MonDie

41 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

I see Trump has  decided to pardon the swamp, rather than draining it.

And "Starlight" is playing as he signs the orders.

10 hours ago, Moontanman said:

 

I'm part of a Bantu sect that requires ritual consumption of the brains of dead relatives.  The good old days.

COVID-19 got nothing on Mad cow disease.

** Karma

confused with Dharma

**Gandhi

I am not Hindian.

But any Christian who dismisses Gandhi is just a conservative.  I wonder whether he is translated.

On 11/17/2020 at 9:31 AM, Moontanman said:

Damn, I was looking for the question what does the moon do for me... anyone? Bueler? 

One thing is for sure.  It doesn't do it for you because you kept imagining that it would.  Imagining your god exists is as pointless as conversion therapy for gays.  I could say I'm open to something flexible like kharma, but even if I am honest I might as well be saying that I'm open to unicorns.

I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh in middle school.  He will let you be atheist; maybe Ghandi would too.  But American Christian lobbyists are engaged in a vicious, passive-aggressive, sectarian, and exploitative campaign that will keep "Believe" signs hanging in your local supermarket.  For what? For a shallow superficial acknowledgement that only appeals to the easily duped minority of their majority.  Tomorrow is now and it becomes racism and white nationalism as shallow as the color of your skin.  Tomorrow it will be some other sectarian identity being exploited for public relations purposes.  This is culture, this is a cult, this is humanity in a still uneducated twenty first century with staggering student debt.  I guess I'm an atheist.

Only a poor, uneducated person living in an elitist twenty first century has said in his heart there is no God.

Keep donating to your charities like a bandaid on an open wound.

"Panic" by The Smiths

On 11/16/2020 at 4:39 PM, Moontanman said:

 

"Panic" by The Smiths is mine.

Right hemisphere! Right hemisphere! No offense please.

6 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

We can't.

In any case, I didn't want to discuss religion but to discuss how discussion of religion could be useful, so I will end with some comments on the opening poster's content.  Please note that I have virtually no philosophy studies.  It is a hobby.

Another advantage to this pragmatism or functionalism is the idea that a problem should be diagnosed before it is solved: If it isn't broke, don't fix it.  I will elaborate this later.  For now, the opening post repeatedly evoked my notion of precedent.  

[...] Acceptance of a hypothesis is of course like acceptance of any belief in that it demands rejection of whatever conflicts with it. The less rejection of prior beliefes required, the more plausable the hyothesis--other things being equal.

Often some hypothesis is available that conflicts with no prior beliefs. Thus we may attribute a click at the door to arrival of mail through the slot. [...]

The mail falling through the mail slot is not so parsimonious or consilient as it is having precedent--and moreover the phone dialing example seems to elaborate Blike's frequentist approach--.  The parsimony is in each instance of prior observation of the event having precedent, e.g. the mail slot: the parsimony is the corroboration from each sense that confirms what is happening, that mail is falling through the mail slot.  When you think it might be happening again, you are relying on precedent, not parsimony.  Blike's "modesty" elaborates the first complication of relying on precedent.

Virtue II: modesty:

One hypothesis is more modest than another if it is weaker in a logical sense; if it is implied by the other, without implying it. A hypothesis A is more modest than A and B as a joint hypothesis.[...]

This is the complication of categorizing similar events or things without violating parsimony.  For a human who is the product of evolution within an ecosystem of other evolved organisms and evolved structures, the Gestalt processes of perception are usually enough to efficiently identify recurrent things and iterative behaviors.  At least, that is what I personally arrived at.  Thus my diagnosis: Gestalt perception is necessary for the categorization of recurrent phenomena which is necessary for the notion of precedent, but it is evolved for the parts of a natural ecosystem and not scientific inquiry per se.  This is a potential diagnosis that could allow us to identify why people have problems reasoning about abstract scientific concepts.  Again, I am not an expert, but it is an example.

Virtue III: simplicity:

Where simplicity considerations become especially vivid is in drawing curves through plotted points on a graph. Consider the familiar practice of plotting measurements. [...]

[...] However many points we plot, there remain infinitely man curves that may be drawn through them. Whatever curve we draw represents our generalization from the data, our prediction of what bioling temperatures would be found at altitudes as the slimplest curve that passes through or reasonably close to all the plotted points. [...]

