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JoBo

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JoBo ,

The fact of higher protein content appears to be true (without going back to find and critique all the original studies). Explanations are much harder to ‘prove’ for questions like this.

We can’t do experiments on the evolution of tears, so all we can do is come up with plausible theories and look at how they fit with the body of evidence. With enough evidence, from enough different angles, we might one day be able to say which proposed explanations fit the facts (and which don’t). It’s how we (eventually) proved smoking was killing people (another question we cannot do experiments on human beings to prove one way or the other) but not all questions are as important as smoking was and there isn’t necessarily a neat, single factor explanation to find even if someone was willing to fund all the necessary research.

Not my area but, for example, I recently saw a study claim that sniffing women’s tears makes men less aggressive. That’s an angle that might help build some support for, or knock down, the theory that emotional tears are useful for social communication (ie help get women killed slightly less often). Did those studies use sad stories or onions? Did any study compare sad stories to onions? If we’re seeing hints of differences between sad stories and onions, that would tend to support the social communication element of the explanation. Unless we think there’s a difference between sad tears and frightened tears, which there probably is, so we should check that too. And the rest of the literature on tears, if it’s considered important enough to get the theory right. And we need to remember that sticky tears are not the same thing as smelly tears, so can we do experiments where non-emotional tears are made sticky, and non-sticky tears made to smell frightened?

Etc etc.

Explaining things we observe but cannot directly experiment on is a process, a process which typically takes many years and dozens of research groups. And a lot of funding. And decades of exhausting battles, if there is a lot riding on the answer (as it did with Big Tobacco vs Public Health).

JoBo , (edited )

They get away with it if the people they attack are less powerful than they are, yeah. Power is a thing.

JoBo ,

No it doesn’t. The dean who made this decision, as with most people in stable positions of power, does not need telling what to do because he will do it anyway.

Rutledge clerked for Clarence Thomas, and is featured in a painting included in ProPublica’s reporting on Republican donor Harlan Crow’s gifts to the Supreme Court Justice.

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel (www.nytimes.com)

This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state...

JoBo ,

I agree with a lot of this but this bit is a non-sequitur:

One thing many people don’t realize is that the Zionist colonial project was in motion long before WWII, as far back as the late 1800s.

Political zionism did get started in the late 1800s, as a proposed solution to the centuries of pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews in Europe. Prior to the horrors of WWII, most Jews considered it literal heresy. It was the Holocaust that convinced many that Zionism was their only option, not least because most of the free world closed its borders to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. There was nowhere else to go.

This is a very useful short piece by a Jewish anti-zionist, pleading with the pro-Palestinian movement to take more care with their understanding of history: Zionism, Antisemitism and the Left Today

The Palestinians are paying the price for Europe’s crimes. The problem cannot be solved by denying that those crimes ever happened.

JoBo , (edited )

I didn’t say you denied the Holocaust. I said you implied that it is the first example of European antisemitism.

JoBo ,

Statutory rape does not exist as an offence in English law. The offence is sexual contact with a minor.

The age of consent is 16 but 18 if the older party is in a position of responsibility (like a teacher). So whether or not she had unlawful sexual contact with the second boy would depend on how that law was interpreted, as well as when the first contact took place.

JoBo ,

I’m used to that having full articles

Quite a lot of communities ban posting of full articles, including this one:

Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post.

JoBo ,

Helluva headline given the story is about tied labour.

JoBo ,

I mean, yeah. All of this. Absurd.

But, FWIW, offloading cheap tat onto charity shops is not going to work well. It costs them money to put it on a shelf and it probably takes up more space than it is worth. Plus, they very likely can’t sell electrical equipment that has had its cord chopped up and repaired, or at least not without spending more on having it tested than they could sell it for anyway.

Next time, find a friend with small feet who would like to take it off your hands.

JoBo ,

DOIs are forever. It’s why they exist.

How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals

I constantly see angry mobs of people decrying “woke”, “critical race theory”, ““grooming””, and whatever other nonsense they made up this week. They march around with guns, constantly appending lib as a prefix to any word they can use to denigrate. They actively plot violence and spew hatred in the open....

