justmotteingaround
No bio...
User ID: 2002
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
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
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
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
2mo ago
Would be a shame if we stopped using them because of incorrect beliefs about the root causes of group differences…
This is essentially what I am earnestly claiming, because I do see how we get back to equal protection without explicitly acknowledging point 1. The courts have been doing this since the 1970's, clarifying that disparate impacts are fine so long as a non-arbitrary business necessity can be demonstrated.
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
It is a defense to disparate impact along protected class lines if it can be shown that the discriminatory factor is a business necessity. I'm less confident in how this plays out in practiced, how many bullshit claims of prevailed since the CRA, and how much bullshit claims have trailed off since.
justmotteingaround
4mo ago
I fly international a lot. My strategies work for me and I have my typical routes mastered. Timing your sleep/wake cycle on arrival is most important.
Melatonin is great on paper, doesn't seem to do much for me. I time caffeine, cardio, and sleep so I'll be most tired at the local bedtime on the first few nights. (Example: NYC to Switzerland takes off 6pm, so I get up at 3 am in NYC, binge coffee, work, take off 6PM, and I can sleep a few hours on the plane. Arrive 8am, caffeine around 10am and I'm fresh for the whole afternoon. I make sure to to push through to at least 8pm and then pass out for the night.)
Never stay up too late. Plan everything so you're tired as hell for bedtime the first few nights. Try to avoid caffeine after 12pmish the first few days after arrival so you can sleep well later. If you absolutely have to nap, do some math to calculate if you'll be tired that night, and set SEVERAL timers. Otherwise, just push through. Get on a regular schedule. Cardio/loooooong walks are great if you have too much energy and its getting late. You need pass out and sleep well at the normal bedtime for the first few nights!!!
As for the planes themselves, noise cancelling headphones if you got them. I drink at least 1L water every 2 hours minimum. I go to the back and have them refill my airport plastic bottle. Nobody else does this and its crazy. Planes are so dry. A good book or magazine is the best to pass the time. I have a kindle with 100's of books to read or re-read, and I'll put boring ones down in search of something that is great for long trips. Download any potentially interesting podcasts before takeoff. Series are great to binge. (I recommend alphabet boys, especially season 2). I've never had a 7 hour layover. The lounge might be worth it. Going into town might be worth it just to have a mini adventure, but you have to like random stuff like that (ie not find it stressful).
Nice deadlift! At ~23sec I saw your hips come up first. I don't use a belt, but I think I take a deeper breath and expand my stomach more to fill out my leverages, then brace. Perhaps something to play around with. You may want to mix in straps just to put more attention elsewhere (hips, leverages, whatever). Just some ideas.
justmotteingaround
6mo ago
The Church has changed traditions over time in order to maintain itself, increase its robustness, promote antifragility, etc. As an institution, the Catholic Church probably isn't amenable to rapid, radical change. (hence the slow move away from a Latin mass, the gradual lack of condemnation for charging interest on loans (Islam has created a bizarre, less efficient workaround which probably cost them economically), and the explicit condemnation of slavery being late to the party). Dozens more I think, but I know very little about the history of religion.
At some point, it may be optimal for the continuance of the Church to bless gay unions. In a few decades to a few hundred years. But also maybe it will never be optimal. However, imagine a contemporary Church that continued to argue, as I think Acquanias did (and I'm not sure if he was Catholic, but just as an example), that owning people as slaves was fine so long as you treated them well. That would be bad for the institution today. I'm not chiding the Church for being "late to the party". It's the kind of institution that should change slowly, cautiously, and with much debate.
Why its relevant: As I said, I'm pretty ignorant of the history of religion (its by far my worst Jeopardy! category). Therefore, I don't know how democratic religious have fared compared to more top-down structures, and I can't analyze the causal factors in a religions outcomes as institutions (for example, Buddhism and Hinduism are about twice as old as Christianity, but I don't know their institutional structures).
"we must make a fundamental change to [institution] to appeal to more progressive audiences, and grow our membership" scenarios play out in a non-destructive way,
My view is that this debate is the long arc of history: how much progress, and how fast? A balance must be stuck according the function of the institution. The US got rid of slavery, let women vote, allowed for constitutional review by SCOTUS, etc. Perhaps its not as robust as everyone would like, but it has worked out pretty well by historical standards. Companies can change faster than governmental bodies, which can change faster than spiritual institutions. Change too fast, you blow it up. Change too slowly, society moves on.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
This literally begs the entire argument.
At one nanosecond after fertilization, has a person formed? Is the affirmative obvious and/or rational? If not, what about 2 nanoseconds? Should murder charges apply for disposed IVF embryos? Why don't we have funerals for every lost embryo? Should the State be able to enforce veganism? Etc, etc.
The State shouldn't be able to force behavior in accordance with unfalsifiable beliefs without broad consent/consensus from the governed - which is lacking with abortion. It's exactly the kind of thing that should be left to people's own mind.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
how do you keep a strict diet without counting calories?
