ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
15d ago
Woman or bear: would you rather have to deal with a bear, or a woman who potentially has no water, food, or gear and needs your help to get to safety? I feel like the latter is more likely to ruin my day in the woods.
It's all just signalling, though; at most 1% would take the bear. Plenty of women go on hikes in the woods and regularly share the space with men without issue or note, and the few who encounter a bear would typically throw a fit over it. I read it as low-key trolling of men more than anything else. (And I have to admit, it's at least a little bit funny to see some men seemingly taking the question at face value and getting testy over something that obviously bears no relation to reality.) It's like someone joking they'd rather have a blind person drive them around than someone from California.
One post I've always puzzled over: Ozy's Cis By Default.
I've never felt like I'm a man, nor have I ever felt like I'm a woman. Some would have it that since I don't identify as a man or a woman, that must mean I identify as agender! But that sounds just as silly to me as identifying as either a man or woman: I don't identify as anything. The only time I think of it is probably in the context of trans discussions, and I always come to the same conclusion: a shrug. Perhaps gender agnosticism? Of course, if a medical professional asks my sex, I say a man, but that's about communicating a constellation of physical traits to others to make interfacing with the world more convenient, not how I identify my self in my inner monologue. If tomorrow I woke up as a woman, I am pretty confident that my primary reaction would only be "damn, this is going to be a lot of obnoxious paperwork to deal with."
And so I'm Ozy's "cis by default." And if someone (cis or trans) wants to say they identify as something, my reaction is... okay, sure, I guess that's neat. I'd file away in my head that that person likes to be labeled as a Woman or Man or whatever, politely humor that label, and get on with my life. It's no different than someone saying that they're a proud Catalonian or a brony or a Yankees fan.
What I struggle with is that I get the sense that that's something many trans activists aren't okay with: there's a demand that gender be recognized as having some deep metaphysical reality (trans women are women!). And so when Ozy says
We simply have to explain to cis-by-default people what a gender identity is
I say... yes, please do. Because as far as I can tell, it's either completely undefinable or the desire to act out the opposite gender role, with the same person switching between those two options depending on what's rhetorically convenient at the moment.
And it makes me sad, because I've always wanted to see gender roles become less rigid, not more. What I fear is that people who deviate from increasingly narrow gender roles are going to be funneled into an increasingly narrow gender role of the opposite sex, which is every bit as much oppressive as a father who berates his son for playing with dolls.
Depends on the exact population involved, but blue at least sometimes.
Suppose it's a population of two: you and your spouse. An exact tie goes to red. You have no way to collaborate beforehand (e.g. both of you have been taken to separate rooms that are totally isolated from one another). Which do you choose?
Without having discussed the situation beforehand, there is a nonzero chance my wife would choose blue. So I choose blue. If I die, well, I die. The key to an optimal outcome here and in life is to develop the character to choose blue and develop a community who chooses blue. Reducing everything to a calculation of the optimal individualist outcome ends up degrading the spirit and the self. In a way, committing to choose blue is the selfish, personal utility-optimizing choice, because it means you're the type of person who chooses blue which is what enables the existence of the community, without which the individual life is empty and meaningless.
If we are talking the general population, it becomes a lot trickier. But consider two variants of the original scenario: one where the cutoff is 0.1%, and one where the cutoff is 99.9%. With 99.9% the choice is obviously red, and with 0.1% the choice is (a bit less obviously, but still obviously to me) blue. It's not clear to me where the cutoff is, but it does show that it isn't something you can decide based purely on first principles. You need data about the health and the quality of the community. For the USA, my guy reaction is a cutoff of around 10%, though that's just based on feels.
ThenElection
11mo ago
The "Poor Unfortunate Souls" change is odd. Ursula is a villain, and it doesn't take any leaps of insight to realize that she's not someone to be emulated. If anything, it'd be a more effective feminist message if her anti-feminist advice was shown to be a counterproductive part of her cynical ploy.
I think adding physical fitness measures as metrics for college admissions would actually decrease Black admissions on the timescale of two or three years. The second they're added, every current academic try-hard would shift priorities to working on those things, and it's actually an objective metric that can't be gamed (by applicants and admissions officers) as much as e.g. GPA or extra curricular padding. I wouldn't be surprised if switching to 1-mile time as the sole criterion of admission would select more strongly for IQ than the current system.
