hooser
1yr ago
Try: "I find your phasing... problematic." (Followed by a dignified silence.)
Seriously, though, if your purpose is to improve your own communication skills--and that's a laudable purpose to have--I recommend seriously adapting Socratic method. Ask questions, and genuinely listen to their responses. If they talk about broad ideas, come up with realistic concrete scenarios, preferably based on your own life or someone you know. If the terminology gets in the way of communication, suggest "tabooing" a particular word and see if it improves communication of ideas.
By the way, I recommend reading Plato's dialogues. The character of Socrates is great at walking the narrow path between a devil's advocate and a troll, and it falls to other characters to voice "common-sense" ideas.
hooser
1yr ago
I agree with your assessment of what makes one a programmer. Programming is a specific technical skill, and what makes one a programmer is being good at--and doing--that technical skill.
A software engineer, on the other hand--or better yet, a software architect--need not necessarily do any programming. They can offload the tasks that require that specific technical skill to programmers.
I suspect that this is at the root of the contention between your perspective and mine. Do you regard doing science as a set of technical skills? Or do you regard doing science as making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world?
And once I phrase it like that, I find that the specific issue of our contention--under what conditions you/we call the people who progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world "scientists"--stops mattering so much.
The current system (in US) where one can progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world on a fundamental level is done mostly in university-based labs. These labs rely on funding to continue to make their progress. Funding depends on maintaining a solid and clearly-legible track record of previous progress (which in our system involves high-quality publications in peer-reviewed journals that are well-regarded in the field). Funding also depends on seeking out and getting those grants, and then making sure to satisfy their conditions so the lab can get more of such grants in the future.
So if I run a bio-chem lab (the Hooser Lab at Stanbridge) and my goal is to progress what we know about what causes aging and what may halt the process in mammals, then my main job is to make sure that my lab can actually make useful progress in my goal. I need to break down what my lab needs to do, what resources it needs to do that, and how I can get those resources. Then I get those resources, and oversee the process. And as much as I enjoyed writing scripts to analyze data when I was a postdoc at Whatihear Lab at Oxbridge, maybe my time would be better spent on reviewing drafts for publications (because I have the breadth of knowledge to connect that esoteric result to broader field, or to suggest in the discussion multiple probable interesting consequences), and speaking with grant-giving foundations (because I have built my reputation as a serious scientist and they will take me seriously), while a postdoc in my lab oversees the data analysis.
hooser
1yr ago
I work at a small selective liberal arts college where both students and faculty are almost all split among the classical-liberal / left-progressive / left-radical. The ideological fights tend to happen between classical liberals and the progressives / radicals. Aside from me, no professor identifies as Republican; students who are willing to say they vote republican are <1% (students who actually are politically conservative are more like 10%, but a lot of those are international students), and staff tends to keep mum about their personal politics.
So when our Dean of Faculty asked for volunteers to develop a "bias-incident response procedure", I volunteered. And I made sure that the system would recognize incidents that marginalize people because of their political affiliations (didn't have to do much, the HR wanted to include it to cover all the bases), and that the method of reporting a "bias incident" made that possibility explicit.
Then I told everyone about it, and how I will now be on the lookout for casual remarks putting down Republicans as a group. Cause, you know, microaggressions.
It's a small campus, and word gets around. The classical liberals on campus (faculty, staff, or students) don't like the woke attempting to take over, so they think it's a grand idea to turn the tables and usurp the woke language for the benefit of Republicans. The progressives and radicals (that still speak to me) are actually cool with it once I point out the advantages to having someone around willing to argue for conservative ideas. And the ones who don't speak to me... who cares.
One of the tenets of Critical Race Theory is called "interest convergence": that the majority (e.g., "white" in US) will only support the rights of the minority (e.g., "black" in US) if there's something in it for them. Sounds reasonable to me. So I figure out how to convince the majority-on-campus classical liberal / progressive-but-not-completely-woke that it's to their benefit to protect the rights of the minority-on-campus Republicans / conservatives.
