Things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics III

report back on how it goes

1. How much should a couple talk if they are having dinner in a restaurant, after being together for one month/year/decade?
   

2. If it’s safer to face backwards in vehicles, then what is it that’s shared by infants in cars and soldiers on military planes but no one else?
   

3. Among rock bands with > 250 million albums sold, 5/6 are from the UK vs. 1/6 from the US. (Or 6/8 vs. 2/8 if you count Elton John and Michael Jackson). Why?
   

4. If you swim in public pools, is that because you reject the research suggesting that most contain 30-80 liters of urine, or because you don’t mind?
   

5. Is declining fertility destined to be reversed through growth of high-fertility subcultures, or could there be competing low-fertility cultures that peel people away so effectively that population declines forever?
   

6. Does postapocalyptic fiction represent a yearning for the life and death of pre-history? If so, where is there so little fiction based on ordinary pre-history life?
   

7. What is the best Brassica? I collect here the most common for readers negligent in their Brassica studies:

   

8. Does it matter to you, emotionally, that only nigra, oleracea, and rapa are diploid species, and the others are lame tetraploids that just add together the ancestral genomes (carinata=nigra+oleracea, napus=rapa+oleracea, juncea=nigra+rapa) as first proposed in 1935 in Woo Jang-choon’s Triangle of U theory?
   

9. Which color of food should there be more of?
   

10. Choose two yes/no opinion questions. Around 50% of the population should say yes to each. What do you choose to get the smallest possible intersection?

11. Do you think you could cultivate a taste in types of music you don’t currently like if you tried? If yes, why don’t you?
    

12. What percentage of young people’s increased propensity to explore new music is driven by social taste competition?
    

13. Say you were born in China/America/India (assuming you weren’t) but you are still “you”. What’s the biggest difference?
    

14. What are the odds that humans are just too dumb to understand the universe and our place in it?
    

15. What are the odds that consciousness isn’t unified and that there isn’t just a single “you” in your head experiencing the world?
    

16. If you could cure all heart disease or all cancer, which would you pick?
    

17. Take the conditions in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, e.g.
    

    • Antisocial personality disorder

    • Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

    • Autism spectrum disorder

    • Avoidant personality disorder

    • Bipolar II disorder

    • Borderline personality disorder

    • Dissociative amnesia

    • Major depressive disorder

    • Paranoid personality disorder

    • Schizophrenia

    • Tourette’s disorder

    • etc.
      

    What fraction of these concepts will still exist in 100 years?
    

18. Does time actually go faster as you get older, or do we just remember it differently?
    

19. What foods are best eaten with chopsticks but don’t come from food traditions that use chopsticks? What about with Western cutlery? What about with your hands?
    

20. I’ve written to the “corresponding author” of dozens of published research papers, always with polite and straightforward questions. Something like 80% do not respond, at all. Even when they promised the journal to make data available upon request, most do not respond. How much of a jerk would I be to publish a list of those papers?
    

21. To what degree is the anomalous self-confidence of American economists explained simply by the existence of Milton Friedman?
    

22. Say you can have your eyes to be upgraded to either (a) have a fourth group of cone cells peaking around 370 nm in the UV band, like birds or (b) to be sensitive to polarization, like cephalopods. Your visual cortex is also upgraded to process the information. Which do you choose?
    

23. How different would the next 20 years be if things created entirely by humans AI got an unfakable gold star?
    

24. How much do normies really miss out on by using a Bourdieu-007 final last (1) ACTUALLY FINAL 2b edited.txt style file naming scheme instead of learning a source control system?
    

25. If you could make yourself enjoy something less, what would it be? Would that make you enjoy life more, overall?
    

26. How much does it matter how open people are to persuasion? If people were much more/less open to being convinced by arguments and changing their minds, how much better/worse would the world be? Assume that people are only convinced by “good” arguments.
    

27. Say you flip a standard US penny 20 times, getting 15 heads. What’s your best estimate for the true bias of the coin, if you think there’s a 50% chance Bayesian statistics are correct?
    

28. Per minute, is there really any philosophy text that offers more insight than Existential Troopers?
    

29. Who would win in a wrestling match, Jesus or Shirdi Sai Baba?
    

30. In an alternative universe where when yeast broke down sugar molecules into fentanyl rather than alcohol, would we all get together and celebrate the new year by consuming fentanyl?

If you’d like to answer these questions instead of using them to start arguments as intended, you can do that here.

(previously) (previously)