RenOS
something is wrong
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User ID: 2051
That’s a difference in values between us; you consider sex to be an important characteristic that carries with it a certain weight and thus should be truthfully communicated, while I think it’s an unfortunate holdover from our evolutionary history that has trapped people in roles they didn’t want, both biologically and socially. I recognise the usefulness of having police officers and military service members be correctly identified, but I think the sooner we make biological sex irrelevant, the better
I actually think that argument is much better for gender than it is for sex. Gender roles are in many, many ways entirely irrelevant in the modern world. Child rearing and housekeeping has gotten so efficient that it simply makes no sense to keep women in the kitchen, as the saying goes. Physical fighting and hunting is even worse, both have been effectively completely replaced and the obvious male optimisations towards it are pointless now. Instead, almost everyone is doing office or light physical work that can be done by both sexes, and that both sexes are clearly broadly unoptimised for.
A pet theory of mine is that a lot of the modern confusion around gender and sex stems from the fact that in the ancestral environment sex differences were just so obvious that there was no chance to become confused, so we didn't evolve to recognize our sex outside of them. If you go fight to protect your family because you're obviously much more physically capable than your sister, while your sister got pregnant at 14 from her husband, it really makes no sense whatsoever to ask "maybe I'm a woman?". I know the alleged trans identities of some older traditions, but they're almost exclusively weak submissive males that probably would have been killed or left to die being allowed to instead serve as prostitutes for the capable men, and they're deliberately kept apart and considered distinct from the women.
On the other hand sex: As another transhumanist, I don't mind eventually abolishing it! But the reality is, we can't. For the foreseeable future, you'll need a women to create a new human being. Insemination is not quite as far off, but still for the time being AFAIK only possible from male to female. Likewise, there are massive hormonal differences and otherwise between the sexes that make them very distinct across a wider range of attributes. Most notably the massive physical differences. If I want to date you, I want to know your sex, not your gender; If I'm working with you, I want to know neither. HRT can make you more similar to the other sex, but is still very crude and only includes a portion of the hormonal differences between the sexes.
And to go further, most trans people I've met or indirectly heard about quite frankly still make more sense to be grouped in with their sex than with their alleged gender. I don't know you and so don't take this personally, just talking from my own average experience. I'm usually respecting everyone's wishes in regard to pronouns and such and have no desire to insult anyone in person, but I'm being a bit candid since I want to be clear on my impressions.
Most MtFs have stereotypically male hobbies and jobs, male mannerisms and blatantly obviously male bodies. Joking about G.I.R.L.s in video games is only half a joke; MtFs are so ridiculously overrepresented in techie spaces that you will frequently run into places with more MtFs than cis women. They're much more similar to the typical shy male nerd than any women. MtFs are also very commonly hyper-sexual compared to women; physically speaking they look like someone wanted to turn a scarecrow into a blow-up sex doll. All the online "passing" MtFs I've seen do not pass anymore once you see their movements in a video or hear their voice. If you look up these " first female to do X" news where X is a super-stereotypical male job or hobby, it's extremely disproportionally an MtF.
FtMs on the other hand I've almost exclusively ran into thanks to my wife, since they are quite common in, you guessed, female-dominated fields like psychology. The two I've personally met and talked with could easily star as the main character of any female librarian anime (and in fact had similar jobs). They were less superficially female, but overall had a clearly quite sensitive feminine personalities. Physically speaking, they're tiny dorky guys with a silly sounding voice (and frankly Buck Angel is as well, not to mention Elliot Page!). They're not or minimally interested in any stereotypically male hobby. I don't know it personally for these two, but FtMs AFAIK have the typical lesbian dead bedroom issues as well.
These differences become most obvious once you see their behaviour around babies and small children that aren't theirs; MtFs are often entirely uninterested just like cis men, while FtMs are often actively thrilled like cis women.
It's clear to me that gender is the unfortunate evolutionary holdover that has become unnecessary, while sex is a basic biological category that we will not get rid off for the time being.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
Some news from germany:
Bürgergeld-Skandal: The new welfare project by the current red-green-yellow government is exploding in costs. It was originally projected to cost ca 36 billion in 2025, but based on current estimates will cost 45 billion, i.e. a whopping 25% more. To give some perspective: The Bürgergeld is now almost 10% of the entire budget of ca 490 billion. In 2024, it was "merely" 27 billion.