E.g.: classes are a heck of a lot more fun if you got some contrarians taking the unpopular conservative positions and letting the liberal / left / left-radical students practice their arguments for real. If you ain't got no conservatives in your class, then the liberal/progressive professor needs to take on the conservative position yourself defend it devil's-advocate style (and probably straw-man botch it), or worse: have a boring class. So clearly, ensuring that our campus is explicitly welcoming to the minority Republicans / conservatives, and that they are definitely welcome to speak up and represent their views, is to the benefit of liberals, leftists, and left-radicals.
hooser
1yr ago
I am fascinated by your idea of what actions make a scientist. If an experiment I am conducting needs some beakers washed, does it make me less of a scientist if I have a freshman undergrad wash them--so long as I check that it's done properly? If the experiment that I designed needs some chemicals mixed in particular proportions and sequence, does it make me less of a scientist if a senior undergrad does it--so long as I check that it's done properly? If I design three experiments to test a theory, does it make me less of a scientist three first-year graduate students carries each experiment out--so long as I check that they are done properly? If there are multiple competing theories in my field and I have good ideas about how I can test them but to design the experiments in detail I would need to have a thorough and detailed knowledge of several disparate sub-fields and possibly fields in adjacent disciplines, and also I would need to raise substantial funds to finance such experiments, does it make me less of a scientist if I recruit a team of grad students and post-docs, each specializing in some particular sub-field and tasked with designing and carrying out experiments there, while I use my broader expertise and established credentials to convince whoever I can to finance these projects?
Are you less of a programmer because you don't program in Assembly? Or because you import modules? Are you less of a software engineer if you spend your time with the client determining their needs, then oversee the development of architectural design, APIs for relevant modules with appropriate testing system, and then hand off the actual code writing to a team of programmers?
hooser
1yr ago
At the college where I work, I have successfully used the rhetoric of microaggressions and bias incidents on the casual put-downs of republican-coded ideas. The college instituted a "bias incident" reporting system ("non-punitive" and "restorative-justice"), and the legalese-sounding description of what a "bias incident" is includes "political party affiliation".
hooser
1yr ago
UCLA Williams Institute released a report examining the number of trans-identified people over the past five years. It buried the lede in its June 2022 report: in the same five-year period while trans-ID increased 100% among youth, trans-ID among adults 25 and over dropped 21%.
This might reflect a change of what transgenderism means, in Blue Tribe circles at least.
I work in a small liberal arts college with almost all students in the 18-24 age range. Twenty years ago, if we had any transgender students or employees, they either were closeted or completely passed. In 2008-2015, we got a few students who were openly trans and really worked on presenting themselves as their chosen gender. I don't know if they had surgeries, but at least testosterone / estrogen intake was involved.
After that, we got more and more students who would say they are trans, but I am sure that no pills or surgeries were involved. In fact, if they didn't tell me they are trans I would not have known it, because most of them don't do anything outside of the (liberal arts college) norm of their obvious biological gender. (Guy with long hair wearing a skirt? Whatevs. Gal with short hair wearing... wait, is there even something a gal can't wear and still read female?)
By now, being trans just means that you say you are trans, both socially and in Williams Institute report:
The BRFSS module asks, “Do you consider yourself to be transgender?” with response options,
“Yes; No; Don’t know/not sure” or respondents could refuse to answer. If a respondent expresses
confusion, then interviewers provide definitions of transgender and/or gender nonconforming. If
respondents affirmatively answer the question, they are then asked if they consider themselves to
be male-to-female; female-to-male; or gender nonconforming. The YRBS module asks, “Some people describe themselves as transgender when their sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about their gender. Are you transgender?” with response options, “No; Yes, I am transgender; Not sure if I am transgender, Don’t know what the question is asking.”
Which means that for most people who self-identified as "trans" in the past, "de-transitioning" just means "not saying you are trans anymore".
