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dr_analog

razorboy

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dr_analog

razorboy

1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 14:10:31 UTC

					

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User ID: 583

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Anyone have thoughts on the Huberman article run by NY Magazine? He apparently was dating 5+ women simultaneously, letting each of them believe he was only dating them, and therefore it would be safe to have unprotected sex.

My first reaction is: why did he need to lie about this? He lives in the polyamory capital of the world? Surely plenty of women would be down?

On further thought, I wonder if he didn't want to do the poly thing because you'd have to go through the process of electing a #1 girlfriend that you can swap fluids with, and then for girlfriends #2-5 you have to use condoms and that's no fun.

But on even more advanced thought, perhaps this is a signal that poly is actually pretty low status? If an adored sensitive smart hot famous-ish science-y guy can't even be honest about his sexual desires and find suitable partners, again, in the Bay Area (!), that suggests poly has a very, very long road to general acceptance.

I keep coming back to the fact that Japan does actual fat shaming, on an institutional level even (employers fined if employee waist sizes are too big) and as a result doesn't suffer from high obesity.

This should put the disease model of obesity to bed, unless we believe the Japanese, who love 7-11s and convenience perhaps even more than Westerners do, are somehow genetically immune or their food is still so much more pure.

So.

Is there any good evidence that organic produce has health benefits or that conventional produce is health detrimental?

We've been doing thie for... 20+ years now?

I should make this a top-post. But for now: Anthony Bourdain. Humble beginnings doing "real" work as a cook and a chef at a string of New York City restaurants. Has a passion for French cuisine. Then struck out as a writer who published Kitchen Confidential, sharing this quaint but authentic view of a working class life with the world. All of these honorable professions go far among progressives. They are relatable, humble, involve zero obvious exploitation. True honest work.

I've seen this quote of his pop up at various art festivals:

“Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

From humble beginnings, he was signed to do two travel shows, No Reservations and then Parts Unknown, glorfying open-minded exploration and celebration of other cultures: their food, their traditions, their people, etc. Super romantic while still keeping an edgy down-to-Earth quality. Alludes to having lived a life of mild depravity but in a cute way. Seems like he could come up with an amazing wine pairing with seared sea scallops but you can also have a beer with him and shoot the shit. The worst thing you could ever do is suggest going to McDonalds.

He cannot possibly be a better progressive role model. He even struggled from mental illness! Showing that even hard working, successful and productive people who seem happy on the outside can suffer from depression and bring themselves to suicide.

Mild tangent: I can't shake the feeling that his romanticism, attempts at authenticity, never losing his edgy side belied a somewhat destructive live fast die young ethos and may have all been a big cry for help but progressives I've discussed this with don't believe there's any connection between the two at all whatsoever. He just caught mental illness the way anyone can catch flu.

I can think of a lot of progressive musicians or artists who I admired but none of them seemed like they had a life I could ever achieve. Or necessarily ones I'd want to achieve. So, probably not fair to say they're role models. At least for me.

I do wonder if progressives think these role models are actually a lot more legitimate because they could imagine themselves getting great at guitar and being world famous musicians and touching people through beautiful music or whatever. Whereas those conservative role models are such conformist boring trad-squares.

EDIT: actually, Anthony Bourdain. I'm sure a lot of progressives consider him a role model, though in the wake of his suicide all of his romantic world-spanning zeal seems like a desperate cry for help slash running from his demons or whatever.

EDIT2: thinking further, I'm really amazed by what a perfect progressive role model Anthony Bourdain is. Holy shit.

After experiencing some shocking data mangling, I noticed this part of SQLite3's documentation and it made me run screaming

A column with NUMERIC affinity may contain values using all five storage classes. When text data is inserted into a NUMERIC column, the storage class of the text is converted to INTEGER or REAL (in order of preference) if the text is a well-formed integer or real literal, respectively. If the TEXT value is a well-formed integer literal that is too large to fit in a 64-bit signed integer, it is converted to REAL. For conversions between TEXT and REAL storage classes, only the first 15 significant decimal digits of the number are preserved. If the TEXT value is not a well-formed integer or real literal, then the value is stored as TEXT. For the purposes of this paragraph, hexadecimal integer literals are not considered well-formed and are stored as TEXT. (This is done for historical compatibility with versions of SQLite prior to version 3.8.6 2014-08-15 where hexadecimal integer literals were first introduced into SQLite.) If a floating point value that can be represented exactly as an integer is inserted into a column with NUMERIC affinity, the value is converted into an integer. No attempt is made to convert NULL or BLOB values.

