Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I agree overall, although I'd argue that the progress enjoyed by the current generation of Chinese adults is highly unlikely to be replicated by their children. I expect they'll go down the same path we did unless 'Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics' and endless readings of 'Xi Jinping Thought' can save them.
My money is on pessimism setting in 20-30 years from now, and foreign capital moves to Vietnam or Africa or whatever the next manufacturing base will be.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You yourself commented a few months back about doing a 'double-take' when reading some of my recent writing, suggesting (in different language) that I was becoming 'radicalized' on a few topics. One area you've counter-radicalized me is the conversation around falling birthrates in the west, and frankly, I'm coming to align more with the TwoXChromosome worldview that it's just a trojan horse for social control.
Don't get me wrong, I'm more concerned about the birthrate than I was. I'll even grant that surrogacy makes me uncomfortable, though more because I dislike the idea of disempowered people (surrogates in the third world are even more gross) being exploited in yet another way.
However, in the last 24 hours, we've had two comments explicitly shaming people who want to have children, specifically because the way they're trying to have children is aesthetically displeasing to you.
Wait what? Yes I do! I'm all for tolerance, and living and letting live, but you're not going to make me see this as a lovely family moment, and anyway I don't remember signing on to turning a fundamental human experience into an industry when I supported the gay rights movement. Accept the limits of your biology, and move on.
The limits of our biology are changing by the year. Will you make your children accept the limits of their biology and watch them be crippled by polio, or something? As Doglatine put it when seeing the reflexive support amongst locals for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, your position is boiling down to a reactionary rejection of anything the left and/or mainstream like, rather than a prospective, constructive worldview. So with that in mind, I have to ask: If, tomorrow, I invented a way to boost the birthrate comfortably above replacement (or to whatever arbitrary value you want), it's eugenic, it's whatever you want it to be - but it doesn't involve traditional, cis-het men repeatedly sticking their penises inside conventionally attractive cis-het stay-at-home tradwives followed by 9 months of pregnancy discomfort and childbirth - are you going to be joyful that we solved our demographic problem and charted a course towards our brave new future of eugenic John Von Neumanns? Or are you going to be upset that we didn't do it the way you wanted and those nasty degenerates are still having buttsex and dying xir hair blue?
If your answer is the latter (and I suspect for many of the Katja Grace haters it is), then yeah, I have to say TwoX are probably right about you.
Given the utter dominance of the trans ideology, the vindication of the slippery slope argument, and the extrapolated trajectory of these ideas, I believe we have no other choice - Transhumanism must be destroyed!
Still reactionary. Have you ever laid out a positive vision for what you want the future to be, since you don't like mine? I'm curious to hear what you actually want as opposed to talking about those awful people doing things that you don't like.
More songs about buildings and food discussion of trans matters, this time courtesy of Freddie deBoer.
Care to explain the reference? Is the album name a spoof on buildings and food being a common topic in the 70s musical zeitgeist?
Having seen how the progressive agenda around education is a steaming pile of what makes the roses grow
It's not clear to me how the conservative agenda (at least in America) is much better, but we can let that potshot slide for the moment.
Well then eff me, Freddie, if it's not genetics and it's not physiology and biology not real, what is gender identity tied to?
Maybe... feelings? I feel like a woman?
To perhaps offer a steelman, there are certain cultural practices and norms tied to gender that are essentially arbitrary in the modern environment. There's no inherent reason that women should be forced to shave their legs/armpits to be considered attractive, for instance, or that men shouldn't do the same. There's no biological imperative that men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses, or makeup, or be considered submissive or cute. Ditto for being the majority caregivers after your child is more than a few years old, and earlier if you aren't breastfeeding. We long ago left the Hobbesian jungle of burly men hunting megafauna with stone tools, and physical strength is largely irrelevant in a world of Zoom meetings, work-from-home and knowledge economies. I'd argue that many of these gender norms have fluctuated throughout history. So what if someone identifies with a set of traits or characteristics that our society would typically associate with the opposite gender, regardless of whether this is caused by genetics/early childhood experiences or environmental exposures/'feelings' (themselves a product of all of the above, even if you try to use vocabulary suggesting that they are transient or unimportant)?
This in and of itself causes problems for people arguing that we should eradicate the gender binary entirely, and I haven't seen anyone square that circle convincingly. I'm personally more particular to those worldviews where most gender norms should be abolished and trans identity is more of a kludge in response to society enforcing a binary, but I'm not representative of everyone on the left.
