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I just looked through my sheaf of saved papers to evaluate this and interestingly enough there are further examples of symbioses occurring without the initial mitochondrial endosymbiosis (albeit not well publicised ones) - for example mealybugs possess specialised cells containing endosymbiotic β-proteobacteria which themselves contain endosymbiotic γ-proteobacteria, essentially forming a set of nested obligate endosymbionts. The authors note this probably occurred multiple times, with different precursors of the ancestral γ-proteobacteria independently infecting the ancestral β-proteobacteria on approximately four occasions.
There's also the fact that it's hard to gauge how likely endosymbiosis would have been on early Earth; mitochondrial development likely hindered the development of further endosymbiosis along those lines to some degree because the already established eukaryotic lineage filled available niches.
I’ve seen this posited as well - that the primary endosymbiosis that formed eukaryotes, where a free-living bacterial cell got incorporated into a host cell to create mitochondria, expanding the cellular energy budget, is an extremely rare event that might limit the prevalence of advanced life throughout the galaxy.
That hypothesis falls apart a lot though when you consider that this has actually occurred multiple times; e.g. chloroplasts are also the result of endosymbiosis and in fact they have developed independently in Archaeplastida and Paulinella alike, which certainly speaks against the idea of it being a rare occurrence. And then there are the nitrogen fixing organelles in certain types of marine alga, which appear to have been a result of this same process. For primary endosymbiosis to have happened at least four times indicates the mechanism itself is not rare, and significantly weakens its ability to explain the Fermi paradox.
Every time I’d read their use of the term in Chinese Communist literature, it’s always got this background connotation with their earlier philosophical systems, owing more to the fact that even when Communism was developing and taking root in China, it was growing out of context of other traditions that history never shakes off entirely from the population.
To be quite honest I think China at this point is just straight up not "communist" and is not trying to be, frankly that ideology is not compatible with a country that quashes unions and Marxist agitators the same way they do any other potentially destabilising dissident, and produces new billionaires at a rate exceeding anywhere else in the world. Aspects that one might point to like e.g. state direction/ownership of some business are aspects of boilerplate authoritarianism, and these policies were also pursued in decidedly non-communist states like Mussolini's Italy (albeit it did so indirectly via state-owned holding companies). It always seems to me like people focus too much on the "communist" label stuck onto them and ignore the way the country is actually being run, which is something very meaningfully indigenous; what actually developed is not communism but a form of technocratic cyberpunk Legalism that deeply values political meritocracy (they even maintain the civil examination system for officials), iron-fisted rule-by-law, practical results-driven legitimacy, etc, and merely features some trappings of the discursive framework of Marxism to articulate their goals. If anything, out of all the countries in the East Asian region, China probably possesses the format of governance that's most true to the premodern Asian norm.
I always find it quite funny when people say things like "I love Chynese culture, but hate the government and CCP" or treat China as if its beautiful traditional culture has been wholesale supplanted by a very bad, no good system of statist authoritarianism when a cursory look at Chinese culture would tell you that the Party-state is in many ways a very close modern analogue to old Chinese ideas of legitimate governance and in fact the CCP is very nice in comparison to that. Most people appear to place too much importance on labels, have a view of culture as a set of aesthetics and vibes for outsider consumption instead of an entire framework of legitimacy, philosophy of governance, etc, and contextualise countries selectively depending on whether they are a friend or an enemy geopolitically, which leads to frankly psychotic discourse.
The reason that 'Western conservatives' in 2rafa's top-level post are unable to achieve lasting transformations of the country is because they really don't have that much support. They can join winning coalitions, but if they try to pursue transformative agendas, they run into not only institutional but popular backlash, because their goals are genuinely unpopular.
On a broader level, I think that American politics ever since the 50s onwards has been something like a "coalition of the hegemony" vs a "coalition of the dissenters", with the parties essentially switching sides in this dichotomy at some point during the 70s and 80s. The challenge for the former group is to try and hold the line on their relatively unified consensus without splintering apart over the tyranny of small differences, whereas the challenge for the latter group is to try and piece together a generally coherent and cohesive group out of many little ragtag bands of dissenters with different objectives and interests.
Much ink has been spilled over how incoherent and all-encompassing intersectional critical theory is, and having read the absolute trash that counts as scholarship in these circles I have to agree. But it makes more sense when conceptualised as an attempt to build a coherent coalition with a shared goal; before then the political "left" was full of different unpopular dissident groups that didn't necessarily agree with each other or believe they were optimising towards the same thing, and were pretty much unified solely by their opposition to whatever they considered to be the political and social hegemony at the time. Due to the big tent nature of the early movement, progressives hung out with people one would see as persona non grata now (e.g. in France progressives were deeply entwined with existentialists and postmodernists who were a little too into pedophilia for comfort, and gay rights parades in the US at times featured the presence of NAMBLA).