Vote in Thüringen: This vote is considered an ill omen among almost the entire german elite. AfD, the new right (or far-right, depending on your viewpoint) is the strongest party and it's not even close. ALL other parties try to block the AfD from just about any position and power whatsoever, which in particular included a ridiculous scene when the age-based preliminary president from the AfD tried to just work through the official meeting agenda in parliament, but was constantly disturbed by the other parties asking for a later item to be moved forward (which was predictably about blocking the AfD from getting the position of president based on the fact that they are the largest party, which has so far always been the case, and which was agreed upon in the last government by the CDU back when they thought they'd get the majority). This is, of course, described by the media as the AfD-president "disturbing the parliament by constantly going back to the meeting agenda". In general, the entire current government coalition - SPD, Greens and FDP - lost a lot of votes in all the latest state elections, but the CDU can't really capitalize on it since many voters lost the trust in them.
Border controls: Due to the immigrant crisis deteriorating even faster than expected, the current government decided to institute a measure that formerly was claimed to be flat-out impossible based on EU law - border controls. The CDU in the opposition pressured for this as well. The problem is that they are completely ineffectual, pure showmanship. They only control large roads at easily recognizable border control placements. And as long as a person can utter the magic word "asylum" they get to go past anyway. Again, it is clear that the traditional main parties have very little interest in solving the immigrant crisis.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
This is what I was told, and, being born into a solid middle class environment, I believed it. But tbh after living for a while in cheap urban neighbourhoods (I'm very glad I do not anymore!), it seems much less obvious. Not literally everyone, but the majority of my neighbours really was trash reality tv-tier in behaviour. A minority was worse. Very few were better. Afaik reality tv nowadays selects in both directions; Yes they look for trashy people, but not too trashy bc middle class and higher who have no contact with these people will stop watching since it's too much for them.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
Yeah, sorry, this sounds like a no-brainer. Don't fall for modern soul mate propaganda. Especially if you're here, chances are you're prone to over-thinking and to be over-critical. Objectively, the things you worry about are absurdly rare in women, to the degree that any women exhibiting these traits will most likely have something wrong with them. If you want kids, you ought to want a great women, not an even greater man with tits.
Also, I know it sounds unromantic, but long-term what matters is to find a person you can respect, whose quirks you can tolerate each day again and again, and who is attractive enough that you like having sex (and vice versa, of course). Love at first sight, deep intellectual connection, sharp humor, extreme attractiveness, spontaneity, all those things that romantic movies push are certainly nice extras, but don't really matter much in the long run.
Or to put it in a bit more romantic terms: It's not the love you start with that matters, it's the love you learn.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
AFAIK contemporary research has trouble actually showing advantages for the worst students, while there seem to be moderate negative effects for the best students. I have the impression that in a "strong" society, you can improve some of the worst performing groups by giving them help and good examples to follow while simultaneously harshly punishing, up to kicking out, troublemakers. On the other hand, if the troublemakers are not punished, they can drag down everyone so much that it overwhelms any advantage of exemplary behaviour or help from better students. But in the current climate this is not really investigable, so the research base is pretty bad, and the researchers are also far too biased to be trustworthy. There is also the "issue" that the current level of segregation isn't actually hard to overcome for a competent immigrant parent (in fact, highly educated immigrants basically end up in good schools by default without any effort, at least here), so the number of students that would improve in a better school is pretty low. Even low-education high-conscientiousness immigrants will leave bad schools quite fast.
I have to admit I've been moving from a position of sympathy for Gaza towards more sympathy for Israel in the last years, and this attack perfectly exemplifies the reasons why.
Israel aims to destroy military targets, and at most you can complain about a lack of concern for civilians. Though in general they at least attempt to minimize civilian casualties. Hamas actively targets civilians, gleefully massacres them en masse, and then parades their naked bodies through the streets where common people spit on their corpses, so it isn't even just Hamas specifically. And they happily put all of it online, where other arabs cheer them on. WTF would you even attack a music festival?