Frequent rebuttals to this argument are often rooted in evolutionary psychology or Chestertonian fences. Or, as you frequently argue in other posts, it's 'just a fetish' and/or sexual predators trying to sneak under the radar to rape people, none of which I find particularly convincing. You can point to trans rapists; but then again, so can I for most of your favored groups, and these niche cases don't invalidate the cause as a whole.
It does seem that society is undergoing some kind of upheaval in response to generations of Women's lib, and where the new equilibrium will fall, I can't say. Perhaps the optimum would be one where everyone could freely choose for themselves, and while most people would naturally occupy the gender roles the correspond to their birth, there wouldn't be any stigma or disgust associated with people who (for whatever reason) do not. But...that just sounds a lot to me like trans acceptance, no? There used to be a futurist transhumanism strain here that was more optimistic and trans-positive that has either been driven off or converted to conservative trad thinking, which is a shame.
Then why isn't it possible to feel like a black woman? To have that same yearning about identity and conviction that what you are "assigned at birth" is not the truth of what you really are?
It's not a bad question. My personal response would be that black women are typically viewed as less attractive, as loud, stupid, etc. externally by society, regardless of whether they personally identify with any of those traits as well as a shared cultural history/tradition that is frequently tightly intertwined with the history of racism, segregation, slavery, etc. in the west. Thus the many examples highlighted here like Rachel Dolezal and the fake native American women which are most often rooted in self-advancement or Munchhausen-like addiction to sympathy, no? A white man who likes basketball and rap is viewed by society as...just a normal man as opposed to transracial, whereas a black man doing the same is viewed significantly differently. Meanwhile, a white man who likes wearing dresses and makeup is certainly not viewed by society as just a normal man, thus the 'trans' identity and pushback against social norms.
There's also the everpresent (although perhaps less frequently explicitly expressed of late) undercurrent of a post-racial/gender GLSC future. Such a world could still have 'trans' people who are born one sex and express traits that current times would code as of the opposite sex, whereas black women would just be women with more or less pigment. Assuming we reached some kind of equality without racialized underclasses, and maintained it for at least several generations.
But I can recognize that the logic isn't perfectly airtight.
He sings along to the chorus like a good right-thinking person on the right side of history. But maybe those who don't hold the conventional progressive position aren't all dishonest or activated by unthinking bigotry and prejudice? Something to think about.
This reads like 'mainstream view bad!' boo-outgroup. Ironically (considering the second half of your statement), you act as if the only way one could hold mainstream views on LGBTQ issues is to be a self-righteous, intellectually dishonest NPC. Just as I don't believe that you are dishonest or bigoted, maybe consider that Freddie and I actually do spend some time thinking about issues and arrive at our own conclusions.
Biden seems, on a deeply personal level, to hate the US military and its treatment of its men, due to his son Beau's death-by-burn-pit-carcinogens. In fact, I rather suspect the withdrawal from Afghanistan was so insanely rapid (foolishly, of course, but still) because Biden personally said "get our fucking troops out of there LITERALLY RIGHT NOW BECAUSE YOU FUCKING PIGS KILLED MY SON." So I am heartened by his realization -- unlike so many of my country's insane leaders -- of the true cost of American military mobilization.
I've seen this come up a couple of times over my years here, and always meant to go dig up a quote I remembered from Obama's memoirs. Finally bothered to do it. For what it's worth, Obama's version of events regarding military leaders pushing for a troop surge in Afghanistan:
Among the principals, only Joe Biden voiced his misgivings. He had traveled to Kabul on my behalf during the transition, and what he saw and heard on the trip—particularly during a contentious meeting with Karzai—had convinced him that we needed to rethink our entire approach to Afghanistan. I knew Joe also still felt burned by having supported the Iraq invasion years earlier. Whatever the mix of reasons, he saw Afghanistan as a dangerous quagmire and urged me to delay a deployment, suggesting it would be easier to put troops in once we had a clear strategy as opposed to trying to pull troops out after we’d made a mess with a bad one.
