domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
ymeskhout
14m ago
I should've maybe been more explicit that progressives only complain about mutable negative effects, like poverty. I've never encountered a progressive who has been willing to assert anything similar to "[race] has lower IQ and higher impulsivity, because of [environmental factor]". The filter tends to be on that first clause. I'm aware of only one major progressive scientist who acknowledges the heritability of IQ and other traits but her name escapes me at the moment.
Ben___Garrison
22m ago
I think it's wrong to attribute the popularization of "incel" primarily to women. Women definitely prefer to be with men who are successful with women, but the vast majority are not consciously aware of their hypergamy. Women don't look for men who brag about their bodycount. They have other insults for low-status men, like the ever-useful "creepy" term that will never go out of style. While some women might have used the term "incel" on Tumblr or in random blogposts, it was more used as a replacement for the "entitlement" phenomenon, i.e. that men are not "entitled" to have sex with women because they're friends or neighbors or "boys will be boys" or whatever.
In contrast, some men absolutely consider bodycount to be crucial to any man's overall value. Thus, terms like "incel" really started gaining popularity on male-dominated forums like 4chan long before they broke into the mainstream.
Azeltir
25m ago
That seems tangential to what I'm saying - one can claim that the poverty, crime, etc. etc. are independent of intelligence. I agree that most progressives deny that disadvantaged groups have lower intelligence - but they do agree that they suffer from the above effects, and attribute that to social factors like racism and other biases.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
28m ago
Only boring people are bored.
I was talking with [a child] the other week, who was complaining about boredom (in the absence of screen time) and observed that I remember being bored when I was a kid, but as part of growing up, I'm never bored as an adult. There is always something (many things, actually) I should be doing, and never enough hours in my day. And I even have to take care to use my hours wisely: not all interesting things have equal long-term value: I've largely retreated from video games except in a social capacity with IRL friends far away, instead working on improving myself (exercise, learning languages, art, hobby skills, reading), and valuing getting things done that provide long-term benefits.
sliders1234
30m ago
I will give you Thomas. Though part of Thomas is he’s great at pissing off the left and it’s not only thru legal reasoning but being a player in the federalist society and his wife being intimately involved in 1/6.
More likely than not at this point though Sotomayor is who she is. I think the left could make a strong case for replacing her on her merits alone and not her age. If you have 3 SC justices I don’t think you can claim she is one of your top 3 liberal legal minds. If you are going to lose a lot of cases it still makes sense to have your best writing you le disagreements.
I believe that regression to the mean is highly supported by observations and data when it comes to the children of recent immigrants.
Trace suggested I preemptively address this but I couldn't take this argument seriously. The first problem is that it's explicitly moving the goalposts by conceding that a high IQ immigrant might be ok, but concern might still be warranted due to a hypothetical risk regarding their kids. The second problem is that the only method of properly estimating someone's "mean regression potential" (there might be a better word for this equilibrium) would be measuring a sufficient sample of their ancestors, which at just 3 generations (completely made up threshold) would mean data from 14 ancestors (2 parents + 4 grandparents + 8 great-grandparents) across 75-100 years. This is obviously impractical, but the further you stray from this the more you're on speculative ground. Simply assuming that "country of origin average" as a sufficient proxy for "mean regression potential" is definitely the most practical option, but it's still highly speculative and also flattens whatever variability may exist within a country's subpopulations or ethnic groups. The final problem is the number of hypotheticals this concern is predicated upon. "We should pre-emptively prohibit individuals who might have a low regression to the mean potential from immigrating because they might have kids who might have lower IQ which might also be lower than native average IQ" isn't very compelling.
@SwordOfOccam I admit I was caught off-guard by Walt's answer in the moment, but this was my genuine understanding of regression to the mean. I welcome your critique.
Of course HBDers would probably still agree to this plan if it was an option on the table, but this discussion is heavily suppressed by the enemy.
