guajalote
9mo ago
Write more, edit yourself more, and find someone who is a strong writer to help you edit your writing. Be merciless and aggressive with the editing. "Kill your babies." Also, read the works of people who are strong writers in the style you want to achieve and emulate them.
guajalote
5mo ago
Wokeness only appealed to a segment of the elites and was unappealing to most non-elites. So wokeness gained power quickly but ran out of steam because it lacked any grassroots support. On the other hand, Christianity started out as a religion of the proletariat and by the time it trickled up to the elite of Roman society it had massive grassroots support. I think that's a key difference.
guajalote
3mo ago
I am focused on empirical evidence rather than theory. Houston, with no zoning and few impediments to building housing, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. Canada as a whole has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents. Vancouver appears to be something like 728 per 100k with 4,821 homeless and a population of 662k.
guajalote
8mo ago
Driving safely while going 10mph over the speed limit is a behavior the state should condone.
guajalote
8mo ago
Guns have valid uses, recreational drugs have less of a claim
What valid use does this website have? It's largely recreational and a drain on user's productivity, a bit like weed. Should the government ban the Motte?
guajalote
12d ago
Christians generally believe humans have free will that enables them to act contrary to God's will. Those bad actions are still "part of God's plan" in the sense that he anticipates them and "plans around them" so to speak, but those sinful actions are "contrary to God's plan" in the sense that he does not want them to happen.
guajalote
3mo ago
If everyone is aware that firing a gun on the subway is illegal and will result in serious prison time, and therefore anyone carrying a gun is extremely unlikely to use it in that circumstance, then I’m not sure what would actually be causing the deterrent effect.
A jury decides self-defense cases. If you can convince even one person out of eight that you credibly feared for your life or the life of another, you are not guilty.
Leave aside that the average bum is not even in a clear enough state of mind to seriously consider who might have a gun
Even a very addled person can understand "Lots of people around here have guns and there's no way to tell who. I had better not cause trouble (like swinging a makeshift halberd at people) or I might get shot."
Observably, this is what we see. The homeless objectively behave differently in places with guns versus places without.
Republican-run areas tend to give their police and prosecutors far greater leeway to punish vagrancy
Houston's government is entirely run by Democrats and vagrancy is not punished. The police force is smaller and less active than most comparable cities. Houston's police force is 5,300 (pop. 2.3 million) versus 11,000 in Chicago (pop. 2.6 million).
guajalote
9mo ago
The smart attack is to outflank him from the populist side by out-promising him in a vague way. Whatever Trump says he'll do (on the economy, immigration, whatever) she'll do even more and better. "I'll do even more and give you more free stuff."
This approach doesn't appeal to me personally at all, and probably doesn't appeal to the type of person who is coaching Kamala for the debate, but it appeals to the average voter and Trump would have a hard time rebutting it.
guajalote
1mo ago
This is how engineering, science, and law are already tested at all decent universities. It's only the humanities that don't grade this way.
guajalote
4mo ago
I don't know whether the data exists, but my understanding is the vast majority voluntarily resign, probably over 90%.
Thanks for linking this article, I hadn't seen it before and its strikes me as pretty accurate. My family has been G2/G3 for several generations and I'm now in the E3/E4 range as a partner at an elite law firm.
Your question is pretty open ended but I guess my advice would be to network with other elites as much as possible. Send out Christmas cards, host parties and invite them over, go golfing with them, do whatever you can to nurture those connections. Learn elite class hobbies and conversation topics like tennis, skiing, golf, wine collecting, international travel, etc. People at this tier have real money and power, and friendships with them have the potential to truly change your life in ways that aren't possible at the lower tiers.
guajalote
8mo ago
The fact that "there are situations where your choices are limited exactly on these grounds" is not a justification. The government limits my liberty in many unjustified ways.
guajalote
11mo ago
I would pick Fooled By Randomness over the Black Swan, but either way Taleb deserves a spot for sure.
guajalote
8mo ago
Because it's a joke that's been done many times with different islands as the punchline. I've heard the same joke with Australia or the UK as the punchline.
