Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
No bio...
User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I suppose my intuition is they also would not have cared, had they been asked in advance. I'm imagining this kind of caring as being symmetrical about whether something has happened. If you would have objected to, or had a problem with, the thing happening before it happened why wouldn't you have the same objection to its happening after it happened?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think my point is that the median "normie" position is much closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" position than you realize.
I suspect most people think a slogan like "end racism" being on helmets or in end zones is anodyne. The same way people are fine with the NFL turning everything pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month. When people see ads highlighting female athletes or coaches or whatever they don't think "Cringe Progressive Propaganda" they think "Neat!"
You characterize the actions taken by Swift, the NFL, etc as being directed towards liberals but I think you underestimate the extent to which "normies" either agree with or don't care about those actions.
7.
I think this is an often underappreciated aspect of an artist's career. Many of them just do not know when to throw in the towel on new stuff. Mad respect to Billy Joel who has not released new material in 30 years but still plays a few concerts (including Madison Square Garden) every month. He's someone who knew when he was done.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I am admittedly a progressive, which I'm sure colors my perspective, but I can't help but read your paragraph after the "AND YET" as exactly the kind of stuff Hanania is complaining about. If you roll up on some Normie Who Just Wants To Grill and start talking about the number of black people Swift has dated compared to the number of black people she danced with in what's basically an extended music video... what do you think their response is? How does the conversation proceed? I submit that a Normie does not spend one iota of brain power thinking about this fact and, if so confronted, would struggle to understand how the two things are supposed to relate to each other. Is this a particularly progressive perspective? Am I the one out of touch?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Sure. I don't intend to make any particular claim about how often one is actually in the described state. My point is that Scott is wrong when he says you should say something happens with probability 50% if one finds themselves in the described state.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Not really analysis but something I found amusing.
I read a Forbes article doing a retrospective on Desantis' campaign. That article happened to mention his polling peak was about a year ago and links to 538 as a citation. Not good to peak a year before a single vote was cast! The icing is, as ballotpedia notes, Desantis didn't even announce until May 2023! His polling peak was months before he announced and it's all down hill from there (contrary to Haley who is gaining in polls). The more republican primary voters got to know Ron Desantis the less they wanted to vote for him apparently.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Peter Thiel is pretty smart, he topped a maths competition in California, made a couple of multi billion-dollar companies in the STEM sector. Who better to talk about the innovation/science process than a man who did it personally?
Wait a minute. Let's keep our eye on the ball. Peter Thiel founded or helped found a number of successful companies, yes. How did this advance the frontier of our understanding of the world? What original research has Thiel done to contribute to our body of scientific knowledge?
I also don't see how his winning a maths competition is relevant. You could almost certainly take the best mathematician alive today ask them a bunch of questions about cutting edge research in, say, chemistry and they would not know the answers. Raw G is no substitute for domain specific knowledge, which as best I can tell Thiel lacks regarding the fields he critiques.
'If you're so smart then why aren't you rich' carries a certain weight to it. If those chemists/statisticians/physicists and especially economists were so smart, why don't they have nine-digit net worth? Likewise with Musk, he clearly knows things others don't. Regardless of whether he's right about other matters, he clearly knows how to innovate and make things.
Surely the obvious answer is because smart people can want to do things with their intellect other than maximize their wealth. In general, looking at history, the smartest minds have not been the richest. People like John Nash or Ronald Fisher or Srinivasa Ramanujan did not end up particularly wealthy by the standards of what were possible in their time, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue that richer people were smarter.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
This is something I never understand when this discussion comes up. Why think Thiel is right about science not living up to its potential? Peter Thiel knows better than the best chemists/economists/statisticians/physicists/etc what kind of world-changing discoveries they could be making but aren't? Why think this?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Rephrase my second statement slightly. "I have no bias towards any number [0..100] as the probability for X." Does that convey the same information as "I think X occurs with probability 50%?"
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I am not a paying subscriber so I cannot access the post in question to check if my objection is addressed. I think there's a simpler problem than what you've articulated here. Consider two statements: "I think X occurs with probability 50%" and "I think X is equally likely to have any probability [0..100]". There is a sense in which both statements are "the same" because the expected probability of a uniform distribution over [0..100] is 50 but the statements (to me) clearly convey different information. Sure, if you're forced to give a particular integer value for a statement's probability you would choose "50" in both cases, but there is clearly a distinction between the subjective states that lead to that same probability. The assertion that you should use 50% feels like it is an attempt to treat these two statements as equivalent when they aren't.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think this is an important (and under-discussed) aspect of the birthrate discourse. Say you wound the clock back to 1923 and projected 2023 demographics on the basis of 1923 brith rates. How accurate would you have been? My impression is not very accurate. More generally, for how many century-long periods were birth rates at the beginning of the century predictive of demographics at the end of the century? My impression is not very many. And yet we're expected to believe birth rates in the present day are predictive of demographic composition in a century. Seems unlikely!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I mean, I personally do not have much sympathy for Epps but I understand why other people do.
