domain:academic.oup.com
the males are smart and the females are dumb breeding machines
Not at all, and not what I said. The females are, in this phase, about as smart as the males. They just have less pressure to use those smarts — for the time being. Sit tight!
Actually your reaction is kind of humorously on-brand for the chapter, if I'm reading it right. Did you detect, here, the edges of an idea which might hurt your social status were you to accept it?
It may help to remember that I'm describing a last common ancestor (LCA) which would map to something like 6-7 MYA, not modern humans. And, having studied this fairly intensively, the situation I'm describing is pretty much the current best mainstream academic hypothesis as to how they behaved. (If you'd like to know more, probably start with asking an LLM and it can direct you to where all of this is in the literature.)
Partly this is inferred from observing modern chimps, gorillas, and so on, and working backward. No strict harem system where one guy gets all the sex, but coalitional, with close allies also getting substantial preferential mating access. And, most interestingly to me, lack of female identification with the coalition in question. Instead, females ranging where they please and associating with the local males until moving on. But now I'm just repeating myself.
Point being that there's plenty of time for the situation to change between then and now, which is rather the topic of next week's chapter.
But laughter is good medicine.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7hr ago
Does grandma get a three hundred thousand dollar chemotherapy course for a sixty percent chance at two months of vomiting and brain-fog?
This is a powerful objection because it feels like an unanswerable dilemma. It conjures the image of a cold, centralized bureaucracy, a "death panel," weighing a beloved grandmother's life against a line item in a budget. The implication is that any system forced to make such a choice is morally monstrous, and that your current system, for all its faults, avoids this grim calculus.
But this assumes the alternative to an explicit line is no line at all. In reality, the American system draws lines constantly. The line is your FICO score. It is the fine print of your employer’s chosen insurance plan. It is the difference between an in-network and out-of-network hospital. You don't get to avoid the decision about grandma’s chemo, you simply outsource it to an opaque web/distributed network of insurance adjusters, hospital billing departments, and personal bankruptcy lawyers. I presume that, at some point, someone with an MD will have opinions on the matter.
The interesting thing is that the dreaded explicit system is not a hypothetical construct from a dystopian novel. It is a real, functioning, and remarkably mundane bureaucracy in places like the United Kingdom. The NHS confronts the line-drawing problem head on, not with a panel of grim-faced commissars, but with a legion of actuaries and medical ethicists, and yes, actual medical doctors at an institution called NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
NICE's primary tool is something called the Quality-Adjusted Life Year, or QALY. It is a straightforward, if necessarily imperfect, metric. One year of perfect health is one QALY. A year lived with a condition that reduces your quality of life by half is half a QALY. NICE then calculates the cost of a given treatment per QALY gained. As a general rule, a treatment that costs between twenty and thirty thousand pounds per QALY is considered cost-effective.
I'll run the numbers on grandma, even if I already know the answer. A $300,000 treatment (roughly £240,000) for a 60% chance at two months (0.16 years) of very low-quality life (let's generously say 0.2 QALYs) results in a cost per QALY that is astronomically high. The answer from the system is a clear, predictable no. Conversely, a treatment with the same price tag for a teenager that offers a high chance of fifty more years of healthy life would be approved without a second thought. The system is explicitly utilitarian. It prioritizes maximizing the total amount of healthy life across the population. It can and will spend millions on a child, but it will counsel a family against a futile and painful intervention for a demented octogenarian. This isn't some big secret either. I have had such discussions with dozens of families, and not a single one has had a problem with it, or withdrawn their relative to go elsewhere, as they are at full liberty to do.
For those who find this calculus unsettling (I do not know why the standard approach to handling scarce resources unsettles anyone) the system provides an escape hatch. The existence of the NHS does not preclude private medicine. The wealthy, or anyone with good private insurance, can opt out of the public queue and pay for the treatment the state has denied. You can, in effect, disagree with the state’s valuation of a life year and substitute your own. The state provides a robust, free baseline for ninety-nine percent of situations, while allowing a private market for those who want more. A similar model exists in India, a country with far fewer resources than the United States (citation available on request) which manages to provide basic care for free while supporting a thriving private sector.
