lambdaphagy

Total population has oscillated for 20 years, but it would be mistaken to conclude that it's reached steady state because it's also been aging all the while. Meanwhile, TFR in Russia has been sub-replacement since at least 1990.

I think you're getting downvoted for suggesting that all the great world religious traditions were comparable in their influence on Western civilization, the civilization that the author knows best, is part of, and writes about.

In point of fact, the West draws primarily from the Hebrew messianic tradition and Hellenic philosophy. The influence of other systems of thought, while not literally zero (notably in the case of Islam) is just not comparable to that of Athens and Jerusalem. However valuable these other traditions might have been, they didn't shape the West like these two.

I used to have much the same view as the author. My view changed after reading what Christian theologians and philosophers actually wrote on the topic, as opposed to what I had just kind of figured they must have written.

When I read Aquinas on the soul, I realized:

- Aquinas means something quite different by "soul" than I had assumed.

- According to Aquinas's definition, I already believed in souls. (If you think that there's an important ontological difference between a turtle and turtle puree in a blender, you believe in Aquinas's souls.)

- Aquinas claims that rational souls are immortal because they can know and participate in a realm of eternal truths, so there must be some part of the soul that is already there, and hence eternal.

- Take that argument or leave it, but it is no more or less wacky than any other mainstream position in the philosophy of mathematics, where there are many problems for which there are simply no non-wacky possible solutions.

Correct or not, I found Aquinas's position surprisingly down-to-earth and was disappointed not to see it discussed.

1. School funding is actually somewhat progressive: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f...

2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.

Imagine that there were a government program that taught infants how to walk: the infants enter the program unable to walk, and a year later just about all of them can.

Now imagine trying to kill that program, or even taking your own children out unilaterally: "But walking is so important! How could you be opposed to children learning how to walk?"

Your reaction to that is my reaction to the idea that a state apparatus is necessary for children to learn how to make friends and play.

The article makes several important criticisms of EA that are obscured beneath self-parodically uncharitable language. The insults are self-defeating in that they suggest the authors can't think calmly about the targets of their criticism.

If your political tribe controls a given institution, then there is generally no need to do things by legislative fiat-- you simply do them, and your choices are status quo. Meanwhile the patrons of a library have essentially no say in who staffs their libraries or the schools where those librarians are trained, whereas the state legislature is at least theoretically democratically accountable.

Not making any kind of normative point here, just observing that it's a little less clear than "selfless librarians vs meddlesome politicians".

At the risk of overinterpreting your comment, I think most religious people would be surprised to see their religion characterized as an ersatz government social service.

I'm not saying you should reflexively believe the opposite of what any given source reports, just bear in mind the track records.

My original comment pertained to a general pattern of communication from public health agencies-- I believe you were the first to bring up that tweet.

But if you want to explore the topic, by 14 January 2020 the virus had been sequenced for over a week, and its status as a beta-coronavirus with substantial sequence similarity to SARS established. Even if the sentence "preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" was true, rather than merely asserted by Chinese authorities (as now seems more likely) it's just not a terribly pertinent thing to report if you're trying to be Gricean about it. It was one instance of a pattern of minimization from public health agencies that persisted even after it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 had global reach: https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/things-can-get-r...

WHO was largely denying the possibility of airborne transmission as late as July 2020.

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/71/9/2311/5867798

It's simply a matter of applying a prior: when I hear an organization's claim, I consider the base rate at which past claims have proven trustworthy, adjusting for whether past errors were honest mistakes, noble lies, culpable failures to apply medieval-peasant-tier common sense, the fruit of transparently ulterior motives, and so on. I sure hope they're right in this case but it's not clear why in particular I should think so.

What do you do?

Where have you heard that before?

My understanding is that "invention of the printing press" generally refers to movable type, the thing that caused a revolution in the mass production of written material. Other techniques like block printing or indeed any other method of applying ink in a fixed pattern, came earlier but were not as generally useful.

Yes, it's a minor inconvenience when it's expected and you have confidence in a good prognosis. It can be tortuous when you don't know whether it's about to get worse.

Glad you're ok, but I'm surprised you describe SOB as a slight inconvenience. In general, SOB is a pretty bad sign-- you're having trouble getting the one thing you'll die fastest without. Sure, you can put up with temporary mild SOB if you know it's going to stay mild, but not everyone can know that :/

In common law, there is a doctrine called "strict liability". Some activities, e.g. building demolition, are so inherently risky that, in the event of a tort, the court does not bother to determine whether the defendant was malicious or negligent: the plaintiff is simply awarded damages.

Guarding Jeffrey Epstein seemed very much like a strict liability situation. If it was obvious to everyone on the planet that Epstein would have some sort of "suicide" on your watch, and you failed to bubble wrap him in gopros and triple-guard him with officers from three different units, you're just at fault, period.

