what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
how is it that in a community that has been self-enclosed for thousands of years only two people are black?
Wheel of Time did this as well. Two Rivers is an isolated farming village surrounded by mountains, several days away from even a moderately sized trading down. But some of the main characters are white (Rand, Mat), some are mixed (unsure, but Perrin is from the UK so I'm guessing white and black) and others indigenous Australian/New Zealander (Egwene and I believe Nynaeve). They also made Lan Asian, which works well IMO except he's supposed to be 6'5" but is shorter than literally everyone else.
For some characters it probably doesn't matter, but throughout the books characters' appearance indicates where they're from (the main region where most of the book series takes place, nicknamed "Randland" by readers, is roughly the size of the US and has everything from lily-white to extremely dark-skinned character, but each country has very distinct appearances and accents). In addition, Rand's appearance is totally central to the entire plot and if the Aiel don't have a consistent appearance, then lots of things don't make sense. But they've already changed the story by quite a lot, so I maybe it won't end up mattering.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Simply put: your vaccine should not significantly increase cardiovascular risk. It should be absolutely negligible. 1 in a million, whereas these vaccines might be 1 in 100,000.
Why? This seems to me like you picked "an order of magnitude safer than what it allegedly is" and if the alleged rate of danger were different, you would have picked a different goal. Unfortunately I can't easily find the serious side effect rate for various common medicines, but https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/consumers/Safety-of-Medicines/Medicine-safety.asp says that a "very rare" side effect means one that happens to 1/10,000 people or less.
I find these numbers to be particularly confusing in light of how dangerous COVID itself is. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext#seccestitle140 says that at age 65, the IFR for COVID is about 1.7%, 1,700 times higher than your alleged risk of the vaccine and 17,000 times higher than what you claim the risk should be.
And according to https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/facts.htm, the baseline rate of ischemic stroke in the US is slightly over 2 per 1,000 people, again much higher than the alleged risk of the vaccine. For those of age 65, it seems to be slightly higher, increasing quickly with age: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/STROKEAHA.120.031659
For additional context, to have a 1 in 1 million risk of dying while driving, you would have to drive less than 100 miles (overall rate is about 1.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States, although I think that number is outdated and is even higher now).
No medicine is completely safe, but this seems like a real no-brainer to me.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Why would you expect them to have well-thought-out risk/reward tradeoffs? Other than what's in the other replies, most of what I know about Andrew Tate comes from youtube and instagram bits where he's bragging about how much money he has and insulting men who aren't rich, and how he has a surefire way for you to get rich. Sounds like walking survivorship bias to me, where someone made bad gambles that paid off for a time but have come around to bite him. Also, "plenty" of revenue is never enough for some people.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It'd be convenient if all of this tail-covering was focused on Policy 8040, and no small amount of it was, yet even to the extent Policy 8040 and broader trans-related stuff comes up, the school and its officers seem more interested in avoiding any controversy or blame on any sphere and from any direction, despite their significant powers and significant responsibilities. There is little or no evidence of ability to handle a non-culture-war variant of the same types of assault, or other criminal behaviors, despite evidence that they could have been occurring (39 missed notifications in one year!).
Is this at all surprising? Totally unrelated to any trans issues--I would not be surprised at this behavior for any scandal at a public school, or indeed any institution. This is perhaps a slightly extreme example, but really only because the initial crime is so bad. (I'd like to think it might be less bad at a non-public school, but that's probably just my bias showing.)
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?
Lobbying politicians and funding research (think George Mason, Hillsdale College, or private think tanks) come to mind.
Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?
A lot of tech companies have attempted to make hiring as merit-based as possible. Have several people interview every candidate. Make teams set up rubrics so that candidates can be evaluated according to specific, objective criteria that correspond to their ability to do the job. Everyone fills out their feedback separately, then if needed, everyone meets for an open discussion. If you have a personal connection to the person, you're separated from the hiring process. Similarly for salary, raises, and promotions: These are all based on specific factors which get written down, collected, and evaluated by multiple people. Also, make sure that the job requirements actually match the job; unnecessary college degree requirements will unfairly exclude a lot of minorities. Some companies are working towards salary transparency as well, where the salary range for every position is available to the whole company and employees are not discouraged from discussing salary with each other.
