lemongrab
23d ago
> non_radical_centrist
> doesn't read much of Kulak's stuff
...fair, username checks out.
Kulak's edginess-to-insight ratio is really high, and maybe increasing lately? Contrast him with Zero HP Lovecraft, who's definitely absurdly racist, usually wrong in some way, and also has edgelord tendencies. ZHPL sort of credibly presents himself as a classic philosopher who bravely followed his quest for the wisdom to save society deep down into the blackest abysses of edginess. Kulak presents himself as a guy who wants to watch the world burn, which, to me, makes his forced edginess even more obnoxious.
Given Kulak's recent post about blonde women, I'm disappointed he passed up the opportunity to speculate here about how hundreds of generations of arranged marriage must have relaxed the selective pressures for physical attractiveness on Indians. It would be very on-brand.
This from the article,
[...] mere observation of any of the billions of members of other species and subspecies of human.
with accompanying graphic, reminded me of an exchange I had here last month
I've never seen the claim that different human races should be considered sub-species, at least not by anyone who isn't absurdly racist.[...]
Maybe the geneticists are just knocking down a straw man when they say humans don't have subspecies and therefore there aren't biological races of humans, but it is a thing they do. [...]
There are admittedly an handful of absurd racists out there, so at some point I think scientists do have to knock those down. [...]
So here you go, @non_radical_centrist, the subspecies take in the wild. Or was @KulakRevolt already established among the "handful of absurd racists" around here?
I don't think there's anything miraculous about the fact that as we've observed the wondrous variety of natural phenomena, it's been possible to pick out a few aspects that can be reliably approximately explained with reference to simple mathematical rules. It's just selection bias that we hype these singular aspects of nature where it does work well. The vast majority of our observational data has resisted lossless compression -- it's only reasonably predictable through extensive particular knowledge, if at all. Various non-physics authors have drawn attention to this as the "Unreasonable INeffectiveness of Mathematics" in their domains of study. I get suspicious every time somebody holds up the law of gravitation as a "representative" outcome of scientific inquiry.
Undoubtedly there is a genetics-related meaning of race, in the sense that there are identifiable genetic markers that discriminate (heh) between people of different racial categories.
I should have made clear in my reply above that I was specifically questioning the implication, in the post I was replying to, that a PCA plot showing distinct racial clusters can rebut 'the old feel-good rhetorical device" that there's more genetic variation within than between. It does not necessarily do this, in the situation where the PCs showing those distinct clusters themselves explain a negligible fraction of overall variation.
But that's fine! Rebutting "more variation within than between" does not seem not necessary for race to have a genetic basis.
Maybe the geneticists are just knocking down a straw man when they say humans don't have subspecies and therefore there aren't biological races of humans, but it is a thing they do. See Biological Races in Humans:
The word “race” is not commonly used in the non-human biological literature. [...] Of all the words used to describe subdivisions or subtypes within a species, the one that has been explicitly defined to indicate major geographical “races” or subdivisions is “subspecies” (Futuyma, 1986, pg. 107–109; Mayr, 1982, pg. 289). Because of this well-established usage in the evolutionary literature, “race” and “subspecies” will be regarded as synonyms from a biological perspective. In this manner, human “race” can be placed into a broader evolutionary context that is no longer species-specific or culturally dependent.
The question of the existence of human “races” now becomes the question of the existence of human subspecies. This question can be addressed in an objective manner using universal criteria.
This guy goes on to argue that by the broader race/subspecies criteria, there are biological races of chimps, but not of humans.
I also have no idea what people who think race is 100% socially constructed and not biological mean. Do they think a baby born to self-identified black parents is not likely to have noticeably darker skin than a baby born to self-identified white parents? There's something to be said for "racial classifications are not cross-culturally consistent", such that in Brazil people might be called "white" while having a large percentage of African ancestry than many people in America who are called "black", but that just reflects how the map is socially constructed, not the territory -- which is a truism.
As I understand, what the professional geneticists mean by "human racial classifications have no basis in biology" is something like the claim
(1) "Inasmuch as there's a sensible biological phenomenon of "race" or "subspecies" that we can talk scientifically about all across biology (not just humans), we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations. Morphology and behavior isn't enough. If you want to tell me that you've discovered a new subspecies of gray flycatcher, the distinctive markings on its tail feathers and the distinctive song that it sings aren't going to cut it -- you have to show something about the ratio of overall genetic variation within vs between candidate populations of gray flycatchers.
