Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I skimmed the paper and there's something I don't understand, I'm not an expert on this so hopefully someone can explain it to me.
Fisher has equations that describe how for a given intensity of a assortative mating and a given degree of relatedness how much phenotype correlation we should expect. Clark compares how different measures of social status correlate for each degree of relatedness (sibling, cousin, grandkids, second cousin etc) and finds that the correlation declines for each generational step in the way Fisher's equations describe. That genetic distance predicts the change in correlation in status metrics is strong evidence that there is a genetic component to status.
Clark says that because the rate at which status outcome correlation declines with genetic distance is constant over time there has been no change in social mobility, but doesn't the initial correlation matter? If I look at Table 2 Parent Child Higher Education status correlates at 0.53 from 1780-1860 and at 0.37 from 1860-1919. That looks like it could be a decline in the heritability of educational attainment but Clark says that the important thing is that the change between parent-child and cousin-cousin educational status correlation fits Fisher's equations in both data sets. He says that because social status measures decline with genetic distance at the same rate rate in all these different time periods there's been no change in social mobility. But wouldn't a society with a 0.8 correlation between say, siblings home values, have less social mobility than one with a 0.2 correlation even if they both declined at the same rate with genetic distance?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
One of the big aspects of a Post-Elon Blue Check for a while, was that blue check replies would automatically get listed at the top of replies to a tweet. This significantly degraded user experience because instead of the top replies being whoever got the most likes it would be whoever paid $8. This is part of what sparked the mass blocking of blue checks because if you actually wanted to see the top replies without scrolling for a while it's what you had to do. Blue Checks now seem like a signal of a low-quality engagement bait, or someone who is trying to commercialize their content.
The original blue check system existed to solve the problem of people impersonating brands. celebrities and major newscasters, but the marginal journalist who got certified enjoyed an unearned credibility boost over random bloggers and posters which led to a lot of animosity towards blue checks from right-wing posters. Elon tried to turn the mild status boost into a subscription service, maybe it'll work out, but now we're in a period of weird experiments where it seems to have mostly damaged the average user experience while benefitting opportunistic engagement-baiters.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
"Let's sterilize all the Jews" is extremely different from "we'll let ~1% of the Jews voluntarily sterilize themselves".
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The actual utility of determining who is the 'Fastest Woman' or 'Fastest Man' is non-existent and society's interest in elite sports is in entertainment and propagandizing physical fitness. Anyone who is an Olympic finalist at something like the 800m is the recipient of profound genetic gifts, and the concept of fairness between them and the average person is laughable. Excluding an extreme outlier in terms of genetic advantage for the benefit of a cluster of the far far right tail of the distribution doesn't seem to have much to do with 'fairness' for the general population.
Semenya differs in that her genetic advantage is larger, traceable to a single chromosome, and used to construct a category of social solidarity. If Semenya wins over and over XX women may be less inspired to participate in athletics since they cannot identify with her as an intersex person. Or if there is a single gene which gives massive athletic advantage among 'women' then women without that gene would be less inspired to compete. The carve out for women's sports is an acknowledgement that it is worth creating categories for people genetically disadvantaged at athletics so that even though they can never really be the best they can still be honored for fulfilling their potential, even if it's limited.
The fun futuristic version of this to me would be if we eventually develop some way of calculating genetic advantage from DNA and creating athletic 'gene classes' for different sports. If we're worried XX women will be less inspired to compete if someone with an identifiable genetic advantage like Semenya wins than shouldn't we be worried about short men, or people born with poor biomechanics not competing? In the short term something like height classes in basketball seems like an obvious starting point.
I'm confused about your reading of the Good Samaritan Parable.
The Samaritans aren't the friendly neighboring faith to Jesus's jewish audience, they're the heretical near outgroup. The Jews had demolished their temple in the previous century and in Jesus's time the Samaritan's profaned the temple mount by scattering bones on it. The parable is given in answer to a questioner asking 'who is my neighbor' that they should love as themselves. Before the heretical Samaritan helps the injured man, a priest and a levite refuse to help him, possibly because they value ritual cleanliness so highly they don't want to touch the man who may be dead. Jesus ends the parable by asking which of these is the injured man's neighbor.
Casting the hated heretic as the merciful unexpected neighbor rather than the high status fellow Jews suggests a broadening of the boundaries of who is a neighbor we are commanded to love, not a limiting of it to co-religionists.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
But taking CNN's "just asking questions" article at face value, it makes me wonder where all the real gay people are, and why we can't seem to get a gay rights case in front of SCOTUS with parties who aren't being puppeted, Chicago-style.
