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5hr ago
Pharma companies held back the release of their vaccines to not give any perceived benefit to Trump.
Citation? I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.
He didn't do much about global warming. I'm happy about that. Honestly worrying about something with consequences 20 years out feels a little silly at this point. It was nice when we had such long time horizons.
Do you smoke? (Or purposely do something else that can ruin your body on a roughly 20 year time scale.) I don't find this argument persuasive - even accepting "consequences 20 years out" at face value, "consequences 20 years out" isn't dispositive of "prevention best done now."
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23d ago
I only read what Aftab quoted of the original article, the original being pay-walled, but those quotes and the points the author/interviewee include in his own summary are probably pretty familiar/predictable to people here: The accommodations are generally of unknown effectiveness, ineffective, or effective without respect to disability; colleges err on the side of providing accommodations, for both good and bad reasons; students try to game the system; there are (according to the author) negative consequences to making accommodations; and disability advocates allegedly responded with hostility to these things being pointed out. The possible culture war angles here are approximately all of them, but I'm mostly interested in the following:
And I’d like to take a moment to talk more about this “discipline,” given the enormous power it exerts over discussions of disability. Disability studies is not, as one might think, comprised by legal experts and neuropsychologists and the like, who, you know, study disability. Rather, this interdisciplinary field is defined by its founders and practitioners explicitly as an advocacy field. You can be a legal scholar or a research psychologist and also be in disability studies — but what qualifies you is not the object of your study, it’s the ideological flavor of your methodology and conclusions.
The paragraph (it's not clear whether the citation comes from Levinovitz or Aftab) includes a link to this 1998 paper (sci-hub pdf) - in light of the paper being 26 years old, does anyone know of current "scholars" self-identifying as deliberately-misleadingly-named activists?
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7mo ago
Search term you're looking for is the Leonard Law, passed in 1992. Not sure by how much; the California legis lookup only goes to 1992. Stanford did try the our ban is our free speech thing, but courts rejected it. The 2007 Amendment was passed with pretty clear margins, though Yee (better known for his other work) being involved doesn't encourage.
I meant I was curious about the PR and legal reasoning of Stanford announcing a "ban" they acknowledge is illegal to enforce.
The War at Stanford - The Atlantic
A few interesting things about this article:
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The author is a sophomore student-journalist, and it's really good writing, by any standard. It turns out his parents are both top journalists. Nature vs nurture (vs high-status parents faking achievements by their kids to make them look good) is ambiguous, yet again!
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One observation he makes that I hadn't seen in other reporting on campus protests, is that college admissions select for people who are "really good at looking really good," which includes strategic political posturing. This reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism." Are the elite student protestors my former classmates' gen-z counterparts? If so, how do my elite "betters" actually go on to do good things? Or, if the elite students are genuinely better than me, why are the people who are the best at looking the best mounting their (electrically conductive material, as required by this deliberately mixed metaphor) flagpole to the third rail? Or, is the sophomore student-journalist's observation true, but irrelevant, making this is just a really well-written, yet redundant, article about campus protests?
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The Stanford administration banned calls for genocide, in response to the House hearing, but acknowledged to the reporter that this is illegal, due to a California statute requiring all universities to adhere to the First Amendment, not just public universities. I'm curious what the PR and legal discussions leading to this "ban" were, and what may result from it.
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7mo ago
If "fifty Stalins" is original to Scott, I love the irony that one of his best insights is from his presentation of a viewpoint he opposes, but that is not it; it was him justifying skepticism of social scientists, by listing examples of social scientists openly stating they were ideologically motivated.
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7mo ago
Apologies. I'm rushed, but hopefully describing the basic idea and the prior idea it implicitly contrasts is a sufficient explanation of why it's worth discussing.
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7mo ago
I checked the ones with seemingly relevant titles, but no, it was a list of examples of social scientists saying they were ideologically motivated. But perhaps Scott removed it.
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7mo ago
Do you remember what belief?
Some social justice thing, the implication being that they were doing pseudoscience in bad faith.
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7mo ago
Shouldn't this username be relatively dyslexic-friendly, as the two symbols have a spacial displacement and alternate 1-1, as opposed to a random string of p and q?
I assumed it'd be least bad for a question with culture war implications to go in the culture war thread.
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7mo ago
I (possibly mis-)remember an SSC post, in which Scott linked examples of social scientists stating that the purpose of social science was to prove a such-and-such belief, but I couldn't find it. Anyone know which post this is, or have their own examples of social scientists stating this?
(I know this is a suspicious comment by the standards of the Motte, but it can't be asked at all in /r/slatestarcodex)
Which ones? Weren't Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all in Phase 3 by the time the election happened?
And it'd be better to begin geoengineering now than to wait 20 years, wouldn't it?
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