justmotteingaround
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User ID: 2002
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
with total police abolition, lighter sentences, less bail, decriminalising hard drugs, violent criminals out on the streets by lunchtime, rioting, arson, looting, violent takeover of city streets and public areas and anti-white ideology
Good news: Most of these positions have effectively zero public support, with the possible exception of bail reform.
This poll was done at the height of the Floyd riots.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/reuters-ipsos-civil-unrest-george-floyd-2020-06-02
Four in five Americans (82%) report that peaceful protests are an appropriate response to the killing of an unarmed man by police, while 22% say that violence and unrest is an appropriate response.
A similar number of Americans (79%) say that the property damage caused by some demonstrators undermines the original intent of the protest’s call for justice in George Floyd’s death.
Republicans (83%) and Democrats (77%) agree that property damage ultimately undermines the cause of the demonstrators.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
One swallow doesn't make a summer. One paper (by a non expert) doesn't invalidate an entire field of experts.
we should restructure all of society based on these projections is yet another outlandish claim (with a side-helping of massive conflicts of interests)
I think looking at proposed answers to climate change is what turns evaluating the climate change hypothesis form a reasoning exercise into an emotional/political endeavour - and it cuts both ways. This is the only way I can explain all the special pleading for climate change as uniquely suspect for decades, despite being a bland, intuitive hypothesis. I think it's helpful set aside looking at proposed answers before thinking about the hypothesis.
I think Global Warming/Climate Change/etc... is nonsense
We should expect some kind of climate change a-priori. Anything else is nonsense. We've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1859. Very basic. We've known the atmosphere:earth is roughly proportional to apple:apple-skin for a fair bit too. I'd be shocked if adding ~1 quintillion Kg's of CO2 to the atmosphere had precisely no effects. Measuring CO2 in ppm is trivial. Measuring temperature is trivial. Even if climate change isn't human caused, it'd still be worth investigating so we can engineer around it.
That we have the tools to model the Earth's climate at all is (imo) an outlandish claim
This is also a dubious line of thinking (its something like the appeal to ridicule). Chess computers, controlled flight, weather prediction, gene editing, nuclear fission, were all once claimed to be too outlandish to be possible. They still feel outlandish, but all can be done by hobbyists.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
This still seems like special pleading. Perhaps you can argue/explain to me how its not. As I see it, we can figure out chess, engineer billions of transistors per sq in, manipulate genomes, program LLMs with billions of tokens, perform a million-trillion operations every second. Therefore its not unreasonable to suspect that we can make good climate models.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
I'm okay with any politician being thrown in jail for a decade for merely doing what Trump did on his call with Raffensperger.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
Jews and non-Jews will always naturally develop into hostility.
Only if we keep playing the identity politics game. Erroneously ascribing group traits to individuals, or conflating group criticism with bigotry, is the poison pill which melts brains. For example, its possible to criticize aspects of 'black culture' (population level) without impugning individuals. I'm not claiming people will interpret such criticism charitably, but that's because they swallowed the poison pill. It's possible to notice that the Jews are successful without spite for members of that group. It might be expedient to simply join a different tribe (American, the middle class, Democrats, Republicans, Unitarians, (who, coincidentally, may have the highest IQ's)). But this is only because people keep playing identity politics.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
Forget the name but there’s a book about one of the guys who ran Xerox PARC
Fun note: I've read a few popular books on the history of science which tell stories about places like PARC, Bell Labs, GE, and IBM funding pure research in the ~40-60's. Iirc companies got leaner, financialed, government funding expanded dramatically, more people went into academia, bureaucracy expanded at all levels etc. Walter Isaacsons recent "CRISPR" book talked about research labs spending weeks filling out 100 page forms for government approval/grants for some projects (possibly the recent mRNA vaccines). Lots of factors at play. It all sounds sad, but I can only hope its somehow closer to optimal.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
IQ is no better or worse.
