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PaperclipPerfector  23hr ago (text post)   585 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 23, 2025

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I have a genetics problem I don't know if my math/analysis is right because I haven't had to do math or Punnett squares in approximately 20 years and I was always kinda shit at statistics. I nerd baited myself I guess because I've been thinking about this for a week:

My wife has blue eyes. I have brown eyes as did both my parents, but both my grandmothers had blue eyes. So I know my parents were both carriers for blue eyes. The chances of me also being a carrier is 2/3 then, so the chances of my first child having blue eyes is 1/3. Our oldest came out with blue eyes so now the chances of having a kid with blue eyes is 1/2 because that confirms I'm a carrier. But what if my oldest came out with brown eyes? What would be the chances for every subsequent child to have blue eyes if all their older siblings had brown eyes?

My initial guess was 2/3s of whatever the last probability was. So kid #2 would be 2/9, then #3 would be 4/27, but that seems to drop off way too quickly. Doesn't pass the smell test.

I thought maybe I have to evaluate the probability that I'm a carrier before bringing the wife into it. So that would mean if I had a brown eyed first born, my chances of being a carrier are the chances I had a blue eyed kid for #1 [without knowing my status yet], divided by the chances that I had a blue eyed kid for #1 [without knowing my status yet] plus the chances that I had a brown eyed kid [in the event that I'm not a carrier, which is 1/3 atm]. I reasoned this because having a brown eyed kid will lower the chances of subsequent blue eyed kids so it goes in the denominator. That way, it still maintains the possibility while making it subsequently less likely.

This would be (2/3 x 1/2)/[(2/3 x 1/2)+(1/3)] which is (1/3)/(2/3) which is 1/2, making the chances of us having a blue eyed kid for #2 now 1/4. Kids number 3 and then 4 would be 1/6 and 1/10 respectively. This seems way more reasonable, but my equations are just going on vibes here. I have no idea if its right so can any math people clue me in?

both my grandmothers had blue eyes. So I know my parents were both carriers for blue eyes

both my grandmothers had blue eyes. So I know my parents were both carriers for blue eyes.

Maybe. Kind of. There are recessive brown eyed genes. Two blue eyed parents can possibly have brown eyed children. The examples of Mendelian genetics used in high school tend to be extremely oversimplified. They really shouldn't use these examples without a huge warning that any practical application on humans may defy what you were taught. Reality tends to be very polygenic with a lot of codominance unlike the Punnett squares we learned in school. When we learned Punnett squares in middle school in the 90s, our teacher warned us this is a huge oversimplification that only works for carefully selected traits like pea plant stalk shape and not common traits in humans.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41433-021-01749-x.pdf

I am never not awed by the things Mottezins obsess about. My own mother had blue eyes, and so did my dad. My eyes are hazel. My high school biology teacher told me to check the milkman's eyes. My high school biology teacher was an ass.

Are you sure? The prior probability for a man who is confident of "his" kid's paternity to actually be a cuckold is 2%, and the eye thing must raise it by at least a few more percentage points. I'd check, if I were you.

Hell, I didn't even have any indication to doubt my lineage (my father and I look a lot alike), but one of the reasons I got a set of 23andMe kits for me and my parents is that I wanted to be certain (the other reason is that I wanted to know how white I was; it's a Hispanic thing). Turns out, he truly is my real dad; good to know.

Seems like the kind of thing one would want to know. Do you have other objective biological indicia to support the assumption that your mother's husband is your father?

It was always incredibly obvious that my dad was my dad. It was like those, "don't talk to me or my son ever again" memes.

This is a standard application of Bayes's theorem. The probability that you are a carrier given that you have N consecutive children with brown eyes and zero with blue eyes is 1/(2N-1 + 1) so the probability that your next child will have blue eyes is 1/(2N+2). When N = 0, this agrees with your correct statement that the probability that the first child has blue eyes will be 1/3.

Bayes's theorem says that

P(Carrier|N children with brown eyes) = P(N chlidren with brown eyes | carrier) P(carrier)/P(N children with brown eyes).

You are correct that the a priori probability that you are a carrier is 2/3. Clearly P(N children with brown eyes | carrier) = 1/2N. To compute the probability that you have N children with brown eyes unconditionally, you need to take P(N children with brown eyes | Carrier) P(Carrier) + P(N children with brown eyes | Not Carrier)P(Not Carrier) = 1/2N * 2/3 + 1 * 1/3 = 1/3 * [(2N-1 + 1)/2N-1].

