coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Not gay but I loved the episode.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Just saying “prosocial actions are necessary” does not magically induce the prosocial action, which is the problem in our cosmopolitan democracy. If prosociality is necessary, we actually need to create the evolutionary underpinnings, otherwise I doubt they will really happen to any meaningful degree. Maybe American parents would not try to conceal their children’s crimes, I have no idea. But America is precisely the country where “families acting for their interests first” is not significantly punished, whereas in ancient societies the descendant’s reputation would be harmed (and so would be their opportunities). In America, if you have the chance to be a Madoff and it sends your kids to the best schools, that is the best evolutionary choice. In ancient societies, it wouldn’t be, because it would affect the child’s reputation, and reputation impacted status, and thus resources and mates. The fact that the children would be punished may lead children to attempt to cover up crimes, but only a small minority of social defection can actually be covered up by one’s children in the first place.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Ancient developed societies had social technology that worked on an evolutionary level. Family name was important, and so the actions of a father would influence the repute of the son. The effect of this was that social defection, from criminality to serious corruption, would not benefit the proliferation of the defector’s genes. A cowardly general or a treasonous noble would reduce their children's opportunity for gene proliferation. Towns in the past were often mono-ethnic, as were many religions, and so civic engagement and “selfless prosociality” would benefit the expansion of one’s extended gene pool. Many human populations evolved prosocial tendencies because such genes were beneficial to the whole, but not necessarily the individual.
It is interesting, but not often stated bluntly, that the culture of the modern West is illogical from an evolutionary standpoint. We are taught not to judge a person by the actions of their parents or kin, and in fact having parents who were antisocial has a sympathetic residue in our media. Because a person’s behavior no longer affects their children’s reputation in any meaningful way (outside of losses from legal action), corruption and perfidy is the evolutionarily correct option in certain cases. It doesn’t matter how many customers you harm, how many people you lie to, or how corrupt you are in a bureaucracy — if you make more money than the legal repercussions take, then your children will go off to a good college and have as high a social standing as before. A Madoff can make off with money and his descendants are not worse as a result, and arguably better than had no corrupt moneys been accrued. (Social shame is essentially limited to the children of conservative politicians who haven’t publicly renounced their parents. Even the children of murderers are given a sympathetic lens.)
Prosocial actions in pre-modern living conditions almost always benefitted the expansion of one’s genes which, in the zero-sum mathematics of mammals, are a kind of dominance-action against other human groups. Helping a homeless person get back to working on a farm may have lead to gene proliferation greater than that of passing up the opportunity. Acting modestly and selflessly, living a simple life of following social rules, would benefit the whole group exorbitantly provided others aren’t defecting from the same standard. Most remarkably, the modern multicultural cosmopolitan America is perhaps the first society in history where prosocial actions are generally against your evolutionary interests. That is, when you don’t signal them to others! The action qua action, undirected to a stranger, is likely going to benefit someone whose genes are too far from yours to benefit your expansion. Even in the Rome of the Roman Empire, groups manly lived in the same neighborhoods, had extended kin groups, had region-locked gods, and in the case of the patrician classes put enormous weight on family/tribal ties. When cross-tribal empathy was practiced, it was so that the stranger would know the goodness of your community — (for instance, failure to be a good host in Greece to a traveler in Greece would dishonor your family and town).
When we talk about the decline in civic engagement, and the bureaucracies that aren’t working for the best interests of the people, and the inefficiencies of ostensibly prosocial organizations that care more about signal than substance, we may want to look at the evolutionary underpinnings of all of our actions. Perhaps we have fashioned ourselves a moral Gordian Knot. We simultaneously value and miss prosocial actions, while forbidding any natural evolutionary impetus for prosocial action. Ironically, the most natural and established methods of prosociality — extended gene nepotism and racism — are the very things that are considered most defective by the cosmopolitan liberal. If this is all true, and there’s no good way to slice this Gordian knot, we will somehow have to devise an advanced capitalist surveillance state that incentivizes substantive prosocial action and not just the signal.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Your linked articles do not criticize Pfizer for corruption with CDC/FDA, but for being capitalist and profit-motivated. I imagine Jacobin, wanting more government regulation, would not want to write a piece about the regulators being corrupt. My point is, again, that Progressives do not see these companies as being fundamentally corrupt — otherwise they would have to discount the CDC/FDA judgment on vaccine and entertain the “reasonable skepticism” of the opted out.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
But it’s not a progressive supposition that Pfizer is corrupt. So the admission does not score any points, compared to something like, “Pfizer needs to work on its diversity”. The more efficient way to establish his identity from his career would be to talk about things that are not his career.
doesn't really implicate this guy as doing something beyond repeating company gossip
It’s not gossip when you’re in the meeting. That’s now, I don’t know, eye witness testimony.
video trickery
Any conservative documentary which uses editing to promote its message (to a populace with a short attention span) will be called trickery. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Binder full of women? The Covington martyrs? “Good people on both sides”? All the media does is trickery.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Where were you during the Fauci worship hours? Normal Democrats put enormous trust in the CDC. This is where the “it’s safe and effective” shilling comes from. If the CDC is corrupt, then none of its judgments are authoritative.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
The “gun-shaped” object was the drone they flew into his house, with a live video feed confirming he was holding it. Imagine you get woken up in the dark by a mini UFO circling your head. A normal person will grab it, and likely not drop it within the 20 seconds the police are commanding you to get outside with your hands up.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
An aside, but there was another video of police brutality released this week. I don’t know if the Memphis video will be worse, but it will be hard to top “flying a drone into your home, telling you to raise your hands, then shooting you several times while your hands are raised.”