For me its getting really good at estimations after logging everything in a paid app for a couple of months. Now I just log my weight a few times a week, and the scale keeps me honest. Everything is a habit now. I cook most of the food I eat, and I think thats important. If I go out, I try to eat a filling snack before (veggies, fruit, low-cal smoothie, water, etc). I just assume the calories I consumed while out are double or triple my norm, so I just go hungry for a meal or two afterwards. If the scale is trending up, I just get more strict for the next week and see what happens. The key is never letting the weight creep back up.
so I figure 1g / kg will be sufficient; do you disagree?
I'd up the protein. Iirc the research shows that protein drives lean body mass and helps spare muscle. You may have more muscle than you think and probably want to save it as much as possible. I think you have a lot of headroom for additional calories and should be mindful of crashing, yo-yoing, and lowering your BMR for a few months. Whey and filtered milk (ie Fairlife)/water might be a good low carb protein and calorie adjustment; 40-50g protein, 6g carbs, and 250-300 calories. I don't know much about keto to say if 6g is too much. Also, I do know that people take keto supplements like magnesium for some reason.
I've thought about what you're trying; melt the fat then build back the muscle. The research convinced me to go the very slow route of 0.25-0.5% body-weight loss per week for 15-30 weeks. My base metabolic rate, satiety, and fitness should be exactly where I want it as soon as I'm done. But I love to cook and lift weights so it also suits me personally.
If you go for operation fat-melting, you should start a really dialed-in fitness routine when finished, which should take 4 months to figure out. Done correctly, that should stoke your metabolism. Then you can maintain easily (with keto or whatever). I've had friends that had success going this route. Eventually they found the keto too boring, but I eat a lot of repetitive meals so who knows. You'll gain water weight if you stop keto, which isn't something to worry about. Then just keep your eye on the scale. Best of luck.
As I mentioned before, I got most of my info from youtuber Jeff Nippard. He has a lot of videos going through quality research on diets, proteins requirements, cheat meals/compensatory overeating, rep-ranges, and progressive overload.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
When the POTUS asks someone to overturn election results immediately after falsely notifying them that they are committing a serious crime if they don't, just chuck them in a jail cell for a decade to teach them about reckless disregard for the truth, and intimidating election officials.
justmotteingaround
10mo ago
It was amazing how much that question pissed off my acquaintances.
Seems more highly predictable than amazing. I'd save such questions for a more appropriate social context (ie here, among a different group), even if they're interesting. To borrow an imperfect analogy from the imperfect gender debate: momness is a spectrum. If the kids, father, and law all view the stepmom as a mom, then yeah, stepmom is pretty much a mom. Self ID doesn't work here because so much of momness is contained in others. Steven Dubner of Freakonomics fame has talked about adopting a kid (after having many kids the usual way). The kid was adopted near birth, and he says it was just as special.
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
While I think your initiative is extremely laudable, just know that the path ahead of you is fraught. You may have a serious medical issue which forums could exacerbate. But keep documenting things, trying new things, and taking the initiative. I'd recommend a heavy bias towards experts who can see you in person, even if you have to shop around for the ones that work for you. Cautionary note: cascades of care, and incidentalomas.
Lastly, this reads like you're looking for a simple fix that has a clear mechanistic explanation. Generally speaking, I would not expect such specificity, but keep trying to make things better.
So, here is a layman speculation (without knowing your age, weight:height, mood, stability, aerobic capacity etc).
sorta-permanent emotional numbness and pleasure deficiency.
This sounds like anhedonia. It could be hormones (testosterone, free-T, T:E ratio, various thyroid hormones, medications you are taking, cortisol, micro or macro nutrient deficiency). These can all be looked at in one blood panel. I'd start with a full workup from a GP. (and the results will give us amateurs more to (possibly dangerously) speculate about!)
It may be a neurotransmitter imbalance. This can be an appealing thought, as it seems to promise a clear mechanistic solution. IME, it isn't nearly so cut and dry. If you can get through your day without chaos, I'd investigate this last.
For now:
Consider cutting caffeine. It isolates one variable and should improve sleep. I won't sugar coat this, this is awful for a week or two. However, you'll get back good data quickly. Sleep is a miracle drug.
Consider following a balanced diet of whole foods with a tiny caloric surplus. Whole foods and sufficient calories are the goal.
Supplements: vit-D+k, zinc, and magnesium are the most common deficiencies. Might want to wait until after the blood panel. Creatine 5g per day because almost no harm, many potential benefits. L-citrulline (malate is fine). May improve blood flow at 10g per day. Glycine for sleep. NAC works for some to clear brain fog. Can also allegedly cause anhedonia (did neither for me). Prob some others but the supplement world is waaaay overhyped imo.
One-crazy-thing: Carnivore diet. Never tried it. Seems insane. The good: It's simple (but not easy) to adhere to. It's an elimination diet so fewer variables. Its radically not the same, perhaps resulting in different outcomes. Wide anecdotal support. The bad: most support is anecdotal. Its wild. Diarrhea for a week.
Again: have a bias towards experts in person, but keep the initiative. Its your life you're free to experiment and deviate. Best of luck.
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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