So I'm thinking of "discipline" as a broader and longer term thing that's about persisting at overcoming obstacles in a structured and intentional way over time. This persistence takes, as one of its prereqs, at least the occasional availability of "energy", the immediate capacity to exert effort to overcome obstacles here and now.
It takes discipline (for many people) to keep a clean house day in and day out. It takes energy to get up right now and wash the dishes. If you rarely or never have the energy to get up and wash the dishes, you're missing one of the key parts of the discipline of keeping a clean house.
But it also takes energy to do things that aren't necessarily part of any pattern of discipline -- it takes energy to organize friends for an outing, or to ride your bike to the bodega, or to refine a tactic in a competitive videogame.
Set aside whether you're willing or able to pursue a sustained program of efforts for the sake of delayed or diffuse rewards -- the realm of discipline. In the more basic sense of energy, do you feel like you have the inclination to exert moderate immediate efforts for moderate near term rewards? Or do you consider exerting such efforts, but think "that sounds like too much work" and accept known low rewards for the sake of lowering effort?
Like being on time -- you're preparing to leave for work, and you get the moderate reward of getting there on time if you leave now instead of leaving in 10 minute. This isn't necessarily a matter of discipline and long term thinking -- this is "right now, is it too much effort to get up and leave for the sake of being less stressed out 10 minutes from now?"
Potentially it's a matter of discipline if there's a lot of earlier preparation that has to go into being ready to leave on time. But if it's just "I'm going to watch YouTube for another 10 minutes at the cost of being late", that seems like a different problem. What's it feel like to you?
Or say at your shitty min wage job you were actually paid daily for performance in some legible way, so that if you were able to do "50% more work" in your next shift than you normally do, by some measurable outcomes, you'd take home 50% more money at the end of that day. Does that opportunity sound appealing or aversive?
lemongrab
1mo ago
How confident are you that you have a problem with "discipline" as opposed to a problem with "energy"?
To clarify, I'd say the classic hyperactive ADHD person has a primary problem with discipline, not with energy. They can maintain a high level of activity, but it's poorly directed toward their professed goals. In contrast, somebody who's, say, chronically severely sleep deprived may incidentally have a problem with discipline, but primarily has a problem with energy -- there's not enough energy available to do what's needed to stay on top of their responsibilities, and redirecting it more strategically won't fix the problems.
Are you somebody who chronically doesn't do things you need to do, or are you somebody who just chronically doesn't do things, full stop? Where does the day go? I'd say if it tends to go to "the lowest-effort available alternative at any given moment", you may have a problem with energy, rather than discipline. This may have a variety of potential causes, including physical unwellness.
Not an expert on this issue, but my impression is that conditions there were exacerbated by
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neighboring slaveholding nations discouraging trade with them in the decades after the revolution -- a de facto embargo being especially hard on an island nation.
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huge reparations they had to pay to France under threat of military attack, which were such a large fraction (or perhaps initially, multiple) of their economic output for so long that successive governments could only focus on extracting enough wealth from the populace to service the debt
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early lack of economic development and limited trade led to low-tech dependence on burning wood for fuel, which in turn led to extensive deforestation, erosion, and desertification of the productive lands. Supposedly neighboring DR avoided a corresponding environmental catastrophe during the mid 20th century by having a stronger central government that could, for instance, execute illegal loggers in their territory (while outsourcing their supply of illegally-logged fuel to Haiti).
Don't know if any of these fully explain the difference from majority-black baseline, but the onerous debt -- which they kept having to pay into the 20th century to US investors who eventually purchased it from France -- may have contributed to setting them off on the wrong foot institutionally.
lemongrab
2mo ago
gluten is a fall guy for glyphosate in the wheat supply chain.
Gluten is probably a fall guy for fructans or other difficult-to-digest oligosaccharides that are naturally present in some grains.
lemongrab
4mo ago
don't know what the climate is like there
Amusingly, the town motto is literally "It's The Climate". Great place to sleep outside.
