It would be an improvement over turchin’s plan of framing this as a protest.
alienist
I don’t think anyone would call you an extremist for worrying about these things.
I thought Bush’s claims about Iraq’s WMD’s had been thoroughly discredited, mostly because it was something “everybody new”, then I saw this. Turns out ISIS is now taking possession of Saddam’s “nonexistent” chemical weapons stockpiles.
I believe “vibrant” is a euphemism for has plenty of low-IQ-high-crime sub-populations. In particular I doubt Germans want to live in the Muslim neighborhoods.
Why is Publius Scipio Nasica a “good guy”? His opposition to Carthage’s destruction was based on his idea that without a strong external enemy Rome will descend into decadence.
Well, it did.
Little observed fact: The Enlightenment was a (small r) reactionary movement, in the sense of wanting not just to preserve the status quo but to go back to a Greco-Roman status quo ante, and declaring the intermediate period the “middle” or “dark ages”.
On top of that, he can survive torture without suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms.
PTSS almost seems like a culture-bound syndrome of the modern West. In particular there don’t seem to be any references to it before WWI and even there (and in subsequent wars) all the references seem to be from the western allies. Furthermore, the reaction to “shell shock”, as it was then called, during WWI suggests that this was something new that the established structures didn’t know how to deal with.
Here is Paul Graham’s essay on the subject.
Interestingly enough, the scores on individual questions are extremely bimodal. They’re theoretically out of 10 but the numbers between 3 and 7 are never used.
Well here is an article by Megan McArdle that talking about how insider-outsider dynamics can lead to this kind of rank inflation.
Wouldn’t it be more efficient to use that energy to destroy Mars and build start building a Dyson swarm from the debris?
In the US (I believe depending on state) there are rules which are intended to prevent someone from being able to provide proof that they have voted a particular way (to make coercion futile),
And then there are absentee ballots which potentially make said laws a joke.
Are e.g. the Ferguson/police crime protests a good way of attacking the problem?
What problem? That Blacks aren’t free to steal from and intimidate Asian store owners and then charge at a police officer going for his gun?
There’s also selection pressure on instruments to make them pleasant to listen to. There’s no corresponding constraint on video games.
Well, in the parent I listed one potential “problem” that the protests were trying to “solve”. You might not think of it as a problem (and I would agree), but at least some of the protesters seem to. In any case the protests probably have in fact helped to “solve” that problem. Given what happened to Officer Wilson, many cops are going to decide that they don’t want to risk being the target of the next “anti-racist” media circus/protests and simply avoid policing black neighborhoods.
Fundamental rights work, and are consistent, as long as one sticks to the so called negative rights or “first generation” rights, e.g., free speech, right to life, right to no arrest without a fair trial, etc.
For example a negative “right to internet access” simply means that the government can’t bad you from using the internet, i.e., laws like this would be a violation. Neither it, nor anyone else, is actually obliged to provide you with a computer or any kind of ISP.
It isn’t clear to me that the only reason why maximizing E(X) and maximizing E(log(X)) are different is that “zero is special”, even when we are considering what happens in the long run. Specifically, suppose your individual bets have some nasty distribution whose tails are too fat for the variance to be defined; then it needn’t be true that your performance almost always looks like its expectation.
In particular its possible for log(X) to have well-defined variance but not X, and for E(log(X)) but not E(X) to be defined.
Another question is whether Lewin is actually guilty of sexual harassment. This raises the question of how exactly “sexual harassment” is defined. Given the kind of things feminists have been trying to get away with (and scarily enough frequently succeeding) with calling “sexual harassment”, for example see the recent #ShirtStorm incident (or elevatorgate, or DongleGate), my prior is that whatever Lewin did doesn’t mater. That is if you call whatever Lewin did “sexual harassment” then “sexual harassment” doesn’t matter, and if you define “sexual harassment” to only include things that matter then Lewin isn’t guilty.
Now you might ask how exactly I can be this confident without knowing what exactly Lewin is supposed to have done. Well, Im basing my prior on a combination of two things:
1) We are in the middle of a witch hunt against “rapists” and “sexual harassers”, especially on campus, with respectable columnists arguing that we shouldn’t let mere facts get in the way of fighting “rape culture”.
2) The reason I don’t know what Lewin is supposed to have don’t is because MIT hasn’t seen fit to inform the public of any details. To see how big a red flag this should be, imagine if the authorities had accused Lewin of terrorism, but without even describing the plot he was supposedly involved in, much less any actual details. Would you take the official account at face value?
Sexual harrassment and associated problems contribute to fewer women in the STEM fields,
Evidence? Because, the typical argument I’ve seen for this claim tends to boil down to “If you even have to ask you’re an evil misogynistic sexist”.
Well, is the protest saying anything that isn’t already within the Overton window?