The American conversation on this topic often seems stuck in a state of arrested development, terrified by the philosophical specter of a problem that other Anglosphere nations have long since downgraded to a matter of accounting. The "death panel" is not a uniquely socialist horror. It is an inescapable feature of any system that deals with scarce resources, which is to say, any system in the real world. Not even the most charitably inclined soul will spend the entirety of their nation's GDP on the cancer treatment of even the most photogenic child. Their parents might empty their bank account and go into debt to do so, but that's simultaneously their right while also not entitling them to demand infinite resources from the rest of us. The Pope might claim that all lives are priceless, but you don't see him pawning off the Vatican's paintings or his Pope Mobile to do so.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
I think its less awkward when its actually a norm, but sometimes it does get used as a backhanded way to 'beat' someone by claiming "hah, you don't actually believe [thing] unless you put money on it!"
I understand the reluctance to put money on the table, but it doesn't have to be this way, gentlemen's bets are a thing as well. The feeling of losing face might be a bigger issue, but I think one can learn not to take it thay way.
even if you're perfectly calibrated
Meh, I'm kind of sour on the rationalist idea of calibration. Too easy to game by making predictions about things that no one cares about, and are easier to gauge.
Throwaway05
7hr ago
you will cause new cancers once you scale to hundreds of thousands of people.
Ugh this is one of the biggest issues with large scale medical interventions like vaccines. Yes your vaccine can be perfectly safe for plenty of sigma but if you give it billions of people some weird shit is going to happen!!!!
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
7hr ago
Where can I read more about this? None of the related articles have anything to say on the subject.
Various critics were deriding FDR as fascist within his first year in office, yet that NIRA article mentions none of it. Herbert Hoover was a prominent critic and wrote 2 anti-New Deal books in 1934 and 1936 specifically pointing out the parallels.
In the part about critics from the left:
Richard Hofstadter noted that critics from the left believed "that the NRA was a clear imitation of Mussolini's corporate state".[35]
There is this line in the criticism of FDR article:
John P. Diggins found only superficial similarities between the New Deal and Italian fascism. However, Diggins produced some quotations indicating that Roosevelt was interested in fascist economic programs and admired Mussolini.[49]
Footnote 49:
Early in 1933, Roosevelt told a White House correspondent: "I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman". In June 1933, Roosevelt wrote to Ambassador Breckinridge Long in Italy about Mussolini: "There seems no question that he is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and to prevent general European trouble". John P. Diggins. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1972). Princeton University Press. pp. 279–281.
I haven't read the book by Diggins, but it sounds interesting.
This article by Codevilla talks about it some, but he doesn't cite sources.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
even my 90% CI is unmet, can I interest you in a $10 giftcard from Amazon or equivalent? That would be from me to you, no need to pay if I'm right.
That's a very nice gesture, but it feels a bit unfair when it's one-sided.
I don't think anyone else would be crazy enough to imagine catching skyscrapers with chopsticks, and pull that off too.
That, admittedly, was pretty damn cool. Luckily for me no one was soliciting bets on that one, because honestly, I thought thr idea is absurd, and would have walked right into taking the "not gonna happen" side
But that aside, it's the recovery of the second stage that is more likely to do them in. They're not even doing it for the Falcon 9, Starship is probably exponentoally more difficult.
Throwaway05
7hr ago
Laziness or ineptitude is certainly a cause at times but "I don't want to lose my livelihood" is a potent motivator.
ED pan-scanning is functionally "standard of care" because using your training effectively is going to result in a few miss or near misses at some point and it is much safer to hide behind the donut of truth.
When laziness and safety line up it's really hard to alter behavior.
However there is something to be said for "we are the richest country why can't we have the most expensive care and avoid making certain kinds of mistakes."
I don't think people realize the trade offs we are making and it's certainly worth a discussion but we rarely do that.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Yeah, it's tough for men. But for women, it's not attention as "here you are as a person", it's "here's boobs on legs". Visibility, sure, but might as well be invisibility. Some women work that angle, but when you're fourteen and growing into womanly features this kind of "every male from fourteen to forty is looking at my tits" is not the boon it might appear.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
She got everything handed to her on a plate (and, um, if she's Lil' Ms Genius, how come she's not back in Wakanda doing high high high level super science?) and still complained. Disparu went a bit too hard on the series, but he's not wrong: she bitches about what good is a degree, it'll only get her (a really good high-paying doing science) job, then she's all shocked Pikachu face! when they go "okay then, you don't want a second chance, you're expelled".
