barry-cotter

> Early on, Fouchier told Science that he had created “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” But after controversy broke out, as the science communicator Peter Sandman has written, Fouchier and his supporters shifted to downplaying the danger. In early 2013, flu scientists ended their voluntary pause, arguing that when the research was done at enhanced biosafety level 3, or BSL3+, the benefits outweighed the risks. Kawaoka, who was normally the more taciturn of the two, hosted journalists in his lab, where he explained his safety procedures. “The influenza virus is sensitive to detergent,” he reportedly said while explaining the process of showering out. “They die.” A biosafety staffer at the University of Wisconsin got up before a university audience to dispel what she called myths about lab oversight. The address was broadcast on local television.

> Then, months later, Kawaoka’s lab saw two accidents involving lab-generated flu viruses, just one week apart.

> The accidents, a spill and a needle prick, carried a low risk of infection. Flu viruses are typically transferred through respiratory droplets, not skin contact or injection. Nonetheless, in letters obtained by The Intercept, staff at a funding agency accused the university of shirking biosafety precautions that Kawaoka had promised to adopt. They also demanded changes to the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s protocol for accidental lab exposures. Of particular concern was a plan to quarantine all researchers exposed to modified H5N1 at home, even if they were at high risk of infection — an approach that the funding agency administrators found so alarming that they threatened to end the lab’s grant unless the university changed course.

No, censorship can totally be the answer to getting people to stop saying things you don’t want them to say if you don’t have any commitment to free speech. See how Tucker Max or Milo Yiannopolous are no longer culturally relevant. Censorship works.

> If people are planning their near future based on what you've said you would likely be giving them, then at some point there is probably some inherited responsibility to at least give the user of that service a heads up so they can make other plans if possible.

If you’re not paying for it you’re not owed anything. Someone was doing you a favour at their expense and then they stopped. If you want something you can rely on pay for it.

> The [psychotherapy] myth is that people often cannot process or work through adverse events and traumas—abuses, breakups, firings, humiliations—and sometimes even repress the memories because they are too painful for the psyche to assimilate. But repressed or poorly processed traumas do not simply subside; they fester, and they spread, causing further psychological pain and maladaptive behaviors. Time alone, it seems, does not heal psychic wounds. But if the sufferer works through the trauma, potentially recovering repressed or degraded memories, she can understand and perhaps even eradicate the sources of her misery. Thus, the talking cure is indispensable, and a stoic embrace of silent suffering, once lauded, is not only a species of misguided masculinism, but is inimical to mental health.

> If I were to guess, I would say an average 4th grader knows the difference between nano, milli or micro seconds.

Have you ever spent any significant time in an environment where most people are not (children of) college graduates? Because this is absurd. The average person who has just finished a year of high school physics probably can’t tell you those.

No, spies for the Soviets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Hall

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Koval

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Gold

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Glasser

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dexter_White

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Gregory_Silvermaster

There were many, many people in the US who betrayed their country to the Soviets because they believed in Communism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_Unit...

Most people are at school because their parents need daycare, not to learn. Schools perform the important social function of sorting and ranking by academic ability and what students learn isn’t all that relevant to the sorting and ranking. One sixth of students in US high schools are bored in every class, every day and two thirds are bored every day[Highschool Study of Student Engagement].

Most people aren’t at school for learning.

You misread the post you’re replying to. It is in support of vouchers and is implying that public schools are pushing a viewpoint that is as faith based as any religion and as open to falsification. There are people upthread singing the praises of state schools as tools of assimilation. The point of the comment you’re responding to is to point out that many people have no desire to be assimilated to the new dispensation and as such the political system will accommodate them or not. Not is left as an exercise.

Alabama median household inching $52K https://datausa.io/profile/geo/alabama/

UK median household income £29.4K https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom

There are no US states as poor as the UK, Alabama included.

Colonies were always irrelevant to metropolitan standards of living. See how Norway, Sweden and Denmark with tiny or non-existent empires did as well as Britain, or how Germany and Austria-Hungary were no less wealthy than France. Developing makes a country rich. Looting a non-developed country is a one time thing. Developing is ongoing.

> the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the United States in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do – driven by improved use of existing technology and inputs, and accumulation of capital, rather than driven primarily by technological advancement. With the exception of a few sectors like AI, we are so far behind the frontier in terms of economic development that worrying about technological progress doesn’t make much sense, and at worst is a serious distraction.

> One of the other reasons men shy away from the discourse is they know before even setting foot on the road that the destination is Therapy. The true cliche, often quoted by Richard Reeves, is that women relate face to face, men relate shoulder to shoulder. That may be why men find therapy and the therapeutic worldview alien and unhelpful. Even the flimsiest male specimen has psychological needs related to accomplishment, strength, usefulness and capability; an atmosphere of unconditional empathy and unrestrained emotional disclosure can be poisonous to those things. Whatever the reason, men understand that therapy (the practice) is mostly just the medical codification of a typically female worldview as objectively true and correct. Most men aren't going to be interested in joining a conversation conducted in that spirit.

> Perhaps the stupidest idea that everyone takes for granted is that higher education in the United States is left-wing.

…

> Whatever else colleges and universities do in the United States, they define and police our most consequential social hierarchy, the dividing line between a prosperous if precarious professional class and a larger, often immiserated, working class. The credentials universities provide are no guarantee of escape from paycheck-to-paycheck living, but statistically they are a near prerequisite.

> The academy itself is incredibly hierarchical. Within a university, distinctions reign between a graduate student or postdoc, an adjunct, an assistant professor on tenure track, an associate versus full professor. These ranks are salient and consequential, treated as legitimate and earnestly policed.

Normal

> It’s arguably an artifact of an increasingly competitive society. The base “cost” of existing keeps rising, it’s simply becoming impractical to not be career focused.