So here's my theory to explain the drop in trans-identifying adults: in 2016 when college-attending or very-online normies caught wind of this new and exciting idea--that saying you are transgender marks you edgy and cool but you don't need to do anything more expensive than claim it--there was a spike of 25-35-year-olds self-identifying as "trans"-something. Now, when the idea is old and "trans" has lost its coolness-signaling edge, that spike isn't there, and some of the people who added to the spike in 2016 no longer say they're trans.
hooser
1yr ago
If it's there, though, they'll still know it's there, even when they're not looking at it. Thus they will suffer some psychological harm they otherwise wouldn't have suffered, if it just wasn't published in the first place.
The same idea applies to using people's likeness in memes. Like for the woman in the "first world problems" meme--I am sure that being the literal poster-child of getting-upset-over-silly-things isn't what she wanted out of life.
If those memes are distributed for free--and they are--does the woman have the right to ask websites to take them down?
hooser
1yr ago
I'm not sure why you're bothering to make yourself one degree removed by making this be about your 18 year old daughter.
I am old, married, and no longer give a fuck. But I would care if it were my daughter.
I appreciate you taking the time to vividly describe the hypothetical experience. I know that your intent was to make me feel disturbed or disgusted, but that's rather the point of this discussion: it's about exploring our intuitions on the subject.
hooser
1yr ago
And training the AI on the actual person's breasts isn't required for the result to be highly similar to what they actually look like topless, at least for some women, considering at least some people's breasts are visually similar to other people's breasts. Thus a person who has not already consented to having topless photos of themselves present anywhere on the internet can have topless images of them created to what is indeed a very high degree of verisimilitude to their actual naked form, using i.e. pornstar's breasts as training data.
Porn stars not only self-select based on their agility in smoothly changing positions in front of cameras--incidentally, a skill shared with politicians--but also for how good they look naked. If an AI image generator is trained on naked bodies of porn starts, its AI-completed naked version of me will look amazingly better than I actually do.
Women's breasts, in particular, come in a variety of shapes, and they are frequently not symmetric. Older women's breasts tend to be flat--think more like those pictures in the old National Geographic depicting women in some far-away hunter-gatherer tribe. The nipples and areolae come in various shapes and sizes, and change with temperature. Some have inverted nipples. Practically all of this variability is hidden by the kinds of clothes women wear, especially if they are into padded bras.
The distribution of body fat also varies significantly for overweight women, and this is also mostly hidden or distorted by clothes.
hooser
1yr ago
Perhaps in reality the ultimate causes of this dissonance are that modern-day sexual mores are completely stupid, so deeply incoherent that acceptance of any one of them will necessarily lead to cognitive dissonance when contrasted against some other
That observation is a very useful starting place. When I find myself in a similar confusion, I try to switch my perspective to a more traditional view by imagining it involving my kin. Like: "What would I want to do to the guy who did this to my 18-year-old daughter?"
If a guy uploaded to pornhub a realistic sleazy deep-fake porn with my daughter's image and distributed the link within my community, I'd be contemplating the percussion sound of a baseball bat striking his kneecap.
Now that I have an anchor to my reaction, I can explore its possible reasons.
The modern US culture is (broadly) a culture of dignity, where "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is an aspirational ideal. If I aspire to this ideal for myself and my hypothetical 18-year-old daughter, then the sleazy deep-fake porn is "words" that I and my daughter ought not allow to hurt us. We would then treat the incident as we would one where someone created a fake Linked-In account for my daughter, or a controversial blog post written in my daughter's name, or if someone hacked my daughter's Twitter account and posted some unsavory tweets in her name.
In a culture of dignity, I would assume that my daughter's dignity cannot truly be compromised by something she didn't do (in this case: make a sleazy porn video). I would understand the need to correct the record--have pornhub take down the video, issue a clarification within our community --and I would regard that task as an annoyance.
However, underneath that culture-of-dignity veneer lurk centuries of cultures of honor. It doesn't take much for me to get into that mindset. By creating the deepfake porn and distributing it among my community, the guy compromised my daughter's honor--altered for the worse her reputation among my community--and by extension he compromised my honor. Swift baseball-to-the-kneecap plus spreading the word about the retribution is pure restorative justice.