I've already addressed this in the post. It just doesn't make sense to say "gee I wish we could test for IQ directly but leftists are whining too much so I guess my only choice is to ban all immigration based on country averages oh darn". If the first option isn't available because of [reasons], neither would the second option!
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
33m ago
Vaughan herself didn't get involved in digital computers until 1961. The Department of Labor had only one computer-related job title then, "Computer Specialists", and it was slightly over 30% women.
Ben___Garrison
36m ago
I find Nate's arguments pretty compelling here, assuming you actually want woke democrats on the Supreme Court, which I don't. But setting aside my personal feelings on the matter, he's basically correct.
Your arguments can basically be boiled down to the following:
- Seniority is important for judges to gain respect through judicial rigor.
- Democrats shouldn't bother thinking tactically since they should just win more elections by appealing to more people.
- Sotomayor would be more left-leaning than any candidate the dems could nominate now.
The first argument is the strongest, but it only has a marginal impact. The respect of judicial rigor that comes tenure is non-negligible. Further, other people in the thread added to the point that more senior justices get selected first to write opinions. But neither of these are that important. Even if they nominate Dumbo McGee, they're still locking down a lifetime appointment in one of the most consequential positions in America and the world. As a counterexample, Anthony Kennedy had pretty terrible reasoning in many of his opinions, but he was ultra-powerful by virtue of being a swing justice. So while you're making a good point, it'd be a lot stronger if you had some evidence of how much it actually matters in practice.
The second argument is just goofy. The senate has a heavy bias towards rural states, and it's been a minor miracle that Dems have remained competitive thus far, but as blue senators in red states retire or are defeated the bias will become undeniable. Nate has argued many times that Dems should stop pandering to the woke crazies, but he doesn't control the entire Democratic party. Abandoning positions will always come with a ton of pushback and there's no guarantee others will be on board, and the Dems would need to cut extremely deep to appeal to rural conservatives. The "tanking" argument doesn't hold a lot of water since there's a big difference between a 9-0 conservative majority vs a 5-4 conservative majority, just like how there'd be a huge difference between a 51-49 senate split vs a 100-0 split. Doing an end-run around the SCOTUS would be far, far harder than just fighting tactically for a justice now. Dems might end up uncompetitive in the senate in the long run, but they can still delay that for a bit.
The third argument is disproven by Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was recently confirmed in the same environment that a replacement for Sotomayor would face. Jackson is a female equivalent of Ibram Kendi, so no, I don't think the Dem pick would be guaranteed to be some moderate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
40m ago
Russia waited until after the pandemic, then waited a bit longer because the Chinese wouldn't support an invasion that could disrupt the Beijing Winter Olympics. I don't think we can draw any conclusions about their preferred timing via-a-viz US domestic politics. Pre-pandemic conventional wisdom among the "Trump will let the Ruzzians invade NATO because Putin owns him" crowd was that the best time for Putin to start shit was after the 2020 election.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
43m ago
This leads to farces like "Learning and Memory Impairment in Rats Fed a High Saturated Fat Diet" They analyze the fatty acid composition of their lard and it is only 30% saturated. Despite this, the study uses lard as their Saturated fat intervention.
You can hardly hold this random rat study against me.
I encourage you to check the studies in the meta and see that this is not going on.
Specific to Hooper et al. (2020) that your linked article uses for it's argument, I am looking at their studies and am having trouble finding which showed a benefit from substituting polyunsaturated fat with saturated fats.
Review says:
Eleven RCTs (11 comparisons) assessed SFA intake during the study period and showed that SFA intake in the intervention arm was statistically significantly lower than that in the control arm (Black 1994; DART 1989; Ley 2004; Moy 2001; Oxford Retinopathy 1978; Simon 1997; STARS 1992; Sydney Diet‐Heart 1978; Veterans Admin 1969; WHI 2006; WINS 2006).
...
