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PaperclipPerfector  9hr ago (text post)   293 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 3, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Have any other middle-aged dudes grown out their hair? How did you keep from going insane?

I'm over a year into growing it out and it's long enough to pull into a ponytail. However, I don't want traction alopecia, so it can't be in a ponytail all the time, and it drives me crazy when it's loose and I can feel the weight against my neck (I have very coarse hair that is also very thick [such a burden for a man in his 40s, I know]). Taking care of it is one thing, but always feeling it is another. Perhaps I have too much 'tism for long hair.

Is there anything interesting going on artistically lately?

Aside from the obvious, that digital artists are getting supplanted by cheap, fast AI images?

I tried searching a bit, and asking ChatGPT, and mostly people seem to be saying that there are a bunch of different things going on, many of which are identity based and fairly boring as far as I'm concerned. The last large movement I liked was probably Impressionism; Art Deco is also pretty good.

People around here mostly paint the hills and skies, which I think is just kind of a default, I don't know if I'd call it a movement. I guess recently I like the atmospheric, somewhat out of focus landscape artists, like Gareth Edwards or Paula Dunn.

Extremely absurdly niche genres/mediums that you can't train an AI on because there's no prior art is my guess of where to look.

Where to look for what? Interesting artists?

On the one hand, that's likely to be true, like the interesting music coming out of various subcultures in the 90s.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how one would go about looking for that. They have an "artist studio tour" in my area, and although there are something like 40 artists, I didn't find anything I felt any energy from. They were mostly boomers painting hills, or sometimes textural abstract sorts of things.

How much detail do you think is in the data that governments and tech companies are keeping about us?

  1. Are they keeping a log of every website you visit?

  2. Are they keeping a log of your phone's 24/7 location data?

  3. Are they keeping transcripts of all of your phone calls?

  4. Are they keeping transcripts of every word you say in the vicinity of a smart device?

  5. etc.?

To take this on a slight tangent - at least for phone/tech companies, they're not keeping nearly enough data about me.

I bought a new flagship Samsung phone this year, billed as having all the AI bells and whistles. It was supposed to work magic with its cloud access, integration with all the built-in apps, on-device processing, and smart assist / suggestion features.

What Samsung AI actually does is sit around offering an inferior version of my SOTA-subs (Claude,Gemini,ChatGPT) and I basically never touch any of its features. It's the brand-new-but-already-outdated-car-touchscreen of AI tech. Also, a few times a day it annoys me with an unnecessary pop-up saying "Good afternoon! Here's a random news article based on your location. The current weather is overcast. Have a great day!". I hope to god no inference cycles were wasted generating these turds that wouldn't have passed muster as a feature in 2015, let alone 2025.

I want to be able to sell my soul to the machine. I want it to spy on me every second I use it. I want it to already know that I've been pulling up my topo map every time I have a spare minute, see that I've been looking at such and such an area, know that I usually do hikes of this distance and that elevation gain, and go have a think about that in the background and come back to me with something useful that I would actually want to know, and haven't seen yet - that "there's low cloud forecast for that area on Saturday, just FYI", and "trip report from 2 days ago mentioned an active bear in the area".

and to head off objections, Yes I want it reading my texts. Yes, I want it looking at my photos. Yes, I want it to be my Whispering Earring. "Better for you if you don't hit send on that reply. She'll likely think you're being flippant even though you're being sincere".. and so on.

obviously not with that kind of sharing enabled by default, but it should be available!

Google shows you it's location tracking in Google maps timeline.

Apps that respond to voice commands Hey Alexa, OK Google etc. Must record all sounds to parse the command sound. That doesn't mean they archive it all but it's all getting recorded and processed. They certainly have all your phone call metadata (who you called and for how long). Your browser has site history which is generally sold widely.

I would operate under the expectation that all of those but phone transcripts to be available to anyone who wants to buy them.

How difficult would it be to set up a company that actually buys the data on either a major country, anonymized, or specific smaller groups or individuals, not anonymized? What are the rules for who they are allowed to sell to, and in what form?

What's currently the most cost-effective and practical method of getting ahold of Ozempic/whatever weight-loss drug in the US without a diabetes diagnosis?

Also, is it worth messing with oral delivery, or are they flat-out less effective than the injection method?

I'm tired of people lying to me that I'm not fat when I observe the differences in the way the world treats me vs other people every day.

What's currently the most cost-effective and practical method of getting ahold of Ozempic/whatever weight-loss drug in the US without a diabetes diagnosis?

You should learn how to buy the freeze-dried peptides directly from gray market sources and constitute them yourself in vials with bacteriostatic water and use an insulin syringe to inject it. There are Telegram groups where people get together and test the gray market sources, usually organized by the gray market source itself.

Most cost-effective: this comes to about $60/month if you buy a one year supply of the drug and related materials.

