Crowstep
4hr ago
As a newly married man, my experience has definitely been that having a wife makes life easier. Pooling our social lives means that she picks up maybe 70% of the organising seeing friends, she organises most of the house stuff, she helps me draft tactful messages with her womanly social skills. Plus even if I'm working from home I'm guaranteed to spend at least some time socialising every day. 12/10 would wife again.
Crowstep
1d ago
Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there
I'd assume it's a selection effect. Think Amy Chua the Tiger Mother marrying a Jewish law school professor. Assortive mating is being driven by higher education and people moving to cities. Cities and colleges are both more racially diverse than towns/neighbourhoods.
Crowstep
1d ago
Not exactly. The idea of 'parents distributing citizenship' is an odd way to frame it. States issue citizenship. I reject the idea that any non-citizen is entitled to citizenship at all. In my ideal world, children could only inherit citizenship from their parents and nobody could have dual citizenship.
Whether you frame it as states rewarding criminals by giving their children citizenship, or as states rewarding the children of criminals (thereby incentivising crime) is immaterial. The key issue is that we have a thing we want to reduce (illegal immigration) and instead of disincentivising it, states provide massive incentives for it.
Crowstep
2d ago
I'm not arguing that birthright citizenship doesn't exist. It obviously does and these children legally are entitled to it. I'm saying that they shouldn't be.
And even if having a citizen child had no benefit for the parents (clearly false, having a citizen child makes it easier for illegal immigrants to stay), that doesn't make it any less of a prize. Parents obviously do things that are good for their children. And a system that incentivises parents to commit crimes by rewarding their children is a bad one.
Crowstep
2d ago
Framing citizenship as a "reward" is completely nonsensical
It doesn't matter how anyone on the internet frames it. Illegal immigrants (quite rationally) do treat first world citizenship as a prize and lie and cheat their way to getting it. They do it for the same reason young third world men risk their lives coming across the sea on rubber dinghies and why rich foreigners quite literally buy it.
Crowstep
2d ago
this seems potentially pretty society altering
Birth right citizenship is a bizarre American (meaning the Americas) custom. Why on earth would you reward illegal immigrants by making their children citizens? It's a planet-sized moral hazard. Just because you benefitted from it doesn't mean it's good. Crimes should have negative consequences, not positive ones.
Crowstep
3d ago
That doesn't explain why its female dominated now though. Medicine and law used to be male dominated. Now women make up a majority of new doctors and lawyers. These things can and do change.
A better explanation is that nursing, a caring profession, is majority female because all caring professions are majority-female, because women enjoy caring (for obvious biological reasons relating to maternity).
Crowstep
3d ago
because it pays very well
This study suggests its appeal lies in it being a caring profession. This one too. I don't know how things are in every country but in the UK, nursing doesn't really pay well. The average nursing wage is only slightly above the average wage for the country as a whole. Also, we see in other jobs that higher salaries attract more men than women, relative to the pleasantness of the job. High salaries should make nursing more male, not more female.
and is female gendered
That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.
Crowstep
4d ago
I always found it strange for activists to complain about emotional labour (rather than simply describing it neutrally). I mean sure, most emotional-labour heavy jobs are predominantly female, but that's because those are the jobs women want. A woman doesn't become a nurse because she likes changing bedpans, she becomes a nurse because she likes caring for people. The emotional labour is the main appeal of the job.
Crowstep
4d ago
I'm your man!
So I've turned my phone into a pseudo-dumb phone. I've replaced the stock launcher with a minimalist black and white one, deleted any fun or distracting apps and installed an app which blocks the browser (but which allows me to access it for 30 seconds every five minutes for logins etc).
If you want to lock down your phone even more (assuming it's an Android), the Universal Android Debloater lets you uninstall anything, even stock apps like the browser or the app store. ChatGPT helped me set this up despite my lack of technical ability.
All my browsers on my personal and work PCs have site-blockers, blocking mostly news sites. The best ones let you set a password which you can make as a string of numbers which you save somewhere else. Typically you can also add sites without entering the password, but you need the password to remove sites.
My tablet has a whitelist of sites I'm allowed on, with the parental control PIN set to the aforementioned password. Previously I let my wife set the PIN number which also worked.
Finally, if I want a complete digital break (say, to read a book), I'll activate SelfControl which completely disables the browser on my laptop.
Now of course, all of these things can be reversed if I want to (except SelfControl while a block is active). What seems to work for me is that the pain of setting everything up makes me less willing to e.g. simply uninstall the browser extension.
I still slack off at work more than I should, but this makes it much easier to get back to what I should be doing. Also having books easily accessible for when I want to proactively rest is helpful.
Crowstep
4d ago
That said, a comment on the article from Scott:
I know of two secret results I'm not supposed to talk about, by people claiming they've found very large amounts of "missing heritability". Not yet peer-reviewed or confirmed by anything except rumor. I expect one to be out within six months, and the other maybe eventually.
Crowstep
8d ago
You don't need to know who is pushing something to notice it's being pushed
If you're positing a worldwide, decades long conspiracy to fabricate or exaggerate a genocide that never happened, then yes you need to actually say who (specifically) is pushing it and how they are doing so. Otherwise all you're doing is noticing that millions of eyewitnesses and all serious historians agree that the Holocaust happened, and that many government censor its denial, without actually demonstrating the conspiracy you're positing.
but you should probably not trust the survivor's testimony too much
Crowstep
8d ago
Who exactly is 'they' here?
