TheVat

I would question the either/or here. Doesn't it take both personal consumption choices AND feedback to companies and government? If I stop buying carbon-intensive widgets, that sends a ping up the supply chain. If I write Congress and ask for better widget regulations that's also a signal. Why not do both, when both consumption choices and letters can send a message? I know some say political action is the better path, and it can be, but I have also seen grassroots consumer movements (combined with letters to companies letting them know what's happening) effect change. I guess I'm suggesting that we don't have to feel individually powerless, that we can make choices every day and let others see us making them, without waiting on some politician to start listening.

Many people can be influencers - they take measures to reduce their impact, do it with grace and skill, and then those around them gain a more positive view. The trick is to implement lifestyle changes that work, that you can stick with. People have been aware of the basic lifestyle changes (bike, walk, reuse, recycle, eat lower on the food chain, wear woolens and turn down thermostat, etc) for decades -- what helps is to actually have people in their peer group who "just do it. " Step one: own an umbrella. 🙂

I live on the edge of wildfire country, where there is some thinning. I find the argument for clearing some growth fairly persuasive, given that it does yield a western woodland closer to its natural state. Also, when you do have a wildfire the pre-cleared forest doesn't burn as fiercely and some tree species survive external charring quite well (trees that would be wiped out if the fire were fueled by more crowded foliage) and make a comeback. The moisture retention approach, while it may be valid in some Eastern forests, wouldn't seem to apply here where there is less foliage density and conditions are dryer, but it is a complex issue which can't be mastered reading a couple articles. Thinning can be done badly, and that's been evident here, as when crews leave slash piles that dry out and then just go up like blowtorches when a spark lands on them. A related issue that's come up here in the western USA is that some areas may be become dryer and hotter to the degree they no longer support a woodland ecosystem and give way to grasslands and scrub. The only pluses to that will be it decreases the fire danger in those areas (grassfires are far more manageable) and the higher albedo of grassland will have a cooling effect. But it also means land that retains less carbon, a shift which we really don't need right now.

Can I call you a taxi?

Would I call them a term whose meaning I only vaguely understand if at all? No. What does neurodivergent mean? To your example, I'd call someone at the top of the scale in extroversion "very outgoing. " Or "quite gregarious. "

Going to ask for an abstract of your paper before reading. A concise description of your main points. Would be very helpful.

But your hypothetical situation cannot map precisely onto the real world. In a world where human fertility went off a cliff in 1950 and population growth flatlined (which in population biology means that fertility rates actually slumped a couple decades before) , there would have been all sorts of societal changes that we might not expect. For example, the southwestern US and west coast might still have seen mass migrations due to the attractive climate and scenery, and so would still be afflicted with rapid-growth ills - water shortages, smoggy urban basins like LA, offshore drilling leaks, etc. And where people are more sparse, there may have been less regulation of some human industry and agriculture, thus enabling more casual and irresponsible dumping, leaking, polluting. Nations that are now moving away from coal might, if they had one third their present populations and proportionate energy demands, more easily shrug off the downsides and drag feet on green policymaking. It's also possible that without any population growth for the last 70 years, there would have been less push towards innovations that were partly in response to population pressures. We might be using more arable land per person, employing fewer agricultural advances and using water and chemicals less efficiently. And, given the demographics of non-growing populations, people might be on average more conservative and less willing to try new ideas. Your alternate world could be dangerously complacent.

More food for thought than I can digest or address. On the whole issue of harassing horndogs at parties, I fall back on the great Dr. Asimov: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." I don't live in 1870's Deadwood, or wherever Koti lives, so my view is through a certain lens of time and geography. Perhaps I've been fortunate to live in parts of the US where a woman, encountering an unwanted Romeo, can simply respond to any offer with "that's flattering but I'm not sure my husband/boyfriend would go for it, " or something equally gently deflating. Deflations allow the miscreant to slink away without provoking an escalation (like, say, a beer tossed in the face might) and neatly underline the situation of being in an exclusive relationship. Competent people appeal to reason and give reality checks, they don't need to punch faces in. I have to wonder how many actual fights, starting from this situation, were theatrical displays that carried both men farther along than they wished. A lot of "masculinity" is performative. That was my experience with a friend who called my then-GF a bitch. I invited him outside, we proceeded bravely out into the yard, then as we lost an audience we realized neither wanted a fight, and so he apologized and we shook hands.