Most practical: because you can just get everything delivered and don't need to manage a prescription via a doctor, though it takes a bit of research. It's not as idiot-proof though so you could mis-dose yourself, but if you're sane and can do basic math and trust a friend to double-check your work you should be 100% fine.

If you don't have a diabetes diagnosis but can convince your doctor to write you a prescription for it anyway (since it is approved for weight loss as "Wegovy"), you can expect to pay about $350-500/month by buying it ("Zepbound") from Eli Lily direct. You still have to fill and inject yourself with syringes though.

Can you get a medical marijuana doctor to ‘diagnose’ you with diabetes and give a scrip for ozempic?

I've been thinking that perhaps the woke/liberal/feminist (there is a lot of overlap between these groups) hatred for intelligence research and FUD-creation around the IQ concept is not merely about the incendiary topic of "race" or ethnicity and IQ that might pop up if society takes IQ seriously, and not just about the basal opposition to anything that goes against "tabula rasa", but perhaps also because men are more extreme in IQ than women. Nature takes more risks with men, while women are somewhat more clustered around the mean. Why does that matter, if the average IQ is almost the same for women and men? Because most of the geniuses are going to be men. Even at 130 IQ there is a major difference. Something like 6/10 of individuals with 130+ IQ are men. If you go up to 145+ IQ, there are fewer and fewer women compared to men. With high intelligence being one of the key ingredients to make for better leadership of groups and societies, this should naturally lead to an overweight of positions in the highest offices being filled by men in a meritocratic society concerned with getting the best results for its future. Feminists may have discerned this IRL and in data, and of course do not want to be ruled over by men. Thus they seek to obfuscate and mislead around the topic. Thoughts?

I don't necessarily believe this to be the case, but an amusing thought: What if the feminist hoe-maddening over IQ is not because they believe such a concept could be used to incorrectly characterize men as smarter than women, but because they already do (at least subconsciously) believe men are smarter than women. And where IQ research, or the IQ concept, is only further pouring fuel on the fire in legitimizing this belief and spreading awareness of it.

Three potential non-mutually exclusive drivers come to mind that could lead to the female belief that men are smarter than women:

  1. Lived ExperienceTM. Women—with their allegedly greater Empathy, Social Intelligence, and Emotional Intelligence that they love gassing themselves up about—have cultivated a sense of the Hanania-pill (posted below by @FtttG) through their lifetimes of interacting with men and women.
  2. A mild case of the Apex Fallacy. If when considering the distribution of men in some trait, women automatically focus on some top quantile of men. If one only mentally compares some top quantile of men against the same quantile of women in IQ—in the presence of greater male variability—one could conclude that men are smarter than women.
  3. A less mild case of the Apex Fallacy. Similar to 2), but greater male variability is no longer a necessary condition. If one only mentally compares some top quantile of men against a less restrictive quantile of women (such as women as a whole) in IQ, one could conclude that men are smarter than women.

Have to also account for how that brain is wired up and, maybe most critically, how it responds to stressors and setbacks.

Having two people of equal (and relatively high) IQ but with different neurochemistry you can still find one a neurotic wreck who can nonetheless make good contributions to a group, and the other can be calm and decisive and able to actually take responsibility for the group's actions and inspire the group to follow him.

I'm never going to say ONE factor determines all observed differences, but a brain awash in testosterone will produce far more behaviors we expect as 'leaderly' than one awash in estrogen.

And on the other hand, cortisol is the stress hormone, (see the previous links) which can trigger cognitive disruptions... but also lead someone to be decisive out of pure survival instinct.

I can say that my perception is that women that attain leadership position read to me as high-cortisol style leaders. Constantly stressed, constantly making decisions because they have to and are basically in continual fight-or-flight mode. And if they're high-IQ enough, they are able to navigate those decisions well, but they're never emotionally comfortable with it.

If cortisol is too low, of course, then the response to dangers/threats is delayed so even if they make good decisions, they might come too late to make a difference.

If the majority of women at all IQ levels fall into the low-T/High-C quadrant, it would explain why there's just fewer female leaders overall.

I also think there’s something to be said for how large male-dominated orgs have chosen a decision structure or maybe also a leadership structure that suits their strengths. I don’t think it makes sense to make this out to be more powerful than it is, but I think as you say even if women make equally good or even better (as I think some research suggests) decisions, time is money, faster can be better, and sometimes forcefully imposing decisions on others can also be more effective than we give it credit for. It does make me wonder is sociologists could invent a managerial structure that improves performance across several axes. However I think research on this also attracts hucksters and bad science, so it’s hard to tell a legit management consultant (assuming they exist) from a bad one.

but I think as you say even if women make equally good or even better (as I think some research suggests) decisions, time is money, faster can be better, and sometimes forcefully imposing decisions on others can also be more effective than we give it credit for.

From an evolutionary standpoint, yeah. Men in a hunting band have to respond a lot quicker to a changing environment than women gathering berries, in general. Slow decisionmaking kills, or lets the prey escape, which is also bad.