There was a 21% reduction in cardiovascular events in people who had reduced SFA compared with those on higher SFA (RR 0.79, 95% CI 0.66 to 0.93, I² = 65%, 11 RCTs, 53,300 participants, 4476 people with cardiovascular events, Peffect = 0.006, Analysis 1.35). This protective effect was confirmed in sensitivity analyses including only trials at low summary risk of bias (Analysis 1.36), that aimed to reduce saturated fat (Analysis 1.37), that significantly reduced saturated fat intake (Analysis 1.38), that achieved a reduction in total or LDL cholesterol (Analysis 1.39), or excluding the largest trial (WHI 2006, Analysis 1.40).
Table 4 additionally shows that reducing total fat has no impact on cardiovascular events.
However, the figure in question still shows that when dietary saturated fat reaches >12% of calories, markers improve! Risk of Stroke goes way down. CVD goes down.
It would be a big surprise indeed if a moderate amount of saturated fat is bad, but a small or large amount is good. The relationship is most likely to be linear.
Weight isn't studied in the Meta-analysis at all.
It was, of course.
There was evidence that reducing SFA intake resulted in small reductions in body weight (MD ‐1.97 kg, 95% CI ‐3.67 to ‐0.27, I² = 72%, 6 RCTs, 4541 participants, Analysis 4.3), and body mass index (MD ‐0.50, 95% CI ‐0.82 to ‐0.19, I² = 55%, 6 RCTs, 5553 participants, Analysis 4.4).
How much protein do you need?
This appears to be a study on untrained men? I agree that if you're okay with the average untrained physique, 44g is enough (and also not that far from the recommendation of 54g for a 150lb person).
Isoleucine and valine are specifically the Amino Acids that are problematic, but really to avoid them you need to avoid protein.
Most of these are mouse studies, so let's look at the first one.
The restricted protein group in this study was eating protein at the RDA of 0.8 g/kg, which again is fine for people without aspirations to build muscle (which doesn't apply to OP).
The study doesn't seem to report if the change in weight loss between PR and CR is significant or not. However, looking at figure 1, id suspect not, especially when removing the 300 pound guy in the PR group.
As far as metabolism goes, figure 2 shows that the CR had a much lower metabolic rate at baseline vs the PR group, so the randomization seems to have failed. The PR group's variance is way bigger too, perhaps due to the aforementioned outliers.
Here's a more sophisticated metabolic ward study with three isocaloric overfeeding diets with varying protein content. They're using dexa scans, CO2 respiration rate, and doubly labeled water to measure body comp, resting energy expenditure and total energy expenditure, which are gold standard methods.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1103993
Overeating led to a significant increase in resting energy expenditure in both the normal and high protein groups. This increase occurred mainly in the first 2 to 4 weeks and the slopes of the regression lines were not significantly different from each other (Figure 4). In contrast, resting energy expenditure in the low protein group did not change significantly with overfeeding, and the slope of the regression line was not different from 0, but was significantly less than the other 2 groups (P < .001; Figure 4).
The metabolic efficiency of weight gain (defined as the excess energy intake divided by weight gain5) was significantly higher in the low protein group (75.1 MJ/kg [95% CI, 54.1-96.0 MJ/kg]) than in the high protein group (38.0 MJ/kg [95% CI, 18.6-60.5 MJ/kg]; P = .04).
Lean body mass decreased during the overeating period by −0.70 kg (95% CI, −1.50 to 0.10 kg) in the low protein diet group compared with a gain of 2.87 kg (95% CI, 2.11 to 3.62 kg) in the normal protein diet group and 3.18 kg (95% CI, 2.37 to 3.98 kg) in the high protein diet group (P < .001).
Overall, higher protein intake is more favorable for body composition (holding calories equal), and increased metabolism more than lower protein intake.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
44m ago
From what I can tell, early computer operators were not infrequently people (many women) who had previously worked as human computers. The story of Dorothy Vaughan of Hidden Figures fame comes to mind.