Many biological "subspecies" that were previously identified based on morphology and behavior don't hold up to modern genetic analysis. This is not to say that your candidate subspecies of gray flycatcher can't be reliably identified by genetic analysis -- maybe it has a handful of mutations that always appear in it but not in the rest of the species, and maybe those mutations underlie the distinctive behavior and morphology -- but those distinctive differences may be located in too few genes to make the cut overall. Maybe the genetically-mediated differences in morphology and behavior will drive true subspeciation in the future, but it's not there yet.
Applied to human races, the genetic differences between human racial groupings fail to stand out against the backdrop of human genetic diversity sufficiently, across the whole genome, to make the cut as biological subspecies, at any threshold of "sufficiently" to be useful across the rest of biology (not that biology has a lot of use for subspecies in general -- species are fuzzy enough already)."
What some people seem to want this to mean is more like
(2) "Observed average morphological and behavioral differences between members of different human races are not genetically mediated."
This is absurd on its face, and is not implied by (1).
There's plenty of room for different socially-defined and approximately ancestry-tracking racial groups of humans to exhibit genetically-mediated differences in morphology and behavior without qualifying as biological subspecies. There's plenty of room for greyhounds and pitbulls to do so as well, also without qualifying as biological subspecies.
lemongrab
1mo ago
Any of us can download publicly available genetic data, run a PCA on Europeans, East Asians, and Sub-Saharan Africans to get a clean triangle with each of the three populations on a node.
I have not performed this exercise, but my understanding is that the first two PCs you'd use as the axes of this plot will usually explain a negligible percentage of the total variance in a genomic dataset. PCA will always rank axes by variance, but that doesn't mean the top few PCs are any good, in an absolute sense, at reducing the data dimension while preserving structure. Even if the PCs that let us reliably identify these clusters happen to be the relatively 'best' PCs we could use to collapse the multidimensional data onto a graph, they could still suck, in an absolute sense.
lemongrab
1mo ago
It looks like it took the police killing at least 6k people, possibly up 12k or even higher, to reduce the number of murders over that period by ~15k cumulatively. Probably a fair bit of "substitution" there, assuming drug gangsters were murdering each other at high rates before -- some of this must be criminal-on-criminal killings being replaced by cop-on-criminal killings. Still, it does look like it was plausibly a net win on that measure -- have to be believe at least that police killings were better targeted at criminal elements than the background murders were. And it sounds like Filipinos broadly supported the effort. Still not sure how much it cut down on the actual drug use, but cutting down on the associated crimes is probably more important.
El Salvador, yeah there it does sound like they made big gains with locking up all the gangsters, don't know if they had to kill a lot of people to do that, or if US accusations that Bukele cut deals gang leaders are true. Easier to know who to go after in a place where the criminals are basically tattooing their criminal affiliations on their faces.
lemongrab
1mo ago
Sick society, sure, hard to argue with that, but I can't believe a Philippines-style approach makes it any healthier -- what's the evidence that executing however many thousand people there even improved the problem at all? Last I heard, the outgoing Duterte government didn't make much of an attempt to quantify the positive effects the several-year "reign of terror" had on stopping drug crime. Certainly haven't heard the compelling evidence that it worked well enough to justify normalizing the "shoot a guy and sprinkle some meth on him" tactics that police were empowered to use against civilians (and maybe civilians against each other).
I don't know who's laughing about how the need to test our policies to see if they work entails the risk of making people's lives worse, and I'm certainly not seeing how some Judge Dredd approach is so self-evidently superior that it wouldn't need to be empirically evaluated.
I don't really know about this fuzzier sense of "seeking death". Maybe that is what some of them are doing. Speaking as guy who fully expects to take his eventual death into his own hands but doesn't expect to ever abuse opioids, it's not what I would do if I were seeking death, but I can see how it could be that way for some. Certainly it's not a thing to do if you're unwilling to risk death. Regardless, I don't think most of the ones who are alive are seeking death in the immediate sense -- the sense in which they would actually choose to make use of a MAID kit if it were offered to them.
