I believe if you use time.nist.gov it round robins dns requests, so there’s a chance you’d have connected to the Boulder server. So for some people they would have experienced NIST 5 μs off.
While those may or may not be issues, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Child abuse and pedophilia has been a scourge on children since at least Ancient Greek times when it was well documented and I’m sure even longer than that.
I believe the estimates are one in six children before the age of 16 will encounter sexual abuse of some form. Yet when cases like Epstein reach the news, people act shocked, even though it should be clear this occurs at every level of our society.
Ultimately it requires vigilance on the part of all of us and our institutions, and an awareness of how these predators operate. Even if you shut down one avenue they’ll find another.
So let’s not let those who turn blind eyes continue to be part of the problem but hold them accountable. Only then can we reduce all the avenues.
You’re comparing a hysteria over D&D where no one was actually harmed to actual child sexual abuse being allowed on an online platform?
One of the comments above has a video of a guy arrested and admitting to contacting several kids a day for a year.. that doesn’t sound like just some sort of over exaggerated panic.
> So about three per year, out of 112 million users? That's a far better track record than the Boy Scouts of America or the Roman Catholic Church.
It wasn’t immediate obvious when those were occurring only years later.. so most likely we are seeing the tip of the iceberg.
> You’re comparing a hysteria over D&D where no one was actually harmed
People were definitely harmed, psychically, and physically - straight up to torture in 'conversion therapies' and death, over the D&D (and related RPG) hysteria.
> admitting to contacting several kids a day for a year.
Have you ever played online games? "Contacting several kids a day" is how internet chat works. I'm sure if it was up to you kids would only be able to play single player games and stay inside, god forbid they get struck by lightning or eaten by a polar bear.
What do you want gaming to do? Have a checkbox where you swear you're not a pedophile or something? That's on-par for most of these idiotic suggestions of how people seem to fucking think the internet and gaming works, and what sort of actual solution is viable.
Roblox tracks all the chat and hands it over to law enforcement and NCMEC. They restrict chat for . They give ample parental controls to limit chat/friends/interactions. Now they're adding AI-powered age validation (which I think is a terrible idea) just to appease more people like you who can't think critically about the risk, nor apparently have the ability to teach your kids "hey maybe don't talk to creepy strangers who want you to send them images and give them your home address?"
Maybe watch the video. He wasn’t just chatting with them he was sexually abusing them online. He was using Roblox because they made it easy for him. Watch the video.
Your hand waving away is the type of behavior that is complicit in allowing this type of abuse to continue.
And this isn’t just about parents. In one breath you’ll complain about helicopter parents and the next you’ll say it’s the parent’s responsibility to prevent it. The callousness to the suffering of children is disgusting. That’s not just “how the internet works”
This is about not allowing companies to cultivate online spaces specifically enabling this behavior because it makes them money. Your comments indicate you either condone the behavior or work for Roblox or a company like it.
> appease more people like you who can't think critically about the risk
Or the parents. I wasn't aware the corporations were responsible for the raising of children.
That said, I'm with you on reducing the abstraction of liability that is the purpose of corporations. I just don't think parents not parenting is the reason to do it. I also don't really think parents should be thrown in prison and families destroyed. The use of violent force in this situation, against the CEOs or the parents, is entirely uncalled for and does more real damage than the "problem".
Our parents had problems figuring out how to program the time on the VCR. Technology advances faster than parents can keep up.
If someone was selling drugs on the street on the way to school, would we be blaming parents who let their kids walk to school that they should parent better, or would we deal with the drug dealer?
If we think a drug dealer on the way to school is a good analogy, I have to ask; many someones went into a school with guns and shot children. How did we deal with that?
I agree 100%, but it is fair to point out there is really no precedent for the level of involvement and knowledge and handholding it takes for a parent to navigate the digital world. Yes parents are widely failing, but it should be no surprise.
Parents understand that they cannot be the sole arbiter of everything for their children. Locking down your children's inputs is not fully realistic. If you remember being a child you remember circumventing your parents at every turn.
I'm not sure that's implied anywhere. There are many non-parental roles to be filled in society that should steer harm away feom children. Priests for example. Teachers and librarians, nurses, bus drivers, shopkeepers, and so on.
