SSCReader
4d ago
Oh i'm not a mod ao I'm commenting on its truth/probability vis a vis the sources you quoted only. Personally i wouldn't consider you've done enough to show female answers would be obviously more incorrect.
You perhaps need to hedge a little more. Obviously is a very certain and consensus building word so your evidence should be equally convincing, i think. Probably or likely would give you more leeway.
SSCReader
5d ago
Just to point out though none of that supports your claim that their reply would be obviously less correct on quora. That's the claim that you need to buttress. Do you see why?
Because someone answering a particular quora question is self-selecting. First to be on quora in the first place and second to answer that particular question.
It could be 8 out 10 women have worse general knowledge, but that given the selection pressures men and women's answers on quora are equally correct because only the 2 out of 10 women post there, and so on and so forth.
You can't evidence a specific claim like this with general statistics. Consider: Men generally have less knowledge of fashion than women. Positing this is overall true for a moment, it doesn't mean that men answering fashion questions on a website will statistically answer worse than the women, because it is highly likely those men are very unusual, otherwise they wouldn't be answering questions on fashion in the first place. They are very likely to have greater fashion knowledge than the average man. Whether they have more knowledge than the average woman on the website we could only determine by analyzing answers on the platform itself.
So you still haven't actually evidenced the women on quora would be obviously less correct in general. You may have evidenced that if you pick a random woman and ask her a general knowledge question she will on average do worse than a random man. But that wasn't your claim.
To evidence a claim about quora you will have to analyze data from quora (or something similar perhaps), or find a way to unconfound the general data to account for selection effects on quora. Which in itself probably requires you to analyze a lot of data about quora.
Or to put it another way, the fact 8 out of 10 men know little about the goings on on Love Island, doesn't tell you much about the level of knowledge a man who CHOOSES to answer a question on Love Island has. Because interest in the topic is a factor in both level of knowledge and wanting to answer the question.
SSCReader
5d ago
Associated with middle class striving, so probably skewed Protestant back in the day. My grandmother did keep the toaster in a cupboard. My mum doesn't.
SSCReader
5d ago
So if anyone has brilliant ideas about US visa applications, creative leave arrangements, or general life optimization, I'm all ears.
I'd start by reaching out to Inkhaven. If they had this open internationally, they should already have considered visa issues. Hopefully a whole bunch of influential rationalists should already have considered how they could do this. If you're not getting paid I would think a tourist visa would do. It's essentially a writing holiday. But if you are getting paid for for your blog posts that makes it considerably more complicated I should think. There are visas for artist residencies, so I wouldn't be too concerned about the writing thing being weird as being the problem, but those generally would require the sponsor (Lightcone presumably in this case) to be engaging with being an official sponsor through the US government. Also the timing is likely tight for November. J-1 or B-1 Visas might be a possibility depending on the exact details. Unfortunately India is not part of the Visa Waiver program or you might have been ok with just an ESTA as you can travel for 90 days for business.
"You may be eligible for a B-1 visa if you will be participating in business activities of a commercial or professional nature in the United States, including, but not limited to:
Consulting with business associates Traveling for a scientific, educational, professional or business convention, or a conference on specific dates Settling an estate Negotiating a contract Participating in short-term training"
SSCReader
6d ago
In the cupboard as opposed to out on the counter. Popularized by Derry Girls where a Catholic girls school and a Protestant Boys school are attempting to find commonalities.
A Jewish man is walking through Belfast one night when he gets stopped by two men in balaclavas with Armalites.
One of the men asks in a thick Belfast accent "Prod or Taig?" The Jewish man looks confused. "What?" "Are you a Protestant or are you a Catholic?" the other man asks in an even thicker accent. The Jewish man says "Well, I'm a Jew". The first paramilitary gives a long suffering sigh. "Yes, but are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?"
That's the joke.