guajalote
1mo ago
I am confident there are many insights out there that remain to be "discovered" that will seem obvious in retrospect. So much of the history of human progress is discovering obvious (in retrospect) insights. Even something as simple as wheels on luggage. People pushed luggage around on wheeled carts for decades before figuring out we should just put wheels on the damn suitcases. Insights from Taleb and Mandelbrot about tail risks and black swans are another good example of something "obvious" that it took smart people a long time to come to terms with. It's really hard to see obvious things until they are pointed out.
guajalote
3mo ago
Richard Feynman's memoir "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" describes his relationships with his parents, his wife, his colleagues and friends, etc. and I would describe all of those relationships as basically functional and healthy.
guajalote
10mo ago
The incentive will arrive as soon as people start saying "I'll believe it when I see the negatives."
guajalote
11mo ago
Personally I think fresh, high-quality raw fish always tastes better (and has better texture) than cooked fish. Why, in your opinion, would it have been better cooked?
guajalote
3mo ago
I agree with what you're saying but I also agree with cjet79's central point that "if someone is going to make a claim contradicting [most people's common sense about medicine] they need to have a lot of evidence and some damn good explanations."
I think this is true in general, not just in medicine. If you're going to make claims that contradict peoples' common sense, then you need to be prepared to carry a heavy burden of persuasion, and you should empathize with (rather than attack or belittle) those people who are unpersuaded and trust their (perhaps incorrect) common sense. This is where the medical establishment really messed up. Even on issues where I think the establishment is correct (e.g., the covid vaccines are effective, adults should be allowed to medically transition) I still think the establishment has done a horrible job of messaging, and has blamed its failures on the people it failed to convince.
guajalote
15d ago
I grew up around many Christian Zionists. I think they would agree that "the Second Coming is going to happen when God plans it to" but would add that (1) God puts his plans into motion largely through the actions of people and (2) the Bible sets forth the outline of what that plan looks like. Because people have free will, it's therefore important for them to choose to follow God's plan as laid out in the Bible.
To them, your critique would sound a little like if someone said: "What's so bad about murder? Everything happens according to God's plan, therefore if someone commits murder that must be God's plan."
guajalote
1mo ago
Airports and train stations have always been perfect use cases for wheeled luggage, but nobody started using them until the late 90s/early 00s. I remember as a child in the early 90s every airport had huge racks of carts you could rent for $0.25 because nobody had wheels on their suitcases.
guajalote
3mo ago
My wife and in-laws are Mexican and I've come to learn that Mexicans love to toast all forms of bread and find it a bit weird to eat untoasted bread. It seems like basically all forms of bread taste good toasted, but I still prefer sourdough and good french breads untoasted to preserve their chewy texture.
I believe her LDL is around 135.
Assuming they actually prolong life. My understanding is that "statin clinical trials have shown marginally significant benefits on mortality" at best over 5 years, and there's no good evidence they reduce long-term morality. That's why I came here to ask the question, I'm curious if there's newer or better evidence to support their effectiveness. If they don't work, then we're just risking side-effects for no gain.
I get that nutrition is hard to study, but do you really have no opinions about this topic as a doctor? Shouldn't lifestyle changes be the first line of treatment for this sort of thing? If you had to recommend the optimal diet to a patient with high cholesterol, what would it be?
I ask this because my mother is something of a health nut and will follow credible diet and lifestyle advice religiously. When her doctor told her to cut out red meat, butter, and eggs, she completely eliminated these things from her diet. If a doctor told her eating nothing but unseasoned boiled potatoes was the key to lower cholesterol, she'd eat nothing but unseasoned boiled potatoes. On the other hand, her doctor has not told her to avoid things like processed sugars or margarine, so she still eats plenty of that stuff.
So I'm interested in trying to set her up with the best evidence-based diet and lifestyle interventions possible. Since she is going to religiously follow some sort of diet program regardless, it may as well be the best possible program.
She is not at all overweight, goes on long hikes/jogs daily, skis, bikes, and is otherwise very physically active for a 70 year old.
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