I grant there's not a bright line between
(1) "refrain from taking away the means for people to kill themselves"
(2) "actively give people the means to kill themselves",
(3) "kill people at their request",
(4) "kill people people at your discretion"
It's appealing to try to erect a fence between (1) and (2), which separates decriminalization of potentially lethal drugs from MAID. A fence between (1) and (2) looks like making it generally permissible to possess but not to distribute. But of course this runs into problems with the presumption of "intent to distribute", and with the substantial overlap between users and distributors.
Personally, I don't care so much if people who want to die actually do so, and don't believe it's possible or desirable to spend a lot of effort to prevent this in general. It is worth spending effort to make people less inclined to self-destruction in the first place, and maybe keeping them from initially getting their hands on substances that set them off down the spiral is an important part of that. Ultimately I just don't know enough about why these people are abusing these drugs in the first place -- hard to believe it's that they don't know what road they're stepping into when they start.
I suspect the root of the problem is that we don't know how to build the "rat park" mentioned elsewhere in this thread, neither can we actually stop the movement of the fentanyl, so none of this going to get "solved" in any way that doesn't look like brutally grinding a bunch of unfortunates under society's heel. It's not surprising that this is unpalatable enough for people to try just looking the other way.
lemongrab
1mo ago
Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts?
This feels mostly boo-outgroup. Setting aside both the moral arguments and factual issues of how Canada uses MAID, it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.
lemongrab
1mo ago
I think this is partly just Oregon being Oregon. Oregon has historically been a leader in direct democracy and ballot access (first to use ballot initiatives, first to directly elect Senators, first to use universal vote-by-mail), and as such they sometimes pass half-baked initiative policies that are unwound later (like the initiative-based supermajority requirements on local tax increases).
Fortunately, Oregon seems pretty open to actually testing policy to see how it works -- this is the state that literally A/B tested Medicaid expansion. It was also, surprisingly, the first state to roll back federal covid quarantine requirements, and kept them rolled back after seeing that they were no longer making any difference.
You may be right though that disillusionment is setting in with certain liberal policies. Oregon's green-space-preserving laws that make development outside of cities almost impossible are also coming under attack recently as the housing situation worsens. At least Oregon finally overrode labor interests and its general nanny-state tendencies enough to let residents pump their own gas.
lemongrab
1mo ago
If you're most concerned with physical symptoms of anxiety, have you/your doctor considered beta blockers? Off label for anxiety, but very commonly prescribed, seem to work well for the somatic shaky-sweaty type symptoms.
lemongrab
2mo ago
Several of those antisocial behavior examples you listed just seem trashy. I can respect a solid Evil Scheme executed with cunning and deceit, but stealing the snacks from the break room or pushing the limits of return policies ain't it. I imagine myself doing these things and it just feels like it would be embarrassing to stoop so low for something so trivial, and where the social risk of being caught is more "disappointment" than punishment. This is the antisociality of an animal or a machine, that doesn't even have a theory of other human minds and can't understand the disappointment when unaccompanied by punishment. It's more aesthetically depressing than morally repugnant to see this kind of behavior.
This looks like it was written by someone talking slightly too much Adderall (I Can Tell by Some of the Pixels and by Having Taken Quite a Few Adderalls in My Day) and the inverted U's being drawn as normal curves when they'd make more sense as parabolas looks like a tip-off that the author is unconsciously pushing a little too hard at that satisfying feeling of fluent-compression of concepts -- but overall this seems reasonable.
My midwit slap-another-axis-on-it extension of that model would be that (for a given task context, but maybe more broadly shared between a variety of task contexts) there's something like a y-axis of "expected reward for effort" superimposed over the x-axis of exploit-explore, or "focus-divergence" (exploit-explore only trade off at a fixed level of task effort). On that graph, I think the effect of Adderall is to push up-and-left -- to increase the expected reward for exploit-effort. This is very performance-enhancing for people who need more exploit-effort, bad for people who actually need more explore-effort, and mixed for people who already have a good explore-exploit balance but just need to put in more overall effort to improve at the task.
In this model, a depressive state is one where, for almost any available task-action context, the expected reward for effort is very low -- and that's why Adderall can sometimes be a decent antidepressant. The classical hyperactive ADHD state would be higher up the y-axis but shifted way the right, while an inattentive ADHD state might not be as far shifted to the right, but lower down below the x. Each might get some benefit from Adderall pushing up-and-left, but in different ways. And of course, some people who look like any of those phenotypes might just need different task-contexts than the ones they're presented with.
lemongrab
2mo ago
But “becoming” French should mean, at a bare minimum, being married to an ethnically French person, having a child with at least two ethnically-French grandparents, and changing one’s name (given name and surname!) to a historically French name.