I have heard a different version which plays off it:
A man is walking home late at night in Belfast. Suddenly he's pulled into a dark alley and feels a knife at his throat! A hoarse voice whispers into his ear, "Are ye Protestant or Catholic?" Thinking quickly, wondering how to answer to save his life, the man has an inspiration. "Neither! I'm Jewish!" he says. "Well now, I'm the luckiest Arab in Belfast, so I am!" says the attacker.
Edit: I see my near namesake beat me to it!
Edit Edit: There is also a version where it's an atheist and the final question is: "Yes but is it the Protestant God or the Catholic God that you don't believe in?"
SSCReader
6d ago
This is a region where walking into the wrong neighborhood could get you shot.
Well we still have the murals and your chances of being shot have gone way down. Though FYI seeing which colours the kerbs are painted or which flags are on the lampposts is probably easier as there aren't that many murals, you may have to walk a while to work out where you are if relying on murals alone.
You chances of being shot in the wrong region weren't zero, but they weren't massive even at the height of the Troubles. I was on the Falls road (Catholic area) a fair bit even though I was Protestant. Without checking where someone keeps their toaster, or talking to them about schooling you can't tell a Catholic from a Protestant in general just by looking. Hence the old joke about a Jew being stopped by Paramilitaries.
SSCReader
10d ago
I do not understand why you would have concerns about someone asking an LLM.
Well because an LLM is not a person. It doesn't have ideas or thoughts. It's not an interaction with a person at all. Asking another person to proofread not only gets you another set of eyes it gets you an interaction with an actual living breathing person, and now their messiness gets injected. Having said that I'm not saying the way you are using it at this stage is wrong necessarily. My point is basically about not confusing the destination with the journey.
Imagine if you want to get from A to B and you can 1) Use a teleporter (non 40K style or its another kettle of fish) 2) Get on a train or 3) Walk. 1) Means you don't have a journey at all, you just get from A to B swiftly and efficiently. If that is your goal it is the best option. But if you want to see the countryside, and look at sheep in a field on the way it is of no use at all. It replaces the journey with the destination 100%. The train limits what you experience on your journey but doesn't remove it entirely.
I think part of the charm of TheMotte is the journey, the back and forth, the tangents, the random weirdness that gets injected from messy human thinking. Maybe I'm wrong and the LLM usage you currently have won't reduce the kind of vector space for that kind of energy bouncing off. You may well be right that my concerns are overbaked! Hopefully so, because I would anticipate AI usage is just going to increase and maybe not everyone will resist the pull of having the usage pretty heavily circumscribed as you do.
I'd like us all walking together ideally, romping up and down the hills of discussion and the dales of Red vs Blue tribal responses from our messy little human brains. If we're on a train well that's a little worse form my perspective. And the closer it gets to a bullet train whizzing past the hills at 300mph the less I like it. A meandering steam train is probably ok as well.
I'm more musing than condemning just to be clear. You're an extremely valuable contributor here and I always read your posts with interest, and you have to remember, I am old after all. Shaking my fist at the Cloud and wearing onions on my belt is a time honoured tradition!
SSCReader
10d ago
I also, simultaneously, feed them into a more powerful reasoning model such as o3 or Gemini 2.5 Pro for the purposes of noting any flaws in reasoning. They are very good at finding reasoning flaws, less so at catching errors in citations. Still worth using.
But isn't that the point of posting here?
"This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases"
If you're testing your reasoning against an LLM first then you're kind of skipping part of the entire point of this space no? We should pointing out flaws in your reasoning. You're making an arguably better individual post/point, at the expense of other readers engagement and back and forth. Every time the LLM points out flaws in your reasoning you are reducing the need for us, your poor only human interlocuters. You're replacing us with robots! You monster! Ahem.
If the LLM's at any point are able to completely correct your argument then why post it here at all? We 're supposed to argue to understand, so if the LLM gets you to understanding then literally the reason for the existence of this forum vanishes. It's just a blog post at best.
