domain:mgautreau.substack.com
johnfabian
14hr ago
KSR is very much a utopian socialist, and thinks that humans could - if we all sat down together in open conversation - Figure It All Out. I don't mind it, it's nice to have not everything you read be endlessly cynical. But this streak of his obviously runs through all his work.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
I think Trump and Desantis and Abbot have demonstrated that the accelerationists were already in charge on immigration. There really was basically no control of the border and no attempt to remove obvious criminals once they got here. That's why Trump was able to get at all that low-hanging fruit, and why there haven't been really compelling immigration atrocity stories. The best they could do was Abrego Garcia... and he certainly seems like a bad hombre, even if his case was screwed up procedurally.
thejdizzler
15hr ago
We do see people without much plaque who have eaten diets relatively low in fat, especially saturated fat. But this usually means that one's diet is high in protein (which greatly increases cancer risk and kidney failure, although at least the former can be greatly mitigated through DNA-repair), or carbohydrates (which greatly increases the risk of insulin resistance). Now many traditional populations experience none of these three metabolic failure modes. Yet that is (as far as I understand it) usually a result of them being on the edge of starvation most of time, which increases risks for other things like malnutrition which would negatively impact cellular replication.
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
I certainly think it would help, but I'm not sure it would solve things completely. Kids can get T2D and athero, so merely having robust new cells wouldn't fix things completely.
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
Certainly, and I'm by no means arguing that enhanced DNA repair wouldn't help improve lifespans significantly. I just don't believe that this would be the magic bullet, as there are many other things going wrong as one ages. In addition to metabolism there's also the problem of the brain no longer producing new cells at all, which you point out in a comment thread below.
Corvos
15hr ago
High-risk high-reward strategy is to build up a clear list of cases where his behaviour lost the company money, either directly or in missed opportunities, and then take that list to the level above him once it gets big enough and explain how you or a different person could increase profits. I've seen a friend do that to great success, but you need to have a good reputation yourself plus a willing superior and a very delicate touch to make it work.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
15hr ago
The leftists who thought it was a war were routing their opposition right up until the right decided it was one as well. Perhaps they were correct that it was a war -- or perhaps if one side treats it as a war, it is one.
Is there anyone here on The Motte whom you do consider a principled liberal? And beyond The Motte, is there an example of a public figure whom you consider to be a principled liberal?
pbmonster
15hr ago
I don't know about acceptable ways that can be used right there, in the moment, in a social situation, that go beyond giving the target a death glare and maybe clenching a fist in your pocket
With enough verbal intelligence, you can also get away with quite some veiled ridicule or malicious compliance, while maintaining enough plausible deniability that shouldn't get your parents called. We had a class clown that got very entertaining when angry... I'm sure it made him feel better (especially in public with people laughing), although raising your kids to be obnoxious little shits might not be exactly advisable.
roystgnr
15hr ago
I only glanced at this story briefly last night, but: isn't 68 Bq/kg less than the radioactivity of bananas?
I also concluded that they must be worried about contamination that they missed - if some cesium capsule leaked a tiny bit into these shrimp, does that mean there was a tiny leak, or does that mean there was a big leak but this particular sample only included a tiny bit of it? Imagine if the most contaminated packages ended up near the center of a different shipping container, hidden from detection by a meter of cargo in every direction.
Switching from normal brain to crazy internet-addled brain: is there any chance this could have been a penetration test rather than unintentional contamination? Customs doesn't check every import for radioactivity because they're worried about shrimp with the power of bananas, they do it because after 9/11 we spent like a billion dollars on radiation portal monitors designed to detect "dirty bombs". If I was a psychopath looking to slip something by those monitors, I wouldn't want to blow my shot without a test run first, and I would want that run to have some kind of relatively-innocuous plausible alternative explanation in case the pen test didn't pen. If a dirty bomb hidden inside a bunch of radiation shielding still leaks as much gamma as a pallet of barely-contaminated frozen shrimp, well, then, barely contaminate some shrimp and send them through first and see if anybody freaks out.
faceh
15hr ago
Is this considered an actual symptom of 'aging' wherein its inevitable as one gets older? I mean, do we see old people without much plaque as often as we see them with it (Yes yes, accounting for the survival of such persons to old age).