Wow. You make the wife sound helpless and like some sort of possession ("you... take your wife and leave"). Have you met many American women? Why would my confronting the guy be "standing up for myself"? In your scenario he is hitting on her, not me. And my wife would definitely stand up for herself, an alternative you completely ignore for some reason. (As well as that my wife would refuse to leave a party unless the building was under rocket attack) And there's yet a fourth alternative where I do get involved and neither flee the party nor tell the guy rudely to leave or get punched - instead I simply tell him he is making my wife uncomfortable and he should stop. And I'm aware of no evidence that any such pest would have "a set of skills" that allows him to predict my or my wife's response. And, from my experience, most spouses opt for the relatively peaceable "knock it off" response because they know the interloper will back away in embarrassment. I think you may have watched too many violent American movies where everything must be resolved through some vigilante asskicking. Social shaming is far more powerful.

First "vat" joke of the day tells me the whole day will be fun. One can poke a hole in my milk analogy, fair enough, but I was just trying to say that sampling is useful. If I've read six articles by, or quoting at length, JP, and they're all similarly structured hogwash, then I will conclude he's a pop culture hack. If he wrote carefully researched scholarly papers on his various popular theories, I would read one. But he hasn't, has he? And that would be due to his following Jungian psychology which is more a school of literary philosophizing than a cognitive science. He's more of a folklorist, like Robert Bly or Joseph Campbell, than a scientist. And that's fine. If I want to dip into some Jungian reflections, I'll check him out.

The founding fathers did not choose or want a two party system. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Washington all spoke out against the formation of political parties. Several Federalist Papers were issued against the whole idea.

The OP sounds like a manifesto excerpt from a religious cult. Why is it in a biology forum?

Sampling can be useful. One sip from a gallon of milk will inform you that it's turned sour. Not necessary to chug the whole bottle.

I think there may be some misunderstanding of what expertise means here. I have no doubt that, as @MigL thorough listing shows, JP has read many many books and meandered through many topics en route to his PhD in clinical psychology, focusing on familial dynamics and alcoholism. But when he critiques identity politics or attacks SJWs as "weaponizing compassion, " to me it looks like someone who is offering some rather vacuous opinions that do not flow from his actual expertise in psychology or from much grasp of social justice. I find them rather hard to pin down and often they seem little more than clever aphorisms he came up with while studying his navel. I don't really care where he fits on some political spectrum, and so I don't much care how he labels himself. More interested in real content and shrewd analysis, which I don't get from him. If he wants to go about saying he's a free thinker and an iconoclast, that's great, and I hope that's true, but that doesn't mean he can convincingly gripe about cancel culture and suppression all while he and other "classical liberals" can keep shouting at us through their media bullhorns.

Peterson is an expert in many areas that are not his field and in which he has no training and has done no scholarly work submitted for peer review. IOW, just another opinionated guy with a YouTube channel and some half-baked ideas. And he seems to make the RW bigots happy with his arguments that treating NB and trans people with respect is some Maoist plot that will force us into reeducation camps. Ironic to me is that his bestseller is titled 12 Rules for Life.

...that the world was slightly saner today for about four hours when FB, instagram and whatsapp all went down. (bet someone tried to reconfigure a DNS server and it crashed)

Likely philosophers who focus on a specific branch (usually numbered at seven: metaphysics, logic, axiology, aesthetics, ethics, epistemology and political philosophy) that pertains to specific methods or objectives of science will get more respect and fewer sixteen ton weights. Ethics is one, as several noted. Epistemology is another, as it looks at what can be known in the interpretation of data and what can be said to be known in advance of that interpretation. And good old logic is handy when you kick the tires on any conclusion. I've found epistemology the most useful branch when it comes to making sense of areas like NCC (the neurological correlates of consciousness) or quantum theory.

