Doubletree2
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User ID: 2881
Given the analogy youve made with election deniers (totally not the same structure at all), it's probable my point didn't come across.
When you said "hbd counters the [institutional racism] argument", I imagined someone actually making that argument in the context of unequal outcomes. I.e. Saying the real words to a real person, perhaps in a public forum, who has prior beliefs in the opposite stance (differences are due to systemic racism).
But, it sounds like that is not what you had in mind. So who is making the argument, who is the recipient, and what is the forum where the argument is occurring?
Asiding your aside: "inherent" seems to me to be the crux of the whole debate! I did not mean "invariably". If intelligence were easily malleable, making stupid people smarter would just be a matter of better education or nutrition or something. Yet the HBD stance is that your intelligence is capped from the moment you're conceived.
Doubletree2
8mo ago
Geographical proximity seems like a blunt instrument to solve problems like this. If the betlins have suffered some discrimination, why is the fact that they make up 60% of one province relevant? Is their plight any worse than if they had been distributed/diluted to 1% in all the other provinces? Arguably they have it better, being able to easier to form informal networks, autonomous zones, etc to look out for their own. The 1%er would have a greater cause but less ability to secede.
And in the Internet age personal relationships and economic transactions are increasingly online, there geographic proximity is virtually meaningless. Why should the interactions of individuals be mediated based on rules-boundaries that are purely geographic?
That challenge can only be defeated by pointing out that sometimes certain groups get arrested more because they are more criminal, or score lower on tests because they are less smart, or whatever
No I don't think so. If your goal is to be rigorous and fact based, then asserting a different simple explanation for a complex and highly path dependent process is more likely to be wrong. It's also just not logically how you disprove things anyway.
On a political basis, where facts don't matter, or where people are unlikely to be swayed by mere facts only, it's also not an effective challenge for the reason I said downthread: you're just confirming your opponent's biases.
I think there are many possible antidotes to the idea that we need institutional discrimination to fix prior discrimination and HBD is among the worst of these.
I don't know how the HBD vs racism argument got wrapped up with meritocracy, but it seems to me they are totally orthogonal . I wouldn't make someone with down syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome, or extreme lead poisoning, or who suffered so much racism that they didn't learn to read, the CEO of my company, no matter how unfair their circumstances, no matter that their conditions is totally out of their control. Meritocracy doesn't need any explanation whatsoever for why differences in abilities exist.
Doubletree2
8mo ago
Slightly off topic, but does anyone else have the impression that there bas been a general increase in just bad, poorly socialized, aggressive, or anxious dogs? Probably over 75% of the dogs in my dog-sphere (friends' dogs and neighborhood dogs that we see often) have some sort behavioral issues that makes me not want to spend time around them (the dogs). I could count the number of "actually good dogs" amply on one hand.
I don't remember it being this way in my childhood. But obvious issues with trying to compare today to my childhood memories.
the value that it adds is that it counters the argument that differences in average outcomes between ethnic groups are evidence of discrimination, perpetrated by either members of better-performing groups or anyone who is casually involved in the outcome or its measurement.
It doesn't actually do this though, in practical terms, in a conflict/political context. If you respond to the blank-slatist-unequal-outcomes with "actually, black people are genetically less intelligent so there's no problem here", you're not just shooting yourself in the foot, you're shooting yourself in the face.
The person who makes the former argument already believes that society is full of people who believe black people are inherently stupider/more criminal/whatever and make real consequential decisions based on that belief. When you say then, "yes I do believe black people are inherently stupider and intend to make practical, perhaps policy decisions based on that, and here's all the science that shows I'm right", that is not a counter argument. It is exactly the opposite of a counterargument.
Doubletree2
8mo ago
Right, this is what I repeatedly alluded to, why I called your original point incoherent-- if legitimacy is subjective, still, any one's assessment of what is or is not legitimate cannot be, in and of itself, a basis for a practical election process. It is a fundamentally unworkable position to take, because it is impossible to simultaneously meet all standards of credulity. I suspect you are only retreating to it to avoid having to argue your position on its merits.
But also, the claim that deniers arent making or haven't made categorically factual claims is not true. It's just a straight lie.
Endlessly repeating "contested environment" does not negate the fact that the steal crowd is making claims about factual matters which can be evaluated on a factual basis given the evidence available to us.
If they don't care about facts, and want to "take their ball and go home", and force us from a real existing condition where the guy with the most votes wins to one where we have to renegotiate our electoral processes from the ground up, that just means they've been prosecuting aforementioned claims in bad faith-- and their bad fath claims should be responded to appropriately--
Doubletree2
8mo ago
Every region has its own driving culture. NJ may suit you, but I find driving there to be absolutely miserable.
Among regions with aggressive drivers, I much prefer Boston. They are aggressive, but in a precise, pointed way rather than what I perceived to be the raw hooliganism of New Jersey.
The fact that NJ has fewer traffic deaths than other areas is probably more due to the fact that they've eliminated unprotected left turns than any particular skill of their drivers.
Doubletree2
8mo ago
Now if you meant targeted reform like stricter limits on prescribing then it would likely do some good.
I think this experiment has already been tried. Opioid prescriptions are the lowest they've been in decades, down 50% from 2010. Curiously, the downward trend in prescriptions coincides with the upward trend in opiate ODs
https://thegarrisonproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/opioid-prescribing-1400x788.png
Doubletree2
8mo ago
Looking at the fentanyl deaths per year shows the dramatic spike beginnings in the 2015-2016 timeframe. I wondered what caused this spike, why that particular point in time and why so large? Fentanyl has been around for a long time, first being synthesized in the 50s.