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
15hr ago
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear.
By this standard no one except dead martyrs have moral principles.
thejdizzler
15hr ago
This fits what I have read and seen of the research as well. There was a poster at a meeting I went to this year in San Diego where they selected flies for long lifespans by only taking offspring after a certain date (usually around 40 days I think). The genes that they found to be modified were all over the genome and didn't point to a single nice answer about aging other than it's something that affects the whole organism through many different pathways.
Nick Lane (one of my favorite biologists these days) has a theory that aging is caused by accumulations of mitochondrial mutations that prevent optimal ATP production. Eventually you get to the point where tissues can't produce enough energy to sustain themselves and then you get multiple organ failure and die. I'm attracted to this model because it means that in order to combat aging you should do a lot of aerobic (easy) exercise and have kids with people who are physically fit. Over time the average human lifespan should increase.
07mk
15hr ago
besides escaping the "single planet trap" which hedges against catastrophes that are extremely unlikely, many of which would still leave the surviving humans on earth better of than the humans surviving in our potential colonies
This isn't true, though. These catastrophes that would literally leave no humans (or any life as we know it) alive on Earth aren't extremely unlikely, they are basically guaranteed according to our best understanding of physics and astronomy. Now, Mars is close enough to Earth that it's not an effective hedge against these catastrophes, but one must step into one's entrance way before one steps out one's front door.
Fortunately, we likely have millions, if not billions, of years, to get human civilization sustainable on another planet that's safe from these guaranteed catastrophes on Earth, which is a lot of time to research and develop innovations to enable us getting off Earth. But it's still a very finite amount of time, and these innovations aren't going to just happen over time without humans trying to come up with solutions to problems that get in the way of a goal. Dunno if terraforming is the right idea, but certainly some form of self-sustaining human colony on Mars seems like a reasonable intermediate goal for motivating the necessary innovations.
faceh
15hr ago
There are a whole lot of factors in aging that by definition can't be cured by DNA repair because things in body that intentionally have no major maintenance mechanism after reaching adulthood keep deteriorating from plain physical stress and wear.
"intentionally" is a weird word to use there, what do you mean with that?
Likewise "after reaching adulthood." This implies that these maintenance mechanisms existed prior to adulthood. Which implies they could be re-activated.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
Don’t worry; I could tell that it was metaphor. Nobody wants to waste hand grenades in this economy.
But if you don’t think “there’s nothing worth saving in there” counts as indiscriminate demonization, what does?
faceh
15hr ago
The thing is, the body has many built-in repair mechanisms, unlike your average engine, and in theory (i.e. we do observe this in nature) is able to keep repairing things 'indefinitely' if it is able to function at full capacity.
One of the major drivers of 'aging' appears to be the breakdown of the repair mechanisms. Including the repair mechanisms for DNA in the cells. But that, too, is downstream of damage to DNA. And eventually damage to the DNA accumulates and outpaces the ability of the repair mechanisms to repair.
Bolstering the natural repair mechanisms is likely to get us a lot of improvement on the longevity front.
There will almost certainly need to be other interventions for certain ailments, though. Big one would be accumulated damage to the brain, due to blunt force trauma or similar damage that is additive over time with no natural means of repair.
Uhhh that is not the reason. You get build up of atherosclerotic plaque in the circulatory system for reasons we don't really understand fully yet, but has something to do with the activity of immune cells and levels of dietary fat. Over time the plaque blocks the vessel and you get a heart attack. No cell replication involved. I can point to a bunch of other diseases of aging (T2D for example) that have similar mechanisms of action that are metabolic, not replicator dependent. In the case of T2D for example, making the beta cells of the pancreas more robust won't fix the fact that your body doesn't respond to insulin any more. Of course there are things you can do to prevent these diseases (exercise and diet), but those only work up into a point.