I would argue IQ is better as it substantially correlates to job performance in high, medium, and low complexity jobs. All else being equal, companies want a higher IQ programmers, mechanics, and window washers). Perhaps IQ is bet thought of as latent merit.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
As an aside, I still think chess fits. I don't even think we know how many games of chess are possible. Humans recently approximated a Go engine - something people long claimed was too complex to ever be done, much like chess. Models + compute can beat humans at games of unimaginable complexity.
Regardless, even if chess is a bad analogy, admitting that doesn't gets me out special pleading that climate science is not only special in its complexity, but also special in that thousands of people with PhD's, from Montana to Mongolia, overwhelmingly agree that its possible to model climate usefully.
What reason do I have to disbelieve climate science that doesn't also apply to designing bleeding edge microchips, or medicine, or applied physics, or the improvements seen in weather forecasting? I'm trying to argue myself into climate science skepticism inductively and/or by way of inferences. A strong quantitative scientific consensus about cause and effect is usually a good bet. What makes climate science different?
The only thing I can come up with is that climate science is more akin to a year-long weather forecast (ie cannot be computed in P time because well understood chaotic conditions). But then why do such a large amount knowledgeable keep spending money on the practical applicability of climate models? I'm back at special pleading that science is a liar in this case in particular.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
While I don't expect the public to follow the plot, both incidents do have quantitative and qualitative differences, though I suspect this will become less true as time goes on. As far as I know, Team Biden found about 12 documents and handed them over within 24 hours, whereas Team Trump had around 300 and dragged his feet for months.
Anyone crying "where is the raid" is either trying to score political points in bad faith (which is fine if that's the game), or is not thinking too hard.
the President is deflecting and denying rather than crying “witch hunt”
He appears to be front-running it, if anything. Now that the story is (finally) out, he said
[The people who found the documents] did what they should have done. They immediately called the [National Archives] … turned them over to the Archives, and I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office," the president added. "But I don't know what's in the documents. My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
This conflates national and federal polities. And at the Federal level, you have the Koch and Federalist cartels to undermine the public for conservatives, balancing things out. The US is a divided nation, but its between 60/40 and 50/50. Nevertheless, what flies in California won't pass muster in Alabama.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
That's great and I don't want to take anything away from a fantastic accomplishment. I do want to provide some useful info on your diet plan. There is lots of good published studies on which weight loss strategies lead to long-term decreases in fat mass (youtuber jeff nippard covers a lot of the science if interested). In short, you want to aim for an average weekly calorie consumption of about 10% below maintenance, with weekends eating at maintenance, and weekdays consuming 14% below maintenance, with 2-3 times a week resistance training, and protein consumption of 1.8-3g protein per kg bodyweight. Cardio is not strictly necessary. Low impact cardio is recommended. So that is a brief description on how to increase and keep lean body mass gains. I think calorie tracking apps are a good idea for the first few months. Keto is fine for many, but I would bump the calories, take the fat off more slowly, and do something to retain muscle. That way when you're done dieting down, you're most likely to keep the gains you made. Whatever you choose, best of luck and congrats!
justmotteingaround
6mo ago
Counterpoint: history is largely a one-way conversation of destroying traditions in favor of such progress. Preserving tradition is a balancing act for the more necessary goal of maintaining the the systems and institutions which beget the traditions. Its 60% compromise.
I don't think the Catholic Church is at a point where blessing gay unions is necessary to optimize the institution, but it's clearly now in their Overton window.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
That is trying to understand a really complex system
This is practically a definition for 'science'.
Well, they have a vested interest in it, no?
This is largely true for most fields of science.
the system as such began a long long time ago and we don't know much about that period.
Similarly, this is also true for most of science.
I can't find anything that makes these arguments apply to climate science, but not biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, etc.
Eg. Do we really know bacteria cause disease? Researches have a vested interest in continued research, but the proposed mechanisms are beyond complex, based on biology that began over a billion years ago.
that they at least produce the predicted results
Apparently climate models have been, on average, predictive. But this is not the kind of inductive claim I'm searching for.
weather forecasting as I see it isn't much better than an old man and bad knees.