Now Blike was getting into the abstract, and that is why we are using a representation, a graph.  I have struggled with this a lot.  In my opinion, the idea of simplicity is more complicated because it so easily traverses the subjective/objective divide between the mental representation and the thing represented.   Sometimes the simple representation fails to capture the entire reality, because the mind must conform to the reality and not the other way around.  After the mind conforms, the corrected concept starts to seem more familiar and accessible to the subject, and the altered mental landscape means that subjective simplicity has aligned with the objective phenomena that is represented by it.  If this seems whacky, you might be right.  The same problem is precisely why I took issue with Blike's description of Conservatism.  Sometimes improper training of the mind, or improper reinforcement of the problem solving tendency, results in the increased accessibility of concepts despite the concepts' lack of parsimony or empirical utility.  Such an improperly trained mind will perceive Blike's "conservatism" where others will not.

I hope that was fun.  Peace.

I will revisit this thread to heck for interesting responses.

This is a slight diversion, but it will be interesting as a creative idea about how to stimulate this sort of thinking in other people.

We already know that the process of neuronal death guides cognitive development.  If we can tie this to God's existence, we might get some productive discussions about truth and reality.  A pragmatistic understanding of knowledge that explains ideas as useful and functional---but ultimately subjective--tools in the interaction between the subject and his surroundings is not something that is easy to reconcile with the notion of consciousness without evolution via natural selection.  Selection among random variants, whether biological or cosmological, seems to be the only process by which functionality would emerge from randomness.  If you assume that randomness comes first and that cognition must involve functionally useful concepts, it is difficult to imagine cognition that is not the result of natural selection.

Will this taint Darwin's theory with filthy atheism?  Darwinian evolution =/= Atheism.  Evolution does explain life without providing an explanation for God, and it could potentially explain cognition through neuronal death without explaining God too.  And kinetic molecular theory doesn't explain God either.  However, if cognition has an explanation and God still does not, Huston we have a problem.  If we can discuss God's existence while discussing the cognition of information and facts, we could do society a service.  We will not taint Darwin's well established theory with atheism if we always distinguish it from speculative, philosophical theories about cognition.  Debating God's existence could be an antidote for misinformation if it becomes a debate about cognition in consciousness.

The sort of perspective I am describing is really not some tenuous theory but rather an uncommon way of describing something very common.  We always talk about thinking in the first-person and second-person.  This cognitive pragmatism is only the consequence of thinking about thinking in the third person and acknowledging the necessary relationship between perception and cognition (first person), which is the relationship between the perceivable world and our ideas about the world (third person).  The consequence of this third person perspective is that our ideas are not parts of the world but are tools with a functional, pragmatic relationship with the parts of the world they pertain to.  The more controversial question would be whether ideas that are functional tools are the result of an evolution-like process underpinned by neuronal death, but I think it is probably the case.  This should have consequences for where we should expect to find cognitive activity or the communication it produces, but also, because it produces analogies between the scientific method for a hypothesis and the trial testing of a tool, it has consequences for what sorts of popular ideas should or should not be verifiable by the populaces they infiltrate.

That is all for now.

Uh, happy - and hopefully safe - Thanksgiving. 👋😌

bye

On 4/16/2020 at 8:22 PM, hypervalent_iodine said:

There was a paper circulating a little while ago that caught my attention, published in Nature. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2223-y

To be honest, I am pretty baffled that it was published in Nature. The top leads identified in their screening assay are known as pan-assay interference compounds (PAINs). IOW, they are nuisance compounds and generally not something you would pursue in a drug design campaign. In fact, the seminal paper that discusses PAINs is a Nature paper (https://www.nature.com/news/chemistry-chemical-con-artists-foil-drug-discovery-1.15991), which makes this even more confusing. I can't imagine anyone with a med chem background would have reviewed this, as the red flags should have been very obvious. In any med chem journal, this paper would have been rejected since you have to screen for PAINs as part of their submission guidelines. I'm worried that this signals a general lowering of the bar when it comes to these sorts of publications, which will only make things more difficult in the long run. Derek Lowe has written some good blog posts on the matter:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/10/more-on-screening-for-coronavirus-therapies

Duck, duck, duck, duck, homodimer!!!!