There's also the theory of mitochondrial dysfunction causing aging. This one is a DNA-caused problem. Basically mitochondrial genomes accumulate mutations much more rapidly than cellular genomes. Since a large amount of the DNA for mitochondrial proteins is stored in the nucleus, not in the mitochondria, this eventually leads to some serious incompatibilities and dysfunctions in mitochondrial energy production. These eventually become so large that one by one the individual tissues in your body can no longer keep up and you die from multiple organ failure. This could theoretically be fixed by fixing mutated DNA in the mitochondria, but it's not clear to me yet how you could accomplish this, nor what template you would use for repair.
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
15hr ago
That's fair. I do wonder how much of that is due to not being principled versus not being effective at communicating in general though? Effective communication skills aren't that common, particularly at the higher bar of being effective at communicating with an at least partially adversarial audience.
pbmonster
15hr ago
Classically, that's your skip-level's problem, right?
If you'd prefer to stay, you'd normally built a clear cut case for yourself as an example for the type of behavior you're unhappy with, and then request he deals with it. Depending on your relationship with the skip-level, you can directly try to be assigned to a different supervisor, get your supervisor assigned somewhere else (maybe there's a reason he's worried about his job), or at least try to have the behavior reigned in a bit. A team with lots of churn should worry the skip.
If your skip-level is bad or supportive of people being forced out, you might be out of luck and just paint a target on your back, though. So handle with care (or only do it after you've already got a few interviews lined up).
kky
15hr ago
Amusingly, I disagree with pretty much all of your premises. But #1 is interesting as a jumping-off point, so I’ll address it.
There’s a broad concept that left-wing sentiment is pro-black and right-wing sentiment is anti-black, and the two forces battle over how nicely to treat blacks. I think this is a misconception. Neither side, from what I can tell, really likes blacks, and both surface their antipathy in different ways which wind up being one and the same larger system.
By blacks, I don’t strictly mean people of African heritage. What I’m pointing to here is a subculture in America that is descended from slavery and which exists substantially outside the main drive of society. It has its own norms, doesn’t intermarry too often, doesn’t economically interact that much, watches its own TV, listens to its own music, and so on. This is what is disliked in its actuality by the political wings, because it’s not really part of either of them. The reality is, of course, more nuanced than this, but this is a good overview.
The left nominally likes blacks, until it comes to the problems that really do exist in black communities. These can be broadly described as symptoms of poverty, or of an underclass. I'm talking crime, of course, but homophobia is a pretty serious repellent here. The left response to these is to pretend they don’t actually exist, or are somehow caused by systemic pressures, which of course is besides the point. The left loves blacks who have integrated thoroughly into their cultural milieu.
The right is simpler. They just don’t like ‘em. There are some good ones, but the rest are bad. Best to stay away as much as you can.
So, neither wanting to get deeply involved, a fairly predictable pattern emerges. First, the left tries to support the “black community,” or at least the image they have of them. This tends to be through charity and lenience towards crime. This generally does not go well, and without seeing any positive outcomes, the general public starts getting sick of crime. Then the right wing sweeps in, declares the problem in racial(-ly coded) language, and cracks down hard. It doesn’t take long to notice that this policy rests on practical elements of prejudice against blacks, and so the general public starts swinging the other way…
So you get this effect, where first the left comes in and says: listen, you don’t need to work, have these handouts, shoplifting isn’t that big a deal, neither are drugs, no we won’t stop the violent gangbangers, we believe in community justice… so black people take that at face value, huh, guess dissipation and petty crime aren’t a big deal, and if anyone disrespects me I’d better deal with it myself. Then the right comes in and says, HA! You idiots believed that? Nope, it’s prison for you. And we know you’re all like that. So now obviously a lot of blacks are in jail, but also the kids start to learn: this is what it means to be black, they all see you that way… and maybe start thinking it’s right.
So I see these two movements as the greater American ambivalence towards blacks. There was a great injustice done to them, and they are suffering from it generations later. This is felt on a wide scale. It makes people uncomfortable. So people aren’t willing to see blacks as other people, and instead hide their individuality under the label. When a white person does something, or feels something, it’s because of who they are, but when a black person does, it’s because of who blacks are. But if you want to change a group’s behavior, you need to change the behavior of the individuals in that group, one by one. There is no other way.