But I also suspect that the tasks these operators were doing differed quite a bit from the very abstract notion of what a computer is today. It makes sense to hire the folks that were previously manually crunching, say, your numeric integrals for artillery shell trajectories to operate a machine that does the same, because they already specialize in breaking that problem down into discrete operations that can be done by hand. That seems qualitatively different from writing an operating system or building a web app, partly because the digital computer was still seen by most as a machine that replaced the human computers.
hydroacetylene
48m ago
Asians and illegal fishing seems to be a predictable pattern anywhere there’s a large Asian diaspora population- commercial fish poaching on the gulf coast is a mostly Vietnamese crime and buying carp fished out of the trinity river(fish from this river is banned for human consumption due to water contamination) is, according to local legend, how Chinese buffets in Dallas get their fish.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
50m ago
I have no idea. It's in the middle of a very bad shift that extends for another 12 hours, so I can only apologize for my lack of enthusiasm in chasing down links for what's largely an academic concern.
ymeskhout
50m ago
I don't see why you present this part as a big gotcha.
If that's a big gotcha, it would only apply to someone who is using average country IQ as a pretext for pursuing the ulterior goal of limiting immigration for plainly racist reasons. I'm not claiming everyone who acknowledges the reality of IQ is hiding behind a pretext. Your point about gameable IQ tests is admittedly outside my wheelhouse, but the evidence I'm aware of regarding the SAT (itself just a proxy IQ test) tutoring according to Freddie deBoer indicates it has little to no impact (see bullet point 4).
it seems that if you want to keep talk of the possible genetic group differences off the table, we'd still be mostly in the status quo where people will just aggressively go for the "genetic group differences are impossible, actually" angle, since arguing back against this is not allowed.
It's not that I don't think people should research or mention group differences, I just don't think emphasizing their salience is going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced. If you want a bothsideism from me, it would be that I believe the "because racism" camp on the left and "because genetics" camp on the right are too often used reflexively and with lacking evidence. The other problem is that even if the "because genetics" explanation brings compelling evidence (which definitely happens) it isn't actionable except to refute a "because racism" explanation that was already lacking supporting evidence. The one point I'd give to the "because racism" camp assuming it actually proves its claim is that at least it it's more likely to give you an actionable solution.
Rule utilitarianism sets rules that protect individual liberty as a bulwark against oppression and as a safety valve.
It only does this in the context of valid arguments that protecting individual liberty is in fact such a bulwark/safety-valve, and I don't believe such arguments exist. It is very tempting to think they exist, because I agree with their conclusions, but I do not believe this is not how people actually defend those principles in practice. For example, ...
In my mind, the US constitution is a good representation of rule utilitarianism.
My response to this has a lot in common with my response to @coffee_enjoyer above [https://www.themotte.org/post/966/why-rule-utilitarianism-fails-as-a/205363?context=8#context]. I love the US constitution, but I do not think it has much to do with rule utilitarianism. Most provisions of the American Constitution and Bill of Rights are borrowed almost wholesale from the English Constitution, English Petition of Right, and English Bill of Rights that came just before them in the same tradition. Where there was a discussion of which changes to make,
- when the argument was, we should do this rather than that because the calculated consequences of this are better than the calculated consequences of that, I submit that is political science or social engineering, not utilitarian ethics.
- when the argument was, we should do this rather than that because that wrongfully infringes on our rights as Englishmen, I submit that argument was based in sacred tradition, not utilitarian ethics, and
- when the argument was, we should do this rather than that because that wrongfully infringes on our self-evident natural human rights, the argument was based in deontology.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
51m ago
I know what's true and what's not; I know men with unjustified anger at women exist. But I see no reason to accept the "incel" framing of that phenomenon when it brings in all the stuff that isn't true also, and by accepting that framing I implicitly validate that too. That brings no one closer to truth.
I can't find any records involving either person in the Pennsylvania court system, though given how crappy most court records are, that doesn't mean much.