Yes. At the tail end of my comment I stated that calls for violence (forced imprisonment) against either CEO (like original poster in this thread) or parents (like me, as satire) for not sanitizing a child's entire life is wrong. Both are wrong. There isn't even a problem here. Certainly not one that requires the use of force to deprive humans of their volition.
Agree, in any other field if a product cannot be made safe for consumers, you just don't produce and sell it. The world does not need to have a Roblox app (my 11 year old would disagree very much)
> Agree, in any other field if a product cannot be made safe for consumers, you just don't produce and sell it
This is patently untrue. We are exposed to risk, incl. death, from products and services every day. Nothing can be 100% safe, nor would it be wise to aim for it. The benefits, as they say, often outweigh the cost.
Roblox has tens of millions of daily active users.
I'm guessing they would say it is a great way to entertain themselves and to spend time with others, amongst others.
They literally said dangerous products couldn’t be sold to consumers in general. Obvious nonsense or chainsaws would require a license. I am pushing back against the safetyist notion that unsafe products cannot or should not be sold to the public.
A correctly manufactured chainsaw can be used safely by adults. Products like "MoonSoll and Magic Chems Fuel Bottles" [1], "Tesla Powerwall 2 AC Battery Power Systems" [2] and literally tens of thousands of other products listed at [3] have been determined that they can not be used safely by adults, and are literally taken off store shelves until the issues can be resolved. It is a normal, everyday occurrence that manufacturers are very motivated to not sell products that cannot be used safely, Hacker-Newsesque semantic nitpicking notwithstanding. If similar liabilities applied to software like Roblox (think "kids committed suicide due to interactions on Roblox" being held equivalently to "kids have been suffocated by this defactive crib"), there would not be a Roblox without effective moderation.
The first example is a labeling and packaging issue, the second is a malfunctioning product. There are plenty of fuel oil bottles available on the market and other much sketchier (though not obviously malfunctioning) batteries that haven’t been pulled. The available alternatives are still dangerous and potentially flammable, they just don’t meet the criteria set for shipping, storing, and normal usage.
Chainsaws can be used somewhat safely, but they are never totally safe. Chainsaws are inherently dangerous. But if a broken chainsaw that always cuts off your arm makes it to market, yes it will be pulled whether it’s a recall or a lawsuit.
> think "kids committed suicide due to interactions on Roblox" being held equivalently to "kids have been suffocated by this defactive crib"
Psychological harm is notoriously difficult to measure (was it really Roblox or was it bullying?) and is a political football. I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to open that box for a multitude of reasons. (For one thing every website on the internet would immediately face a mountain of lawsuits.)
I don't understand why this is getting downvoted. As another response mentioned, we wouldn't tolerate this in any other industry.
If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say, "it's on the parents." I don't get why so many folks are willing to say that with harms caused by tech companies.
Scale is no excuse either, "at our scale we just can't handle all the content." If anything it makes the problem more pressing to address.
> If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say
Is sugar in your country restricted? Or meat? I guess alcohol is, as it's everywhere. But restaurants server many harmful food which is only tolerated because harm comes from time and serving-sizes. But the same can be said for dark patterns in software, they are usually not obvious and in your face, but sneaky enough to fly under the parent's attentions.
This sounds good as a sound bite. But barely any investigation cracks it. We don't police companies much because we have entire divisions of law enforcement who are supposed to be doing that job.
1. If a restaurant serves food that harmed people the health department is the avenue used to investigate and punish.
2. If a game company enables endangering children the FBI is the one responsible for investigating it.
etc etc.
I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.
The nanny state is wrong which is why the OP is being downvoted.
1. It is the parent's fault for not monitoring their children. It is absolutely a reflection on poor parenting-by-proxy via video games. I don't understand why we continue to absolve parents of responsibility for everything.
2. We have legal avenues with which we have used and continue to use for the investigation of harmful things produced by companies.
3. If we cannot use (2) we should ask why - the answer is almost always follow the money.
4. Corporations should never, under any circumstance, be turned into police via lawfare.
The one catch here is that there are limited legal avenues, and your solution requires a robust legal system and laws which is what we don’t have. At the moment over -worked police departments have to play wack a mole going after every single perpetrator, and they also can’t see everything happening on these systems to police it.