This big tent later started to be standardised into a more overarching worldview which led to all the causes being associated with each other in a way that would ensure more ideological consistency and agreement regarding end goals, which led to impressively befuddling things like the "war on drugs" being folded into the larger omnicause of "racism" and the emergence of concepts like the intersectional stack and the Superstructure (the White Cisheteropatriarchy); these concepts were not created to be logically sound but instead existed as a consensus-building tool to convince everyone they were actually fighting the same thing and that all their goals were inextricably tied up with one another. Progressives love to say that there are "many different progressivisms" but a while back a user here posted a political typology with results that indicated "leftward progressives" were far more homogenous in their opinions than any of the other groups, largely due to this manufacturing of consensus.
I don't think right-wingers currently have anything resembling a shared vision; there's no sweeping conceptual framework like intersectionality that would unite all their causes under one banner and create widespread cross-group support for a constellation of dissident opinions all at once. Most rightists here are very prone to disagreement and are in a sense part of the problem - I for example care most about opposing identitarian politics and oppression narratives I view as corrosive and consider many Rightists here to give too much lip service to the values and framing of the left, yet break ranks whenever someone does the whole jingoistic American Exceptionalist, foreign-interventionist, China-hawk stuff that is very common among certain strands of the right, and that kind of internal disorder is not something you can tolerate if you want to enact sweeping reforms that stick.
At the moment, conservatives are just too fractured and divided to actually be able to enact a transformative agenda the same way that the Counterculture did in the mid-20th century, and there is no rallying cry that will make them all unite around each others' causes.
I was a mini-STEMlord myself as a kid and if the longest thing he has read is a Wikipedia article, short stories probably work for you, and they don't need to be YA. Ted Chiang's stuff is evergreen and I imagine they would be rather accessible; Story of Your Life and Exhalation are two good ones he may enjoy.
Some Greg Egan ones may work too, though I may not recommend whole short story compilations from him since some can get heavy. But Learning To Be Me is particularly accessible and very haunting.
DISCLAIMER: I may be overindexing on the "was able to follow a 1st-year undergraduate biochem course on MIT OpenCourseware" part and failing to properly factor in "is literally 10", so maybe use your own judgement.
Firstly, thank you. Secondly, I see people are coming off Reddit to find me now. I stopped doing this because I'm now supremely busy (and dealing with the absolute state of gender research and discourse was like trying to stem a river of diarrhoea with my hands for no good reason), but since you went to the trouble of actually getting here I'll try to respond.
These studies show almost no gender symmetry even though they have used modified CTC. They describe it as male perpetrated and tell no gender symmetry exists(the sample size is too small but the findings I don't think I can dismiss)
So what goes on in studies like this and what exactly do they do in their methodologies that leads to data like this? Because in PASK I can see that they found near gender symmetry. But for some reason in asian or middle eastern countries it is not the case.
Regarding the two studies you linked from India, you're correct that the sample size is small, but in my opinion an even bigger issue is that the "modified CTS" (from what I see, these studies are actually using questionnaires based off the modified CTS) is being utilised here in two separate studies conducted a year apart, one which only studies men and one which only studies women. I'd be very careful with this. Since they were conducted in two different sessions these studies can feature subtly different questions, interviewing norms, and methodologies, and the "methods and materials" section of the study is very high level and does not provide a whole lot of methodological detail other than really high-level coverage of basics; they may very well have adapted their approach over time. Without detailed methodological information, it's possible that the questions administered or the approach taken to the respondents in both studies may have been subtly different. Timing is also itself a problem - different survey waves mean different historical contexts, and there may be real changes in prevalence or in willingness to disclose over time. This confounds any attempt to compare between the two studies.
From a cursory read of the studies it does appear that there were differences in the questionnaire administered; e.g. economic violence was assessed in the female study, while it was excluded in the male study, and it's hard to know how differences like that would affect respondent behaviour within the study. As an example of how this can work, it's possible for there to be a priming and framing effect wherein a longer questionnaire assessing a broader list of behaviours signals a wider definition of violence, and can change what respondents recall and count as abusive, including in other domains like physical violence. In general it's always better to source either a meta-analysis featuring a very large curated swath of studies that harmonises definitions, assesses study quality, and models between-study heterogeneity, or to use a singular study where the explicit goal is to provide comparative data for the sexes, instead of picking out two different studies conducted at two different times and then trying to compare figures from these to come to an overall conclusion.
