sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Why didn't you link an archive of the thread in question? The first commenter, sliders1234, specifically says "Critiqueing your other post". He just came across another post on the same Substack and was more interested in responding to it than the one actually linked. The second post by stiffly is clearly responding to that line because he saw it quoted in sliders1234's post. Maybe he didn't actually read your post and thought the quote in the other reply was from the linked post, maybe he knew it was from another post but wanted to respond to it anyway. Neither are mining TheMotte for content, just responding to another post on the same Substack and then to another reply in the same thread. Among repliers more will read the other replies than read the linked article, so it's not weird that stiffly would end up replying to something quoted by sliders1234. And looking at the linked archives of their comment histories neither seem like bots to me.
sodiummuffin
2mo 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
4mo 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
11mo ago
"Anti-woke" includes many things that are beneficial to black people, most obviously in that it opposes wokeness in areas that have nothing to do with race, but also even within the realm of race. For instance, consider the CDC's COVID-19 vaccine prioritization policy. They deprioritized older people relative to essential workers because older people are more white, even though they estimated this would result in many additional deaths (especially if the vaccine was less effective at preventing infection than serious disease, which turned out to be the case). This policy killed more black people it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. How did it benefit black people that more of them died so that more white people would die so that the percentages looked better to woke ACIP/CDC officials? Take the argument from the expert on ethics and health-policy the NYT quoted:
“Older populations are whiter,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
I don't think the average black person would really be sympathetic to this argument, even before you pointed out it was also going to kill more black people. These sorts of arguments are mostly only appealing to the woke. And of course the same is true for plenty of less life-or-death issues, like Gamergate's NotYourShield consisting of women and minorities who didn't think they benefited from journalists defending themselves by accusing critics of being sexist/racist/etc.
Furthermore, even within the limited realm of affirmative-action I don't think wokeness genuinely serves the racial self-interest of black people. There are many more black people who benefit from infrastructure than from racial quotas in infrastructure contracts, more who need medical care than who go to medical school, more who use Google than who work for Google. It isn't just the principles that want the black percentage to be high vs. the ones that want it to be low, there is an inherent asymmetry because meritocracy isn't just an arbitrary "principled libertarian stance", it serves an important functional purpose.
Of course diversity advocates also sometimes say that affirmative-action/etc. benefits everyone, it's just that they're wrong. Other times racial resentment and malice clearly play a role, but even then that doesn't mean it actually serves racial self-interest. In general I think ideological conflicts have a lot more true believers and a lot less people cynically pursuing their interests than people tend to think they have.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
There's a timeline (from the anti-Atheism+ perspective) here. The two things that made it blow up was when Watson "called out" Stef McGraw and then when Dawkins responded to a blog post defending that calling out. The original negative responses to Watson's video were just some Youtube comments, Stef McGraw's blog post, and Rose St. Clair's video response. Stef was a student who posted a blog post disagreeing with the idea that the encounter was an example of sexism. Watson, giving a talk at the CFI Student Leadership Conference, mentioned Stef was in the audience, called out her "parroting of misogynistic thought", conflated fear of "sexual objectification and assault", and claimed people like her were scaring women away from atheist conferences:
Because there are people in this audience right now who believe this: that a woman's reasonable expectation to feel safe from sexual objectification and assault at skeptic and atheist events is outweighed by a man's right to sexually objectify her. That's basically what these people have been telling me, and it's not true.
Since starting Skepchick I've heard from a lot of women who don't attend events like this because of those who have this attitude. They're tired of being objectified, and some of them have actually been raped; quite a number of them have been raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted. And situations like the one I was in, in an elevator, would have triggered a panic attack. They're scared, because they know that you won't stand up for them. And if they stand up for themselves, you are going to laugh them back down. And that's why they're not coming out to these events.
The call-out provoked some criticism on Twitter, and Watson responded with a blog post defending her actions and calling out some other people like Rose St. Clair and CFI intern Trevor Boeckmann. More criticism followed, such as Abbie Smith's Bad Form, Rebecca Watson blog post and McGraw's own response. This in turn provoked a bunch of blog posts supporting Watson's actions, such as PZ Myers's "Always Name Names!". In the comments for "Always Name Names", Richard Dawkins made his famous "Dear Muslima" comment mocking the idea that being asked to have coffee together at a conference was an example of sexism. (It is sometimes characterized as being a "don't complain because things are worse elsewhere" argument, but his other comment specifically said that wasn't his point and explained his reasoning.) This got too many blog posts to count calling him a misogynist and so on and got Watson to say she would boycott his work.
