4doorsmorewhores
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User ID: 223
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
A major university (in Canada) published another one of those studies where they give homeless people money and see if they spend it on crack or job applications. Mostly this was met with admiration and joy by the journalist class. The more right-leaning publication I posted above is more skeptical, pointing out of some of the potential problems with the study:
Unfortunately, putting a thumb on the scale was almost the first thing the researchers did. 732 possible participants in the study were screened. The UBC folk didn’t want their sample to include the long-term homeless, so to be eligible, participants had to have been homeless for less than two years. Also, they rejected severe drug and alcohol abusers and the mentally ill.
...
Note that the researchers didn’t even consider including the tent-dwelling, park-occupying homeless: merely by working with shelters, and with the people who prefer to sleep indoors despite some filth and danger, they were giving themselves an enormous implicit advantage. The study, having kinda announced at the outset that it’s garbage, goes on to describe how 229 people were chosen from the screening sample to provide the experimental group for the study. Alas, of the 229 people who took $7,500 payments, half (114) of them disappeared from view and didn’t complete the series of questionnaires and tests they had supposedly undertaken.
This isn't that interesting, it's just a bad study done in Vancouver, what I found interesting was the writer starts with a brief summary of the replication crisis, to an audience that is presumably not intimately familiar with it:
You ever hear of a guy named Daryl Bem? Bem is a social psychologist from Cornell University, now retired at age 85. In the ‘90s, after a long conventional career as an experimenter, he took up the cause of establishing evidence for human extrasensory precognition, and did some studies that seemed to confirm it exists. This set off a war in psychology as critics descended on Bem to nitpick the flaws in his studies and citations of psychic phenomena. Article content
In the end, the consensus about Bem’s research was mostly not that he used mainstream tools of statistical analytics improperly. He had mostly coloured within long-established scientific lines and followed his training in hypothesis tests — everyone’s training. Article content
Bem is now widely regarded as a weird sort of antihero who inadvertently demonstrated flaws in classic hypothesis testing, and whose late work was ground zero for the current “replication crisis” in psychology. It is not that humans are psychic: it is that you can prove the absurd proposition “humans are psychic” by very lightly abusing the received 20th-century scientific method.
There has been and is lots of discussion here about relaying rationalist concepts or ideas to outsiders or average random people in Mottizen's day-to-day lives. With the rise of culture war divisions, and especially the political rhetoric surrounding the Coronavirus Lockdowns and other policies, I'm wondering what approach if any you use when talking to acquaintances or friends who skew liberal, who broadly are happy to have the inertia of universities or the intelligentsia on their side, that you often reject social science research or findings unless personally having vetted them, without sounding to them like a low-IQ backwater hick redneck science denying flat-earther. I suspect that this is impossible.
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
And do what, specifically?
Repeal Bill C-21. For other specifics the party convention is this weekend. Feel free to follow along: https://cpc23.ca
4doorsmorewhores
6mo ago
🏆🏆🏆
4doorsmorewhores
6mo ago
How many of us are there?
4doorsmorewhores
1mo ago
A nuclear warhead isn't a big gun, it's a big bomb. Bombs explode roughly equally in every direction. Bullets travel in a forward line. That's their main distinction.
4doorsmorewhores
4mo ago
I don't understand the basis of that determination. We have lots of good comments or posts which don't provide context or an argument, but just themselves. Like this jolly little story for example: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/e5odim/the_barbarian_and_the_711_clerk/
Would it be a problem if I painted a picture (Think like Where's Waldo not Ben Garrison) of my view of some present issue, or a song, if I didn't provide context and explanation for why I think it's interesting to have a picture instead of a comment thread? Where is the dividing line that I can intuit?
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
By your logic
This is usually a thought-terminating phrase and should probably be avoided here. Arguing that because someone thinks X about Y, they might also think A about B, and since you disagree with A and B, they should reject X and Y has several problems.
- There are lots of other confounding variables (In this case London in the 16th century and Polygamy in Portland) that make the comparison meaningless
- We don't know anyone's beliefs of A and B, so framing the discussion is just your opinion
- People don't reflexively have consistent opinions
- The phrase itself connotes a negative stereotype of an annoying twitter or forum arguer.
- It's easy to dismiss your parable example and is therefore unlikely to be productive (Yes, London would've been a population sink if not for factor η)
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
I don't understand what your issue is with this. The goal of the party is to pass a few laws, enact what their voters want, create some jobs, etc. This is what happened under Harper. If "The party will do things their voters want" isn't enough for you then perhaps electoral politics isn't for you. Do you want me to point to some zeitgeist I think will occur that lines up with someone's wonkish substack because a different party won a majority for 4 or 6 years? That is unlikely.
