tryonenow's comments

The modern argument is that SAT and ACT tests discriminate against minorities. The reasoning is that minorities score lower because of socioeconomic factors.

>“Well, that didn’t come to pass in 1984, but if we’re not careful that could come to pass in 2024.”

I refuse to participate in social media because the tech is already here, and at this rate it's only a matter of time before our government or big tech itself nefariously taps into the the massive data ocean that is being collected. It only takes a handful of seemingly innocuous data points to uniquely identify a person, and from location data alone one may infer a host of private identity markers - race, religion, political affiliation, sexual preference...especially with a bit of machine learning magic.

Combining this with the political polarization we are increasingly witnessing in the US pushes us onto the precipice of a techno-authoritarian, dystopian nightmare. Imagine how much worse the Soviet Union would have been if the government had access to the breadth and depth of personal information that is merely an access key away from our own government right now. After Snowden we know that even the NSA is vacuuming up enough a massive store of potentially dangerous data.

I don't know that there's any practical solution, as I doubt the average person will care enough until it's too late. Our current economy is built on data collection. Mitigation of this threat would effectively require reengineering of society.

It is critically important in a political climate where one side is using the spectre of white supremacy as a political cudgel. When a complicit media makes a consistent effort to paint a false picture. This censorship is not an isolated incident. News articles regularly leave out the perpetrator's race unless it's white. Reddit regularly deletes and locks threads on inconvenient articles/videos such as this, including on default subs. Right leaning sources are effectively forbidden from wikipedia and stackexchange. A dangerous narrative is being manufactured across the social, news, and entertainment media sphere.

>Yes, in some ways. A new study shows Twitter users post even more misinformation after other users correct them.

I can't help but feel like the academics studying this "problem" are blinded by hubris. Even the byline is exemplary - what's being described is a discussion.

When you gatekeep science in the public square with "fact checking" you inevitably end up with a politicized orthodoxy. The opinions and majority consensus of our academic institutions are not beyond reproach, and there have repeatedly been instances where the messaging was misleading or false - look no further than the discourse surrounding covid starting early last year. Latest example being the lab origin hypothesis - a cooky, right wing, xenophobic conspiracy theory, until it wasn't. Fortunately media outlets are finally backtracking on their politicized "fact checking" in this case: see the editor's note here [0] for example.

0. https://www.vox.com/2020/3/4/21156607/how-did-the-coronaviru...

What does free speech entail when a literal handful of unelected people control the modern public square?

There are understated psychological consequences to casual sex, particularly for females. Only in my 30s did I begin to understand the damage that my ostensibly harmless casual relations caused to many past partners, particularly those who grew attached before the end of the casual relationship.

Pair bonding is crucial to social organization and casual encounters erode the psychological capacity for such bonds, without nullifying the innate human desire for long term companionship. The result in a "sex positive" society is a growing proportion of perpetually lonely and frustrated people, or dysfunctional relationships. One of the few instances in my opinion where ignorance truly may be bliss.

So, to your question, it's quite possible that we will rediscover the purpose of monogamous marriage, if we can reason past the barriers of some recent ideologies.

But a larger nucleus would be unlikely to produce the same spectral signature even with the same charge. The energy transitions would be different, especially with different orbital shells and subtle quantum effects.

The high cycle counts of the PCR tests in the US make all official numbers suspect. Particularly in combination with implicit political pressure against the previous administration, and an overzealous press. The entire system - academic, medical, news and entertainment - is rotten with bias and society collectively is worse off for it, especially with respect to handling this pandemic.

It's hard to find a source now but these PCR tests were being run with cycle counts anywhere from 30-40; in this regime you are extremely likely to amplify noise and generate a huge percentage of false positives. The inventor of the PCR tests made similar comments regarding abuse of the PCR process during the HIV/aids pandemic - and wouldn't you know it, Dr. Fauci was involved in [mis]managing that pandemic as well. His self serving publication and premature press release created an ultimately unfounded stigma around HIV positivity. There is simply no reason to trust the guy now, regardless of his overtly warm, anti-trump persona. And now he has repeatedly denied before congress that he was affiliated with funding/conducting gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. But the publications, with authors publicly and directly linked to Fauci and funds he managed, are freely available online. This should be a far bigger story.

