TournamentFishing
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User ID: 2652
TournamentFishing
1d ago
"Debate" is a sport. It's historically connected to honest truth-seeking discourse, but often strays far from it. Twitch illustrates one degenerate mode. Competitive policy debate illustrates another.
TournamentFishing
1d ago
It would be one thing if professors/scientists said: "I don't care what the science says about xyz policy, I believe abc for ideological reasons".
I actually had a professor who said something like this. He was talking about some differences between countries. Somebody asked whether genetic differences might be a factor, and the professor said "they probably are, but I'm ignoring that because it's against my religion".
TournamentFishing
1d ago
That clip confirms the interpretation in King's apology.
TournamentFishing
1d ago
The seal of confession isn't a universal feature across all Christian denominations.
TournamentFishing
2d ago
Regarding the stoning thing. There was a kerfuffle where Steven King tweeted that allegation and then very quickly apologized.
His tweet where he stated that Kirk “advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin.’” got at least 25 million views before being deleted.
His later apology: “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.” has 2.5 million right now.
His followup tweet that "I have apologized. Charlie Kirk never advocated stoning gays to death." Has 1.6 million.
Those are quite impressive numbers for an apology. But they're still an order of magnitude lower than the engagement numbers on the accusation.
Perhaps your second criticism is warranted. I genuinely don't know, I don't care to check. But your first is apparently not, at least according to King. (I'm being a bit hypocritical here in not looking up the original videos or articles myself.) We should all keep in mind that social media rumormongering selects for discord, not truth.
TournamentFishing
2d ago
I find it disheartening that even when there are easily accessible primary sources, people prefer unsourced rumors. This isn't unique to the things people are saying about Charlie Kirk, but it sometimes seems like the internet has made this human tendency worse. All the information in the world at our fingertips and it doesn't matter one bit.
I don't know, maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds.
TournamentFishing
2d ago
Well there you go, I guess there are no Pareto improvements in the world.
TournamentFishing
3d ago
An old economics professor once told me that "unfortunately, the only actual Pareto improvement I know of is to allow right turns on red"
TournamentFishing
18d ago
For what it's worth appending to this old conversation:
- I know what insurance is.
- I am well aware of all the shenanigans behind the scenes with negotiations between insurance companies and medical providers and billing.
- I am aware that some consumers do not understand the financial products they purchase.
- I am aware that the medical providers say the price info they can provide is useless.
- Nonetheless, it is not.
(Pinging @ControlsFreak again since they're the only other person that might still be interested in this comment chain.)
I've had several conversations with medical staff which go something like this:
"What would be the price for X?"
"I can't possibly say. It depends on your insurance."
"Can you just tell me how much you'll charge?"
"Impossible. It depends on your insurance."
"You have my insurance info. Can you check how much you'll charge them?"
"No, still impossible."
"Okay, pretend I'm uninsured. How much would you charge?"
And then SURPRISE SURPRISE their quote turns out to be useful for making decisions and estimating how much I will pay.
And I'll further grant that you (the individual) probably aren't personally empowered to give meaningful price estimates. But @ControlsFreak is right that you (as synecdoche for your employer and the supply chain behind you) do have access to information on what you will ask from insurance, and that has a connection to what insurance will pay, which will in turn be connected to the cost born by the consumer.
And yes, costs aren't always perfectly predictable. The same is true for mechanics and contractors. But we don't have to play a game of make-believe for them to give me a estimate.
This information matters to people. You (synecdoche) should give it to them.
TournamentFishing
23d ago
There have been mathematicians that brag about how their work has no application.
Ironically, some of those were number theorists...
TournamentFishing
1mo ago
Those seem like reasonable responses and I'm neither right-wing nor religious.
I feel like I must be missing some context here.
TournamentFishing
1mo ago
Well, the names of Harry's mentors are references to esoteric alchemical processes, so it's not the craziest fan theory I've ever heard.
TournamentFishing
1mo ago
Take the case of Gerd R, one of the victims mentioned by Pink News. Gerd was a married, heterosexual man who had a history of crossdressing. He was arrested multiple times for public indecency after his neighbours grew tired of finding him hiding naked in their communal bins. He was later rescued from a concentration camp by the intervention of his doctor, who pointed out that he was heterosexual.
I think this segment is worth highlighting. It illustrates Rowling's point (Nazis were targetting LGB, not T) in a very darkly comedic way.
TournamentFishing
1mo ago
I've never heard of a faculty member denied tenure for poor teaching at one of these schools;
I was told of a professor at UPenn who never showed up to class the year he was up for tenure review. He still got tenure.
TournamentFishing
1mo ago
Do the genes that code for immune system responses also tend to be the ones that have a big effect on polygenic scores for eg, intelligence? If not, I'm really not too worried about these selected embryos being dangerously similar to one another
TournamentFishing
1mo ago
Oh no, they don't need to wait for the destruction of Israel to start warring with their other neighbors.
TournamentFishing
1mo ago
Equally impractical idea:
Convert all arable federal lands into Strategic Amish Zones. With a TFR of 6 children per woman, we'd only need 9% of the country to become Amish to return national TFR to >2.
TournamentFishing
1mo ago
the author simultaneously wants the deconstruction of women's social roles but is also a TERF
Well, yes. The RF stands for "Radical Feminist", lest we forget.
The TERF position is that the treatment of "woman" as a salient category based on societal attitudes and cultural roles rather than one based on sex necessarily reinforces those roles and attitudes. Thus saying that a male is a woman is at best meaningless and at worst actively harming the cause of feminism.
It's not my position, but it seems to be a self-consistent one.
trans people and their allies that are doing the most to bring this world about. Directly challenging the association between biology and certain forms of social relation
I don't think the TERF would agree.
By analogy: Alice wants to abolish religion in general but the Catholic church in particular. Bob wants to pass a law affirming that those born Protestant are allowed to identify as Catholic if they'd like. Do you understand why Alice would be upset with such a law?
TournamentFishing
2mo ago
Often, one needs to know a specific term to have any luck with search queries. LLMs can sometimes help with that.
(I feel like search engines used to be better for this kind of thing before they added semantic fuzziness.)
TournamentFishing
2mo ago
A farmer once told me "farmers run land management companies with a farming problem"
TournamentFishing
2mo ago
My experience with a very small sample size of normies (my wife) is that they use reddit to view only one or two hobby subreddits.
The most baffling I saw on the front page was a headline about how the University of Minnesota allows senior citizens to audit classes for 10 dollars a credit hour.
"Oh, how cute," I thought.
Redditors were furious.
I think there might be a dynamic going on whereby the kind of person who hangs out on big Reddit subs is looking to be angry, (either because that's their hobby or because of selective pressure on comments in a large subreddit), so pattern matches even completely innocuous stories into rage bait (in this case something about student debt and boomers stealing from the future).
TournamentFishing
2mo ago
Forget about simulations. Humans have one million times the mass of a bee but only ten times the ability to experience joy. It would be downright unethical not to convert all humans into swarms of happy bees.
I once saw a flat earther talking to students on a college campus. I thought it was interesting how many people walked up to him to argue that the earth is round, and then strung together incoherent or factually incorrect arguments.
I'm not sure what the lesson is there, but it stuck with me.
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