sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
3d ago
It includes future children who aren't conceived yet, so by that logic it would also apply to preventing them from existing via condoms or abstinence.
The argument is that it will harm them in the future after they are born, which is presumably considered different from preventing them from existing in the first place. Like if a company was dumping a chemical that caused birth defects and you got a court to order them to stop on behalf of victims that don't yet exist. (I am not a lawyer and don't know if you can actually do that, but I'd guess you can.) Conversely I would be very surprised if someone distributing free condoms or putting up "Say No to Teen Pregnancy: No sex before marriage" posters could be sued on behalf of the counterfactual people who would have been born if they didn't do that.
sodiummuffin
5d ago
The reason people thought there was a "client list" to begin with was because of people using "Epstein list" to refer to the lists of everyone who ever flew to a party hosted on his island or were mentioned in the court documents in any context.
The Independent: The Epstein List: Full list of names revealed in unsealed court records
BBC: Jeffrey Epstein list: Who is named in court filings?
Newsweek: Jeffrey Epstein List in Full as Dozens of Names Revealed
Yeah of course it didn't exist, I personally saw the rumor of its existence develop from people saying "Epstein list" to imply things that the actual Epstein lists clearly did not imply.
sodiummuffin
5d ago
The stuff about Epstein potentially working for Israeli intelligence (or U.S. intelligence) seems fairly plausible to me, though I haven't followed the case that closely. The idea of a secret "client list" that the police retrieved from his documents but haven't released or been leaked across multiple administration (coincidentally matching the "Epstein list" meme that developed for other reasons) is much less so, especially when people respond to the continued non-release by assuming "it must incriminate high-level politicians on both sides" over "it doesn't exist". Israel is fully capable of storing their own blackmail documents. If he was a blackmail tool they probably wouldn't be "clients" anyway, it would be "turns out that girl you had a one-night-stand with was under the age of consent".
sodiummuffin
5d ago
Today in trying to interpret survey results: 22% answered "No" to "Do you think tattoos can ever be attractive on a man?". But when asked "How do you think tattoos generally look on a man?" only 19% answered "Bad" or "Terrible". This implies at least 3% who thinks tattoos can't ever be attractive but think they generally look "OK" or better, and also a severe lack of people who think the average tattoo looks bad but that some small minority of tattoos can look good. I assume they are not answering the questions literally, but the result is sufficiently far from the questions that it is difficult to guess what they are actually trying to convey.
Skimming ahead, in the next table I check out 51% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Assume someone with tattoos is more likely to commit a crime" but only 45% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Deport immigrants based on their tattoos". So at least 6% think that if someone has a gang tattoo it's unacceptable to think he's 1% more likely to commit a crime, but acceptable to kick him out of the country for it. (Well, unless there's some sort of non-criminal-associated tattoos they want to deport people for? Like if there were a bunch of people who thought of swastika tattoos but just associated them with "political beliefs" rather than "being in a prison gang"?) I guess what's happening here is that ironically the very severity of "deport" makes people imagine worse tattoos, even when the language of "always" should make that a non-factor?
sodiummuffin
6d ago
People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead, so you can't trade off QALYs for time worked 1 for 1. Instead it's just another adjustor to quality-of-life, roughly equivalent to time spent working without being paid (the actual workers get paid, but it destroys the value they would produce doing something else). You could also compare the cost to the standard "economic value of the life" calculations derived from the premiums on risky jobs, and indeed certain safety measures require risky construction work and thus are partially paid for with the deaths and disabling of the construction workers you have implement them. Your calculation is still useful as a sanity check though, even though the actual tradeoff in time spent wouldn't be 11 minutes.
sodiummuffin
11d ago
The IQ gaps have been investigated a lot more and the evidence regarding them is stronger. It is only natural to focus on them. The other things you mention are much more speculative, generally have a lot of room to plausibly be downstream of intelligence or culture, and are probably much less impactful than intelligence in any case. Sure we can acknowledge the possibility of genetic differences in other impactful traits, but that doesn't mean we can just assume that based on observing some difference between the population groups. In general I am wary about building castles of speculation on scant evidence, it might seem more sophisticated and cutting-edge but I think it's a much less likely to be true than something simple and well-tested.
sodiummuffin
15d ago
PISA is itself a standardized test though. Admittedly it's low-stakes for individual students since it isn't part of your grade, so you could hypothetically have a model where South Koreans are "studying for the test" which helps them on that individual standardized test but if they were spending that time on more holistic learning it would be dramatically more effective on standardized tests they haven't bothered to study for, but I'm dubious. It's not like students know what is going to be on the test that exactly. Or at least I assume not, I've never actually looked into the practice tests that "cram schools"/hagwons have.