I hope if I am accused of a crime, all the judges decide I was punished enough by the bad press, and in fact deserve the chance to sue for millions.
I do not understand this sentence. A judge in a criminal case cannot, as a general matter, decide a defendant cannot file a civil case against some third party. It is up to whatever judge is hearing the civil case to decide whether a case can go forward or not and a criminal conviction in some other case is not, for I think obvious reasons, generally disqualifying.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
But Eps didn't escape a federal criminal conviction. He pleaded guilty to federal charges. My understanding is judges have a pretty wide latitude to consider a defendant's circumstances at sentencing, so nothing explicitly prevents a judge considering these factors.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Who on the left is willing to forgive Eps' crimes? Certainly not me. Citation on how the left acts for "everyone else?"
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Leftwing news outlets and even the judge at trial all bewailed how poor Eps was made to suffer as the victim of conspiracy theories. This is uniquely generous! Maybe there are some other outliers (I know there's some grandma who went viral by apologizing for her participation and calling MAGA a cult). But, by and large, the same people calling J6 an attack on democracy are saying Ray Eps is a victim. Why? -- he wanted to attack democracy! I am not aware of the judges treating anyone else so leniently.
Two things can be true here. (1) that Eps committed crimes on J6 for which he deserves to be convicted and (2) he is unfairly the target of right wing conspiracy theories of being a federal agent. Eps can be a bad person in one sense and a victim in another. There is no contradiction here. In terms of how judges have treated other defendants, what other defendants have been the target of conspiracy theories like Eps?
Epps' suit against Fox News will be allowed to continue, suggesting the possibility that he could win millions of dollars. It's shameless. I don't suppose some secret tribunal met and decided that Ray Epps gets his payout. But nobody in DOJ is working to stop him from making millions. If the DOJ didn't like this, they could try to find something else to charge him with. (Double Jeopardy is no guarantee -- the DOJ made big headlines about potentially investigating Darren Wilson over shooting Mike Brown. If Merrick Garland wanted to, he would get on TV and say Epps deserves to be looked at again.)
Maybe I am the one who is confused but I'm pretty confident the DoJ does not have a mechanism to force someone to drop a civil suit. If Fox News did defame Eps by calling him a federal agent when he wasn't, why should the DoJ step in (to whatever extent it can) to stop him? Maybe Eps' actions are shameless if you assume he is a federal agent but from another angle he's another entity (like Dominion) defamed by Fox News and trying to protect his reputation.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think it is more important from the perspective of modeling the internal process of people who want to deal with homelessness with compassion. The OP describes the "compassion" genie as magically creating 100 more homeless people. But what is compassionate about that?
I agree the effects are not as cleanly separable as I might like but sometimes it feels like people don't even try. When I hear people talk about the "homeless" in an unqualified way I assume they mean it in an unqualified, not "a specific subset of homeless people who engage in particular behaviors."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem? Is it possible to effectively campaign for the cruel genie?
I know your post ties these questions together but I think they are actually pretty distinct.
For the first question, one of the best grounds to argue against compassion is its effectiveness. Pretty much no one wants homeless people to exist for their own sake. Even the "compassionate" side wishes there were no (or fewer) homeless people. The question is do compassionate means actually function to reduce the homeless population? Are we willing to devote the kind of resources that would be necessary for those means to succeed? As @guesswho says, we could just build every homeless person a house if we were willing to commit that level of resources. The best way to attack compassionate solutions is probably to argue against their effectiveness, either in total or in terms of tradeoffs. "This thing might be good to do but would not be worth it" is an argument everyone can understand (though perhaps disagree).
On the second question it depends on what you mean by "cruel." If you think we should merely leave the homeless alone, devoting no resources to helping them, I think that becomes a variation in the tradeoff argument I discussed above. On the other hand if you want to inflict some more active harm on them you are going to have problems. My impression is lots of people think some good reason is required to justify harming other people. Those people do not generally regard "does not have a permanent residence" as being a good reason. Often discussions about homelessness focus on other bad things homeless people often do as justification but is this other behavior that is functioning as justification, not homelessness itself.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I don't know why people in this particular debate are so obsessed with intuiting the answers to empirical questions. It is not the case that nobody has ever tried to measure the sport performance related effects of gender transition. Here is a BMJ meta-analysis from 2021 of 24 different studies. What do they find? Basically what you'd expect. 1-2 years on HRT decreases strength related performance pretty substantially. The study subjects retained some advantage over cis women but were significantly worse than cis men.