On top, even when an Israeli attack kills a large number of civilians, you'll often find out that it's because Hamas deliberately put a military base inside a civilian building, actively aiming for this outcome.
Sure the Israelis also have plenty of questionable tactics such as the creeping settlements in the west bank, but everything they do just seems so much ... saner in comparison. It's the difference between a cutthroat CEO who'll backstab you in a corporate deal when it is beneficial for him to do so, and the murderhobo who'll physically backstab you because you were the nearest person and fuck jews, that's why.
Oh, the irony! I know talking about a lack of context is quite popular currently, and it is occasionally appropriate. If, say, a norwegian guy is dunking on native american casinos and how they totally could have other sources of income, and lists a bunch of options while knowing nothing, it's a rather reasonable charge.
But critically examine my post and your post, and who is lacking context here: The person talking about his own wife, friends & acquaintances? Or the person offering a bunch of possibilities while knowing nothing about us? If anything, you may say that I have an overabundance of context, that I'm steeped so deep in it that I can't see the greater picture. I don't think so, but it would make vastly more sense.
So, to cure you of your fatal lack of context: When my wife got pregnant (which was planned), we both were PhD Students in our first (me) and second (her) year. We both agreed to share obligations perfectly 50/50 and did in fact do so. She was 100% convinced that she would get tired of the little one rather fast and would be thrilled to get back to work. We both finished our PhD's, and we are both Postdocs now, at the same university (in different fields though), earning exactly the same per hour. But she realised that she simply cares much, much less about her work now. Finishing the PhD was an obligation she pushed through. We regularly have the situation that I'm technically obligated to take our daughter from daycare for the day, but she simply WANTS to do it and will hassle me until I agree. Or that I do it, and then she comes home 5 minutes later to spend more time with us. In light of the realisation that her priorities and mine are quite different after all, we agreed that I work full-time and she works ~80%, and that for the next child, she will stay home much more than me. In fact, she has gotten quite anti-feminist recently since she feels betrayed and tricked; All her life, she was told how amazing a career is, how women are held back by children, by wrong-headed social expectation and by unwilling husbands, and how having children should be postponed as far as possible (and if you don't have any, it's fine as well). But now her (and mine) view is the inversion: Women are manipulated into careers they don't really enjoy and talked into having less children later, to keep them in the workforce for longer (similar to the former claims, we don't think this is a conscious conspiracy, merely the automatic and implicit market forces of the modern world at work).
And this isn't just my wife, this is the majority of mothers I know. My wife's current (female) professor has a baby, and the plan originally was for her to stay home only 3 months and then her husband takes over (he has a rather flexible job as a programmer), since there was a large project that she was heading. It's now a year or so, and the project she was heading is now de-facto led by my wife. The professor is working waaaay less and when at work is regularly talking about her baby, how she wants to get back and how unimportant work feels to her now.
Another acquainted couple is a well-earning high-performance physician at a clinic and her husband, a programmer (you may see a pattern here; Yes we have A LOT of programmers, often in home office). They also split up obligations 50/50 when the child was very small, I know because I regularly met him alone with the child in the park or at the playground. But now that the child can go to daycare and it isn't necessary anymore, do you want to take a guess who is pulling back now? By your theory, it should be the husband; His job is less demanding and can easier incorporate a child, he doesn't really earn much more and they generally earn enough that they can afford it either way and he can't weaponise his incompetence since, just like me, he has regularly cared for his child on his own. Also, daycare is both comprehensive - as a shift-working clinician, she would have access to a round-the-clock daycare - as well as ridiculously cheap here, so neither really needs to pull back at all if they don't want to. But no, she decided that she doesn't want to sent him to daycare full-time yet and that she doesn't want to continue her work because family is now more important, so she switched to a part-time government (pre-school checkups etc.) job. He is working significantly more than her nowadays and you usually see her alone with the child.
We obviously also know traditional couples where the man does earn significantly more anyway, but ironically that makes them less conflicted than us.
Yes I know, if you're just doing some context-free pondering you can make up a an arbitrary number of possible explanations. But once you know a bit more, you'll see that they don't hold up.