It's like turning up for sex half way to climax from a vibrating fleshlight then getting off quickly with your partner. If your goal is just having a baby (getting a perfect argument) then it's certainly more efficient. But it kind of takes away something from the whole experience of back and forth (so to speak) with your partner I would suggest.
Now it's not as bad as just ejaculating in a cup and doing it with a turkey baster, start to finish, but it's still a little less...(self_made_)human?
Not saying it should be banned (even if it could be reliably) but I'd probably want to be careful as to how much my argument is refined by AI. A perfectly argued and buttressed position would probably not get much discussion engagement because what is there to say? You may be far from that point right now, but maybe just keep it in mind.
SSCReader
13d ago
Likewise! And I appreciate you always trying to take the heat out of things, it's not easy. I've rewritten and deleted my own share of posts on things that are hot button topics for me, so I know it's not necessarily easy!
SSCReader
13d ago
Why should teachers be deprioritized for whiteness when they're going to be in high-risk environments, and spreading it to black kids who will then spread it to their higher-risk families?
This is a reasonable point! And indeed if you read Schmidt's paper his final recommendation is healthcare workers and essential workers who are likely to be exposed to and spread the disease to multiple people. While he discusses race as an impact his final recommendation doesn't actually suggest making the distribution race based directly at all.
Now part of that is because retail, grocery store workers and the like skew minority in the US in any case, but his final position in his paper does indeed seem to be there is no need to discriminate on race. I don't know whether the article only asked him about the race part or only used his answer for that part, but his papers recommendation does not suggest discriminating on race for vaccine distribution in the end.
Now having said that his recommendation turns out to be wrong anyway. There are 2 main vaccine pandemic responses 1) Vaccinate the most vulnerable (this directly reduces deaths) 2) Vaccinate the most likely people to spread the disease, workers who come into contact with many people. The 2nd saves lives indirectly by restricting spread even though you are primarily vaccinating people who individually are not at much risk of the disease.
However it has to be with a vaccine that is effective enough and taken up enough to get to herd immunity levels. Without that option 1) is generally your best shot. But Schmidt was making that recommendation before the vaccines were created so presumably we can't hold him responsible for the fact the vaccines were not as effective as option 2) requires, he didn't know that at the time.
SSCReader
13d ago
Sure, the disparities were not that wide (as far as I know). But do note the article is from before there was a vaccine at all, as they were discussing how it should be allocated when they had them, so reasonably early on.
Having said that if you actually read the paper and not the media phrasing even Dr Schmidts final recommendation was fairly anodyne. Prioritize healthcare workers and then essential workers who are likely to spread to multiple people (so a retail worker who has to come into contact with lots of people each day over say a farmer). In the end he didn't actually recommend that it be decided by race at all. Just worker type. He just talked about it being a factor to consider in his paper, which is the bit he was then asked to comment on for the article, or the article only published his quotes on that section perhaps.
The media version of X may not really represent X very well in actuality.
SSCReader
13d ago
Sure like I say, by the numbers they might be wrong. But presumably that means you accept the principle that if say 25yo black Americans were dying at the same rate as 85yo white people from Covid then it might have been reasonable at the outset to reserve vaccines for white people over 65 and black people over 25, befoe you start expanding it to white people 45 and so on. That if the difference was as stark as age turned out to be, that their argument would have been justified.
Which means i think its hard to call it evil. At least for me. But thats value not fact dependent, so certainly arguable.
SSCReader
13d ago
Absolutely. And that is a reasonable critique of the position. Especially if you pointed out significant parts of the poor health is behavioural! I'm not saying they are correct, I am saying its a reasonable non evil position to hold. With scarce resources some people are not going to be treated. But note that is also the basic decision we came to with age. Younger people had to wait to get vaccinated. So were we punishing young people for being too healthy? Or is it simply the pragmatic choice to try and equalize death rates between different age groups? We did deprive young people of care they would have got in an age blind society then presumably. Is that ok but race skewing isn't? Or are neither ok?