As an example, organized crime thrived in the US at the turn of the century because we didn’t have the legal apparatus to deal with it. Not until the RICO act in 1970 did we finally start to stamp it out.
So exactly what we need are legal avenues to make sure that companies can’t purposefully enable child abuse in order to turn a profit which is exactly what’s happening here. (Regardless of what they claim, the evidence is overwhelming they know but don’t want to dent their income)
> I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.
I think there is a couple of things at play:
First, negativity bias. I think it's pretty clear that as a society we're not that interested in harm reduction, just biased towards harm reduction of things that violate our value system. So when things happen that do violate our norms, they're presented outside of the background noise. For example, very few people feel compelled to come in and share personal anecdotes of how they lost relatives to a car accident when the topic at hand is vehicles in america. Yet they're the second leading cause of death from unintentional injuries.
Second, these things affect people across the social stratification index. People of privilege experience it. I claim that we also as a society are not very concerned with protecting vulnerable populations. The top 10% of the nations families hold 60% of the wealth, while 1 in 10 Americans live in poverty. We consistently rank lower in social welfare compared to other developed nations. So, further supporting the first point, it's even more outlandish when these things happen to people who are not accustomed to having bad things happen.
Finally, technology consistently outpaces our ability to reason about and structure our society as a whole. It's easier to attempt blanket and ham fisted reactions to these bad things we see without understand the wider implications.
To a lot of people, the easiest and most obvious choice is Authoritarianism, because in there mind there's no other way to stop the pain.
Plus, it's difficult to talk about these things without being callous. "Bad things happened to me, so you should simply give up your right to privacy so we can prevent it from happening further." At face value is difficult to take seriously, but when it involves that cross section of the privileged vulnerable class, it's difficult to have a reasonable argument without being steamrolled.
I've come to the belief that there is a larger than we assume portion of the population that is either complicit in these things, or doesn't think that these types of behaviors are "that bad". (some of the comments here are, sadly, exactly that) It's the only reasonable explanation I can think of why these things are so hard to root out. Some of these people perhaps never had children, which might be part of the disconnect. But if I was the CEO of a company harming children in this way, I'd make it my life mission to stamp it out and find and prosecute the individuals involved.
What else must we think goes through these executives minds? It's got to be things like "It's not my kids, so I don't care?" or "It's not that bad, people are too sensitive", or "I don't care what happens to kids because I have anti-personality disorder (psychopath) and only care about making money"
Yes, it's absurd how tech considers "but we're too big" to be a legitimate reason for inaction. That would get handcuffs clapped on you in any other industry. What happened to "too big to fail" being a sign of deep corruption requiring immediate action and breaking up companies?
Really? How many handcuffs were clapped in the Too Big To Fail 2008 financial crisis? Why we think other large corporations with infinite funds would ever face consequences? This forum is funny in how when discussing the failures of tech seem to think it it is isolated from the rest of the corporate world, yet when discussing non-tech corporations are constantly lamenting that the corporate veil of protection is impenetrable.
Is it not possible that there is concern for individuals well beings in the midst of a mental health crisis?
It’s one thing to be talking about suicide or assisted suicide because you’ve decided it’s right for you and your situation.
It’s another to be dealing with depression from trauma, unable to get help and have no support system, and then be coerced by individuals on forums with ulterior motives.
I’m not saying I am in support of the UKs attempts, but it’s also not helpful to paint everything black and white on either side. Real solutions require dealing with the grays and the details.
edit: And for reference I have spoken to people in the later situations who have found all too many toxic individuals online who will say things like “you should definitely just kill yourself” in the midst of such situations, who after therapy consider those people to have been committing even more trauma (most likely because they get off on the control of another persons life, playing out murder fantasies etc, and who use the internets anonymity to further traumatize people at their most vulnerable)
I doubt Ofcom are motivated by "concern for individuals well beings in the midst of a mental health crisis", but even then, it is clear in the context of the current discussion that they should be concerned with enforcing their legislation in their own country. The UK is free to build The Great Firewall of the United Kingdom and block half of the internet if their concern is so great.
What they cannot be allowed to do is tell organizations in other jurisdictions that they now suddenly fall under UK jurisdiction.
There are 195 countries in the world. If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons. It's obviously not a sane position.