Apparently, these are accurate 75% of the time inside of 5 days. This would be easy to disprove. Again, not an inductive claim. As an aside, if interested I'd be willing to bet money that weather forecasts are about as accurate as 30 sec. of googling led me to believe they are.
that a myriad of special interest have their hands in all kinds of places
I'm extremely mindful of this regarding climate policy.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
I don't think the solution to the problems of the poor is "kill the poor". But it's a classic pro-abortion talking point, isn't it?
I mean, that's the least charitable interpretation of: allow people to answer the widely debated philosophical question of the moral worth of a fetus for themselves, all while providing society with a list of known benefits. The implied eugenics (initially a progressive cornerstone) is just a bonus imo.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
When the PODUS, or any higher ranking politician, calls someone to tell them "The ballots are corrupt and that's illegal... Its more illegal for you than it is for them. You know what they did and you're not reporting it, and that is a criminal offense. You can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you... And you're letting it happen. I'm notifying you that you are letting it happen. And all I want to do is find X votes" just put them in jail.
justmotteingaround
9mo ago
I've actually wondered how public schools dodged the bullet of horrific pedo scandal that rightfully hit the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts.
It's probably way less common on a per-capita basis. For whatever reason, males commit ~90% of child sexual abuse. The younger the students, the more overwhelmingly female the teachers. And unlike schools, The Catholic Church and Boy Scouts have structures where the highest ranking authority figure can create significant alone time with children. The Sandusky scandal was similar.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
I'm sure exceptions to the rule exist, but we should deal in probabilities and stive for accurate piors. The president ran on being against the death penalty, and was elected. In my examples, I'm talking about sub 20% popular support. I don't know what it was in France.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
thus they were far less secure
This doesn't follow from the given. Allegedly they were lost in some locked closed that nobody went in and out of for years. Something like that. The FBI had security footage from Mar al Lago of people going in and out of where the documents were stored.
The fact that team Trump was adversarial to the classification people doesn't make his conduct bad.
It course it makes his conduct worse. I mean, whats worse: unknowingly keeping a work laptop, then giving immediately when found; or, unknowingly keeping a work laptop, and refusing to give it back, and forcing the police to come get it?
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
No, I mean that these positions are as likely to ascent to power as the Mises wing Libertarian party. Sure, some people probably want their neighborhoods looted and burned to the ground. I'm not especially worried about them gaining a consensus.
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
I think this is where HBD is misapplied as a heuristic if the goal is a colorblind meritocratic society. There are 40M blacks in the US. Plenty have merit for various jobs, things get weird at the tails, but there is a skew is already roughly reflected in broad achievement. From a quora post "what is the IQ of blacks"
"It’s about one standard deviation lower than whites or about 85. In practice, this means that individuals at the upper end of the curve are massively underrepresented. Look at two rather meritocratic statistics: 1) about 1% of NIH grants are awarded to black scientists 2) about 1% of CPAs in America are black. In either of these examples, there isn’t a big push to have candidates get external support or preferences (e.g. medical school or Ivy undergrad) so blacks are underrepresented by about 10 fold, which is what would be expected by a bell curve shifted to the left by one standard deviation.
Tally for black achievements (14% of U.S. Population):
1% NIH Grants awarded 1% of CPAs 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs (19 out of 1,800 recorded over history) 1% of American billionaires 1.8% of Law firm partners (virtually zero 0% at big NYC law firms) 2% of U.S. Air Force pilots 0% of Nobel prizes in Physics, medicine, chemistry ~1% of Nobel prizes in Economics (1 in history, note some years multiple recipients creating fuzzy math) 0% of Fields Medalists (considered the closest to Nobel for math) Another way to look at the issue of black intelligence is to pick an IQ required for a demanding job and see how many individuals fall in that category. Some researchers have suggested it takes an IQ of 130 to become a professor, senior executive, physician, tech entrepreneur. One could argue this is a floor, not an average. In the general population, about 2.5% of people would have an IQ this high. If the distribution curve is shifted to the left one SD, only 0.13% or about 1/17th as much (1/17th of 2.5%) of the population reaches this level. This suggests only one out of 770 American blacks would likely be capable of such professions.
