alchemist
1yr ago
Amen, brother. I just so don't give a shit. I realize that's a luxury that some don't have (gotta check that privilege), but where I live, there are no masks, no vaccine requirement, you can get one if you want. Yes, it was bad for a while, but they never actually forced it (except maybe for healthcare workers, which was something of an own-goal, and also reasonably understandable to me).
I think Covid broke people's brains in both direction (Bill Gates is implanting chips, and if you don't double-mask outdoors you want to kill my Grandma and give me long Covid).
I guess you're trying to be generous, but it feels like you're taking it too far. I think you really overdo it -- not being obese shouldn't get people big points. Most women don't need to wear much make-up, if any, to still look okay. I don't think applying basic make-up is particularly hard, but perhaps I'm missing the complexity. Hair back in a pony-tail, halfway healthy, and you will be attractive to most men.
Most late teen girls basically can eat crap food and still not get fat (at least according to the older people I talk to now who talk about how they used to be able to eat anything).
(I think women do have a hard time finding someone who values them for more than just their sexual attractiveness, I don't want to downplay that at all, I just want to say in terms of easily getting attention, young women are generally "playing on easy mode" (much as I hate that phrase).)
alchemist
11mo ago
I thought that had to be intentional, and snuck in by the one competent writer on the crew. It was so blatant.
alchemist
1yr ago
You're making sense and The Blade Itself from Abercrombie is also a good grimdark world and trilogy.
alchemist
1yr ago
I tend to agree, but I think you may be taking them too much at face value. If they feel that attraction quickly, they'll also just say -- "I felt a deep connection, like we'd already known each other!" Maybe I'm just too cynical though, or projecting my own take on it -- i.e. I wouldn't want to jump someone I just found attractive, but if I found them attractive and felt something of a connection, I wouldn't need to to know them a long time to get physical -- that would in fact be part of 'getting to know them'.
alchemist
1yr ago
I agree it's a bit too much, but they don't have to be evil to destroy everything. I think many of them have good (if unexamined) intentions, at least at a surface level. I think they still tend to fundamentally destroy things, rather than make them better.
alchemist
1yr ago
I think there's truth to this -- I think Italy, which is another 'modern but antiquated & extreme gender roles' country has one of the lowest rates in Western Europe.
alchemist
1yr ago
So, I watched the first two episodes of the Rings of Power -- and it wasn't that bad.
For the record, I thought Wheel of Time was pretty horrible, and while it was far from the only problem, the woke aspects (forced diversity, all men have to suck, all women have to rock) was definitely a big part of the issue. RoP has some forced diversity as well, but it's somehow not as bad. The black elf is one of the few elves who actually seems attractive and somehow beyond human -- the others come across as Roman Senator types.
Galadriel is a Mary Sue, but I guess she is in the books too. We'll see how her story develops.
I'm not happy with the proto-hobbits, and of course, the one who pushes the rules and is clever and daring is a woman, but that's mostly okay.
Dwarves -- well, of course the woman gives wise council to her buffoon husband, but it was still fairly well done I thought.
The visuals were great, and you did somehow get a sense of fleshed out, interesting and complex world. I'm very cautiously optimistic. Miles and miles ahead of Wheel of Time.
For the record, I'm /u/The-WideningGyre on reddit, but felt like grabbing one of the more common usernames I use on the new Motte.
I'm really disappointed by the weird groupthink shitshow I feel like 'normal' reddit has become, so I will do what I can to support this new Motte. Thanks /u/ZorbaTHut and other creators!
alchemist
1yr ago
The problem is, some -- too many -- do treat them that way, and have banished the use/mention distinction. It's like the Jehovah scene in Monty Python. So rather than risk crazy people trying to ruin your life, people avoid the words.
I prefer to take it further, and talk about either Voldemort or "the letter-after-m word". Well, actually I generally prefer not to talk about it at all, since there are too many rabid, crazy people out there. (yet here I am, oops)
alchemist
1yr ago
I would even find it okay to let current loans be dischargeable in bankruptcy. Maybe you could have some kind of federal support. Changing that incentive seems key to the whole extortion.
alchemist
1yr ago
I mean, it's mono sodium glutamate. That's like, one sodium.
