RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
I'm recommending people to read the first book, but nothing else. It presents a really interesting and unique setting and through focusing on and exploring that setting it manages to be good. By his second book, the novelty wears off and you begin to see more and more how silly his character writing is, the story writing is mediocre but salvageable, as is the prose.
On respect
Recently, my wife attended an online lecture organised by her professor and held by an acclaimed researcher, on the topic of augmented and virtual reality. She is part of the (social) psychology department. The lecture was late in the day - 18:00 - so we all listened to it at home while at the dinner table (though we eventually turned on the TV for our daughter so she doesn't get bored).
Fellow academics might already guess were this is leading - we thought the topic was something interesting about how AR/VR can be used, unexpected challenges, etc.. It featured a small part of this, but a large part was about gender norms and how totally inexplicably people continue to behave the same way in VR as they do in RL, down to minute details such as the way they move, despite now finally having the freedom to shed their skin!
Clearly, this is evidence of the insidiousness of their oppression: They have internalised it so much that they can't even process the possibilities. It ended on a hopeful note however, that when we educate people better, all differences may eventually stop existing and people can be free in the VR.
But this is also just background for what I want to talk about: What struck me was the experience. In my field, genomics, genetic disease risk factors, etc., if I make a talk only about possible biological explanations, you can be sure that someone in the audience will ask "did you control for [social/environmental risk factor]?" If I'm advising a PhD student on a study design with a big data set like UKBB, I'll tell them to control for a long list of social/environmental risk factors. If the database has sparse information on this account, I mention it as a limitation. Even internally, I think this is important, this isn't something I only do because I'm challenged.
In other words, I genuinely respect social explanations.
Contrast this talk: The possibility of biological differences between sexes/genders isn't even mentioned. Nobody in the audience challenges that glaring oversight. My wife agreed that this is how it works in the department in general; If her colleagues talk about their social research, and my wife mentions the possibility of biological explanations, people look at her as if she just pissed on the ground. At most a hushed agreement, sure, maybe, it's a possibility, to get it over with. Needless to say, since she worked in the neurology department beforehand, she has to hold her breath quite often. She wanted to make a comment on it during the talk, but there are smarter ways to make enemies. She asked something anodyne instead, to show interest, make a good impression.
There is this idea that social sciences are not well respected among other scientists. I claim it is the other way around: The social scientists actively try to ignore other fields, insulate themselves and include non-social explanations only if pressed (which they are rarely), and grudgingly.
They do not respect any science except their own.
Also, assume I wrote some boring hedging about "not all social scientists" etc. I guess you could claim that this is just "boo outgroup", and I admit part of the reason this was written is me venting, but I think it might be an important observation: What does respect for a field mean? People may talk shit about social scientists, but in general they agree that the field is important to study. They're just unhappy with the way it is done.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
Admittedly I stopped somewhere towards the end of the second book (I don't even remember whether I finished it, just that I put it aside with the thought "these characters are worse than most YA fiction"). Maybe I should pick up the third book after all?
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
That's quite some time ago. Even mentioning The Bell Curve with anything but disdain is asking for trouble nowadays.
It was part of a list of things that didn't change in VR and as such not elaborated on in particular. I guess we could have challenged her, but didn't.
If you want me to steelman it, some people essentially consider their public behaviour a (gendered) performance they put on because it is necessary. Once they are either with the right people or in an "anonymous" environment like VR, they just let the mask fall off so to speak and show their true self, which includes mannerisms and body language. Think closeted gay who is trying to act tough in conservative circles and is flamboyant in progressive, but it's a popular enough perspective in some social circles that this applies to essentially everyone.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
It seems I fell for something, though I'm not sure what. FWIW, the linked "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" report does read more even-handed than what is acceptable nowadays, and is even mentioned as such in the wikipedia article (while the report is just using the weasely "no support for a genetic explanation of the differences between groups" as usual, the wiki article is almost falling over itself to repeatedly mention that any genetic basis of group differences is thoroughly discredited nowadays).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
10mo ago
I'm not american nor would I vote rep if I were, but this piece does come across to me as mainly contemptuous and disparaging. In combination with his other recent writing, it seems obvious to me that Hanania mostly despises the average republican and only has a very limited policy overlap with them.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
10mo ago
I used to know a woman who got raped in the past and continued to regularly have casual sex with strangers in an attempt to "regain control" of her sexuality (unsurprisingly a psychology student in the same year as my wife, yes all the stereotypes about different study topics are true). She occasionally admitted that it's mostly stupid and never actually led anywhere good, several of these encounters even have ended up kinda rapey and made everything worse. But she just couldn't not do it, as I understood her she constantly feels threatened by men and going partying, targeting a specific guy, getting him to buy you drinks, getting him to focus on only you the entire night, and then "rewarding" him at the end, all completely on your own schedule made her feel powerful. Especially if he afterwards gets obsessed with her.