Rather than deciding on the spot, I assigned Tom Donilon to convene the NSC deputies over the course of the following week to determine more precisely how additional troops would be used and whether deploying them by summer was even possible logistically. We’d revisit the issue, I said, once we had the answer. With the meeting adjourned, I headed out the door and was on my way up the stairs to the Oval when Joe caught up to me and gripped my arm. “Listen to me, boss,” he said. “Maybe I’ve been around this town for too long, but one thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president.” He brought his face a few inches from mine and stage-whispered, “Don’t let them jam you.”
...
IN LATER ACCOUNTS of our Afghanistan deliberations, Gates and others would peg Biden as one of the ringleaders who poisoned relations between the White House and the Pentagon. The truth was that I considered Joe to be doing me a service by asking tough questions about the military’s plans. Having at least one contrarian in the room made us all think harder about the issues—and I noticed that everyone was a bit freer with their opinions when that contrarian wasn’t me.
...
In mid-February, Donilon reported that the deputies had scrubbed General McKiernan’s request and concluded that no more than seventeen thousand troops, along with four thousand military trainers, could be deployed in time to have a meaningful impact on the summer fighting season or Afghan election security. Although we were still a month away from completing our formal review, all the principals except Biden recommended that we deploy that number of troops immediately. I gave the order on February 17, the same day I signed the
Recovery Act, having determined that even the most conservative strategy we might come up with would need the additional manpower, and knowing that we still had ten thousand troops in reserve if circumstances required their deployment as well.
It was published mid-November 2020, so while events may have been spun one way or the other to make Biden look good, at least it wasn't done to boost him in the election.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Don't mistake eloquence and verbosity for truth and just roll over and abandon your point because people posted 15 links to their extensive post histories from the last three years. There's a steelman to be had for things aren't as bad as the terminally online make them out to be, that liberalism has been remarkably successful and is worth fighting for, and that this is still the best time and place to be alive bar none.
It's easy to paint a grim picture of liberalism and the West when it's failures are trumpeted to the heavens while it's successes are the water we swim in.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.
Did you miss GATTACA? Beggars in Spain? Hysteria around designer babies when Dolly was cloned, or the human genome draft was published?
change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ.
That's just not anywhere close to realistic with our current level of technology and understanding. You could try cloning Shaq or whoever you think is smart, but we're laughably far away from editing your fertilized embryos for traits in that way. Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Seconded, as well as the mods doing God's work, as ever.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Is this what we've come to? Ridiculing weird people for trying to have a consensual relationship they want?
Come on in and have a seat. I was getting lonely clutching the pearls all by myself.
I thought you'd have some nits to pick around her hip/waist ratio or bosom size though.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
In the most pithy form - is retirement just plain immoral?
If you're retiring in your prime, maybe. More Boxer less Napoleon.
The path of least resistance for talented people is DINKing your way to FIRE at 40 and maybe getting a golden retriever or a couple of cats. Playing video games, smoking weed, phoning it in at your job (if you have to work) and taking a couple months of vacation a year.* I know an unfortunately large number of people who fall into this bin.
This is very much not the behavior we want to incentivize. We need people to do the hard work of having children and raising them well - or perhaps more realistically, decreasing the financial and social burden, but that's another story. We'd all be poorer if Elon Musk had spent his 20s/30s blitzed in Ibiza doing lines of coke off hookers, or whatever it is fun people do at raves. The American frontier wasn't tamed by childless, unemployed scions of wealthy families, good times create weak men, insert your preferred aphorism about rich, lazy fucks here.
*I'm not so tedious as to argue that vacation itself is immoral, but c'mon. Everyone should try to accomplish something worthwhile with their lives, everyone should see what their body is physically capable of in their prime and we need to cultivate a sense of ambition and civic responsibility.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
I still enjoy them. When getting into a topic I'm completely ignorant of, I'll just walk down the relevant stacks, grab books that catch my eye and skim a few sections or pages. I often find tangentially related books that I never would have otherwise if I had just searched 'Chinese history,' say, on Amazon. This was particularly valuable when I was a child and ended up with a cornucopia of books on the wild west, the Yukon and California gold rushes, the world wars, etc., none of which I even knew existed at such a young age. I feel much more nostalgic about public libraries than school libraries so this article doesn't evoke much of a reaction, but the thought of losing the former feels like a gut punch.
I also still use them to study or work if I'm not at the lab/between jobs. IMO, nothing beats a quiet, secluded desk buried in the middle of the stacks for focus.