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
His admission that Pfizer is in bed with its regulators is important. That’s not something that people make up to brag about on dates, it’s actually the opposite. No one brags about their company being corrupt to a gay liberal on a date, neither would they say that they think Covid leaked from the Wuhan lab. This makes me strongly believe he wasn’t lying about his first claim, either.
I don’t know what Pfizer’s defense will be. “You don’t understand, our director of global research was a token diversity hire” is not something that can be transmitted on CNN.
Even if we were to interpret his remarks as “the idea came up in a meeting for fun but was shut down”, his statement on Pfizer being corrupt is super important!
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
I’d try increasing magnesium and potassium intake just to be sure
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
This is especially true when the criminal community is high in narcissism and fractured into competing gangs, as they see themselves as fundamentally different than their opps (opponents) in character and predestination. The music that they listen to celebrates criminality and are essentially odes to egomania. Once they learn that a single opp committed a crime and got away with it, their competitive egomaniacal drive tells them that they can do the same, even if they know of many instances where other perpetrators were caught.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
We can look at a plain “percent population imprisoned for homicide” rate to loosely determine whether the cohort does indeed contain more violent members (versus, contains violent members who are much more violent). But remember that the chance of a black American getting away with a violent crime is actually much higher than that of a white American, contrary to popular belief. That’s because the cities with the lowest homicide clearance rates are also the cities where a supermajority of homicides are committed by black americans. (If 60% of cleared homicides are black perpetrator, and the city has a homicide clearance rate of 50%, and the uncleared homicides are mostly gang-related, then we can be sure that true (cleared + uncleared) homicide rate is >50% black perpetrator, and we can estimate it would be considerably more). Note that the FBI data on homicides is perfectly fine (pre-change 2021 changes) because while not every town reports their homicides, every high population area does, and the towns that don’t usually just don’t have homicides. My town of 10,000 hasn’t had a homicide since the 80s.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
If you know the thread title, or any sequence of words in the thread, you can search on the 4plebs archive website to try to find it.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Dumb question: the absorption of a water soluble vitamin is not affected if it’s taken with fat, right?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Material conditions of Americans require them to outsource most of the parenting to the State. They are in organized education for all of their high alertness daylight hours Monday through Friday outside of breaks. Mothers who were the primary moral pedagogues of the young in history (see Augustine) are pressured to work stressful jobs and were themselves raised by stressed overtaxed mothers. It’s not feasible for parents and communities to instill real morality in a young who are forced into bureaucratic education and then need to spend the remaining hours studying and checking off college app boxes to obtain a high-status profession. What’s left is the Asian mode of punishing bad results, which is useful for creating fearful and dedicated workers, but will create an essentially immoral population.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
From important metrics we are already degenerated in physical health, mental health, and cultural taste. The cultural promotion of twerking women and naked homosexual men dancing is, for all intents and purposes, the clearest sign of degeneration. The only thing I can imagine worse than that would be if large record companies were signing artists who extolled the value of doing opiates and fentanyl, but luckily Lil Peep is already dead.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
It is fundamentally incorrect reasoning to conclude that a person ought not criticize a bad thing because lesser bad things in the same category occurred before. “All these people caring about the Iroquois Theatre fire didn’t care when houses burnt the year before!” But an especially bad event can prove to us the true risk of a thing. In the case of Tik Tok it is worse for obvious reasons: the format is worse than its predecessors, its popularity is greater than its predecessors, and it can plausibly be weaponized by a geopolitical enemy whose ascent has only recently started to be dealt with. It is clearly worse for a vice to be weaponized by an adversary you are in competition with than not. Because geopolitical dominance is zero-sun.
That’s the logical reason, and here’s the pragmatic: the China element of the story reminds the Public that our everyday habits have maximal consequences, including the risk of geopolitical ruin and worsening quality of life. It reminds them that dominance whether socially or geopolitically is zero-sum. At the same time, it shows the Public that there are alternatives with clearly better results in the young (China’s policies). Lastly, human males have a built-in instinct to fight against an enemy intentionally harming us.
start censoring films and banning pornography
We already do this for the young, let’s hope we expand it.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
No, the original thought on how tryptophan crosses BBB was extremely murky, because it a lesser competitor to other LNAAs. So we knew that we could toggle greater crossing by reducing the competitors (see wurtman lab) by flushing LNAA to to muscle via pure carbohydrate insulin spike (tryptophan stays bound to albumin). We also knew exercise increases serotonin synthesis, and tryptophan depletion decreases this. What was relatively new, I believe from 2015-2018, was that tryptophan selectively unbinds with albumin at the BBB, so the albumin-bound tryptophan will release uniquely there. It’s an example of how we know little about the mechanisms of serotonin. There’s also controversy about whether how important T:LNAA ratio is to sum total T, the mice studies are not clear. Maybe I’ll dig up the metastudy I read a bit ago
Re: serotonin, I don’t actually disagree, but the consensus I read was that “more serotonin” does not decrease depression.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
The distinction I would make is that these studies are flawed and there is actually very limited ways to organically increase serotonin production in the brain: increasing dietary T:LNAA ratio (also found to be widely healthful per a large Japanese population cohort study, on things like sleep); using fruit to flush LNAA muscle tissue; or exercise (somehow; possibly by using up LNAAs).
