sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I don't understand what you mean. Gender is not used to mean gender identity. They are distinct concepts.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender
"Those seeking state driver's licenses in Massachusetts are closer to being able to designate their gender as "X" instead of "male" or "female." The state Senate has overwhelmingly approved a bill that would allow for the nonbinary designation on licenses."
— Steve LeBlanc
"Facebook's message was clear when the social media network added new gender options for users on Thursday: the company is sensitive to a wide spectrum of gender identity and wants users to feel accommodated no matter where they see themselves on that spectrum."
— Katy Steinmetz
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/male
b: having a gender identity that is the opposite of female
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/female
b : having a gender identity that is the opposite of male
Merriam-Webster changed those and similar entries in 2019.
Many people use the terms “gender” and “sex” interchangeably. However, gender and sex actually refer to two separate things. Gender is an identity — your personal sense of who you are. The term can also refer to socially constructed categories that relate to what it means to be a man or a woman.
BBC Three: Gender is what you feel, not what parts you have
The truth is that gender is in the brain and physical sex is a completely seperate and different thing.
There is of course also use of the "gender role" definition, though such use is rarely consistent. Rather, as I have been saying, definitions vary according to the needs of the argument or situation at hand.
If you have actual evidence that trans-activists now generally believe that the terms "sex" and "gender" mean the same thing, I would be interested in seeing it (note that I said "generally", not one nut job.
This is newer, less mainstream, and even less coherent than defining gender as gender identity, it's me commenting on what anecdotally seems like a growing tendency in pro-trans arguments rather than something mainstream enough to be in Merriam-Webster. I said that it had become fairly common on social media to see arguments basing sex on gender identity as an illustration of what seems like a broader move away from the "gender and sex are two different things" argument, which at least still treated biological sex as a legitimate concept. (Probably because of those adopting the trans-activist "gender vs. sex" distinction in order to argue that things like sports should be based on sex. Some of which already have regulations or laws which happen to use the word "sex".) Most don't explicitly make that argument, they just use "gender" and "sex" interchangeably the same way normal people do while basing both on "gender identity". But some do make it explicit, and for them often the structure of the argument is something like 'sex is a social construct/complicated (argued in a way that equates those with 'meaningless', the same way 'gender is a social construct' was used) and therefore 'sex' is either best defined based on gender identity or abandoned entirely".
Deanna Adkins, director of the Duke University Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care:
From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.
The idea that science can make definitive conclusions about a person’s sex or gender is fundamentally flawed.
Forbes: The Myth Of Biological Sex
Or the controversy a little while ago about a fictional Warhammer 40,000 sourcebook mentioning biological sex:
Goonhammer: Transphobic Language and the Horus Heresy
“The hormonal and biological make-up of the human male” sounds innocuous if you are not aware of the process that’s going on to alienate people from their trans friends, family, co-workers and neighbours. If you do not know enough about this miserable “debate” to know the words used to imply hate rather than state it outright. To someone who does, this sentence is viciously coded.
Let’s get the science out of the way: There is no specific hormonal or biological make-up of a human male. Sex is basically a pair of giant buckets of characteristics we lump people into. There is no single specific indicator of sex, there are hundreds, and almost every human who has ever existed is a jumbled mix of them.
An Open Letter to Games Workshop
Today we wish to address the accidental (we are to assume good faith) use of Gender Critical* language in the Horus Heresy Age of Darkness Rulebook, but there is no reason that such checks shouldn’t extend to further minority subjects such as race, ethnicity, and disability in your mainline products.
This is a letter imploring you, Games Workshop – in order to better protect members of your community – to employ or consult sensitivity readers for subjects that mirror the lived experiences of your hobbyists, but extend beyond the lived experiences of your writers.**
However this is unfortunately phrased in a way that is uncannily and uncomfortably close to the rhetoric used by Gender Critical and trans-exclusionary groups. You need only skim tabloid press for examples of the terms “biological male” being used in malice, and open the comment sections for the people who use them to justify hate.
