sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
5d ago
On the other hand, people who get more sun live years longer.
Observational studies without clear mechanisms of action are almost completely worthless. Reading the study it's just the classic thing where they controlled for a handful of factors that they thought of and then declared whatever was left over the effect of the thing they're studying. Rather than it being any of the countless variations across the population that aren't included in the arbitrary list of controls. (I think Scott has a post somewhere where he mentioned how little he trusts studies like this.) For instance this is how they controlled for comorbidity:
As a measure of comorbid illness at the start of the study, we created a dummy variable termed ‘comorbidity’ to identify women who had been treated with antidiabetic or anticoagulant drugs or medication for CVD for more than 1 month.
I wonder if any illnesses not prescribed those drugs might both increase mortality and decrease sunbathing? Or general variation in health below the level of actual illness?
This is in contrast to the skin cancer risk where the mechanism of action is very straightforward. It seems like a serious failure of both science and science communication that this sort of largely-meaningless observational study gets put on the same level.
sodiummuffin
8d ago
Not all randomized control trials are blinded randomized control trials. All you need for a randomized control trial is to randomly assign a group of patients that gets the treatment and a group that doesn't. As far as I know, no long-term randomized control study of gender transition has ever been conducted, in either children or adults.
Non-RCT's are if anything even worse than euphemisms like "moderate-quality" make them seem, reading something like Scott's ivermectin post might help give a sense for it. That's why fields like nutrition, where long-term randomized control trials are impractical, are so terrible despite far more quantity and quality of research than a small field like gender dysphoria.
As a result of the GRADE approach, we read things like this in the report:
There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.
No, it's way worse than that, the high/moderate/low quality ratings were based on the cited meta-study and seem if anything too lenient. Reading the meta-study, many of the studies only looked at physical outcomes like "is puberty suppressed", they made no attempt to measure psychological outcomes to determine whether suppressing puberty actually provided any benefit. This is the supposed single "high-quality" study. It isn't a randomized control study, it compares patients who have been given puberty blockers to ones who just started the assessment process. (It also compares to a "cisgender comparison group", such comparisons tend to be even more worthless.) Among other potential problems, this means the results are very plausibly just regression to the mean or benefits from the other mental-health care provided. If you think the parents of children with worse self-reported "internalizing, suicidality, and peer relations" are more likely to seek treatment than the parents of children who are currently doing fine, which the study itself shows, then improvement over time is the expected result even if you don't do anything. And then here are the detailed explanations of why they considered the other studies to be even worse.
sodiummuffin
14d ago
It's only unchangeable if we allow the combination of the eugenics taboo and a lack of long-term planning to deny us the use of current technologies like embryo-selection and potential future technologies like polygenetic genetic-engineering. (To say nothing of the possible individual enhancements opened up if we manage to achieve brain emulation.) Remember the general population of whites and asians is also less intelligent than intellectuals tend to assume, because they associate with a highly selected subset. A large fraction of the population struggles with tasks like "interpreting a simple bar graph". It's also getting worse, with current dysgenic trends. Just achieving and maintaining the sort of humanity that many people already assume exists requires transhumanism, for every race.
Afterwards we can look back on the statistics about stuff like intelligence and crime and obesity and depression the same way we currently look back on 50% infant mortality rates and widespread stunting from malnutrition. Though of course the biggest leap would be curing aging, if we ever achieve that I expect a lot of the other improvements would seem like a sideshow by comparison.
sodiummuffin
16d ago
You can argue that consistently using "anti-X" to refer to any restriction on X, even if the restriction is the lack of a special privilege and is something the speaker thinks is justified, would be a more objective way to use language. But it is not the standard way to use language, guesswho isn't out there talking about people arrested for dangerous driving as being "arrested under an anti-white law", so it seems understandable for Folamh3 to interpret guesswho as making a bolder and less semantic claim.