These measures have the advantage of reducing a wide range of negative hiring practices, not just those based on race. For example, it prevents a charismatic but unqualified person from charming their way through.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
My understanding is that Robber's Cave involved a lot of manipulation by the experimenters to get the boys to behave one way, and that by changing the circumstances they were able to get them all to work together again. "Fake" is an exaggeration, but the standard interpretation of the results may not be correct. E.g. https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html mentions this.
I'm less familiar with the Milligan experiment, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity indicates that the reported data may be inaccurate or missing key information. The section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replications_and_variations indicates that the results could be highly dependent on situation.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
On one hand, this is a nothingburger. On the other, I might be sheltered but it does surprise me when people in positions of seniority, especially Europeans, reveal such base, zoological prejudice, grounded more in axiomatic disgust than in any moral outrage about population replacement, decay of trust, death of the national Logos or whatever.
I suspect this is actually how pretty much all cases of xenophobia throughout the world, and throughout history, operate(d). It never actually mattered who the outgroup was, or what their real behavior was, or even if they had personal spaceships while you lived in a cave. That just means they were crass materialists while you were in touch with the spirits of the world. It's this meme, but unironically, because the meme was always an accurate depiction of reality. It's only relatively recently, and only in some parts of the world, that things like empirical evidence and logical argument started to be considered as valuable, or that beliefs should flow from them rather than the other way around. And so people need to at least come up with a plausible-sounding explanation, grounded in some sort of logic rather than pure visceral tribalism, as to why the other actually is a civilizational threat this time.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Intelligence is helpful, it just isn't sufficient. African kingdoms have been prosperous before (at least in a similar way to other old civilizations, which is to say, they had rich rulers and impressive art, even if the average person's life sucked). But building truly prosperous societies, in the sense of benefiting a large portion of the people, is incredibly difficult. What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace--is probably closer to many ancient societies that we now glorify as being important steps on the road to civilization, than the latter are to what we have today.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Travel blogger Jake Nomada affectionately refers to the “lack of common sense found in many areas throughout the region” as “the Latin Hammer.” Some examples he lists include getting stuck in traffic for hours because road workers were on a siesta break, getting scammed by landlords, and bribing narcos.
Is there anything in this section (other than time-period specific technology) that would have been out of place in the US 100 or 200 years ago? For example, the behavior of early Mormons makes it seem like skepticism and common sense literally hadn't been invented yet:
Unlike the story I've [the author] been taught in Sunday School, Priesthood, General Conferences, Seminary, EF Y, Ensigns, Church history tour, Missionary Training Center, and BYU... Joseph Smith used a rock in a hat for translating 2 the Book of Mormon. In other words, Joseph used the same magic device or “Ouija Board” that he used during his treasure hunting 3 days. He put a rock – called a “peep stone” – in his hat and put his face in the hat to tell his customers the location of buried treasure on their property. He also used this same method for translating the Book of Mormon, while the gold plates were covered, placed in another room, or even buried in the woods. The gold plates were not used for the Book of Mormon we have today.
One of the key witnesses is described as:
The following are some accounts of the superstitious side of Martin Harris: “Once while reading scripture, he reportedly mistook a candle’s sputtering as a sign that the devil desired him to stop. Another time he excitedly awoke from his sleep believing that a creature as large as a dog had been upon his chest, though a nearby associate could find nothing to confirm his fears. Several hostile and perhaps unreliable accounts told of visionary experiences with Satan and Christ, Harris once reporting that Christ had been poised on a roof beam.”
Among other fantastic claims. There's a lot of crazy stuff in that link. And this wasn't the Borderers in Appalachia--Joseph Smith's ancestors were definitely Puritan and Mormonism began in upstate New York.
Safety is expensive. Car seats, climbing harnesses, etc. If something has to be done, and you're poor, then you'll just have to do it in the unsafe way. How many Darwin Awards went to hillbillies using guns for things they shouldn't have?