This is not anything as coherent as trans-activists all switching to a new definition, and some of those explicitly say sex is biological to the extent that they recognize it as a legitimate concept at all. Rather it's that the previous "gender vs. sex" redefinition left a loophole in that people could still say "sex" if they knew and cared about the redefinition, so now doing so is associated with the enemy and there is an effort against it employing various arguments/redefinitions/accusations-of-transphobia.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
especially with some examples I've seen posted on twitter, where the art is almost identical to some of the stuff it was trained on
The examples you have seen are almost certainly someone using img2img and then it being spread around with the source image as if the resemblance is spontaneous. Several cases like that have been going viral among the anti-AI-art people recently.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The post you're referring to might be "Does Class-Warfare Have a Free-Rider Problem?".
I'm skeptical though. It seems like the place that the modern SJW memeplex got going was internet communities like Livejournal/Tumblr/Something Awful and various fan communities, there's not a lot of career advancement happening there. (And being on the internet there's not even a lot of awareness of how wealthy anyone is, except insofar as it is displayed by behavior.) There might be advantages to be found in some early takeovers like academia and sci-fi writers, but in plenty of the proto-SJW communities like within activist circles the beneficial move was to not bother with the community in the first place. It was only later that it got enough power over influential institutions for there to be real benefits. You can say something like "it's incentivized by status-seeking/tearing down leaders/tribalist instincts that people are prone to because it helped obtain resources over evolutionary history" but at that point the connection between the behavior and the benefit is getting pretty tenuous.
sodiummuffin
13d ago
Maybe you're thinking of some particular subset that I'm not, but not that I've seen? Anime loves high-school, so a lot of characters are 16-18, and a fair number are 13-15 too. Reddit famously once (temporarily) banned subreddit mod holofan4life for posting a picture of Kaguya from the romantic-comedy Kaguya-sama in a bikini. (Presumably for "sexualizing minors" either because she's 16 at the beginning of the show or because her breasts aren't big enough.) Outside the school settings ages still tend to be pretty young and often feel like they were chosen at random, Yoko Littner is canonically 14, though it's not mentioned in the show. I'm less familiar with videogames but I think a lot of visual novels have school settings, and the characters in the aforementioned Atelier Totori range from 13-17.
Of course, the same is true for whole swaths of western media, like the teen sex comedy genre of movies, or teen dramas, both of which can have outright sex-scenes without anyone of note screaming about how that makes them "child porn". Some media from SJW-adjacent people will engage in the ridiculous business of deliberately writing characters to be 18+ because they believe it would otherwise be immoral to depict them sexually, but it's still not a mainstream taboo. Now, I think SJWs would probably go after those if they could get away with it (and probably have something to do with there being less teen sex comedies nowadays, though mostly for other reasons), but they're too obviously mainstream to act like they're doing something weird. Anime-style media is an easier target because any free-floating feeling of weirdness can be converted into talk about how something feels "creepy" for "sexualizing minors", without consciously thinking about how the same standards would apply to western media that doesn't feel "creepy".
sodiummuffin
4mo 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
4mo ago
No? That depends on birth rates, intermarriage rates, and the actual rate of immigration from different nations and races. Non-hispanic whites and asians currently have the same birth rate, which presumably means east-asians specifically are even lower. Furthermore, assuming you count people with 98% white and 2% east-asian ancestry as white, intermarriage is going to reduce the proportion of the minority demographic, and unlike with black people I don't know of any research indicating there's a disadvantage to having east-asian ancestry. (There was that one survey of online hapa communities where they seemed to do worse than average whites or asians, but that was obviously because of the selection bias of participating in those communities.) So even if your immigration policy ended up letting in more east-asians than white people, that doesn't mean the country would end up more east-asian over time. And of course there are plenty of hypothetical selective immigration policies where the end result would be the majority of immigrants being white without being an outright ethnostate, in which case the end result will be a higher proportion of white people than if there was no immigration at all.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Right, I saw that part of the sentence but skipped past that part of the argument, I should have explicitly said why I was talking about the military of Ukraine. I think it is deeply silly to attribute Ukrainian military performance to the politics of the U.S. army because of U.S. intelligence passing them some information. Also, even if we were talking about the U.S. military, soldiers are more right-wing than the general public and belief in "non-binary gender identity" is far from consensus in the U.S. even outside the right.