JoBo ,

Because there is no mirror image.

@pjwestin has given you a good description of fascist methods. They’re not available to the opponents of fascism because they are not fascists.

Fascism appeals to the worst parts of our nature. It gives permission to those feeling fear, humiliation or shame to lash out in anger and destroy the people that make them feel that way.

You can’t deploy the same tactics to make those people want to be on your side instead. If you try to shame them, they will just hate harder.

You should, of course, expose and ridicule the grifters who lead fascist movements and punching fascists is encouraged. But you need to distinguish between authoritarian leaders and the people they seek to lead.

You should not pander to the billionaire-funded leaderships (take note NYT), but you must not sneer at the people they are trying to lead (take note centrist Dems).

JoBo ,

Because handing election victories to fascists is a really, really bad idea.

JoBo ,

You think there’s going to be civil war and also, you want to maximise the numbers fighting for the fascists. Cool, cool.

JoBo ,

The article is not arguing that it should have been any different. The sub-editor had a bad day and that’s OK.

JoBo ,

You can learn to swim in water that is shallow enough to stand in. And if being safe in the event of a pychopathic ‘prank’ is the primary concern, focus on learning how to tread water. Everything will seem easier once you know for sure that you can keep your head above water. Most people who are enjoying a pool or the sea are not actually swimming anywhere anyway.

JoBo ,

What percentage would be right?

Given that they’re using the cost of R&D to justify their prices? A lot more than 21%.

The rest of the world gets much lower prices. That’s not out of the goodness of their hearts or the generosity of their wallets, yaknow?

JoBo ,

It doesn’t cost that much because the company are making a hefty profit, of course. And much more profit off it in the US as per usual, the NHS pays considerably less

The deal struck [in 2021] with Novartis Gene Therapies, secures the drug for NHS patients in England at a substantial confidential discount and paves the way for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to publish draft guidance recommending treatment with Zolgensma.

The terms of the deal mean that some young children that currently fall outside the NICE recommendation criteria will also be eligible to be considered for treatment by a national multidisciplinary clinical team (MDT) made up of the country’s leading experts in the treatment of SMA.

This means as many as 80 babies and young children could potentially benefit from the life-changing gene therapy a year.

But profiteering aside, the number in the final paragraph is your answer. Up to 80 kids in the UK per year, so up to ~400 in the US, ~500 for the EU. It’s not a big market but the cost of drug development doesn’t get cheaper just because the number of cases is small, it gets more difficult and more costly. And there’s more than one drug company chasing the market.

None of that is a defence of Pharma. But it is inevitable under capitalism. Eat the rich etc etc.

JoBo ,

That’s a mind-numbingly obvious point which completely ignores the context, which is Pharma justifying their high prices based on the amount they spend on R&D.

The rest of the world gets drugs 2-3x cheaper than the US. Do you imagine they’re selling at a loss to everywhere else?

JoBo ,

Good grief. You don’t need to wave your hands so wildly, this is really fucking simple maths. Expenditure which is 21% of the total cannot possibly be the reason why USians pay 2-3 times more than everywhere else for drugs.

JoBo ,

lol

JoBo ,

I don’t know which jurisdiction you’re in but, while it isn’t illegal in the UK, you’re absolutely right about it being a bad idea and you are correct about the reason. In the event of a crash, it could count against you (in the UK, at least).

[Serious] Do you know of any processed snack foods with some vitamins?

Trying to keep my very picky eater 3yo healthy as we’re (hopefully) expanding his diet. Right now the only foods I can get him to actually eat are McDonald’s, a specific brand of yogurt, banana bread, some crackers and some bars. Refuses any beverage besides water. (He’s likely on the spectrum.)

JoBo ,

What did you think this bit meant?

(He’s likely on the spectrum.)

JoBo ,

So the fuck what?

JoBo ,

Advising a parent to torture a child over food is piss poor advice to start with but when the parent has identified possible autism, you realise you know less than nothing and shut the fuck up.

JoBo ,

I don’t disagree with your overall argument but, if they’re fined 100% of revenue, that’s way less than zero profit (because they’ve still paid to make, distribute, and recall the things).

