I’m curious if similar experiments have been tried with other animals? Can we tell if model-based reinforcement learning is common to all mammals, or did it evolve independently in different lineages?
We had a horse named Doc that I’m pretty sure plotted how he was going to kill me every time we went to work. More than once I had to do a tuck and roll when he suddenly decided to go over and try to crush me.
He was smart, but not smart enough to realize where that ended.
Never saw it get $12 crazy, but at one point farmers had to kill off 100 million chickens because of bird flu. That’s nearly 1 chicken for every man, woman and child in the US.
Imagine the disposal cost, let alone the costs for sterilizing monstrous chicken warehouses. Then factor in the costs of keeping operations going while they repopulated.
However, there was something I read and can’t remember, about the prices staying jacked beyond what was to be expected.
It’s not pedantic to object to “nearly 1 chicken per man, woman, and child” in the US when it’s much closer to “1 chicken per 4 people” than it is to the former.
My dad worked for a private company that was a government contractor for almost 30 years before they were bought out by some international corporation.
I asked my dad if they used to have years where they didn’t turn a profit. “Oh absolutely, but we made up for it the next year, or they had money set aside, or…”
None of that happens anymore. Those chickens, I guarantee, caught those diseases because of the practices put in place by the 4 or 5 companies that basically produce all of the poultry for this country. They made poor business decisions, they chose to pinch pennies and not put money aside for unexpected emergencies, they continued to pay out dividends and issue stock buy backs instead of creating an emergency fund like they tell us poors we need to do.
So no, I don’t care to imagine any of their costs, because if they were a legitimate business, they would have contingency plans in place beyond “jack the prices up as high as they’ll go and keep em there until it starts to hurt our wallets enough.” They would take the hit for fucking once instead of passing the cost along to those who can least bare it so they can maintain their lifestyle built on greed and stolen wages.
Another way to look at this is that you’ve linked to an article that necessarily lacks the entire last eight years of context necessary to discuss an article written in 2024. Please, join the rest of us in our current reality if you want to discuss what’s happening now.
Seabaugh, a Republican, was elected to the Georgia House in a special election in the summer of 2021, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. His district includes parts of western Cobb County and portions of Marietta and Kennesaw.
Also, I wanted to say that the more open Trump is about racism, the more he will turn people off. There are a lot of people who are pretty much racists, but they would never admit it, even to themselves. These are people who cross the street when they see a black man coming toward them, but would never dream of saying the N-word and think Martin Luther King had a dream about something involving ending racism and that was good.
Those people will not want to be associated with Trump and Vance the more overt they get.
This is an interesting question - if you’re lying to yourself about being racist, and won’t condone racist policies and you know, act in a way to not look racist… Like a philosophical P zombie, are you for all external functional (maybe limited to politically) purposes not racist?
This doesn’t really address my thought experiment though - if they don’t act racist then now we’re just arguing about how they should feel inside, where no one can see their private thoughts. I.e. are we doing a purity test here, or do we care about actual things the people do?
I was assuming the people that are the potential P zombie here are the ones turned off from Trump because of open racism, and therefore NOT voting for him. I implied that these people are taking actions they (at least think) are not racist, like not voting for Trump.
All people are racist to some degree. The ability of our brains to perform categorization and pattern recognition are two major reasons why humans have been successful as a species. We can’t help but apply those concepts to the people we interact with.
Some people are more fear motivated and gravitate towards the “black people are violent” kind of racism while others tend towards the “Asians are good at math” kind of racism but both are forms of racism. Obviously the first type is going to have more negative outcomes in society than the second but that doesn’t mean the second type is not racist. They’re both fundamentally generalizations based primarily on the race of another human.
Simplifying complex information for quick analysis is how our brains work and that’s essentially what racism is. There is no getting away from it completely.
In this case, I think using the term racist here is diluting the term and causing confusion. I think it’s better to us the anthropological term here of tribal, at least in your first and last paragraphs. If everyone is racist then I have trouble not considering that a normal part of being human. It seems like railing against people who breath or something. If we’re biologically programmed to be this way, then we need to stop trying to claim people are bad for their biology, and at best we’re now going to say there’s an acceptable and normal level of racism on the spectrum that everyone is on.