To the extent talking about "the they/them army beating Russia!" is a real argument at all, it is a response to those who have said it weakens the U.S. army when it adopts policies such as lowering standards to let in more women and pandering to divisive left-wing political groups who are not particularly patriotic/nationalistic or likely to join the military. Those criticisms have essentially no relevance to the U.S. keeping a spy drone over international waters and passing some of its data to Ukraine. Meanwhile the actual Ukrainian army is not particularly left-wing, owes much of its success to the Ukrainian people being more patriotic/nationalistic than Russia expected, and by the way a surprisingly successful force in pushing that sense of anti-Russian patriotism was a militia of literal neo-Nazis who were subsequently successfully integrated into the mainstream army and political system. (Meanwhile the U.S. military brags about campaigns to root out supposed "right-wing extremism".)
Mocking someone's beliefs or taboos does not mean you like the thing you are mocking, even though if it vanished that would remove the assumed context for your work. Making Postal 2 doesn't mean you want people to believe that violent videogames cause violence, rather the fact that they already believe that is part of the premise and context. Chris Ofili can make The Holy Virgin Mary and sell it for £2.9 million regardless of what his own views might be on taboos involving pornography, dung, or christianity.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe. Saying they want to ethnically cleanse the jews just gets denial because it's not true, arguing that a one-state solution would inevitably result in ethnic cleansing might result in an actual conversation.
Furthermore unthinkingly dismissing "obvious impossibilities" is lazy thinking that tends to just make people slaves to their local overton window. There are plenty of people to whom it is obvious that historical opponents of racial integration were just racist villains with no motive besides hate, while simultaneously dismissing palestinian citizenship as an impossibility and never even considering that those historical figures might have had their own well-thought-out reasons. Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:
It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others...
The point isn't that the situation with the palestinians is necessarily the same as those historical analogues. It is that actually considering the matter leads to understanding and perspective based on something better than what your social environment considers "obvious". If the anti-zionists win and Israel becomes yet another failed post-colonial state but doesn't have actual ethnic cleansing besides largely voluntary "jewish flight", "the zionists were right" could easily become the unthinkable opinion even as events validate some of their concerns.
For an unrelated example, take the following question. Which of the following exist as "real" distinct and inborn traits and which are just social phenomenon: transgender, non-binary, demisexual, otherkin, plurality? (And of the ones that exist, are the "real" cases currently outnumbered by the social ones?) It can be very frustrating to watch someone act like the answer is obvious based on an overton window popularized in their community a handful of years ago when I saw how the sausage got made.
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
Missing a not, anyway this is just a made up principle. Annexation is beyond the pale but we can bomb various countries into anarchy, set up puppet governments in them, divide countries into smaller parts, place troops in countries without their permission?
Yes. Wars of annexation materially strengthen aggressors and incentivize further war, they are a sort of geopolitical positive feedback loop. In the modern era going to war makes you weaker and poorer, less capable of waging war rather than more. Sometimes countries are willing to do it anyway, and of course there is gaming of the boundaries, but keeping the feedback loop negative rather than positive helps stop this getting too out of hand. How harmful (or beneficial) the war is to the country being invaded isn't really relevant to that, the important thing is that it be harmful to the aggressor. For instance the invasion of Iraq imposed a cost rather than a benefit on the U.S. (as even most of its proponents knew it would) so it didn't result in a series of more U.S. invasions, but the Russian invasion of Crimea was sufficiently beneficial that it chain-reacted into the invasion of the rest of Ukraine.
