ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
17hr ago
Do men actually ever do things like this? Smollett is kind of close, but he reads a bit differently to me: he wasn't seriously injured, and he seemed to more be trying to get negotiating leverage for his career than sacrificing himself for the greater benefit of the Cause.
ThenElection
17hr ago
Everything old is new again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Todd_mugging_hoax
On October 22, 2008, Todd claimed that she was robbed at knifepoint by a "six-foot-four African American of medium build, dressed in dark clothes wearing shiny shoes" at a Citizens Bank ATM in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh. She also alleged that after the robber saw a McCain bumper sticker on Todd's car, he assaulted her, cut a reversed letter B into her cheek, and told her "you are going to be a Barack supporter."
ThenElection
20hr ago
IIRC the dumbing down wasn't so much in removing calculus entirely, but setting aside time to review concepts like derivatives and integrals and generally setting a much slower pace for the class, with gratuitous handholding.
Comparatively, I took the same freshman physics sequence at the same university decades ago, and it included Hamiltonian mechanics the first quarter. When I mentioned this to her, she laughed: the students would absolutely not be reaching that same level.
The most troubling thing is that, in theory, the students all had passed the prereqs (a year of high school calculus, high school physics). But she had no idea how a solid third of them had managed to satisfy those prereqs.
ThenElection
21hr ago
I remember two or three years ago, a friend of mine (then working on her physics PhD) was having to TA the intro physics sequence for majors at a highly prestigious undergraduate program. But the freshmen were wildly unprepared, struggling even with simple calculus. She and her fellow TAs brought it up with the professor: the team wanted to simply fail them. But that was impossible, because various administrators decided that teaching physics (again, to would-be physics majors) with calculus was too harsh and cruel to be allowed. So they had to dumb down the problem sets and class, and even solve upcoming exam problems for students who came to office hours.
Any class can be dumbed down if you try hard enough.
For one, men have much greater variation than women: the worst men will mess up your life more than the worst women. That's not to diminish that there are plenty of pretty bad women out there, but, statistically, if a member of a couple is being killed, it's usually the wife by the husband.
For two, after a divorce, a man can more easily start over and find another high quality wife. A single mom with kids may find someone else, but she'll have to limit her expectations of a mate much more than the man does.
Alimony exists and is often unfair, but it does nothing to help women facing the consequences of bad partner choices: he will not pay alimony or child support, and he certainly doesn't have a house to be granted to you.
If the husband is significantly above average, the calculation changes substantially, but most women can't marry men who are significantly above average.
ThenElection
2d ago
This requires taking a gamble on the other person's capabilities/potential.
It's true, but to be fair to women, this gamble is much higher stakes than for men. If she makes a wrong decision, the consequences for her are worse (in terms of finding a good mate to build a life with). Your last point is critical to making that kind of system work, but the culture generally makes that an uphill climb.
Yeah, though it's a bit broader. Lots of black people who have a couple years under their belt also hold it (with the ending welfare dependency part being the most likely exception). The issue is that, although lots of people hold this view or adjacent ones, no one actually votes based on it.
I just saw this poll about attitudes among Oakland voters: https://www.oaklandchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025PollResults.pdf
Some interesting bits: it's black voters who most strongly want stronger police presence (78%), with white people (60%) being much more split. And, maybe a bit more surprisingly, black voters also want more tax cuts for businesses (88%) than white people.
It's important to not let the media define black people by elevating only those ones who most flatter white progressive views.
ThenElection
6d ago
MS still employs a meaningful number of engineers dedicated to security patches for XP.
ThenElection
6d ago
The original accelerationist.
Though, I'd question whether he really qualifies as a rightist, at least in his CCRU days when he was at his most creative, amphetamine-fueled, writhing-on-the-floor best. He treated all politics and political programs as essentially epiphenomena of the deeper process: technocapital. He was a cynic and a nihilist, not a partisan.
ThenElection
6d ago
I've got an old Fuchsia prototype laying around in my office somewhere. And IIRC some Nest devices are running it.
ThenElection
6d ago
There's a coherent anti-racism that doesn't lead to evil-white-menism.
Through some non-genetic differences (endowment of resources, geography, simple good luck), some civilizations significantly surpassed others. This led to things like colonialism and slavery initially, because historically pretty much everyone is happy to use violence to improve their own position.
Eventually, white Americans abolished slavery. But whites and blacks still had different endowments, and that affects their descendents. And, more importantly, slavery left deep scars on black culture, breaking up families and opposing education. Later on, government programs (intentionally or not) exacerbated the toxic parts of that culture, and that's how we get to the sorry state of the present.
This isn't even a particularly out there take, and it was fairly widespread in the 90s (and lives on to this day, albeit not in the halls of government, media, and academia). The issue is that this argument/analysis doesn't suggest any plausible political program--"we are going to end welfare dependency, invest in policing minority areas to protect them from crime, and encourage stable family formation" has approximately zero takers, for whatever reason.