There have, however, been studies conducted with the goal of providing a large slate of comparative data that surveys men and women in many different countries; a pretty early example of this is the International Dating Violence Study, with results summarised here. They asked students regarding their domestic violence perpetration, and if an incident was reported they asked about bidirectionality. The results from India show that approximately equal proportions of men and women perpetrated minor violence on their partners, and a higher proportion of women perpetrated severe violence compared to men. Of those relationships with violence, 8.3% featured male perpetration only, 16.6% featured female perpetration only, and 75% was bidirectional. You'll note that if you look at the figures for Middle Eastern countries in the paper there's also gender symmetry. This isn't the only one either; there are many studies like that around, showing the same patterns.
Also studies like this https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077801214521324
Oh, this is Johnson. To be quite frank, this is probably one of the single worst domestic violence researchers I have ever come across; his entire body of academic work has entirely been him trying to create two different categories of domestic violence: "Common couple violence" and "intimate terrorism", with the first occurring out of routine frustration and the latter being perpetrated out of a desire for control. He claims that the former is largely gender symmetrical and the latter is mostly male-perpetrated, and around the '00s and '10s he basically tried to launder a false idea of gender asymmetry into academia. When he first attempted to prove this claim he literally used samples that included either known female victims of male violence or samples drawn from crime surveys of women’s victimisation using only women's reports. When this was actually tested by other researchers using non-selected general population samples, it was repeatedly found again, and again, and again, and again that intimate terrorism as per his own typology was either gender symmetrical or majority female-perpetrated. Johnson of course does not want to acknowledge all this research as it delegitimises his ideology and his "contribution" to the field.
In this study, in order to try and save face he claims that asking people about their experiences with "ex-spouses" is much more of a better measure than asking them about their current relationships, and says that in survey data he finds more intimate terrorist ex-husbands compared to intimate terrorist ex-wives. But his data source for this study is the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS), which isn't the best source to draw from, to say the least. As this blogger notes; "The study was never intended to measure domestic violence in both genders. It was developed by feminist researchers for the purpose of exclusively surveying women [7]. Indeed, for the first three months of the study, only female respondents were interviewed [8]. The CDC later decided to add a male sample as well. However, the male respondents were not treated equally in this survey. While all female respondents were assigned female interviewers, only half of the male respondents were assigned a male interviewer [9]. A further bias, or a consequence of the above mentioned biases, was the much higher refusal rate among men in the survey (45% vs 36%) [10]. Because of these methodological and statistical biases, the findings of this study are far from the last word on the subject." Given the issues with the survey and its methodology, such research operating off the NVAWS is not to be taken as definitive proof of, well, anything. Yet the state of the academy is such that this is the kind of research people are touting as "evidence" for their pet theories.
Where can I know more about these things and be aware of bad researches on DV?
Honestly, dissidents are dispersed all over the internet and many of the old guard that were critical of SocJus academia have dispersed now. And given my inactivity lately on gender issues, I'm probably not the best person to ask for up-to-date, centralised sources which actually go in-depth on the problems with progressive academia. It also increasingly seems to me like the popularity of the old identity politics hobbyhorses of the 2010s have largely waned in popular discourse as well, and the focus has shifted to new things like AI and the Iran War and so on. While feminism/women's studies is still an extremely powerful lobby and still produces a lot of crap academic work, in popular-discourse circles these kinds of topics seem to have gotten increasingly stale.
Or maybe I'm just less terminally online. Hard to say.
But you've gotta have something, and millions of people even in our "modern nihilistic age" do find something, so you don't have much of an excuse to not get to it.
This sort of precludes the possibility of depression among people who aren't experiencing immediate threat, though, since depression is in large part a problem of lack of meaning. Crucially, you can't simply will a telos into existence when you don't have one. I'm not saying rolling over and dying is the correct answer (it's not), but "finding purpose" is a very open-ended task with a very individualised solution and it can be easy or nearly impossible depending on the person in question.
It always strikes me just how radically different people are in terms of mental architecture, such that imagining a different cognitive landscape is sometimes like trying to conceptualise an alien mind.
Honestly I think you're closer to the population norm than I am. Everyone's always talking about how depressed they are and how meaningless everything seems. I feel like the odd one out in that I've never struggled with any of that.
Selection bias is probably a very big factor influencing that perception. People talk about their malaise partially because they need to get it off their chest; people who are doing fine don't speak about just How Very Ok they are. I don't really think the Redditors traumaposting about their deep depression are at all representative of what the general population actually is like.
