It’s not a text, it’s a video. You can download it with yt-dlp if you don’t want to just open the URL for some reason.

This is just semantics, but I mean… nature isn’t good. Nature is really terrible, actually. It’s an endless cycle of violence, death and entropy that has killed literally all of our ancestors and will kill us just as quickly if we give it the chance (to paraphrase one of my favourite games, The Talos Principle II). Being better than nature is an ideal anyone who isn’t some kind of insane social darwinist should strive for.

While I’m pretty sure I wholly agree with the sentiment of the majority of people saying it, I resent this “man is part of nature” argument because at face value it romanticizes suffering. Nature is dying by 40 if you’re lucky, and by 5 if you’re not. It’s your entire tribe starving to death because a volcano you didn’t even know about erupted on the other side of the world. It’s being killed or enslaved by another tribe’s raiding party because they want something you have (you may argue that this is human action, not nature, but chimps go to war and chimps are animals in nature, ergo war is part of nature). I am glad to be above a lot of that, and I hope future humans can be even further removed from it.

Of course what most people mean when they say that humans aren’t (or shouldn’t be) above nature is just that they think we should stop destroying the planet in the various completely unnecessary ways we do, and that if we don’t it’ll bite us in the ass, and I fully agree with that. I just don’t vibe with the way it’s phrased.

We’re above nature in a far more profound way than the ant-eater, because for the most part humans don’t rely on nature replenishing itself – we have agriculture. None of the problems facing us really have to do with replenishment so much as they do with unchecked consumption. For example with climate change the problem isn’t that we’re burning fossil fuels faster than they replenish, but rather the fact that we’re burning them at all.

People making this point probably usually think of climate change destroying humanity, but the truth is that even completely unchecked climate change will not make humans go extinct. It may destroy our global society, lead to the death of a large chunk of our population and set us back hundreds of years, but it almost certainly won’t kill us all. That, I think, goes to show just how far above nature we are, for better and for worse.

Humans are above nature in many very real and very tangible ways, and have been since the invention of fire or clothing or farming or any number of other things. It is not a mistake to believe that.

The mistake is in believing that the foundation doesn’t matter because you’re above it.

Around here they do calibrate the theaters but the spec says they can still be insanely loud, as long as they’re not loud all the time. The peaks are well over 100 dB.

The way they do dynamic range in movie theaters sucks too. I have to wear earplugs because it’s so loud.