I guess I was hoping to see a definition of "conservative role model" that didn't automatically imply religious.

Seems like the ghist of it is

  • happy embracing fatherhood
  • devoted/providing husband
  • works hard
  • successful at work
  • proud of work

Mm, I'll take your word for it. I'm pretty unimpressed by SQLite :P

I haven't much experience with scout and church leaders though I also was a teenage admirer of John Carmack. I realize I knew very little about him until I listened to his four hour Lex interview

What makes him a good young role model? Even in a space like video games he can make a mark and be successful

  • deeply throwing himself into his work; stories about how Michael Abrash would leave him at the office on Friday and come back on Monday and see that John had been there the whole weekend hacking away trying to optimize Quake
  • shamelessly learning from every source possible (he mentioned consuming programming magazines and even reading ads for educational value)
  • was not credentialed but he didn't let that stop him
  • was actually kind of a young cyber-criminal (black hat hacker) but that didn't define his future
  • doesn't let his obsession with nerdiness have him eschew physical fitness: he's also a fit and in-shape BJJ practitioner
  • still ate pizza his whole life, every day, from Domino's
  • presumably still found a happy healthy relationship with a woman and is a father that provides for his family and also spends time with them?
  • mentions stuff about taking vacations to hotel rooms next to an airport just so he can get away and concentrate on his work undisturbed
  • oh also bought himself Ferraris to play with after he became wealthy why not

Okay he seems pretty awesome. Someone kids could look up to.

Does this stuff make him a conservative male role model though?

And conservative communities have little difficulty producing positive role models for boys. Which seems like an obvious drawback- leftist communities need to astroturf someone into a role that is already filled elsewhere.

Asked with genuine and humble curiosity, what are some positive conservative role models for boys?

I've had a reasonable amount of hands on time with Claude Opus, and I would rate it as indistinguishable from GPT-4 in terms of usefulness, or at least I can't tell any obvious disparities after tens of thousands of tokens of conversation.

So, if I'm only going to pay for one, ChatGPT4 or Opus, is it worth switching from ChatGPT4?

Wait. I guess we're not disagreeing here that much. I looked over your grandparent post again because I thought you were expressing more confusion about why dealers aren't being rational economic agents but it seems like you're not. Whoops.

Thanks for humoring me!

I believe you're substantially overestimating how smart street dealers are. They might want repeat business but they probably don't understand how to get it and also give up immediately if posed with even a slight challenge because they run out of brain juice. Measuring and mixing a potent drug like fentanyl into your supply of meth (or whatever) seems easy to manage to us, but given people with (e.g.) 80 IQ can't even microwave food I wouldn't trust street dealers to do this well at all.

Right. The state legislature did touch it in this case! They rolled parts of it back and re-criminalized drugs.

Initiative petitions are often a clown-show, but on the other hand, they're a good vehicle for testing risky policy that career politicians might never put their name on. If it's a huge disaster the career politicians can step in and take credit for rolling it back.

This seems good, actually!

Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.

No offense but have you met many drug dealers? Like everyone has their cool guy that hooks them up with the best LSD imaginable like it's some sacrament but that is not the norm at all. My Ayn Rand view of them was shattered when I bought drugs on the street a few times. They often don't know what they're selling, in the concentrations that they're selling. They don't particularly care about repeat business. They don't care if they kill you. They're also generally too dumb to even think about testing their stuff or weigh things. If they are smart enough to weight things they're probably not going to buy the $300 milligram scale when the whippet shop sells some that advertises milligram precision for $20. They may be addicts themselves. They are not rational economic actors.

Drug dealing doesn't primarily attract smart entrepreneurial people who to make a fortune. It attracts rather unsmart, not well people who have very few other options for making money.

Sure, but, what do with this information? Have the state manufacture pure fentanyl and dose junkies up in safe use sites?

It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.

It is cute but I think it's actually good to run experiments? Don't we bemoan vetocracies and general unwillingness by politicians to take risks? Initiative petitions (referendums) appear to be a good outlet for some direct democracy.

We do get some good outcomes from time to time and the fact that we rolled back so quickly is a credit.

If you asked this question two years ago I'm sure the sentiment would have been that the West Oregon leftists that dominate state political power would never roll back such a pro-drug law that was wrapped in racial justice.

Great comment overall in general.

I'm still astonished that the Oregon legislature re-criminalized. Maybe this won't affect anyone's sense of liberal identity, but it at least shows luxury beliefs have a limit, and can be abandoned if confronted with enough harsh reality.