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
I haven't nor do I intend to read this fanfiction, nor have I played Pathfinder, and I don't know some of the terminology used here beyond a google search ("Isekai"). That said, I have problems. Someone from the Pathfinder universe (especially with spell training like a Paladin) would probably be familiar with food preservation magic since it exists, I also find it very personally offputting to shoehorn into a story about a child (admittedly one who considers herself an adult) about how actually most of the time when people get raped, they didn't actually get raped since nobody had a knife to threaten them. There are probably a dozen examples like this where her being from Pathfinder doesn't actually mesh with the story very well. Again, haven't read it, other than the excerpts here, but if there is nothing interesting between the comparison of her Medieval-ish world or her oath as a Paladin and our modern world, and it's just a generic medieval fish out of water tale, why is she a Paladin at all? Is it an in-joke between the Pathfinder player author? Does it mean anything?
I don't really think The Motte is the place for literary criticism, since it's a largely non-rational practice. But god, the writing here is just bad. Maybe if you're a direct person who likes it when characters spew forth punctuated idea after punctuated idea it's the right pace for you, but these paragraphs are a hard read. If you want worlds-colliding or a reflection of modernity fantasy fiction, there is lots of stuff you can find with enjoyable prose. Try /r/fantasy. I don't get the giddy appeal of having the author stand-in character give a "glorious" "refreshing" look at our modern age. I've seen dozens of posts here with better rundowns of how things operate and the problems and virtues with society. This strikes me as midwit-tier.
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
who is hlynkacg? can i get a summary of who he is like any top level comment would be expected to give? this seems oddly vague given the standards we expect from people posting a link to their blog for example
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
Other users feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I've found that the most economical choice is actually to buy new iPhones whenever my old contract ends. Simply because I can sell the old one for 500-900$ and use that to pay off most or all of the cost of the new phone (which is usually discounted when you sign a 2 year data contract). I have found that the resale market for 2 year old Android phones is not as active (1 exception being the Galaxy series which are typically more expensive and feature-laden than iPhones)
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
Which sweeping societal reforms do you believe the LPC passed? Mostly they are just corrupt with ineffective or misguided tax policy and virtue-signalling feminism.
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
So that Canadians can continue to freely own guns.
4doorsmorewhores
7mo ago
That's what the French and Indian war was. If there had been continued resistance, terrorism, and guerrilla fighting by the Native Tribes after the 19th century. Which year would it have gone from righteous to not righteous? 1935? 1970? 2001?
4doorsmorewhores
10mo ago
Why does a bunch of subreddits going private for a few days prove that it was a good decision?
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
I don't think that's anywhere near the standard to which (especially top level) comments are held. A short comment without any context or analysis, and a response of suggesting I read 2500 posts by someone to figure it out, the totally unfounded assertion that nobody else needed a summary (Based on what 7 replies? Your comment was posted at like 3 AM EST and I asked my question 8 hours later), and finally "If you don't get it, just minimize it and move on?"
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
I would not characterize things like changing the retirement age to 67 instead of 65 as a sweeping reform, or changing the makeup of certain tax benefits or models, or giving a comment about church burning. Almost everything else listed were explicitly in the last platform. The listed bills, MAID, immigration, families. Expect them to be there going forward as well.
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
Why do I care about voters of the party having their preferences expressed through the party they elect? That is the entire point of the system we've agreed upon. Someone asked what will happen if they win, I pointed to something, and let him know we're figuring it out at the convention this weekend.
UBC Toronto and McGill aren't comparable to Ivies in prestige or outcomes (Admittedly some of this is driven by the intake, if you took the top X% most affluent Yale undergrads and made them go to McGill they would probably end up as economic and political elites at a rate more reflective of their social and economic upbringing than their new Canadian-college cohort but alas). They're more like good big state schools (Which they are). Think of UBC as similar to UW in Seattle, or any other good state school, Michigan, UCLA, UT Austin, NYU, I'm sure that if you lined up the best state schools in the 15 largest states (Analogous to British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec), the proportion of student size would be similar to the 3 you summed up.