Btw, don't put words in my mouth; I don't think childcare is a lesser type of work, in fact I think it's under-appreciated compared to its importance (as are having children and families in general).
RenOS
something is wrong
2mo ago
From my experience talking with women about it, many hate men vividly imagining them naked just the same, they just can't do anything about it. If a mindreader was created tomorrow, I'm pretty sure a group would get together to lobby to outlaw sexual fantasies about a person without their consent the day after.
Add the risk of circulation (even by accident!) and the implied threat from the possibility of people mistakenly believing it to be real, it's obvious why the women react so badly.
In other german news, the CDU has successfully finished painting itself into a corner: Thanks to questionable strategic decisions in the run-up to the election, there is literally a single party the CDU can realistically form a government with, the SPD. Worse yet, both want to push through new debts - the highest in the history of germany, and something the CDU explicitly denounced before the vote - which requires an amendment of the debt ceiling by a two-third majority. This is supposed to finance infrastructure + defense, though it's in practice only necessary because social government costs have skyrocketed to such a degree that the budget is full despite the highest government income in the history of germany.
In the new parliament, amending it would be impossible, as die Linke + AfD have more than one third and explicitly reject it. So they have to do it with the old parliament.
This has a multitude of problems; First, the practical one that it needs to include the Grüne as well. For this reason, the CDU has now mentioned the possibility of further amending the amendment to make clear that financing defense can also mean "pro-democracy" NGOs, which in practice means leftwing/green, and that financing infrastructure can also mean climate protection. It's a complete 180 on the proposed former course of cracking down on politically biased NGOs.
Second, while probably not against the letter, it is arguably against the spirit of the constitution on the question of the formation of a new government. That the old parliament still exists after the vote until the new one is formed is explicitly justified only on the grounds of emergency actions, otherwise it is supposed to be only a passive custodian. Of course the CDU now claims an emergency, but if so it is an emergency (well, multiple) that has been running for a decade if not longer.
Third, as already mentioned, the CDU explicitly denounced new debts as unconscionable, so not only making them anyway but even with the old parliament despite being the technical winner of the election reeks of blinking right while driving left, which even before the vote was one of the primary justifications for people to switch from CDU to other parties - If you want left, why not vote for it directly, if you want right, the only realistic option at this point seems to be the AfD. Hell, even the FDP had more spine, and that's considered the historically most spineless party for a good reason.
All of this taken together means that on the question of government formation, the SPD can behave on-par with the CDU despite having roughly half the vote, since the dependence on each other is perfectly symmetrical - neither can form a government without the other. And the Grüne can then basically dictate terms if this already biased alliance wants to get the amendment through at all. In fact, the Grüne has already publicly rejected one CDU offer of 50 billion explicitly for climate-related projects as not good enough. It's not clear whether they even want to cooperate, as a re-vote would probably hurt the CDU the most at this point.
TL;DR: Merkel has now officially endorsed Merz.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
AFAIK most studies on the benefits of higher intelligence actually just show the benefits of IQ in the range of ~110-130. Past that, results vary wildly since recruitment becomes increasingly difficult, some finding consistent mostly-proportional further improvements, many show diminishing returns, some even claim negative repercussions. Not to mention that most IQ tests have strong ceiling effects, so to even test for ultra-high IQ at all often requires non-standard, mostly unverified/uncalibrated testing methods. 180 is so far beyond the ranges we usually test that it's hard to make any reasonable claims about what a whole population like that might even possibly look like.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
Yes, it's not just "to some extent", it's a giant effect. It's all about the fundamentals, baby. One of the things even strategy video games are teaching you is that by far the worst thing you can have is a dependant, i.e. a person that produces nothing but eats resources. For a toy example, imagine that you have 100 people each producing 1 unit of [resources], and using up 0.6 of [resources] (which is already quite optimistic). So you generate a surplus of 40 with a full pop, which can be invested profitably (often according to an exponential growth function, which means that looking only at the original surplus is vastly underestimating the differences). With 10% dependants, it's 90-60=30, so a 25% loss of surplus. With 20% dependants, it's 80-60=20, a whopping 50% loss. Yes you can often get a few extra % with some smart organising, but you can't really overcome even just modest differences in the fundamentals.
