recovering_rationaleist
No bio...
User ID: 1768
recovering_rationaleist
7mo ago
Korea has a "National Pension System" much like Social Security, except that the fund is invested in the domestic stock market. This has a number of negative consequences:
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The fund has immense power over private businesses due to its size. Via its minority share, it has even vetoed restructurings of the Samsung group (remember that the Samsung group accounts for roughly 20% of Korea's GDP).
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The fund is not invested well. It gets put in places for political as well as economic reasons, and in theory a purely economic fund would perform better.
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The fund makes transparent financial decisions. This means everyone with assets who pay attention to the news has a chance at front-running the fund.
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There are going to be issues in liquidating the fund when it is needed. This to me is the biggest issue - that selling off the assets of an entire generation is going to devalue those assets, and I'm not sure that anyone realistically accounts for this when determining the present value of such a huge fund.
All that said, NPS is currently in surplus by an amount corresponding to 1~5% of Korean GDP, and is expected to remain solvent until 2055. So perhaps there really is an argument for "privatization" (at least until the end of this stock market bubble).
recovering_rationaleist
8mo ago
@sodiummuffin and greyenlightenment's points below are correct: underpaid "essential workers" only have low wages because there are so many people able and willing to do their jobs at low wages, relative to the "need" for those jobs.
Several years ago I saw a cleaners strike happen at a university. (The cause was dissatisfaction with a middleman temp firm which was taking a large cut of the budget allocated for cleaners' salaries). The hallways and lecture halls were messy after only 2~3 days, and after two weeks they were full of trash. At which point graduate students were paid extra to clean up the hallways and lecture pits. To have graduate students cleaning the hallways was much more expensive than having the cleaners do it, but the labor market was suddenly artificially tight, and the department feared that having trashy lecture halls would result in undergrad enrollment dropping.
In labor markets flush with workers, salaries are completely unrelated to the infrastructure that makes it possible for jobs to be done, as well as completely unrelated to the upper limit of what people would pay for that job to be done (i.e. what would be paid if there were absolutely no workers), despite the net value of their jobs to other people in society being several orders of magnitude larger than the prevailing salary. They cannot negotiate higher salaries because if they do then someone else will come in and replace them, getting the job by undercutting their wage.
The same is true in reverse: if there were only one person able and willing to do plumbing in the entire country, that person would be paid millions of dollars per hour servicing nuclear reactors. If there were only one person able to clean in the entire country, they would be paid handsomely to work in a semiconductor fab.
Every society has their "golden path": study, employment, marry, have kids, retire, die. In Korea, the golden path is very well-established: study, get into a university, graduate, get a white-collar job, get engaged, buy a condo, marry, move into the condo upon returning from the honeymoon, and have kids 9 months later. Note two things: first, marriage is scheduled shortly after the couple buys a condo, and second, that most of the people who deviate from this golden path (traditionally) will have been low-status, low-class, or of lower impulse-control. Deviations from the path result in a loss of social status, a lot of awkward conversations with friends and relatives, and sometimes even the loss of legally-mandated benefits (which benefits are rather small to start out with).
So the failure to have kids is tied up in a cultural resistance to deviate from the path, as well as with inability to buy flats.
The average price of a flat in Seoul doubled from 2018 to 2021.
There isn't much more to be said. Any dual-income, median-wage-earning, responsible millenial couples (1) who were saving up to get married discovered mid-pandemic that the prices on flats were rising at roughly 5x the rate at which they could put away money. (2) Half the young professionals I know were hodling their savings into cryptocurrency and stonks, because nothing else had a high enough rate of return to keep up with housing (and then Tether blew up).
The government is unlikely to do anything about housing prices: popping the housing bubble would devastate the economy, stop a bunch of construction projects needed for increasing housing supply, devastate the wealth of the political class, and wipe out the wealth of retirees who were putting their money into housing funds and are very politically active. Much easier to shrug shoulders about subsidies for kids are not working and there is nothing that can be done.
(1) Young white collar couples will not earn median income in Korean society. Millenials in their 30s might, but in their 20s they are working overtime gratis for a chance at getting promoted.