(But seriously, I fail to see how MSG is saltier than salt, or has more sodium. Given glutamate is fairly complex / heavy vs Chlorine, I would assume that it has less Na than NaCl by weight. (But I haven't checked the math))
alchemist
1yr ago
Apparently there are some that live solely in the Tube tunnels, as it stays nice and warm there, year round....
Also, I commend you in your killing of mosquitoes. They and ticks deserve nothing but a swift death!
alchemist
1yr ago
This is exactly the conclusion I came to as well. tailcalled seems more interested in obfuscating and claiming we can't know anything than clarifying and getting closer to the truth (despite occasional protestations of the opposite).
alchemist
1yr ago
Sorry, didn't check your Twitter, as I'm not on it, and don't like it (and don't like following links just to know what someone's talking about; I do like them for references).
I think it would be best to read what people are saying before responding to them.
Write it here, clearly, and I will. Don't send me to Twitter, or your blog (or do, but realize you've lost much of your audience). Reading this, I think you would be better off if you spent less time on Twitter (well, I think that goes for just about everyone...)
I guess if you stated clearly what you think contributes to IQ scores then perhaps we'd mostly agree. [...] What I read from your initial post is that effort was more important than everything else, which seemed clearly wrong. You gave this impression by not specifying how much effect you thought that it had, and by saying people claiming it didn't have an effect "obviously massively contradicts common sense," which is a very strong formulation.
Sorry, the point about how it "obviously massively contradicts common sense" was not meant to be interpreted as a measure of effect size, it was meant to be interpreted literally: as an expression that if I went out and told people that IQ tests don't depend on effort (as HBDers wpuld have me do), then people would conclude that I am delusionally worshipping IQ tests - and as I showed in the thread, it appears that they wpuld be right to conclude that.
I don't think people would conclude that, and I don't think you proved that in this thread. You remind me of the XKCD about using language in a very non-standard way and then feeling clever that they didn't understand you.
I don't really agree that effort is particularly nebulous of a concept. Have you never had the experience of just quickly marking down your first thoughts without wanting to bother thinking them through and not double-checking that they are right?
I get the concept of effort, but I think it's difficult to turn into something where you can say you're giving 20%, 50% 80% effort. But it's a minor point.
I feel like you're not listening to me, and I assume you're feeling the same about me. I think we've both reached our limits of what we think we can convey to the other. I wish you luck and success in better understanding g, IQ tests, HBD, and conservatives in general. My final two requests: work on writing more clearly, and listen more with the intent of understanding, rather than proving why you're right. (I will try to do the same!)
alchemist
1yr ago
"Just about all sex difference correlate with gender equality"
I don't think that's close to right -- it's much too strong, but I admit I haven't seen a lot of data. What I have seen is consistent differences across multiple cultures:
Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests
The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality
Note that the differences tend to be actually larger than many of these suggest at first glance, as there tend to multiple, at-least-partially-independent, so if you take multiple traits at once, the means move further apart.
Scott also has a great discussion on it in Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences
alchemist
1yr ago
No, it's still fairly good advice. If you watch, e.g. the Hacking Google series on YouTube, you'll see the start of the initial Chinese Aurora hack was in fact getting people to click on random links.
The basic idea is that due to weaknesses on some sites (I think XSS -- cross-site scripting is the term) or in other places, you get the people to execute code authenticated as themselves, which sometimes lets you do bad things.
(I am not a front-end person, or a security person, I just have had to follow some of the guidelines and tried to understand why).
alchemist
1yr ago
Sorry, wasn't meant to be cryptic, but it wasn't as easy to find again as I expected. I was referring to Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who is/was a highly decorated (eight honorary law degrees) and celebrated maybe-first-nations judge.
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/mary-ellen-turpel-lafond-indigenous-cree-claims
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/15/world/canada/canada-indigenous-identity-pretendians.html
although I may have been blending it with Carrie Bourassa, who seems to also have faked her way into a senior post (also from Saskatchewan)
https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/carrie-bourassa-allegedly-faked-her-indigenous-identity.html
alchemist
1yr ago
Germany also has an immensely expensive healthcare system.