This is the same for companies. An employee that doesn't produce anything not only eats up pay, they also takes up office space, HR resources. In reality, an employee often just creates a modest surplus above their pay, so even being slightly less productive will put the employee into the negative unless the pay gets substantially slashed. Which is the reason why firing the least productive employees should be the first thing every company does once it gets into the red. There is good reasons why we try to make jobs as safe as possible, but we shouldn't kid ourselves, it costs us big bucks.
Which leads us to countries. Both children and pensioners are about as pure examples of dependants as is possible irl. But unlike pensioners, children are actually a de-facto investment into the future; In fact arguably the most important one, since they directly control the ratio of productive vs dependant in the near future. People like to talk about how if we just had invested our retirement money better we wouldn't have problems, but this is again ignoring the fundamentals. For another toy examples, if people had no children but would invest their money sensibly, everyone would still be fucked once retirement hits, because whom to even give the money? It's worthless numbers on a screen at that point, with nobody actually producing anything. You can trivially extend this to low TFR and conclude that no matter how sensibly it would have been invested, it gets mostly eaten up by inflation, since what actually matters is the number of working people available who provide for the pensioners.
Yes there are alternative strategies to sustainable TFR, but they need to be done thoughtfully, and well. Investing into high-quality immigration is one; For example, one of my wife's former roommates is a thai nurse who was taught german already in thailand, in a school partially financed by germany, with a direct preparation for getting accredited as a nurse in germany. If they didn't put in the work at the school, they failed, and wouldn't go to germany. This is how you do it, and she correspondingly was a model immigrant. It's cheaper than having children yourself, but it's still a substantial amount of money you need to invest, and has some added extra risks. It's also inherently symbiotic/parasitary, as it requires other countries with spare TFR. This idea of just letting everybody in, and then just hoping it will go fine not only doesn't provide the necessary workers, it actually puts extra stress on the system as we have more dependants now, not less. The average MENA immigrant in germany is substantially net-negative.
We produced a giant surplus for a while, but we used it mostly for early retirements, going on lots of vacations, and an education system that is both unusually long and inefficient. Maybe we get bailed out by AIs in some fashion, but I don't like blindly hoping for a tech that isn't quite there yet. And the most likely trajectory I'm seeing there, though not apocalyptic, doesn't really seem particularly appealing.
RenOS
something is wrong
2mo ago
It's a much bigger problem than this: Most laws favor the entrenched & powerful by default unless very carefully designed not to. This is one reason why large companies often are neutral or even actively lobby for extra regulation. THEY can afford a large legal department for compliance. Smaller competitors, not so much. This is completely independent of whether a law is also deliberately designed to boost specific actors.
And it gets worse once you consider politically entrenched powers. A new law to limit political donations to specific parties in the vein you are considering? Well, WE are only unaffiliated NGOs defending democracy, YOU are obviously a thinly veiled campaign contribution, so all money spent on you needs to be added to the fund of our the other side!
Turns out, helping the genuinely weak compete is pretty hard. Usually you just end up helping a different faction of elite. And even if you design a law that helps bring down a powerful actor, the same law can often be used to bring down anyone, which means it destabilises the entire system.
RenOS
something is wrong
10mo ago
I want add to your edit another falsehood I often see repeated: That the wider western world also has free abortion laws similar to what the american left wants. As it turns out, 12-15 week bans are the norm, and if I talk with women here about it they also feel strongly about it not becoming longer. The 20 weeks+ I often see from the american left (and unfortunately even our own left is starting to propagate it) is almost as extreme as the Evangelicals ban on abortion except for medical reasons.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
By that definition, most laws are "anti-human". I'm not generally opposed to strict, literal interpretations, but this definition seems to go quite strongly against common sense understanding of "anti".
I studied applied maths in biology/medicine and my year was literally 4 men and about 20 women. I already knew that it was much more gender balanced than pure/theoretic math but was still surprised, so I talked with some of them about why they chose to study this. The answer was fairly uniform: They had always been very good at math, but didn't particularly like it. Some originally wanted to study medicine, but were put off for some reason (and there's more than enough good reasons!). This allowed them to take advantage of something they're good at, while still ultimately working on a topic they like.