This is all explicitly legal (a non-arbitrary business necessity must be demonstrated for disparate achievement to be perfectly legal. Standardized tests are fine). So you'd want to build merit based coalitions which doesn't lump ill defined groups together. HBD is less useful because its too broad. Coleman Hughes has collected wildly disparate outcomes at the group level within the squishy race categories, and HBD misses all of that. There are certainly edge cases of unqualified candidates being pushed forward to everyones detriment (such as the Barpod sadfunny ATC episode), but such instances have been challenged in the courts repeatedly, with ruling which work with HBD anyhow (ie demonstrating the necessity of disparate outcomes for organizational functioning).
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
Thanks. I am trying to ignore specifics and make an inductive argument about science in general to shed light on why climate science appears special (ie: most biologist claim that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, physicists say the universe has a speed limit, meteorologists say 80% chance it'll rain in 3 days etc). Normally, people just go "oh okay". AFAIKT, some 95% of climate scientists are saying "yep, the climate is projected to warm for x and y reasons" and yet many people are have been uniquely skeptical for ~50 years despite increasing consensus among people who have studied the science thousands of hours. I curious what the reason for this is.
Personally, I think the hypothesis is the expected one. Humans have added a trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere in 200 years, and its trivial to prove CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I'd expect something to happen, probably warming, although this need not be the case, and I don't really care either way. All I want to know is what makes climate science uniquely dubious from the highest vantage point, without specifics (mostly for practical reasons).
I haven't followed this much at all. I don't disagree with the points you made, but at a 5 minute glance it seems that the climate models are useful. Even if they weren't, skepticism in the face of an increasing consensus in a quantitative field over decades begs for an explanation.
justmotteingaround
9mo ago
I couldn't find the link for this claim:
The U.S. Department of Education found that 5% to7% of public school teachers engage in sexual abuse of children per year.
It seems outrageous. 1:15 teachers sexually abuse kids? And only 20% are males? The a-priori likelihood is low because of the offender rate and composition of the institutions. Unless schools hire females with a 10x offending rate, AND churches (broadly) hire males with 10-100x lower offending rate (based on this averaged with this, accounting for this. Its a-priori statistically very unlikely for male dominated or 50/50 places, to have higher offending rates than 60/40+ males spaces. But its possible.
All that said, the offender rate comports well with a good article from a solid source. But definitions make everything wonky, conflating language with acts sometimes. So I don't really know with any confidence. Bayes makes me think sex abuse is always much lower the more female dominated a place is.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
The goalposts were
police reform is now inextricably linked in the minds of at least half the populace total police abolition, lighter sentences, less bail, decriminalising hard drugs, violent criminals out on the streets by lunchtime, rioting, arson, looting, violent takeover of city streets and public areas and anti-white ideology
The data indicate that, for most of these things, public support falls a far south 50%. ~85% of Americans want police funding to remain the same or increase. More people want it to increase substantially than to decrease substantially.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
Which is most still do and
At the height of the violence, support for "reasonable" violence peaked at 22%. Without looking I'd be willing to bet fewer than 10% of congressmen endorsed violence at that time. Would also bet that the majority decried it when asked.
Claims that majorities genuinely want, will want, or recently wanted riots, violence, arson, looting, and violent criminals released by lunchtime does not comport with the data. Its an irrational belief in total contradiction to the lives claim they want.
I think he is correct. I find HBD plausible in principle, but it's terrible political tool in practice. For one, its radioactive and attracts a high proportion of radioactive supporters. Second, many better tools already exist (standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting). HBD is a worse substitute than existing policy frameworks. It purports to partially explain a wide variety of complex human behavior of ill defined groups. Interesting in principle; a bad policy tool for a nation that focuses so much on the individual (culturally and legally).
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