Français par le sang verse seems like a reasonable additional alternative.
Worth the Candle is unique and memorable, sometimes frustratingly uneven but hard to put down. Much of the kitchen sink world building fell flat for me (but there are some striking inventions); sometimes the story drags (but it rarely feels like the author is losing his grasp on it); some of the characters have odd motivations and aren't especially likeable (but they're consistently and characteristically odd, and their dynamics with each other are well developed, with moments of surprising insight); in all, it's rarely missing on every aspect at the same time, so there's almost always something to keep pulling you along. And the prose is workmanlike throughout, which is saying something because the book just does. not. end. Even the end isn't the end, but if you're still with it by then you won't mind. As the only LitRPG I've read, I can't say with authority that it's way better crafted than most of the genre, but that's certainly the impression I get secondhand, despite it being a Door-Stopping Work of Staggering Self-Indulgence.
lemongrab
2mo ago
Sounds like EA should work on better pain relievers so folks like you can spare their livers all those bottles of wine. But for real, is supporting the development of better pain relief an EA priority? There's interesting work to be done there, some recent progress being made on sodium channel blockers I think. On top of the whole "make everything less painful for everyone" angle, there's how most of the ongoing opioid trainwreck could have been averted if we had real painkillers that didn't require escalating doses to keep working.
lemongrab
2mo ago
What escapes me about all this: where does the moral certainty of the progressive "Modern Puritan" come from/what's it grounded in? What faith are they even evangelizing? To recall a recent topic around here, what's their answer to Nietzsche?
Most charitably we could credit them with a form of liberal humanism -- "we believe in self-actualization, and in the righteousness of removing all the oppressive obstacles to the self-actualization of others". But that seems like weak gruel for the Puritan soul. How to make an orthodoxy of human freedom? How do fanatics whip themselves into frenzies of 'you do you'? Isn't it paradoxical, even more paradoxical than a good religion needs to be?
Not to get all TLP here, but I think we can see the core progressive aesthetic as a fetishization of the self-actualizing process, a kind of social BDSM. The process is understandably more easily fetishized when it manifests in a YA novel trope of a special individual's picturesque struggle against the constraints of societal expectations than when it manifests in a more opaque internal process of self-cultivation. We're seeing now that it's also possible to fetishize an individual's righteous struggle for freedom against the constraints of personal biological reality.
It's the visible struggle against outward restraint that arouses the moral energy, and which draws focus away from the oppressed individual's goal in the struggle. The actual human victim's personal hopes and dreams -- tawdry or outright distasteful as they might be if laid out for sober scrutiny -- can be set aside during the ecstatic spectacle of liberation. But then, the goal achieved, the ropes untied, the scene completed, the post-nut clarity setting in, the unsettling condition of being reasserts after the spasm of vicarious becoming. What will the liberated do now with liberty (ever so exquisitely attained)? Do we really want to know? What, indeed, will we do with ours?
The answer, of course, is clear. Find a new character who can reenact the performance. The emptiness of freedom compels the search for fresh veins of righteous struggle. Better hope oppression is a renewable resource, or sooner or later we'll all have to stand around looking at each other's naked flabby souls in the cold light of full luxury automated gay space communism.
lemongrab
3mo ago
I'm generally not that interested in trans stuff, and haven't really talked to trans people about their subjective experiences of it, but my wife suggested an idea about it the other day that had never occurred to me: I've never heard of a pre-transition trans person express the fear of not 'passing' in the opposite direction -- e.g., a pre-transition trans man, feeling like a man in a woman's body, finds himself in the women's locker room feeling afraid that the other women will detect that he's actually a man, despite his physically gynecoid appearance. If I were to wake up and find my mind 'trapped in a woman's body', I think it would be hard to escape the 'illusion of transparency' -- I'd be paranoid that I'd be found at as not a real woman, no matter how much I looked and sounded like one, because I'm 'essentially' a man. Is this an experience that trans people report?
lemongrab
3mo ago
Somewhat poorly. It helps that screens can be dimmed a lot, with third-party tools (Twilight, etc) if necessary, and a screen can be useable (for non-graphics tasks) when extremely dim if the surroundings are dim too. I also have a red-backlit keyboard -- looks a bit like fireplace embers.