(2) This oversimplifies, omitting the interest rates on jeonsae mortgages, which are a whole 'nother level of fucked up: the tenant takes out a mortgage to put down a deposit for a two-year housing lease, where the deposit is capped at 80~90% of the value of the property. The landlord keeps any interest made when investing the deposit, and when the two-year lease is over may renegotiate and increase the deposit amount. So the tenant needs to save up the money for an upcoming increase in the deposit while also paying back for the interest on the deposit to the bank. At some point around 2021 jeonsae increases of $100,000 were not uncommon.
recovering_rationaleist
8mo ago
Ballot secrecy serves to stop a specific problem of coercion and bribery when voting, which were a big problem back in the Gilded Age but which are far less prevalent now.
Are you sure? Another thing associated with the Gilded Age is machine politics, which is supposedly just fading out in Chicago as of 2021: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-prem-mike-madigan-chicago-machine-politics-illinois-progressives-20210305-cmh33nn2svbajlkk7ma6omo4ee-htmlstory.html
Given how the incentives are skewed, I predict that it will only take a few election cycles of widespread mail-in voting for coercion and bribery to become commonplace again. It will be implemented with plausible deniability a la Wells Fargo: swing-state campaigns tell their campaign workers to get out the vote, and pay them per ballot in their precinct of responsibility, multiplied by the percentage of the vote they win on election day. Campaign workers in turn will do the rest quietly and of their own free will, and will also have plausible deniability: "gift cards" for votes, no matter who you vote for, but we'll love you more if you vote for X. (The few campaign workers who step over the line and get caught will be prosecuted, but there will be no evidence of systemic fraud.) Frankly, I think we already had gift cards for votes in 2020.
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
The difference between "occupation" and "allies" or "mercenaries" is that you can politely ask "allies" or "mercenaries" to leave, and they will pack up and go, whereas once you are occupied you lose that ability forever. Guantanamo Bay is occupied. Korea is not.
In the 1950s one could plausibly say that the US was occupying Korea. US troops based in the center of Seoul propped up dictators that benefited US interests. However, fifteen years ago the democratically elected Korean government asked the US to get its troops out of Seoul. The US did. Now there is a large swath of vacant land between the old city and Gangnam. The US is still in Korea, but critically the US garrison in Korea is maintained on the request the Korean government. The relationship is mutually beneficial: the US gains a base of operations counter Chinese expansion, and the Koreans gain a tripwire against North Korean expansion. In particular, the Koreans are willing to pay to keep the US troops garrisoned: when Trump hinted at leaving, the Korean side fussed and then increased their side of the bill. (Japan picked up the whole bill right away without a fuss, because Japan knows it is in their interest to pay to stay in the Pax Americana.) So Korea and Japan willing to pay to be "occupied"? That's not a military occupation by any definition I know. (I don't know anything about Germany but suspect the situation is similar.)
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
6mo ago
My impression is that Covid was a signal for Boomers to retire. Now all those service jobs which used to be filled with Boomers are staffed by nobody, so labor is hard to find and more expensive. As a concrete example, an aquaintence was a nursing assistant and dropped from full-time to retired in May of 2020. They have since returned to work, but only around 4 hrs/wk, and only in 1-1 care for clients they like, rather than the more economically efficient (but more demanding) group care. Social security is paying about what they used to make; why would they subject themselves to the stressful job?
recovering_rationaleist
5mo ago
The report [1] makes it clear that CDC didn't want to test anything. Their official position is that a fridge with an "Ebola" label isn't worth testing for ebola unless the vials in the fridge are themselves labelled "Ebola", and "there is no evidence" [2,3] that this company imported any pathogens. I mean, CDC "[i]ssu[ed] an Import Permit advisement letter to Prestige Biotech to ensure they know the Import Permit Regulations for importing infectious substances into the U.S.” and “[i]ssu[ed] a Federal Select Agent Program advisement letter to Prestige Biotech informing them of the requirements for possession, use, and transfer of select agents and toxins if the entity decides to possess them.” No response, so obviously Prestige Biotech has not imported any infectious substances (/s) [4].
You can't make this shit up. The only reason we are still alive is because nobody has tried any serious bioterrorism, not because the CDC would be able to thwart a motivated and intelligent bioterrorist.
[1] https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/Reedley-Bio-Lab-Report.pdf [2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag [3] https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/Reedley-Bio-Lab-Report.pdf, p. 14 and p. 40. [4] ibid, p. 40.
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)"
O'Toole is close to the mark in surmising that the low birthrate is housing related, but Korean houses haven't gotten smaller in the past 30 years, so the declining birthrate doesn't come from "feeling cramped".