I'm mostly rephrasing @Terracotta here, but there's always different ways to deal with a perceived threat. If you get beat up, you can either get buff - fight response - or forever avoid - flight response - every situation where it might possibly happen again. And the more extreme the (perceived) threat, the more extreme the reaction is usually.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
9mo ago
One reason I suspect engagement is low is that the "depth" per country per post is pretty low so unless I already know something apart from what you write here, I'll not really be able to engage. Maybe it will increase as people who are following it every week become more familiar. There are also relatively little "hooks" in the post that drive engagement, it's almost entirely descriptive so again there is little to argue about. Btw I don't think that's a bad thing, I enjoyed these posts so far.
I’m hoping for this not to really be a thing I lead
Ha, I'm sorry to say that this is in my experience not how it works.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
9mo ago
'Conventional employment' is a pretty broad term. Would I rather take care of children than fight in Ukraine or mine coal? Yeah, probably. Would I rather take care of children than work in an air-conditioned office or as a cashier? No way. Childcare sucks, even if some things suck even worse.
I think you're overgeneralising from yourself here. The majority of mothers I know not only work half time, but would actually like to work less than that and spend more with the children. Even when mothers complain about their husband not doing their share, they will often don't actually want to do more work - they mainly want more quality time with the entire family. Talking personally about my wife and me, she generally tries to actively maximize the time spent on childcare, while I try to have a balance. If we could afford it more easily, we probably would both work less. Also, by all accounts I know, cashier is a notoriously boring and tedious job that people only do if they have no other options.
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
Dadder than dad
9mo ago
No offense but literally just googling "Phoenix Lights" gives you a wikipedia entry that offers fairly mundane explanations relating to pilot training, not "super secret weird government shit". I haven't looked too deeply into this particular incident, but in my experience this is a pattern that has repeated over and over: Alien believers go around claiming that something is being suppressed or that the only other plausible explanation is secret government projects that sound as outlandish as aliens. If you point out the mundane explanations, they are nitpicked on minuscule details in a way that you simply can't do with "aliens did it" (or "god did it", for that matter) since the space of things that can be imagined is always almost infinitely large.
It's like seeing an image of jesus on a toast, doing a statistical analysis on how unlikely that is to happen by chance and then concluding that the only reasonable explanation is an act of god. Sure compared to happening by chance it may seem reasonable, but that's hardly the most sensible explanation.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
9mo ago
Ironically I increasingly think that these kind of thought experiments are net negative to pose, i.e. making people think about them causes them to make real-world decisions that are worse by most reasonable metrics than if they haven't thought about them. The reason is that they regularly make assumptions that are almost universally untrue, in this example the claim that we have perfect knowledge whether it has practical benefits to the person. Some people will then over-apply their conclusions from these thought-experiments into the real world (in this case, keeping secrets by finding lazy, convenient excuses), and some people will smell that something is funny and go to the other extreme (in this case, practising impractical radical honesty).
In the end, the extremely vague "Think about how you think this particular person will react to you telling them the secret, whether that reaction is good by what you judge their own moral position to be, whether that reaction is good by your own moral position and to you worth the hassle, how likely they are to find out regardless, how likely they are to find out you knew, how they'll react when they find out that you knew but didn't tell them, and so on" and further weighted by things like your own risk tolerance will lead to the best decisions. This is obviously quite bothersome to do and explains the appeal of simple approaches like radical honesty or "it's none of my business", which are also the best starting points for less important secrets which aren't worth making a huge calculus of (but which also runs the risk of falling prey to lazily call everything unimportant).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
9mo ago
Aliens, obviously.
The example I was thinking about is a news story I heard some years ago about people setting up a shrine - I think in Latin America - with a Jesus on a toast with details way beyond the capabilities of a mere toaster. To my eyes, somebody obviously helped along with a burning needle or something similar (or just directly used a burning iron with a Jesus stamp form). Either way, I could only shake my head at the so-called critics claiming "it's coincidence" and the believers rightfully pointing out that it is almost physically impossible to be so - therefore, god. The people running the shrine clearly seemed to make some money off it.
Now that you made me write it out though, I realize that I nowadays would probably think that the critics are probably also simply paid to look silly. I'll leave it to the judgement of the reader whether I've not been cynical enough back when I was younger, or whether I've become too cynical by now.
In light of some recent discussions, I have a question about GDP for people with better economic knowledge then me. In particular, I'm thinking about the comparison between "clean" source of energy vs "unclean" source of energy in terms of gdp changes it causes (it doesn't need to be energy, could be food or whatever). I've heard the claim before that GDP does not properly price in externalities, but as far as I can judge, it's even worse than that: GDP makes externalities seem positive!