>How did this article get through peer review? Like the author, the journal’s reviewers and editors seemed to have been glamoured by the shine, tech fetishism, and naive empiricism of even the most poorly executed digital methods — without the methodological humility to work together with colleagues from information science, or at least check in with someone familiar with the basic workings of tools like Google

Well, that's what happens when your institution is brimming with ideologues who practice one sided research and immediately praise any results that confirms their political, dogmatic biases. Doubly so when criticizing certain results or topics will get you implicitly or ex-communicated, particularly if you are not part of an approved protected class.

The retraction doesn't matter very much, the damage has already been done, and far more eyes will have been exposed to the results than to the retraction.

>Surgical masks with particle collection efficiencies around ~50% cannot prevent the release of millions of particles per person and their inhalation by others (green dots in Fig. 1, B and D). In other words, the human-emitted respiratory particle number is so high that we cannot avoid inhaling particles generated by another person even when wearing a surgical mask

So the entire premise of the modeling in the paper rests on the assumption that surgical masks can filter some percentage of viral particles. It's my understanding that viral particles are around 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the pores in surgical masks. So is there any evidence that surgical masks can filter aerosolized viral particles?

I'm completely surprised by the negative reaction to my comment. I think people are misinterpreting my use of the word hacker, and I don't even mean to imply that God exists - only that the universe is intricately clever and whether by intent or by emergence this frameshift exploit on which some viruses rely for reproduction is an absolutely brilliant trick. My comment was made in reverence. Or perhaps it's the implication of intelligent design that upset the downvoters/flaggers?

>I read your comment as a reflection in the hideous cruelty of life, anyone studying biology or medicine beyond high school confronts the cold indifferent ugliness of nature

Perhaps my comment came off callously then. I made no value judgement, it was only the design that I meant to describe. Nuclear weapons are terrible things, but they are still technical works of art.

>Frameshifting almost never happens in our cells. It would lead to dysfunctional cellular proteins; however, certain viruses, such as coronaviruses and HIV, depend on a frameshifting event to regulate levels of viral proteins. For example, SARS- CoV-2 - the virus that causes COVID- 19 - is critically dependent on frameshifting promoted by an unusual and intricate fold in the viral RNA.

God is a hacker.

Typical generic, infantilizing dating advice, about as effective as telling unattractive people to just "be themselves".

Dating norms exist. They vary from culture to culture and over time. The natures of norms and humans are such that there will be large scale average behaviors and some varying proportion of the population will consist of outliers. Toxically optimistic platitudinous advice such as this only ensures a perpetual class of lonely, dissatisfied people, primarily men.

Historically the rate of reproduction among men has varied, anywhere from 4/5 to 1/17. Lonely men need to be proactive and most importantly realistic, and understanding current preference norms and in what ways these men fall into or outside of them is critical to evaluating which aspects of themselves they may improve, and to what degree their immutable characteristics realistically limit their chances of attracting mates that they desire.

Hypergamous cultural norms, like those toward which the west is moving, create masses of perpetually frustrated men, many of whom who at best lose interest in participating in society, and at worst become bitter and violently antisocial. Thus movements which tilt dating norms toward hypergamy create unstable and dysfunctional societies. I know that your advice is given in good faith, but your relative is not the toxic one.

The interview effectively explains why climate science by its nature cannot be considered settled. We are measuring a tiny fraction of a chaotic, oscillatory time series with component frequencies spanning many orders of magnitude, up to eons, and even pretending that the last 100 or so years of records are complete and accurate enough to extrapolate, they simply do not measure enough history with the degree of fidelity required to determine any anthropogenically influenced future trends.

