dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
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User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
I find Steven Pinker very easy to read and extremely informative. No idea if his audiobooks are as entertaining (though he's also a great public speaker, so, perhaps!)
Bonus: his brutal takedown of Malcolm Gladwell is super entertaining https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html
IMO, best Pinker books are Enlightenment Now and also Better Angels of our Nature. Also The Blank Slate, but that's preaching to the choir in the rat community.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
I consider myself in good shape (I work out a lot and lift) but even a cold seems to knock me on my ass and exercising through it seems to set my recovery back. Feels like it's the new normal where I just lose 5 points off my VO2 max during winter respiratory ass-kicking season and gain it back in early spring.
I haven't tested positive for COVID yet though. Kinda suspecting it's a scam at this point... /s
One obvious confounder I just thought of: if a twin dies isn't the other twin going to feel, like, super bummed and like their life isn't worth living anymore?
According to ChatGPT4
Twins, particularly identical ones, often have a very close emotional and social bond. The loss of a twin can lead to significant emotional stress and grief, which might impact the surviving twin's health. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the "twinless twin syndrome," where the death of one twin can lead to deteriorating health in the other.
An alternate title for this study could perhaps be: Twinless twin syndrome kills more than good lifestyle habits protect
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Propensity to live an extremely long life (longer than 90, certainly than 100) is almost entirely genetic. If your family mostly checks out at 80 it’s unlikely going full Bryan Johnson is going to get you to 100.
I'll admit a fairly huge part of my skepticism of study results like this is because I assume the world is full of haters who don't want Bryan Johnson (and other longevity types who rub like 50% of the population the wrong way) to succeed in living longer: https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1727742379522949433
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Makes sense. Can't smoke, drink alcohol and do drugs if you're too busy exercising.
(Unless you start running with the Hash House Harriers)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
One thing that I don't understand how to deal with is
Alcohol use was based on average alcohol consumption (g/day) in 1981 of beer, wine and spirits[25] and classified as never, former, occasional (>0.1 and <1.3 g), low (≥1.3 and <25 g), medium (≥25 and <45 g), high (≥45 and <65 g) and very high (≥65 g)[26].
Body mass index (BMI) (kg/m2) was calculated based on self-reported height and weight in 1981. BMI based on self-reports has been shown to agree well with BMI based on measured values[23].
They assessed these in 1981 and maybe tried to control for them? But the study ran through 2020? Why only check these once? What's the impact either way? I flip between "maybe this doesn't matter at all" and "doesn't this render the study findings highly suspect enough that you should feel bad for submitting it for print at all?"
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
I don't fully understand all of the lingo being used in the paper, but it looks like the lifestyle factors they controlled for are smoking and alcohol use. Isn't that the right thing to do to here?
New Swedish twin study just dropped[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10274991/
Maybe exercising doesn't matter all that much?
Results
We identified four classes of long-term LTPA: sedentary, moderately active, active and highly active. Although biological ageing was accelerated in sedentary and highly active classes, after adjusting for other lifestyle-related factors, the associations mainly attenuated. Physically active classes had a maximum 7% lower risk of total mortality over the sedentary class, but this association was consistent only in the short term and could largely be accounted for by familial factors. LTPA exhibited less favourable associations when prevalent diseases were exclusion criteria rather than covariate.
Conclusion
Being active may reflect a healthy phenotype instead of causally reducing mortality.
I both want this to be true (because it would be a relief, in a way) but also don't (because it means your mortality isn't really modifiable by exercise). Any good analyses/critiques available?
- On Jun 5th 2023. So not that new.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Can someone summarize right-wing contempt for Israel for me? Is it something like
- Jews, believing they were oppressed minorities, were woke or woke adjacent
- Israel famously refuses Palestinian settlement in their country but urges others to take refugees including Arab refugees, some of whom end up being terrorists
- Israel gets attacked by Arab terrorists
- Jews discover that the woke consider them oppressor colonialists
- Israel apologists make “might = right” and “actually, multiculturalism bad” arguments
- conservatives now point and Nelson laugh “ha! ha!” at the irony and hypocrisy?
Do I have this right?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
The reaction of the team seems predictably train wrecky to me, and I don’t mean to excuse their behavior. But from my POV you chose your hill to die on by saying gender shouldn’t be included in the survey. It appears to be bruising for the kind of fight that culture warriors are primed to ferociously engage in.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
It wouldn't take too much to make all but the top 10% of the following jobs obsolete:
This may be theoretically true but strikes me as much too optimistic.
I use AI tools all day every day and continuously have my mind blown and say "this is going to change everything" to myself and to my wife if she's not tired of listening to me, but whenever I talk to other people, even other technology professionals and hear them tell me how they don't find this useful, I become resigned to the fact that it's going to take decades for the AI tech we have now to permeate the rest of industries. Just as it took decades and a fucking pandemic before we began to accept remote work as a viable way to function (though perhaps not optimal) even though people who were hip have been doing it since the late 90s.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Sorry, to be clear "not permitted" means Max and The Gray Zone have been deprecated as a source.