The FDA authorization for mifepristone is for abortions up 10 weeks, at which point the fetus is, at best, about the size of guppy. In the context of all the shed uterine tissue that's expelled alongside it, the "remains" are not even easily identifiable as such.
Aside, mifepristone is just one of two pharmacological components of the standard "medical" (as opposed to surgical) abortion. The other is misoprostol, which can induce abortion by itself, just somewhat less reliably. Mail-order abortions would not stop if mifepristone became completely unavailable tomorrow.
lemongrab
7mo ago
I talked about this in the thread I originally linked -- I think zoologists are trying to classify based on something like relative distance between overall genomes, whether or not that corresponds to obvious phenotypic differences. They're trying to make it more consistent than old-school 'natural history', and that makes their definition diverge from popular use.
I'd say this just highlights how the stuff the zoologists are interested in among other animal species doesn't correspond well to what's politically relevant in an HBD sense, and it's an unhelpful veneer of scientism to try to apply the zoologists' "subspecies" label to human races.
The real argument is to show that politically-relevant behavior relevantly originates in genes that distribute unevenly across politically-characterized racial categories. That can probably be done, but it shouldn't be confused with what the zoologists are doing with other species.
lemongrab
7mo ago
> non_radical_centrist
> doesn't read much of Kulak's stuff
...fair, username checks out.
Kulak's edginess-to-insight ratio is really high, and maybe increasing lately? Contrast him with Zero HP Lovecraft, who's definitely absurdly racist, usually wrong in some way, and also has edgelord tendencies. ZHPL sort of credibly presents himself as a classic philosopher who bravely followed his quest for the wisdom to save society deep down into the blackest abysses of edginess. Kulak presents himself as a guy who wants to watch the world burn, which, to me, makes his forced edginess even more obnoxious.
Given Kulak's recent post about blonde women, I'm disappointed he passed up the opportunity to speculate here about how hundreds of generations of arranged marriage must have relaxed the selective pressures for physical attractiveness on Indians. It would be very on-brand.
This from the article,
[...] mere observation of any of the billions of members of other species and subspecies of human.
with accompanying graphic, reminded me of an exchange I had here last month
I've never seen the claim that different human races should be considered sub-species, at least not by anyone who isn't absurdly racist.[...]
Maybe the geneticists are just knocking down a straw man when they say humans don't have subspecies and therefore there aren't biological races of humans, but it is a thing they do. [...]
There are admittedly an handful of absurd racists out there, so at some point I think scientists do have to knock those down. [...]
So here you go, @non_radical_centrist, the subspecies take in the wild. Or was @KulakRevolt already established among the "handful of absurd racists" around here?
I don't think there's anything miraculous about the fact that as we've observed the wondrous variety of natural phenomena, it's been possible to pick out a few aspects that can be reliably approximately explained with reference to simple mathematical rules. It's just selection bias that we hype these singular aspects of nature where it does work well. The vast majority of our observational data has resisted lossless compression -- it's only reasonably predictable through extensive particular knowledge, if at all. Various non-physics authors have drawn attention to this as the "Unreasonable INeffectiveness of Mathematics" in their domains of study. I get suspicious every time somebody holds up the law of gravitation as a "representative" outcome of scientific inquiry.
Undoubtedly there is a genetics-related meaning of race, in the sense that there are identifiable genetic markers that discriminate (heh) between people of different racial categories.
I should have made clear in my reply above that I was specifically questioning the implication, in the post I was replying to, that a PCA plot showing distinct racial clusters can rebut 'the old feel-good rhetorical device" that there's more genetic variation within than between. It does not necessarily do this, in the situation where the PCs showing those distinct clusters themselves explain a negligible fraction of overall variation.
But that's fine! Rebutting "more variation within than between" does not seem not necessary for race to have a genetic basis.