Regarding "suffering", I think that's a very difficult thing to quantify and can't necessarily be assessed so easily. Generally I think the discourse surrounding suffering is flawed in many ways; firstly people tend to overweight sources of suffering that are essentially severe but temporary over sources of suffering that are lower-level but more persistent, and secondly people tend to underweight the influence and importance of someone having hope that things will get better for them in the future and belief in their own agency to change it. The lack of conception of what a feasible "better life" would look like is an extremely underrated factor in suicides. More than anything else, I think our brains regard the idea of being stuck as intolerable, and searches for any kind of actionable solution.
In your hypothetical of someone experiencing a potentially fatal health condition, often suicide doesn't even occur to them because there's some kind of conception of a better future to fight for and a clearly defined set of steps to possibly stop the suffering that is currently occurring; you have something to fight against and a sense that you will either reach a state where things will get better or you're going to die trying. Paradoxically, I think actively being under assault creates more of a sense of urgency and purpose. You can look to the future and declare that you will be happy once you make the negative stimulus stop (at least, until the hedonic treadmill inevitably kicks in and you return to your natural affective baseline, but your brain focuses on the here and now and doesn't think about that). But when, on paper, you already possess the things that any reasonable person could expect - you're healthy and have a job, friends, hobbies, and so on, and yet you're still coming back to your apartment feeling horribly empty and unmotivated as if the things you were doing only served to prevent you from having to deal with yourself, there's nothing to work towards. It's much easier to fall into a mindset where life itself, or your own ingrained mental patterns, are the problem, because that's less of a concrete issue that you can identify and take steps to address.
I'm not sure people do it on a whim per se, rather I'd frame the impulsive nature of suicide as being a response to the straw that broke the camel's back. I think we have affective baselines which are more insensitive to circumstances than we would like to believe they are, and there is a subsection of unlucky people whose affective baseline oscillates somewhere between misery and ennui (an idea partially supported by behaviour genetics). Modern life has reduced the number of blameworthy agents they can pin the problem on and try to fix, which only makes it worse. When you don't even know what the problem even is, what would make you happy, or what there is to even strive for, when you on paper should be doing okay but everything only seems like pointless sound and fury, I see why one would look around at the paucity of other feasible options and choose the only way out.
Can’t give a full response now, but mostly agree.
I don't think you need to be a spiritualist (although I am) to think that ML systems cannot experience pain.
I believe we’ve spoken about this before; I agree with this if you are defining pain as the sensation of physical pain, since you likely can’t capture most of its dimensions without a body or a sense of ownership over that body as belonging to you. Affective and emotional pain, on the other hand, is a broader category; it’s not prima facie implausible for an artificial system to have some kind of weird hall-of-mirrors distorted analogue of that which represents “negatively valenced response to stimulus”.
But qualia is very subtle - for instance, things as similar as men and women can experience distinctly different qualia.
It gets way weirder and more fucky than that: I’m aware of a study where researchers blinded rats and fitted them with a prosthesis which fed their visual cortexes info from a geomagnetic sensor. Their brains quickly adapted to the new sensory modality, to the extent that they were navigating mazes almost as well as sighted rats. Mole rats use magnetonavigation, and become incredibly stressed out and fearful when placed in experimental conditions that prevent them from sensing that. I have no clue how it would feel to be that rat, to be able to experience the Earth’s magnetic field firsthand. I literally have no conception of what that looks or feels like.
Thus I think that if we ever were able to make self-aware machines, their qualia could and would likely be vastly different from ours, possibly incomprehensibly so.
This is my take too. There’s no reason to expect their subjective perceptions would be similar at all; just because qualia may arise does not mean that qualia needs to be anthropomorphic. It’s the main problem I have with a lot of sentient-AI fiction; they’re just humans in metal skins meant to induce empathy and understanding. But in all likelihood the inner workings of a human mind and any kind of hypothetical future ML model won’t be the same.
I won’t speak on the topic of whether radically dissimilar alien qualia deserves moral consideration, except that I expect the topic to be divisive if it ever becomes a salient point of conversation. Though as per the blinded rat study it’s possible that humans themselves in the future will be able to use prostheses to experience many dimensions of unnatural qualia inaccessible to us, it’s likely they’ll assign moral value to them, and as such they may be far more sympathetic to the idea of the welfare of cognitive aliens.