I don't think it would really be a better way to use language either, because it's so impractical to do consistently that nobody would do it. Nobody is going to use it for every hypothetical special privilege that could exist, at best it would be influenced by status-quo bias based on what laws already exist, and realistically personal bias would creep in immediately. It would just create a natural motte and bailey where people would use "anti-X" in some cases based on their biases, and then retreat to "it's a restriction on X so it's anti-X" when challenged.
sodiummuffin
16d ago
I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.
Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"? Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions? Yes white people are more restricted than if they got an exemption from traffic law, but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacists. But this means that describing a law that restricts X group as "objectively an anti-X law" is just a way to smuggle in assumptions about what laws are reasonable. I think Folamh3 assumed the implicit argument was that those laws were unreasonable, not that they were anti-transgender in the same way that "Chinese-Americans need to pay income tax" is anti-Chinese, because otherwise the argument doesn't make sense.
Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.
sodiummuffin
23d ago
There isn't a great explanation that I'm aware of, but my working hypothesis is that it just really does turn out that the Blue Tribers are correct about built environment massively influencing how people interface with the world.
Isn't selection bias the most obvious explanation? Like how it tends to be the explanation for everything in education, and looking for "successful educational practices" without carefully controlling for it just tells you the educational fads in the most-selective schools.
Being normal weight correlates with traits, like intelligence and conscientiousness, that are also useful for succeeding in the educational system and getting high-status jobs. (Not always high-paying jobs, but that's because so many people want those jobs that there's competition driving down wages.) People move to the areas where those jobs are available, and they have children who inherit those traits. Left-wing ideology is popular among the educated/upper-class, so those areas are also left-wing.
This also tangentially relates to the recent blog posts about conservatism's human-capital problem, TracingWoodgrain's The Republican Party is Doomed and Hanania's Coping with Low Human Capital.
sodiummuffin
23d ago
On the other hand, we have unique duties, shared by and asked of no other creatures, and we are moral monsters if we refuse to assent. It makes us both "part of nature" and "above nature" in a way that is full of psychological and philosophical tension -- not to mention is precisely and uniquely burdensome to human beings in particular. It seems like this point of view attacks human specialness while affirming people have special obligations. It eliminates human privileges while compounding human duties.
You could apply the same logic to babies, which most people value morally but which do not understand morality or take actions based on it.
The utilitarian answer is that there is no such thing as "unique duties" in utilitarianism, or even really "duties" at all, the whole framework is wrong. There are only choices and their results. Some choices have better results than others, so they are preferable, and this is true even if you are the only moral being in the world. The better choice is better whether it is part of your "duty" or not, and whether the beneficiaries share your sense of morality or not. You should, as a practical matter, make choices like specializing on the tasks you're good at, and taking into account the second-order consequences of helping people with the ability and inclination to help others themselves. But this is only because doing so has better consequences, not because you stopped counting the welfare of the amoral/severely-disabled/etc. when deciding which choice has better results.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Your link is mangled and goes to a random /r/funny thread, seemingly due to some combination of trying to link an image hosted on Reddit and old.reddit.com.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
The established institutions of our society — government, academia, media, NGOs, etc. — are filled top-to-bottom with true believers who hold this as a terminal value, and it’s not going away until they all do (which is a problem, because there’s no voting them out).
This isn't how ideological groups work. They do not hold power by being all fanatics who would support the same policies regardless of their factual beliefs about the world. Nor do they have unlimited ability to hold onto power if public opinion turns strongly against them. There are some people like that, but they rely on support from the much larger numbers of people who buy into mainstream "anti-racist" arguments premised on factually incorrect beliefs. Most supporters of any ideology are aligned with it by some mixture of traits like factual beliefs, trusted information sources, formal principles, and informal biases. Many of them can be persuaded by chipping away at their factual beliefs and their trust in their current sources of information. If mainstreaming HBD failed it would be because the vast majority continued denying it, not because people accepted it and then just shrugged. Affirmative action doesn't have majority support already, it hangs on through disproportionate elite support, but that doesn't mean it can continue to do so even if you persuade a large chunk of public/elite supporters.
