what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I'm no doctor, but this claim doesn't explain anything to me. The spike protein is in COVID, that's the whole point. AFAIK COVID doesn't cause anywhere near this range of symptoms, and if it did, it would be vastly more dangerous than most vaccine skeptics seem to think. Just because something is "toxic" doesn't mean it causes literally every symptom imaginable.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I've used Feeld and this is such a bizarre description. I did not recognize it at all from the article until they named it. AFAICT the app is aimed at people who are interested in kink and/or polyamory. Most of the profiles that have any information at all include one or both of those things. This group is not necessarily more mature than anyone else, the age range seems pretty similar to other apps (maybe slightly more late 20s than early), and it's not any more hookup-focused than the average non-relationship-type-specific app. Lots of people on it are looking for serious, longer-term relationships. It's probably more progressive than average, but few people explicitly put anything like that on their profiles--again, not much more than any other app if you're in a big city. They would probably rate higher on the Big 5's openness to experiences measure, and are more likely to be upfront about what they want out of a relationship, but that's about it.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.
This is valid, but then you have to make sure this is actually what's happening. It seems like it might be easy to assume that this is happening, without looking closely at the history of the ideas. Or you might even have different groups coming to a vaguely similar conclusion, but independently--neither is trying to "fix" the other.
My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments. The DTP example seems like it refers to different sets of claims of what to do rather than reasons why we should it. The moderate liberals aren't coming in and cleaning up after the radicals made a mess, tidying up the support columns after they accidentally built a beautiful cathedral. They're both reacting to perceived injustice, but one is going further in the other direction than the other. Sometimes the arguments they use ("racism is bad") will overlap, sometimes they won't ("we can entirely replace police with X"/"no we can't").
Scott's post seems to blur this distinction as well. It's a combination of "social dynamics that cause strange groupings of people" and "what is actually correct?" If all you, personally, care about, is whether God exists, then you should only care about the strongest arguments from the most reasonable proponents. If you, personally, are just trying to decide on what public policy to support, then it shouldn't really matter what the relationship is between moderate reform liberals and radical DTP leftists. But it does matter politically, for the reasons Scott describes.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
It should matter, though. As @Rov_Scam pointed out in a previous thread on this topic, you really do not want to encourage people to be very loose with their standards when it comes to applying violence to another person. It certainly can be difficult to summon lots of sympathy for the average person making a disturbance on the train, but that's missing the point. The kind of person who will aggressively (aggressively as the opposite of "conservatively" here, not in the sense of being the aggressor necessarily) use deadly physical force will likely not limit themselves to people that you personally find distasteful. Offend them on the road by cutting them off? They might take it on themselves to play cop and run you off the road. Take part in a protest they disagree with? Maybe they'll start a fight. Get into an argument at a bar? They might leave to retrieve a weapon, or wait for you outside.
To be clear, I'm not accusing Penny of being this type of person. I have no basis on which to make that particular determination. He might have just made an error in judgement (or he could even have acted in the right--I think this is unlikely, given the witness statements I've read, which don't seem to actually include any actions that Neely took that would constitute a serious threat to human life, but they could be incomplete or wrong). But the use of violence by civilians against other civilians has to be based on high and objective standards, rather than how we feel about the people involved.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Communism. Like, it's not even close.
Communism is a system; blood/nobility is a personal characteristic. This feels like a category error. I agree that "need" (as in, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need") manages to be worse than blood, but this is quite a low bar and they're both so bad it feels pointless to ask which is worse.
For most of that history, wealth as we understand the term effectively didn't exist, because there wasn't a workable way to create it.
Indeed, wealth creation jumped massively right as inherited power and nobility-based political systems were starting to be replaced! I wonder if there could be a connection between these events? Maybe such a confiscatory tax regime discouraged higher production? Perhaps nobles are effectively of random competence and random (or worse) moral character? Possibly such a rigid hierarchy discouraged innovation?
If everyone abandons the fields to go chase better wages in the cities,
I think it was quite far from "everyone" who wanted/tried to move, and some of those still planned to farm, just under someone who would pay them more. In any event, if nobles can foresee this happening, there's an obvious solution: Pay the peasants more! In this situation, their work is clearly valuable, so that shouldn't be an issue. It's not like no one except nobility is capable of understanding that food will need to be harvested 6 months out! This is exactly the kind of problem that markets are wonderful at solving and central planning is terrible at. Obviously if too many people start to move to the cities, wages drop because of supply effects, because there's limited capital, and because the productivity of the marginal migrant goes down, which discourages more migration.
Speaking of central planning, I find it rather bizarre that you pointed out how terrible communism was, then immediately suggested that some of the things the Soviets did, such as preventing peasants from moving to the city and engaging in confiscatory levels of taxation, all enforced by military strength, which demonstrably destroyed the economic productivity of huge swaths of land (most notably Ukraine) and lead to mass famine, were somehow good when implemented under feudalism?