Like I said in the other thread its not just about race, its also age, and class and job role. Should you vaccinate a farmer or a barista? The farmer is likely to be more important to food security, but a barista is likely to be exposed to and expose many more people. Depending on your goals/priorities you can make a reasonable case for either.
SSCReader
14d ago
we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
So obviously you feel strongly about it and I don't want to rile you up. But I don't see too much objectionable here. Levelling the playing field is about taking into account the differences here. He even says it, the white populations are healthier so they live longer, so if you just take into account age, you will miss out on morbidity increasing factors which in the United States are drawn heavily along racial lines because your underclass is heavily skewed black. Likewise with teachers, middle class white people with degrees are likely to suffer from fewer health issues than non-middle class, non white, non degree holders. All of this appears to be factual information.
I think that equity phrase/cartoon is hijacking your perception a little here. The equity cartoon isn't a one to one description of how equity would work in the real world when carried out by real people, nor do people always mean the same thing when they say equity. The actual positions they were advocating are nowhere similar to taking a machete to a tall person. They are actually advocating for something closer to the original equality cartoon, with vaccines instead of boxes. The tall people are still going to be tall. The healthier groups are still going to be healthier, they would have to be making the healthier group intrinsically less healthy in the name of equity for the machete to apply. Like putting immuno-suppressants in the water, so that the death rates were equalized with the worse off populations or something by making them worse (a al Harrison Bergeron).
Rather than giving something to the worse off populations to reduce their death rates to similar to the taller population. That's the definition of the ladder analogy really. They advocate to make the short person taller (healthier) rather than make the tall person shorter (unhealthier). The latter would be equity as described by the (I agree) objectionable cartoon. If they were recommending making white people more vulnerable to the disease, so that they died in rough equity with black people, I completely agree that would be very objectionable! That would be taking a machete to the legs of the tall. But that's not the recommendation they are making. The vaccine is the boxes or ladders. If you didn't give them to anybody, the tall person would still be tall and the short person would still be short.
Which isn't to say they don't have objectionable views in general, or that they are definitely correct. I'd want to take a much deeper dive into specific proposals and trade offs, and confirm numbers and the like, but I don't think they show much sign of being outright evil monsters. At worst they believe the boxes version of equity, while you believe the machete version of equity.
Note: The Equality vs Equity cartoon a woke person is likely to point to doesn't involve any machetes at all. It just shows shifting one box from the tall man (equality) to the short man (equity) so the short man has two and the tall man has zero. But I've gone with the (more critical of equity) version you describe to keep the analogy rolling along.
https://pressbooks.openedmb.ca/app/uploads/sites/52/2023/01/image1.jpeg
SSCReader
17d ago
To hear cis is to understand that transness exists, to hear hetero is to know that homoness exists.
I think this is the heart of the argument. If I show you a man buggering another man, you don't need a word for it to know that it exists. Similarly if I show you a man dressed up as a woman. You already know it exists. Then you create a word for it. That word does make it easier for you to communicate what you mean. "My neighbor is gay" is easier to say than "My neighbor fucks men" (barely) but you know the concept exists even if you lack special words to describe it. The shadow as you put it is already there, it predates the words. Men have been fucking other men (and boys) going back pretty much as far as we have recorded history. You're going to find out homoness exists whether there is a word for it or not.
We could replace the word (and yes I agree it's a pain to type) cisheteronormativity with menaremenandwomenarewomenandmenfuckwomenandthatisnormal and the only thing that would change is that it's maybe marginally even more of a pain to type than cisheteronormativity. You can indeed just say that cishetero is normal and gesture to every other mammal. There is nothing to stop you doing that. You don't have to defend it academically is basically my point.