Often when Elevatorgate is summarized from the pro-social-justice side it's described as if Watson just made the comparatively mild original video and the atheism/skepticism community blew up at her, but what really got it going was how she responded to those like McGraw who disagreed. As well as ramping up her condemnation of the original interaction. (Something many of her supporters took even further, such as Amanda Marcotte arguing that Elevator Guy's invitation amounted to a rape-threat.)
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Fetish communities seem to have figured out a method that is at least somewhat effective, it's just neither psychiatrists nor Christian groups are interested. And the time investment, unclear reliability, and possible side-effects are such that it's hard to see it being worthwhile under most circumstances. The basic method is that you masturbate (and possibly edge), a lot, to the thing you want to be attracted to. To do this you generally couple it with something you are already interested in. Examples:
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Fetish acquisition and drift. It is common for people to pick up new fetishes (and strengthen existing ones) over time. It is also common for those fetishes to become more extreme and/or more abstract over time, more distant from baseline sexuality. Unlike most of the other examples, I think this one is sufficiently well-known on the internet that it's almost considered common-sense. People masturbate to something with content they like, it also has other fetish content, and over time they find the other fetish content arousing as well and may seek it out. It's not the origin of every fetish, plenty of people talk about having certain fetishes arousing from very early on, but it clearly happens. On places like 4chan you can see people talking about the progressions like this they have gone down. Sometimes they end up doing something like deliberately going back to more vanilla porn or cutting back on porn in general because their fetishes ended up in an extreme and emotionally unpleasant place. I remember a Reddit comment by someone claiming to be involved in prosecuting child-pornography offenses claiming around 50% of cases are people who seem to have been pedophiles to begin with while the other 50% are like this, people who sought out increasingly extreme pornography until getting caught with child porn.
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Fetish sponging. You see people in fetish communities talk about picking up fetishes from sexual partners. It's a similar principle but with sex instead of masturbation.
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Sissy/humiliation/chastity/hard-femdom/etc. fetishists who fetishize the idea of being turned gay . Here we get into sexual orientation. For various reasons related to humiliation/submission/transformation fetishes/etc. some men are not attracted to men but do find the idea of being turned gay sexy in the abstract. In this case part of "something you are already interested in" is the idea of being gay, but also that sort of porn is generally focused on women even if it claims not to be. 4chan's /gif/ had regular "gifs that make you want to suck cock" threads but they had women doing the sucking, their "sissy hypno" threads would straight-up alternate between women/straight-sex and images of penises, chastity-cage image-captions where the reader is forced to sexually serve men while being caged still use images of sexy women, etc. Trans porn is often used, combining both elements in a single individual. Screenshots I've seen floating around claim with seeming sincerity to have become sexually interested in men for real after masturbating to enough content like this. (I also remember seeing one that claims to have arranged a meeting to give a gay blowjob and then backed out because it wasn't at all sexy like the abstract fantasy was.) While someone could argue anyone like that had unconscious/suppressed desires all along and sought out that sort of porn for that reason, that is not the impression I get from the accounts and from my understanding of how the relevant fetishes work. Now, obviously comments on the internet are untrustworthy and comments about fulfilling sexual fantasies especially so, but it seems plausible enough as an extension of the fetish drift phenomenon.
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This Medium article, linked by a post here a while back, describes a similar fetish community that is gay to straight instead. I'm not familiar enough with it to guess if they've had actual success or just fantasies.
Regarding time investment to do this sort of thing on purpose, a lot of people don't specify and obviously it hadn't been studied so its hard to guess. Probably stuff like fetish drift doesn't necessarily take that much. But you do encounter people mentioning edging to relevant content for hours almost every day for months or years, so possibly more extreme changes like sexual orientation take something like that. This could also have unwanted side-effects, such as increasing or decreasing your sex drive. (Would an exclusive pedophile trying to shift his desires over to adults risk increasing his sexual desires generally? It's a pity that a study examining this can't happen for a variety of reasons.) Or increasing tolerance for extreme sexual stuff in general, particularly with edging. I guess someone who already masturbated a lot could change his habits to fit the desires he wants to have. Mostly I think this concept is potentially useful in avoiding doing it by accident, don't make a habit of porn involving X if increasing your interest in X would be undesirable.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I think the reason the logic of this article seems so strained is probably that there's a segment of the conspiracy-theorist community which has latched onto "transhumanism" as a buzzword and have a distorted idea of what it is. This allows them to equate stuff like "X once gave money to some sort of group with ties to self-described transhumanists" with stuff like "X wants to inject you with a chip to control your brain". Search 4plebs for transhumanism to see some examples, or conspiracy-theory sites like Transhumanism.news. The author seems to have picked up some of those ideas about transhumanism.