Instead, buying a flat (usually a condo in a high-rise) is the cultural norm in Korea upon marriage, and to marry without a flat lined up is to be subject to a lot of awkward questions. Imagine trying to avoid answering 200 variations on "so where are you going to live?" Anecdotally, the price/availability of housing has delayed every Korean marriage I am aware of. People really don't marry unless they can afford the property or win a housing lottery.
So the question O'Toole should be asking is not "why small houses?" but instead "why expensive houses now?" Part of that price could be the dependence on high-rises, but it doesn't quite have explanatory power: High-rises are more expensive to build per unit floorspace, but they are less expensive per family unit than detatched single-family homes. Construction costs cannot explain why the average sale price of a condo in Seoul is now more than one million dollars, in a country where the median income is around 50,000 dollars. The cost of housing is instead set by two other factors:
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Everyone wants to live in Seoul, because of the metropolis network effects: there are more jobs, more services, better infrastructure, more retail/entertainment options, better hospitals, and better schools in Seoul. Consequently, moving to Seoul is high-status: "마소의 새끼는 시골로, 사람의 새끼는 서울로." - "Send your kids to Seoul, and your foals and calves to the countryside."
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The housing market is dominated by speculation. For the past 15 years hodling Seoul apartments has been more lucrative than any other investment. People who have cash have been putting it into housing, people who don't have enough cash to buy flats outright have been putting it into housing "stocks" and taking out mortgages which release money if they win a government-run housing lottery (protip: for an edge in the lottery, get your disabled relative to apply, quietly buy the flat from them after a few years have passed, then flip the flat for profit). Due to a change in policy around 2020, even the mortgage route has recently became infeasible for the middle class:
Korean housing policy has been a disaster. The long and short of the linked article is that the last administration attempted to control housing prices by increasing property taxes and making it harder to get a mortgage, but this priced the middle class out of the market in Seoul and Incheon, and speculators who have cash have continued buying, with the price of condos doubling from 2018 to 2021.
My read on this is that the government is either dominated by or beholden to the speculator class. What remains to be seen is why the people seem resigned to the situation, instead of seeking alternatives. In a sane world, housing prices increasing beyond measure would incentivize more construction and more people seeking alternate housing arrangements to raise their families. To a certain extent, more construction is happening, with Seoul set to increase the limit on high-rise height and developing new satellite cities. But until then, few people seem willing to take the prestige, economic, or stability hit of moving to the countryside, trying to raise children in rental flats, or trying to raise kids in their parents' homes. Instead, young people of middling means have been moving abroad to have kids.
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
I looked up the page for "evolution" on both of these sites, then looked up "Gamergate", "Gaza," and "Trump" on Infogalactic vs. Wikipedia.
Conservapedia goes ad hominem in the second paragraph of "Evolution", stating that the majority of the vocal proponents are atheists and agnostics, and proceeds to go into 12 paragraphs of skepticism, including in there the whopper that "The fossil record does not support the theory of evolution and is one of the flaws in the theory of evolution." (Sources: "creation.com" and "annointed-one.net"). Combined with the failure to properly explain what evolution is, this bias makes it useless as an information source.
Infogalactic, in contrast, takes the text for the "Evolution" and "Gaza" articles straight from Wikipedia. Gamergate, as one may imagine given the Vox Day connection, is a completely different article from that of Wikipedia: the Wikipedia article emphasizes the "harrassment campaign". The Infogalactic article emphasizes the revealed corruption in journalism, but does touch on harrassment allegations.
Finally, the "Donald Trump" article: Infogalactic auto-redirects from "Trump" to "Donald Trump". Wikipedia redirects to "Trump (disambiguation)". The intro to the Wikipedia article injects POV in where it doesn't seem appropriate (differences with Infogalactic emphasized):
Trump won the 2016 presidential election as the Republican nominee against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton while losing the popular vote.[a] During the campaign, his political positions were described as populist, protectionist, isolationist, and nationalist. His election and policies sparked numerous protests. He was the first U.S. president with no prior military or government experience. The 2017–2019 special counsel investigation established that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to favor Trump's campaign. Trump promoted conspiracy theories and made many false and misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged or racist and many as misogynistic.