Even now, the savvier people deadset on prestige education brands know that excelling in some obscure sport is one of the best ways to get a meaningful edge in the admissions game.
That suggests an interesting speculative question: how often have assassins shifted the course of world history toward something they would have preferred, making the assassination "rational" in some sense?
Most of the time, the effect seems to be neutral at best. Princip did nothing for Serbian nationalism. Goatse provided a founding myth for a secular, not Hindu, state. James Earl Ray didn't kill the Civil Rights Movement but birthed a martyr. Charitably, Brutus may have delayed empire for a decade or so. Who knows what Oswald's political opinions were, but it's almost certain that they didn't come to fruition.
The only effective assassination I can really think of is Booth's. He managed to eliminate a politician who was a genuine driving force toward something the "deep state" wasn't particularly interested in, and it made the Reconstruction stillborn, with a new President not particularly interested in tackling a hard problem anyways. It was going to be a hard slog anyways, but he killed it with a bullet.
Maybe there were some Russian anarchists who maybe helped the serfs a bit?
Explicit note for any insane Motteizans (and lurking Feds): even ignoring morality, most of the time assassination seems useless at best and counterproductive at worst.
ThenElection
7mo ago
But you can easily adjust for income: speculate about the average difference in income that's "natural" and adjust for it. Which is exactly what is done for lifespan. It might be flawed, but as you point out repeatedly the index is full of flaws and can still be useful. Why do it for one and not the other?
ThenElection
7mo ago
I am curious: the hotel workers' union organized the petition, but I have a hard time imagining it originates from the rank and file. Hotels would presumably have to hire significantly more staff to handle this, but 1) existing workers would have to deal with homeless people and 2) it would almost certainly reduce the proportion of their work that results in tips. If you're an existing worker, what's the advantage here?
ThenElection
11mo ago
5'3" here, and it's not quite that bad. Fit, but six pack only visible part of the year; not particularly charismatic and arguably mildly on the spectrum; less than half a million per year. I do make time for partners, and most people would agree they're conventionally attractive. It does take a lot more work than if I were a foot taller. TBQH the biggest issue in my dating history has been getting taken off the market for long periods by people who didn't really appreciate me because I thought I couldn't do any better.
ThenElection
3mo ago
since the level of pre-meditation and personal desire makes it qualitatively different to say, treating someone who tried to commit suicide because of mental illness.
Isn't something like nullification a pretty solid indicator of mental illness? FWIW I agree that we should give more sympathy/pity to people who attempt suicide, but I have a hard time identifying the difference.
Maybe the usually higher level of pre-meditation and planning plays a role, but I'd still sympathize more with someone who planned a suicide attempt over months than someone who planned and received a nullification over the course of a day or two.
ThenElection
8mo ago
besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing
It got me to wondering, why is New Mexico more left wing than the surrounding states? I had two hypotheses: indigenous population and government employment.
Looking up indigenous population, New Mexico is third in the nation, at 10.86%. And looking up government employment, New Mexico is also third in the nation at 22.2%. The combination of the two seems initially compelling.
Looking at other states, however, seems to refute both hypotheses. In terms of both, Alaska trounces New Mexico, taking the top spot in both at 19.99% and 24.6% respectively despite being significantly less left-wing. I can buy that it's kinda sorta a special case. But at second place are Oklahoma at 13.2% and Wyoming at 24.1% respectively. (Oklahoma is 6th in government employees at 20.6% and Wyoming is 8th in indigenous population at 3.5%).
Curious if anyone has other explanations.
And most importantly, Russia can never be a ‘strategic check’ on China’s designs in East Asia. What does Vivek think he can do, get Putin to invade Manchuria in case Gyna threatens to bomb Taiwan?
One of the biggest limitations China has is a dependence on imports of oil and natural gas; if those are cut off sufficiently, any invasion of Taiwan is stillborn (and Xi runs the risk of his head ending up on a pike). Russia (and areas in Central Asia in which it has a lot of influence) is a very important backstop; with Malacca closed off, land-based imports of oil would still allow China to wage a war on the scale of a couple years instead of months. Russia offering a credible promise not to export fossil fuels to China would be worth a lot, if it were possible.