Maybe the geneticists are just knocking down a straw man when they say humans don't have subspecies and therefore there aren't biological races of humans, but it is a thing they do. See Biological Races in Humans:
The word “race” is not commonly used in the non-human biological literature. [...] Of all the words used to describe subdivisions or subtypes within a species, the one that has been explicitly defined to indicate major geographical “races” or subdivisions is “subspecies” (Futuyma, 1986, pg. 107–109; Mayr, 1982, pg. 289). Because of this well-established usage in the evolutionary literature, “race” and “subspecies” will be regarded as synonyms from a biological perspective. In this manner, human “race” can be placed into a broader evolutionary context that is no longer species-specific or culturally dependent.
The question of the existence of human “races” now becomes the question of the existence of human subspecies. This question can be addressed in an objective manner using universal criteria.
This guy goes on to argue that by the broader race/subspecies criteria, there are biological races of chimps, but not of humans.
I also have no idea what people who think race is 100% socially constructed and not biological mean. Do they think a baby born to self-identified black parents is not likely to have noticeably darker skin than a baby born to self-identified white parents? There's something to be said for "racial classifications are not cross-culturally consistent", such that in Brazil people might be called "white" while having a large percentage of African ancestry than many people in America who are called "black", but that just reflects how the map is socially constructed, not the territory -- which is a truism.
As I understand, what the professional geneticists mean by "human racial classifications have no basis in biology" is something like the claim
(1) "Inasmuch as there's a sensible biological phenomenon of "race" or "subspecies" that we can talk scientifically about all across biology (not just humans), we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations. Morphology and behavior isn't enough. If you want to tell me that you've discovered a new subspecies of gray flycatcher, the distinctive markings on its tail feathers and the distinctive song that it sings aren't going to cut it -- you have to show something about the ratio of overall genetic variation within vs between candidate populations of gray flycatchers.
Many biological "subspecies" that were previously identified based on morphology and behavior don't hold up to modern genetic analysis. This is not to say that your candidate subspecies of gray flycatcher can't be reliably identified by genetic analysis -- maybe it has a handful of mutations that always appear in it but not in the rest of the species, and maybe those mutations underlie the distinctive behavior and morphology -- but those distinctive differences may be located in too few genes to make the cut overall. Maybe the genetically-mediated differences in morphology and behavior will drive true subspeciation in the future, but it's not there yet.
Applied to human races, the genetic differences between human racial groupings fail to stand out against the backdrop of human genetic diversity sufficiently, across the whole genome, to make the cut as biological subspecies, at any threshold of "sufficiently" to be useful across the rest of biology (not that biology has a lot of use for subspecies in general -- species are fuzzy enough already)."
What some people seem to want this to mean is more like
(2) "Observed average morphological and behavioral differences between members of different human races are not genetically mediated."
This is absurd on its face, and is not implied by (1).
There's plenty of room for different socially-defined and approximately ancestry-tracking racial groups of humans to exhibit genetically-mediated differences in morphology and behavior without qualifying as biological subspecies. There's plenty of room for greyhounds and pitbulls to do so as well, also without qualifying as biological subspecies.
lemongrab
8mo ago
Any of us can download publicly available genetic data, run a PCA on Europeans, East Asians, and Sub-Saharan Africans to get a clean triangle with each of the three populations on a node.
I have not performed this exercise, but my understanding is that the first two PCs you'd use as the axes of this plot will usually explain a negligible percentage of the total variance in a genomic dataset. PCA will always rank axes by variance, but that doesn't mean the top few PCs are any good, in an absolute sense, at reducing the data dimension while preserving structure. Even if the PCs that let us reliably identify these clusters happen to be the relatively 'best' PCs we could use to collapse the multidimensional data onto a graph, they could still suck, in an absolute sense.
lemongrab
8mo ago
It looks like it took the police killing at least 6k people, possibly up 12k or even higher, to reduce the number of murders over that period by ~15k cumulatively. Probably a fair bit of "substitution" there, assuming drug gangsters were murdering each other at high rates before -- some of this must be criminal-on-criminal killings being replaced by cop-on-criminal killings. Still, it does look like it was plausibly a net win on that measure -- have to be believe at least that police killings were better targeted at criminal elements than the background murders were. And it sounds like Filipinos broadly supported the effort. Still not sure how much it cut down on the actual drug use, but cutting down on the associated crimes is probably more important.