Overall I don't see a good reason to believe that these are problems inherent to a particular ethnicity of people rather than contingent on education, wealth, and possibly culture.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Whether it's "stealing" or not, I think that, in some cases, there is no moral obligation to respect copyright. Copyright is a truce, an agreement, to encourage certain productive behaviors that are otherwise difficult to incentivize. As the US Constitution says,
[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
(emphasis mine). To the extent that copyright etc. accomplishes something useful, then it makes some sense to respect it. But calling it property (as in, "intellectual property") is a lie, a legal fiction. If an agent is abusing copyright law to oppose its intended use--which large music companies and ticketmaster do, for example--then I see no reason to respect it. They are violating the agreement, not as written, because they used their ill-gotten gains to lobby lawmakers in a twisted Kafakesque circle of theft, but certainly in spirit. I certainly don't see a moral requirement to pay a middleman who exploited legal loopholes rather than the actual creator.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Sex has a very strange history in America. Recall Albion's seed: A large portion of early elites came from cultures where adultery was strongly and seriously discouraged (the Quaker and Puritan ones). A large portion also came from the Borderers and Cavaliers, where (male) adultery was, maybe in theory considered wrong, but in practice actively encouraged, at least for a portion of the population. I think a lot of confusion about how sex is treated in America comes from failing to distinguish between these 2 groups.
(Also keep in mind, the Cavalier practice--where the male elite can take many sexual partners--is probably the most common throughout world history, at least in practice).
I was going to point to the lyrics of "Baby it's cold outside", a song from 1944, which (at least according to one interpretation) acknowledges the strict anti-sex norms of the time while also being a popular song about flouting them. But in trying to find a better description I found this article, which has some additional historical information: https://time.com/5739183/baby-its-cold-outside-consent/
The 1940s was not exactly a time of extreme chastity. In fact, World War II brought with it a wave of sexual activity. “People behaved in war in ways they wouldn’t behave in peace time,” says Beth Bailey, author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America and the Director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies at the University of Kansas. Many wartime couples “thought they might never see each other again” — and many married young, often ending up with the first person they’d lost their virginity to, because it was considered the right thing to do.
Within this environment, the contradictions were many. According to surveys by Alfred Kinsey, author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, one of the best-selling books in America in 1948, about half of men said they wanted to marry a virgin, more than 60% of college-educated men said they disapproved of premarital sex, and about 80% of college-educated women said they had moral objections to it — and yet, about half of women and more than half of men said they had had premarital sex.
But for women who were caught doing so, the consequences could be steep. Her personal reputation and her family’s reputation was on the line. Abortion was criminalized, and contraception was illegal in most states. Women who got pregnant could be kicked out of their homes and out of college; pregnant high-schoolers could be sent to homes for unwed mothers, forced to give their babies up for adoption, and to undergo a rehabilitation program before they could go back to school, according to Rachel Devlin, author of Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture and a professor of History at Rutgers University.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Addendum, entirely my own opinion: One reform that I would like to try is to make lawsuits default to "loser pays." Almost every other developed country requires the losing side in a lawsuit to pay for the other side's legal fees. I think it's generally well known that lawsuits are often a tool used to bully people into complying by making that cheaper than defending the lawsuit. Meritless lawsuits are still very expensive to defend, and almost every story I read about cost inflation seems to mention lawsuits at some point. Suing over a missed period in an environmental impact review as is common in CA, or suing because a building would be taller than surrounding "historic" buildings like in Miami, or for minor procedural limitations like with Austin's CodeNext, or Cambridge suing Boston because of "visual impact" of a bridge redesign during the Bid Dig, is very common. I think this happens in medicine, too: Malpractice insurance isn't cheap, but probably far more expensive is the vast amount of extra tests done for reasons of "CYA." Loser pays would discourage lawsuits that are likely to fail, but costly to defend.
(The only thing preventing me from declaring this the Solution to All Cost Disease is that I haven't seen a lot of discussion of lawsuits in educational cost disease. However, one might also think about the attitudes described above in both of those contexts: Do we insist on expensive and impressive-looking inputs, regardless of cost or efficacy? Are we highly insensitive to price? Is it considered unethical to reject the "best" solution because it's costly? Do bears shit in the woods? etc.)
But also, I think you can see similar attitudes reflect in the people filing those lawsuits, or otherwise being obstructionist (such as county officials who drove up the price of CA's HSR by demanding it take circuitous routes). They would rather tank an entire project to benefit millions of people, than not get their pound of flesh or deal with a minor inconvenience of something changing or having their property appreciate in value slightly less quickly. Even as a libertarian who's usually very suspect of "people being selfish ruin everything" style arguments, it seems like borderline narcissism or sociopathy.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored. The book is never taken down from Amazon or any other publishers for the controversy.