I don’t think that’s a great framing, and avoiding that framing in my mind means not claiming that everyone is racist.
I think you have a good point but it gets pretty far into the semantics of language. Most people seem to use the term racist in casual language to refer specifically to what are widely considered the worst outcomes associated with grouping people together by race. The “black people are violent” kind of racism that I referred to earlier. However, I don’t think there is anything about the academic definition of the word racist that would limit it to this kind of usage. I also get why you would want to avoid the conclusion that everyone is racist but I really believe that is the most accurate assessment of reality.
Granted, it is easy to see how your KKK kind of racist would want to latch on to this conclusion to minimize the horrible nature of their beliefs. Still, I don’t think you can get a holistic view of the problem without recognizing the fact that this tendency to make generalizations about groups of people exists within us all. Without seeing the scope of the problem I don’t think you can address it in any meaningful sense.
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The safety net has people-sized holes in it. I nearly became homeless in June, and it wasn’t the state that came through for me, it was a relative. Even though I’m stll sleeping on a porch, I count myself lucky.
The programs that are supposed to help people stay housed are failing: not enough funds for housing vouchers, restrictions too high for enrollment, and waiting lists too long for practicality.
And Gavin is a wannabe autocrat. If it weren’t for him and his vetomania, we would have legalized natural psychedelics in CA by now. But no, instead we have people out there getting sick from sketchy products. And it seems like it’s the same with everything: do the exact opposite of helping while making it look like you care.
A large number of the homeless people in L.A. have jobs. It’s just ridiculously expensive to live there, so they end up living in their cars or a tent.
That’s what I’ve heard as well. Passing them on the street you’d probably think they weren’t even homeless at all. Not everyone finds it possible to get their life together that much, though :/
a 2021 study from the University of Chicago estimates that 53% of people living in homeless shelters and 40% of unsheltered people were employed, either full or part-time, in the year that people were observed homeless between 2011 – 2018.
In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.
Especially now that you can “become black.”
That said, I wonder if someone like Obama is counted in the “white people” part of that statistic. He should. He’s as white as he is black, just like Kamala Harris is as Indian as she is black.
It’s only in the past few years that “two or more” races became an option on most demographic forms. Even into the early 2000s most demographic forms only let you pick one category so you had to make a choice. The 2024 number may more accurately account for mixed race people but there is no way that 80s number does at all.
Source: was a confused mixed child asking adults which I should pick on official forms and just got shoulder shrugs and hand waving from them.
Three other day, I was reading through the parts of Mississippi constitution which regard marriages and got to the section about race-mixing. It was really disturbing to see some of those incredibly offensive terms merely crossed out from such a legally influential document.
Also, I learned that you have to accept the existence of “a supreme being” to hold any office in Mississippi. Less fucked up, but still fucked up.
I grew up in the south. Mississippi was too much even for a lot of us more country folk. My apologies to any decent people in Ms for getting lumped in with the rest of the terrible folks in that state….
Oof. I’m from Texas and had a friend in highschool who grew up in Mississippi. One day while discussing dominant and recessive traits in biology, she noted that she was born left-handed, but the teachers at her public school beat it out of her and got her to use her right hand. Anytime she’d use her left hand they’d
smack her hand with a ruler
because
"that’s THE DEVIL’S hand!"
Fucking beating kids in public school over superstitions! How we haven’t nuked Mississippi yet is beyond me. Fuck it, nuke everything from Texas to Florida up to South Carolina. I haven’t lived a perfect life, I’m sure I deserve a face-full of nuke, too.
If you haven’t seen bittersoutherner.com I highly recommend it. A great publication that’s doing good work trying to counteract all the shit happening down there. A lot of stuff I love about the south but unfortunately even more that I’m ashamed of about it.
I don’t doubt it, but based on Trump’s reasoning, Kamala Harris has an Indian mother, so she’s Indian. Therefore Barack Obama has a white mother, so he’s white.
Which is why I’m going to keep telling that to Republicans.
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