El Salvador, yeah there it does sound like they made big gains with locking up all the gangsters, don't know if they had to kill a lot of people to do that, or if US accusations that Bukele cut deals gang leaders are true. Easier to know who to go after in a place where the criminals are basically tattooing their criminal affiliations on their faces.
lemongrab
8mo ago
Sick society, sure, hard to argue with that, but I can't believe a Philippines-style approach makes it any healthier -- what's the evidence that executing however many thousand people there even improved the problem at all? Last I heard, the outgoing Duterte government didn't make much of an attempt to quantify the positive effects the several-year "reign of terror" had on stopping drug crime. Certainly haven't heard the compelling evidence that it worked well enough to justify normalizing the "shoot a guy and sprinkle some meth on him" tactics that police were empowered to use against civilians (and maybe civilians against each other).
I don't know who's laughing about how the need to test our policies to see if they work entails the risk of making people's lives worse, and I'm certainly not seeing how some Judge Dredd approach is so self-evidently superior that it wouldn't need to be empirically evaluated.
I don't really know about this fuzzier sense of "seeking death". Maybe that is what some of them are doing. Speaking as guy who fully expects to take his eventual death into his own hands but doesn't expect to ever abuse opioids, it's not what I would do if I were seeking death, but I can see how it could be that way for some. Certainly it's not a thing to do if you're unwilling to risk death. Regardless, I don't think most of the ones who are alive are seeking death in the immediate sense -- the sense in which they would actually choose to make use of a MAID kit if it were offered to them.
I grant there's not a bright line between
(1) "refrain from taking away the means for people to kill themselves"
(2) "actively give people the means to kill themselves",
(3) "kill people at their request",
(4) "kill people people at your discretion"
It's appealing to try to erect a fence between (1) and (2), which separates decriminalization of potentially lethal drugs from MAID. A fence between (1) and (2) looks like making it generally permissible to possess but not to distribute. But of course this runs into problems with the presumption of "intent to distribute", and with the substantial overlap between users and distributors.
Personally, I don't care so much if people who want to die actually do so, and don't believe it's possible or desirable to spend a lot of effort to prevent this in general. It is worth spending effort to make people less inclined to self-destruction in the first place, and maybe keeping them from initially getting their hands on substances that set them off down the spiral is an important part of that. Ultimately I just don't know enough about why these people are abusing these drugs in the first place -- hard to believe it's that they don't know what road they're stepping into when they start.
I suspect the root of the problem is that we don't know how to build the "rat park" mentioned elsewhere in this thread, neither can we actually stop the movement of the fentanyl, so none of this going to get "solved" in any way that doesn't look like brutally grinding a bunch of unfortunates under society's heel. It's not surprising that this is unpalatable enough for people to try just looking the other way.
lemongrab
8mo ago
Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts?
This feels mostly boo-outgroup. Setting aside both the moral arguments and factual issues of how Canada uses MAID, it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.
lemongrab
8mo ago
I think this is partly just Oregon being Oregon. Oregon has historically been a leader in direct democracy and ballot access (first to use ballot initiatives, first to directly elect Senators, first to use universal vote-by-mail), and as such they sometimes pass half-baked initiative policies that are unwound later (like the initiative-based supermajority requirements on local tax increases).
Fortunately, Oregon seems pretty open to actually testing policy to see how it works -- this is the state that literally A/B tested Medicaid expansion. It was also, surprisingly, the first state to roll back federal covid quarantine requirements, and kept them rolled back after seeing that they were no longer making any difference.