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
They are, but even in cold American cities it's rare that it's so cold that walking or cycling become impractical. Like, a few days a year rare--certainly similar to the frequency with which snowfall makes cars impractical in those same cities.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
The French Revolution, and the whole downstream branch of purported Enlightenment thinking and subsequent revolutions which took the French Revolution as their model, which appears to me to be the predominant portion both in raw numbers and in intellectual influence throughout the modern era.
Maybe this is just my Amero-centric bias speaking, but it seems to me like the American version is much more influential worldwide. Are there any countries that are currently trying to do what the French Revolution did as far as religion? I agree that the American Revolution is fairly unique among revolutions, but I think this more likely has to do with who was doing the rebelling and the circumstances of that rebellion than ideological influence. For example, the Americans were British colonists, rather than being natives of the country they inhabited, and so were not subject to the same sort of oppression (and technological and economic disadvantage) as, say, the Indians, Haitians, Mexicans, or Congolese.
(One could even argue that the real legacy of the Enlightenment is neither of those 2 big revolutions, but rather the peaceful granting of independence to countries like Canada and Australia much later, and these data points don't even come to mind because of how boring it is. That's fairly speculative on my part though).
Yes, the French Revolution was influenced by and incorporated aspects of the Enlightenment. I think it's a mistake to judge any intellectual movement by its worst "members" since some portion of any group of people will have bullies, narcissists, sociopaths, and people just hungry for power or violence, who are willing to join any movement and utilize it to their own ends, as well as extremists who truly believe but also use it to justify violence regardless of what those beliefs actually are. For example, what exemplifies the "core elements" of Christianity? Is it the Crusades? The forceful suppression of Native American culture and religion? The preservation of Greek and Roman learning through the Dark Ages? Maximillian Koble sacrificing himself at Aushwitz? All of these are some combination of what Christianity teaches and individual behavior by individual people. The French Revolution is the same.
(Communism rightfully gets dragged because all of its examples, at least above Dunbar's number, are horrific.)
No, it doesn't, because what people claim is of far less evidentiary value than what they do. But the flipside of this is the people who claim that Communism is Utopia, and therefore the USSR wasn't really Communist since it didn't create a Utopia. That is what I perceive you and others to be doing with the Enlightenment; you seem to be claiming that good results are part of its definition, and therefore an instance that produces bad results can't have been part of it. I think we should understand ideologies by the methods they employ and the outcomes they produce, not the outcomes they claim to be pursuing. The claims are still helpful in understanding how their agents saw themselves, but those statements should be heavily outweighed by what those agents actually did and the results they actually achieved.
I see what you're saying, and I agree that it's fallacious to just redefine a thing you like to be "good things" and a thing you don't like to be "bad things." However, in this case I really do believe that the individual liberty interpretation is much more in line with what Enlightenment thinkers like Locke actually proposed, and French Revolutionaries were largely taking out their anger with the Church, which was heavily entwined with the monarchy and had benefited from special privileges, rather than implementing an Enlightenment philosophical vision. Particularly when you have a mass movement with individual people from many walks of life... do you think that all of those people had read and digested all of the Enlightenment thinkers? Similarly I'm sure there were aspects of the American Revolution not perfectly in line with Enlightenment principles.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky
How about neither?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pg
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pi
As far as major economic trends, nothing seems to have even changed when Trump was elected. These graphs show % change from 1 year prior, but they're easy to modify to show raw level or whatever else. I guess he was "lucky" in the sense of being elected after the recovery was well under way but even that seems like a stretch.
Amadan can disagree, but I don't think I have seen a modhat comment explicitly invoke that rule in a long time. Since the migration off of reddit, at least. If they have receipts, I would be happy to see them. @ZorbaTHut, since this is a meta-thread do you mind if I tag them in this thread (or you can let them know or whatever you think is best) to ask for specific examples?
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
they managed to allow states to ban abortion with minimal loopholes
I'm confused by this statement. Wasn't, "states can decide what to do on abortion" the entire explicit point of Dobbs?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Ok, but the Northern part of Africa is still incredibly dysfunctional and poor today, so it still seems to present a question about what makes people capable of building civilization which can't be answered by reference to inherent intelligence. I don't know enough about the ancient history of sub-Saharan Africa specifically, but I do know that Botswana has seemingly dodged most of the problems plaguing its neighbors and is substantially richer than Egypt today.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Pack too many people in too little space.
...this is what makes a city, a city. Are you just opposed to the existence of cities?
Cities aren't built to walking scale.