The survivors, the soldiers who liberated the camps and the historians who studied the Holocaust afterwards are not the ones doing the censoring. Governments (and not most governments) censor Holocaust denial because they know that the only people who question the historical facts do so because they hate Jews, and hating Jews caused the Nazis to kill six million of them. We can argue whether censorship is the right approach or not, but its mere existence isn't evidence that the Holocaust was exaggerated or made up. To believe otherwise fails in the same way that all true conspiracy theories fail, it requires too much coordination from too many people over too long.
Crowstep
8d ago
Can you give examples of these institutions and how they censored information?
Because every developed country (and most undeveloped ones) used COVID vaccines and demonstrated their effectiveness. Is the entire planet in on this conspiracy?
Crowstep
8d ago
Holocaust denial censorship is best understood as part and parcel of bans on Nazi symbols. Holocaust deniers aren't disinterested historians searching for truth. They're Jew-haters who are threatened by the idea of a genocide of Jews because it undermines their beliefs that Jews rule the world.
Fortunately, I live in a country which bans neither Holocaust denial (our vibrant Muslim underclass are very grateful) nor Nazi symbolism. The Holocaust deniers have failed to win in the free marketplace of ideas because they are wrong (and motivated by transparent ethnic animosity), not because the government won't let them post on the internet.
Crowstep
8d ago
I have literally personally spoken to a Holocaust survivor who was in a death camp as a girl. I believe her (and the entirety of the historical field) over internet jew-haters.
Crowstep
8d ago
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you suggesting that I need to personally know doctors, scientists and scientifically literate people to believe that vaccines work?
Crowstep
8d ago
Contracting and then passing on COVID to my older immuno-suppressed relatives, for whom the vaccine doesn't provide 100% protection. And since the way we ultimately defeated the virus was by achieving herd immunity, me getting a vaccine contributes to that, rather than free-riding as anti-vaxxers did.
Crowstep
9d ago
Who are 'the pro-vaccine people', every government and health authority in the developed world? The supermajority of people on the planet who willingly got a vaccine? Humanity is not in a manichean struggle between pro- and anti-vax. Vaccines are just a (very) useful medical technology that unfortunately got tied up with the toxic partisanship and negative polarisation of American politics.
In the less angry parts of the world, we just got our jabs and got on with life once the virus went away because of them.
It's pretty fallacious to split the entire species into 'the pro-vaccine side' and 'the anti-vaccine side' and conclude that because some people or organisations were censoring information (as if this is a new thing for organisations to do) then you can ignore all studies and evidence (and your own lying eyes) about whether the covid vaccines worked.
Germany censors people who think the Holocaust didn't happen. That doesn't mean the Holocaust deniers are right.
Paul Graham says to keep your identity small, and this is a perfect example why. You're wilfully putting yourself at risk for a disease because your political partisanship won't allow you to accept a medical technology that your political opponents might like.
Crowstep
10d ago
we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against
No, but we have a counterfactual population to compare against, the population who chose not to get vaccinated. The comparison is gigantic and unambiguous, vaccines saved lives. And that's with the unvaccinated population benefitting from the partial herd immunity provided by the vaccinated population.
the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines
If they weren't being honest about side effects, why did you quote an article about them describing side effects and how common they are as a reason for not getting the vaccine? How does that not count as honesty?
There was no scientific curiosity
If that were true, they would have just released the vaccines instead of spending months and months doing exhaustive trials to see whether and to what extent the vaccines reduced infection, and what side effects there were. If scientific curiosity means anything, it means testing your hypotheses with studies. What exactly did you expect them to do beyond that?
but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this
You have a massive population of vaccinated people, living among a massive population of unvaccinated people. The unvaccinated population had death rates from COVID that an order of magnitude higher than the vaccinated population. What more evidence could you ask for?
Crowstep
10d ago
So you're avoiding a vaccine which stopped a global pandemic that killed millions because four out of every million (that is, 0.0004%) people who get the vaccine develop a heart condition because of it?
It feels like your position is based more on political contrarianism than statistical sense.
Like, I get it, governments got authoritarian and petty when it came to vaccines. I couldn't buy a beer in a German biergarten because I didn't have the right vaccine passport app, while all my friends (who I was sitting with) were allowed to, as if the beer somehow facilitated the transmission of the virus. That was dumb. But you're not sticking it to the wokes by not getting a vaccine, you're just increasing the chance that you get ill or (God forbid) die from a preventable disease.
Crowstep
10d ago
Your post suggests that you're talking about yourself rather than your child, which is a relief. But I have to ask, what negatives do you forsee from getting vaccinated so much that you'd risk getting the diseases they protect against?
Crowstep
12d ago
Surely, such a gigantic supermajority must reflect the will of the voters.
I'm sure you're aware, but Labour only got a third of the vote. Their supermajority of seats is an artefact of a bad electoral system, not a mandate from the people. And I'm pretty sure making nine-month abortions legal wasn't in the manifesto.
We don't need to speculate about what the public thinks about this amendment. We know what they think because they (at least the female half) have been asked directly. Only 3% of British women think abortion up to the point of birth should be legal.
I'd say it's more like 60-70%. There's definitely a percentage of women's fashion that is just signalling taste/wealth to other women. Septum rings and baggy mom jeans aren't sexy but they've still had their fashionable moment.
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