> Societies collapse when the gap between the haves and have-nots becomes non-sustainable. Provable back to the Mayans and likely earlier.

I'd like to see some citations on this. Feudalism lasted a pretty long time...

EDIT: only Reddit would a request for citations be seen as an affront to the hivemind worth downvoting...

So...you just don't like it when you don't get uniform adulation and upvotes? Presenting even the mildest challenge (informed by scientists who work in the field) is enough to trigger ad-hominem attacks like "shitstain."

That seems kind of silly and fragile, imo.

The Martian doesn't present itself as nonfiction. The Hot Zone does.

I just think that if people are looking for a popular science book to read about zoonotic spillover, they would probably get more out of Spillover than the Hot Zone, since it's a more scientifically informed book.

Idk why you're stanning so hard for The Hot Zone - it's not super crazy that as time goes on, science advances, and more recent books improve on earlier ones.

Nothing that you said makes it an "excellent" book. It may have had a positive impact, but that's largely independent of the quality of the book - a lot of what is in The Hot Zone is just straight-up factually incorrect. In a work of scientific nonfiction, that's pretty much a disqualifier in my mind.

In fact, you could argue that it is the poor qualities of the book that prompted the billions of funding (since exaggerated fear-mongering makes a larger impact than measured, conservative science).

The Hot Zone was widely panned by virologists for fear-mongering and exaggerating the terror and grossness of Ebola.

It was critiqued in David Quamen's excellent book Spillover, which is a much more scientifically informed discussion of zoonotic viruses and how they spillover.

Read that, not The Hot Zone.

I'm not an expert (I came across this during a lit review on "emergence" in philosophy and found it refreshingly quantitative), but here's my take-away:

Say you're a scientist and you're trying to model some system. The general, reductionist assumption is that the best you can do is always going to be having a complete model of the micro-scale. Sort of a Pascal's Demon kind of thing. If we had enough knowledge and computing power, we could solve biology by just reducing it to a bunch of quantum mechanics problems.

But the world doesn't seem to work that way. Macro-scale objects in biology seem to have a "causal power" of their own. When you say, idk, you got sick with the flu, it doesn't really "feel" right to say that your illness was "caused" by a bunch of interactions between atomic orbitals or whatever. The illness can be modeled pretty much perfectly in terms of "macro-scale" interactions between the bug and your biology. So even if Pascal's Demon could do it all based on particles, he doesn't apparently need to.

What (I think) the authors are arguing is that we can understand this in terms of redundancy. There's not really any point in modelling every atom in a flu virus because they are, for the most part, totally redundant. If you wanted to predict the future of the illness by modeling every atom, you'd be doing something hugely wasteful, since two atoms in the shell of the virus capsule basically contribute the same thing.

So what the authors do is show that (in a bunch of silly, toy systems), you can "coarse grain" a system (sort of like lumping all the atoms together and saying "we don't care about individuals, just the structure you're part of"), and in doing so, that redundant information about the future copied over many elements gets "converted" into "useful" information specific to macro-scale elements.

I'm a bit fuzzy on this "synergy" construct - I'm not sure where that fits in.

This seems a bit paranoid, imo. It's a factual headline, and in the article itself, it literally says:

> Last month, the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen (BRS) union, representing more than 6,000 members, voted against the deal as did the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWED), which represents 11,000 workers.

Not everything is evidence of a plan by the Globalists to break the working class. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.