The New Yorker article says why they had to go with Lawrence & Garner
Since Bowers, no other test case had emerged in which someone was actually arrested for violating a state sodomy law. National gay-rights groups had been challenging state sodomy laws based on supposed harms to gay citizens, who were, litigators claimed, made to look like presumptive criminals. That strategy wasn’t working. After the Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans (1996), struck down a Colorado initiative excluding gays from anti-discrimination protection, the time felt ripe for another challenge to sodomy statutes. But the gay-civil-rights groups needed to find plaintiffs who would not suffer custody losses or other collateral harms from admitting that they had violated criminal sodomy laws, which tended to rule out gay couples in a committed family relationship. As Carpenter puts it, civil-rights attorneys knew that they needed plaintiffs “with little to lose.” Garner and Lawrence fit that bill.
As to why 303 Creative didn't have any real gay clients demanding wedding websites:
Puzzlingly, before she actually filed the first suit in 2016, Smith had apparently never designed a wedding website.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I think Yud is messing up badly and making AI concerned people look crazy. I"m more pro-rationalist than most people I talk to and there's so many leaps in his theory that it's hard to get normies to make. His own little ingroup venerates him and he's done a good job of persuading them but once this becomes a real technology where money and improvements to people's lives are at stake he's gonna get shredded in the public arena by people actually good at this.
As a semi humorous aside the obvious correct tactic for AI doomers who don't think we're on the brink of FOOM is to try to do an AI false flag attack, get GPT-6 to blow up a building or something and try to launch a Global War on Terror style response.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Except that Texas will take your kids away and charge you with child abuse if you let them take puberty blockers rather than allow that variety of family life to flourish. As far as I know most U.S. states have some proceedings to take away your child if you abuse them, and is there anyone who is such a believer in parental rights that they would allow a pedophile widower to retain custody of a 12-year-old after impregnating her? It's not really a meta-dispute about centralized state authority vs. anti-fragile family life, it's an object-level dispute over whether puberty blockers and/or hormones constitute child abuse. Texas thinks it does and will take your child away to be raised by bureaucrats, Minnesota thinks it doesn't and will refuse to enforce Texas's rulings stripping a parent of custody if their kid is in Minnesota.
People in this thread are then very concerned that Minnesota's claim of emergency temporary jurisdiction over child custody proceedings means they will also emancipate runaways. So far has shown themselves to be an expert on Minnesota custody laws and explained whether jurisdiction over a custody proceeding also means jurisdiction to hear a termination of parental rights by a minor, and/or whether refusing to allow a child to receive gender-affirming care would be grounds for termination of parental rights in the absence of other abuse.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Wagner forces were seen entering Moscow Oblast a few hours ago. I think Pirghozin understands he has to win quickly and is rushing Moscow and betting that they can't coordinate a serious defense fast enough. I don't think either side is trying to mobilize the people to get in the streets like Erdogan did in Turkey. The public is assumed to be bystanders, the audience for communications is the other military commanders, everything will hinge on whether Pirghovin has support from any other factions of the millitary. Rosgvardia vehicles were seen with Wagner vehicles if Rostov but it's unclear if they were seized or collaborating.
I agree that the odds of the coup succeeding are small but the coup hasn't stalled yet.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's hard to square this idea that progressives are relentlessly devoted to engineering the human condition with Scott's piece "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck" which describes progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people or attempts to inform people with rare genetic conditions so that the don't marry people with similar genes The 'eugenic instinct' is dead, replaced by deep concerns about ableism.
Your examples of how the liberal engineering drive would function in response to HBD don't make much sense to me. Recruiting international scientists isn't about eugenics it's about meritocracy. You don't need HBD or hereditary IQ to justify it. You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.
