Hyperion
1yr ago
Simpson's Paradox is a thing that shows up all the time.
Hyperion
1yr ago
I'm also pretty confident that smartphone adoption was driven by tinder as much as any other single app.
That seems really out of touch. People were scrambling to get iphones the moment they came out and cost was the main barrier. People in third world countries have smart phones now, because they serve lots of useful functions outside of hook up apps. By the time Tinder came around smart phones were already ubiquitous. If you looked at a graph of smart phone ownership Tinder coming into existence wouldn't be noticeable.
Hyperion
1yr ago
The Census categories in America differentiate between Races and Ethnicities. With Hispanic being the only allowed ethnicity. This is because Hispanics can be pure European in ancestry or any amount of European, Native American or African.
It's especially ironic you use Hungarian as your example. Since the Magyars were originally East Asian Siberians. It's laughable for a Hungarian to talk about the dangers of race mixing.
I don't think you understand that Europeans are themselves descended from extremely deeply diverged races. The Ancestral North Eurasians are as different from the Early European Farmers as modern Chinese people are from the French. There are countless examples of groups that are culturally descended from one group, but who have little ancestry from the original group. Every Uralic speaking people in Europe, the Hungarians being the most prominent, and least Uralic by ancestry, Chadic people in central Africa, even the largest ethnic group in the world the Indo Aryans who originally came from Europe. Genes and culture correlate, but not enough that having different terms to refer to these concepts isn't useful.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Conservatives going back to Plato and Aristotle argued an anti-critical theory stance. That is a stance based on the idea that certain social relations were natural. Aristotle going as far as arguing slavery was natural and any person who was naturally not a slave would rebel and overcome his slavery.
Hyperion
1yr ago
The point is race is a legal term in the USA. It used to be the case up until the mid 20th century that only people of the 'white' race could be naturalized as citizens. There was a case brought against Finnish people who sought naturalization and eventually the judge ruled that they despite being originally of East Asian Siberian origin were of enough Nordic stock to be considered white to be naturalized as citizens.
See also miscegenation laws.
Hyperion
1yr ago
If you read my responses to the original poster he was claiming as an American he had never heard the term ethnicity used to refer to anything other than ancestry, despite the fact any American would have had to fill out various government forms that list ethnicity as something other than race.
We need a term to denote if someone is culturally, genetically or phenotypically like a certain group. Ethnicity seems the most obvious and widely used term to denote culture.
Turks all consider themselves the same ethnicity despite ranging from people who look like Nazi propaganda posters to people who wouldn't be out of place on the streets of Beijing.
Usually in the field of population genetics they refer to people of being of different 'clusters' or 'ancestries' usually using some specific principle component analysis or the genomes of some ancient population as a reference.
Hyperion
1yr ago
The standard American English dialect doesn't correspond to a simple phonics, anyway. We're not Spanish and even Spanish has weird dialects like Argentinian.
Hyperion
1yr ago
I find the idea that right libertarians believe that natural monopolies don't exist, both true, and disappointing. As a right libertarian myself.
Hyperion
1yr ago
They wouldn't blend, because inheritance is Mendelian and discrete. Just look at the Uighurs and other Turks who still evidence the blonde hair and blue eyes of their Aryan ancestors, even red hair on occasion.
Though, recessive genes follow a power law in expression; so, they would be much less likely to be found in mixed populations. Northern Indians have 10% the blue eyes allele variant; so, they are only 1% likely to have blue eyes, and it is considered something rare among them.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Scott has talked about this a bunch.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/19/scientific-freud/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/03/to-the-great-city
His conclusion was a tepid, yeah kinda.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/16/cbt-in-the-water-supply/
For a maybe CBT has something going for it over the other methods.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Diverse might as well mean 'has lots of black people' at this point; but, no one wants to say the quiet part loud.
In defense of the social security situation, what safe assets is the government supposed to buy? There is nothing safer than US government bonds, which are funded by future tax revenues. Buying foreign or corporate bonds could make sense at the margin, but it opens you up to a lot of risk.
For a large, closed economy like the USA whose inability to collect taxes would not just mean the downfall of its own economy, but the whole world order, I don't think anything else makes sense but relying on your taxation powers.
You could argue that the government should borrow less in general, but that is a separate issue from Social Security.
Hyperion
1yr ago
It doesn't really matter if they put it into US treasuries or cash those are just government liabilities the same as the liabilities the Social Security administration has to it's members. That is my point. The fact US treasuries pay a few percent interest over cash doesn't matter, because the Federal Government is paying money from it's right pocket to it's left.
The only thing that would matter to it's position would be if it offloaded risk or earned interest from some other entity than itself.
In all actual communist countries it was the physicals who controlled things like heavy industries or the military who had power. Artists were kept on a tight leash and only allowed to do things in a style that would uplift the status of the leaders of the physical hierarchy. It was the USA where the CIA pushed abstract expressionism as a way to undermine the Soviets.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Russia was on paper far superior to the Ukrainian forces early in the war. They were shelling Kiev and there was a very real fear it could fall, before Russian logistical and morale problems forced a retreat. No one, not even the Russians themselves, expected such a pathetic showing by the Russian armed forces.
Hyperion
1yr ago
What do you mean declined? They are still stronger than they have ever been post Soviet collapse. A late 90s Russia was a Potemkin force pretending to be a world power.
No, immediately after the Civil War the south was occupied by the Union and went through a period called reconstruction where it was forced to accept the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and basically existed under the control of the federal government.
It was only after the south was fully reintegrated with the Union and reconstruction ended that they could start passing Jim Crow laws in the late 19th and then early 20th century.
Though, of course, there was extra-judicial violence and prejudice against blacks like the original KKK. But, the actual Jim Crow laws are decades after the Civil War.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Even in the trans-human future trans people would still be personality and interest wise more like their birth sex than what they transitioned into. Unless we are also changing our brains now. That is the biggest lie of the transgender movement, that trans people are psychologically more like their preferred gender on psychometric traits than their biological sex. Programmer socks are a meme for a reason.
Or, why not just preemptively use our magical transhuman technology to erase the existence of people who are transgender.
“The methodology of those studies is very flawed, because they didn't study gender identity,” said Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at UCSF’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic “Those desistors were, a good majority of them, simply proto-gay boys whose parents were upset because they were boys wearing dresses. They were brought to the clinics because they weren't fitting gender norms.”
Yeah, I think that's exactly right even today.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Labor income has been consistently been higher than capital income for at least as long as the industrial revolution if not earlier in western countries and has been remarkably stable. They teach you this is in intermediate macroeconomics as part of the Solow model. So, the discounted present value of that labor income is going to be greater than the discounted value of all capital and land income assuming no difference in average risk.
Interesting in the abstract, but it's also not really very interesting for someone deep in debt to learn that the discounted value of their future labor income is more than their debt, sure they can pay it off, but what kind of living standards are they gonna have.
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