Wars must have no winners, only losers, and to ensure this continues to remain the case countries are willing to take losses themselves so that attempted wars of annexation leave the aggressor indisputably worse-off. Complaining that countries are "irrationally" willing to harm themselves for the sake of deterrence is deeply silly, it's basic game-theory and central to the logic of modern war. If Russia thought countries wouldn't really be willing to harm themselves for no benefit besides vague principles of game-theoretic value, that's just another way that Russia's status as a low-trust society has made them weaker.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
In other words, for an extremely broad offense that was created to use against people interfering with trials and has never been used against protesters before, despite it being common for protesters to disrupt congress or other government proceedings.
Congress intended § 1512(c) – which was enacted as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 – to broaden punishment for document destruction. As the Supreme Court explained in Yates v. United States, this was prompted by revelations of Enron’s massive accounting fraud and of the fact that the company’s outside auditor, Arthur Andersen LLP, “had systematically destroyed potentially incriminating documents.”
There is nothing in the legislative history that supports the notion that Congress enacted § 1512(c)(2) to criminalize the disruption of a Congressional proceeding by persons engaged in a political rally.
While that statute prohibits individuals from “corruptly obstructing” official proceedings, courts have interpreted those terms to include making false statements (see here, here, here and here), encouraging others to do so (here and here), falsifying documents, destroying evidence, thwarting a criminal investigation, or intimidating witnesses in a criminal proceeding.
None of these things happened on Jan. 6.
Further, demonstrators often disrupt congressional proceedings. Here are some examples:
The use of § 1512(c)(2) to prosecute demonstrators is novel. Other than the Jan. 6 cases, no reported cases prosecuted under § 1512(c)(2) since its passage in 2002 have involved a claim that demonstrations that disrupted an official proceeding committed an obstruction offense under § 1512(c)(2).
Mizhena from Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, a 2016 Baldur's Gate expansion from Beamdog, the publisher for the Baldur's Gate remasters.
It's particularly out of place in the high-magic medieval-fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms, since not only is the idea of having an inborn gender identity that makes you "truly a woman" all along a very specific recent concept, but it's hard to square it with a setting where a mid-level character (and healing-spells seller) like Mizhera could buy actual transformation magic like a Hat of Disguise, a casting of Polymorph Other, the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity which you can find in the original game, etc. Other highlights include five different ways to say the same thing and having Minsc make a Gamergate reference. This attracted controversy, and some of the remarks by the writer didn't help:
If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism, [we tried to address that],” said writer Amber Scott. “In the original there’s a lot of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife and that was played for comedy. We were able to say like, ‘No, that’s not really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.
https://archive.is/4HIow#selection-4337.0-4337.268
I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's "forced" or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I'm happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many Social Justice Games in the future.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The 13/53 figure is for murder not crime in general. Which is something the rest of your post should be taking into account. For instance there aren't a lot of murderers being let out of prison to commit murder again 4 more times, though I suppose you could have an altered but similar hypothesis like "failing to sufficiently catch and punish black criminals before they commit murder" or black career criminals being more severe in that they escalate to violence more often.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Also, real life is nowhere near as clean as these hypotheticals, and focusing more on safety has many negative knock-on effects elsewhere.
Sure, that's the cost of using real-life comparisons, but do you really think that's the only thing making some of those tradeoffs worthwhile? That in a situation where it didn't also affect economic growth and immortality research and so on, it would be immoral to accept trades between even miniscule risks of horrific consequences and very small dispersed benefits? We make such tradeoffs constantly and I don't think they need such secondary consequences to justify them. Say someone is writing a novel and thinks of a very slightly better word choice, but editing in the word would require typing 5 more letters, slightly increasing his risk of developing carpal-tunnel, which increases his risk of needing surgery, which increases his risk of the surgeon inflicting accidental nerve damage that inflicts incredibly bad chronic pain the rest of his life equivalent to being continuously tortured. Yes, in real life this would be dominated by other effects like "the author being annoyed at not using the optimal word" or "the author wasting his time thinking about it" - but I don't think that's what is necessary to make it a reasonable choice. I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that on its own very slightly benefiting your thousands of readers outweighs sufficiently small risks, even if the worst-case scenario for the edit is much worse than the worst-case scenario for not editing. And by extension, if you replicated this scenario enough times with enough sets of authors and readers, then long before you got to 3↑↑↑3 readers enough authors would have made this tradeoff that some of them would really have that scenario happen.