they seem to have come to it by way of a strange version of liberalism; not just that you're free to act as you like but are free to be whatever you say, even against the veto of biology, society and basic sense
Except it's not "whatever you say" - transracialism is largely taboo and otherkin had more success but still failed to become a mainstream part of social justice ideology. Rather there is a whole ideological framework for how people not only can but should transition if they "are transgender". Then there is a social environment in the social justice community (and often among professionals in trans healthcare) with a heavy bias towards encouraging people to think they're transgender at any supposed sign and then "affirming" those who think they are. Like Scott's old post about conceptual superweapons that talks about medical testing, except that was supposed to be an analogy.
The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo
But if one side has a superweapon, it's impossible to argue for the other. If the threshold starts at forty, and one doctor says "But we can't be the sorts of monsters who would refuse a potential cancer patient live-saving surgery!", and this argument is a deeply-ingrained part of medical culture and the other doctors don't want to be tarred as cancer-sympathizers, then the threshold goes to 30. Then another doctor brings up the same argument, and the threshold goes to 20. Soon the threshold is at zero and they're referring rashes and hay fever for surgery and no one can protest because they don't want to look Pro-Cancer.
Part of allowing only one side of the argument might be that you sometimes see arguments like "Even if you're worried you aren't 'really transgender' (and if you're wondering you almost certainly are!) there's no harm in having the body you want.", ignoring the serious and lifelong negative effects. But this isn't part of any broader commitment to transhumanism. If anything the mandate towards affirmation of "legitimate" identities means things tends to get squeezed into a dichotomy, where something like transracialism must be not just "weird" and "probably a bad idea" but problematic and racist. Because if it wasn't there would be pressure to apply the same sort of logic used for "misgendering".
Finally, remember the main emphasis of transhumanism is not on people satisfying arbitrary preferences about their bodies to begin with, it's on making people better. Transhumanist fiction might have the occasional person who decides to be downloaded into an octopus body or something, but that's an irrelevant sideshow compared to intelligence-enhancement and immortality, especially outside the realm of fiction where real-life transhumanists are less concerned with imagining exotic visuals than authors are. Needless to say, the social justice community is often intensely hostile to such improvements, being more concerned with the idea that improvements to longevity or intelligence might be used by the rich than with the enormous benefits they would bring. They are also very hostile to anything that can be interpreted as "eugenics", which a lot of the easier transhumanist technologies could be classified as. Unlike the general public they are sometimes even hostile to the idea of curing disabilities and with the idea that being disabled is indeed objectively worse for reasons beside society's "ableism". Those deaf parents who deliberately choose to have deaf children (to be part of the deaf community) through embryo selection might use similar technologies to transhumanists, but doing so is pretty much the polar opposite of transhumanism.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Relevant themotte posts I made a year ago (the decision is currently being appealed):
sodiummuffin
1mo 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
8mo ago
What does it mean for an organization to secretly know something? Is the idea that organizations like the ADL have internal emails and fundraising plans where people write "Here's what we're doing to make people more anti-semitic so that our fundraising goes up"? But if there was such communication it would be leaked. Is the idea that this is instead a plan kept entirely secret within the minds of key leaders? But not only would that make it difficult for the plan to perpetuate itself across generations of leadership (as those in on it are replaced by true-believers), why would those leaders have such a goal? You mention that it benefits ADL fundraising, but the ADL doesn't have a mind and doesn't want things. People act in the interest of organizations insofar as they want it to succeed or are incentivized by the organizational policies/structure, but if nobody is writing "Fundraising by creating anti-semites" fundraising plans and promoting/firing people based on adherence to them it's hard for that sort of coordination to function. Meanwhile there are people who want the ADL to succeed independently of organizational incentives, but mostly as a subgoal of promoting their ideological goals.
