whatihear
9mo ago
A lot of drug dealers are fronted their supply because they don’t have the cash to buy it directly. They pay for it when they get their next re-up. This is how businesses in basically every other category work, so it shouldn’t be surprising. Street peddlers in their third world also borrow their merchandise. Retail stores borrow to buy merchandise. It would be weird if drugs was the one line of business where no one used debt financing. It’s just a more competitive economic structure so it will outcompete people buying up front.
Think about it from the perspective of a cartel boss. You have 1000 kilos of coke to move. You could either distribute 5 kilos at a time to the 5 guys who can afford to pay up front and take forever to move your stuff, or you could front the product to dozens, and move it way quicker. The second obviously makes more money quicker. The fact that you’ll have to break some legs from time to time is just some overhead.
whatihear
9mo ago
This is wrong for two reasons:
- Genetic determinism does not require a deterministic universe. At this point, I don't think many people who are aware of quantum mechanics think we live in a deterministic universe, and it is totally reasonable to believe in genetic determinism WRT intelligence anyway. While intelligence can be measured, it can't be measured down to the planck length. There's a level of precision that's just impossible to achieve, and so long as genetics determine intelligence closely enough, it's fine if the biological processes are a little fuzzy because of quantum uncertainty or whatever your preferred source of non-determinism is.
- A non-material universe is orthogonal to its materiality. There is no reason that non-material objects need to be non-deterministic. For a great example of this, consider the various "hard magic" systems in fantasy books that have clear and well defined rules for magic, but contain obviously non-material objects like souls.
To be honest, I don't much care for the term "genetic determinism" in this context. I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role. In my experience the debate is between hard core blank slateists, who deny the impact of genetics at all because they understand that it would wreck the foundation of much of their worldview, and hereditarians who think that there is a mix of genetic and environmental factors. "Genetic determinism" is generally leveled as a slur against hereditarians because it's pretty silly to think that genes are the only thing that matters and that your exposure to lots of words and symbols as a kid has zero impact. Can you point to someone making a "strong argument for heritability" that really says things are 100% genetic?
whatihear
9mo ago
It’s not though. A universe containing non physical things could very easily contain organisms with wholly genetically determined intelligence. They just don’t have anything to do with one another.
Imagine a purely material universe with species A that is intelligent and has its intelligence completely determined by genetics. Now imagine that one day in that universe species B evolves and has souls (just an example of non physical things, it could be anything you like that is non physical). Nothing has changed for species A, they are still genetically determined.
whatihear
9mo ago
I don’t think that’s true at all. There are plenty of materialists who think things are environmentally determined. This is liberal blank slateism in a nutshell. The opposite of genetic determinism is environmentalism in almost all debates on intelligence. This is actually the first time that I’ve encountered someone saying that variations in intelligence originate from something non-physical like the grace of God (this seems like what you are saying, but maybe you mean something else, it does seem like an odd thing for God to do to me).
whatihear
9mo ago
Yeah totally agree. Before I believed in god, I was a superveniance functionalist (now I’m confused). I think qualia are just one more superveniant thing in that frame.
A lot of people who are not materialists and also don’t believe in god cite qualia as the reason why, so I was trying to make the case in a way that would appeal to those people. It was sloppy and I regret the error, since I don’t actually think that makes sense.
whatihear
9mo ago
materialism / genetic determinism
What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.
It seems like you want to associate these things because you want to strike a blow against materialism, but it’s just unrelated.
whatihear
11mo ago
I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science.
What fields have you observed this in? In capital intensive STEM research, the senior grad students and postdocs do all the work and the PIs are out of touch managers who have to spend all their time grubbing for money. I could see your statement being true for like economics or something, but it is not at all what I observed in the hard sciences.
What equipment would allow you to kill someone in seconds leaving only the marks left on Epstein? How many seconds are we talking? Getting a garrote on a resisting victim is not trivial unless you have the element of surprise, and strangulation takes a while to set in. Even after someone goes out they are not dead immediately. Whether by blood or air choke, it takes seconds to put someone out but much longer to kill.
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