While the number 3↑↑↑3 is obviously completely irrelevant to real-life events in our universe, the underlying point about scale insensitivity and tradeoffs between mild and severe events is not. Yudkowsky just picked a particularly extreme example, perhaps because he thought it would better focus on the underlying idea rather than an example where the specifics are more debatable. But of course "unlikely incident causes people to flip out and implement safety measures that do more damage than they solve" is a classic of public policy. We will never live in a society of 3↑↑↑3 people, but we do live in a society of billions while having mentalities that react to individual publicized incidents much like if we lived in societies of hundreds. And the thing about thinking "I'd never make tradeoffs like that!" is that they are sufficiently unavoidable in public policy that this just means you'll arbitrarily decide some of them don't count. E.g. if the FDA sincerely decided that "even a single death from regulatory negligence is too much!", probably that would really mean that they would stop approving novel foods and drugs entirely and decide that anyone who died from their lack wasn't their responsibility. (And that mild effects, like people not getting to eat slightly nicer foods, were doubly not their responsibility.)
Many people enjoying a game is (imo) much more significant than many people getting dust specks, while a few people getting skin cancer is much less significant than one person getting tortured for 50 years.
But it isn't nullifying their enjoyment of the game, it's a slight barely-noticeable flicker in the broadcast. (If you want something even smaller, I suppose a single dropped frame would be even smaller than a flicker but still barely noticeable to some people.) If you're making media for millions of people I think it's perfectly reasonable to care about even small barely-noticeable imperfections. And while the primary cost of this is the small amount of effort to notice and fix the problem, this also includes taking minuscule risks of horrific costs. And it isn't a few people getting skin cancer, it's the fraction of the people who get skin cancer that then have something go wrong with surgery such that they suffer torture. I just said torture during the surgery, but of course if you multiply the number of planets enough you would eventually get high odds of at least one planet's broadcast operator suffering something like the aforementioned ultra-severe chronic pain for a more direct comparison.
Genuinely, even going so far as to write out a company policy for that ridiculous scenario (where 3^^^3 people risk skin cancer) would mean asking all of your employees to familiarize themselves with it, which would mean wasting many lifetimes just to save one lifetime from skin cancer.
Feel free to modify it to "making a design tradeoff that either causes a single dropped frame in the broadcast or a millisecond of more-than-optimal sunlight on the broadcast operator", so that it doesn't consume the operator's time. I just chose something that was easily comparable between a single operator making the choice and making the choice for so many operators that the incredibly unlikely risk actually happens.
Would you choose Maximal Suffering above Maximally Miniscule Suffering?
Sure. Same way that if I had a personal choice between "10^100 out of 3↑↑↑3 odds of suffering the fate you describe" and "100% chance of having a single additional dropped frame in the next video I watch" (and neither the time spent thinking about the question nor uncertainty about the scenario and whether I'm correctly interpreting the math factored into the decision), I would choose to avoid the dropped frame. I'm not even one of the people who finds dropped frames noticeable unless it's very bad, but I figure it has some slight but not-absurdly-unlikely chance of having a noticeable impact on my enjoyment, very much unlike the alternative. Obviously neither number is intuitively understandable to humans but "10^100 out of 3↑↑↑3" is a lot closer to "0" than to "1 out of the highest number I can intuitively understand".