So women might have a decent structure for reaching consensus on important matters (do these fruits look ripe? Are these berries poisonous? which section of the forest shall we forage in today?) It will necessarily be more slow and 'sensitive' to feedback from the group members, whereas for men, if the guy leading the hunt screams "GRUG! THROW SPEAR NOW!" better to not talk back and just DO IT.

This is the exact observation that, twenty years ago, cost Larry Summers his position as President of Harvard. It is called the "greater male variability hypothesis."

Interestingly, although many of the "greater male variability hypothesis" charts I find online "illustrate" the bell curve differences by showing a flatter but equally-centered curve for men (lower in the middle, higher at the edges), the only clear male-to-female comparison I can find (PDF warning, also cited here) that uses hard numbers shows male curves that are both slightly flatter, and also shifted higher (i.e. centered more to the right).

cost Larry Summers his position as President of Harvard.

It frustrates me that whenever his name is mentioned, I picture Douglas Urbanski.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

I sincerely doubt that the average person, or even well read feminists, are aware of the precise IQ stats here. I didn't know the how the skew worked a mere few years ago, and I've been keyed into the IQ 'debate' for ages.

Men are better leaders than women even when IQ is identical, though.

Yeah I have that impression too, primarily based on the fact that every progressive woman I have talked about it with in person, upon explaining the iq variance situation, immediately scoffed "Oh so men are smarter than women are they?" And when I say "Yes, but it also means men are dumber than women." They usually stopped being so angry. But their anger doesn't go away entirely, and it feels like wounded pride to me.

Yeah I have that impression too, primarily based on the fact that every progressive woman I have talked about it with in person, upon explaining the iq variance situation, immediately scoffed "Oh so men are smarter than women are they?"

Which is actually funnier than it sounds at first. It suggests either A) a conflation of average and variance, even after an explanation of variance or B) the apex fallacy, where in a discussion on the distributions of men and women in some trait, women automatically jump to focusing on the right side of the distribution for men. Or both A and B. Ironically enough, either would provide mild Bayesian evidence for updating one's priors in favor of men being smarter than women.

Richard Hanania certainly agrees with you.

So, what are you reading?

I’m finally on ‘The Far Side of the World’ – perhaps the most famous novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series.

Captain Jack Aubrey, expert sloth debaucher, knowingly recruits enough lunatics and mutineers to fill out the complement of the ‘Joyful’ Surprise, before pursuing an American cough ‘French’ Man of War around Cape Horn and into the Pacific.

And after spending nine novels vociferously proselytizing his hatred of alcohol abuse to anyone who will listen, Dr Stephen Maturin has now chewed, injected, snorted, smoked, enema’d, or otherwise ingested most drugs found anywhere in, on, or adjacent to, the entire Seven Seas.

Aware of his addiction to the laudanum from his own medicine chest (that somehow didn’t make it into the screenplay), junkie Maturin decides that the only sane course of action is to wean himself off with the aid of a new wonder drug; Cocaine.

And that’s before he tries to cover up a fellow officer’s cuckoldry.

Unhappily, Peter Weir somehow felt the need to rewrite the film version to appeal to a broader audience.

For shame.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi.

Unapologetic Palestinian perspective. Khalidi is highly educated and Westernized, so occasionally makes some obligatory noises about how terrorism is bad and it's unfortunate that Israeli civilians have been killed, but this is pretty clearly performative throat-clearing before getting into how everything is always Israel's fault (or the US's). That said, makes a good case for where Israel has gone wrong (and admits some of the areas where the Palestinians have). It won't change any minds but if you want the best-articulated Palestinian perspective you can get without academic faffing about "subaltern identities" and "Zionist colonial-settler projects" (e.g., Nur Masalha and Edward Said) this is probably it.

I’m finally on ‘The Far Side of the World’

Give you joy on reaching the antipodal point on your circumnavigation of the series. I think The Far Side of the World is where O'Brian was at the height of his powers. The five novel sequence from The Thirteen-Gun Salute through the The Commodore is where I most like to get lost in though. One just flows into the the next.

junkie Maturin

To be fair to Maturin its clear he deals with chronic pain from his physical torture in HMS Surprise and the physiological torture by Diana.

It's quite clear his physical recovery was very slow from the bowling-green scene in The Commodore.

Even though the film could never live up to the novels, I have mixed feelings about a sequel. I think they still did a beautiful job, especially with the sound stage. I wish we could have had more of at least the same quality, but I'm afraid that any sequel moves would be a shameless cash grab at far lower quality.

The Skin by Malaparte. Not as good as Kaputt so far, but it has been worth it if only for the chapter about how the young male survivors of WW2 became communists because they were homosexuals and wanted political justification for their pederasty.

Black Magic Sanction (The Hollows Book 8) by Kim Harrison.

The other day I started reading Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Only about twenty pages in but I'm liking it so far.

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