Scott Aaronson was speculating on why, when Caplan visited his university to speak, no one seemed to care. No protests, nobody in the audience even asking snide questions. As he pointed out, by a reasonable definition of feminism ("women are people too"), Caplan is a "feminist" and considers "feminism" to be so obviously true as to not be worth talking about, but in his own experience, stating one's agreement with feminist beliefs never protected one from accusations of sexism or behavior that negatively impacted women. Maybe we've passed peak feminism, but Scott offers his own explanation: The worst actors, the kind who actively take pleasure in tearing down other people, wished to tear him down specifically because he claimed to be an ardent feminist. They enjoyed being able to say, "he said he was a feminist, and clearly he was lying." I have another hypothesis, though: That Caplan actually doesn't care about slacktivists and won't be guilted into capitulating, so he's not as easy of a target.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think Nate Silver is effectively betting on his predictions, since the only reason his website gets any attention (and therefore makes money) is if his predictions are well calibrated. This isn't always perfect (he got a lot of flak for 2016, based on the mistakes of other people that he deliberately avoided, for example) but I think it's reasonably close.
Economists think about this all the time--see, for example, this video from David Friedman, but it's also one of the first things that are discussed in introductory Econ right after the perfect competition model. But I don't think this post does a great job of identifying such cases; the video I linked has what I consider to be better examples.
How much I'm having a hard time finding evidence on; maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.
For the most part, it's up to each person to determine if the benefits outweigh the costs. Most people can determine how much they like drinking; an estimate of other people's preferences won't help you much. But... what does this have to do with diffusion? Generally, each person experiences the costs and benefits of their own drinking. If anything, the cost of drinking is more diffuse, since health care costs are often socialized even in the US, so non-drinkers will pay for drinkers' drinking-related health care.
Induced demand: Among urbanists and YIMBYs, the concept of induced demand is often used to argue against increased road capacity. If people just drive more when new roads are added, what's the point? As /u/freet0 notes, of course there is value in driving beyond just driving fast. You actually get places! The fact that people drive more when there are more roads indicates that there were places that weren't worth driving to before, but now they are. Those roads opened up access to useful places to go2.
Again, I'm confused as to what this has to do with your general thesis. Generally, both the benefits and the costs of more road space are relatively diffuse, at least in North America, since most people drive most of the time (edit: this depends on the road/project; for one road serving one area, what I said is wrong. For expanding many roads serving many areas, it's more correct, although there still will probably be some agents with more or less benefit and cost). If anything, since many more people drive than bike, the costs are concentrated and the benefits are spread around (sanity check: if the benefits were concentrated, it would be easy to privately fund roads; this almost never happens).
(On a side note, IMO, this is a strawman of why urbanists care about ID. "Reducing traffic" is an explicitly stated goal of a lot of road construction and urban and suburban design, so the fact that congestion isn't actually reduced is an important counterargument. Moreover, the fact that people want to go places but currently can't is not an argument in favor of building more roads: It is impossible to build enough roads to not have consistent congestion in any reasonably populated area. You can certainly reframe ID as "lots of people want to go places but the current infrastructure doesn't allow it" but all this tells you is that roads are an inefficient use of space in populated areas).
And yet people continue to support suburban zoning restrictions in their voting choices. There is a cost that proponents of development and public transit (basically, of making it easy for poor people to get around) are missing though: poor people are bad (on average) to be around
I can't tell what this has to do with costs or benefits being diffuse at all. It sounds like you're just dropping an argument for zoning into the post at random. A zoning law has a very clear, concentrated cost (someone who would like to build a different type of housing unit on their land) with diffuse benefits (spread across all of their neighbors). (edit for clarity: Zoning, like many policies, can have both concentrated and diffuse costs and benefits. I was trying to get at the point that there's nothing particularly concentrated or diffuse about the particular argument you mentioned).
Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes).
First, I think your math is wildly off. 1.46 looks to be roughly the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, while 5 miles is, presumably, the distance of one commute. So 1.92 minutes is the risk due to your car making 1 commute, which means that these values are actually extremely similar.
But also, where are these numbers coming from? If people are biking or walking instead of driving, then congestion will go down and you won't take more time (certainly the converse, where adding road capacity does not reduce congestion, has been consistently observed--see the ID argument just above; you don't seem to dispute that ID occurs, simply how to interpret it).
That estimate of vehicle risk is probably way off, though, since these are city streets at speeds where vehicle passengers are in no danger.