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Of course the sentence could have been clearer. It's sloppy conversational English relying on the reader to fill in part of the sentence which accidentally ended up having a more straightforward meaning that the writer did not intend, something akin to a garden-path sentence. If there was no context your interpretation would have been the more intuitive one. But there is context, and it's very unlikely that a Twitter employee would claim the rioters were all false flaggers rather than Trump voters, or argue it that particular way if he did. And I think that not only does my reading of it match what he meant, it matches how the other Twitter employees in the conversation interpreted it, how the reporters posting the conversation interpreted it, and how the people responding to you in this thread are interpreting it. So while it's a bit interesting that your reading of it is also possible based on the text it doesn't seem particularly significant.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
They have a portrait of Stalin hanging in their office and gave thanks to Marx and Engels during their VGA award acceptance speech. Maybe some part of it is ironic and/or they're like the portion of /pol/ who like to use Hitler and the swastika as edgy symbols despite not being neo-nazis themselves, but it's not as straightforward as just being anti-Soviet anarchists.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
That's about what I would expect from UN Women, I assure you they're quite sincere and behave with similar intellectual rigor in more consequential ways than just tweets. Off the top of my head their responses to the 2014 Ebola outbreak comes to mind, a search finds this blog post summarizing it. Archive of their report:
In Ebola-affected communities and quarantined areas women should be prioritized in the provision of medical supplies, food, care, social protection measures and psychosocial services.
Women are "vulnerable" and thus need to get priority, you can count on that being their conclusion regardless of situation. Some news articles reported this as if they were more medically vulnerable, but mostly UN Women meant they were vulnerable in some vague social sense, along with implying they might be more medically vulnerable based on some dubious early data (ebola deaths by gender ended up being around equal). That blog post also has some links regarding the UN's decision to only distribute food to women after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Good luck getting food if you don't have any living and friendly female relatives.
On a lighter note, the "Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls" report from the UN Broadband Commission with "editorial inputs by teams from UN Women, UNDP and ITU" was laughably terrible. Most blatantly regarding the citations, which ranged from "literally blank" or "citing a file on your own hard drive" to referring to "Recent research on how violent video games are turning children, mostly boys, into ‘killing zombies’ 118" based on citing a 2000 article published on a LaRouche website raving about "killings which are caused by the use of Nintendo-style games, such as the game Pokémon,", "satanic video games", etc. For whatever reason feminism within the UN seems unusually incompetent and written without considering potential criticism, the tweet doesn't seem too surprising with that history.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
By the above 4chan usage many of them would call it a meme ideology, yes. It has the distinctive unseriousness of having never held power and thus never having to make compromises with reality. It is generally justified based on a set of principles that are too strict to fail gracefully if they run into problems and that are major contributors to its appeal as abstract ideas. Some of those ideas have bizarre and meme-worthy implications, as seen in the anarcho-capitalism memes that tend to focus on the Non Aggression Principle. E.g. "My NAP-bot detects the neighbor's voluntarily-contracted child slave has stepped 0.4 inches past my property line onto my flower bed, responds to his aggression by dousing him in McNapalm." The McNuke meme actually predates its modern incarnation by decades, as a child I remember reading Vernor Vinge's The Ungoverned from 1985, and that's a story generally considered sympathetic to anarcho-capitalism. Or the general idea that it deeply matters whether a system of social organization is classified as a government or not. I remember anarcho-captitalists on the internet talking a lot about boycotts and refusal to provide service as an alternative to government, as something that would limit pollution for example. Experience with real-world examples of that sort of thing, like social media companies, payment processors, and even banks cracking down on those expressing the wrong opinions, paints a less idealized picture and has probably played a role in making such rhetoric less popular. By analogy Goat Simulator owed its popularity to a few strong ideas, but those ideas didn't have the depth and staying power to remain entertaining under closer and longer inspection, and it had bugs that were often funny in the abstract or the first time but not if you had to deal with them all the time
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Instead I’d make the simple assumption in this particular case that those Latvians who support this decision are clearly unhappy with the direction their national history took in the past, and ask the question what sort of past they’d have preferred to have.