Wardens can't realistically control every single thing that happens on their turf. But they can absolutely keep the single most important prisoner in the country alive, even against that prisoner's will, if they want to.

There was a time in my life where I would have made approximately minimum wage at a nominal 40 hour work week, and far below that in consideration of actual hours worked. I didn't live alone. I don't know whether you would have called my conditions "comfortable", but with some spending discipline I was able to travel to Europe several times a year.

I value my solitude to be sure, but it's not really clear why living alone is a right rather than a nice-to-have or even a policy goal. If legislators had responded to my plight by making the terms of my employment illegal and hoping for the best, gratitude would not necessarily have been my first instinct.

Some of the constructs in this paper are pretty tendentious, without much self-awareness about it. For example, one of the six measures they use for alignment with scientific consensus is: "should the government fund stem cell research?", which is a moral and political question rather than a scientific one. Two parties could agree on all of the positive facts about stem cell research while differing over whether the government ought to fund it.

> scourge on civilization international community a fight for the cause of democratic norms rules-based international order consistent pushback “innovation” mistaken beliefs and not supported by any evidence quirky ideas chattering class “the potential for innovation” amorphous and hand-wavy rhetorical gestures a anarchist political narrative Private entities now wish to disrupt the global international order attempted financial coup anarcho-capitalist wing of Silicon Valley something so unregulated and volatile ideological purpose crypto acolytes cling to this narrative misplaced faith magical thinking and unspecified means or empty appeals failed narrative seemingly plausible zero evidence token schemes failed narrative highly irrational infinite chain of economically irrational actors greater pools of fools into the scheme Ponzi scheme laughable absurd to think systemic misunderstanding absurdly small original sin bluster amazing solution for nothing non-existent problems they don’t understand extremely byzantine Rube Goldberg-esque slot machines casino fiefdoms money laundering, ransomware criminality dark money veneer of gambling false claims zero evidence environmental devastation increasingly frothy ecosystem of scams to defraud the public

Aquinas acknowledged heavy philosophical debts to Maimonides and Averroes while critiquing them in particulars. And as for the theology, I don't see how you get "looked down on" from: https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q10. To say that Aquinas "looked down on" pagans seems like an almost maximally uncharitable summary of the man's actual views. Where are you seeing this?

What prediction would this theory make for Sweden?

In surveys of hundreds of human cultures, I don't believe anthropologists have found a single one in which women are, on average, even as tall as men. Though average height differs considerably between groups, there appears to be a consistent bias favoring men (see Fig 1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1558-5646....).

We also know that although secular changes in diet can shift population averages over time, the heritability of height is pretty high: most estimates end up at about 0.8. If your parents were short, getting adopted into a tall family is not going to help you become taller.

Height is a highly polygenic trait and no single gene controls more than a few percent of the variance. When people say that we don't know the "genes for height", that's what they mean, not that the jury is still out on whether height has any genetic basis at all.

It's 0.002%/yr. Mostly just impressed that we can measure this at all.

The substance you're talking about is already essentially banned in the developed world.

Cooling costs 1/3 the energy of heating per degree day, but comes in for more hate because it seems decadent.

I hope no one ever posts a horrible thing like calling for the death of a politician on twitter.

Or take the 1954 attack on the Capitol, in which Puerto Rican separatists opened fire from a balcony, wounding five members of Congress. That seems to me at least as bad as what happened yesterday.

Did this discredit the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism and drive its supporters from public life? It would appear not: you can still be a celebrity with a successful career while voicing your support and admiration.

I'm not asking you to say that what happened yesterday was good, because of course it wasn't. I'm asking you why you think that such events are so rare and universally condemned. In fact they seem to happen on a timescale of decades at most, probably less, and the public judgment of the perpetrators seems to correlate less with the objective severity of the act as with elite consensus opinion of the cause it promotes.

Does bombing the Capitol strike you as a qualitatively lesser offense? I say they are both bad. What do you think?

I don't think that's actually true. Weather Underground, for example, bombed the Capitol in 1971. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/02/a-...)

One of the group's leaders, Bill Ayers, lives unremorsefully in a tony neighborhood in Chicago where he went on to have an influential academic career, dedicating books to political assassins, and mentoring future presidents. This caused a minor kerfluffle when the details resurfaced to public light in 2008, but it was clearly, in the end, no obstacle to Obama's election.

One might raise a similar point about a figure like Oscar Lopez Rivera who, while he never bombed the Capitol, definitely did bomb about 100 other locations around the country and was rewarded for his efforts by an NYC ticker tape parade once he was released from prison. Lin Manuel Miranda's admiration for Rivera has hardly proved a stumbling block for his wildly successful career.

And that's just one end of the frequency-severity spectrum. Mobs break into the Capitol and interrupt proceedings with perhaps surprising regularity, as with the Kavanaugh hearings for example.

In any case, it seems that bombing the Capitol or doing widespread domestic terrorism is only selectively an impediment to a later life of comfort in the US.