She's aware right from the start that the Hood and gang are a bunch of criminals, there's no "oh well maybe they're just misunderstood, maybe they're actual urban revolutionaries". Nope, she jumped straight at "violence? crime? murder? for money? gimme gimme gimme!"
That "am I supposed to know who you are?" line to Mephistopheles isn't as smart as she thinks, because now if she's messing around with magic, she better know who is who in that world. But of course this is Riri Williams, Know-It-All Brat, and she can't be bothered to learn anything because she already knows it all. Tony Stark, when faced with the fallout of what he's been building all along, decides to go the hero route. Riri goes straight to "I don't wanna work, I want free stuff, I want money, if I have to commit crime and sell my soul to the Devil, no problem".
Tony Stark was Tony Stark from the start, he was being shown around as a kid genius from the age of four. That's not the family weapons industry at work there. And yeah, box of scraps in a cave, as against Riri being handed the tech from the start and then stealing it because she's incapable of producing her own.
That's not "more interesting" as character arc, that's straight up "she's dumb and evil".
Tenaz
7hr ago
Don't they?
Not per capita, as far as I can tell.
I see the idea of God "by definition" as an artifact of Gnosticism. He can't just be God, he has to be, not only the greatest possible being, but the greatest conceivable being, or he's not God.
If you disagree, let me ask you:
Say everything in the Old Testament and New happened pretty much exactly as described. God is perfectly good and loving, he is omnipotent, he is eternal, etc. BUT say he's not the un-caused cause. Say that instead, there was some proto-cause that created God and then blipped out of existence, because that's just how reality happened to happen. Would you, upon learning this from God himself, continue to be Christian, or object that, essentially, your definition of God is greater than God himself, and the God who stands before you is not worthy of your worship because he falls short of your definition?
In the past when I have asked Catholics this question, they have answered that no, that omnipotent being would not be God. It astounds me. It tells me that Catholics, at least the type likely to frequent places like this, are more concerned with Platonism and heady intellectual arguments than with reality.
I call this Gnosticism but it's probably more accurately called Platonism. But I hope you can see where the confusion comes from:
As one of the Gnostic texts, the Secret Book of John, describes him, God is
illimitable, since there is nothing before it to limit it, unfathomable, since there is nothing before it to fathom it, immeasurable, since there was nothing before it to measure it, invisible, since nothing has seen it, eternal, since it exists eternally, unutterable, since nothing could comprehend it to utter it, unnamable, since there is nothing before it to give it a name.[5]
Since Gnosticism’s God was too perfect to ever have any reason to do anything, he didn’t create anything – not even Heaven.
What drives me insane is how many of these multi-thousand-dollar fuck-ups are the result of someone not on the hook for the bill (sometimes the doctor, sometimes the patient) choosing the vastly more expensive option just because it’s slightly more convenient. This guy gets told to take his infant to the emergency room for a UTI because hey, why not? Insurance will pay for it.
You can see why insurance companies turn into money-grubbing assholes.
This is a fake example because I'm not a doctor but very easy to imagine something similar playing out.
Oh no, you're bang on target. I'd know, being both because I'm a doctor and because my dad has a heart condition that behaves more or less exactly like this. It would likely be cheaper to get a brand new heart than attempt to cure it with medication.
Some people think it's absurd, but I would argue that by not covering preventative and maintenance types of treatments early on, they're creating much more serious problems down the road.
Depends a great deal on the costs and benefits of the prevention and maintenance! Screening not only costs money, but if it involves, say, ionizing radiation, you will cause new cancers once you scale to hundreds of thousands of people. NICE in the UK does painstaking evaluations, and insurance companies definitely have their own systems, if not nearly as open to scrutiny. It is difficult to make a blanket statement, in some cases, it genuinely is better to wait for a disease to manifest before acting on it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8hr ago
I think I recall reading something about how the "we have always beem at war with Eastasia" bit was inspired by his experience of the infighting between the Republican factions in the Spanish Civil War.
Throwaway05
8hr ago
"Good surgeons know how to operate, better ones when to operate, and the best when not to operate."
Alternatively one of the rules of The House of God - "The delivery of good medical care is to do as much nothing as possible."
Both are far harder than they sound.
anon_
8hr ago
Concorde wasn't transformative because it never scaled.
My claim is that merely achieving "equal to Concorde but consistently adds at least a handful of new routes every year" is transformative, even if it's not any better or cheaper. And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.