IIRC correctly, people visited doctors on average more than any other OECD country. I'm also shocked by how common, e.g. MRI devices are in Munich. In BC in Canada there are a few mobile ones that services the entire interior, and there are often month long waits for elective scans (too long, IMO, by the way). Near Munich I was able to get an MRI for my knee the next day.
So, there's at least some fat to be cut.
(In a further out there way, I think there's an unserviced niche of 'low-level' medical care -- basically advanced first aid clinics, where I wish we could have 'associate doctors' trained in 1/3 the time (basically advanced nurses) in clinics, as I think they could handle many 'standard' issues that GPs do (including taking blood for tests and administering vaccines. But that's a whole 'nother area)
alchemist
1yr ago
So, first off, thank you for posting, and apologies in advance if the criticism I'll give comes across as too harsh. You seem to be trying to get more seen and read, so I'm going to try to help.
First -- your writing style doesn't work well for me. It's too abstract, and you don't clearly state your point. For example, your point #1 "Heritability simply does not mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean - because of the phenotypic null hypothesis." What is your point here? What do you think "HBDs want it to mean"? What is the "phenotypic null hypothesis"? It's not good writing to make me chase down you thoughts, especially on other sites, especially before you've proven you're worth the work. I went to that site, and am not much more enlightened. You seem to somewhere make the point "Things influenced by genes often go though non-biological channels". Or maybe "things that look inherited aren't always". Sure, I'd say both are fairly non-controversial. A classic example of the second is, e.g. "speaking French" which looks inherited on the surface, but is clearly not biological. And yes, our environment and society mediate all kinds of things, we live in a complex interconnected world.
Do you have more of a point? I couldn't really tell (of course, that can be on me, but ... I've read and understood a fair number of others on this topic, but not your writing...) I really don't know what your code and diagrams at the end are supposed to show. Summarize your cool conclusion! E.g. "Even though X is not directly responsible, in a naive analysis it looks like it is, exactly like QQQ, which actually is directly responsible. Here's how that can play out ...". I think you're saying something like that, but you don't bother actually saying it (or I missed it).
In any case you sort of seem to be saying "we can't figure anything out" which both seems wrong, and kind of useless. Do you apply this to all such studies? Maybe we should -- I admit, I tend to write off almost of all psychological and sociological studies these days, because they seem so ideologically captured. On the other hand, between statistics, twin studies (and separated twin studies), and sibling studies, we seem to be able to do a pretty good job on some things.
Second -- you seem to be coming at this from a place of significant bias. "Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes," is an incredibly weak straw-man, it's basically "Everyone I disagree with is a racist". Is that really the best you can do, in terms of extending charity to the people you disagree with? I personally, like most of the others here, see the acknowledgement of group differences (and for what it's worth, I don't really care much if it's culture or biology, and both seem taboo anyway) as primarily an alternative for differing outcomes, without discrimination being the ONLY explanation.
I'm in tech. There aren't many women, nor many black people. This is ascribed to sexism and racism, which doesn't match what I've seen, experienced, or heard from the affected people (from women at least; I haven't asked many black colleagues about racism). I see my company following policy to massively privilege both groups, and to blame white cis-men for all the problems, and those both seem wrong, and even damaging to me (and to a number of people in the targeted groups, e.g. women who just want to be SWEs, and not feel they got their role because of their sex, and no, I'm not concern trolling, the suspicion around the privileging is real). I see differing interests (and maybe ability at the margins) and degrees as the main reasons for the differing representation, but we're not allowed to notice that, as "It's not the pipeline". James Damore got fired for trying to make this point.
You also see this censorship of blasphemy in the US, especially around crime, where apparently pointing out some choice statistics around violent crime is considered a hate crime. (Again, FWIW, I'd consider those stats more a cultural issue, but it's a pretty important one, upstream of the 'getting shot by police' issue).
