Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "Veritasium" channel.

  1. That thruster control for the satellite is a thing of beauty. I'd love to see an animation of how it works!
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  2. It's wisdom, not just knowledge. This is the kind of information that benefits the person who understands it.
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  3.  @gablesguitars  I think it's like that expression about horses and water. People can be taught knowledge, but have to accept it for themselves before they can understand it, and the knowledge becomes wisdom.
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  4. There's a fundamental incompatibility between an economic system that requires constant growth (obtained through methods like planned obsolescence) and the fact that the ecosystem we live in has physical limits. If every company has to sell more, more, more of everything forever, eventually something much more fundamental than a light bulb will break.
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  5. Really cool video! And now for the first time I understand why the black hole in Interstellar looks the way it does! Neat!
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  6. What you're talking about is a logical fallacy, but it's also human nature. It's a logical shortcut we fall back on when we feel overwhelmed by information or unsure. I think the best way to get people to avoid making the fallacy is to help them avoid becoming overwhelmed or unsure of what is real in the first place. That means clear, impartial discussion of proper risk management by people who are already highly trusted. But of course, finding someone who everyone trusts is also a problem...
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  7. The basic idea is to redefine all the units of measurement used in SI (the measurement system of science) so they depend upon inherent properties of the universe (physical constants), instead of solid objects. The reason they're doing this is because any solid object will change with time, and measurements based on them won't be accurate forever. (Today's kilogram will weigh a tiny bit less or more than the same kg measured in 1799.) All of the other SI units have already been redefined this way, and now it's the kilogram's turn. By using the method described in the video, the kilogram can now be defined by using two different physical constants: Avogadro's number and the Planck constant. So they're doing two different measurements (one with each constant), and checking to see that both methods agree on the same measurement of the kg. That way they can be certain of the kilogram's weight to a high degree of accuracy.
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  8. Thanks!
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  9. Thank you for making this video! It's truly fascinating and well explained. I've been taking NMN for several weeks now (a lot less than Dr. Sinclair is reported to take, since it's really expensive), and I've noticed a definite increase in my energy level. It's easy to understand why the old mice wanted to run and run. Actually the most surprising thing I've found is that it seems to be easier to think after taking NMN. I don't get mentally tired even in stressful situations.
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  10. I think there'd always be some human jobs, though. Teachers, child care workers, chefs, scientists, engineers and the like. And artists of all kinds. Basically people in professions that help others, or people in professions that create and discover. Education would be essential in that post-scarcity society. If people don't understand the world around them their horizons will get smaller and smaller and they'll end up being the ones who sit around all day.
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  11. That's a good point, TonyOneBlairoby. But if the switch is made of plastic the only real environmental processes it needs to worry about are exposure to sunlight and heat. And if it's encased within a switchplate and/or within a wall it probably won't be exposed to much of either. But on the other hand, other applications of flexible machines might have more of a problem with wear, like the flexible cam for the chainsaw.
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  12. Thank you for this wonderful video! I've read about all of these concepts before, but never heard them explained as simply and as carefully connected together as you do here. It really all seems like a single train of thought. Or maybe one branch of the gigantic, incredibly complex, ever evolving thought that is physics. ;-)
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  13. This is a wonderful video! Thank you for making it. I've read about the Prisoner's Dilemma before, but you and your guests described it in a very clear, accessible way. You actually talked to Professor Axelrod! That is so incredibly cool. Also, I'd like to elaborate on a point you make at the end of the video. This is the reason life is fundamentally anti-entropic - living things always tend to increase order in their local environment, because cooperation is better for individuals than unrestricted selfishness. It's the reason multicellular life forms evolved. If selfish strategies were better overall, the world would contain nothing except for marauding amoebas and parameciums.
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  14.  @woodstockjon420  The person learning the knowledge.
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  15. The basic problem is there are hidden costs our economic system wasn't built to recognize, because it was created (or sort of evolved into existence) hundreds of years ago when people thought the Earth was limitless. For instance, there's no purely economic penalty for cutting down the last tree or catching the last fish in the ocean, even though those actions would deny trees and fish to all future generations. It's actually the opposite: rare trees like Ebony and rare fish like Bluefin Tuna become more valuable as they get harder to find, which increases the pressure to harvest them all. Carbon taxes are an example of governments trying to make a hidden cost quantifiable as a monetary penalty. The costs of climate change which are usually paid in an indirect manner by people far away become an actual tax we pay when something we do leads to the release of carbon dioxide into the air. In theory this kind of feature bolted-on to capitalism should make the system more efficiently price goods and services, and lead to the reduction of hidden costs. But the subject is still new and experimental.
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  16. "To "fix" our system this way, you'd have to bolt on a tax for a lot of things. And it'll fight you at every step, and every individual facet of improvement." Absolutely. And places that don't impose these kind of taxes will be more attractive to industry than those that do because of lower operating costs. So the tax has to be adopted as widely as possible before it can even work properly. There are definitely challenges. "...The only change it makes is towards more profit, which even with infinite resources, isn't a direction that leads to betterment of human existence by anything other than coincidence." Well, you're getting into a much larger issue than just fixing capitalism. I agree with you that capitalism isn't the sole requirement for human fulfillment (no matter how many people seem to think money is all you need), but it is the best system available for the distribution of goods and services. I think we're going to need that system for a long time to come, and anything beyond that is a different matter. An equally important matter, but not something you can fix with goods and services.
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  17. Thank you for explaining your ideas! I see what you mean now, and you make a lot of sense. Those are indeed problems that capitalism can't solve. If anything, a laissez faire economic system would only make them worse by concentrating capital in fewer hands. How do you efficiently price labor when it's no longer needed? If it's a choice between "efficiently" impoverishing billions and solutions like universal basic income, then we should absolutely explore the UBI. It might be the key to a whole new kind of economy where everyone's basic needs are met, but to go beyond the basic you need to mentally add to the world in some way.
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  18. Thank you for making the video! But I just can't pretend that this is the end of the decade, and I don't understand how most people can make the compromise that this belief is "psychologically" correct. It's a math problem, not psychology or philosophy. In math there's only right and wrong, there's no "technically" correct. Anyway, aside from that aside I really enjoyed this video. The strategy of having clearly defined, written goals, and making small, steady improvements toward them while tracking your progress seems like a good one. I think I my resolutions fail because I never write any of them down and don't track my progress - so either I stop improving or I underestimate how much improvement I've actually made - which leads to despair and dropping the whole project until next year. It sounds like regular, written down tracking could short-circuit this process.
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  19. It's a self reinforcing cycle. Some people get lucky, but they have the talent and drive to make the most of that lucky break. The worst case is probably people who are lucky, didn't make anything out of it, but still believe they achieved their position through hard work.
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  20. Congratulations, man! That's very cool.
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  21. Thank you for another wonderful video! This is truly unique, I can't think of anyone else on YouTube (even mathematical channels) that would present a problem like this, in this way. Thanks to your descriptions and graphics I think I actually get it. Or rather, I get why nobody has been able to get it.
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  22. That was genuinely interesting and useful! I knew it would be interesting (because Veritasium always is) but I wasn't sure how how this Peak/End stuff could be useful to an individual until you busted out the advice for things like runs and vacations. It's really odd to think about intentionally manipulating how we remember things, but that makes a lot of sense.
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  23. Very cool!
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  24. An incredible achievement for science! And an incredible achievement for Albert Einstein. I wonder what he'd say if he knew that more than a hundred years later scientists carrying on his work would actually get a picture of a black hole?
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