Hence Bayes's theorem gives

P(Carrier|N children with brown eyes) = [1/2N * 2/3]/[1/3 * [(2N-1+1)/2N-1]] = 1/(2N-1+1).

A nice visualization of this answer:

Draw three squares of equal area 1/3, two squares representing you being a carrier and one not. Then, carve out a 1/2N-fraction of the two carrier squares and color those blue (this represents the probability that your children all have brown eyes AND you are a carrier), and take the entire non-carrier square and color it brown (this represents the probability that your children all have brown eyes AND you are not a carrier). The probability that you are a carrier is the blue area divided by the blue + brown areas, which is [2/3 * 1/2N]/[2/3 * 1/2N + 1/3] = 1/(2N-1 + 1)

What are groypers? The discussion(s) in the CWR doesn't make much sense, if you don't already known what they are.

A kind of low-IQ antisemite.

Nick Fuentes fans. Generally the ones who form online mobs. If you talk about Fuentes on Xitter you'll attract a big group of them at once.

Reporters have been trying to stretch the term by talking about "Groyper-adjacent views" but it's generally very narrow and specific.

I mean...?

The Groypers, or the Groyper Army, are a far-right group loosely defined as followers, fans, or associates of the American white nationalist political commentator, activist, and live streamer Nick Fuentes. They are named after a variant of Pepe the Frog, an Internet meme.

Basically, (mostly) young (mostly) men who are engaged with (whether seriously or as a LARP or meme) ideas on the identitarian right, in particular taking their cues from Fuentes. It's sometimes hard to tell whether they're being serious or just being incendiary for the lulz. Maybe they would say it is always or often both.

I have literally never heard of a female groyper. Antisemitic women like Candace owens instead.

A Wikipedia article is not necessarily a good source for such a right-wing topic.

Generally true, but in this case I think it reflects the real state of affairs. See also on Groypers: https://roddreher.substack.com/p/what-i-saw-and-heard-in-washington

should note that Ross Douthat expressed some skepticism about Rod's approximation of the scope of the problem

I am not sure who to believe because in my area (very red state with a lot of Mormon and Evangelical presence) there are virtually no presence of groypers or groyper-adjacent propagandists, as far as I could see, but I am not sure who to believe about what happens in DC - and what happens in DC may have much more influence on the national politics.

I'd like to read Ross Douthat's view on that (link?) but I think it won't be able to convince me, on this stage, that groypers aren't a problem for Republicans. I may be very wrong on the size and importance of that problem, but it is the problem nevertheless. And it's not only a problem from my POV (which is obvious - I am not going to vote for a politician that genuinely considers me subhuman evil monster, whatever other position he could hold, I am only a human and have my limits) but from purely practical purpose - most of the normies won't flock to a platform that enables edgelords so far out of the consensus. At least unless they have something very attractive to offer, which groypers don't. And, also, if you want to bank all in on hating the Joos, there is enough competition to vote for on the other side, so you don't have any advantage even if you embrace that oldest of all low roads. Maybe if they ignore them enough they'd just wither away. Why couldn't we get lucky just this time?

Like everything else with Zoomers, this is all online. I’m not sure you would see a visible Groyper presence anywhere, no matter how much support there is.

Thank you, I had been meaning to make a Sunday question about this as well.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The Dawn of Everything. Not much progress.

About one-sixth of the way through Cryptonomicon.

Currently reading The Balkan Languages by Victor A. Friedman and Brian D. Joseph, from the Cambridge Language Surveys series.

Went back to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I tried to read it once and got to about the middle and abandoned it because I just couldn't make any sense out of it. On the second attempt, I kind of understand what he's talking about much more - not exactly agreeing or liking everything, but at least I now understand what's going on. Willing to see how far I get this time and if I can get to the end without losing it again.

Also after finishing Asimov's autobiography that I mentioned a while ago, I realized I never got to read the prequels to Foundation series, and read Prelude to Foundation. Which was pretty decent, but a bit underwhelming - maybe a curse of all prequels, since reading the Foundation series (a long, long time ago) was so exciting, and the prequels do what prequels usually do - describe things that happened before the important things happened. Also, the appearance of robots there was kinda meh - yeah, robots, so what, nothing really changed. So I got exactly what I should have expected, which wasn't bad, but also wasn't an absolute must read. I'll probably read Forward the Foundation next sometime soon.