An explanation that sounds plausible: opioid prescription rates have been increasing since at least the 90s, either for legitimate or illegitimate reasons (as alleged in lawsuits against Purdue pharma etc).
Opioid prescriptions peaked in 2010 but by this time we have a large subpop hooked on opiates. when prescriptions are heavily curtailed, addicts still need their fix, so they turn to illegal substitutes. First heroin (heroin ods start to rise in ~2011), and then illegal fentanyl. Fentanyl wins out because it's potency probably makes it cheaper than heroine per "unit high", and likewise it's high potency makes oding easier. not to mention the profliferation of fentanyl analogues which further complicates dosing appropriately.
If true it seems like another, particularly tragic , lesson in unintended consequences, or cruel indifference if you subscribe to the allegations against the pharma companies.
And unfortunately the same features that make it cheap and deadly also make it harder to fight a drug war against it. It is apparently easy to manufacture and total volumes trafficked are relative low, in many cases being trafficked through international mail.
Doubletree2
8mo ago
I will also chime in to say, as someone who has felt frustrated by many the election fraud claims, these are all reasonable and important concerns and I absolutely agree with the overall need to have high quality election processes.
No, it's incoherent. There is literally no point in having audits or paper trails if there is not an objective measure of who wins an election. In our actual reality, the organizing principal we use is, " the guy with the most votes wins" (to first order). Even the steal crowd universally couches their arguments in terms of stolen votes, vote counts, counting processes etc. factually, the number of counts matters, because that is the agreed upon standard.
Someone can always in principle defect from the process, but that is not particularly interesting since anyone can always defect from any process. In that case, the losing party should be honest and say, "I don't like this outcome, so fuck you I won't respect it" rather than endlessly engaging in claims of irregularities in the administrivia.
the onus is on election officials to convince the losing party that they lost fair and square.
This doesn't logically follow from what you wrote above. Granting we have a mutually agreed upon process (as you say), even if it has no contact with any objective truth or measure, if party A has a concern, they should be able to point to some irregularity in the paper trail. That is it's whole reason for existing, by your own argument. If they think the process itself is unfair, they can always point to a specific attribute of the process. If party A just sits back and says, you know what, this seems fishy, why don't you bring me another rock and maybe that will assuage concerns, there's no reason why that should shift the burden of proof at all.
Doubletree2
8mo ago
You don't kick out election observers and board up the windows, period
You sure do, if the number of obsevers is in excess of the legal limit. What is your alternative? Break the law simply to meet your personal standard of credulity? Such an action would be just as likely to be highlighted as one of the "irregularities" that "proves" the steal as assuage your concerns.
I don't know what kind of weasel words these claims of the GOP having the "maximum" number even means. Did the dems have more? Then how is it a maximum? How large was the facility? Is the "maximum" some generic statute, related to the fire code, for that specific facility?
These are all great questions that have a large bearing on whether or not anything untoward happened. Unfortunately you seem ignorant of the answers to them, despite the fact that this case was brought by you as evidence of your position. That you should then try to parlay this ignorance into further "evidence" is, charitably, wild as hell.
Some shit goes down that any person can plainly see is suspicious,
We do not all "plainly see" that something suspicious is happening, hence this discussion.
You need to understand that the purpose of an election isnot to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and thier voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost. This is why we use paper ballots with documented chains of custody, this is why we have laws requiring that the counting be witnessed by representative of each candidate/party.
This is an incoherent pair of sentences. What function does having a paper trail or bipartisan autiding have except for helping to establish that the reported vote count is true and accurate (or it's degree thereof)? A paper trail will not make someone accept an election as legitimate, if they are not interested in obtaining (or respecting, as a process for determining who wins) the factual truth of the vote count.
The simple thing that after 4 years of this conversation you still don't seem to grasp is that you aren't going to convince anyone the election was legitimate by arguing the niggling technical details of individual cases and motions. You need to actually address the elephant in the room
"You aren't going to convince anyone the election was legitimate by arguing and evaluating specific factual claims". Quite right! It was clear in 2020 and even more clear now, that most who believe the election was stolen did not come to that belief through a sober consideration of the facts.
Doubletree2
8mo ago
Democrats love freedom actually.
Democrats are keeping the border open for their own dark purposes
Lame boo outgroup nonsense.
Reading through the article I quickly found a couple errors in reasoning. Also overall the writing style doesn't give the impression that the author is deeply knowledgeable in the subject (or in heat transfer generally). Mostly this is unconvincing to me.
The author gives insinuates that this somehow violates the laws of thermodynamics, but it doesn't. I can't tell if he doesn't understand this or is being intentional misleading.
Take two black body radiatiors at different temperatures and places them near each other. Would you say that the lower temperature body radiates in every direction /except/ the side facing the hotter? Of course not. While the net heat flow will be from hotter to colder, it is totally reasonable to talk about energy transfer from colder to hotter as a matter of accounting.
For 2263 w/m2 solar irradiance, 0.7 albedo, 0.85 emissivity, Venus "Should" only have a surface temperature of less than 200c, instead of the 400+c we observe. Internal heating of Venus appears to be negligible (10s of mW/m2 at the surface).
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