This is true, but what I do find to be rather frustrating sometimes with these AI discussions is that people (not you necessarily) very often bake in their assumptions and take it for granted that AI cannot be sentient and choose to ridicule the idea that "electric patterns" can experience hurt (your brain substantially runs on electric patterns too but we'll just ignore that). Many people within this community act as if the hard problem of consciousness has been solved already, and we know what makes things sentient, and we know for a fact that ML systems cannot experience qualia. Well, we don't; when and how exactly has this been established? This argument has been made for so long, with many (flawed) thought experiments like Searle's Chinese Room to try and disprove the idea that any kind of sentience can ever actually be attributed to a chatbot.
Please note: I'm fairly certain they aren't currently sentient, and if they ever become such their "subjective experience" will be very different from any human one. But the strain of thought here that is essentially a contrarian reaction against the admittedly sometimes irritating crop of rationalists who care way too much about model welfare is frankly quite annoying and bakes in a number of assumptions that are framed as common sense. If you are a spiritualist, then explicitly state that assumption and acknowledge that it's one strand of possibility among others predicated on a metaphysical view of consciousness, not the only possible one that can exist.
I found that film goofy as shit, the practical effects were impressive for the time but the plot and dialogue felt incredibly hackneyed, B-movie-esque (which it is) and honestly quite unintentionally funny at times. Lines like "Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first... insect politician." absolutely laid me out in a way that I don't think was intended.
Maybe this is weird but I conceptualise it as a very breezy popcorn film. The grossness for me is probably also tempered by the fact that there was a period of my own life best summed up with the sentence "we have body horror at home" and barely any of this affects me anymore.
The scorn for and hatred of 'whites' is real, albeit often with an implicit 'but I'm one of the good ones' exception attached, but I don't think they actually expect to do themselves harm.
This has been discussed ad nauseam but it’s just intra-racial status signalling. The progressive leftist outgroup is not other races/immigrants; they don’t necessarily see themselves as being in competition or even in the same social worlds or status hierarchies as them, the outgroup they would most like to distinguish themselves from is the poorfag hick whites who worry about low-status things like manual or unskilled work being outsourced to waves of Oppressed Refugees who massively increase the supply of low-skill labour and are willing to perform these jobs for lower pay. By embracing these kinds of lax immigration policies, they distinguish themselves not only as one of the Good Whites but also as one of the Cultured Whites, who are magnanimous in their kindness, enlightened enough to accept and understand the value of other cultures, and most definitely not a part of the lowly social stratum at risk of competition from migrant workers. They are too genteel to care about that.
It bears mentioning that the converse exists too; those who hold the opposite view are countersignalling in a way that marks themselves as the populist voice of the masses, as steadfast advocates for the Real Salt-Of-The-Earth Americans/Australians/Canadians/[insert nationality here] who are so impervious to social control that they’re willing to go against the Establishment, but their base position is also just less inherently paradoxical than that of white racial progressives and it’s no great mystery why they would hold this position.
Yeah I always roll my eyes a little bit at "Chyna is going to collapse from demographic crisis". There is also the fact that China is only about 60% urbanised at the moment, and still has considerable ability to offset productivity losses from the ageing of its population via further urbanisation of their populace; urban productivity is far higher than rural productivity. It's not a permanent solution for an ongoing demographic trend, but it certainly does give them a lot more time to kick the ball down the road and implement viable solutions like growing its automation base (alongside other things), which means the Chinese have much more of a fighting chance compared to other countries. IMO the problem is far more exacerbated for countries like Japan and SK, both 90%+ urbanised countries where it's not as easy to offset the productivity losses from aging via urbanisation and scalable mass automation.
There's this weird tendency for a lot of "sinologists" and China Watchers to compulsively bet against China and predict imminent collapse, which has not gone well ever since... frankly, pretty much ever since Liberation in 1949. One would have thought that the ignominious failure of all the previous bearish predictions would have caused people to think twice before overconfidently proclaiming Chinese collapse in 30 days, but they appear to psychologically contextualise this as a replay of the Cold War which makes them believe they just need to wait for the falsities and contradictions of the Dragon Empire to be exposed, upon which time the whole edifice will cave in on itself. Very Francis Fukuyama of them.
To add to this, the fact that the US still has a higher birth rate than death rate is being largely driven by the immigrants they have brought in, who as mentioned are themselves are not necessarily net boons and who may well create drag on the system. The aggregate figure obscures a shit ton of heterogeneity - non-Hispanic white American deaths exceed births, and this has been true ever since 2012. If not for the mass importing of poorly-integrated low-skill foreigners who breed like rabbits I suspect the US' demographic situation would look more similar to what is currently going on in East Asia.
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