> I doubt Ofcom are motivated by "concern for individuals well beings in the midst of a mental health crisis"
Do you have evidence for that? Because when I search I do see them doing investigations concerned with abuse of people including mentioning coercive and controlling behaviors
> If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons.
Sounds like a slippery slope fallacy to me. Again, not necessarily supporting the policy, but when such arguments are used against it, it’s not convincing.
It's not a fallacy since there is nothing special or noteworthy about the UK. If every other country sent out such letters, then you'd have to block every country except your own. That's a fact. There are 195 countries in the world, no law office could possibly ensure you're complying with the laws of all of these countries within your own country. The laws are not even consistent, for example you violate the EU's GDPR by complying with Ofcom's demands. The UK's behavior sets a bad precedent that other small countries might follow. It's already enough having to keep up with US and EU regulatory demands, and we have to, since these are markets we can't ignore. Even just a few more small countries coming up with demands like Ofcom could create insurmountable legal problems for small companies like ours.
Let me put it another way: Would you comply with a similar letter from North Korea? From Russia? From China? If not, your attitude is hypocritical and inconsistent.
We're taking those threat seriously and have decided to block all UK IP numbers and not to do business with the UK for the time being. News that Ofcom might ignore such measures are worrying to us.
What’s your company? Perhaps you have an ethical obligation to your users and should have these regulations in place. We’ve seen what happens when companies are underegulated (Facebook, etc etc)
And here’s why your argument is a fallacy:
“This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fearmongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience” [1]
I don't have anything major to add to what I've already said. We have indeed an ethical obligation towards our (future) customers, that's exactly why we couldn't fulfill Ofcom's demands - that would literally be illegal in our jurisdiction. Sovereign countries have their own laws (not the UK's), and in addition to these we also provide strong moderation tools. So for now we have to block the UK. We're in closed alpha stage and have a long way to go so this is purely a matter of legal prudence.
By the way, I've worked closely together with argumentation theorists at university for many years, so I know quite well what a slippery slope argument is. You should know that not all of them are fallacies.
> It’s one thing to be talking about suicide or assisted suicide because you’ve decided it’s right for you and your situation.
And that's what the site is for. They could improve by blocking all countries where there's free access to assisted suicide though.
> It’s another to be dealing with depression from trauma, unable to get help and have no support system, and then be coerced by individuals on forums with ulterior motives.
You've answered your own question. "And then" - exactly, THEN, not before. If they could get help, they would. But they can't so they end up there. If your alternative is that they should just suffer for years instead then I strongly disagree with this stance.
I remember one guy on a Polish forum announcing his plans which were stopped because someone called the police.. I kept checking his profile since then and it's clear that he continued to suffer and does to this day.. whoever thought that they "saved" him instead subjected him to literally years of suffering.
> THEN, not before. If they could get help, they would. But they can't so they end up there.
This is honestly disgusting and exactly the problem. You don’t know why they couldn’t get help. There are many possible reasons and instead they should be continued to be encouraged to find proper mental health counseling, not feed into a mental health crisis talking about suicide.
And it’s not your place to decide what is suffering or not for them. That is exactly the problem. The fact that you checked on this persons profile and decided based on that he’s continuing to suffer is exactly the issue. You are not a trained mental health provider I’m sure. Encouraging someone in that place to commit suicide is exactly the problem. You are not a soothsayer who can see into this persons future. What if in 10 years that person has a child and finds true joy and meaning, glad that they went through what they did in the previous years. There are many such cases.
It’s also not your job to somehow “ease suffering” for a person on the internet you don’t know, with some kind of self satisfaction and sense of control over another’s life that you took away an individual’s suffering by helping them kill themselves.
Instead the person needs to decide for themselves, by themselves, AND they need to be in a healthy mental state to make that decision. Depression is not a healthy mental state, it’s a period of delusion.
Your comment only proves exactly why sites such as this need massive regulation, and anyone who knows someone who contemplates suicide and came out the other side living a fulfilling life with joy and happiness would understand exactly why.
And I could agree that a site talking about assisted suicide is a net positive, but the burden is on that site to ensure it is not encouraging people in mental health crisis to suicide. In an open, mostly unmoderated forum that is a very high bar indeed, and it's even higher when the company hosting such a site has a profit motive. Trained mental health providers should be available and reviewing discussions in those situations, and such regulation requiring that is in my opinion not a hinderance on free speech.