I think it's less profound and more historically contingent. As with Eugenics where a regime of forced sterilization made the whole field taboo obviously segregation made the entire study of racial difference taboo. Even where that difference is not facially threatening to liberalism, like explaining black athletic achievement, genetic explanations are taboo (with maybe an exception for Ethiopians because they're a subset of black people and there's the environmental explanation of altitude). There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Matthew 25:34 NIV
"Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
I can see there being a theological implication of a homeless criminal saying he had nothing to eat or drink and being publicly strangled to death by a former soldier. He may have posed such an imminent threat to others that his killing was justified self defense but that wasn't in the viral video that provoked the response.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Those Prediction Markets are predicting the Republican nominee not the general election. It's totally plausible Trump is extremely popular with the Republican base and not popular with the general electorate.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Leonard Leo is a conservative legal activist with a 1.3 billion dollar legal fund. If he thought Virginia anti-cross burning laws found constitutional in 2003 posed a risk to conservative political power these people would have the most zealous representation money can buy. I'm skeptical that a law that bans burning objects for the purpose of intimidation on public property has a broad chilling effect on Conservative political organizations since most political rallies don't involve burning objects.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yeah I voted this was warning worthy because it was exceptionally rude but I 100% agreed with the basic point. We're forum posters and not professional writers and so most literary stuff is going to be not great but people should be allowed to experiment with writing style without extremely rude criticism.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Is there a recent historical example of barbarian mercenaries taking over the empire? There's instances in Africa where one ethnic group within a state created by an Empire dominates the military and uses that to rule society. I'm not sure African post-colonial states have comparable social and economic situations to the U.S. though.
If the American military suddenly became 70% Uzbek or something they wouldn't have a substantial share of the civilian population behind them, and there wouldn't be a primary export industry like oil or rubber or diamonds to seize control of and distribute revenue from to cronies.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
They even showed it in years past with a permission slip and just forgot to send out the slip this year. It's a paperwork mishap elevated to a firing offense because of the ongoing culture war over parental rights.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Ah, but the fiscal effects: taxes must increase because budgets must increase. Why? Solving problems is no longer the goal of the government; now, issues must be managed. Societal woes must be serviced by specific groups of unionized government employees. Union contracts have to be renegotiated because wages have to increase with inflation and/or remain a multiple of the minimum wage.
Federal Receipts as a share of GDP have bounced around within the same 15-20% range since the 1950's. Labor productivity has followed a roughly linear trend . Public Sector unions are still around but private sector unions are dead as a door nail compared to the pre-enshittification era. Here's a Brookings report outraged that we're hitting a record high of roughly 11 million Federal employees, but their graph shows we had roughly 9 million in 1984 and we've had a 40% increase in population since then so I'm not sure there's been a large proportional change.
Your talk about American Libertarian Capitalism but the era of triumphant deregulation before Conservatives started to admit that globalization deindustrializing the 'heartland' was bad lasted thirty years from 1980-2008?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It'd be pretty shocking for Russia to have a 4:1 casualty ratio in their favor and for the war to be going this poorly for them.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
How are people encountering Dylan Mulvaney ads? I have never organically encountered her content outside of culture war discussions about what it means that she's prominent/has brand partnerships. Is she huge on TikTok or something? Was this a targeted thing aimed at Gen Z or is she going to be in ads run during the NBA playoffs?
I don't know what's going on with Dylan Mulvaney but there were a bunch of articles on 'bimboificiation' and the 'rise of bimbos' a while back so cis women social influencers are also performing parodies of high femininity. I think it's kind of an Elle Woods thing where the idea is that you can act stereotypically hyper feminine and still be competent and agentic. I wonder if it's a way to respond to the pressure of always having to present an image or something. Chrissy Chlapeka is cited in a bunch of those essays and she recorded a song about being so hot she wants to fuck herself, which reeks of autogynephillia except she's cis (I think).
I can kind of see drag, and the way some trans women act as an insulting parody of femininity, but then the people I know who watch RuPaul's Drag Race are mostly straight women. I also thought Lana Del Rey was kind of performing a man's idea of a woman, but she has a huge female fan base so I don't know what's going on there.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I assume you're implying she's some sort of sex worker by calling her a "dancer" which would normally be a reasonable assumption but the article says they met when she was a movement coach on one of his movies. Do Hollywood production companies hire sex workers as coaches for their actors often?
I'm not a lawyer and I've been trying to figure out exactly what the standard is for using force in self defense. I read some FAQ from law firm websites and a lot of the issue comes down to whether the threat is 'imminent'. In clarifying whether a threat is imminent these blogs usually focus on timing. If a guy with a knife says "I'm going to stab you", that is an imminent threat you can defend yourself against. A guy without a knife saying "I'm gonna go get a knife come back here and stab you" does not constitute an imminent threat and you have no right to use force until he actually gets the knife and comes back. I haven't found anything on conditionals like "I don't care if I have to kill a F, I will" where it's not clear what he is about to do, or when he will do it, since we don't know what he 'has' to do.