If you still don't get on with Zen you could try Pirsig's Lila.

I'm currently reading the last book in the Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio. The subtextual Catholic apologia is threatening to lose its "sub" status, but it's still quite enjoyable if you're looking for something that straddles the sci-fi fantasy line in the same way as Dune.

Can you summarize the last couple of books? I'm curious what the deal with the "gods" is but didn't enjoy it enough to finish.

The evil gods are Lovecraftian monsters that may or may not be Angels who rebelled against future God.

Future God seems to be some kind of ultimate post-singularity intelligence that is impacting the past in order to guarantee its existence.

Threshold: Unbound Book 5 by Nicoli Gonnella.

Shogun by Clavell. Someone mentioned a new miniseries being created based on it, which I will never see (have never seen the original miniseries, either), but it reminded me of the book's existence. It seemed like every household I visited as a kid had a copy, and it was easy to spot because it was massive.

I'm half done. It's entertaining but far from high literature. The political parts are very well-written and he picked good surnames for the Japanese characters so it's easy to remember them all. No massive battles so far, but the little fights have not been well-written. Definitely his weak point. All the ways the two cultures view each other as horrific barbarians is enjoyable, but the Japanese overall come out looking better (so far).

The anti-Catholic animus is prominent and amusing. It's basically the Predator 2-arm meme between the Japanese and Protestants for hating the Catholics. I've read out-there criticism of the Jews that could be swapped for what everyone in the book thinks of the Jesuits.

I can't imagine it's all that historically accurate (and I don't mean his descriptions of castles or the messenger pigeons, which the wiki entry fixates on), so I mentally think about it as an early-1600s-Englishman traveling to the fantastic land of Nippon, where instead of elves, orcs, or dwarves, there are Nipponese creatures. Someone here mentioned wanting a high fantasy work set in 1600s Europe instead of a fictional medieval Europe where most fantasy tends to take place and I try to view it through that lens.

Here is one for you - what will happen if the Federal Government straight out forbids mortgages longer than 15 years? This question was raised in my head after the consensus about how terrible the Trump idea about 50 year mortgage is. So what happens if we go in the other direction?

A lot of people discover they have no hope of ever buying a home, and probably elect some asshole that promises them to fix it quick and easy, usually by taking other people's money who don't deserve it anyway, and it'll get only worse from there.

Single-family homes would get a lot smaller. Hard to tell what the effects on the financial system would be though.

The 30-year-mortgage is a tool for hiding the extent of government subsidization of the housing market. For all we know, it might be the only thing propping-up the economy. The buisiness model of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is offering "too-big-to-fail" government credit backstops to mortgage originators as a service.

"The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is because we got our fingers on the scale in their favor. I take my hand off, well then the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do, but they don't.

You need a higher credit score and a bigger down payment to qualify for one.

Which will lead to prices falling and stabilizing in another point.

"Prices falling" means massive amount of underwater mortgages - we all saw how much fun that is - and also massive budget problems in every place that relies on property tax income.

also massive budget problems in every place that relies on property tax income.

This part is 100% not true -- if your home price goes down so will your property taxes, but if everyone's home price goes down, the taxes will stay the same. Your town has a budget -- it determines the tax bill per dollar value, not the other way around.

In practice, that would just gum up the housing market and prices would ossify at a high level, because noone wants to take a loss.

And yet in all other markets people take losses all the time while still not wanting. And everyone that wants to sell their house can't afford to wait forever. They will break and probably sooner than later. Of course we will also have to keep private equity and some other over capitalized entities out of residential housing, but that is hardly a bad idea anyway.

And yet in all other markets people take losses all the time while still not wanting

Not the same "people". Most individuals that participate in stock market, for example, do that via relatively safe vehicles, or if they don't, it's commonly understood as being a very high-risk activity. Buying a house is understood as a part of being a responsible adult. If that results in massive losses, you'd have a lot of very angry people around who would demand the government to "do something about it" - and since we have a democracy, people usually get what they want, for better or (usually) for worse.

we will also have to keep private equity and some other over capitalized entities out of residential housing

Or just make local zoning less restrictive so that more housing can be built.

