RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1d ago
In addition togenomic prediction/lifeview, https://www.orchidhealth.com has also recently entered the consumer market afaik. I have little personal info on them, though.
FWIW, a large part, possibly majority but at least close to 50%, of our college-educated left-leaning friends (and it's not even unpopular among our non-college-educated friends) is some kind of vegetarian. Among those who aren't, the majority is constantly stressing how little meat they're eating. The line between them is pretty fuzzy, since there's a decent number of people who claim to not eat meat at home, but sometimes outside when there's no other option, and these people will sometimes consider themselves vegetarian anyway, sometimes not. Almost nobody is an unabashed meat eater. As justifications go, animal sympathy is at the top for the stricter vegetarians, health benefits for the less strict (this actually includes myself), climate considerations are generally second line ("and btw it's also good for the climate I've heard").
Surprisingly, this did not greatly change when we became parents; Yes there's very few super-militant vegetarian parents, but we know multiple families where only the children eat meat, not the parents, and eating relatively little meat is actually the norm.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8d ago
Yes, I'm also considering writing a post about (the loss of) trust which imo explains large parts of our current problems. Blacks have lost trust in whites ever since the colonial era's blatant racism, and only ideologies that strongly denounce this past manage to successfully build a coalition with them. The right has lost the trust in public institutions since many of them blatantly push a left-wing agenda, sometimes even above the interests of the institutions they nominally belong to. Center-left people disgruntled with wokeness don't trust the right with power due to the moral majority & McCarthy era and more recently the rights failures to replace laws and institutions they got rid of with functional replacements.
The same is happening on the country level; Russia, after briefly moving towards the west shortly after the fall of the USSR, has lost the trust in the west due to consistent "will never happen -> has already happened, sorry" Nato-creep. China, India and many other non-western ascendent countries feel likewise betrayed by a western attitude they interpret as "we totally tolerate all cultures, except everything about them that's not about exotic food and funny clothes, or else you're a fascist and we'll punish you with sanctions".
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8d ago
As advice, one thing that is not explicitly banned but somewhat frowned upon and which makes people suspect a troll is writing a top-level post and then not engaging at all with the comments. You can't answer everything, but most regular people would at least be reactive for a short while after writing the OP.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8d ago
Vegetarianism/Veganism has already been extremely popular on the left due to animal sympathy, and they can be quite pushy about proselytising. Mandatory Veganism is imo a weakman. Anti-natalism is the same; Having less kids has been quite popular on the left (arguably in general) because it means less obligations, more money you can spend on hedonistic pleasures, more time to do whatever you want. In both cases, climate justifications have come long, long after people argued for & adopted the change in the first place.
Also disagree on the second point. If you're actually seriously trying to tackle a problem, you'll usually end up with some technical, politically agnostic solution. If I notice that a certain widely used statistical measure is biased by, say, base rates, then I'll just recalculate it with a correction term, write a proof that the correction term indeed does what it should and maybe write a paper about it. I don't advocate that more BIPOC representation will somehow solve it (well, maybe I'll advocate for more statisticians, but that's not considered political yet). If engineers notice a turbine having a rare but potentially dangerous unexpected failure mode, they'll add a component to compensate or re-design it.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
10d ago
I was talking about Peter who assigned something ridiculous, though now he claims he was just trolling with that one.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
13d ago
This ties in with another argument :re poverty-as-a-cause-of-crime. If you actually do some ballpark estimates for the average criminal, you'll frequently find out that they make money barely on par with a regular minimum wage job, often worse, with the added risk of ending up in jail. This goes against the claims of significant parts of both left and right; The left often thinks that people turn to crime since minimum wage jobs aren't enough to get by, but as it turns out crime isn't actually better so that argument is kinda moot; Many on the right think that criminals are self-serving egoists taking advantage of a well-meaning system for their own gain. As it turns out, the majority of criminals are probably just idiots who are screwing themselves over and others. And at least for me a lot of things clicked into place upon that realisation; For example you'll notice that many people who just barely get by have a certain degree of self-destructive behaviour that holds them back significantly, they just also have some admirable (or at least tolerable) qualities in addition. Your contractor seems like a good example.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
13d ago
I was literally taught in a german school that resettlement was a serious option for awhile and that some Nazi officials probably indeed favored it. It's just that when they ran into even moderate difficulties they jumped to "let's just kill them all send them to camps where they mysteriously vanish, then". Which is in no way surprising, since the Nazis are very much on record even before the actual holocaust started how much they'd like to cleanse the world of jewry.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
13d ago
It seems you haven't been here for very long. This forum had this problem a bunch of times and has banned multiple people over it, with different offending topics. Holocaust denial is certainly an all-time-favorite, but there's been a pedo who would constantly top-level-post about age of consent, another who invented a new "scientific" theory of power and would write multiple absurdly long, barely readable screeds about it, and Skookum was quite recent. It's a rule only a certain kind of obsessive tends to run into, but it's important imo.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
16d ago
I think you're greatly overstating hostility to #4 here. This is my field and I'd say the majority of biologists is not only fine with it, but even frequently colloquially uses the language indicating #4 as the primary reason. Me included. Yes, it's more complicated overall, but "genetic variants associated with sharper front tooth developed because it allowed specimen to sever meat better and so they had more offspring" is more or less correct in my view.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
16d ago
Tbh if you're at that level, the answer is probably "Please don't buy stocks, you're gonna get ripped to shreds by the professionals'. There's basically just two reasons why I'd say it's a good idea to buy specific stocks by yourself:
-
You're a professional who knows the ins-and-outs on how everyone else does their stock picks, where they get their information from, and generally plays on an equal footing with them
-
You're a domain-specific expert who is extremely bullish/bearish on a certain technology by a specific company due to deep knowledge that traders can't reasonable have
In the first you already know where to look, in the second you only want to trade on a short list of companies you know well anyway.