The corresponding infogalactic paragraphs:
Trump won the general election on November 8, 2016, in a surprise victory against Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, and commenced his presidency on January 20, 2017. He became the oldest person to assume the presidency (surpassing Ronald Reagan), until Joe Biden in 2021, the wealthiest person ever to assume the presidency, and the fifth to have won election while losing the popular vote, though his supporters claimed there were irregularities.[1] His political positions have been described by scholars and commentators as populist, protectionist, and nationalist. In the first year of Trump's presidency, the economy improved significantly[2], but progressive opponents strongly criticized his direct and plain-spoken personal style. With no significant scandals or international events to report, the democrat media focused on unsubstantiated allegations that Trump's election campaign team had colluded with Russian intelligence agencies to influence public opinion[3][4]. The official investigation was eventually closed, with no evidence of the conspiracy theory[5].
Infogalactic definitely has a bias, but it isn't leaving as many details out selectively. I might start preferring Infogalactic now. However, from the change log it looks like there is only one active contributor?!
Act 3 of the Hamas' ideal outcome involves international condemnation of Israeli human rights violations, televised slaughter of Arabs, and the hardliners within Saudi Arabia vetoing a normalizing of Israeli-Saudi relations. The beginnings of this were already visible in the Asian news tonight: the official Korean national broadcaster (KBS) had a segment focused on the blockade of humanitarian resources (with mention that fuel cuts impact hospitals) which segued into a report that Israel has dropped white phosphorous bombs. (The NYT reported one day ago that "the Israeli army denied the use of white phosphorus, saying soldiers had deployed only illumination flares." Footage was from broad daylight, so either the footage is old/repurposed, the denial is out of date, someone is lying and it was white phosphorous, or it was actually anti-SAM flares.)
recovering_rationaleist
6mo ago
Motivated by a Manifold market on whether racism is bad [1], I thought it might be profitable to argue the opposite. Alas, having drafted my argument, I don't think it is appropriate to post in a place where my ID is tied to my real name. So here is an argument, advocatus diaboli:
Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group, like an ingroup bias for one's own family. What I discovered living in a foreign culture is that people tend to have an ingroup bias to their own ethno-cultural group, and Westerners call this racism. It is easier to communicate with people of shared language, and people of the same cultural background will have shared interests. People of shared ethnic group are more likely to share values, and more likely to agree on topics political and personal. This isn't even a conscious thing: in my experience people of a shared ethnic group are even more likely to make strong eye contact with each other.
The bias is similar to how (most) people have an ingroup bias for their own family: I don't see my siblings often, but when we meet we connect strongly, and discover inadvertently that we face similar challenges and overcame them in similar ways. If my sibling confesses to me of a misdemeanor, I am not likely to hold it against them, and if they confessed to me a felony I'm not sure I would report them. If they are in need, I would help them with minimal complaint, and although we disagree vehemently in politics, we still love each other. My family is my ingroup. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way things are.
Now at the social level, that ingroup bias for family has its drawbacks: nepotism is common and harms society as a whole, and as I would be willing to help my sibiling get away with a crime, so does that closing of ranks around family horrific enable horrific acts, domestically, in the wider society, and even at the level of public policy and the economy. However, on balance the ingroup bias for family is a great thing (there is a reason why evolution has selected for it!). People take care of each other, they love each other, loneliness is diminished, and we trust each other more.
This is also what I see as an outsider in the foreign culture: people take care of each other, they love each other, they find companionship with each other, and they trust each other more because they share ethnic and cultural bonds. And while those bonds disadvantage me as a foreigner in their society, they have provided an evolutionary advantage, and I can't deny envying them life in the hamlet their forefathers made.
[1] https://manifold.markets/levifinkelstein/is-racism-bad
recovering_rationaleist
9mo ago
many women don’t want to spend more than a decade without much adult company
This means that, at least among smart or educated women who choose when or if they have kids, often only those most set on motherhood have children. People on the fence might like the idea of having children, might feel the biological imperative, but they override it because it seems like an impossible sacrifice.
This idea of leaving one life and entering another (which again, if you like the company of other adults, is strictly worse in ways) is what scares many women about parenthood
You repeatedly call this a lack of adult company, but the problem you describe is not leaving the company of adults, but one of changing from socializing with non-parents to socializing with other parents. As a SAHM after the first year or so your free time is mostly during the workday, while non-SAHMs mostly have time to socialize after the work day ends (which for parents corresponds to mealtime and bedtime). To put it another way, motherhood comes with all the social detriments of a long-distance move. (But people still move all the time.)