The local zoning codes are as they are not because of some random accident. They are such because usually people want them as they are - or are ok with them as they are. What would make them change their minds? If housing markets suddenly drops - e.g. because it became harder to get a mortgage - then they are unlikely to say "well, let's make it drop even further by increasing supply now!".

I mean to be clear, zoning regulations are almost universally the way they are because people don’t pay attention to them. That’s true both in low-zoning regulation cities like Houston and high-zoning regulation cities.

That could be so, but to change them, you will need to make those people active and on your side. And to make homeowners actively on your side with the message "you home price just dropped, we will make it drop even further!" does not look like a winning strategy.

The problem with doing this is that then more housing is built and the Venn diagram of "reliably votes in municipal elections" and "actually wants more housing to be built" is two unconnected circles.

There is no need for an outright ban. In the absence of government subsidies, the 30-year mortgage is not "abolished"—it withers away. Quote from Hidden in Plain Sight chapter 4:

After the speculative boom of the late 1920s, in which mortgages with LTV (loan-to-value) ratios of 100 percent were not uncommon, the Great Depression produced excessively conservative lending policies by the banks that had been the primary sources of housing finance. At the time, there were no national markets for mortgages, many local and regional differences in mortgage terms, very low LTV ratios of 50 to 60 percent, and a homeownership rate of less than 44 percent. Mortgages tended to be relatively short-term, with bullet payments at the end. If a mortgage could not be refinanced at the end of its term—and many in the Depression could not be—it was foreclosed.

The US government's direct involvement in housing finance began in 1934 with the creation of the FHA (Federal Housing Administration), which had the authority to insure mortgages for up to 100 percent of the loan amount. By providing a government guarantee, the FHA was intended to overcome the reluctance of banks and others to make long-term mortgage loans. Over time, the FHA had a major role in standardizing mortgage terms, increasing acceptable LTV ratios to approximately 80 percent, and encouraging the development of mortgages that amortized over multiyear periods. In 1934, FHA-insured loans had a maximum LTV ratio of 80 percent and a maximum loan term of 20 years. A 1936 FHA underwriting manual shows that, in addition, FHA underwriters wanted to see a good or excellent credit record and a relatively low debt-to-income ratio that took into account the borrower's residual income (remaining income after taxes, household costs, and outstanding debts). Because of these strict underwriting standards, the FHA's record for the next twenty years—through the Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war housing boom—was exemplary: defaults on FHA mortgages remained well under 1 percent.

Of course. But the politicians who don't offer the voters some goodies also wither away and are replaced with ones that do. It's easy to discuss theory but when the question is "do you have a chance for your family to have a home or you'd need to move to some bumfuck place in the middle of nowhere to afford it, or rent increasingly shittier apartments for your whole life" - how many people would be disciplined enough to still maintain "the government should not have any role in it"? Sadly, not so many. The politicians successfully sold the nation the dream of "every family can own a house" (with some sad exceptions of course, but you don't want to be a sad exception, you want to be a normal family) and now it is expected to deliver on it, and if certain politicians don't, then others will replace them who do.

What is your favorite part about your parish, if you attend church?

Or your social group, if not!

Personally I love that I go to a Greek church and they all kiss each other on the cheek. I love the physical warmth there.

…Thé religion.

I don’t post about it to the motte, because this is an argument forum, and I would flame people replying to my posts with blasphemy. But I am religious for the religion. Having a natural fertility bubble is nice, Jesus is better.

kids everywhere. Had a friend visit from out of town today and he remarked how he had never seen this many young families in a Catholic church.

Like @FiveHourMarathon, my church is the one I grew up in and my children go to school in the same Catholic school attached to it. It’s very beautiful to really feel such a circle of life sense to the place

Yeah that’s a beautiful thing. I hope to give that to my future kids.

I like that it's active. We reach out to the wider community regularly. I live in a transient are, near many military installations do we have a healthy amount of turnover over the years but it's about Dunbar sized with the long time members.

This may sound shallow, but I value most that my church is mine. I was baptized there, took first communion. I disliked the architecture as too modern when I was young, now I admire it as an artifact of its time and fight to preserve it from those who want to make it more modern.