There are some other interesting things about this: certain human domesticated crops have higher tryptophan than wild-type; there’s a possibility fruit consumption in humans is kind of evolved to increase serotonin, and certain fruit actually have serotonin itself, like kiwi and strawberry, which is fascinating
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
When should we privilege the phenomenological over the pharmacological?
There are herbal remedies that people swear induce some certain desired state. Scientists attempt to discover the underlying chemical structures that induce the state, but they don’t always get it right. I’ve come across some interesting cases of this. There’s valerian root, which only recently was found to interact with adenosine (having previously been discarded as an insomnia treatment). There’s California Poppy, which was only recently discovered to contain Reticuline, which in turn was only recently discovered to induce an opioid response in the brain. There are all sorts of things going on with cannabis which are not related to THC but instead implicate a THC/CBD synergy and plausibly the addition of chemical structures known as terpenes. There are the essential oil studies that clearly indicate certain odors induce alertness (bitter lemon) or relaxation (lavender). Then there’s the science of things like serotonin which are hardly understood at all — only recently did we learn that tryptophan will selectively unbind with albumin at the blood brain barrier, and only recently has the consensus shifted to serotonin deficiency lacking a role in depression (although I have my own views on this).
Essentially, if a person asserts “the aerial parts of the Phenomena Logicila plant make me happy”, and a scientist looking at a paper finds no clear mechanism for this to occur… what do we say? The science is never conclusive or half-finished, and maybe the person has a unique physiological or genetic profile that corresponds to the feeling. What should a reasonable person do?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Random walking videos in random Asian cities, especially a Chinese city I pick randomly from a list. NHK documentaries (the filming style is maximally relaxed, nothing like it exists in American documentaries IMO). ToldInStone, a Roman historian who makes wonderful short videos on Roman life. Videos on old video games like Sanitorium (1998)
He doesn’t “regularly” make these posts. Going off memory it’s once every 2-4 weeks. The post is high quality in every way I can think of. It’s informative, relevant to the news du jour, written well and gratuitously sourced. I’m saying that as someone who would vote for Trump again (if I thought he had a chance of winning).
The nitpicking that some replies do is so annoying. I don’t see why someone would presume the right to call a consistently good contributor “beating a dead horse”. Trump is a relevant and divisive figure and so criticism of him is expected for purposes of culture war discussion. This particular avenue of criticism is novel and interesting.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
The post was awesome, informative, and even cited. Why quibble?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
I wrote 100mil at the end of the century.
In order for GoF to be demonstrably beneficial, to have been a good idea in practice, you will need to make up the 100mil dead by 2100. While it’s not impossible that GoF finds some use with malaria, it will likely be an eternal net negative for developed countries. To justify its existence, you now need GoF benefits to make up for the 1 million American lives lost so far and 16 trillion dollars. Do you think that’s actually going to happen?
You are wrong on these counts:
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Covid is (potentially) infinitely more harmful than a dam collapse. The dam killed 200k, and Covid 6 million and counting.
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Your go-to an example is one where no one appears to have been placed with responsibility.
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There’s no evidence that dam-builders are cowards who would not sign off on “I stake limitless torture on my dam not killing 200k people.” This is actually a completely reasonable thing to make them sign and similar principles have been used throughout history. Men still captioned the Titanic despite the expectation they would go down with their ship, and this was a coveted profession. In Japan, men still competed to become officers despite mistakes resulting in ritual suicide. Men still defended their territory from the Persian Empire in the face of certain death. I don’t think good scientists are cowards — I think the best scientists would stake their life on not accidentally killing millions of people.
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A dam has provable benefits that often result in massively increased productivity, whereas playing around with highly lethal coronaviruses has no sum total benefit. We now need to find a way to use an enhanced virus to save, by the end of the century, 100 million lives. Only this would cancel out the harm that the leak caused.
It’s likely the CIA is involved in some way. Consider that they boosted up abstract expressionism, which (inadvertently?) reduced the power of regionalism. They then boosted atonal composers and 20th century classical music forms over Bach/Mozart etc through the Congress of Cultural Freedom. In 1953, the CIA founded Encounter Magazine which was an anti-Stalinist Left publication (thanks Bill Kristol’s Dad!). We like to think the intelligence agencies have gotten less powerful over these decades, but this is certainly false — we have gotten easier to control, the surveillance and technological state makes it easier to influence people. They are spying on us through all of our phones and computers. Whoever got the DSA to go full-send on the feminized IdPol stuff probably got a raise.
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