Some discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_287#RfC:_Grayzone
Not posting in the Gaza/Israel thread since this is more generic, IMO.
In the most recent Sam Harris podcast, he elevates the problem with Hamas to the more general problem of jihadi terrorism. The episode is here and there's also a transcript here.
In this, he paints a picture of Hamas being a jihadi terrorist organization that's beyond reasoning with in terms of any reasoning we'd consider compatible with liberal western civilized order. He reads this quote from a member of a different jihadi group that had just finished slaughtering young children:
Human life only has value among you worldly materialist thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does.
Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqaal.” It means “transfer,” not “end.”
Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet… They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine.
They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [“Allah u Akbar”].
Allah Almighty says Himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169-170] that they are not dead.
You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise.
He makes the point that atheists have a lot of trouble understanding how utterly fanatical and unreasonable jihadis can be. People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under. That people living in a utopia would never succumb to such depravity. Sam argues that Muslims of faith are just as destructive outside of Israel and disputed Israeli territories.
For more concrete stats, I found this from Google generative results
According to a French think tank, between 1979 and May 2021, there were 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide, causing the deaths of at least 210,138 people. Of these attacks, 43,002 occurred in Muslim countries, resulting in 192,782 deaths. This represents 89.5% of Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide and 91.7% of deaths
The culmination of this episode is Sam practically condemning belief in Islam entirely. Almost bordering on saying that every Palestinian is a mope in the Muslim Matrix who could become inhabited by a jihadi Agent Smith at any time. He argues that unlike Jesus, or Buddha, the central most beloved figure in Islam is Muhammed, and he was not anything like a saint:
The problem that we have to grapple with—and by “we” I mean Muslims and non-Muslims alike—is that the doctrines that directly support jihadist violence are very easy to find in the Quran, and the hadith, and in the biography of Muhammad. For Muslims, Muhammad is the greatest person who has ever lived. Unfortunately, he did not behave like Jesus or Buddha—at all. It sort of matters that he tortured people and cut their heads off and took sex slaves, because his example is meant to inspire his followers for all time.
There are many, many verses in the Quran that urge Muslims to wage jihad—jihad as holy war against apostates and unbelievers—and the most violent of these are thought to supersede any that seem more benign. But the truth is, there isn’t much that is benign in the Quran—there is certainly no Jesus as we find him in Matthew urging people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. All the decapitation we see being practiced by jihadists isn’t an accident—it’s in the Quran and in the larger record of the life of the Prophet.
What I hear from this is that there are no "good" Muslims, or if they are good it's an aberration, or that they're Muslim in name only.
How does one operationalize such a belief? Is Sam arguing that accepting Muslim refugees is a mistake, full stop, and that the only way to deal with jihadis is the grant them their wish: death, because there's nothing else in the world we could offer them? Is that even enough to cure the problem?
There are two billion Muslims in the world. If bringing them capitalism and the pleasures of modernity (everyone gets Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc as a poster recently suggested for pacifying the Palestinians) does not innoculate against jihadi mind viruses, what would?
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology, and Christianity's deck was not nearly as stacked against it (its central figure was still practically a hippie). Will we have to wait this long for Islam to do the same? Sam sounds like he's advocating a form of genocide by another name.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Not /u/Lizzardspawn, but that's basically what it boils down to. Until the IDF restores something like a 21st century notion of civilized order, helping Palestinians is nearly impossible.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
He’s not permitted as a Wikipedia source, for whatever that means.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
How are they supposed to do that while Hamas runs the place?
That said, I don't favor underdog analysis as a particularly useful lens, though clearly others disagree.
Maybe you debate people more aligned with you than I do; there are legit people who condemn Mr Rogers in this, what I consider, pathologically slanted absurd example and I often wish I had known that way ahead of time.
To me that reveals a kind of moral confusion that makes the finer scope points a more first world issue.
Is your debate partner an underdog fetishist?
Someone here (or maybe on /r/themotte) opened my eyes to this idea. I'm sorry I can't find the post and credit you, various searches aren't helping me find it.
There exists an apparent mini-moral philosophy of always siding with the underdog. On the surface this has good feels: always side with the weak against the strong. In every conflict, between individuals or between nations, find out who the strong one is, and find out who the weak one is. The weak one is the one you should side with.
This is not as ironclad a moral imperative as it appears on the tin. The most extreme and simple form of the imperative's flaw is such:
Suppose Mr Rogers and some random homeless guy get into a fight.
These are the facts and they are not disputed: the homeless guy demanded Mr Rogers’ wallet and he said no. So, the homeless guy attacked him. Shocking everyone, Mr Rogers fights back ferociously, sending the homeless guy to the hospital. Mr Rogers escapes without a scratch.
Digging into the homeless guy's background reveals that he has been in and out of prison a lot. For theft and minor violent offenses, except he was most recently imprisoned for pushing random bystanders off of train platforms onto train tracks. He had been arrested before anyone died. The homeless guy was released from prison a few days before he got into a fight with Mr Rogers.
Mr Rogers is a saintly widely beloved media personality with a legendary benevolence towards all.