I suspect Rat Park has something to do with the modern view on addiction and these bleeding heart laws.

The moral framework is

  1. drug addicts exist
  2. but they wouldn't, if society wasn't failing them in some way (too much like rat cage, not enough like rat paradise)
  3. since it is society's fault, we should not be putting addicts in jail. that's just cruel
  4. so, lets not put them in jail
  5. instead, offer them high quality mental health services instead!

That is, someone who was happy and healthy and content with life would not be an addict. Lets fix, I dunno, global capitalism or something.

I guess the problem is we, by far, can't offer anything like rat paradise. Further, high quality mental health services don't work very well at curing addiction. Worse, what the state offers isn't high quality but rather what you'd expect. Worse still, addicts in the full depth of addiction often don't want treatment. And finally, making life more like rat paradise doesn't stop people from becoming addicts.

As per Scott's critique Against Rat Park, people that are totally content and have every reason not to want to be hopelessly addicted tent city fentanyl addicts end up there anyway. Drugs really do re-wire your brain.

I had originally posted this in the Friday fun thread but it turns out that it was killing the vibe in there. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway...

Note: I will completely qualify Portugal Europe and Portland Oregon in this article because they're easy to mix up.

Is liberalism peaking in Oregon?

In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.

Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal Europe model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the 2.3% of the population that's black.

As an occasional drug enjoyer, I do find it a relief to wander the streets of Portland Oregon squirting ketamine up my nostrils like I'm a visionary tech CEO without fear of police. But in broad strokes it appears to be a disaster.

Indeed, the ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions.

By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.

https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/02/21/fentanyl-overdose-rate-oregon-spikes

Oregon's fatal fentanyl overdose rate spiked from 2019 to 2023, showing the highest rate of increase among U.S. states, according to The Oregonian's crunching of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal Europe's system. Some stark differences!

https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf

Briefly, Portugal Europe uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe.

In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.

The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.

Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)

“Portland [Oregon] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.

That's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.

After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.

The NYT again https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/oregon-drug-decriminalization-rollback-measure-110.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/3zksH)

Several prominent Democrats have expressed support for a rollback, including Mike Schmidt, a progressive prosecutor in the Portland area. After the decriminalization initiative passed in 2020, Mr. Schmidt implemented its provisions early, saying it was time to move past “failed practices” to “focus our limited law enforcement resources to target high-level, commercial drug offenses.”

But he has reassessed his position, he said in an interview this week. The proliferation of fentanyl requires a new approach that treats addiction as a health issue while holding people accountable, he said. The open drug use downtown and near parks and schools has made people feel unsafe, Mr. Schmidt said.

“We have been hearing from constituents for a while that this has been really detrimental to our community and to our streets,” he said. Mr. Schmidt said the new bill still prioritizes treatment and uses jail as a last resort. That, he said, could ultimately become the model Oregon offers to states around the country.

The governor has indicated that she would sign.

Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use. I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help, but fentanyl complicates the situation substantially. People need to hit bottom before they seek help (or so goes the popular saying) but fentanyl is so potent and unpredictable that they're dying of an unexpected OD before they find themselves at bottom, ready to seek change.

Frankly, I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.

I believe this shows Oregon is not quite as ideologically liberal as previously led to believe. Or, at least, not anymore.

Fair enough, perhaps my sense of humor is too dark and absurdist. Should I delete?

Yes that's the irony of it. The Portugal model is still not a shining example.

Aside: I would post this in the main CW thread but it's Sunday and don't want it to get lost when the thread rolls over. So I'll just do a lower effort slightly trashier post here.

HAS LIBERALISM PEAKED IN OREGON?(!)

In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.

Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the, say, 5 black people who live in Oregon. (okay okay they're 2.3% of the population)

The ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions. By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.

Anyway! At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal's system. Some stark differences!

https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf

Briefly, Portugal uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe lol.

In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.

The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.

Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)

“Portland [not Portugal, just to be clear --ed] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.

Yes. At least, that's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.

After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.

The NYT again: https://archive.ph/3zksH

Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use.

The governor has indicated that she would sign.

tbh I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.

Well, she (he?) ends up not enjoying it. It's actually written on that same page.

showed them images of Gender Queer, and the page where the kid is giving another kid a blowjob,

In fairness, I just looked it up, and it's a strap-on.

Anyway, to your point.

I would find this pretty outrageous, but my default state is to be generally annoyed or outraged when our teenager tells us what he's learning about in public school. Be it economics, math or sex stuff.