And for anyone reading these comments and suffering with depression, if you’re unable to find good mental health care, first and the very least read the following book, and know that there are people who can help you find the light on the other side:
> There are many possible reasons and instead they should be continued to be encouraged to find proper mental health counseling
There are many possible reasons, that's why they should be PROVIDED with help, not "encouraged to somehow find it" as if they didn't know that something was wrong already..
> And it’s not your place to decide what is suffering or not for them. That is exactly the problem. The fact that you checked on this persons profile and decided based on that he’s continuing to suffer is exactly the issue.
It's not my place to decide, but it's THEIR place to decide. I don't need to be a trained mental health provider to see that that person is TELLING the world that they suffer, posting and interacting with other people who also suffer.
> You are not a trained mental health provider I’m sure.
No, but I am the person who used to suffer, and that makes me more qualified to talk about these problems than a trained+qualified+certified+award-winning "mental health provider" (which.. did not help me btw, others from the community did).
> Encouraging someone in that place to commit suicide is exactly the problem
I'm not encouraging anybody to commit suicide.. where did you even get this idea? My stance is to not prohibit that last resort solution.
> What if in 10 years that person has a child and finds true joy and meaning, glad that they went through what they did in the previous years. There are many such cases.
It doesn't delete these 10 years of suffering which you apparently see no problem subjecting people to. It was his decision and that decision was not respected. Should it not be interrupted, that person would not suffer ever again and we'd not need to have this discussion.
> with some kind of self satisfaction and sense of control over another’s life that you took away an individual’s suffering by helping them kill themselves.
I did NOT encourage them to do that. It was their decision and it was interrupted. The people who interrupted that have that "self satisfaction", I see things as they are. Those people didn't care about that person at all, just called the police and forgot about him. It's not that they could pay his bills or anything, they didn't care.
> AND they need to be in a healthy mental state to make that decision. Depression is not a healthy mental state, it’s a period of delusion.
Disagree, if someone decides that it's enough suffering for them, that decision should be honored. If you can't cure that person instantly, prolonging this "unhealthy state" is what I'm against.
> and anyone who knows someone who contemplates suicide and came out the other side living a fulfilling life with joy and happiness would understand exactly why.
Nothing bad would happen to that person should they not be interrupted. This search for "joy and happiness" is absurd and it blinds you so that you accept that you might subject someone to literally years of suffering.
First, do no harm. If a forum and group of people push even one person to commit suicide that would/could have been helped by a different approach, then that community has committed harm.
Doing no harm is a high bar, and that bar requires commitment that online communities and the companies that run them almost certainly cant provide without a lot of effort. The disregard for the possibility that those communities may have caused harm (even if you believe they helped you) is alarming.
> This search for "joy and happiness" is absurd
This is the problem when people with this viewpoint get together in forums, it can create a vicious feedback cycle that are not healthy for anyone.
I'm sorry you are suffering or have suffered. But searching and finding joy and happiness is not absurd. We only have one life to live, and it definitely doesn't need to be suffering. Every one of us has the power to change that (believing you cant is a thought trap, a type of delusion.)
> Nothing bad would happen to that person should they not be interrupted
This speaks volumes. You are saying that the death of a person is nothing bad. A life.. a loved one. A child going through a momentary suffering. That death is BAD. Not understanding that is delusional thinking.
> It doesn't delete these 10 years of suffering which you apparently see no problem subjecting people to
I'm not subjecting them to anything, nor are you by not talking or telling a person how to commit suicide. That persons suffering is not your or my responsibility. But the moment you do talk to that person about how they could commit suicide, then you have taken on a responsibility. And it is an immense one, not to be taken lightly.
Finally I'll say this, all your comments indicate to me someone who is suffering from depression. If you truly believe that not to be the case, I challenge you to read the following book cover to cover, do all the exercises, and once you have finished, look back on your words and ideas and see if you may have been stuck in some delusional thinking:
And finally, if you ever actually consider suicide, I urge you to question your thinking and consider the possibility you could make a choice that in another mindset you would regret. Imagine getting high on shrooms or LSD and jumping off a roof. Depression is like that... when you come to, you realize you were just on a bad trip.
And as my favorite Starship captain says... "Never give up. Never surrender!"