Fines should, of course, always be more than the profit made. 3x is a good number.

London police apologize after threatening to arrest ‘openly Jewish’ man near pro-Palestinian protest (www.nbcnews.com)

London’s police force has been forced to issue two apologies after officers threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man if he refused to leave the area around a pro-Palestinian march because his presence risked provoking the demonstrators....

JoBo ,

It doesn’t matter? This incident was doubly antisemitic, preventing someone from protesting because they are Jewish, and assuming that pro-Palestinian protesters would attack them simply because they were Jewish (ie equating Jewishness with support for Israel and criticism of Israel with antisemitism).

Yes, he’s a provocateur. So what? If the copper had said it was because they wanted to keep the two groups of protesters apart (as they routinely do, or are supposed to do), that would be fine. But he decided to be racist about it instead.

Land of the dinosaurs: baseline of sexism overshadows tennis in Madrid (www.theguardian.com)

When the female tennis players head back to Spain’s capital for the Madrid Open this week, they may be forgiven for letting out a collective groan. A quick glance at the tournament’s history shows a litany of gaffes, accusations of inequality and a full-blown sexism row just last year. Not exactly a highlight of the...

JoBo ,

The event is called the Madrid Open.

Gun supervisor for 'Rust' movie to be sentenced for fatal shooting by Alec Baldwin on set (apnews.com)

A movie weapons supervisor is facing up to 18 months in prison for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by Alec Baldwin on the set of the Western film “Rust,” with her sentencing scheduled for Monday in a New Mexico state court....

JoBo ,

She was crap at her job but she was also too inexperienced for it and employed to do it by cost-cutting producers who took so many shortcuts on set safety, half the crew walked out before this happened.

More powerful heads need to roll.

JoBo OP ,

The legal system didn’t deal with it, as per fucking usual. He decided that he would use that fact to prove he was innocent, giving the court an opportunity to explain very carefully why he is quite clearly guilty.

This was a huge political scandal. It’s not reasonable to declare that the media should not have reported it.

JoBo OP ,

This is an easy statement to make but context matters. In this case, he was not named by the media but had they not covered the story, he would never have been charged because it suited the political establishment to do nothing at all.

Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague in an exclusive 2021 television interview with the Network Ten’s “The Project” program, which also raised questions about the official response by ministers and political staffers in the aftermath of the alleged assault.

After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.

JoBo OP ,

Oh, please! Streisand the fuck out of it. Plenty of people have done what he did without ever being forced to acknowledge it was rape. Keep this story going for the sake of everyone, everywhere.

JoBo OP ,

What high profile court case?

On Being an Outlier (www.goethe.de)

Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are...

JoBo OP ,

That kind of analysis is done all the time. But, even if we can collect all the relevant data (big if), the methods required are difficult to interpret and easy to abuse (we can’t do an RCT of being born female vs male, or black vs white, &c). A good example is the proliferation of analyses claiming that the gender pay gap does not exist (after you’ve ‘controlled’ for all the things that cause the gender pay gap).

It’s not easy to do ‘right’ even when done in good faith.

The article isn’t claiming that it is easy, of course. It’s asking why power is so keen on one type of question and not its inverse. And that is a very good question, albeit one with a very easy answer. Power is not in the business of abolishing itself.

JoBo OP ,

Isn’t that a continuation of “why the outlier was culled”?

Not sure I follow, but I think the answer is “no”.

If you control for all the causes of a difference, the difference will disappear. Which is fine if you’re looking for causal factors which are not already known to be causal factors, but no good at all if you’re trying to establish whether or not a difference exists.

It’s really quite difficult to ask a coherent question with real-world data from the messy, complicated reality of human beings.

A simple example:

Women are more likely to die from complications after a coronary artery bypass.

But if you include body surface area (a measure of body size) in your model, the difference between men and women disappears.

And if you go the whole hog and measure vein size, the importance of body size disappears too.

And, while we can never do an RCT to prove it, it makes perfect sense that smaller veins would increase the risk for a surgery which involves operating on blood vessels.