Compare to libertarians. In theory principle-based libertarians shouldn't even care how effective libertarianism is, right? The justifications are stuff like Freedom and the Non-aggression-principle, not effectiveness. But of course it's not a coincidence that they generally believe libertarianism is effective as well. There's presumably some libertarians who would, for instance, oppose conscription even if they sincerely believed it was the only way to prevent being conquered by a communist nation, or support open-borders even if they thought it would result in statists taking power or otherwise end in disaster. But most wouldn't, and in fact I've noticed a notable number of libertarians and ex-libertarians online who became alienated from hardline libertarianism based on stuff like believing that open-borders would end disastrously for liberty. And once you get into actually trying to set government policy alongside people who don't care about principled libertarianism, of course "Privatizing X will end terribly for everyone, but we should do it anyways because Freedom" isn't an argument anyone makes.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Online polls open to self-selecting members of the public are garbage. But that's different from conducting a survey online by selecting people some other way and then giving them a link instead of a sheet of paper to fill out, which is how many surveys are conducted nowadays.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
I can't conceive of a space between determinism and randomness where free will could exist. It's possible that I'm just missing something here, or there is such a thing as free will and it's just absolutely indescribable in any terms that we could possibly understand, but right now it makes more sense to me to just say that free will is an illusion.
I think a better way to phrase it is that it's just a poorly-defined concept that ends up functioning as a motte and bailey. "Illusion" makes it sound like something constantly apparent but untrue, rather than just a confused way of thinking about a concept. In the motte, he can declare that things that happen for a reason are "deterministic" and thus not free will, while things that don't happen for a reason (like the outcomes of quantum randomness) are "random" and thus not free will, and then imply that magic can produce results that are neither caused nor uncaused and thus free will is proof of magic. But then when the time comes to argue the existence of "free will" he doesn't have to do anything to argue that something can be neither caused or uncaused, just that people make decisions. Well yes, I believe that people make decisions, I am a "compatibilist" who thinks that people can make decisions with their brains even when those decisions are caused by prior events. I just think that those decisions are some mixture of caused and uncaused rather than some incoherent third thing that has been arbitrarily associated with magic.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
And for any characters where it's too hard to apply that label, behold the Female Character Flowchart for some other options. (It's from a post on a 2010 nerd-feminist blog that was linked on Jezebel and made the rounds, it stuck with me because normally you only see such critiques used one at a time.)
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
Here is a graph of both traffic and homicide deaths by race and time. Here are the black deaths by week, in which we see that both kinds of deaths spiked at the exact same time: immediately following the death of George Floyd. (Both graphs courtesy of Steve Sailer, the only person of note I've seen discuss the traffic component of the Floyd Effect.)
The simplest explanation is that it is still 100% the Floyd Effect. Police pull over black drivers less than they used to so dangerous drivers stay on the road until they kill themselves or others (as well as it possibly affecting deterrence and so on). The alternative explanation is that it was the Floyd effect originally but some other effect has taken over since then. I haven't looked at the most recent data, if you wanted you could check if it has become less racially skewed than the period covered by those graphs. But with the timing I'm not going to give credence to any explanation in which it was never the Floyd Effect and the spike just happened that week and primarily among black people by coincidence.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
"Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
I suspected this was an inaccurate summary so I reread Bounded Distrust and he doesn't mention Fauci once. Also he doesn't defend anyone else either (besides defending conspiracy theorists as being understandably suspicious of mainstream sources), it's about extracting information from misleading/untrustworthy sources, not saying it is good for them to be misleading. It's so far from your description that I am wondering if this a distorted description of some other post but then you also remembered the wrong title.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
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Yes, in comparison to established democracies they seem less stable and unlikely to survive as long.
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Like most authoritarian governments, they pay the cost to the functioning of the country I mentioned, because they are less responsive to feedback and have to keep things under control in other ways. What democratic countries would actually prefer to live under a government like Saudi Arabia in exchange for some supposed economic benefit from open borders?
