Is the existence of the Guinness World Records a positive or a negative for humanity on net?

Bragging about material possessions is low-status in much of the West, forcing people to jostle through subtle wealth cues (travel, education, hobbies, food). But then why isn’t there another level where people embrace explicit materialism again to show that they are above such things? (Or is there, and it’s just invisible to me?)

Say that if everyone voluntarily waited a bit longer to reproduce then after a hundred generations human life expectancy would increase by 25 years. Would we be morally obligated to do that?

Do we focus too much on classic books/music/movies/plays/art/ideas, or too little?

Those lists of regrets people make at the end of life—how seriously should we take them? Profound wisdom or just how one version of yourself feels on one day?

Generally speaking, is human progress more limited by our ability to build/orchestrate (1) technological systems or (2) social systems?

What should we take from the existence of acquired tastes like spicy food or whiskey? Are they “fake”? Why aren’t we more intentional about which ones we acquire?

If you take an octopus with most of its neurons in its arms and you cut one of the arms off and wait three months for it to regrow, what happened to the memories in those neurons? Did you destroy arm-specific memories or make all memories vaguer or is there some redundant coding scheme where the memories will be re-cached as the arm regrows? (Considered unsporting to use the scientific literature that no doubt exi