Disclaimer: Not a trader precisely for this reason
RenOS
Dadder than dad
21d ago
Coolness or fuckability seems like a simpler and better classification, though. Rockstars are cool/very fuckable, but generally aren't considered jocks or class clowns, see David Bowie for example.
I've never been super invested in this debate, but to me one of the most striking features is that almost all the evidence we have available is filtered through people who have a strong incentive for bias in favour of the zoonosis side. The chinese establishment seems to favour a variant of zoonosis with a heavy implication of coming from somewhere abroad, the local chinese lab favors zoonosis for obvious reasons, and even the global biomedical establishment is hardly unbiased on the matter. Further, I find the justifications on the biggest coincidence, the failed grant for a similar furin-cleavage site, very poor - I'm literally currently working on a project which I failed a grant on. I know how labs operate in the west and almost all of the claims that they would never do this or that are ... just BS, honestly. And chinese labs have a well-deserved reputation to be even worse.
I also agree with the rootclaim guy that the wild overconfidence of the zoonosis side is a very poor look. I really don't get how many people apparently got convinced by this debate, though I only read Scott's textual account, not the full video debate.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d ago
The coalition is not actually doing anything yet, though. Even the SPD lead is rather mealy-mouthed: "we can't entirely rule out a Verbotsverfahren as a last stop, maybe". People are certainly complaining a lot about the AFD, which is legal. Funny enough I've heard the same criticism from the left in person - the SPD hasn't actually done anything against the AFD yet, and Scholz has mentioned deportation favorably in the past, therefore they secretly agree! I find that silly, to be clear.
More questionable is that AFD-members are being kicked out of some smaller organisations, which I'm mostly against, but this has little to do with the FDP, and is difficult to legally control without throwing out freedom of association in general.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d ago
What you call milquetoast false-centrism, I'd call regular centrism. I know Corona is your hobbyhorse, but the FDP was if anything overly critical compared to the center (which suits me, since I also was on the critical side).
On the AFD, the FDP is explicitly on the record as being against the Verbotsverfahren. Privately, I've argued multiple times that the AFD has a point, and that as long as the german political establishment is unwilling to tackle the dysfunctional, barely existent border and immigration politics, they will only get stronger. This is reasonably close to the stated position of the FDP, though I suspect that being libertarians they're more in favor of open borders than I'd like, but unfortunately we don't have a topic-based voting law.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d ago
If you want to know, my last vote went to the FDP, which is the german libertarian party. Unlike the US, the FDP is not consistently on either side, but has coalitioned with both sides (currently it's in fact part of a broad left-leaning government). Myself I'm not even a straight-ticket FDP voter, I've considered the CDU (originally center right, though nowadays probably just pure centrist), due to their family-first focus which I find appealing, and the SPD (center left), since I'm in favour of broad redistributive policies if done right. My vote ultimately went to the FDP however since it's the closest thing to free-speech absolutism on the menu and because they currently appear to be the party most concerned with imo common-sense concepts such as "having a functioning economy".
Privately, at work, and online, I primarily push back against left-wing orthodoxy since it's quite common among my acquintances.