4doorsmorewhores
1mo ago
Oh so the government will make gun-style bombs but not bomb-style guns? Figures
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
Surely you believe it's based around what the logic of the argument implies, not the structure of the argument. A structure is just how it's organized. Anyways, the comparison between London's population flows 500 years ago and the individual mating practices of the people in Scott Alexander's blog are obviously not bounded by the same arguments or logic. It's totally meaningless.
4doorsmorewhores
4mo ago
That's why I bring up the art analogy. Obviously by and large we all recognize that lots of AI content is meaningless slop, but for all we know this guy put in a few hours of work crafting response and questions for the chatbot for this specific output. Is the post only worthwhile if it's an explanation of that process(which I recognize is very unlikely to even have occured)?
4doorsmorewhores
6mo ago
Hard to read this post re: grammar errors but the numbers don't back what you think is happening in the market.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/QQQ
The highest QQQ ever was is 392, it's currently at 362. It's impossible to go bankrupt on this stuff
Here's Meta specifically: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META
Where are you going bankrupt and not making a comfortable profit over a 15 year period like every other investor?
4doorsmorewhores
8mo ago
I think this is sort of close to my central skepticism or complaint. Re the culture clash
- Is that established?
- Is it even true? It's bad history to think that all of it was "women are property, they can get raped freely, and can never say no to sex" many medieval societies were not like this, many accounts contradict it directly. It's a pedestrian trope and stereotype-laden contemporary impression.
- Insofar as it is established, what is the interesting idea that is demonstrated or invoked or compared between these societies? It doesn't read like someone from Pathfinder-world being dropped in a Costco, it sounds like someone who is as present-centric as any of us trying to critique the world we all know.
- The writing style is independent from the content. You could have something non-scientific or non-historical or frankly vapid, but which is still written well. This is written (as many others have pointed out) wooden, it's bad writing.
I - understand - you both have bad time with church. I am sorry that you did. I do not know enough to say more about it. And I have no guess if Jesus alive or no. But I think Christians good and cool. I believe you that my life easier if I pretend this. I no going pretend it
This doesn't strike me as someone from a different religious tradition understanding modern churches. It sounds like an inoffensive faux-empathic rambling. There are 6 separate ideas but each one is an orphan, they're not explained or developed. She just jumps from 3 different ideas about the church, and couched within that are TWO separate disclaimers, but they don't sound like a woman out of time learning about a new culture, it sounds like someone from today giving a "I don't want to contradict your lived experience" speech. That's what I mean by a bad author stand-in.
I just read about a real life version of the "isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" meme. Woman finds out a guy in his 30s dated a girl 13 years younger. She writes a story with their details, except in her story the guy is a creep. And now they're making a movie based on the story.
This is the short story: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person
This is the movie trailer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=J2VukOLSxoY
And this is an essay where the girl in the relationship says the guy was great: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/07/cat-person-kristen-roupenian-viral-story-about-me.html
Alexis, a senior in high school, briefly worked with Charles at a restaurant. She was a hostess and he was a waiter. They liked each other and texted a lot. They slowly started dating. He was the liberal type who wouldn't own a car because it was bad for the environment. He even asked for consent before he kissed her for the first time. She said he was very gentle and caring and they had lots of things in common.
The only downside of the relationship was the fact that she felt people judged her for it, and that she felt she was growing up too fast by being in love with someone so old. They eventually grew apart and broke up when she was a sophomore in college, after dating for 2 years.
A few years later, Kristen Roupenian has an "encounter" with this Charles, after which she finds out that he dated someone much younger than him. She decides to write a story that includes personal details about him and the girl, including their small hometowns, places they worked at, the place they had their first date at, the way the guy dressed and a description of his house. Except in her story the guy is a creep, bad at sex, a liar and manipulator, who becomes abusive when the girl breaks up with him.
The story goes viral during the metoo movement. Alexis and Charles find out and are weirded out. Alexis thinks the author couldn't have known so many details about her life without stalking her online. Charles said he started questioning whether he was really an asshole and would go through old texts to make sure that was not the case.
A few years later, Alexis finds out Charles died. No cause of death is mentioned, other than the fact that it was unexpected. Earlier in the essay she says he was on antidepressants, so suicide is a possibility in my opinion.
Alexis tries to contact Kristen and she responds via email with a half-assed apology in which she says she shouldn't have included some of the details. Alexis writes this essay to tell her side of the story, but it doesn't change much.
And now they are making a movie based on this story.
Also, these are the pictures of the women mentioned in this post. I will let you figure out who's who.
https://imgur.com/2gApE3K
https://imgur.com/l2cfZtd
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