Now, it's more plausible that individuals might hit on a strategy like "troll the Nazis to show how much we're needed" because they think this helps their ideology. But they aren't going to do it to "increase ADL funding by increasing the general level of anti-semitism" because that's not a goal of the individual people who are inclined to join the ADL. At most some fraction might believe that increasing anti-semitism encourages Jews to move to Israel and thus ultimately makes Jews safer. And while it's possible for evolutionary forces on organizations to shape them in ways that their individual members aren't aware of, the ADL is old and one of a handful of prominent Jewish groups, that doesn't sound like very strong evolutionary pressure.
Similarly I am always skeptical about claims like "[Company] is cynically doing [controversial culture-war thing] as a secret profit-maximizing strategy, nobody involved really cares." Even when they openly claim it is a profit-maximizing strategy this is often bullshit reasoning backward from ideological demands, like companies citing dubious "Diversity improves decision-making" research as an excuse for affirmative-action policies. Culture war is strongly driven by true-believers, not cynics weaving intricate plans to maximize corporate profits or non-profit fundraising. When subversion happens it is almost always members of a formal organization subverting it on behalf of their memeplex, not the other way around.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
About the same time, Starlink terminals stopped working in newly liberated territories at the Ukraine-Russia front lines in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials later said that was because the speed of their reconquest had pushed forces into areas Starlink that had “geo-fenced” to prevent Russia from using the service.
It was remarkably difficult to find this. Most of the news coverage, especially more recent news coverage, presents it as implicitly nefarious and either doesn't know or doesn't bother to mention that Ukrainian officials have stated what the issue was. Other than this Associated Press article the only other one I saw mentioning the actual reason was this Financial Times article quoting a third party.
My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary.
Starlink was made free throughout Ukraine so I think it just works if you have a terminal without needing an account. Doing authentication separate from owning the device seems impractical, for many military purposes you want it running continuously and it's not like you want it to start demanding a password (that soldiers have to memorize) any time it loses power. By comparison apparently Ukraine has been supplied with some SINCGARS encrypted radios, they work like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINCGARS
When hailing a network, a user outside the network contacts the network control station (NCS) on the cue frequency. In the active FH mode, the SINCGARS radio gives audible and visual signals to the operator that an external subscriber wants to communicate with the FH network. The SINCGARS operator must change to the cue frequency to communicate with the outside radio system. The network can be set to a manual frequency for initial network activation. The manual frequency provides a common frequency for all members of the network to verify that the equipment is operational.
But something like that doesn't work for Starlink, you can't have someone at SpaceX talk to the user and confirm he's Ukrainian every time a Starlink terminal is turned on.
sodiummuffin
10mo ago
He is likely referring to this from pages 11-12 of the GPT whitepaper:
GPT-4 can also be confidently wrong in its predictions, not taking care to double-check work when it’s likely to make a mistake. Interestingly, the pre-trained model is highly calibrated (its predicted confidence in an answer generally matches the probability of being correct). However, after the post-training process, the calibration is reduced (Figure 8).
In any case, the articles you quote are oversimplified and inaccurate. Predicting text (and then satisfying RLHF) is how it was trained, but the way it evolved to best satisfy that training regime is a bunch of incomprehensible weights that clearly have some sort of general reasoning capability buried in there. You don't need to do statistical tests of its calibration to see that, because something that was truly just doing statistical prediction of text without having developed reasoning or a world-model to help with that task wouldn't be able to do even the most basic reasoning like this unless is already appeared in the text it was trained on.
It's like saying "humans can't reason, they're only maximizing the spread of their genes". Yes, if you aren't familiar with the behavior of LLMs/humans understanding what they evolved to do is important to understanding that behavior. It's better than naively assuming that they're just truth-generators. If you wanted to prove that humans don't reason you could point out all sorts of cognitive flaws and shortcuts with obvious evolutionary origins and say "look, it's just statistically approximating what causes more gene propagation". Humans will be scared of things like spiders even if they know they're harmless because they evolved to reproduce, not to reason perfectly, like a LLM failing at Idiot's Monty Hall because it evolved to predict text and similar text showed up a lot. (For that matter humans make errors based on pattern-matching ideas to something they're familiar with all the time, even without it being a deeply-buried instinct.) But the capability to reason is much more efficient than trying to memorize every situation that might come up, for both the tasks "predict text and satisfy RLHF" and "reproduce in the ancestral environment", and so they can do that too. They obviously can't reason at the level of a human, and I'd guess that getting there will involve designing something more complicated than just scaling up GPT-4, but they can reason.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
there are risks for women alone at night in confined spaces with strange men
This argument always struck me as strange. An elevator literally opens its doors on its own and has more traffic than a normal room, it's halfway to being a hallway. Under what plausible circumstance does it pose more of a risk than a normal room? The timeframe that you can't leave it is a matter of seconds. Anything you could do in that timeframe (like groping/stabbing/purse-snatching someone) can be done elsewhere by attacking by surprise. The thing that stops someone from attacking you isn't that you can open the doors without waiting 10 seconds, it's the combination of most people not being violent criminals and the violent criminals getting arrested.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Option c: blacks are 5x as much "overpoliced" or white criminals are 1/5 as likely to be caught and convicted.