Having experienced a modern society where SAHMs are normal, the first year of the first child is all about baby all the time, but the moms still socialize: they have support groups with other moms of their age group, call friends, use social media, and get a lot of emotional, logistical support, and time off via their parents and parents-in-law. Then once the kid socializes well with other kids they start meeting other moms almost daily, chatting while the kids play. The conversation is mostly centered on parenting, but that's mostly because, as you note, intellectuals aren't having kids.
As soon as the kids go to school (or usually preschool) then these SAHMs either gradually start working part-time or spend large portions of their days with their friends. I used to work in cafes a lot. There were many groups of SAHMs who would come into the cafe after lunch and spend roughly 1 PM to 5 PM hanging out. Book clubs, sports clubs, investment clubs. Of course, this society is almost invisible to non-SAHMs, because non-SAHMs are confined to the workplace during the day in places far away from where people live and where toddlers are raised. To the extent that non-mothers are ignorant of how much adult interaction SAHMs can get, I guess one might steelman your precise wording, but the true core of the issue here is that it's a change in social groups, not completely isolating. Unless you are in the top 5% of IQ, in which case you probably moved away from your parents and none of your friends who share your interests have had kids yet. Which I guess describes the average person in the Bay Area rational community as well as the average Mottizen.
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.
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
5mo ago
I bet they got them on the cheap in a yard sale.
I would bet not, unless it was in the spirit of teens who put "biohazard" stickers around their bedrooms.
One researcher I work with has a story about moving a plate reader into a BSL3 lab to do research on Covid-19 in 2020. The research project has finished and they could use that plate reader elsewhere, but it will probably stay in the negative-pressure zone until the lab itself is decommissioned.
N=1, but this makes me extremely skeptical that one can buy a used fridge from a BSL4 lab, especially one with an "Ebola" label still on it.
recovering_rationaleist
7mo ago
The Joint Direct Attack Munition is a guidance kit that converts unguided bombs, or "dumb bombs", into all-weather precision-guided munitions. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition)
What's this about a "JDAM missile" sound from the video? I heard something that sounded a lot like a missile launching, but JDAMs don't have engines.
The bottom link in this comment is a pretty good match for the sound: https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/149933?context=8#context
recovering_rationaleist
5mo ago
Licensed Nurse Practitioner
Just to play devil's advocate on both sides:
- The hospital is in Northern Gaza, dead center of the region that was given a "24 hour" evacuation notice a few days ago now. The evacuation notice specified that hospitals should also be evacuated. If this was Israel, they might be "softening up" northern Gaza for their ground offensive, or they might have been returning counterbattery fire without restrictions, since civilians are to have left the area.
- With Biden visiting Israel tomorrow (in ~12 h?), presumably to talk Israel down from a ground invasion, leadership on the Israeli side might benefit from a rapid escalation of violence, and leadership on the Hama side would benefit from a rapid escalation in civilian casualties. Good for both sides no matter who did it.
- The fact that there does not seem to be a clear video makes it less likely to me that it was an Israeli strike. Israel tends to either record its own strikes, or provide enough warning that journalists are already pointing their stabilized camera tripods in the right direction from a safe distance. In contrast, Hamas strikes and false flags like yesterday's "airstrike" on the evacuation routes tend to come without warning, and videos tend to show only the aftermath. But it is also possible Israel has gunsight footage of the whole thing and it will be released 5 to 10 years from now.
- All the casualty numbers are claimed by Gazan authorities, who are probably exaggerating. Yesterday's Israeli hit on a UN school where 4000 people were sheltering only killed four people, and we're supposed to believe that 800 people died when a bomb hit a courtyard? I guess it is possible the bomb was fragmentary and there was no cover, but something seems off. I'm not sure if high casualty numbers would shift the blame toward Israel (more likely to have large bombs) or Hamas (not Israeli MO).
Edit: Wikipedia says the summit with Joe Biden has been cancelled, but Manifold is 98% pretty confident that Biden is still going to Israel.
recovering_rationaleist
7mo ago
In Korea, Uber was kicked out of the entire country, and only foreigners complained, because domestic app companies worked with taxi companies to come up with non-shitty ride hailing services of their own. I think they might have a Korean service now, having miraculously discovered how to work within the confines of existing taxi regulations.
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
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
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.
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.
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