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Remember we are talking not just about formal democracy but a "share in governance", in particular in the context of open borders. Non-democracies can still do things to keep the support of the majority of residents, both by controlling who enters (and how long they stay) and by being responsive to the desires of residents. But he was talking about a country that both let in anyone and then disregarded their opinions in favor of democratic rule by the minority of natives.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
Because democracy isn't just an arbitrary principle, it's a political technology for nonviolent resolution of unrest. People who live in your country but don't vote can still riot, can still strike, and can still join insurgent groups. There are ways to suppress the majority, but they are much more difficult and costly to the country than simply having them continue to live far away outside your borders where they can't readily do those things.
In democracies those tactics are mainly relegated to groups with minority political views that can't win at the ballot box, and sometimes they get their way by caring more than the majority or having elite sympathizers, but most of the time it is advantageous to just participate in the democratic system instead. This has made democracies remarkably stable compared to other political systems. Your proposal, on the other hand, seems like it would fall to a Ghandi-style resistance campaign or violent revolution the first time there was a serious dispute between the natives and the disenfranchised descendants of immigrants.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
I found an article with a detailed timeline. It says that the attorney general gave officials the go-ahead for the execution at 7:56. It then says that Smith "began to shake and writhe violently" at 7:58, and that this lasted around 2 minutes. It then says he began taking deep gasping breaths and that his breathing was no longer visible at 8:08 (unclear if it was visible at 8:07 and then stopped, or if that is just when the journalist first noted it was not visible). It quotes the Alabama Corrections Commissioner as saying the nitrogen gas flowed for 15 minutes. So the most obvious possibility, assuming that he held his breath and then began to shake either when they began the gas or after he started running out of oxygen, would be that he lost consciousness in 2-4 minutes and took 10-12 minutes to stop breathing. It is also possible he began to shake before they began administering the gas, in an attempt to get the execution delayed again like had happened previously, in which case the timeline would be less clear.
The BBC article quotes Alabama journalist Lee Hedgepeth as saying that "Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.". My first thought reading this (and the beginning of the post I was writing before deciding to try finding an actual timeline), was that "total" could include the time before they began administering the gas, the time after he lost consciousness, and the time after he was dead when they still had the mask running or were otherwise doing something that the journalist considered part of the execution process. In classic "The Media Very Rarely Lies" fashion, mentioning "total" execution time after mentioning him gasping for air makes it sound like he was living/conscious/suffering for 25 minutes after they began the gas, but does not actually say so. The timeline confirms it, there was 22 minutes between when they opened the curtains at 7:53 and closed them at 8:15. So the 22 minutes includes before the execution was ordered, after he was unconscious, and after he was dead (and then Hedgepeth rounded up to 25).
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
They are like the classic case of using their financial heft to artificially lower prices, drive local grocery stores out of business, and then raise the prices again.
Did they ever actually do that step? Is there a documented case of it actually happening? Or did they just have lower prices by being more efficient and focusing on cheap goods, and then continue to have lower prices? And for that matter for groceries specifically I don't think they tend to be significantly cheaper in the first place, they just have similar prices to any other discount grocery store.
Do Walmart's prices even vary enough from store to store to justify such a strategy? They're not always the same between stores or compared to their website (in large part due to the cost of shipping if you're looking at groceries specifically) but it hardly seems like a big enough difference to be part of some predatory pricing strategy.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
I thought this was about a different study which went around months ago, in which a modified COVID-19 strain caused a 100% fatality rate in humanized mice. So I was going to point out that according to the same study stock COVID-19 had an extremely high fatality rate as well, so it said more about the mice than the virus. But looking it up apparently it's a different recently-published study about a pangolin coronavirus:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.03.574008v1.full
It sounds like a lot of things cause 100% death rates in humanized mice without nessesarily meaning that much regarding humans. Note that in this case 100% means they infected 4 mice and all 4 died.
I remember reading a blog post many years ago that concluded it was probably a mixture of glue with cornstarch and baking soda (multiple sets of ingredients can do the same thing) that expands into a carbon foam when heated. It pointed out that there are now commercially-available coatings that use the same principle but are more durable/practical for long-lasting coatings, they're called "intumescent coatings", though their performance is held back because they're applied in a thinner layer.