(But what if the guy didn't distribute the deepfake? Like, what if I found it by browsing his laptop? The threat of distribution is there. So my gut response is to get immediately angry and see that he erases the video and promises never to do that again. Presumably, if I am browsing the guy's laptop, the guy is part of my community and I will have social levers to ensure compliance.)
The question is then: what culture does my community have?
If it's Blue Tribe PMC: my daughter's reputation will rise by spreading word about (a) her stoic response to someone's attempt at reducing her dignity, (b) our levelheaded pursuit of legal means of redress, and even (c) our high-brow discussions on why our culture regards sex as shameful in the first place.
If it's Red Tribe Appalachia: out comes the baseball bat.
hooser
1yr ago
Ivan Sixpack
Culturally accurate would be Ivan Third-liter. The traditional way to spend your evening drinking was to get two buddies to share--and defray the cost of--a liter of vodka. Thus the phrase "на троих" (literally, "for three").
hooser
1yr ago
Kanye has no ideological allies, because he is taking a culture war stance from two centuries ago, of which one side has already emerged victorious.
Kanye's pronouncements on Jews are derived from the currently-prevalent American-Black mythologies, such as those of the Nation of Islam. Kanye does have ideological allies, but they have very little pull among the current PMC.
Also on Stanford's list: "abusive relationship" should be replaced by "relationship with an abusive person", because:
The relationship doesn't commit abuse. A person does, so it is important to make that fact clear.
Firstly, they are breaking their own guide of "Person-First", which is the section just prior to that entry. According to the heading,
"The use of person-first language helps everyone to resist defining others by a single characteristic or experience if that person doesn't wish to be defined that way.
So, shouldn't that be something like "relationship with a person who occasionally makes an action that is perceived as abusive"?
And secondly, in my experience, it really is the relationship that's abusive, where the spiral of negative reinforcements for obsessively pushing each other's buttons cannot be laid at the feet of a single partner.
hooser
1yr ago
Graduate students in the University of California (UC) system have been on an official strike for the past five weeks. They are unionized by United Auto Workers (UAW). The union representatives have reached a tentative agreement with the UC representatives.
The tentative agreement would give graduate student workers in two United Auto Workers bargaining units an increase in minimum pay from about $23,250 to about $34,000 for nine months of part-time work.
"Part-time work" here means 20 hours per week. That's the official cap for UC graduate students receiving stipends. Translating into hourly pay: the graduate students will go from earning $30/hour to a bit more than $43/hour.
So, culture war angle:
On the one hand, I don't trust government representatives negotiating with representatives of government-employed union members to fully represent taxpayer interests. In particular, I fully expect that everyone negotiating on behalf of UC was fully sympathetic with the striker's cause, and not strongly motivated to maintain low costs.
On the other hand, graduate student workers tend to provide specialized services. So a reasonable question (that I don't have an answer to yet) would be: how much would a professional grader of introductory writing courses charge? What about one for differential calculus? What about one for organic chemistry? From that perspective, $43/hour sounds like not such a bad deal.
For extra culture war angle, the LA Times quotes some tweets from graduate students unhappy with the deal. I will include one that does raise an interesting point:
“It gives us a raise that’s enough to disqualify us for govt assistance programs and bump us to the next tax bracket, but not enough to cover those new costs,” according to the tweet.
hooser
1yr ago
the worst offender being a piece that was literally just a square canvas planted black. That's it.
Yes, but which square canvas painted black was it?
It may be one of Robert Motherwell's Iberia series, painted during the Spanish civil war. Though the most famous variants have a dash of non-black paint somewhere, some don't. Motherwell's Iberia canvasses have thick black paint and look almost like a map relief.