I really want to emphasize this point, though. By driving, you expose other people to danger while slightly reducing your own exposure to danger and increasing your convenience. This is a highly negative externality and deserves to be heavily "taxed" to discourage it, or you should be forced to negotiate. If the math does work out as you claim, it should cost an absolutely trivial amount for you alone to pay off all of the cyclists and pedestrians in the city to keep the roads.
Also, from a more dry utilitarian point of view, expected amount of time is not the only relevant variable. A small risk of dying increases the variance a lot, and is something that people definitely care about. In this case, downweighting the diffuse costs is entirely appropriate.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
What about this is specifically conservative?
In my opinion, nothing (and it's not limited to conservatives either--I'm libertarian and it looks to me like Rittenhouse was fairly clearly acting in self-defense). Self-defense is a basic human right. But even basic human rights are politically charged these days. While I don't think I can steel-man the case that Rittenhouse was definitely guilty of murder, let me offer a few observations:
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From the liberal point of view, carrying a gun is itself an aggressive act. There was a lot of this at the time, people desperately trying to make legal (or debatably technically illegal, but not in a way that is relevant to self defense) open carry into a provocation. This is one of those things that is just invented and has no basis in law.
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2 of the people Rittenhouse shot were not carrying guns. If you are not familiar with guns except from movies and think of a gun as a magical death machine that mows down all opposition no matter what, and don't realize the damage that a blow to the head with a skateboard (or being jumped on while on the ground) can do, then using a firearm in such a situation is a substantial escalation. I think this is mostly a factual mistake, supplemented by tribally targeted sympathy. Relatedly...
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There was probably a lot of tribalism. AFAIK, no one who thought Rittenhouse was guilty also thought that the McMichaels engaged in reasonable self-defense against Ahmaud Arbery, even though in my opinion Arbery and Rittenhouse were in fairly similar circumstances. Again, much was made of Rittenhouses's alleged connections to "militia groups" and his alleged political opinions were supposed to be evidence that he went looking for protesters to shoot. So they assumed, based on those things, that he was more likely to be the aggressor.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
There are fundamentalist LDS groups that seem to be pretty similar to the Hasidim, including not officially marrying to avoid taxes and collect additional benefits and using lots of welfare. They are generally located in the middle of nowhere, and there have been efforts to stop them, but as far as I can tell these are mostly limited to prosecution on the basis of serious crimes (like child rape) which I think the Hasidim avoid. Mainline mormons and the mainline LDS church seem to be at best ambivalent about these efforts, and sometimes oppose them. There are some other legal issues that might also apply to the Hasidic communities (like misuse of public funds and effectively having a privatized religious police force) but they might also be better at staying on the "maybe legal" side.
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints#Short_Creek_raid and the sections immediately below.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
What is the saying? The constitution is not a suicide pact?
Tenure can be very important, but that's because it protects researchers with unpopular but tenable findings or conclusions, or who present those same ideas to students to consider and discuss. It's important that we have the capability to test unpopular ideas rather than just throwing them out at first glance. If it's not actually accomplishing that goal--if universities are not actually bastions of free speech, and tenure isn't even a protection--then why do we have tenure at all?
Similarly, the government should not be telling universities who to hire, what they can teach, etc. But to not do so for a government-funded university is kind of ridiculous! I thought we pretended to care about democracy? Are blue-collar workers required to fund an institution which does not benefit them, and which largely despises them, and that institution has infinite protection from any recourse, regardless of what it is actually doing?
The general point is this: Free speech has to go both ways, otherwise it isn't free speech. Unfortunately, these bills seem practically designed to fail to accomplish much. Removing tenure will just drive all of the up and coming academics to other states or to private universities (including any who might have opposed cancel culture), while bureaucrats, students, and existing professors continue to prevent any actual freedom of speech. Overly broad vague laws are likely to fail a 1st amendment test. Instead, why not push on freedom of speech directly, using money? Tie university funding to adopting and enforcing policies that promote freedom of speech. Deduct funding for failing to protect speakers, treating student groups differently based on point of view, etc. Maybe even a cap on the money that can be spent on administrative staff, although that's probably vulnerable to Washington Monument Syndrome nonsense. The mentioned SB16, prohibiting professors from compelling a student to profess a belief, seems fine to me; a government funded professor teaching a class is acting as an arm of the state and should not be compelling speech.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Is it a realignment? This article doesn't really provide evidence of that. It shows that Trump is doing better among non-whites when looking at Republican voters and comparing to other Republican candidates. This doesn't necessarily generalize to doing better among non-whites in general, or doing better compared to non-Republican politicians. I believe that Scott has a few posts that show some evidence that he did (or e.g. improved his performance among non-whites from 2016 to 2020), although the effect is not as strong as the one described in this article.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Individual teachers are responsible for designing their own curriculum for AP courses and selecting appropriate college-level readings, assignments, and resources. This publication presents the content and skills that are the focus of the corresponding college course and that appear on the AP Exam. It also organizes the content and skills into a series of units that represent a sequence found in widely adopted college syllabi. The intention of this publication is to respect teachers' time and expertise by providing a roadmap that they can modify and adapt to their local priorities and preferences.