The underlying complaint is here, and seems to be resting heavily on past adjudications by the State Board in 2010 (for Herr) and 2018 (for Wentworth). Like most state licensing laws, the definition of veterinary practice in Pennsylvania is very broad :
"Practice of veterinary medicine" includes, but is not limited to, the practice by any person who (i) diagnoses, treats, corrects, changes, relieves or prevents animal disease, deformity, injury or other physical, mental or dental conditions by any method or mode, including the prescription or administration of any drug, medicine, biologic, apparatus, application, anesthetic or other therapeutic or diagnostic substance or technique, (ii) performs a surgical operation, including cosmetic surgery, upon any animal, (iii) performs any manual procedure upon an animal for the diagnosis or treatment of sterility or infertility of animals, (iv) represents himself as engaged in the practice of veterinary medicine, (v) offers, undertakes, or holds himself out as being able to diagnose, treat, operate, vaccinate, or prescribe for any animal disease, pain, injury, deformity, or physical condition...
It's not obvious that ultrasounds (or possibly(?) selling bull semen?) are covered, and there's not a ton of great pragmatic arguments for it, but the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders. And for a wide variety of reasons this sorta thing is near-impossible to practically challenge even were courts willing to push back on it.
Given some of the coverage, though ("both men were advised by their former attorneys not to pay the fines or appear in court"), I'm not sure what happened was completely without any court behavior -- this may be referring to the 'court' of the board licensing group, which is more court in the kangaroo sense, but it also could be about enforcement summons for a conventional court. An actually fake arrest warrant wouldn't be unprecedented, but it's left me noticing I'm confused.
That said:
Rusty Herr was arrested the very next morning, April 11, at 6:30 a.m. at his home in Christiana.
zeke5123a
56m ago
I think you are vastly underselling the cost to the government. Right now their WACC is probably what around 4 or 5%. If 4% and lock in is 20 years you almost cut the tax in half in PV terms.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
59m ago
The step-up basis makes sense to avoid double taxation in a world where there is a meaningful inheritance tax - the estate pays IHT instead of CGT on the gain from acquisition to death, and the heir's cost basis is the value on which IHT was paid.
In a world with no inheritance taxes, there is a reasonable argument that heirs should have zero cost basis in inherited assets - they didn't pay anything for them!
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I think this is a key point- ‘incel’ wasn’t a word that feminists invented because they needed a new sneer. It was invented by the crowd that now populates /r9k/ as a self descriptor, and this crowd being one that a given approximation of nobody likes, it started getting used as an insult.
I would love to be proven wrong and for the officials and the police officers who went along with this to be thrown in jail, but at worst the police officers might be sacrificed. And while they shouldn't have executed unlawful orders, I have a harder time blaming them as it seems likely their fault is mere carelessness and not checking that the order was legitimate (after all, the government probably almost never sends bogus warrants to them), while the Agricultural Department would have to be power tripping for things to have happened as they are alleged to have.
RegularlyExpressed
1hr ago
A cursory Google search tells me it's 5'9 for white men in the UK and 5'10 in the US.
Is that including all ages? If so the result is going to be skewed downwards by older people who have lost a bit of height.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The Republican judges have much more leash compared to the dem judges.
I would also add that Scalia and RGB actually did seem like high Value Over Replacement Justices, much more influential than the other justices of their team on the court, whereas Sotomayor does not seem to be. So I'd say that I think RGB might have even been correct to hold on because of her intrinsic value, but Sotomayor would be more valuable to her team by gaming the retirement to ensure her seat is a permeant Dem possession no matter how elections go.
I'd also say THAT is probably the main argument against overly strategic retirements. If that Chesterton's Fence gets knocked down then the composition of the court gets locked in to whatever it is now unless one party can get a seriously long string of victories to wait the justices out or the justices suffer untimely sudden deaths (RGB was a cancer survivor and might have seen it coming and planned ahead, Scalia's death seemed out of left field). And if the only way the composition changes is untimely justice death that sets up a mighty strong incentive for assassinations.
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