I'll set up a very simplified example to get at what I mean. Assume two groups of each 10 people, let's call them the cleanies and the dirties. Both groups are mostly subsistence farmers so we ignore almost everything except food. Unlike real-life subsistence farmers though, they put up all their food on a shared market so we get to accurately assess their generated food with a GDP. The cleanies do "clean" farming that generates no externalities and each generates one unit of food, so they generate a GDP of 10. The "dirties" generate 10 units of food with only 5 farmers, but the other five are collectively hired by the farmers to clean up the externalities to the degree that it is bearable and getting 1 unit of food in return. The collective GDP is then 15 units, despite living standards being worse since the externalities are too expensive/impossible to perfectly clean up entirely (these uncleaned externalities are the usual "externalities are not priced in" that is often talked about). As far as I can see, neither per capita corrections nor PPP corrections change anything about this.
Am I misunderstanding something here?
RenOS
Dadder than dad
9mo ago
Advice for people in europe: There's a number of brokers in europe available, such as scalable capital or trade republic.
Also as others have mentioned if you have no idea about investing and no interests in having to move your money around regularly, I strongly advice to just park your money in an index ETF. As an example, I currently have 75% MSCI World and 25% MSCI Emerging Markets on scalable capital. Since US companies are dominating the stock market, the MSCI World is strongly biased towards US companies. At least for me that is a positive, since a recession in Germany may already hit me hard without also ruining my savings, and vice versa. Investing somewhere that you're not living is imo also a good way to diversify. If you see it differently, there is enough different index funds to allocate your savings differently. But the details even of this will depend on your country. For example here in Germany, there is the "vermögenswirksame leistung", which means that the employer will pay money for you into savings, and some plans may be usable for this while others are not. I don't think you'll be able to inform yourself well without country-dependent information.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
9mo ago
I think that the primary value of art is serving as motivating higher values for individuals and as founding myths for societies. As such, the intentions of the author may make their work more conducive to certain interpretations than others, but I don't ultimately care if for an interpretation that resonates with me it turns out that the author meant something entirely different. The interpretation always lies primarily with the viewer.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
Yes, but also no. It's definitely practice to over-specify it towards a specific person and that gives the person a giant edge. But if a super-star scientist (relatively speaking) comes around and applies for the job, they will often be hard-pressed to turn them down. This is quite rare however, and generally benefits the institutions (either they get exactly the person they want, or some kind of super-star).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
If people interact with other people in ways that doesn't involve being slowly driven insane and killing each other, it's not DS.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
Just fyi, but I'm a german catholic and our local youth organisation Messdiener (literally "mass servants", when I was still a kid we would be obligated to help with the mass ~once per month per person) as well as the katholische Landjugend (literally "catholic rural youth", technically different but generally speaking was just the same people as the Messdiener) include both men and women, and does these kinds of things. From the things I remember off the top of my hat, the yearly 2-weeks camping trips had plenty of supervising adults of both sexes present and dating was rampant both between adults as well as the kids (sometimes even between the two groups if the age differential wasn't too big), likewise charity events like "72-hours of help" which usually involved building and/or repairing houses for charitable accommodation or for religious events.
But for both groups it would be very unusual to join only as an adult.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
Unconditional agree, half of my posts that landed in the AAQCs are part of a chain of me arguing with someone and read embarrassingly combative and/or pompous bc I got pissed at some point. If only I could sneakily revise them beforehand...
a system of asymetric information warfare
A pet idea of mine that I have literally never seen implemented in a game and that I still wish to implement at some point myself is the idea of location-based information and information propagation. For example in space warfare, if ships can travel at say 1/2x the speed of light and information travels at the speed of light, and you send out scouts towards an enemy that you suspect is coming towards you, then you can only "see" the opponents at 1/2x of the distance between you and where the scout found them, not the moment the scout finds them. And as you move yourself across the map, you will get more recent knowledge of some parts of the map while the knowledge of other parts gets increasingly outdated to the point that if you still have troops beyond just scouts there they're de-facto on their own and can't meaningfully be supported in time.
Though admittedly such a system makes the most sense in a (historic) 4x games, since I think the speed by which information travelled is a big part of why kingdoms tended to break down beyond a certain size and why capitals tend to be in certain places that is just entirely missing from contemporary 4x games.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
I find it utterly bizarre how you managed to write such a long post without mentioning the key reason why spouses need to be employed close to each other, which als blows up all your examples and which was the justification in all actual cases of spousal hiring I personally know about(not too many, admittedly): Children.
You can easily have a ldr without kids, me and my wife did phds in different countries, but you can't look after kids that way. If we want academics to be able to have children, we need to give them a way to live in the same place. None of your examples include looking after children, so none of them make sense to me.
It's still nonsense though. The male advantage is very well replicated. You can't just assume as a baseline that our current choice of treatment for dysphoria, HRT, perfectly eradicates all differences. You have to prove it. Saying "transwomen are women, therefore they should be assumed to be the same in everything unless proven otherwise" is pure word games.
I'm not even completely against transwomen in women sports, as @rae correctly points out XY people born with androgen resistance become largely indistinguishable from regular women. Though I'm admittedly incredulous about the obvious physical advantages accrued in male puberty and also the neurological advantages during early development (better developed spatial reasoning and reaction times), which seem unlikely to be changed through HRT after the fact.
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