The cost of practically every manufactured good and of food have been dropping for decades if not centuries. Average living space per person has likewise been getting for decades. Healthspan likewise.

In what sense has it become impractical not to be career focused? The average salary for a public high school teacher in NJ is $69K and the top $129K[1] while the average salary for a full professor in the NJ public university system is under $100K and the top is $174K[2] for the overwhelmingly dominant 9 month contracts. If you just want to get paid and you’re capable of doing a PhD you can just do a Master’s instead, in a much, much easier field and then do another job to get paid more.

[1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Master-Teacher-Salary-...

[2] https://www.univstats.com/salary/average-professor-salary-at...

Normal for the kind of people who get postgraduate degrees, a small minority of the population.

> There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education".

Yes, people know. Education schools aren’t held in low esteem by social scientists or the educated public by reason of lack of familiarity. They can’t even manage a detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Note I did not say large. The effect of an education degree on teacher effectiveness is not reliably distinguishable from zero.

> It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness

> Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

Your guess is exactly how I did it before returning to the normal handwritten way.

> Significance

> There is widespread belief across the social sciences in the ability of social interventions and social institutions to significantly influence rates of social mobility. In England, 1600 to 2022, we see considerable change in social institutions across time. Half the population was illiterate in 1,800, and not until 1,880 was compulsory primary education introduced. Progressively after this, educational provision and other social supports for poorer families expanded greatly. The paper shows, however, that these interventions did not change in any measurable way the strong familial persistence of social status across generations.

> Abstract

> A lineage of 422,374 English people (1600 to 2022) contains correlations in social outcomes among relatives as distant as 4th cousins. These correlations show striking patterns. The first is the strong persistence of social status across family trees. Correlations decline by a factor of only 0.79 across each generation. Even fourth cousins, with a common ancestor only five generations earlier, show significant status correlations. The second remarkable feature is that the decline in correlation with genetic distance in the lineage is unchanged from 1600 to 2022. Vast social changes in England between 1600 and 2022 would have been expected to increase social mobility. Yet people in 2022 remain correlated in outcomes with their lineage relatives in exactly the same way as in preindustrial England. The third surprising feature is that the correlations parallel those of a simple model of additive genetic determination of status, with a genetic correlation in marriage of 0.57.

> The USSR rapidly went from a relatively backwards nation that had been devastated by WW2 to a highly industrialized world superpower.

Imperial Russia was one of the most powerful countries in the world prior to WW1 and industrialising very rapidly. One of the reasons the Germans went for it when they did was because they knew that any later they could not beat the Russian Empire. To manage to become a “highly industrialised world superpower” starting with the Russian Empire of 1913 is not an achievement.

> Cuba has been hamstrung by US embargoes.

No other countries embargo the US and oceanic transport is so cheap they transport onions to Ireland from Australia at a profit. Cuba is a dump because of its government, not because of the US.

> Unfortunately I’m not knowledgeable enough about Venezuela to say.

Pretty standard communist story. Secret police, middle class and educated flee in their millions, economy collapses.

Your experience of Twitter and mine are very different. I suggest following people who produce threads and tweets you enjoy and blocking, muting and unfollowing others.

Ok, so you’re assuming moral progress of some kind. Do you have any principled arguments for whatever it is you believe?

Interesting rhetorical move. What other kinds of communications are you in favour of censoring?

Peter Singer aims for consistency, for not having it both ways. If killing a being of neural structure X is moral then have the same standard for human and non-human animals. He isn’t pretending that being in or out of its mother is morally relevant. If killing a nine month old “fetus” is moral killing a 3 minute old baby is. Singer will bite all those bullets.

Do you think dogs and pigs who are aware of what’s about to happen don’t?

You’re saying that it’s obvious infanticide is wrong. I’m pointing out that most humans ever have disagreed. Then you’re saying it’s obvious again and that it doesn’t need to be debated. Your “argument” is that the current moral fashions of your society are true and that this is obvious to all.

At best this is an attempt at persuasion by “Everyone else is doing it and so should you.”

Cultures that don’t practice infanticide are the exception in the historical and anthropological record. Not killing your children was invented by the Egyptians, taken up by the Jews and spread by the Christians, Muslims, presumably other Abrahamic faiths and cultures derived from them. It has not been obvious to the huge majority of people ever born that there was anything wrong with infanticide. If you think it is obviously wrong you might want to make an argument of some kind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide

The question isn’t if 2 year olds are intelligent it’s if dogs are of comparable intelligence to a human 2 year old. They are.

> As for language, the average dog can learn 165 words, including signals, and the "super dogs" (those in the top 20 percent of dog intelligence) can learn 250 words, Coren says. "The upper limit of dogs' ability to learn language is partly based on a study of a border collie named Rico who showed knowledge of 200 spoken words and demonstrated 'fast-track learning,' which scientists believed to be found only in humans and language learning apes," Coren said.

> Dogs can also count up to four or five, said Coren. And they have a basic understanding of arithmetic and will notice errors in simple computations, such as 1+1=1 or 1+1=3.

> Four studies he examined looked how dogs solve spatial problems by modeling human or other dogs' behavior using a barrier type problem. Through observation, Coren said, dogs can learn the location of valued items (treats), better routes in the environment (the fastest way to a favorite chair), how to operate mechanisms (such as latches and simple machines) and the meaning of words and symbolic concepts (sometimes by simply listening to people speak and watching their actions).

> During play, dogs are capable of deliberately trying to deceive other dogs and people in order to get rewards, said Coren. "And they are nearly as successful in deceiving humans as humans are in deceiving dogs."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090810025241.h...

Yes. Do you have a point to add to that? Do you feel there’s some reason he’s obviously wrong for example?

If you’re going to make a claim that strong please provide evidence.