I'd wager data science is in a similar boat, albeit to a slightly lesser degree.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
"Immigrant" isn't a fungible good. There is lots of different immigrants, and they have a very blatantly different levels of desirability, but the upper middle class likes to pretend this is not the case for structural reasons. I'm not from the US, but the situation here in germany is this:
Highly educated, high functioning upper (middle) class natives (let's just simplify this to PMC, even if it's not quite the same) have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class people. Even supermarkets and similar establishments are de-facto quite segregated by class, and even the staff there will usually be at worst high-functioning lower class or middle class. As a result, they have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class immigrants either, and plenty of contact with high functioning immigrants. Their opinion reflects this: They're pro immigration, since it's trivial for them to ignore the bad cases it's basically 100% upside. They think that bad cases are a minority, and that anyway even those simply haven't been helped enough (because the only lower class immigrants they meet are those that made it in spite of difficulties this makes sense from their perspective).
Lower class natives, on the other hand, do not have this privilege. They can't afford to live in the same neighbourhoods as PMC natives nor do they have the same political clout, so every time there is a wave of immigration their neighbourhoods are the first stop (either the immigrants themselves find a place since it's cheap, or the political class actively puts them there). At first it's somewhat balanced, but quite quickly high-functioning immigrants leave, or technically live there but spend as little time as possible in the neighbourhood.
We actually had a somewhat similar case here lately; During the worst of the immigration wave in relation to the syrian war, we build short-term accommodation for the worst-off immigrants that couldn't find anything else. There were several planned positions, and one of them was in our university quarter (the majority weren't). Unsurprisingly (to me, at least) there was a decent amount of resistance. By your argument, there was no hypocrisy here; the university already has plenty of immigrants (at times, the majority of my colleagues were immigrants), so being against more of them is not hypocritical. By the picture on the ground, it was very blatantly hypocritical; Almost every single immigrant we have here is a PMC, usually even the child of a PMC couple. In public, university staff claimed that criminality in relation to MENA immigrants was either an outright fabrication or at most a great exaggeration, that dysfunctionality among them was likewise no problem and that in general the large boost right-wing parties got was pure bigotry & racism. But please don't put these high-functioning non-criminal diversity-enriching people in OUR neighbourhood!
RenOS
something is wrong
2yr ago
That's quite some time ago. Even mentioning The Bell Curve with anything but disdain is asking for trouble nowadays.
RenOS
something is wrong
29d ago
It's not about having no experience, it's about them having a tendency to tell you that behaving like a good christian or [insert religion] will surely lead to you finding and holding a partner, when it's at best unrelated or at worst actively counterproductive.
Ironically, I would actually say that they are better equipped to give good relationship advice once you already are committed to each other, for the same reason.
Let’s assume you’re a car mechanic. You love your job, even though it is dirty, hot and physically straining. You go through a bookshop, and stumble over one book in particular: “Why being a car mechanic is great”. It explains the importance of the job for society, it talks about the perks, and so on. You look up the guy who wrote it and yep, he runs a car shop. You buy the book and recommend it to many of your friends, maybe even some teens who might consider the path.
Fast forward, the writer is on some talkshow. Somebody asks him how he handles all the grease. He reacts, uh no, of course he doesn’t get greasy, that’s his staff. He just really likes talking with customers. Maybe he does one car once in a while, if the work isn’t too hard and the car is really nice.
I can’t help but think this after reading Scott’s latest book review of “Selfish reasons to have more kids”. No, we don’t have nannies and housekeepers. In fact, almost nobody we know has them. Some have a cleaning lady coming … once per week, for an hour or so. Tbh, this significantly lowered my opinion of both Scott and Caplan. If you want a vision of a more fertile, sustainable future for the general population, it should not involve having your own personal staff. Two hours is nothing.
And I find this especially frustrating since I think it’s really not necessary; Yes having small kids is really exhausting - after putting the kids to bed around 8-9, my personal routine is to clean the house for two hours until 10-11 every day, and then directly go to bed with maybe an audiobook on (but often I’m too tired for even that, and enjoy falling to sleep directly) - but it’s doable, and the older the kids are, the less work they are, at least in terms of man-hours. The worst is usually over after around 3 yo. And the time before that in the afternoon can be a lot of fun.