Nevertheless, and yes this is precisely what I mean, if you try to force me into a binary left-wing orthodoxy vs right-wing orthodoxy, both enforced equally, I'll choose the left everytime. The right needs to be significantly less orthodox for me to consider it.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d ago
That's my point though. Universities should strive for academic excellence and political independence. However, it got increasingly taken over by leftist politics, got (mostly correctly, then) labeled an enemy by the right, and is correspondingly now a target. I've been a critic of this process from the start, precisely because this was the only logical outcome. Nevertheless, as far as I can see the right has always been more interested in using the same tactics of silencing and outlawing disagreements, just now for their position, than in restoring some semblance of academic excellence.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d ago
I mean, I push hard enough against left-wing orthodoxy both in person and online that I'm regularly reflexively labeled right-wing, and I have the same frustration as you with plenty of other allegedly centrist politicians who fall hard for the "no enemies to the left, all enemies to the right" fallacy. You're really throwing this at the wrong person, sorry.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d ago
I consider myself primarily a pragmatist, not ideologist, so I can see myself allying with a broader right coalition in principle, if I had the impression that I can fit in under a live and let live paradigm. In particular I'm probably more center than left, so it's not even inconceivable that I'll someday identify as center-right. But nevertheless, I just do not have the impression that free speech absolutism is really something the right is dedicated on (nor the left, which is key to my frustration with them, but at least I agree with them on more other things). Currently I do push hardest against left-wing orthodoxy because it's the only realistic threat to me at the moment since the right-wing has no power whatsoever in science, but I have no illusions that life would be better under the thumb of the right.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d ago
See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our increasing frustration with the regressive far-left. I dislike their attitude of wanting to define reality and outlaw disagreement, but I just know that if the right gets into power they'll do the same, but harder. As an example, I have several friends who are as frustrated with the far-left as me, but who support palestine. I disagree with them about this, but I don't thing they should lose their job over it! And nor are they just getting what they're dishing out, no, now we have to take punches from both sides.
Even for cases like Claudine Gay, at least my personal conclusion is that she got her job through politics and lost her job through politics. Scientific competence was only involved as a cudgel to beat her with when it was convenient. This is a disgrace for one of the most renown universities, and the only winners of the whole affair are the people who want to control science with politics. Yes if it was up to me she shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place, but I see little indication that the right would do anything better. In fact I don't even have to look back very far to get right-wing movements such as the moral majority.
I always find it funny that in the soft(er) sciences, the "hardest" theories are reliably the most hated. The average psychology enthusiast will gladly cite papers with vague definitions and findings on discrimination, priming, growth mindset and so on, but they'll suddenly be very skeptical for clearly defined and well-quantifiable traits such as IQ, reaction time and so on. Almost any complaint that is thrown at the latter group applies moreso to the former.
In biology, the hardest and most hated theory is, of course, evolution. Pure biologist will try to avoid it if possible because applying it involves too much math, and almost all ideologies hate some part of its implications. On its most basic level, its also rather trivial (though not tautological); In laymans terms, it goes something like:
Axiom 1. There exist things that can replicate themselves
Axiom 2. Different things have different proficiency at replicating themselves, which is called their fitness f
==>
Conclusion: Things with higher fitness will outscale things with lower fitness, irrespective of their original prevalence
You'll notice that while it's easy, you still need to prove the intermediate here, and in the past this was absolutely called into question. There's a lot of theoretically possible growth functions - linear, logarithmic, root, and so on - that would make it mostly implausible for an originally small group to outscale a large group in any feasible amount of time. As we know now, the correct growth function is exponential, which has this explosive property of jumping orders of magnitude quickly. Even better, the exponential has a rather rigid shape, which you'll come to recognize time and time again when you're actually working with biological data, as I do.
This is, as said, the most basic version. It gets even better! We can actually set up different systems of replication, add mutation generation and how these mutations affect individuals, and the theory of evolution will give us different predictions of the exact shape of the course of the population over time and the distribution of mutations we should expect. And we can prove these in simulations! For one of my favorite examples of this rather theoretical portion of biology, see Gunnarson et al https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580921000666. The short version is that we can distinguish between a population that has recently grown fast and one that has been mostly stagnant entirely based on its current distribution of mutations, no time-based data needed. But we need evolutionary principles to explain this. Or for a much older examples, look at the differences between a Moran Process and a Wright-Fisher Process; Both are plausible, albeit very simplified, population models, and they lead to different predictions, which can be quantified and measured. Of course in the lab, as others have pointed out, we can further watch this process in action. Macro-evolution is then simply the only plausible extension of these finding without invoking some magical "essence" of beings that is not stored biologically and thus never changes.
So you're plain wrong that it leads to no new conclusions; In fact we haven't even come close to finding out all the implications. Tbh, you're argument is on the level of arguing against the entirety of modern particle physics by saying: "well, of course there has to be something that is the smallest, which is even the literal meaning of the word atom. Greek philosophist already thought the same!" while ignoring that a) it actually was controversial in the past - yes for almost any basic concept you can find a greek philosopher who argued in favor of it, just as you can find one who argued against it - and b) that particle physics, just as evolution, is well-quantifiable and can be shown to work the same on multiple levels - analytical mathematical proofs, numerical differential equation simulation, stochastic/Monte-Carlo style simulations, and finally in the lab itself. Your distinction between "Evolution" and "Natural Selection", which doesn't really exist in evolutionary theory, doesn't add much conceptual depth imo, either.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d 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".
RenOS
Dadder than dad
23d ago
I strongly recommend trying them on an emulator. There's even quite a few good emulators for Android, I used to constantly play these games back in college classes with mandatory attendance.
The self-determination in the current mainstream conception is always individual, though. It makes thus sense once you consider that individuals are indeed more free to live their life in the West than in Russia and self determination is supported on those grounds.
More options
Context Copy link