It may be one of Ad Reinhardt's paintings. He did a lot of them. Reinhardt's canvasses tend to have very subtle patterns and shades, though the whole point of some of the canvasses is to not have any patterns whatsoever. That would be consistent with the philosophy of art-as-art he was exploring:
There is nothing there. What you see is not what you see. What you see is nothing. Nothing but shapes, lines, colors. What you see is whats in your mind. What you see is something somebody told you to look for. Look out for anything you see! Watch it! Watch out! Take care! Don’t leap before you look out.
But if you are really lucky, it was the original Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. The Black Square is one of the most influential works of modern art, ground zero for exploration of what modern artists and modern art audience mean by art. [Intentionally so](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)): "It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins."
If it was the Black Square, then there is an additional [bonus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)) for the Culture War angle:
In 2015, while viewing the Black Square with a microscope, art historians at the Tretyakov Gallery discovered a message underneath its black paint. It was believed to read as "Battle of negroes in a dark cave." The reference was linked to an 1897 comic by French writer Alphonse Allais with the caption: "Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit" or "Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night." The researchers at the State Tretyakov Gallery speculated that Malevich was responding to the joke within Allais' popular work.
The "Twitter Censorship Files" (WSJ, archived link) promise to shed some light on the Hunter Biden's Laptop Saga:
The Twitter documents published by Mr. Taibbi include part of what appears to be a memo from James Baker, the Twitter deputy general counsel. “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted,” Mr. Baker wrote.
He continued that “there are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.”
With an election so close, any delay helped the Biden campaign, which was trying to squelch the Hunter Biden story that raised questions about what Joe Biden knew about Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Twitter went ahead and suppressed the story across its platform, going so far as to suspend the New York Post’s Twitter account.
Apparently, no light can be shed without heat. Matt Taibbi agreed to certain conditions in obtaining the files:
Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. [...] There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.
The conversation is therefore veering towards journalistic ethics rather than the content. That WSJ op-ed I linked to above leads with the following:
Elon Musk’s release of internal emails relating to Twitter’s 2020 censorship is news by any definition, even if the mainstream media dismiss it. There will be many threads to unspool as more is released, but a couple of points are already worth making.
The first is that Mr. Musk would do the country a favor by releasing the documents all at once for everyone to inspect. So far he’s dribbled them out piecemeal through journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter feed, which makes it easier for the media to claim they can’t report on documents because they can’t independently confirm them.
hooser
1yr ago
From an op-ed at Harvard Crimson (via Marginal Revolution):
Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do?
[snip]
Yet of the 7,000-strong horde, it seems that many members’ primary purpose is to squander away tax-free money intended for academic work on initiatives, projects, and committees that provide scant value to anyone’s educational experience.
For example, last December, all Faculty of Arts and Sciences affiliates received an email from Dean Claudine Gay announcing the final report of the FAS Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, a task force itself created by recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. This task force was composed of 24 members: six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators. The task force produced a 26-page report divided into seven sections, based upon a survey, focus groups, and 15 separate meetings with over 500 people total. The report dedicated seven pages to its recommendations, which ranged from “Clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage” to “Create a dynamic program of public art in the FAS.” In response to these recommendations, Dean Gay announced the creation of a new administrative post, the “FAS campus curator,” and a new committee, the “FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.”
Regardless of your stance on the goal of fostering a more inclusive visual culture, the procedural absurdity is clear. A presidential task force led to the creation of an FAS task force which, after expending significant time, effort, and resources, led to the creation of a single administrative job and a committee with almost the exact name as the second task force. I challenge anyone other than the task force members themselves to identify the value created for a single Harvard student’s educational experience.
I enjoyed reading the article, and as someone not at all affiliated with Harvard I am happy to argue against some of the ideas the author expressed.
Firstly, a quibble about facts:
In 1986, Harvard’s tuition was $10,266 ($27,914 adjusted for inflation). Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost.
Yes, the sticker-prize tuition at Harvard has grown, as it has at other private colleges. But the question ought to be: do students actually pay more? According to College Scorecard, students [1] pay on average just under $14,000 per year--for everything, including living expenses. I don't have comparable data for 1986, but that's lower than the median for 4-year US colleges (which is around $19,500).