I like our pastor a lot. He's a young-ish (in his 30s) guy from Brazil, who really strives to care for all the people of our parish. He also doesn't make any pretensions to holiness - I've heard him talk at various points about the sins he has struggled with at times, and how if you were to talk to any of his friends from Brazil they would say it's a miracle that he joined the priesthood. He's the model of what a priest should be like imo, and I'm really grateful we have him.

My group of friends is very proactive an intentional about socialising. We all take turns to arrange/host get-togethers. Nobody is doing all the work.

A question mainly for coders/website designers etc:

What might be the reasons why a platform used for graphing and screening the stock market in a browser has got (according to ublock origin) 230 trackers/third party connections running? A very similar competing site has got 3 trackers on their site according to the same Firefox addon.

The main question is: did you pay for accessing that platform?

The main two reasons why trackers are used are actually same reason, but in two instances. It's behavioral tracking. Internally, it is used to see how the site performs, which functions are used and which are not, what links are clicked, which options are selected, etc. etc. This happens in every single project I've ever seen, and it can be (actually, will be) both client-side and server-side. The former is visible to you, the latter is usually not, but it's always there. If it's a paid product, it will be used to make more people pay more money for the product - and for the provider to spend less money on providing it (e.g. by optimizing it or shutting down options that aren't used). Some of it can also be outsourced, because not everybody is an expert in properly doing that, and there are shrink-wrap solutions that can do a lot of it for you.

If you didn't pay for it, then somebody else did. Usually via ads, which serve two functions - one obvious, exposing you to the information the advertiser wants you to see, another unobvious, collecting the same behavioral information, for the same purposes, but for third-party advertisers or marketers. This also has a lot of specialization, so ad platform may have its own tracker and also use a third-party tracking solution to track some aspect that their own tracking doesn't provide. Finding high level of third-party tracking on a private paid platform is usually a case for a beef with the provider - though some providers are big enough to pull it off (like ads on Netflix - what you gonna do, stop streaming?) I.e. if you have no alternative, then why not make a quick buck on the side?

That said, 230 sounds like a very high number - even with what I said, that many separate tracking items look excessive. Though if it counts tracking events then it's plausible - depending on how much things are being tracked and how diligent are the tracker developers on optimizing the performance (not always their best suit since their competitive advantage lies elsewhere) it certainly can get that far.

Yes, I have paid for accessing it. There's no sort of free access or tiered access. There are no visible ads for anything. The price they charge is higher than what the main competitor charges, but they do provide some data that is usually only included in a 3x more expensive product from a different competitor.

During a live youtube stream where the site in question was demonstrated, I thought I detected some shills in the chat, and feedback where a user claimed that the site is very buggy, was promptly deleted.

First, it's not clear what the ublock numbers are actually measuring. It could include things like ad-like elements removed from the page, or requests blocked that get automatically re-attempted. Maybe on one, it manages to block a whole script that would have done a bunch of stuff, earning a block count of 1, while on the other, the script runs but gets all of the things it tries to do blocked, leading to hundreds of block count entries.

I don't think anyone deliberately adds hundreds of trackers directly to a page. But it's plausible they have a single-digit number of moderately sketchy advertising and analytics services directly added which provide various overlapping services, each of which themselves pulls in several other tracking and analytics gadgets.

They might also have no skill or budget for proper website building tools, so they use sketchy no-code services for basic stuff like account management, accessibility, social media sharing, etc, which all insert their own tracking and analytics scripts using yet more third-party services. There's a whole ecosystem for this sort of thing that most people who would consider themselves coders never touch.

For a stock trading site specifically, they may not bother with visible ads. It's likely they have a lot of analytics for stuff like, which prompts and arrangement of controls etc makes it more likely users will actually create an account and execute a trade, what prompts for higher tiers make it more likely you'll actually upgrade, which of their own ads leads to users coming to the site, creating an account, and using it, where their users are and when they're active, that sort of thing. It's quite possible they also make extra from ad network tracking scripts, connecting your use of a stock trading site at all plus your activities there to your advertising identity for more valuable and better targeted ads elsewhere.

First explanation greed or something even shadier. Second - just pulling crap dependencies without thinking (hello wordpress)

I figure they're double dipping on monetizing the user. Both with a pretty steep subscription cost (they have no free tier or anything) and also with intense data collection on user behavior, sold on to third parties. Stock traders must be a pretty juicy demographic to get detailed data from.

Money

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