we live at 10bits/s" has a number of interesting arguments and had me questioning my own experienced reality quite a bit. Then I went onto my youtube feed only to have a retrospective on Virtual Reality pop up and quickly bring me back to skepticism. Certainly the throughput of information into a VR headset, where we are still not adequately satisficing consumer needs, is higher than this rate? Even if we assume human colour perception being limited to 23bits (slightly below the "10 million perceivable colours here https://medium.com/hd-pro/color-bit-depth-and-perception-in-human-vision-ca97313722d3), the ability to perceive multiple colours changing in your periphery quickly overwhelms this rate, even allowing for truncating the bit length to determine much much a colour has to change for people to notice it. Still a lot of interesting examples there though!
I think the paper is saying that while our sensory *input* is quite high (color vision, audio, tactile, proprioception etc.) the actual information *output* (speech, typing, body position, facial expression, eye movement, etc.) is quite low. For example, most human languages seem limited to around 39 bits/s:
2. Fertility. I feel that some of the population decline fears are exaggerated and the negative aspect mitigated. OTOH, I'm happy to include a child allowance as part of a fully VAT funded social insurance scheme. [Whatever effect it woud have would be partly the "message."] And other things like removing obstacles to building more housing are good even if they didn't increase family size. Getting people to pipe down about how terrible everything is (Left and Right versions) woud be nice, but no policy levers.
1. It's good that CO2 concentrations/warming will decline as soon as we reach net zero, but that' not quite the whole story. There coud be (I think, is) momentum in some of the negative effects. "net zero" is a fine milestone, but the actual CO2 concentration target has to be a back calculation from the cost.
That's one reason to make sure the incentives we create reward withdrawing a molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere as it taxes the emission. We'll need to keep reducing net emissions past the net zero point.
"Why do we live at 10bits/s" has a number of interesting arguments and had me questioning my own experienced reality quite a bit. Then I went onto my youtube feed only to have a retrospective on Virtual Reality pop up and quickly bring me back to skepticism. Certainly the throughput of information into a VR headset, where we are still not adequately satisficing consumer needs, is higher than this rate? Even if we assume human colour perception being limited to 23bits (slightly below the "10 million perceivable colours here https://medium.com/hd-pro/color-bit-depth-and-perception-in-human-vision-ca97313722d3), the ability to perceive multiple colours changing in your periphery quickly overwhelms this rate, even allowing for truncating the bit length to determine much much a colour has to change for people to notice it. Still a lot of interesting examples there though!
I think the paper is saying that while our sensory *input* is quite high (color vision, audio, tactile, proprioception etc.) the actual information *output* (speech, typing, body position, facial expression, eye movement, etc.) is quite low. For example, most human languages seem limited to around 39 bits/s:
https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second
2. Fertility. I feel that some of the population decline fears are exaggerated and the negative aspect mitigated. OTOH, I'm happy to include a child allowance as part of a fully VAT funded social insurance scheme. [Whatever effect it woud have would be partly the "message."] And other things like removing obstacles to building more housing are good even if they didn't increase family size. Getting people to pipe down about how terrible everything is (Left and Right versions) woud be nice, but no policy levers.
I think the answer is mainly relative income.
I'm also not super worried about demographic decline (though I think it should be addressed), discussed more in point 3 here:
https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/links-8
1. It's good that CO2 concentrations/warming will decline as soon as we reach net zero, but that' not quite the whole story. There coud be (I think, is) momentum in some of the negative effects. "net zero" is a fine milestone, but the actual CO2 concentration target has to be a back calculation from the cost.
That's one reason to make sure the incentives we create reward withdrawing a molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere as it taxes the emission. We'll need to keep reducing net emissions past the net zero point.