One may argue that all US colleges have bloated administration and thus increased cost, and I am sympathetic to that argument. But at least let's acknowledge that, regarding actual cost of attendance, Harvard seems to be doing better when compared not just to its peers but the set of all accredited US 4-year institutions.
Now, for the challenge that the author kindly provides:
I challenge anyone other than the task force members themselves to identify the value created for a single Harvard student’s educational experience.
I don't know any actual specifics, but I am willing to bet (a modest amount) that at some point in the past decade there were student protests at Harvard regarding the choice of art on display. Probably the protests involved non-white students, or people speaking on behalf of non-white students, and their main objection was something like: people of color don't feel welcome at this institution because all the prominently-displayed portraits are of white people. Likely some professors were part of the protesters.
Whatever your opinions are as to the validity of the protesters' claim that the choice of art affects non-white students, the protests themselves would be disruptive and/or stimulating to the educational experience. The president's response to create the task-force on the issue has calmed the protests (taking away the disruptive aspect ) while taking seriously the vocal minority's concerns. For those who found the protests stimulating to the educational experience (which includes acquisition and polish of social norms, and not merely subject matter studied in one's classes), the president's response models how one goes about addressing strongly-expressed concerns over some issue of institutional inertia.
It's still reasonable to ask: was the process that the president cost-effective in achieving its objectives? I would love to see someone try to analyze that! In my experience, service on such committees isn't directly compensated, though it does suck up substantial time. Like, did those six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators have better things to do? They were either on that committee because they were deeply interested in the issue (the students and faculty), or because they were the nine administrators. Did those administrators have languishing tasks which would have actually been more important to address than calming down vocal protesters current and future? Will that new administrative post be filled by an already-existing Harvard employee, or are they actually hiring a brand-new administrator?
Inquiring minds kinda want to know.
[1] At least, students who filled out FAFSA and received any federal financial aid.
hooser
2yr ago
Thanks for the empathy!
This is also a great example of the limits of sympathy [1]. My reaction to the event was closer to "oh well, that's the subway for ya". I dealt with it, and shrugged it off. Whereas another woman experiencing the same event may end up traumatized and vowing never to ride public transit again. There is no way to know what effect an identical event would have on two people without them telling of it.
(Though one can use a probability distribution based on statistics... I just realized how geeky that sounds, but I stand by it.)
[1] I keep having to remind myself which is which:
Sympathy (which comes from the Greek sym, meaning "together," and pathos, referring to feelings or emotion) is used when one person shares the feelings of another; an example is when one experiences sadness when someone close is experiencing grief or loss. Empathy is also related to pathos. It differs from sympathy in carrying an implication of greater emotional distance. With empathy, you can imagine or understand how someone might feel, without necessarily having those feelings yourself.
hooser
2yr ago
Norms around school bullying are definitely changing. Here's a sample from Wall Street Journal: "When kids exclude peers from group chats and texts, is that bullying? (With lots of "yes" answers from various authorities.)
hooser
2yr ago
Am I missing something here? Do other people believe that all of these women (I’ve probably had this conversation with roughly two dozen of them) have been individually harassed on public transit, and I just have never noticed it? Despite being here every day of my life for over a decade? What is going on?
Thank you for considering the possibility that you are missing something. You are: most acts of public harassment are subtle and most women will not make a scene. (I am speaking from my experience and experience of women I know.)
Here's a specific example: I and my husband are riding a crowded train. We are standing, getting jostled around as people move around. My husband and I are facing each other, we are talking. Suddenly I feel the guy behind me grinding his clearly-erect penis into my butt.
I don't make a scene; I ask my husband to switch places with me, that's all. My husband doesn't notice a thing, nobody else noticed a thing. I look at the guy, and he just pivots away.
And, before anyone asks: yes, I firmly believe that not making a scene was the best option for me. I don't want to start a fight where I or my husband may get hurt; I don't want to report a harassment that has zero chance of prosecution.