You can just say "Clearly gay people do exist but it is normal for men to fuck women." an academic may respond with a torrent of words and the like, but normal people don't understand them and don't like them. You DON'T have to engage at their level to win in the public eye. People aren't persuaded by rational academic arguments. This is what Trump proves every single day. Academia can pound on about cisheteronormativity and Trump can just say "Men aren't women" and the majority of Americans will agree with him.
The infohazard of being gay exists. You can't hide it. The word gay is not the infohazard itself. It just describes it. You can use that to point people to the infohazard or away from it (Gay is good!, Gay is bad!) but having a word for it in and of itself is not the problem. If the infohazard is bad then it is the act of pointing people towards it that is the problem, not the word you use while doing so.
SSCReader
17d ago
No. Not at all. The formula used by the NHS explicitly has a rural weighting so as to offset the population densities. Not entirely of course but somewhat. You can argue that's because politically telling rural voters "Hey you're too expensive to treat, so just fend for yourselves" is a bit of a non starter, but the effect is the same.
In the US about 35% of hospitals are in rural areas but about 83% of people live in cities. Just to be clear rural healthcare is still often poor because the US is really, really big. But it is still getting more than simple population would suggest. Which is probably correct, you want your farmers et al to have access to healthcare even if there aren't very many of them. They are pretty important, whereas a Starbucks worker or what have you is likely not adding quite as much value at a societal level (sorry baristas).
But that is kind of the point, at high levels you do have to take into account other factors than just the number of lives you can save/treat. You have to consider economic factors, political factors and plenty of others. If 1000 bucks would save 3 baristas or 1 farmer. Well it might be you should save the farmer. If 1000 bucks saves Elon Musk or a farmer, well you should probably save Elon Musk.
In fact I might argue the US still needs to skew it's healthcare even more rurally than currently. I'd probably want to do a lot of research to confirm that but it's certainly possible.
SSCReader
17d ago
Sure, not disputing that at all. They also tend to skew female which also skews left at pretty much all ages.
SSCReader
17d ago
So maybe because I've worked in public health this is not particularly bothersome. We already trade off deaths vs other values. Increased speed limits leads to economic gain but more deaths. Another hospital in an urban area will save more lives than funding one in a rural area. Deaths simply are a trade off at a population level. People here argued we should have allowed more Covid deaths in older populations in order to preserve the economy and rights of free movement et al.
Having said that, from the point of view of vaccines, they have two purposes, protect the individual who takes the vaccine and try to achieve herd immunity (or at least reduced spread). Black communities were among those worst at taking up the vaccine (for a few reasons). With increased obesity and other health conditions, even low risk black age groups are at higher risk than similar white (or asian) age groups.
"In people 65 years and older, Blacks are nearly 5 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than Whites. This increased risk of COVID-19 mortality in Blacks is even worse in younger populations—up to a 10-times greater risk in adults 35 to 64 years old. In fact, younger Blacks are dying from COVID-19 at a rate greater than older Whites. For example, Blacks 55 to 64 years old are dying from COVID-19 at rate two-times greater than Whites a decade older."
So their community is less likely to have protective levels of vaccination, more likely to get sicker than an equivalent white person and more likely to die. They're also disproportionately more likely to work in a customer service or retail role and therefore get exposed. Are you sure that it would be the wrong decision to push more vaccines that way, even if all we were looking at was deaths prevented?
If ethnicity impacts outcomes then logically it should be at least a factor when looking at policy. How much of a factor depends on what you're trying to achieve.
SSCReader
17d ago
A society where people use 'cisheteronormativity' in conversation is simply not the same as one where people don't. The creation of the word cisheteronormative innately destroys cisheteronormativity.
I can't see that it does really. A word for water doesn't destroy the society of fish or Atlanteans. It describes their reality. You could create the word and then say, this is the word for what is normal and correct and good so lets not change anything. Or you could create the word and say this is the word for the status quo and that is not good and needs to be changed. But the word itself isn't doing the changing. How it is used (or how the concept is used really, because the word could be blargle for all that it matters).