You may be right though that disillusionment is setting in with certain liberal policies. Oregon's green-space-preserving laws that make development outside of cities almost impossible are also coming under attack recently as the housing situation worsens. At least Oregon finally overrode labor interests and its general nanny-state tendencies enough to let residents pump their own gas.
lemongrab
8mo ago
If you're most concerned with physical symptoms of anxiety, have you/your doctor considered beta blockers? Off label for anxiety, but very commonly prescribed, seem to work well for the somatic shaky-sweaty type symptoms.
lemongrab
8mo ago
Several of those antisocial behavior examples you listed just seem trashy. I can respect a solid Evil Scheme executed with cunning and deceit, but stealing the snacks from the break room or pushing the limits of return policies ain't it. I imagine myself doing these things and it just feels like it would be embarrassing to stoop so low for something so trivial, and where the social risk of being caught is more "disappointment" than punishment. This is the antisociality of an animal or a machine, that doesn't even have a theory of other human minds and can't understand the disappointment when unaccompanied by punishment. It's more aesthetically depressing than morally repugnant to see this kind of behavior.
This looks like it was written by someone talking slightly too much Adderall (I Can Tell by Some of the Pixels and by Having Taken Quite a Few Adderalls in My Day) and the inverted U's being drawn as normal curves when they'd make more sense as parabolas looks like a tip-off that the author is unconsciously pushing a little too hard at that satisfying feeling of fluent-compression of concepts -- but overall this seems reasonable.
My midwit slap-another-axis-on-it extension of that model would be that (for a given task context, but maybe more broadly shared between a variety of task contexts) there's something like a y-axis of "expected reward for effort" superimposed over the x-axis of exploit-explore, or "focus-divergence" (exploit-explore only trade off at a fixed level of task effort). On that graph, I think the effect of Adderall is to push up-and-left -- to increase the expected reward for exploit-effort. This is very performance-enhancing for people who need more exploit-effort, bad for people who actually need more explore-effort, and mixed for people who already have a good explore-exploit balance but just need to put in more overall effort to improve at the task.
In this model, a depressive state is one where, for almost any available task-action context, the expected reward for effort is very low -- and that's why Adderall can sometimes be a decent antidepressant. The classical hyperactive ADHD state would be higher up the y-axis but shifted way the right, while an inattentive ADHD state might not be as far shifted to the right, but lower down below the x. Each might get some benefit from Adderall pushing up-and-left, but in different ways. And of course, some people who look like any of those phenotypes might just need different task-contexts than the ones they're presented with.
lemongrab
8mo ago
But “becoming” French should mean, at a bare minimum, being married to an ethnically French person, having a child with at least two ethnically-French grandparents, and changing one’s name (given name and surname!) to a historically French name.
Français par le sang verse seems like a reasonable additional alternative.
Worth the Candle is unique and memorable, sometimes frustratingly uneven but hard to put down. Much of the kitchen sink world building fell flat for me (but there are some striking inventions); sometimes the story drags (but it rarely feels like the author is losing his grasp on it); some of the characters have odd motivations and aren't especially likeable (but they're consistently and characteristically odd, and their dynamics with each other are well developed, with moments of surprising insight); in all, it's rarely missing on every aspect at the same time, so there's almost always something to keep pulling you along. And the prose is workmanlike throughout, which is saying something because the book just does. not. end. Even the end isn't the end, but if you're still with it by then you won't mind. As the only LitRPG I've read, I can't say with authority that it's way better crafted than most of the genre, but that's certainly the impression I get secondhand, despite it being a Door-Stopping Work of Staggering Self-Indulgence.
That's good! Developing discipline is much more tractable if you have, in principle, the energy to do the shit you need to do!
Not that it's trivial, but at least it does sound like you're asking the right question.
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