None of that means women do not, in fact, have a higher risk of dying after coronary artery bypass surgery. Collect all the data which has ever existed and women will still be more likely to die from the surgery. We have explained the phenomenon and found what is very likely to be the direct cause of higher mortality. Being a woman just makes you more likely to have that risk factor.

It is rare that the answer is as neat and simple as this. It is very easy to ask a different question from the one you thought you were asking (or pretend to be answering one question when you answered another).

You can’t just throw masses of data into a pot and expect sensible answers to come out. This is the key difference between statisticians and data scientists. And, not to throw shade on data scientists, they often end up explaining to the world that oestrogen makes people more likely to die from complications of coronary artery bypass surgery.

JoBo OP ,

Where did you get insurance carriers from?

No idea what your post, before or after edit, is trying to say. But the subject of your quoted sentence is “proponents of AI” not “AI”, and the sentence is about what is enabled by AI systems. Your attempt at pedantry makes no sense.

If you’re suggesting that it is possible to build an AI with none of the biases embedded in the world it learns from, you might want to read that article again because the (obvious) rebuttal is right there.

JoBo OP ,

The systems didn’t do anything they weren’t told to do.

You’re thinking of the kinds of algorithms written by human beings. AI is a black box. No one knows how these models obtain their answers.

JoBo OP ,

It’s how LLMs work.

JoBo OP ,

The data cannot be understood. These models are too large for that.

Apple says it doesn’t understand why its credit card gives lower credit limits to women that men even if they have the same (or better) credit scores, because they don’t use sex as a datapoint. But it’s freaking obvious why, if you have a basic grasp of the social sciences and humanities. Women were not given the legal right to their own bank accounts until the 1970s. After that, banks could be forced to grant them bank accounts but not to extend the same amount of credit. Women earn and spend in ways that are different, on average, to men. So the algorithm does not need to be told that the applicant is a woman, it just identifies them as the sort of person who earns and spends like the class of people with historically lower credit limits.

Apple’s ‘sexist’ credit card investigated by US regulator

Garbage in, garbage out. Society has been garbage for marginalised groups since forever and there’s no way to take that out of the data. Especially not big data. You can try but you just end up playing whackamole with new sources of bias, many of which cannot be measured well, if at all.

JoBo OP ,

It’s asking why don’t we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don’t know how you think science works, but it’s not like that.

JoBo OP ,

The way he plays with the meaning of words

She (or, if you’re not sure, they).

any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making

Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that ‘AI’ is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn’t get any gender data to analyse.

Perhaps that is the point.

That is, indeed, the point.

JoBo OP ,

I think you overestimate the amount of ‘thought’ going on here. (ref}

JoBo ,

That is true of all colours of hydrogen other than green (and possibly natural stores of ‘fossil’ hydrogen if they can be extracted without leakage).

Green hydrogen is better thought of as a battery than a fuel. It’s a good way to store the excess from renewables and may be the only way to solve problems like air travel.

How hydrogen is transforming these tiny Scottish islands

That’s not to say it’s perfect. Hydrogen in the atmosphere slows down the decomposition of methane so leaks must be kept well below 5% or the climate benefits are lost. We don’t have a good way to measure leaks. It’s also quite inefficient because a lot of energy is needed to compress it for portable uses.

And, of course, the biggest problem is that Big Carbon will never stop pushing for dirtier hydrogens to be included in the mix, if green hydrogen paves the way.

JoBo ,

Yes. I’m not watching a video but it is a serious problem, especially as hydrogen degrades metals and finds its way out anyway. The private sector cannot be trusted to self-regulate nor the government to meaningfully regulate.

Trying very hard not to succumb to nihilism here …

JoBo ,

Batteries are too heavy for many applications (including, arguably, cars).

That doesn’t make hydrogen the only solution but it is at least a currently available solution. I posted a link about why the Orkneys (population 23k) are producing hydrogen and switching much of their transport to it: they have so much wind the UK (population 70m) national grid can’t take all the power they generate from it.

JoBo ,

Rich people don’t have all their assets sitting as cash in a current account.

JoBo ,

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