Studies based on the National Crime Victimization Survey show a close match between the racial demographics of criminals as reported by those claiming to have been victimized and the racial demographics of those arrested for those crimes. The 13/53 figure is specifically based on murder and is thus technically not covered since murder victims cannot be surveyed, but violent crimes in general are included and show a similar but somewhat lesser disparity. (Generally the racial disparity is larger the more violent and severe the crime is, so murder has a larger disparity than violent crime in general, which has a larger disparity than crime in general. So while the crime victimization survey also doesn't cover crimes without victims, those have a smaller disparity to begin with, and white criminals with victims answering the National Crime Victimization Survey don't seem to be getting away with it more.)
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Surely a philosophy professor should be familiar with the paradox of the heap? Does he avoid using the word "heap" because of it? What about "hot" or "biped"? The vast majority of words have various levels of vague boundaries.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Because the Rothschild family features in a lot of conspiracy theories due to being enormously wealthy and influential during the 19th century. You really don't need any additional explanation for why a family that had that level of wealth and influence over governments for a century accumulated conspiracy theories exaggerating their power further. Look at the conspiracy theories that have accumulated about Bill Gates in just a couple decades. Someone did the usual conspiracy-theorist thing of playing Six Degrees of Separation and noticing they were connected to PG&E, and then MTG read and repeated it.
sodiummuffin
29d ago
The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.
I've repeatedly encountered sophisticated repost bots making non-political posts, though never an entire thread like that. For example, I've seen bots that will post on /r/videos copying the top comment on the linked Youtube video, to get upvoted posts that are harder for Reddit to recognize as copies. In one case people noticed the comment was strange because it mentioned the year, which wasn't the same year the Reddit comment was made. That does not seem like something you would go to the bother of programming if there was no value in it. Reddit's spam filters treat accounts differently if they have an organic-seeming history of upvoted comments, so people who sell Reddit accounts want a way to create those at scale. Reddit might also treat real-seeming accounts differently when it comes up voting, so upvote-buying services might benefit from such accounts as well.
sodiummuffin
4mo 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
5mo ago
I do not know of any polls about how many Ukrainians believe people born with a "non-binary gender identity" exist, or that people should avoid "misgendering" them, but I doubt it is a significant number. I do not even know if anyone has invented "non-binary pronouns" in Ukrainian, I assume a few Ukrainians on Tumblr have done so but I do not know of them successfully convincing major Ukrainian institutions that their adoption is a civil rights issue. Searching finds an article about a soldier who identifies as "non-binary" and says that "some even used my she pronoun", with no mention of "non-binary pronouns" as a concept. Ukrainians are of course not using singular they as a pronoun to indicate "non-binary" people, since less than 30% speak even "some English".
By comparison, in a 2023 poll 44% of Ukrainians supported common-law same-sex marriage and 30% believed same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children. I do not think it is useful to base your understanding of major world events on bizarre gotchas against conservatives from /r/politicalhumor.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
My own impression is that this is a case of rationalist first-principles thinking gone awry and applied to a domain where it can do real damage. Journalism doesn't have the greatest reputation these days and for good reason, but his approach contrasts starkly with its aspiration to heavily prioritize accuracy and verify information before releasing it.
It seems like the opposite to me. Running with the baseless callout post to show how seriously you take wrongdoing in your community is extremely normal behavior. Normal people tend to assume accusations are true, without appreciating how easily they can be dominated by a small percentage of delusional or malicious people. Normal people tend to take a "if there's smoke there's fire" attitude rather than nitpicking individual claims to see if the accuser is credible. Normal people are more interested in punishing or warning about wrongdoers than the impact of false accusations, and don't think about the second-order consequences of incentivizing false accusations by taking even weak accusations seriously. Indeed, I wonder if one reason the claims weren't questioned enough is because those doing so wanted to act normally and being skeptical would have pattern-matched onto negative stereotypes about EAs: defending an EA organization accused of abusive behavior would be cult-like, while nitpicking the truth of individual claims by an alleged victim would be cold and emotionless. Now, normal people can be skeptical, especially after a response like the one Nonlinear has now posted, and obviously they aren't as bad as SJW-inclined communities with ideological antibodies against failing to "Believe Victims". But the behavior you're attributing to rationalism seems very typical. Sadly this includes large sections of mainstream journalism, regardless of what the SPJ ethical guidelines say they should be doing.