This assumption is wrong, their desire to destroy the obelisk does not imply an opinion on alternative-history scenarios. They aren't thinking about alternate-history in the first place, let alone working off the same specific points of divergence and assumptions about plausibility as you. They're expressing the sentiment "Soviets were bad!", and while you might not think it's reasonable to destroy the monument on that basis, it's strawmanning to represent this as choosing between alternative-histories. Like the sort of thing Scott talked about in this post:
In a way, when we round people off to the Philosophy 101 kind of arguments, we are failing to respect their self-description. People aren’t out on the streets saying “By my cost-benefit analysis, Israel was in the right to invade Gaza, although it may be in the wrong on many of its other actions.” They’re waving little Israeli flags and holding up signs saying “ISRAEL: OUR STAUNCHEST ALLY”. Maybe we should take them at face value.
Others have pointed out that other points of historical divergence are possible, but here's a different kind of divergence relevant to their sentiments: what if the Soviet leadership was made up of moral and competent people? What if rather than brutally suppressing dissent and killing lots of people with various deeply misguided policies, they were a bunch of George Washingtons with more viable political/economic views and more interest in setting up a stable well-functioning system rather than personally hanging onto power? We could debate how plausible it would be for people like that to have taken power in the Russian revolution, but I don't think it's a less valid thing to consider than different war results. And it's closer to the actual way people judge the morality of others.
sodiummuffin
1mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
4mo 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
4mo ago
But zeke5123 is talking about accidentally killing animals as part of growing and harvesting crops, not optimal land use. That seems like it would be similar per-acre whether you're growing alfalfa or wheat.
It's a completely different subject but I'm reminded of Scott's 2015 post about California's water crisis:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/
34 million acre-feet of water are diverted to agriculture. The most water-expensive crop is alfalfa, which requires 5.3 million acre-feet a year. If you’re asking “Who the heck eats 5.3 million acre-feet of alfalfa?” the answer is “cows”. A bunch of other crops use about 2 million acre-feet each.
All urban water consumption totals 9 million acre-feet. Of those, 2.4 million are for commercial and industrial institutions, 3.8 million are for lawns, and 2.8 million are personal water use by average citizens in their houses.
Which leads to interesting calculations like this:
The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use.
But in any case the question of whether alfalfa is worth the resource usage has little to do with zeke5123's objection.
Hospital in Canada:
I suppose if the hospital's "Gender Pathways Service" is already prescribing puberty blockers so freely that there's no requirement for diagnosis beyond the child or child's parent getting a referral by saying something about transgenderism to the family doctor, giving them before the first appointment saves time. While doing so based on 0 appointments is obviously unusual, quite a few of the anecdotes I've heard mention prescriptions after the 1st appointment. The way you describe it used to be much more standard, I remember trans-activists complaining about previous requirements like living for 6-months to a year as the opposite gender, but doesn't seem common anymore.
It's possible they justify this with the argument that puberty blockers are much less significant than opposite-sex hormones and are just "giving the child time to choose" or some such thing, but that seems heavily contradicted by the evidence. For one it amounts to much the same decision: 97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38), but around 60%-90% of trans children who aren't given any intervention (the previously standard "watchful waiting" approach) grow up to not be trans. For another puberty blockers themselves, particularly when used to avert puberty entirely rather than delay precocious-puberty a couple years, are serious business. We know about them impacting bone density based on the use with precocious-puberty, but we also have reason to believe they impact brain development but have zero research on what that impact is in humans. The best I've found is this study on sheep. A concern mentioned by the NHS's independent review:
Given how the medical system is normally so obsessed with the precautionary principle (like the FDA shutting down early unapproved COVID testing) it seems crazy that something as significant as preventing puberty entirely has become standard practice based on no more than the same drugs previously being approved to delay precocious puberty. There's a severe lack of research on even the safety/side-effects of using those drugs that way, let alone a randomized control trial of effectiveness indicating it actually performs better as a treatment of trans-identifying children than doing nothing.
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