At least for me, one of the biggest draws of kids is that it’s, to use poetic terms, “a glimpse of the infinite” that is available for everyone. Everyone wants to leave something behind, political activism is sold on making a change, careers are sold on becoming a (girl-)boss managing others. Yet, the perceptive (or, less charitably, those capable of basic arithmetic) will notice that only a tiny sliver of the population can ever cause the kind of innovation that really changes culture, or who can come into positions of substantial power over others.
Kids, however, everyone can have them. And they really are their own little person (especially my stubborn little bastards). And they will have kids as well, who will also carry forward some part of yourself. I’m not just talking genetics here, though that is a large part, the same will go for how you raise them. Unless you leave that to the nannies, I guess, but that’s your own fault.
I wouldn’t have written this since it’s mostly venting tbh, but I’ve seen some here mentioning wanting to discuss it, so I thought may as well start. What do you think?
This is just simply not in the realm of things answerable by simple slogans. It's all about the details (alwayshasbeen.jpg).
I can't help but always circle back to the relatively uncontroversial example of the car salesman. If he tells you a car is "a great bargain", you don't just take him by his word; You look at the technical details of the car model, you take a look at the actual car right in front of you whether it shows signs of deterioration, repair or even manipulation, you ask around for the reputation of the salesman or the greater dealership he is part of. And you only buy if it looks like at least an OK deal based on the totality of the evidence.
You ought to do the same for any claim. "Temporary migrants" are only that if there is a mechanism to get rid of them, otherwise they're just migrants, likewise with asylum. "Developmental aid for [country/location]" is often, in practice, mostly free money for whoever is currently in power of that country. And more on topic, for the police and the DA, they absolutely love the justification of just protecting the innocent and helpless, a baby being about as archetypical as it gets. Do they do that? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
That said, I actually mostly like the training exercise, at least as a very first test of character. It's clearly contrived (IANAL though), who uses a wicker basket for fishing? In the middle of the night? And it's just about looking into the basket, not a full-on house search or anything other more private. If you can't even muster the bravery for this, you're not fit for the job. It's about mindset; Police and DA should have thinking that is directed towards catching criminals while infringing on rights as little as possible, but not necessarily zero. Just looking into a basket is about as minor as it gets, compared to the severity of the possible crime and in consideration of the sketchy circumstances.
But you shouldn't consider this training a good reflection of real cases you're going to work on. They're probably going to be much more complicated, which I hope gets reflected in some later training.
FWIW, as a non-american the widespread resistance to basic vote protection has always struck me as deeply archaic and backwards. Being on the left doesn't automatically make you progressive, hell, even calling yourself "progressive" does not make you so. If, for example, voter ID is hard to get for poor people, make it easier. Don't refuse to improve the security of your election to the standards of a modern western society just because it's moderately difficult. Others have managed to do it, so can you!
At least from my vantage point, the american voting system seems easy to cheat in the first place and then hard to prove cheating after-the-fact by its fundamental design. That republicans only cry wolf when it suits them is true, but also at least they seem to have some basic interest in improving the standards. Democrats seem to be so deeply unsure about their real appeal that they fight tooth and nail against any attempt to make the system more reliable.
Edit: See marisuno's answer for what a serious election looks like. As long as american elections don't look like that, I can understand anyone yelling fraud; The onus ought to be on the system to prove its reliability, not the other way around.
Unfortunately "low functioning" has become a bit of a no-no term, everyone is either "high functioning" or just has autism (which still includes plenty of "medium functioning"). There's a few newish papers using the term, but most are older, and none are about what we are interested in.
But as usual in science, you can read between the lines. Generally speaking, autism is nowadays considered a continuous range of impairment, literally called ASD (autism spectrum disorder). One of the more popular ways to measure it is the social responsiveness score (SRS), which is then transformed into the SRS T-score (corrected for age, gender etc. similar to how IQ isn't just a raw test score but normed to 100). The T-score is normed to 50 with an SD of 10, so 60- is normal, 60+ mild, 65+ medium, 75+ severe. There's also quite a few other measures, but understanding at least one makes reading the papers a lot easier.