Shattering the illusion is a bit of a strong word to use when I'd estimate >95% of the population has never heard of rationalists, and I don't think it's the source of my amusement at these habits, but if it makes you feel better: I, ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor, high pope of the Church of the Blue Tribe absolve you of your sins. Go forth and live in virtue, my son.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
just maybe! – @KulakRevolt would be fuming about the global kraken of perfidious Albion exploiting American vulnerability under the false guise of allyship, rather than the other way around.
The only constant in every timeline is a man named kulakrevolt fuming about something.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10hr ago
Sneer all you want (I guess you're a Real Engineer), but I think a big reason bits have continued to grow while everything else has stagnated is the regulators haven't caught up with the bits yet.
I've thought about this a lot in trying to bootstrap something in the bio space. Even if I moved to Prospera tomorrow to escape the oppressive FDA, the CapEx required to get something off the ground is absurd. Simplest of animal studies is 10k a pop for really simple studies and more like 50-100k for the real disease relevant models, renting a single lab bench a month for myself is ~3.5-5k (maybe cheaper now that the biotech market has cratered), basic reagents run from a few thousand/month to 10s of thousands depending on what you're doing. Anything with human cells necessarily requires a bunch of infrastructure to do cell culture. There's also very few projects that lend themselves to producing an MVP and moving some units to fund more R&D; these are all decades-long slogs.
I joined a bunch of DIYbio mailing lists, discords and slack groups and the kinds of projects they do are just sad. More fit for high school ed than tackling any real problem.
The fact that you can buy a nice desktop for a few thousand and hack away in a fetid, windowless apartment for a few months or years to build a functional product seems to uniquely support innovation and, most importantly, give aggressive young founders a chance to lead a company. I'm interested to see whether the shift to training giant, prohibitively expensive AI models will lead to the same dynamics we see in biotech.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Fair enough. Although to a large extent, it's just bad luck that HIV is so difficult to vaccinate against/treat paired with much easier anal/i.v. transmission versus vaginal. In a world where HIV was cured with a round of antibiotics similarly to syphilis or gonorrhea I suspect CD would nevertheless hate the gays.
Speaking of self-inflicted diseases necessitating medical intervention, I hope he isn't obese. You could level his argument at more or less the entite developed world and diseases of affluence.
I've got a number of ideas bouncing around in my head that I just never have the time to try and make the case for convincingly. Headline followed by tl;dr.
A) Oryx and Crake was an instruction manual for biological research - not the cyperpunk zaibatsu dystopia species-level cuckoldry, but the bioengineering. We'll never understand biological systems until we start trying to build them. Preferably with the help of AI.
B) The Bayh-Dole act gave us a sugar high but led to us eating our seed corn. The startup ecosystem and private industry are dependent on uncommercialized, foundational basic research carried out by underpaid and overworked scientists motivated by furthering humanity and/or ego, not profit.
C) Are we witnessing the birth of two transnational ethnicities? Also, the case for globalization.
D) What I tentatively call 'pregnancy autism,' or maybe an autistic attempt to analyze relationships and relationship conflict. Hard to do a tl;dr, but maybe it's an existential crisis inspired by this quote from 'What to expect when you're expecting':
Don’t take her outbursts personally. And don’t hold them against her. They are, after all, completely out of her control. Remember, it’s the hormones talking - and crying for no apparent reason. Avoid pointing out her moods, too. Though she’s powerless to control them, she’s probably also all too aware of them. And chances are, she’s no happier about them than you are. It’s no picnic being pregnant.
E) Whatever the fuck this bullshit spam is from Nancy Pelosi/DNC that I get daily:
Subject: Trump MORTIFYING loss
This is incredible:
Since Donald Trump announced another hateful, divisive campaign for President…
THOUSANDS of Democrats have stepped up and chipped in to our Defeat Trumpism Fund to ensure he NEVER returns to power.
For that, I’m so grateful.
But my team just alerted me that we’re still 2,403 gifts short of our goal before the End of Week Deadline.
I don’t want to beg, but this couldn’t be more important. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a statement Monday morning. If we CRUSH our goal before this deadline, we’ll show Trump, Republicans, and the ENTIRE country that our Democrats have what it takes to defeat him and his MAGA allies once again. So I’m asking you to be one of the final 2,403 Democrats I need to chip in so we can start organizing to DEFEAT Trump and every last one of his extremist allies. Please, will you chip in $15?
