SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
I think that academic freedom does have some value, so I'm not sure I'm ready to throw my support behind government stepping in and regulating the research of academics, even at public universities.
However, there are totally reasonable ways governments can regulate public universities that do not infringe on academic freedom:
- Ban ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions.
- Regulate the activities of administrators and the number of staff which can be hired for certain roles.
- Ban the use of DEI statements and other ideological tests and discrimination in hiring.
These are broad principles, not blueprints for concrete laws. I'm well aware that "no ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions at public universities" sessions is unlikely to be an effective law; it needs to spell out the details, and multiple passes may be required to plug loopholes.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Another approach is to bar public schools from requiring or giving pay premiums for advanced education degrees.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
The BBZ wasn't quite as enthusiastic about my plan to devote the NHS's entire budget to improving the health outcomes of trans women of color as I expected them to be. They were concerned about the effect on other marginalised communities.
I flew too close to the sun.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
Don't Catholics always have sins to absolve because of original sin?
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
And mostly they use it to subsidize the American middle class, i.e. the global rich.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
Food poisoning worked for me.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible.
As a parallel, note that woke anti-whiteness is premised on a rejection of the hypothesis that the black–white achievement gap is due to genetic factors rather than oppression.
This is like the Venn diagram meme: At the intersection of the set of those who attribute belief in a genetic basis for the black–white achievement gap to anti-black animus and the set of those who attribute belief in a genetic basis for the gentile–Jewish achievement gap to antisemitism, we find people who do not have a strong need for intellectual consistency.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
As I understand it, heritability can only be greater than 100% if you have negative gene-environment correlation, i.e. if the people with higher polygenic scores tend to raise their children in environments less conducive to increasing intelligence.
Hypothetically you could have infinite heritability if environment perfectly cancelled out genes, resulting in everyone having equal intelligence despite variation in genetic potential.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
There's still a debate on which plant it was but I'm not surprised the Romans used it to extinction if it was real.
It's kind of surprising. Generally plants that are useful to humans flourish due to intentional cultivation. It's not like wheat went extinct. Though the Wikipedia article does mention some speculation that it may not have been amenable to cultivation for some reason.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
There were reasons for the US to be ahead back then that no longer apply, though. The two World Wars. The greater importance of land and natural resources to GDP back then. The US having a large internal free trade zone.
Currently the US operates with a pretty significant human capital disadvantage from the high black and indigenous population.
There's also a straightforward theoretical explanation for high taxation and welfare spending to reduce GDP level path: Diversion of resources away from investment and towards consumption, plus deadweight loss from high taxes. Why knock yourself out if it's only going to make a small difference in after-tax pay?
I'm not sure it's true that the US spends as much on welfare as Western Europe. I've looked into this before, and IIRC several of those countries spend more. But even if it does, this doesn't contradict the claim that the US is richer because it spends a smaller percentage of GDP on subsidizing consumption.
Consider that if I consistently spend 50% of my income on consumption and invest the rest, eventually I will end up spending more on consumption than my coworker who has the same salary and consistently spends 90% and saves 10%, precisely because limiting my consumption spending to a smaller share of my income has enabled my income to grow faster.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
There are a couple of issues here.
First, seventy years is more than enough time for conditional convergence to work its magic. We saw this with the Asian Tigers. The reason that most European countries have not yet converged with the US is not that they need more time, but rather that they're not meeting the conditions required for convergence. In fact, in recent decades the US has actually been pulling away from Europe.
Second, saying that the US also has a welfare state is like saying that Europe also has fat people. Government spending is a smaller share of GDP in the US than it is in most Western European countries, by 10-20 percentage points. The main exception is Switzerland, which totally coincidentally is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, surpassed only by a handful of microstates and one quasi-petrostate (Norway).
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Use of the specific word "insurrection," which is used in the 14th Amendment but had rarely been used in living memory to describe domestic riots, seems unlikely to have been a coincidence.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
In the immediate aftermath of the January 6th riots, there was what appeared to be a coordinated campaign to get as many people as possible to use the word "insurrection" to describe it.
This never occurred to me at the time, but were Democrats playing the long game here, trying to build a consensus that Trump had engaged in insurrection and thus was disqualified to run again in 2024?
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Huh?
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
I was recently wondering why the orders of magnitude for units of length, volume, and mass don't line up. 0.001m^3 = 1L = 1,000g, for water at 4°C. Why aren't they defined such that 1m^3 = 1L = 1g? If we leave the liter as is, this would require redefining the meter to be equal to a current decimeter, and gram to a current kilogram.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Parties are private organizations, though. They can just disregard the Colorado primary in deciding which candidate to back in the general election, can't they?
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Is there something serious there for Biden to answer?
Biden refused to collect interest on student loans for nearly three years, and tried to outright cancel them before the Supreme Court told him to cut it out, and then he immediately got to work on trying to do it again.
In a sane world, the President unilaterally misappropriating hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off his base would be clear grounds for impeachment and prosecution, but we don't live in that world, so I guess they're going to try to tie him to his son's shenanigans.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Are they socialist left, or just feminist left?
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Wasn't ye plural?
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
To whence
This is even worse than "from whence!"
Hence/thence/whence mean "from this/that/which place," so "from whence" is redundant, and "to whence" is nonsensical.
Hither/thither/whither/yonder indicate destination, so you might ask a passerby "Whence have you come, and whither are you going," though I suppose the contemporary verb conjugations might have been different.
So the question is whither to roll back the clock. Whence to roll back the clock? Hence, obviously.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
The Law of Merited Impossibility wasn't what I was thinking of, because it was definitely a sequence of assertions, shifting over time as earlier stages become untenable. The Narcissist's Prayer is much more similar to what I had in mind. The name doesn't ring a bell, but maybe that was it.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
My understanding is that cognitive skill development is fairly specific, and that research into far transfer from games (or anything) to unrelated cognitive tasks has pretty much been a total bust.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Most people here will be familiar with the "This never happens...actually it's a good thing!" sequence. Is there a name for this? I feel like I've heard a name for it before, but I can't remember where (probably here) or what it was.
Also, does anyone know where this was first described?
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Oh, also it helps if you spend a decade learning Japanese first, but not as much as you might think.
With programmers you can get some degree of bilateral monopoly power, where a long-time employee of a firm has a lot of firm-specific knowledge, which is very valuable to the firm but not to anyone else. This the programmer has something unique to offer the firm, and the firm is the only one willing to pay for it.
This is probably more likely to happen at non-tech firms, as tech firms are better at making sure that no crucial software is exclusively maintained by one person.
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