ThenElection
7d ago
The mathematical probability is almost a distraction and doesn't help intuition; even people who know the "right" answer don't have great intuition to transfer it to other problems.
This is basically the same intuition building as what you did, but made much clearer. Suppose you have a thousand doors instead of just three, you choose one, and then 998 are eliminated. Do you switch?
My first inclination was to blame the COVID-era shutdown of schools. It fits the timeframe of the sharp decline well; the great down leveling of schools, although terrible, has been going on for decades and doesn't explain the cliff.
UCSD isn't just finding inability to perform high school math, though; it's had to start teaching remedial classes in middle school and even elementary school level math.
Maybe having no education in high school causes skills to decay? I wonder if these kids scored as competent in middle school math when they started high school; my bet is that they did, though probably marginally, and they've simply regressed.
We should have empathy for the kids, though: they've experienced actual harm, as opposed to the imagined abstract harm of disparate impact. Does give me an increased feeling of job security.
My wife and I were discussing something related yesterday: the question of the day was have we become Boomers, those most maligned of people.
Her little sister, a teacher, has made a series of bad decisions, and now wants to embrace a "tradwife" lifestyle. The issue is her boyfriend has no job. He's currently "studying" social media late into the hours of the night (as daytimes are reserved for chilling at the beach) so that he can become an influencer; he has no money and relies on her for housing, transportation, and food. They want to have kids ASAP and travel the world. And they are both in their early 30s.
We are not fans of this. But, are we just yelling at kids like old people now, not understanding all their challenges?
I don't know whether this is new or not, and whether it'd make me feel better or worse if it was new or not. All I know is that the kids are not all right.
ThenElection
11d ago
What's striking about this to me is that there was zero advantage in fabricating this video. There's about a million other different ways for the media to rally the troops which are totally above board (at least by media standards): dark insinuations, taking things wildly out of context, five degrees of Kevin Bacon, etc. And they'd have had the same effect, without any risk of blowback. Is there anything in the dossier about how exactly the decision was made to create and release the video?
I was curious enough about this to look up Josephson's water memory views, and I found this letter to a critical editor:
Molecular memory
Sir: Lionel MD gram’s account of Jacques Benveniste’s research (“The memory of molecules", 19 March) failed to make it clear that the experiment discussed, where a biological signal is recorded, transmitted over the Internet, and applied to water elsewhere to regenerate the biological effects of the source, is not just an idea but rather an experiment that has already been carried out, with impressive results (see Benveniste’s web pages at ioimo.digibio.com).
We invited him to describe his work at our weekly colloquium to learn more about the research, which seems both scientifically interesting and potentially of considerable practical importance - while the results claimed may seem surprising, the Cavendish Laboratory has been host to many surprising discoveries during the 125 years of its existence, and the controversial nature of the claims was not seen as good cause to follow the herd and veto his making a presentation.
In regard to the Nature condemnation of 1988, my conclusion at that time was that its authors had made an insufficient case for its headline claim “High- dilution experiments a delusion”, and nothing since has led me to see the frequent denunciations of the work as anything other than the hysteria that frequently accompanies claims that challenge the orthodox point of view.
The manifestations of scientific prejudice, well documented by Michel Schiff in the book The Memory of Water, can be extraordinary; another reason why we felt it important to invite Dr Benveniste to talk at our colloquium and be able to present his results to scientists in an uncensored form. I am grateful to The Independent for following on with its article.
Professor BRIAN JOSEPHSON Cavendish Laboratory Department of Physics University of Cambridge
Maybe crank curious, not an outright crank himself?
ThenElection
14d ago
Most men in bio are short because they can’t get women, but because you’re tall I know you’re genuinely interested in bio
What, concretely, bothers you about this? (Are you a height-challenged guy?)
Is it that he seems to hold a belief that shorter guys compensate for a lack of height by choosing scientific occupations? I'm not sure about this, but I'm almost curious enough to pull NLSY data on height and major to find out.
Or is it that you object to the idea that occupational groups show differences in their anthropometric measurements at all? If so, these are very well-attested in the literature: managers, professionals, and especially politicians are all taller than average.
Or is it just that he's not treating possible discrimination in a very somber, serious tone? If so, whenever Obama dies, will you be posting here about how he made fun of Buttigieg and said he could never become President because he's too short?
ThenElection
14d ago
If we want to discuss the hypothesis seriously, not necessarily. Is it merely the presence of melanin? Absolute sunlight exposure? Excess exposure to sunlight modulated by level of presence of melanin? Which hypothesis do you want to debate?
ThenElection
16d ago
Being glad that you're not the subject of someone is not the same as impropriety on the part of the person, though.