I think it's clear from the other poster's previous comments that they mean a combination of walking and transit; not that you can walk literally everywhere. No one who lives in NYC would walk all over the entire city. I think you can understand this and are trying to make gotchas rather than engage in good faith.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
If the street cars are gone (and not replaced with some other transit) it's not really a streetcar suburb anymore.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
In the US, each side pays their own legal bills. Pretty much every other developed country defaults to the loser paying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fees)
what_a_maroon
8mo ago
The 2020 election was closer than the 2016 election.
Measured how?
It came down to a judge in any of 5 states allowing a filed election contest to be heard or even a slight peek at those definitely legitimate ballot signatures.
Ah, I see. Since literally every attempt on /r/TheMotte and here to provide a shred of solid evidence of fraud has been thoroughly debunked every single time, we've come back around to "just repeat things a bunch and they'll become true."
Could Trump run and lose? Sure, and it will take another vast and more ridiculous fraud campaign.
Or, you know, Trump not being that popular. Which, if you look at the 2016 results, was actually always the case--Clinton was just an unusually bad candidate (combined 2 party vote share of only 94% in 2016).
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Neither that argument nor any supporting evidence for it are in their post. It's mostly just complaining about the outgroup.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
The theory I heard is that Hussein was trying to pretend he had WMDs in order to intimidate potential rivals in the region like Iran, and accidentally did too good of a job.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
I think walking 30 minutes every day would add up over time.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
A computer and reliable internet access aren't free (nor a VPN), and many people rely on the library for the internet (ironically enough).
I don't think the internet replaces what libraries currently do, even around getting books. Being able to easily browse, to find books you never even thought of... a physical space like a library is way better than the internet.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
What pressure are you referring to? And what do you mean by "native" here? Rich old money families descended from Mayflower passengers aside, my point is that the great-grandchildren of Italian immigrants from the late 1800s are not pretty much completely indistinguishable from the grandchildren of Polish immigrants in the 1920s or from the great great grandchildren of a German immigrant from 1850 or from the 5x great grandchildren of English immigrants from the 1700s.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
To go from median to +1SD requires that you jump past 34% of the population, no matter how compact or spread the variable is
I'm pretty sure this is not correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule only applies to the normal distribution and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality gives no minimum at all for the portion of the distribution within 1 SD. And of course, this is all assuming that the standard deviation is even finite, which it may not be.
inherently by talking in standard deviations, we are talking in ordinal terms not absolute terms.
I don't follow. Ordinal data can't have a SD, since it by definition corresponds to an ordering or categorization of data, without meaningful numeric values assigned.
Yes, which is mostly a remark on just how huge 1 SD is
But 1 SD income seems like a lot, while 1 SD of height (about 2.5 inches) seems like it's not a lot. I don't think it's meaningful to talk about 1 SD being intuitively big or small since it depends on the variable in question.
Those things aren't typically enough to move you up by 1 SD of income. So even postulating a perfect correlation between the two you wouldn't expect a sub-1-SD rise in income to yield a 1SD+ rise in happiness.
That's fair (although the correlation isn't even defined if income has infinite variance).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
It makes sense to me that the vaccine could cause very different symptoms than COVID itself. It's not the most intuitive, but it wouldn't be the weirdest fact about biology by far. However, I'm still very skeptical that the vaccine could cause hundreds of different syndromes covering every single system in the human body. Is there any single cause that causes such a wide variety of medical symptoms?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Seems to me like locals might not want to live in an environment you consider "interesting" or "unique." The US was full of dangerous, dirty cities and poor farms in 1900. Then after WW2 everyone who could afford to moved to the clean and safe (ish) but absolutely boring, sterile, repetitive suburbs that no tourist would ever want to visit. Partly this was due to top-down changes that other places have the capability to avoid, but people would like to be rich, and with that comes convenience, safety, etc. (Both because those things cost money, and because your time is more valuable and dying is worse when you're reach).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I agree; I linked a video in another comment which goes into detail on the conditions that permit deadly force in self-defense. It includes, among other examples, a description of how drawing a gun, aiming, and firing can take substantially more time than charging at someone with a knife, even from a distance where the casual observer would look and say "that seems safe." My main point is that these standards have to depend on what the person involved actually did and could do in the moment, and that those actions have to reach an objective standard of threat. They cannot be based on someone's personal distaste, or on guesswork, or on the behavior of other people who might be similar, or on an immediate emotional reaction that is not grounded in reality.
Income isn't just skewed, it has a very long tail. Many variables have much more compact distributions. Happiness doesn't have natural units and could be distributed however you want depending on how you measure it, although it would be weird to me if the range of feelings human brains were capable of expressing spanned such a wide distribution (also something something CLT handwaving arguments, emotions are the sum of many small features).
1 SD can be a substantial impact, but if the result above is correct, it would be very difficult to obtain by increasing one's income from typical means (promotion, career change, getting an advanced degree, etc).
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