recovering_rationaleist
No bio...
User ID: 1768
recovering_rationaleist
9mo ago
The College Board could just be skipping ahead in the script.
Important to note that classes start in about 25 calendar days, so it is important to the Florida schools (the College Board's clients) to figure out whether to offer the class now, rather than in December.
recovering_rationaleist
9mo ago
Traditionally, stories of UFOs were planted in the population by undercover members of the intelligence community [1], who needed to provide chaff to distract from civilian observations of advanced spy balloons [2], U-2s, SR-71s [3], and later stealth fighter/bombers. I see no reason to believe this is any different: USAF is researching drones, next-gen missiles, and maybe next-generation fighters/bombers, and needs to get the public excited about UFOs. We'll learn the truth about this in about 40 years.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exair-force-law-enforceme_b_5312650,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men,
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul#Roswell_incident,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_balloon#Skyhook_as_UFO,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB7/nsaebb7.htm
[3] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517742.pdf : "According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. (45)"
recovering_rationaleist
10mo ago
You're failing the intellectual turing test. They see themselves as saving children who were born trans. It isn't obviously mutilation if the child is born trans and the diagnosis is accurate. Thus the phrase "coming for the children" has a relatively innocent interpretation here.
On the other hand, nobody has yet performed a randomized controlled trial on outcomes for different treatments for (or diagnostics of) trans children. (I looked very hard for papers on this last year. The only RCTs are on adults, and in non-RCTs measuring suicide rates in teenagers the effect sizes for surgery and for social transition were about the same. A trans rights activist I was conversing with argued that to perform an RCT would be unethical.)
recovering_rationaleist
10mo ago
I'm not going to read your link. It's 50 to 60 printed pages long. I skimmed the first 2500 words, and the gist of it seems to be that the neoconservative movement was an academic movement supported by majority-Jewish media, and took a pro-Israel foreign policy stance. That's fair, and I will concedie that the most prominent neoconservatives on that list were intellectuals of Jewish ancestry. However, looking on Wikiepedia it seems that most of the prominent American neoliberals on Wikipedia are also Jewish. Can we name an American political movement from the past 20 years which was not dominated by Jewish intellectuals? Do Jewish intellectuals just originate all (American) political movements?
Also, you still need to make the very important causal link from this academic movement to the actual war in Iraq. From the unfinished Gulf War, it is likely that Rumsfeld and Bush had a vendetta against Sadam from 1991, and from the Bush/Cheney oil business it is likely that the war was motivated by the capture of oil fields. Did these neocons originate the invasion, or were they merely providing a convenient rationalization for it? (And why was the supermajority of the American public in support of the Iraq war, when the American public is not Jewish?) You (and Kevin McDonald) admit that the "frontmen" were not Jewish, so you don't get to strip them of agency and culpability for what happened without a very well-articulated causal model.
recovering_rationaleist
10mo ago
A hallmark of jewish controlled movements is non-jewish frontmen
In absence of detail, this statement disproves your argument by making the hypothesis unfalsifiable. It is also a statement with the implication that every single political movement ever was controlled by the jews. That's not a reasonable argument, a high-effort argument, or even a functional argument.
Rov_Scam named a bunch of individuals who are broadly regarded as having pushed the US into the second Iraq War by making public (fallacious) claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of Iraq in 9/11. I think a reasonable refutation would require naming a bunch of jewish individuals who are behind the alleged "non-jewish frontmen", and describing how they pushed the US into war. If you can't do that, then either you need to rethink the assumptions that led you into thinking the war was orchestrated by a jewish conspiracy, or you need to stop trolling.
The deadline set by the Covid Origin Act of 2023 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text) to release names, symptoms, hospital visits, and roles of WIV researchers who had Covid-like symptoms in fall 2019 has come and gone. A Google News search for "Covid Origin Act" results in a single article released over the weekend:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/covid-was-not-developed-as-a-bioweapon-dni-finds/
This source is not mainstream. It suggests that the legally mandated report has been released, but puts a spin on the results of the report (Covid not likely an intentional bioweapon) without revealing the full text. Most importantly, it doesn't name any of the names that the Act required. So I went to the website of the Office of the Director for National Intelligence. Crickets. Twitter? There has been a post, but it is about Juneteenth.
Edit: I suppose it is possible that the DNI has made their mandated report to Congress, and that no congresspeople have leaked it yet. In which case one would expect articles in a few hours to days?