So. Should someone here be penalized?
An underdog fetishist might say yes, Mr Rogers should be penalized because he’s actually a member of an elite class whereas the deranged homeless guy is a member of an underclass. This is a perfect example of class struggle.
In my experience, most people consider the Palestinians the underdog here, but not everyone. Some consider Israel the underdog being propped up by the US.
Anyway, while I consider it morally confused, I contend people who would condemn Mr Rogers exist, and that if you're going to spend time debating an extremely nuanced complex situation like the Israeli/Palestine conflict with others, it's valuable to at least first figure out if your debate partner would always (e.g.) side with the homeless guy against Mr Rogers.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
How much should I read into the fact that nations which have condemned Israel’s treatment of Gaza have not offered to accept any Palestinian refugees?
It strikes me as deeply cynical that the nation with the most obligation to do well by them is the one that a huge swath of the Islamic world considers the great evil.
How much of current homicidal anti-Semitic sentiment across the Islamic world is because Jews settled Palestine? I can understand if they think Israel has to atone for this, but I suspect Palestine is simply a wedge issue that the Islamic world considers useful ammunition against Jews.
Even with your explanation it still seems preposterous to say African-Americans aren't real Americans.
Does realness require being happy about it? Are Irish Americans no longer Americans if American culture takes a turn they find hideous and they start feeling proud of identifying as Irish-American?
Shibboleths abounds.
IMO, as a child of immigrants, I think most people take the awesomeness of America for granted. To apply your standards, I could determine most white Americans who have ancestors born here going back hundreds of years aren't real Americans because of how much they whine and complain about capitalism and consumerism or whatever.
It's pretty wild how much Americans are into guns.
I recently got into deer hunting. Game meat is really healthy, you know? Also it's more humane, I think? Anyway, It started with buying a bolt action rifle with a scope, my first firearm ever. Now that I have one, I need to go to the range to practice. This means I need glasses and also ear protection. Best to get the ear muffs that have loud noise cancellation so you can hear conversation. Oh, and there’s an aux input in case I hunt with other hunters and need a radio. Pretty cool. It even comes with two tone American flag velcro patch. Call of Duty vibe intensifies.
Obviously need a full assortment of camo to go with it. No no hunting camo, not like digital pattern camo don't be silly. Well, the military digital camo is cheaper actually, may as well.
Hey hunting deer is actually really challenging and the season is halfway over. Maybe I should branch out into wild turkey hunting. Oh, I need a shotgun for that? Well, why not. Should probably get slugs and buckshot, just for versatility.
While on some hunts I realized I was the only one without a sidearm. What’s the sidearm for? In case bears and cougars attack! Well shit, now I need to go shop for one of those. What will have enough stopping power? Let me head to the indoor range and rent a few and try them out. Hmm, yeah. I think the Glock 40 10mm should do, let me buy that.
Hey, since I have a handgun now, I may as well take a few extra steps to get it ready for home defense: add a silencer and light so I don't go blind and deaf shooting it indoors at night at an intruder.
Good good. Actually, why don’t I get a concealed carry license? May as well carry it with me just in case. It'd be super annoying to get mugged on the street when I have a perfectly good handgun at home. Probably I should take some classes on proper self defense though. Maybe also drill some tactics in case I end up in an active shooter situation. Again, it'd be pretty annoying to have a handgun with a concealed carry license but not know how to handle an active shooter...
Panoramic thermal/nightvision sounds like it'd be really handy for hunting, now that you mention it. Orienteering is probably a good skill to develop just in case I go too far off trails chasing wounded game...
I’m not sure how this gets to AR-15 ownership and drilling raids, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time.
Meal Team 6 is kinda wasting their time practicing with guns though. If you want to be ready for the war with the federal government you gotta be going all-in drone warfare.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
I’m not going to call modern combat the same thing as hunting, but a surprisingly large number of women post their big game hunting pics on Facebook groups. Yesterday one posted a picture of a cougar, and she had its dead bloody carcass slung over both shoulders. Another posted a pic of a deer she shot at 400 yards.
Women seem like they can be trained to kill with guns just fine. Are they as good as men? Perhaps not. But are they worse than not having them at all? Definitely not.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
I was thinking buy condos in Florida like millions of Jews before them?
Given an enemy so dead-set on your destruction at any cost to themselves (martyrdom!), how can you defeat them and win peace in hearts and minds?
Right, this is the heart of my question. Is there a path forward besides: wait for Palestinians to undergo a complete spiritual and cultural transformation? ( Or for the international community to give Israel a freebie on genocide)
Or, for that matter, a path forward besides waiting for Israel to undergo a complete spiritual and cultural transformation and then hope the Palestinians follow suit?
Why isn’t it also on Israel to try to find a leader like, I don’t know, a charismatic Jesus kind of guy who loves the Palestinians even though many of them will terrorize?
What are latest thoughts on when the begin screening and how frequently to repeat? My physician thinks we shouldn't start earlier than 45 and I feel like he'd laugh if I suggested every 5 years.
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