I'd say the closest to what you want to know is the heritability of these quantitative traits (1,2). TL;DR: the SRS T-score is moderately to highly heritable, in fact most measures of ASD severity are. In particular, I'm a big fan of monozygotic vs dizygotic twin comparisons since they sidestep many of the usual complaints, which in this case leads to a high heritability estimate of ~56-95%. There's a few other concepts you can take a look at, such as familial risk (which often don't include a measure of severity, only an ASD yes/no which is imo outdated at this point) or autism prs scores, but the results are mostly consistent between them.
So, in short, your children will most likely have an autism level similar to your own, with maybe a slight correction towards the mean and with a significant variance. Which necessarily implies a substantially increased chance of severe outcomes given the continuous nature of the disease. Exact numbers are difficult to give without knowing more, sorry. But chances of 10% and upwards, depending on where you make the cutoff of what you consider sufficiently problematic, aren't implausible.
On a sidenote, my favorite approach is measuring the degree of relatedness between siblings (for those that don't know, siblings, unlike parent-offspring pair which always get almost exactly 50% of each parent, can in theory range from 0-100% in genetic relatedness depending on which part of the parent's genome they get, though in practice it's a normal distribution around 50%) and then measuring the heritability based on that. Since this is doable for the majority of society, it further sidesteps some complaints about twin and/or adoption studies such as non-generalisability or different treatment between obviously different siblings.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
I think at the core it's surprisingly a variation of "might makes right", but updated for a modern audience. It vaguely sounds moralistic at first glance, but it can also be used as a simple "your objections don't matter, you will die and we will prevail". It's also an important part of the progressive message as a counter to the natalist objection: Progressive ideologies generally have terrible TFR, and as such are liable to simply be replaced. So they adopted a self-conception as a vanguard that lives on in the ideals of the future society, even if they may not have biological offspring.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
That's certainly a possibility, but it just does not at all fit with my experience both with IRL nerdy friends and online communities. The old guard just is consistently unhappy with the directions these franchises are taking, but just gets utterly swamped by newcomers who think the old games are weird and customer-unfriendly (admittedly not 100% wrong, a lot of older games had awkward UIs and missed QoL features that are normal nowadays). And while the old guard is almost exclusively socially awkward white and asian nerdy men, the newcomers are genuinely much more mixed along all axis of identity (which isn't surprising given that the whole point of the new direction is making the game more accessible to a larger group of people). And even the newcomers who agree with the old guard turn out to be ... socially awkward nerdy men.
When I heard this, the first thing that came to mind is how unfun woman soccer is. Especially if I grant the critics that, yes, non-consensually kissing a woman in such a situation is a Big Deal.
You could have literally have the same situation in men soccer, with a significantly bigger and stronger, literally gay coach kissing a male player on the mouth in a moment of excitement, the receiving player looking baffled & awkward at first but laughing after realizing what happened. It would be the kind of thing that everyone considers HILARIOUS, that would be remembered positively for a long time as showing just how emotionally invested everyone was in this win. In fact, in male soccer people constantly do stupid shit to celebrate winning, often things that in any other situation would be considered kinda gay. I'm not a particular fan of soccer in general, but I can sympathize with the kind of excitement you may generate when winning something as big as a world cup. Also, as some people have already pointed out, kissing is one of those things that varies A LOT by culture. In some it's not a big deal, even among acquaintances, in others it's strictly for lovers. I've been surprised at times by kisses from southern european girls (and had to remind myself afterwards that it wasn't a big deal, despite what my cultural instincts were screaming at me).
I also don't quite know how to fix this. I can see where people are coming from, woman genuinely are often more susceptible to being pressured into uncomfortable sexual situations and so a sense of protectiveness is not misplaced. Likewise men are genuinely biased towards doing something ambiguously sexual and then go for a mediocre justification if it doesn't work out. The current trajectory is pointing towards boring adjustment, where even in exciting situations people consciously suppress their emotions and play it cool, which we already do in most other, especially work, situations. But I think that takes out a lot of the fun of sports, it's one of the few areas where genuine, strong emotions like this are still acceptable.
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