As an aside, when I mentioned I was excited about this disclosure to a deeply Blue family member, they suggested I've shifted right. I wonder how the disclosure of Covid origins information became right-coded.
recovering_rationaleist
11mo ago
Turns out there is another paper. Will try to send you a link by the weekend.
recovering_rationaleist
11mo ago
Oh thanks! I don't know if that's the paper that they were describing, but it sounds similar. Great find!
recovering_rationaleist
11mo ago
Unfortunately I don't think theism is required to explain that. The evolution of cooperation, predation, parasitism, communication, etc ("social behavior") is expected in any sufficiently complex resource-contrained environment, just as a result of game theory combined with selection. Once cells land on strategies of cooperation where they are sacrificing their own reproduction to provide resources for their siblings (in the style of the selfish gene), it isn't a big jump to multicellular organisms. According to Wikipedia, multicellularity has evolved independently at least 31 times, and complex multicellularity at least 6 times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism). Since it has happened so many times, two things must be true: (1) it wasn't spectacularly improbable and (2) the genetic lines of each of those mutations has remained competitive enough to survive to this day.
I'll admit that the evolution of sexual reproduction has me stumped, though. I'm sure someone has written papers on it, and there's probably a Wiki on it, but I kind of want to puzzle over it first.
recovering_rationaleist
11mo ago
Your first bullet point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true. But we don’t have an analogous knowledge of there being billions and billions of universes with different parameters and physical laws, exhausting enough of the possibilities to eventually create life.
No it doesn't depend on a multiverse at all. (Does all statistical reasoning require multiverses to exist?) It only requires a belief that the universe we see is one example of the set of all possible (imaginable) universes.
It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived.
You don't seem to be understanding the implications of the anthropic principle. For every human that is conceived, there are billions of sperm which are thrown out, and there are even more (billions upon billions upon billions(*A)) of potential genetic combinations which could happen but don't. Had the sperm which became you not fertilized the egg which became you, you would just not exist to have this conversation. Full stop. The probability that you in particular would exist is just too small. The number of possible humans is of similar magnitude to the number of atoms in the universe.
(A) The human genome has 3,054,815,472 base pairs, and two random humans might differ by up to 0.6% of their genome, so we can say that two random humans are separated by about 18M base pairs, whereas the rate of mutation in human DNA is ~2.5×10^(−8) per base per generation, so each human will have about 76 new mutations. To simplify a bit (assuming mutations are evenly distributed, which they are not, but you will see that it doesn't matter), this means the possible range of single mutations that are still considered human is bounded between 4^76 = 5.7 x 10^45 (all mutations between humans occur on the same 76 nucleobases) and 18M choose 764 (any of 76 mutations could occur anywhere in the genome). Either way, the number of possible humans is really big, so if you were not born when you were born, you would never have been, at least not in our light cone.
Your second bullet point calls for some subject matter expertise that I obviously don’t have. You mention that RNA can be self-catalyzing. I suppose this raises the question of “just how hard would it be to create RNA by chance circumstances.” How complex is RNA in terms of number of parts and mechanisms?
This was addressed by ResoluteRaven below. The answer appears to be "not very hard", and that was also the gist of the paper I linked above about combining HCN and H2O to make amino acids.
if it was impossible for an organism to live in such an environment, it would be impossible for them to be created in them. But anyway, I’m not sure this is a strong item of evidence in favor of abiogenesis and don’t weight it very heavily.
This is poor logic, because it can be continued ad infinitem to explain anything inconvenient for your position, and makes your position unfalsifiable. (You might say it proves too much. If your position is unfalsifiable, then it is not testable. To put it another way, suppose that 50 years from now scientists were to demonstrate abiogenesis in the lab. You could still argue that they merely discovered the method by which God created life. How convenient, considering it would also the method by which life could have arisen without a God at all.
In the modern day, I've heard creationists arguing on behalf of the position that the earth is only 6,000 years old. When confronted with the fact that fossils can be dated to millions of years ago, they fall back to the argument that if fossils appear to have been buried for millions of years, they must have been placed in the rock formation by an intelligent designer to appear that way, so as to trick modern-day humans. This argument can of course be extended to argue that everything before any arbitrary moment in the past has been retconned, and God just created a world to look convincingly old. If your Designer is all-powerful, I guess that might make sense to you, but it is equally valid to suppose that the Designer didn't do much more than set some parameters on the Big Bang and press a button to see what would happen.
What are proteins “which are highly conserved in bacterial metabolism?” And why is this significant?
I hate to be trite, but another commenter below has explained this already. I may suggest that if this topic matters to you (or is truly critical to maintaining your faith), then you try reading the first few chapters of a textbook on molecular biology for the relevant background. You don't have to read very far. I got to chapter 3.
I would love to chat with your friend, please consider giving me a point of contact.
I'm really sorry, but my friend has spent an inordinate amount of their career arguing against intelligent design. Probably about as much time as they have spent doing biological research. Given that the return to humanity is much higher if they spend their time doing research, I really don't want to provide them access to more ideas from intelligent design.
recovering_rationaleist
11mo ago
A relatively simple reaction that managed to propagate” are you imagining some kind of one-step jump to a self-replicating organism?