Complete with 2005 html-era formatting highlighting text in red and blue.
F) Healthy at more weights than you thought. IMO, people overstate the health risks of being overweight and don't sufficiently differentiate between overweight/obese and active/inactive.
G) Criticism is valuable, but easy - standing for something is hard but much more valuable. Tied to my distaste for reactionary thought and experience with pitching scientific ideas.
Numbered lists apparently reset after quotes, unfortunately. Apologies for having to use letters instead.
edit: for my own records, the consciousness blackpill.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Separatism in developed countries (Quebec, Catalonia, Scotland) is like a short, sharp cold. As long as a country makes it over the initial hurdle, independence is unlikely.
I can tell you it was less like a short, sharp cold and more like a hangover that's been going on for 50 years now:
The office is frequently accused of abusing its powers, such as occurred in 2013 during the "pastagate" affair when an Italian restaurant was cited for having pasta, antipasti, calamari, and the like on its menu, instead of using French equivalents. The office also objects to the sale of "grilled cheese sandwiches", insisting that they be called sandwich de fromage fondue, which literally translates to "melted cheese sandwich".[27] Likewise, the Quebec language office objects to "on/off" switches and to the sale of "steaks", insisting that they be called bifteck, "despite the fact that steak is the far more common term among Francophones."[27]
...
Section 73 of the Charter of the French language had recognized the right to English language instruction to Quebec residents alone. Canadian citizens from outside Quebec are forced to send their children to French primary and secondary schools, in direct violation of S26.(3) of the UN Declaration of Human Rights,[2] which states that "Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.[3]
Complete with unconstitutional (but that's okay, because Quebec never signed the Canadian constitution) laws and successfully driving off a few hundred thousand anglo Quebecers in such a way that would probably (and admittedly, hyperbolically) be called genocide in different contexts.
I can sympathize with the Quebecois perspective - in part because, to the chagrin of my parents, I was forced to take French classes taught by Quebecois sympathetic to the cause of what would, in other contexts, be called a terrorist organization - but obviously I'm still bitter about the situation. My spoken French was good, but not good enough to avoid being treated like shit by my Quebecois colleagues as a teenager trying to scrape by with menial service jobs.
I'm pessimistic on the whole situation ever improving until machine learning enables Babel fish level tech (hopefully sooner than I ever thought!) or the world of the Machine Stops becomes reality. But between the western provinces going MAGA and Quebec being Quebec, Canada may implode before we get there.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Edgy is just an aesthetic now. It doesn't mean a damn thing. People who self-describe as "punk" will mandate all the exact same speech codes in their spaces as HR departments in multinational megacorps across the world do, if not even more stringent. Rebellion has been successfully co-opted by the monoculture and you can buy it at your local strip mall now.
Or the barber pole turns eternal. Perhaps the true counter-culture in a society awash with twitter narcissists, outrage porn and nihilistic realpolitik is a throwback to something like Victorian era propriety. Subs like /r/Cleanlivingkings and /r/nofap (although the latter included a bizarre strain of muslims struck by self-loathing for being horny and masturbating) always fascinated me for this reason. Maybe if we can make it edgy and high-status to be a decent human being without coding it red or blue, to value honesty, earnestness and a moral code we can rein in the brinksmanship and hatred coursing through our country's veins. A man can dream.
And if Your (the royal you, not picking on you personally) visceral reaction to this is 'But the left/right are the lying fascists/cartoonish villains intent on destroying society, consider that you might be part of the problem.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You could run Twitter with 1500 people instead of 7000 (as I’ve argued many times, tech hiring sprees have bloated every big tech business), but you want those 1500 people to be the good ones, you want them to be able to take over for their fired coworkers, and you want them to be distributed so that at least some of the survivors are in all the critical teams you need with the accumulated knowledge to keep the ship moving.
The problem is that in the rocket and electric car businesses, you can 'exploit' highly motivated talent because some huge proportion of aerospace engineers was raised on a steady diet of science fiction and October Sky. People are willing to do the crushing work weeks if they believe that their work is lifting humanity to the stars and enabling the first interplanetary colony in ways that they just won't to make sure MAGA/progressives can snipe at each other with meaningless, puerile gotchas. People at twitter are there for the paycheck, people at SpaceX are there for the dream.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
REAL Banned Books are decades out of print with publishers who refuse to rerelease them despite used copies going for hundreds of dollars due to pent-up demand.