ThenElection
5mo ago
If they see public schools as a problem, they’ll do whatever they have to do to route around the problem.
At a party last week, I was chatting with a liberal couple whose kid will be starting public high school in a couple years. The place I live uses a lottery system: you can end up with your kid assigned to any school in the city, many of which are bad. I asked, what if you end up with a bad (academically failing, unsafe) school? Their response (after some throat clearing that no school is bad) is that they are committed to public schooling, and no matter which one he gets sent to or if he'd prefer a different one, they'll send him there.
I can get this mindset as a cope, if you don't have resources. But they do have resources and could easily afford any of the well-regarded private schools. My unsaid thought was "that's child abuse."
ThenElection
6mo ago
I would be curious to see the efficacy of therapy on reducing suicide rates among men in particular. I imagine it's tricky to disentangle selection effects: people who go to therapy are more likely to be suicidal than the general population, but suicidal individuals who go to therapy are probably less suicidal than suicidal people who don't go to therapy.
Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women. Enough to make it have no effect? Not sure.
the ability of a society to reduce the risk of death from childbirth is precisely the type of thing that is meant by "development"
And what of the ability of society to reduce the risk from male-specific pathologies? Pregnancy is, of course, even more absolute and immutable than any other biological differences men have, and yet we can (and should!) penalize countries that have a high mother mortality during childbirth, not correct it out of the statistics by omitting women who die during childbirth from calculations of female lifespan.
And, we have some idea of how big the difference is; for example, it seems to have been about 5 years in the US for decades
As I mention elsewhere, people in the top 1% in the US have a gap of 1.5 years. Entire countries have a gap of 3 years. And gender-based discrimination hasn't been eliminated in any of those groups.
In contrast, income differences afaik have not reached a steady state for decades.
In fact, the income gap in the US has been stable for at least two decades. See https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-enduring-grip-of-the-gender-pay-gap/. So, if we really want to go with stable differences as the measure for natural state of the world, we should assume a ~20% pay gap as parity.
ThenElection
2mo ago
An internal locus of control gives you better outcomes, regardless of how valid a particular complaint is. Even if it is insanity, it's a useful insanity.
I have no idea if the particular woman in the example above actually faced unfairness or not (she probably has; at some point we all have). But I do know she'd be in a better position, financially and psychologically, if she spent less time introspecting about how mean and terrible and unjust the world is to her and more time embracing her agency.
One hypothesis is that it's due to the allegations of sexual abuse from his sister. But she made them a relative aeon ago, they didn't gain traction, and this isn't the kind of departure you'd see from that. Plus, another employee/board member was removed.
My guess is fraud or IP theft.
ThenElection
7mo ago
As noted previously, the propensity to get murdered or die in accidents is part of the biology of being a young male.
The propensity to die in childbirth is part of the biology of being a female. If we make social choices that result in high murder and accident rates that disproportionately affect men, then we as a society have a gender inequitable social choices, every bit as much as if we made social choices that resulted in more deaths during pregnancy among women.
But the index can't have a different adjustment for every country, so it tries to come up with a global average.
If every country has a different "natural" gap in lifespans between men and women, why have it as part of the index at all? The only meaningful metric would be the difference between actual gap per country and natural gap per country, so you'd need an adjustment term for every country regardless. Assuming a universal, constant 5 year natural gap adds zero information over a universal, constant 0 year gap (or, for that matter, a 10 year gap, or 20 year gap, etc.); it just benefits those countries whose actual gap is close to the constant at the expense of those that happen to be far from the constant.
So, it does not seem that the income gap has been stable for 20 years.
A fair point.
There are obviously systems that would select more strongly for IQ than mile time, like test scores and GPA. But that's not our current system: people are first binned into categories based on their race, and only then do test scores and GPA come into play. What I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised if the mile time metric would manage to better select for IQ, even without the more direct signals from GPA and test scores, because it would drop the binning step. An auxiliary hypothesis needed for this to work is the mile time would still be correlated with IQ, with the delta between it and better measures being smaller than what's introduced by the binning.