I don't have a link to the blog post but looking at Wikipedia it links a youtuber who also seems to have replicated it. He also has some followup videos using different ingredients to make it and trying it for different things. If you want to see the commercially-available intumescent coatings for comparison this video shows them in action at 7:44. Though from what he says apparently they activate at a higher temperature, at least for the ones he tested. Intumescent coatings: A review on recent progress might be of interest.
Edit: Watching the youtuber's second video he discusses commercial intumescent coatings. Also this video from a manufacturer has some good footage in them in action.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
He also coined the "you'll own nothing, and you'll like it" line years before software as a service became a thing.
Do you have a link? "You'll own nothing and be happy" is from a 2016 WEF video based on an essay by Danish politician Ida Auken (which went viral in part because it did not make clear that the future depicted wasn't nessesarily supposed to be desirable). If Limbaugh had a similar line before, that implies that either the video creator got it from him (directly or indirectly) or that they coincidentally used a very similar phrase.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
initially lie to her in at least one way about it
I don't see how that is shown by the email in question.
having at least one other affair at approximately the same time
The email talks about feelings rather than actions, so this may depend on whether we're including "emotional cheating". I'm not saying that multiple extramarital sexual relationships are an implausible interpretation, but it's not completely definitive. More to the point:
having an affair
Note that, while in the email he says "affair", whether he was actually having an affair may depend on the definition you are using. She claims that he falsely claimed his wife was fine with it. If that arrangement was instead actually real, having extramarital sex with his wife's permission would not fit the definition of affair typically used by "polyamorous" people, even if Singer himself used the word. I am not very inclined to think polyamory is a good idea, not least because it leads to more relationship drama like this, but I do think it makes a difference ethically if he had permission. And it doesn't seem terribly implausible for a philosopher and his wife to be the sort of people to think open relationships are a good idea in 2002.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
I do not think you are being nearly skeptical enough towards the account, not just regarding the possibility of deliberate lies but regarding how distorted memories can get regarding emotionally-charged events from 20 years prior. Have you ever had the experience of someone telling you a story regarding a grudge repeatedly over the course of years, and noticing it increasingly differ from your own recollection of the original story until you're pretty sure it's complete fiction? The way that, for instance, "X said Y, I bet that means he was thinking Z" becomes "X said Z"? (And then sometimes, upon further rumination, "X said Z, I bet that means he was thinking A" becomes "X said A".) If you haven't, trust me when I say it happens. Records like emails can tell you the actual contents of the email if you assume they weren't fabricated, but a lot rests not on them but on the context of the narrative surrounding them.
misrepresenting himself as having a "Don't ask, don't tell" arrangement with his wife
As an example, this is a description of the arrangement between two other people 20 years ago. It could easily mean that, for instance, she had agreed to the arrangement but exhibited some amount of jealousy, or something Dawn interpreted as jealousy.
lying to affair partners about having multiple simultaneous affairs
Meanwhile this could easily mean "had sex with me without mentioning that he had already had sex with someone else".
Or take this from the excerpt you tweeted:
From 2002 through 2020, all of Singer's female co-authors were women with whom Singer had been sexually involved, or to who he had made clear his sexual interest.
How the hell does she claim to know this about all his female co-authors for almost 20 years after their supposed relationship? For reference here are his publications. This made me curious enough to download the original complaint, but there's no elaboration or evidence provided that I can see. The language of "made clear" is of course great material for distorted interpretations and memories, all sorts of meanings become "clear" when you're nursing a grievance for 20 years.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater
How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.
Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.
No they weren't, The Guardian just made that up. It's not a prediction, it's a brief outline of a hypothetical written by two non-scientists (both self-professed futurists working for the consulting firm Global Business Network) who specifically state that it is extreme and unlikely. The point is not that they think it is likely to happen, but that they think such unlikely but extreme scenarios should be considered and prepared for by the Pentagon.
An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
These are the steps they propose be taken:
Notice that reducing CO2 emisssions isn't even mentioned because their scenario is so abrupt that it would be too late, rather they are talking about preparing ways to mitigate the damage and/or do emergency geo-engineering, in case an unlikely scenario like that happens.
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