A self-propagating reaction which manages to become more efficient, propagate, then split into multiple (identical) reactions in different locations, each of which propagates itself, is for all intents and purposes the metabolism of a self-replicating organism. The molecules and structures involved in that reaction are called an organism. As an example, the simplest organisms we know of (biological viruses) are nothing but molecules which propagate themselves by hijacking the machinery (reactions) of existing cells to do their replication.
I have connections to people doing research into the origins of life, and frankly the probabilisty-based arguments against natural biogenesis are very weak.
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Cosmological fine-tuning isn't an argument against natural (or at least materialistic) origin because it runs into the anthropic paradox. If the universe were fine-tuned to create life, the same arguments must hold to show that it was fine-tuned to create humanity, and to create you. After all, just as a universe supporting life like us is improbable, so is your specific combination of genes and experience fantastically improbable. Any number of chance encounters (even a half-second delay in your father's ejaculation) could have resulted in a different sperm meeting that egg, and you simply not existing. Nonetheless, we also know that no fine-tuning of sperm selection was involved in the process, and God was not necessary: we can choose sperm in the lab and force a baby to happen. We can even tune the genetics of nonhuman individuals for appearance, health, and personality, and it is only ethics that keeps us from doing that to humans.
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If you look at a specific origin of life it looks fantastically improbable, but there are a lot of demonstrations that the "minimal replicating natural system" is probably a lot smaller than a protein, let alone a full cell. All that would be required is a set of amino-acids that are stable at the temperature and pressure of oceanic vents, and which catalyze the creation of themselves. (The technical term for this is an autocatalytic set.) It has been shown that proteins are unnecessary: RNA can catalyze its own replication (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1371-4), and peptides (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1371-4) and amino acids (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.9b00520) can arise from chemical environments with very simple precursors (HCN and H2O are all you need for amino acids to arise). The search for a minimal amino acid set with the ability for self-replication is ongoing, but if any such set occured even once in the billion-year history of oceanic vents, then it would have become the primary chemical makeup of its environment. Such a set would not even need to be very efficient at first; in an environment without RNAase it only needs to self-catalyze faster than its thermal breakdown, and evolution does the rest. FOOM.
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There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest this happened. The synthesis of amino acids and sugars is more favorable at 85C in the environment of certain porous and hydrogen-rich rocks, and this environment is preferred by certain extant microorganisms (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021JG006436). Most recently, I heard about a manuscript showing that of the 402 proteins which have been highly conserved in bacterial metabolism, 380 of them are highly stable at the pressure, temperature, and pH of these mineral-emitting thermal vents. (Unfortunately, I can't find it. Edit: Maybe ThenElection finds it below.)
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
Not only that, but if the goal is to limit computing to a single supplier of chips to simplify future regulation as alleged, this policy is much more likely to motivated by a confluence of corporate and NSA interests: corporates wanting to control what can be run on computers (app stores, copyright, company secrets) and governments wanting backchannel access to spy and monitor the flow of financial instruments. I would have low prors on EA backchannels concerned about AI takeoff actually motivating governments to work against their interests.
Although as I heard these export restrictions, it sounded more like the actions were to limit China's access to next gen compute, which is probably due to NatSec people concerned about China militarizing AI. That has some overlap with the EA interest.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
We are obligated not to racially select our friends, even if this is motivated by a preference for a certain race of friends.
Can you hear the Kafkatrap being lined up? If you argue against this premise, it must be because you have a preference for a certain race of friends. You must therefore be a racist.
As an unrelated aside, I just discovered about myself that my eyes glaze over and I am predisposed to skip the rest of a text as soon as I hit a premise which is blatantly false. I thus missed a lot of even more blatantly false premises mentioned by other commenters. I guess this is good in that it keeps me from being exposed to nonsense memes and poor in that it forms an intellectual blindspot for true statements which are poorly argued.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
As someone not familiar at all with Commonwealth law, does this set precedent for other former British colonies? Can the King step in to re-establish norms?
When I see a comment like this, my instinct is to ask "How?" We just traded a personal-level problem for a politics-level solution, which means it will happen approximately never. Not only is the morass of US politics highly illogical, it is supported by a whole ecosystem of bad decisions and incentives which work against change, from zoning laws which benefit existing suburban homeowners to subsidized housing requirements which force new developments to be low-status places to live.
I guess the personal solution is to just buy a home for yourself in a nice urban space. Not only can you become part of a community which walks everywhere, but your neighbors will share your values (Hopefully), and if land values go up, other landlords will be motivated to make more places like your urban space.
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