Or maybe the other way around: Concorde wasn't transformative because they only built 14 of them and only served 3 airports, which was downstream of the fact that the thing could barely fly and bled[1] money.
HereAndGone
8hr ago
All that is very true, but they managed to also appeal to a female audience with baby Yoda and the Mandalorian being the protective figure there. I mean, there's a decent and simple plot that was difficult to mess up (until they managed to do so).
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8hr ago
Man, fascism used to be hip and happening.
Where can I read more about this? None of the related articles have anything to say on the subject.
HereAndGone
8hr ago
I'm old enough to have been there when the first Star Wars movie was released (mid-teens), and I honestly never thought Lucas would get the second and third sets of trilogies made.
Now it's almost a shame that happened.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
History? They're still doing it, just the other way around. Plenty of undesirables coming to the bitter dampness of Albion, including me.
roystgnr
8hr ago
Some people would say you should go out and watch all of SG-1 now, but don't listen to them; it's fine to stop after season 8.
BSG, on the other hand ... "The humans haven't figured out what the Cylons are doing" is a compelling premise, right up until you add "the BSG writers are humans" and complete the syllogism.
I'd think LotR was the least nerdy thing you've mentioned, though. Pre-Peter-Jackson, sure, knowing the name "Frodo" marked you as an ubergeek, but today they're still top-100-lifetime-gross movies; when The Return of the King came out it was like top 10.
I remember liking Star Trek 1 and I was surprised when I got older and found out everyone hates it. But I also was obsessed with the Voyager probes as a child, so I guess it hit the spot for me.
You're not mixing up 1 and 4, are you? Everybody thought 1 was dull but loved 4.
I don't know what the Xer and Millennial parents of my cohort raised their kids on.
I tried to suggest to them at least a little of everything I knew was decent as soon as it was mostly age-appropriate; sometimes sooner if the writing was clever enough to slip by ("Under a blacklight this place looks like a Jackson Pollock painting!" - Guardians of the Galaxy) or pointless enough to edit out ("What if we reuse the same joke but don't understand subtext?" - Taika Waititi). I try to tell them which yet-unwatched options are better or worse or scarier or slower or whatever than others.
And they take turns getting to pick what we watch together, which is sometimes the hard part (Gravity Falls was good, Owl House less so, and was Amphibia really worth three seasons?) but is still the important part, because their preferences often surprise me. They've all soured on the MCU and Star Wars (except that we're planning to watch Andor). My oldest loved TNG and likes DS9 but dislikes Kirk too much to watch more TOS. My younger two just tolerated Trek (and won't watch any more scary Borg episodes) but they really like Babylon 5. Everybody loved The Martian, though not as much as the book.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
This is even funnier if you ignore the context of the blurb and assume that "Australia's claim to sovereignty" refers to the actual continent/country of Australia.
17 million people and twice that in kangaroos? Do we have to recognize that as an independent nation-state? I've lived in larger cities! Also, it seems very unfair to give an entire continent to a single country, not Westphalian in the least.
HereAndGone
8hr ago
Hello! I have just rewritten the Kzinti, where the males are smart and the females are dumb breeding machines!
Ah well, you gave me a laugh at least.
anon_
8hr ago
Oh, I have. The interesting thing is that they are pissed they get insurance consults on patients they want to send to surgery, but they freely admit that there are some of their colleagues (and it's a "everyone knows who it is" kind of thing) that propose surgery for literally anyone that comes through the door.
Can't have nice things ...
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
Hang on, don't tar all the West with that brush. The US actually behaves like an agentic superpower, even if it can be a senile one. The rest of the Anglosphere or Europe? You have a point.
I am regularly dismayed by the Motte's average epistemics when it comes to things like vaccination. Some of the takes I've seen post-covid had me pulling at my hair.
The mRNA vaccines? The ongoing moratorium on government funds for the same? Where does the stupidity end?
The rest of the world is not devoid of competent doctors or statisticians, the COVID vaccines are highly imperfect and not that important for young, healthy adults or children. There is no concerted effort to suppress a spree of cardiac myopathies or weird clotting/autoimmune disorders that needs buy-in from the governments of the other 7.5 billion people on this globe. When promising cures for things like aggressive pancreatic cancers are caught in the cross-fire, I am tempted to order a gun, or, in this country, a sharp gardening implement.
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