The null hypothesis is that very few people care about these books, not that there's a government conspiracy to stop you from reading dangerous ideas and tend to their happy flock of sheeple. The fact that someone is willing to spend 200$ on a rare book does not mean that the market will bear the printing of tens of thousands of new copies of said book.
I can find a bunch of books that fit your methodology, but unfortunately didn't make your list; do you think Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story being out of print means that TPTB are terrified you'll start rioting if you read about the sex lives of teenagers in the 80s? Birds of Britain has some pretty women I guess. Maybe if you read Promise me tomorrow you'd think poorly of Nora Roberts, and we can't have that. Here's a couple dozen more you can add.
Then of course there’s Nabarkov’s Lolita (1955)… Which yes, is a Barnes and Noble “Banned book” but 1) It is actually banned in several countries and 2) It will still make you squirm, its the story of a man sexually abusing an underaged girl told in 1st person, it has been on my to-read list forever, ever since Christopher Hitchen’s praised its black humor in an essay I read years ago, but I’ve yet to get around to it.
Not to pile on other people saying the same thing, but I literally borrowed this from my library a year ago for a book club a decade ago. You aren't missing much.
Yet, I don’t know about you, but the Siren song of forbidden knowledge is too much to resist. I dug through too many dusty rare book libraries looking for lost or evil works…
I'm genuinely curious - broadly speaking, what do you think you've learned? If you were trying to sell me on your favorite book or two from your list, what would they be and what do you think I'd gain from reading them?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
For those of you who are parents, what were your favorite experiences/things to share with your children? For those of you who aren't, what are your most meaningful memories of things your parents shared with you?
I'm thinking of books/movies/tv shows, camping trips, activities, sports, video/board games, puzzles, family stories, hobbies - anything you can think of that was meaningful.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You're both dancing around the real issue IMO, which is not salary but research funding. If you offer a professor a million dollar research budget, access to the best students/postdocs and a $75,000 USD salary the vast majority would leap at the opportunity. Besides, there's always the option of commercializing your research and serving on boards and such in the USA.
In aggregate China spends quite a bit on research, but when you look at the actual grant size people are receiving it's quite low. Compare the US situation to Canada; in Canada most labs subsist on a single CIHR grant that awards less than 200k per year, and while the paylines (rates of success) for a single grant are higher, it's very hard to win multiple of the main CIHR grants. In the US, R01s (the bread and butter grant for a research lab) pays 400-500k per year and many people have multiple R01s, program grants, R21s and access to a huge amount of private and philanthropic capital. The same scenario plays out at the postdoc/PhD level; do you want access to that capital to do actual cutting edge work surrounded by the most motivated gunners in the world? Move to the US.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Are you sure about that ? You think sexuality is entirely environmental, there are is no genetic component to it ?
That's bullshit.
With all due respect ma'am/sir, misstating my argument and then rebutting it with nothing more than 'that's bullshit' is remarkably poor form. But anyways:
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Sexuality typically refers to sexual attraction/orientation, which I only tangentially mention.
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I don't assert that it is entirely environmental.
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I'm not sure about anything. It's a worldview, and I'm open to changing my mind. You'll have to try a bit harder though.
I do believe that many of the things we're discussing happen to be largely environmental, though. Male preference for pants versus 'dresses' varies wildly across cultures; from kilts, thawbs, thongs worn by many tribal peoples, togas and roman tunics, whatever. So no, I don't believe men have a genetic imperative against wearing dresses, nor do I believe that women have a genetic imperative to find men in dresses unattractive. There are centuries of wildly different fashions and norms, even amongst Europeans who (presumably) share your genetic background.
Even if you just want to consider sexuality, I do believe that there is significant plasticity and environmental influence on what and who people find attractive. We oscillate between finding short hair on women attractive, to unattractive, to attractive ad nauseum. Repeat for most traits.
And as to cute... ditto. Men aren't cute. You can try to 'consider' them cute, but that's the same level of as talking about feminine penises.
Speak for yourself, I find plenty of men cute. I suspect if you ask some of the women in your life they'll have plenty of examples of men they would describe as cute.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Oh. Alright, my apologies.
Hilarious that foxnews.com is currently headlining an article about Desantis receiving a standing ovation, with the Trump announcement buried below Bankman-Fried, the LA mayoral race and the UVA football shooting.
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