And lots of other UV gets though. Sunlight remains a great disinfectant, maybe not as much as a narrow-spectrum bulb, but it still carries plenty of microbe-killing power. From the actual article:
>> In a paper submitted to the Royal Society of London, they described how over the course of six months they had used sunlight to prevent bacteria from growing in a tube.
Humans have known about this for millennia, with ancient doctors regularly telling people to expose wounds to sunlight. Even animals have been seen instinctively "sunning" a wound. (I remember a BBC doc about Antarctica where a penguin was shown exposing a bite wound to the low-angle sunlight.) Only in recent years has a fear of cancer caused us to retreat from any and all sunlight, a fear revisited as we learn the downsides.
Trying to find life’s answers by giving over your self authority to another individual or group’s philosophy is not rational. Submitting oneself to an authority who’s role is telling people what’s best in life will always lead to attracting the type of people looking to control, take advantage and traumatize others.
It’s easy and popular to hate on pop music, but even pop music has value and requires a certain skill to understand what resonates with people.
This is taking a monkeys on a typewriter approach to all music. Click a button, see what the monkeys made and then click another button to publish to Spotify while you figure out a way to either market the music or just game search and digital assistants by creating an artist with a similar or slightly misspelled name as someone popular. Rinse and repeat.
You’ll always have naysayers, but I think there’s a difference between someone who doesn’t understand or share the appeal of rock or jazz or an artist like Philip Glass where music is made by someone choosing what notes to play, what rhythms, what words and the music that comes out of a statistical model.
You can’t tell me that Philip Glass didn’t understand or agonize over the music when creating it. The creative process is vastly different and that’s my point.
Oh course, there will be artists who use AI in new and creative ways, someone like Brian Transeau who routinely codes tools for creating electronic music. but for most artists, I fear it will just lead to mindless button clicking and prompt manipulation until it’s formulaic because the base model is the same. Or it will result in fewer people learning instruments or music theory and truly experimenting with things that haven’t been done before.
I see AI as having great potential in both art and productivity but maybe it’s just that I don’t trust people to use it responsibly. We’re inherently lazy and easily distracted by anything that will give us that dopamine fix.
I definitely meant John Cage instead of Philip Glass, for some reason those two share the same headspace if I'm not thinking carefully.
I don't think John Cage agonized over 4'33" (I was thinking about making this an elaborate joke, but I haven't the energy. That piece is 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence. It has been performed in public to sophisticated audiences)
When Stravinsky's Rites of Spring was first performed publicly it nearly caused a riot. There were arrests. It deeply upset people and was accused of not being music.
Penderecki likewise composed much that was aggressively argued was not real music and is featured in several prominent Horror/Thriller kinds of films, Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood was heavily influenced for the score of There Will be Blood (listen and tell me if the sounds are just orchestra noise or real music.
Rock music and Jazz music got heavy, heavy pushback from people that this was just not real music and was garbage noise.
Your response fits the common pattern "I know people have said the same things in the past and were wrong but THIS TIME the same argument is correct"
>mindless button clicking
Sounds like all electronic music since its inception :)
Point is, there has always been garbage music and there have always been people criticizing the new thing as the demise of real art. Yawn.
The current solution for creating the kind of music this tool can back-fill is to go on a site like "Free music for presentations" and click line after line after line after line of 10-second samples hoping to find one that "vibes" with you.
An axolotl is a salamander that remains in its larval form throughout its life, while most salamanders go through a metamorphosis during sexual maturity, so it’s not surprising it retains embryonic growth capabilities.
There’s actually a theory that hominid ancestors at some point split off from other great apes by also not going through the typical great ape sexual maturity. For examples humans look a lot more like juvenile chimps that we do sexually mature chimps.
I believe there's also a hypothesis that our ancestry back to the Devonian or Cambrian was based on neoteny/paedomorphism where a particular creature living on the sea floor, when in the infant stage, has a limb for propulsion which it loses when it finds a nice spot to settle. Our very distant ancestors didn't lose those limbs and evolved into the distant precursors to placaderms, bony fish, and, well, terrestrial fauna.
My theory would be that neoteny goes hand-in-hand with the traits of domestication (social friendliness, high tolerance of strangers, etc), and that humans are effectively self-domesticated.
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