There are diligence, ability to cheat, and family income effects that would be captured by mile times, which are themselves positively correlated with IQ.
Name any stupid war, and people will always ask why did the countries keep on fighting even though it was obviously to everyone's detriment. Who cares about Alsace-Lorraine or Kashmir, when it would be better for everyone involved if they just quit fighting and focused on the pragmatics of making money and living life in a stable environment?
Then you have Ukraine, and all of a sudden the most important thing in the world is maps from centuries ago or maintaining a precedent for the liberal world order, and everyone rallies around the idea that we must make massive sacrifices for a bit of soil. ("We," in this context, is the kind of we that is mostly composed of young Russian and Ukrainian men, not the person making the statement.)
ThenElection
3mo ago
From the original Vice article:
The document says that Google terminated 36 employees in 2020 for security-related issues. Eighty-six percent of all security-related allegations against employees included mishandling of confidential information, such as the transfer of internal-only information to outside parties. Ten percent of all allegations in 2020 concerned misuse of systems, which can include accessing user or employee data in violation of Google's own policies, helping others to access that data, or modifying or deleting user or employee data, according to the document.
So, it's a bit hard to parse without the actual numbers, but it appears that of 36 security incidents, 31 (86%) were Google employees leaking confidential corporate information (ironically, including the document leaked to the Vice reporter). 4 of them were misuse of systems (which includes but is not limited to accessing user or employee data). This is actually pretty amazing, considering how many Google employees there are and the scale of data that Google collects. You might say "well, that's how many were caught," but it's very likely the majority of cases are caught (all major systems at Google have every user data access logged and audited, though I suppose some minor systems that no one uses might not have that set up).
I think it's more productive to imagine who Gavin Newsom might have appointed, given political constraints and his national ambitions.
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They have to be a solid Democrat. This is uninteresting and would apply just as much to a Republican appointing a replacement for a Republican Senator.
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They can't be someone with ambitions for the seat. This is a bit less obvious, but choosing a particular candidate for the seat gives them a substantial advantage against rivals for the seat and generates bad blood.
2a) They can't be someone who plausibly would have ambitions for the seat. Once appointed, the Senator can very well say "actually I am going to run," which they will if it's best for their political ambitions. There'd be a bloody primary, but the appointee would know that should they win, everyone will rally around them (exact calculations complicated by California's jungle primary system). Newsom, on the other hand, has to deal with the fallout of causing a nasty, bloody primary.
So Newsom has to choose someone who 1) is a solid Democrat and 2) has absolutely no political base within California for any ambitions. Within those constraints, why not choose the person who earns you the most diversity points? And that's how you land on Butler. The fact that she's an out-of-state apparatchik is a plus in that constraint context, if anything.
My personal preference, for what it's worth, would have been James Sauls, Feinstein's Chief of Staff. Satisfies all the constraints and provides continuity of service in the meantime.
ThenElection
8mo ago
draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating
I had to look this up to see what was actually meant by this: I don't think even the zaniest urologist would make this claim.
Apparently, the radiocarbon testing and DNA testing were separate, unrelated tests, with radiocarbon dating suggesting a date of 1700 years ago when these poor wayward alien souls got lost in a pile of algae muck. And the DNA evidence suggest that a full 30% of the DNA specimen was "unknown" and therefore of extraterrestrial origin, since only 70% matches terrestrial sources. Presumably it's some alien-human hybrid.
ThenElection
8mo ago
Is there evidence that Disney suffered O($10B) from the DeSantis fight? I don't think it's really penetrated among the biggest Disney consumers (children and women obsessed with princess fantasies). Even the fact that it's in a rut putting out boring, derivative content is probably a bigger factor.
I've not followed this closely, but are the tickets offered on a voluntary basis?
It seems like if they were and food and water were provided, it would sharpen the critique against the target cities with the exact same effect. Arguably that might make the posturing seem less "tough," but I would guess that's not nearly as important when it comes to Republican primaries as is embarrassing Democrats.
Then again, who knows if those details would actually even be reported. I don't know if I can trust ABC to fact check someone saying the migrants were sent without food and water.
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