I blame the excessive chiming of cuckoo clocks.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/big-companies-are-funding-campaign-kill-climate-bill/620278/ Doubletalk from large corporations on the climate provisions in the major infrastructure legislation currently being thrashed out in the US Congress. (This magazine provides three free articles before a PW drops down. )

Intelligence is an umbrella term to cover a vast range of cognitive skills, and seems far less relevant to assessing job fitness than more precise measures of competence, sometimes called aptitudes. Competencies vital to a national leader would include social skills, big picture comprehension that sees beyond giant fields of data, sound judgement and quick decision skills, and capacity to empathize with people from all walks of life. It's a failure of democracy, of its filters, of its guardrails, when someone gets through whose competencies are only conning people and covering up their own lapses of judgement, empathy, decision-making, etc. Of course, Clinton was a smart guy who had most of the competencies I mentioned, and still somehow couldn't quite grasp that the POTUS is someone who lives in a fishbowl and can't sneak off and be a horny college boy again. Or that making juvenile excuses makes it far worse than just owning up and apologizing. Maybe the competency I left off the list was: being a fecking grownup. Grownups don't have to be moral paragons, but they do have to own up when they're not. I haven't followed Bo enough to know where he falls on the grownup spectrum, though I suspect he finds it a challenge. On first sighting I'll confess I said something unkind and petty about "village idiot hairdo, " and I regret that.

I think, until some things are clarified, there will be a natural tendency to poke some fun here. My first question: how does someone discover that battery acid is a solvent suitable for washing greasy hands? I mean, at what point do you say, hmm, no soap around, gosh maybe I can pour off that old car battery over yonder, little sulfuric acid never hurt anyone! Second question: if you aren't getting pain signals from a deep cut or strong acids, have you considered seeing a neurologist? That kind of insensitivity could pose some real danger to you. They could determine possibly where nociceptor fibres may be damaged or if there is some other issue with interpretation of pain in the brain. And suggest ways to protect yourself from tissue damage and infection.

Is there a path to such couples having children which are their biological offspring? What I mean is, if a cis-male and a trans-female wish to have children that share both their genes, then you would need to create an egg with haploid nuclear material from the former cis-male (I presume that would be from sperm she had donated/stored prior to SA surgery?) And then you would have both parents with XY chromosomes, so that seems to raise some technical problems, too, at least 25% of the time. Seems like you would need some kind of sorting process of sperm, if the objective was a fifty/fifty chance of either gender of the child, and not getting a double-Y (which sounds nonviable). And then there would be the fact that the egg's mitochondrial DNA would be...my head is starting to ache.

The mitigating factor (I hope) is that Trump appointed federal judges who would turn out to harbor a belief in the rule of law and have professional scruples, and then turn around and toss some Trumpist nonsense out of their courtroom. That's happened enough times to make me think that donning the mantle of office in a federal district court can have a bracing effect even on staunch conservatives.* Another factor is that the Trump admin left many posts unfilled in the DOJ, which means that Garland can now start filling them with competent public servants instead of cultists. *That happens with the Supremes, too. Justices like Anthony Kennedy took their professional duties quite seriously and moved away from their partisan pasts.

I'm thinking of a recent leader who made Bojo look like Benjamin Disraeli. That said, I think playing the fool can undermine confidence - when the leader of a nation appears to be a fool, that can make citizens, and stock markets, anxious. If there is aggression from other nations, or threats of, it can be pretty scary if your perception is that a fool is at the helm. I won't name names, but say a president, let's call him Ronald Mump, is dealing with a rogue nation, let's call it North Borea, and starts talking as if nuclear war were a viable foreign policy choice (and had said nukes were a viable tactical option in other parts of the world, in previous interviews)....

White freedom. A lot of the legislative agenda in Red states is either about vote suppression of minority groups or about giving legislatures power to nullify elections by either statewide fiat or removing county election officials and replacing them en masse. As the saying goes, you know your party's policies suck when you have to cheat to win elections. I think the battlefield on which democracy is saved will be the courts, where all these terrible laws are challenged.