In keeping with the muscular anabolic effects of testosterone and the mixed effects of oestrogens, studies using dual energy X-ray absorptiometry report decreased LBM (0.8%–5.4%) in association with GAHT. Twelve months of GAHT also decreased muscle CSA (1.5%–9.7%). However, a further 12 or 24 months of GAHT did not always elicit further decreases in muscle CSA. Strength loss with 12 months of GAHT also ranged from non-significant to 7%. Taking these strength parameter data collectively, and in consideration of cisgender women demonstrating 31% lower LBM, 36% lower hand-grip strength and 35% lower knee extension strength than cisgender men, the small decrease in strength in transwomen after 12–36 months of GAHT suggests that transwomen likely retain a strength advantage over cisgender women. Whether longer duration of GAHT would yield further decrements in strength in transgender women is unknown.
n contrast to strength-related data, blood cell findings revealed a different time course of change. After 3–4 months on GAHT, the HCT or Hgb levels of transwomen matched those of cisgender women, with levels remaining stable within the ‘normal’ female range for studies lasting up to 36 months. Given the rapid fall in Hgb/HCT to ‘normal’ female levels with GAHT, it is possible that transfemale athletes experience impaired endurance performance in part due to reduced oxygen transport from the lungs to the working muscles. This postulate is consistent with findings reported in one of the few studies conducted in athletic transwomen. In this study, the race times of eight transfemale distance runners were compared at baseline and after one or more years of GAHT. After adjusting performance for age, the eight runners were not more competitive in the female category (after GAHT) than they had been in the male category (before GAHT). Given this, and that the changes in Hgb/HCT follow a different time course than strength changes, sport-specific regulations for transwomen in endurance ver strength sports may be needed.
And trans women tended to be less strong than average cis-men even pre-transition.
Of interest, compared with cisgender men, hormone-naive transwomen demonstrate 6.4%–8.0% lower LBM, 6.0%–11.4% lower muscle CSA and ~10%–14% lower handgrip strength. This disparity is noteworthy given that hormone-naive transwomen and cisgender men have similar testosterone levels. Explanations for this strength difference are unclear but may include transwomen actively refraining from building muscle and/or engaging in disordered eating or simply not being athletically inclined, perhaps influenced by feelings of an unwelcome presence in sporting arenas. Taken together, hormone-naive transwomen may not, on average, have the same athletic attributes as cisgender men. The need to move beyond simple comparisons of cisgender men and women to assess the sporting capabilities of transwomen is imperative.
Anyway I think the whole discussion is kind of dumb. Different athletes have all kinds of different advantages due to biological features. Is there some level of biological advantage at which point intra-group competition becomes unfair? Is the advantage a top trans woman has over a top cis woman larger than the advantage Michael Phelps had over his fellow Olympians? One can't help but notice that no one was interested in banning people from competing in sports due to biological advantage until the discussion was about trans women.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Apparently the source is this study of 52 divorced couples who had gone through a certain pre-marital counseling program. Another 2012 study had 37% of couples reporting infidelity as a reason, 22% drug or alcohol problems, and 13% physical violence. I think one obvious reason for the discrepancy is the UK numbers seem to be coming from legal filings while the US numbers are from reports of divorced people.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?
It might be useful to look at the reasons people give when they get divorced. The top reason (75% of couples cite) is lack of commitment, followed by infidelity (60%). A substantial number also cite substance abuse (35%) and domestic violence (25%). If your husband is cheating on you or beating you maybe you don't care that getting divorced is economically bad for you.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Not sure how long your time horizon is here, but he's pretty easily vindicated on this point. What's your empirical evidence to the contrary? Because it 'certainly' isn't obvious to me...
Studies that try and infer historical reproduction rates from facts about the Y chromosome have an obvious flaw: that chromosome can only be here today as the result of an unbroken chain of male reproducers. Contrast this with females who pass an X chromosome on no matter the circumstance. There is naturally going to be less genetic variation among Y chromosomes than X chromosomes because any variations from men who had only female children are not going to be present to examine, even though these males had children! So we're comparing genetic variation among the men who had an unbroken series of male children back into history with the genetic variation of women who had any children at all. Obviously there is more diversity in the latter than the former.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
But what is there to manage when your currency is pegged to a commodity? The mechanism seems to contradict the justification.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
They can (indeed must) buy USD from others but what others will sell to them? Texas will still be part of the United States and so USD will still be legal tender. If you have USD you can transact anywhere in the United States, Texas included. If you have TexasBucks you can probably only transact in Texas. Why use the TexasBucks instead of USD? Why would I want to sell my USD for TexasBucks, except maybe for speculative purposes?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
1,4
It's not clear to me how much a commodity standard actually constrains government spending. Presumably the redemption ratio between paper currency and the commodity is fixed by law and therefore can be changed. It's somewhat more explicit than the process today but it's not obvious to me how strong a check it would be substantively.
2
Its not clear to me how much of that economic growth is attributable to our particular currency scheme. Lots of things were different pre-1971 (including some pretty large technological developments) compared to what came after.
Could you tell me what underhanded tactics the left used and describe this agreement not to use them in more detail? As best I can tell the way the left has effected societal and institutional change is some combination of (1) joining up with an organization to change its culture from the inside and (2) criticizing various aspects of an organization or culture in media (social or legacy) to effect change from the outside. What is "underhanded" about these tactics? Similarly what was disingenuous about these attempts to change the culture? I'm pretty sure leftists believed their own criticisms of these institutions and cultures.
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