It's been a while since I took AP courses, but the history exams I took definitely had a mix of more open-ended questions where students had to be able to evaluate evidence and make arguments, and also a section of multiple-choice fact questions. In addition, some of the writing questions required you to know all of the relevant information already (FRQ). Even for the part that gave you primary sources and required you to evaluate them (DBQ), you would have to have at least some context and outside information in order to be able to do that evaluating. So although you could emphasize different themes, there was still quite a lot of factual information you had to have in order to get a decent grade on the AP exam.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I actually don't think most of it is psychological, although it may have a vaguely related, CW cause. Autoimmune disease, with allergy being a prime example, seems to be more common in developed countries. One common (although not universally accepted) hypothesis is that the autoimmune system overreacts when it doesn't have anything to do, or otherwise malfunctions if not exposed to pathogens when young. First world countries are so clean and disinfected that our immune systems have started to break down. The idea of increasing exposure to allergens has actually become mainstream enough that the director of the NIH recommends early exposure for kids at risk of peanut allergy (although does caution this isn't universal advice--some allergies probably are just genetic and not caused by a modern sterile environment). The allergies are very real--no amount of psychology will change your immune system's antibodies (although a friend of mine indicated they were able to slightly reduce their peanut allergy as an adult participating in an exposure study).
If you're wondering what the CW angle is, you may notice (if you're familiar with Jonathan Haidt's work, or Nassim Taleb's notion of antifragility) the similarity to the generally-accepted biological fact that muscles grow by being damage, and bones heal stronger than they were to start, and the hypothesis that we need exposure to psychological and emotional adversity in order to be able to handle disagreement and discomfort. And indeed, Haidt uses these biological mechanisms as analogies in his presentations (see the section starting around 26:00 in https://youtube.com/watch?v=B5IGyHNvr7E&ab_channel=PennStateMcCourtneyInstituteforDemocracy). By telling pregnant mothers whose babies are at risk of peanut allergies not to consume any peanuts, we've increased peanut allergies. Are we doing the same for immune systems more generally with excess cleanliness, and for human psychology with helicopter parenting (and general excess adult supervision)?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I don't see how it being an act changes whether something is an insult or not. Jones may not seriously believe that Sandy Hook was a false flag, but it would still be pretty hurtful to hear someone say that you faked your own child being dead for a political fight (and it seems like some people did believe him). Like with most bullies and charlatans, the correct response is not to take them seriously, whether you agree or disagree, not to engage. But I also don't think it's entirely an act; he is actually living in Romania, after saying (as another poster quoted) that you can get away with rape there by bribing the cops.
And if it is an act, then Tate is still a greedy asshole, selling desperate men on get-rich-quick schemes, like 10,000 con men before him. Does that sound like a man with a great grasp of risk management to you?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It's wild to me how people can brazenly lie and expect to keep getting away with it. A lot of them do indeed get away with it, at least for a while, and maybe that's just aided by a favorable media environment that they build around themselves. The
You already have the answer:
$100 million in yearly revenue.
Who thinks about the future when you're making that much money? It seems unlikely he actually committed any fraud or other crime, and courts seem extremely unwilling to rule that advertisements aren't protected speech, so unlike a fraudulent money manager or inside trader or whatever, it's not like there's going to be any real consequences. He isn't going to lose that money or go to jail. He probably never really considered whether he could get away with it forever, because why would he? The bit in the MPMD video about charlatans is spot-on.
I wouldn't be surprised if youtube (and other big platforms like facebook) were refusing to host some Republican/pro-life ads, and they're forced to advertise wherever they can.
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