I'm reminded of Michael Crichton. He wrote a book that was critical of global warming hysteria. An editor of the New Republic stridently criticized it for that. In his next book, Crichton featured a (minor) character with the same name as the editor, with the same education and occupation. And he had that character be a pedophile with an extraordinarily small dick, whose only real characterization is someone who feels an urge to rape his fiance's infant child. Crichton points out that, despite the character's cosmically small dick, he managed to cause severe anal tearing in the infant child. Naturally, the editor sharing the character's name threw a hissy fit.
It's fair to say that this is much less sympathetic than the situation in the OP, maximally so, with clearly no literary value and just a way for Crichton to lash out at a critical review. But did Crichton deserve legal sanction for this? No. The only relevant critique is a literary one: did this help the story? It didn't, but to have good fiction, we need to reserve the space for authors to be petty assholes.
ThenElection
16d ago
The "it made him kill himself!" sympathy mongering drives me mad. I don't take a strict view here--I think people can bear moral blame for someone else's suicide. But in this particular case, based on what we know and plausible inferences, his (hypothetical) suicide is all on him. Maybe if the story was published, and all his family and friends and workplace spontaneously disowned him, there'd be moral blame to share around. (Mostly on those people, though, not the story writer.) But that seems unlikely to be the case.
ThenElection
16d ago
How can it be biased? It's a work of fiction; it either speaks to the reader or doesn't, and the characters' level of realism either works or it doesn't. How the author decides to market it is irrelevant.
I read it at the time, and it seemed serviceable, but not amazing. It probably did take off because it was constructed to be in-tune with the times, but I don't see why that matters. The author made every effort for it to not be treated as anything real (and parts, particularly the last couple lines, rang so false that I don't see how anyone thought it could be real).
If the guy did kill himself and did it because of the story... well, hate to be an asshole, but that's on him. His sense of self-worth shouldn't be dependent on whether the New Yorker publishes a story very loosely inspired by an event in his life, when everyone involved knows it didn't go down as portrayed.
ThenElection
22d ago
I have one friend from the DR, and he always strenuously objects to being called black (or anything on the treadmill). He's Dominican.
Another Chotiner classic, of him interviewing the President of the SFUSD school board:
Chotiner: So none of the errors that I read to you about previous entries made you worried that maybe this was done in a slightly haphazard way?
Gabriela Lopez: No, because I’ve already shared with you that the people who have contributed to this process are also part of a community that is taking it as seriously as we would want them to. And they’re contributing through diverse perspectives and experiences that are often not included, and that we need to acknowledge.
Chotiner: I’m not quite sure what that means when we are talking about things that did or didn’t happen.
Lopez: I think what you’re pointing to and what I keep hearing is you’re trying to undermine the work that has been done through this process. And I’m moving away from the idea that it was haphazard.
This is about as hostile as he ever gets. His specialty is asking a question, getting nonsense back, asking what do you mean, and leading the interviewee to a total trainwreck.
ThenElection
22d ago
Not many people who shove someone to have them hit their head and die on a hard surface actually intend to kill the person, though; it's a result of a combination of ignorance and bad judgment, as opposed to trying to stab you or drawing a gun on you. The threat profile is different, a kind of action that we're adapted to think of as a low escalation part of conflict but in our modern built environments is often deadly. And by the time you're thinking of drawing your own deadly weapon, the threat is past if it was this kind of bad judgment (though, if you're about to be curb stomped...)
The narrative here is more or less correct, though you're framing it in a pretty warped way. ACT-UP had a very hostile relationship with the NIH (and FDA). Their primary motivation was, in fact, to get drugs approved faster and to allow people to receive drugs even when enrolled in trials. From their list of demands from their first mass demonstration:
- Immediate release by the Federal Food & Drug Administration of drugs that might help save our lives.
- Immediate abolishment of cruel double-blind studies wherein some get the new drugs and some don't.
That is, they were literally demand number one and demand number two, ahead of things like public education campaigns and anti-discrimination laws.
The NIH, of which Fauci was the point person on AIDs, did initially oppose these things, partially from scientific principle, partially bureaucratic inertia. This extended from a period starting from the formation of ACT-UP through the end of the 80s.
Fauci had a surprisingly warm relationship with at least some ACT-UP leadership, and he was one of the people in the NIH eventually pushing for their goals (such as the parallel track), but publicly he was, in fact, the big bad, and the rhetoric around his role was extremely heated, including being complicit in their deaths.
Grokipedia gets this core narrative correct, while Wikipedia... Doesn't say anything at all about it.
I agree somewhat, but that is too optimistic. The reason the intro sequence for physics majors was fast and rigorous is that later courses all built on it. If someone only completed the intro sequence their second year, it wouldn't be impossible to finish all the major requirements in four years, but it'd be much more difficult, leave no room for later error, and electives would be minimal.
I also somewhat doubt that the ~1/3 of people having the most trouble would have a good grasp of it after taking it a second time, though here I'm less sure. If it was purely because high schools failed at preparing students because of COVID etc., I can see how a retake could be successful.
We do need to get more comfortable at telling students "you don't have the aptitude for it, we encourage you to do something else you have better aptitude for."
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