We're talking about accidental terraforming, that's an enormous claim which requires enormous evidence - and much of the associated theory is rather young with respect to the history of modern science. Plus, environmental data is also spatially sparse, and was even less complete just a decade ago. And as for modeling, even with modern computational simulation there are effectively enough degrees of freedom to confirm any bias while still backfitting [low quality] historical data.

Claiming that worst case climate change predictions are anywhere near certain is pure alarmist hubris.

And how do you measure the mid to long term risk of a novel mRNA technology which is effectively in trial now, under emergency approval, when vaccines typically take years of safety evaluations? Particularly considering that there are preprints out with a mechanism identified for reverse transcription of the spike producing mRNA, which could result in chronic inflammatory disease in some proportion of recipients, given that other preprints claim that the spike protein itself is a general inflammatory agent and may be responsible for clotting/vascular symptoms.

Note that reverse transcription of COVID RNA also is a convenient explanation for post symptomatic positive tests as well as long COVID symptoms.

I think it's irresponsible to downplay the risks associated with this novel technology, especially when people still have the option of continuing to socially isolate to some degree.

It's hard for me to believe that there is still no way to get your genes sequenced anonymously. There has to be a big enough market for a startup to do so without storing and selling "anonymised" data, right? Is it really that expensive with modern tech to sequence a person's genes and compare against an existing database? I'd pay a good deal extra to 23&me if they'd be willing to take my sample without identifying information and return my results via an [throwaway] email address.

You don't need to be religious to recognize that there is occasional wisdom in the bible.

Actually I think the real reason is that PG&E has ≈100 year old power lines with components that are well past their service life and regularly arc/fail causing fires. But there doesn't appear to be any accountability for their lack of maintenance.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/new-images-of-pge-...

This is a common and disingenuous misconstrual of the argument. It isn't about feeling entitled to sex, it's about making access to sex more evenly distributed across society, for both genders. Not because of entitlement, but because of better overall happiness for both genders.

You are talking about a movement which on its face is about social equality, but refuses to acknowledge that is explicitly engineering norms which are already creating oppressive social inequality. You clearly have disdain for them but whether you want to admit it or not, "incels" are a low status social class, and if they are the way they are because of the efforts of others then by modern progressive logic they are oppressed - by feminists. The refusal to even acknowledge the possibility that this could be happening is a form of disenfranchisement, and is inevitable when your entire worldview is based on a false oppressor/oppressed binary, which is the essence of modern feminism (progressivism really).

I really take offense to the notion that simply for criticizing the feminist movement or acknowledging the romantic power dynamic, I "resent women". Nor have I implied that "this one thing gives women all of the power". Neither of these are arguments, instead they are cheap, disingenuous dismissals which only stifle meaningful discussion.

I am merely explaining that this is a particular domain over which women have massively disproportionate power, however feminists refuse to acknowledge the existence of this power while claiming to be in pursuit of social equality.

A movement which seeks to re-engineer social norms in pursuit of "equality" is bound to disenfranchise men if this power dynamic is ignored. The result is movements like "incels". None of this implies that men are entitled to access to female bodies, but there is an inescapable give and take. If women are to be treated the same as men in all domains, then restructuring romantic interactions while maintaining the onus on men to bear the brunt of initiation and rejection unfairly shifts the power dynamic in favor of women.

And this has consequences for women too. Indirectly, in that frustrated men are likely to withdraw and/or become antisocial (criminally or violently). And directly in that it shifts the dating dynamic toward hypergamy, where many females compete for a small proportion of men. Though perhaps there is an argument that some or most women prefer a polygamist arrangement, but I don't know if that's the case and it certainly is detrimental to men. Monogamy is a social norm which maximizes romantic equity for both men and women, not merely a patriarchal construct. Regardless of the argument of bodily autonomy, the romantic/social marketplace is an economy and can be modeled with the same sort of inequality measures that we apply to financial economies, with consequences for the function and overall happiness of society.