And yes, almost all of my women friends who have lived in large metropolitan areas have at least one such story, and we are nothing special.
hooser
2yr ago
Nice effort-post! And thanks for doing the hard work of examining qualitative evidence.
Your main point is: (A) there's been a lot of female empowerment in Saudi Arabia over the past half-a-century, and (B) that's what explains the coincidental drop in fertility rates.
I agree that evidence indicates a substantial rise of female empowerment. To back up your qualitative evidence: Gender Inequality Index has a sharp drop in 2013, going from higher than Iran to on-par with Russia. "This index covers three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and economic status." For comparison, I have included other countries: USA is lower than Russia but higher than Japan, which in turn is higher than South Korea, which by 2015 is on par with Sweden.
I looked at other measurements in Our World In Data, but many of those measurements don't take into account that almost 40% of people in Saudi Arabia are migrant workers, most of whom are men.
However, I am far from convinced that female empowerment is the main cause of the drop in fertility rates.
There is a strong correlation between fertility rate and child mortality rate, and this is likely causal. If you want to eventually have three adult children and each baby is likely to reach adulthood, then you only need to have three babies; but if half of babies die before adulthood, then you better plan to have six babies.
In Saudi Arabia, child mortality starts dropping in the 60's and 70's, and fertility rate start dropping in the 80's. That's the kind of generational delay I would expect: people get used to the fact that kids aren't dying like flies, and adjust accordingly.
The correlation between female empowerment and fertility rate could have the opposite causal explanation: as it became less necessary for women to have lots of babies in order for a few of them to survive to adulthood, the society can empower women to marry later, get more education, and participate more in the labor force.
hooser
2yr ago
Plus, for the record, if we could engineer 'brain dead' animals that could carry out all the activities necessary to grow to full size for slaughter but were incapable of feeling any pain or pleasure, I would find this a perfectly acceptable solution as well. I don't want animals to suffer.
It's an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work. In effect, it would mean that the animal has leprosy. Humans who have leprosy (aka Hansen's disease) need to actively and consciously monitor themselves for any physical damage, because it's their inability to feel pain that leads small wounds to fester. (And they get wounds easier in the first place because the pain feedback isn't there.)
So a baby calf with something like leprosy will quickly hurt itself and get festering wounds.
That means that for this enterprise to be at all viable, you'd need to keep that calf isolated and in clean environment, and still check it over like every day for sores or cuts. That's a lot of work, and therefore not economically worth it.
hooser
2yr ago
I wish the nascent yet-to-prove-it's-viable cultivated meat industry the best of luck, because I am excited about the possibilities of what might happen if they manage to pull it off.
Imagine: celebrity steaks that are actual meat from celebrities! Want a bite of Ryan Gosling? Now you can!
Ever wanted to try panda meat but have obvious ethical and legal barriers? Now you can!
Or: Ever wonder what an alicorn would taste like? Our food artists have combined muscle cells from a horse, an eagle, and a rhinoceros.
Excellent point! My follow-up question is therefore: what actual utility is there in distinguishing some of the jobs (professions? tasks?) that progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world as "scientist"?
I do think that this utility exists and is important. It reminds me of Feynman's description of cargo cult science:
In an organization whose purpose is to progress in our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world--and which has a solid track record of effectively making this progress--who are the people that are essential to the enterprise, and who are in necessary supporting roles?
If the latter: do they require transferable set of skills that are not particular to this specific enterprise? The plumber who installs the chilled water system is such; so is the CPA in HR; so is the janitor. The lab manager (like, in a chem lab) would need to have specialized knowledge to do her job, but it's still transferable set of skills (solid Bachelor's level knowledge of chemistry plus great organizational skills). These people do useful work that enable the enterprise, but they are not essential.
It's useful to reserve the term "scientist" for the former--those who are essential to the enterprise--to keep the telos of their profession foremost in mind. It's useful, because the scientist's telos is frequently in direct contradiction with goals people have (e.g., getting that publication after you put in so much effort into that experiment, if only those couple of observation points weren't undermining your hypothesis). Let me quote Feynman once more:
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