Looking at actual PISA scores I assume he's talking about 2018, in 2022 there's more of a gap since Finland's score dropped by 74 and South Korea's rose by 11.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
I haven't looked into how much of this can be explained by changing racial demographics. A quick search finds this page saying it can't be explained by that because only 7% of Finnish students are immigrants, but that only includes 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Actual racial data would make things easier, I know the U.S. collects racial data for PISA tests, allowing this interesting chart, but Finland might not. In any case that last chart also shows U.S. whites matching South Koreans, which seems to support the point that either all those extra hours don't make much of a difference to PISA scores or they're doing something very wrong to render them ineffective. Come to think of it I wonder if anyone in those east-asian countries has done randomized control studies on the effects of cram-school enrollment.
sodiummuffin
6d ago
Oh sure, but in this case we're trading off with risk of being killed as a child, not 11 extra minutes on your deathbed, so QALYs are the appropriate metric. By "reduce their lifespan" I was imagining it as taking those minutes from their prime, reducing healthspan by an equal amount.
sodiummuffin
18d ago
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
Yudkowsky tried it but they apparently didn't end up liking it. I know about this because it became the basis of a rumor in SneerClub-adjacent circles that he kept a harem of "math pets" that he forced to do math problems and that this was abusive somehow.
https://old.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/1jel94/hate_for_yudkowsky/cbemgta/
I've recently acquired a sex slave / IF!Sekirei who will earn her orgasms by completing math assignments.
https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1172190781794160641
It didn't work out at all when we tried it, I married her anyways, and the person who made up the "math pets" allegation claimed no such source, but I agree that explains why the concept was in the air.
Example of the rumor:
The guy who (I learned this just a few days ago) allegedly had an abusive relationship with a harem of women and allegedly called them his "math pets", yes.
sodiummuffin
6d ago
Note that "total blindness", "clinical depression", and "chronic pain" all involve average QALY estimates that still imply an above-zero value of life. There's a lot of people with those conditions who would gladly sign up for boring seminars if they eliminated their condition for the duration of the seminar. And of course history is full of people opting for unpleasant slave-labor over death. So if you're not joking your opinion seems non-representative.
sodiummuffin
14d ago
That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.
If there was an effect like that it should be apparent in admixture studies on IQ, like this one on european/african admixture. Instead performance just scaled with percentage european ancestry.
I think the PISA results would mostly just reflect the specific racial composition, where the majority of multiracial-identifying people in the U.S. are "White and Hispanic" and often have little or no genetic difference from the people identifying as just "White". Looking at this Wikipedia page 13.8% of multiracial people identify as black and something else. If we assume they have 40% black ancestry (since regular African-Americans average 80% black ancestry), then by comparison the U.S. is 14.4% black so people who identify as multiracial have half as much black ancestry as the average American. There's also 7.2% of multiracial people who identify as "White and Native American", but most people who identify that way have much less than 50% Native ancestry. 6.1% identify with 3+ races, but that shouldn't shift aggregate ancestry that much. Since biracial self-identification is unreliable, there could also be a bias where more intelligent families are more aware of their family history or more likely to belong to communities where biracial identification is high-status.
Despite the emphasis that tends to be paid to it in media and discussions, surveys indicate that casual sex is only practiced by a fairly small minority. The norm is serial monogamy, under which "more sexual partners" just means more failed relationships than the guy who had the same girlfriend the whole time. Now, it's possible men with tattoos are also more likely to have a romantic/sexual partner at all (after all both "getting a tattoo" and "asking out a woman" might be considered a form of risk-taking), but number of sexual partners isn't the right metric to determine that.
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