I'm also not clear what the exact duration on 'imminent' is since most of the examples given involve very obvious immeadiete threats like someone running at another person with a knife or baseball bat. If Neely is issuing general threats and a reasonable person might fear that he will assault someone in the near future, but he hasn't threatened a specific person or moved to begin the act of assault does that constitute an 'imminent' threat?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I'd expect the WaPo's liberal bias to cause it to overrate the likelihood of these regulations actually working. Pledging dramatic action on climate change at some point in the future is very popular with left leaning institutions. Promising to dramatically cut emissions in the future and then constantly pushing back the date is how this stuff works.
Also the Supreme Court overturned the CDC's eviction ban and the EPA's attempt to regulate carbon dioxide.
LED's are great and Home Depot still stocks Incandescent lights. You can still get a gas stove. I got plastic straws even on my trip to California last week. I guess low flush toilets were tyrannically imposed on us but I'm having trouble remembering the last time I had to use a plunger so I think they're fine. I get the principle of not interfering with consumer choices but the whole 'life keeps getting worse' seems like an overstatement.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It's a common left wing historian talking point that government support for civil rights wasn't pure benevolence but part of a propaganda war to win over African and Asian countries during the cold war. America became the global hegemon but its allies in Europe have all these colonial empires. Instead of strong arming Europe into giving up their colonies we'll just advance an ideology of racially egalitarian national determination where the emerging third world should be free to partake in a rules based international trade system that conveniently enough, we get to make the rules for.
If you read a left wing historian like Judith Stein her account of American deindustrialization is that foreign policy elites fucked over the American working class in order to build up allied economies so that they could resist communism. We let Japan and Korea dump steel in the American market while having massive tariff barriers so that they could build their own economies to ward off China. The seminal 'The Deindustrialization of America' by Bluestone and Harrison is full of examples of how tax and trade policy encouraged American companies to build factories in Europe rather than build them in America and export to Europe.
It's not just virtue signaling it was part of a broader strategy to win the cold war.
So going through those examples
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Paul Letts was alleged to have let people cook meth in RV's on his property in exchange for some of the meth. The police raided his property and found 55 guns, equipment for manufacturing meth, possession amounts of meth and Letts later tested positive for Meth. He didn't plead guilty and lost his trial in two days, he had a criminal history and got 57 months in jail.
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Suzanne Wilcox pled guilty after being found at a traffic stop to have drug paraphernalia and a newly purchased handgun. She got time served (five months) and two years probation
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Isca Johnson was found to have marijuana and a gun in his home, he got 21 months jail. This one is weird because it says he was part of a joint state federal operation called "Crime Drivers" which targeted people with warrants out for violent crime, but it doesn't say anything about his criminal history.
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Darion Hayne had a [Edit:] 5.7 x 28mm handgun and 5.4g of Marijuana, he got five years probation with six months home confinement.
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Your fifth link goes to the Isca Johnson one again so I'll add one Sauma Brata Deb got 12 months for illegally posessing two guns.
So just looking at these cases the most lenient sentences available to a normal drug user who illegally possesses a single gun are six month prison or home confinement and two to five years parole. In that context it looks like Hunter did better then a normal person would, but only by a small amount because the penalties for this crime are normally quite small.
I that scene it's not as if they're not prepared to enforce compliance and totally bluffing, they're just not prepared to enforce compliance on Marlo Stanfield. If Bubbles tried to steal something the security guard would have stopped him without a second thought.
Marlo takes two Lollipops he could easily pay for while looking the guard in the eyes. He's signalling his power and his ability to flaunt the rules and personally disrespecting the security guard. The security guard knows Marlo can have him killed on a whim, he's scared to look him in the eyes and says 'he's not stepping to" Marlo, but him having pride as a man means he can't let the slight to unanswered. He's not asking Marlo not to defect, he's not trying to get the lollipop's back, he just wants to be recognized as a working man outside "the game" who isn't going to interfere with the gangs but shouldn't have to tolerate such clear disrespect either. And Marlo of course says no, it's the other way.
One of the running themes in The Wire is that the code of honor that allows drug dealers to exist alongside the community is in decay. Omar takes pride in never robbing a citizen, he's gunned down by a child. They shoot at his mother on her way to church. Avon's generation might have stolen, but they wouldn't have personally humiliated the security guard in doing so. Marlo is the next generation, he's more ruthless and has people killed constantly for vague suspicions or minor slights. The system that no longer exists isn't state and federal law, it's the norm that people outside "the game", especially "citizens" are to be left alone and not really interfered with.
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