Yes it is.
That's 1000 for $9.99, 999 pills for 1 cent each and then 1 extra. Now, if you buy a smaller quantity it is more expensive, since you're paying them to make and ship around a smaller bottle, and there's probably also a bit of a premium for name-brand Tylenol if you don't know about generics (some of which is you paying them to advertise the existence of Tylenol to you), but here's a smaller quantity of brand-name Tylenol for something like $0.15 each.
https://www.amazon.com/Tylenol-Acetaminophen-Extra-Strength-Count/dp/B000052WQ7/
Not exactly an onerous burden.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat".
I remember Nyberg also shared pictures of Dana with other pedophiles online.
Conversation with #ffshrine at 2006-06-04 18:04:46 on Roph@deep13.xelium.net (irc)
(23:48:28) uranus: thx for giving my cell phone number to alpott
(23:48:33) uranus: and sarahs
(23:48:38) uranus: and giving out danas pics~
Conversation with #ffshrine at 2006-06-30 22:20:25 on Roph@deep13.xelium.net (irc)
(01:18:13) Minty: sarah, have you actually posted pics of dana before
(01:18:23) Sarah: privately, yes
(01:18:29) Sarah: and once when I was drunk I linked to her in the chat
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
Where have all the teen comedies gone? Twenty years ago, it seemed like there were at least several of these every summer to capitalise on the general debauchery and sexual exploits of modern day teenagers, but I can't remember a memorable teen movie in the last few years.
As I read this I thought you were going to go with "because social-justice sensibilities consider them Problematic and are influential among the people and companies that make movies". (The other big potential contributor would be the idea I've seen that comedies are declining because they struggle to justify getting people to come to the theater instead of streaming.)
Nearly all gay films deal with the uncomfortableness and trauma of coming out, but what makes this film unique is that the two main characters are simply gay without further explanation. That alone makes it worth watching in my opinion.
...which makes your actual followup puzzling to me. If that is the reason then of course one of the few teen comedies that makes it to release will be one that immunizes itself by trumpeting social-justice credentials as loudly as possible!
sodiummuffin
10mo ago
The binding force behind all "woke" modern movements is anti-whiteness.
A handful of years ago the most prominent SJW focus was feminism, by far. Race got some obligatory mumbling about intersectionality and how white feminists need to listen to the lived experiences of women of color, but then everyone went back to what they really cared about. For that matter the SJW community has been a breeding ground for new identities to champion, like non-binary, demisexuals, otherkin, and plurals, with non-binary being the main one to get traction outside of a handful of sites like Tumblr. The SJW memeplex has relatively little to do with the specifics of the groups it claims to champion, making it quite mutable.
That doesn't make the anti-whiteness any less real, race-based prioritization of the COVID-19 vaccine alone killed tens or hundreds of thousands of white people. Even if future SJWs refocus on plurals or something, it is likely that without sufficient pushback captured organizations like the CDC will continue quietly making decisions like that about race. But don't assume they're dependent on any particular identity group or expect them to remain the same while you try to position yourself against them.
I very much doubt that burning natural gas in a power plant, converting the heat into electricity, transferring it to your home, and then converting it back into heat is more efficient than transporting the gas and burning it for heat directly, even if electric is more efficient at transmitting the heat to the cookware. The first source I found with a quick search said the same:
https://home.howstuffworks.com/gas-vs-electric-stoves.htm
The potential climate-change argument against gas stoves would be that, in a hypothetical future with plentiful and very low-carbon electricity generation, a gas stove might lock in fossil fuel consumption. But unless you live in an area where the electricity is already all hydroelectric/nuclear this is a risky gamble, if during the timeframe the stove is operating your area is still using fossil fuels to generate electricity the electric stove will cause more emissions. I don't anticipate the energy-generation mix changing that dramatically early in the lifespan of a stove bought today. (If the "three times" figure is true it would have to happen less than a third of the way through its lifespan.)
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