Any serious attempt to deal with the troubles afflicting black Americans, and those they inflict on others, has to start with this view on individuality. “Blacks” are not like you and me, but individual black people can be. Others might not, and they might be criminal, and if so they need to be dealt with, but this is a fact disconnected from the rest. Some might need more explicit inculturation. That will require generations, and the removal of any privileges for being black. The end result of this must be the destruction of a uniquely black culture in America. This is inevitable. If we’re all alike, then there will be nothing left to distinguish that unique culture, except in superficial and vague elements. Anyone know what it means to be Irish besides wearing green on St Paddy’s? Or Italian besides having prejudiced views of different brands of San Marzano tomatoes? Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I. And with intermarriage the distinction breaks down further.
So the current Trump thing is more of the same… except that politics is becoming less racially split. A lot of black men voted T last time. This means they’re not voting as a bloc, that they’re not voting for historic reasons, that there’s something they want past their race. Class is up, comparatively. Maybe that’s the end of black America: in our workers, uniting against the Man. We’ll have to see, I guess.
faceh
15hr ago
Why does the heart/circulatory system break down, if not due to the failure of the cells to properly replicate over time, thanks to DNA damage?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15hr ago
Now, a red-blooded red triber will for sure be cheering if some Indian Googler who retweeted an "America is helping Israel establish neocolonial apartheid" tweet gets unceremoniously deported,
This is a weird scenario partially because Indians themselves (well, some) likely have at least interesting views on the situation between the Indian minority in South Africa during actual Apartheid (not entirely from within the borders of modern India), and modern day India's relations with Israel largely vis-a-vis it's relations with its Muslim neighbor Pakistan.
History and society is complicated.
Jazzhands
15hr ago
I hear that if you eat them you'll gain the powers of a shrimp: having EAs actually care about you.
It seems pretty clear that rhetoric from the top, especially from Trump, has pushed nativist ideas into the open. The strong version of this argument is that this has moved beyond simple policy disagreements (like border security) and has become a real cultural attitude of exclusion. How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?
I don't take those immigration arguments seriously. America is and will remain an attractive destination because America is doing better than most of the world, same as always. Americans are still, factually, incredibly immigrant-friendly by most standards. Hell, I think Trump may end up suffering because of the one thing he undoubtedly did well: closing the border reduces the salience of the matter and normies become much less willing to tolerate his other immigration shenanigans.
Complaints by downwardly mobile people online won't change than an Indian American woman is married to the VP right now and is closer to power than any online dissident rightist or person bitter about being driven out of a Google job
The argument I would make is that the left is better at this, according to the Right's own theory of the case. They took over the institutions more effectively, to the point where the attempted populist reclamation (which came pretty late) looks hamfisted and illegitimate in comparison. They possess the bulk of the human capital and their ideology is just baked into the culture now. So there'll be huge payback when they inevitably get into power with the support of a radicalized normie base. If you think this leads to awful decisions and a never-ending polarization spiral, it's pretty bad for everyone, not just Republicans.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
15hr ago
A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country. Not sure if you’ve seen this too, but I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed and there’s not much I or anybody else can do about it. What does the most persuasive version of this argument look like?
This is "wet streets cause rain" thinking. Unapologetic racism was always there, it was just some people weren't allowed to participate. Consider the recent blowup over Doreen St. Felix, a writer at the New Yorker who published an insipid bit of Sydney Sweeny commentary. She was discovered to have a decade+ long history of meme Nation of Islam tier racism against white people, and that was considered perfectly socially acceptable.
Have you ever actually looked at black twitter? Indian twitter? The stuff you're complaining about is still tame in comparison.
What makes me think about this point is all of the talk about Indian people online. Like them or not, they are STRONG contributors in the workplace.
Are they? Then why is India a dumpster fire? American culture has had the stereotype of the soullness, number-pushing striver for centuries. Are they STRONG contributors in a way that, say, Ayn Rand would recognize? Offering high value for high value? As opposed to ethics-free system-gaming? From the country famous for scamming and fake degrees?
This does sound like a problem that can be solved via pharmacueticals, some chemical that breaks up the plaques (without hurting other cells), and removing the plaque from the blood would probably involve filtering (possibly via an external device?) and reintroducing it.
It sounds more like an oil change type problem, rather than an engine swap type problem.
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