So anyway, what I'd like from you, and I think would benefit you, is to tighten up your writing -- make your point first, then provide an explanation of it (it's a classic academic / systemic thinker error to do it the other way around). Make things more concrete. Work from a specific example and tie your points back to it. People are reluctant to trust generic models, as they are often used to lie (see Abigail Thompson's dissection of Hong-Page's "mathematical proof that diversity trumps ability". There's a nice discussion of it here
Also, try to be more charitable to your outgroup.
Also, as per the community rules, "don't attempt to build consensus", as you do when you write "... which claimed to find that effort does not matter for IQ scores. This obviously massively contradicts common sense,"
No, this doesn't "obviously massively contradict" my common sense, and I think many would disagree. In fact, I thought one of the main points of IQ tests, rather than "effort tests", is that neither effort nor prep makes much of a difference to them. Otherwise, for example, they wouldn't stay very stable over time (which I understand they do). Prep courses would also have more value, which I don't think do. Do you think when people can't make intellectual leaps others do, they just aren't trying hard enough in that particular moment? I think most would agree effort plays some role -- if I don't care or try at all on an IQ tests, and answer at random, I'll have a low score. If I try to be fast and disciplined, and use all my test-taking savvy, I'll probably (?) do better than if I just breeze through (although I wonder). But basically, once you're trying to do well, it's not really clear what "trying harder" even means on IQ test. It's not like pushing on a bar (and honestly, even for that the range where trying, vs training and genes and drugs, makes a difference, is pretty small in that moment. If I can barely do one pull-up, trying really hard might mean I do one, or two, but I'm generally not going to be able to do 10). So anyway, stop claiming consensus on things people will disagree on (especially things where your "consensus" seems to go against standard definitions).
I can't really comment on your main article, because I don't understand it beyond "assigning causation back to genes is tricky", which, I agree with, but, if that is your point, isn't a very exciting one, nor is the the pwn you seem to think it is. But if you have a different point, please state it clearly and simply, with a concrete example, and I'll try to address it.
alchemist
1yr ago
"Confidence - 100% - I don't get these things wrong"
Do you know that saying something like that makes me lose confidence in you? No one should be 100% confident about vague future things, and not realizing that is a pretty big strike against you.
(FWIW, I agree that any housing drop won't be that big -- I think also because there's a global move to finding 'safe assets' (still) and real estate is a pretty good one, at least in bigger cities. I'm only about 60% confident though, because I really don't do much in that economic space.)
alchemist
1yr ago
Meh, FWIW, I think most of the Greens just resisted publicly to appease their base, but didn't really. Habeck has been running around arranging gas deals with UAE and Qatar, and Baerbock has been shipping weapons to the Ukraine, both of which would have been unthinkable for Green's just a year ago. He has scolded the public for wanting unrealistic energy solutions.
Apparently the issue was resolved in four minutes when the cabinet met; hardly the sign of firm opposition.
Perhaps I'm too optimistic, and the anti-nuclear segments are too strong, but I think the Greens have grown up somewhat, due to actually having power and having to deal with a crisis.
Also, the country is facing up to the fact that it's likely to be a tough winter -- many townships in Bavaria are putting out disaster preparedness advisories, warning of potential power and water outages.
alchemist
1yr ago
Well said! I think the fact that the victim is so young is a big part of it.
Euthanasia is illegal in Germany, and so people need to go to Switzerland to do it, and it's pretty awful for everyone involved. They still do it. Some really want to, and I have trouble imagining something more that should be your right to decide over than your own death, if you want it (and considerable effort has been made to ensure it's not a passing desire).
alchemist
1yr ago
And for women it tends to be younger, even though they live longer in pretty much every country in the world (more male privilege!)
The image on the login screen seems quite large -- I have a decent connection normally, but spent 20+s seeing it incrementally load.
Usually you can shrink images signficantly without much quality loss just be encoding differently, e.g. lower quality. I used imagemagick's convert with the following parameters quite successfully (to make 1920px wide image)
convert -quality 65 -resize 1920x> -strip -interlace Plane -sampling-factor 4:2:0
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