In fact, I'd suggest the evidence shows the opposite, people were working to tear down what was "normal" BEFORE the word in question was created. Gay rights movements were campaigning to normalize gay people and spread well before cisgender and heteronormativity were coined (the 90's from what I can see). Showing the words are not necessary for people to try and change the status quo. The words come second. The awareness comes first. For what we observe in reality that must be the case. The existence of the word does not destroy "normality". The existence of people who challenge the concept might but that predates the creation of the word.
It might be true that creating the words make it easier to describe and campaign for perhaps, but they clearly aren't necessary.
SSCReader
17d ago
But the term isn't just about "allocating scarce resources and who should get them", it's "allocating them in such a way, that you are predictably causing more deaths than an alternative, traditional allocation".
Again this is NOT new. In Public Health policy we already take into account things other than just number of lives saved. If we didn't then you would just abandon huge rural areas because the investment there simply gets a worse return on lives saved than adding another hospital in a dense city where the ED is packed every day.
We ALREADY choose to cause more deaths in certain places for certain reasons. We trade off speed limits on safety vs efficiency and on and on. That doesn't mean any particular reason is a good one of course, it has to be examined in light of what you are trying to accomplish, but choosing to predictably cause more deaths is a valid trade-off. If you think poor or rural people should get healthcare resources that could save more urban people that is a valid option. If you think the economic benefits of faster commutes is worth 10 deaths a year, that's also a valid option. At the population level deaths are a trade off for other things.
In fact many people argued here that we should have allowed more deaths from Covid in order to not tank the economy as much and disrupt schooling and the like. It's already established that deaths are tradeable for other values. We're just quibbling over which ones and why. So the fact it predictably causes more deaths is not in and of itself a useful critique. Whose deaths? Why? You have to look at the object level not the meta level.
SSCReader
17d ago
Letting people die for "health equity" is so high brow it's left the head entirely.
Not at all. If you have a certain amount of resources you have to decide who is going to get them and who is going to get them first. That kind of thinking is centuries old (if not older!) The presentation might be new but it's exactly the same sort of decision you have to make when deciding to build a hospital in London or Bradford. Do you put it in a poor area or a rich one?
Choosing it to place it where health outcomes are worst is taking into account health equity. Again the term may be new but the reality that you have to allocate scarce resources and who should get them is old. Probably as old as deciding if you should give food to the old toothless elder who may die any day or to the hunters in your tribe.
SSCReader
17d ago
So the term is created by academia, but it's a word for an already existing concept. Cisheteronormativity (refers to the pervasive societal assumption that everyone is cisgender and heterosexual, and that these are the only acceptable or natural ways to be.)
So if you asked an average person in 1840 and asked them "Hey, are women ,women and men men? Is being homosexual wrong?" He will likely give you an answer that is compatible with the concept of Cisheteronormativity. He understands the idea behind the term even if the term would be gibberish to him. Because it's the water he swims in, he probably doesn't think about it, but he is passively aware of the idea if you were to draw it to his attention and describe it to him.
Academia names the thing, but the thing existed prior to academia and would exist without academia to name it.
SSCReader
18d ago
Well being willing to get help is at least a positive sign. And knowing it was a scam but treating it as a kind of escapist fantasy a la a new sports car seems maybe better than being delusional, hopefully. Still not great financially though of course.
I'll hope the help she is able to get is effective and this is a short term issue fueled by depression and the like. I don't think I have anything more from a technical side so just hope and good wishes.
And they're likely the ones who'll end up walking into a house to find the body unexpectedly if they do just commit suicide.
Thats a problem with suicide generally, not the Swiss system specifically. The Swiss system at least means some kids will be informed in advance who wouldn't otherwise be.
You have to compare it with "standard" suicide and in almost all of those relatives are going to have to unexpectedly deal with remains. Excepting those where the suicidal person tries to disappear themselves. But that of course leaves family members with other issues instead.
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