I'm not religious about this stuff, and I trade off my sleep timing against other concerns. Sometimes I do stuff out in public at later hours under bright lights, and in recent weeks my sleep time slipped because I liked keeping my Christmas lights on late. But I can be confident now that when I want to sleep earlier, being more religious about the lighting situation is an effective way to do it.
I know non-24-hour sleep disorder is a real thing, but since it's most obviously a real thing for blind people, maybe among the sighted it's often something like 'idiosyncratically weak response to day/night lighting cues' -- have you really maxed out the intensity of your day/night cues? Is it as bright as possible in the day and as dark as possible in the night?
I fixed my delayed sleep phase problem (which tended toward non-24-hour during the winters) by being unreasonably aggressive about darkness in the evening. I bought a pack of rechargeable LED candles and if I use no other light source for three hours before I intend to sleep, I reliably sleep at my chosen hour, which is about 4 hours earlier than I'd tend to otherwise, and my sleep time no longer creeps later and later every day like it used to in the winter. Previous attempts at fixing this with super bright lights in the morning, or avoiding blue light in the evening, or avoiding screens in the evening, or using a 'reasonable' degree of dimming in the evenings, all failed. If my evening darkness procedure hadn't been enough, I'd have tried blackout curtains to maximize intensity of nighttime darkness.
Maybe you've already exhausted all your possible gains here, and if you lived in a tent in the woods for a week or two with no artificial lights at all you'd still not entrain with the sun -- but if you haven't tried something roughly that extreme, maybe push harder in that direction.
lemongrab
5mo ago
Been reading some Howard lately -- there's plenty more in the same vein when you run out of Conan -- but Howard's other axe-in-your-face protagonists just aren't the same. The introspective Kull, the melancholy Bran mak Morn, the borderline-unhinged Solomon Kane, the various bitter and vengeful Gaels from Black Turlogh to Donald MacDeesa, they all lack Conan's occasional gigachad jollity. They're all drawn from the same head-breaking tiger-man archetype, but the others just aren't having fun with it.
Have you watched Tartakovsky's Primal? The main characters' names are taken from the title of a Howard story, and it's turned up to 11 to the point that our hero doesn't interrupt his primitive ass-kicking with a single spoken word until the end of the first season.
This superficially looks like an uncharitable take by somebody who never read the original 1999 Dunning and Kruger paper. In that paper, the authors explicitly addressed the obvious objection that their finding could be fully explained as a statistical artifact -- they were by no means ironically unaware of this interpretation. They pointed out that the interpretation as a statistical artifact wouldn't account for the asymmetry wherein the overestimation by the unskilled was so much larger than the underestimation by the skilled. That is, the effect is not just about the slopes, but about the intercepts.
Krueger and Mueller (different Kreuger) in 2002 tried to make the case for the effect being artifactual, but acknowledged that something more was required to explain the asymmetry. They claimed the asymmetry came from a generalized bias for people to assess themselves as better than average, which happens to be less wrong for people who are actually better than average than for people who aren't.
Dunning and Kruger (2002) rebutted with claims that further experiments had discredited that explanation, and I lost interest in pursuing the progress of this debate, though Ehrlinger et al (2008) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702783/ is probably a good next step. Suffice to say though that this is absolutely not some clever new insight that those innumerate psychologists overlooked -- the psychologists have been thinking about it since literally the first paper, and arguing among themselves about it since shortly thereafter.
I talked about this in the thread I originally linked -- I think zoologists are trying to classify based on something like relative distance between overall genomes, whether or not that corresponds to obvious phenotypic differences. They're trying to make it more consistent than old-school 'natural history', and that makes their definition diverge from popular use.
I'd say this just highlights how the stuff the zoologists are interested in among other animal species doesn't correspond well to what's politically relevant in an HBD sense, and it's an unhelpful veneer of scientism to try to apply the zoologists' "subspecies" label to human races.
The real argument is to show that politically-relevant behavior relevantly originates in genes that distribute unevenly across politically-characterized racial categories. That can probably be done, but it shouldn't be confused with what the zoologists are doing with other species.
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