 How many months until the vaccine can be approved for widespread use, again?  We might already be immune by that time if they don't disseminate this information carefully.

Re: Moontanman in What are You Listening to?

To be fair, a pragmatic understanding of knowledge that explains ideas as useful and functional---but ultimately subjective--tools in the interaction between the subject and his surroundings is not something that is easy to reconcile with the notion of consciousness without evolution via natural selection.  Natural selection among random variants, whether biological or cosmological, seems to be the only process by which functionality would emerge from randomness.  If you assume that randomness comes first and that cognition must involve functionally useful concepts, it is difficult to imagine cognition that is not the result of natural selection.  I will grant that my lack of imagination is inevitably a limiting factor, but I have to admit that "autistic" gods like Spinoza's or Temple Grandin's are probably a lot more imaginative and substantive than the pop-theology that helps people get more donations.

Call me Egnostic.

Andrew Jackson Jihad shout out!

I had a Defiance Ohio song removed form page 9.

Sometimes I have to refresh myself. Diffusion of responsibility, or the bystander effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdpdUbW8vbw

It's kitty genovese, but it didn't embed.

Haven't read, but Yay Guns is closed.  Re: the hate speech problem.

I've been mulling over and over the relationship between neuroticism (and mental health) and power, given that neurotic, "emotionally unstable" people enjoy less success while antagonistic people, with "callous unemotional" traits, enjoy as much success as anyone else.  It would seem that unemotionality is favored over emotionality even though neurotic people score higher on measures of "emotional empathy."  To be fair, honesty-humility, the sixth factor of personality which splinters off from agreeableness, is probably the better predictor of life success.  Neuroticism would probably be the next factor to splinter, but my printer broke when I tried to print information on the SNAP and DAPP measures of personality.  Neuroticism is related to suicide and being female even though females are less suicidal, which could be explained by sub-factors of the neuroticism factor.  Whenever we direct our attention toward violent behavior -- rather than callous behavior which includes violent behavior -- we reinforce an implicit bias, an availability heuristic on neurotic people, that neurotic people are bad because they can turn violent.  The argument isn't any more logical than suggesting that we shouldn't have toasters if some people electrocute themselves, but it probably sticks with us implicitly via the availability heuristic.  Of course violent tendencies should be reigned in, but that doesn't mean neurotic people should be stigmatized.  They might be a lot more compassionate than a lot of the indifferent people who lord over us.  Incidentally, meditation would increase empathy and emotional control... 🙃  It is hard to say the extent of the damage, but these mass shootings and the argument that guns don't kill people have probably been useful for reinforcing negative stereotypes about powerless people.

Posting now.  Might have more

That said, I also think racism and sectarianism might provide convenient routes for blame externalization and the misdirection of anger.

Re anti-semitism, I have to wonder whether there is a discussion to be had about whether Hitler himself was corrupt even while he scapegoated the Jews for this problem.  I don't like AIPAC any more than I like any other special interest, but I really wish Bernie had won the primary.  I don't think it's a Jew problem.

11 hours ago, Moontanman said:

I worship the Moon, at least it exists and al I have to do is Look at it... 

10 hours ago, MigL said:

That's very conceited.
You are the 'Moon'.

He both is and isn't the moon, depending on who he's talking to.

High self-monitoring, you see.

and an ever simmering kettle to boot.

... My bad.  I'm music babbling.

On 10/3/2020 at 5:48 AM, ahmet said:

a bad musics but good ratio of listening in comparison to european style

你 好！

 

DuThe Shins was my first favorite from way before the unexpected acid trip.

He also has Broken Bells, which I never noticed until 2020, somehow.

I don't think I ever posted The Damned here.

Franifio FTW!

I have a magical unicorn that is completely untestable and mostly inconsequential. 

And it lends my Xbox to people who believe in it.  So which side are you on?

On 9/5/2020 at 1:56 AM, Markus Hanke said:

Obviously in most modern societies we are free to express pretty much anything we want (with notable exceptions, and with the caveat that some forms of speech will certainly result in consequences of various kinds). But - and let me play the devil’s advocate here - where does this fit into a larger picture? Is unrestricted freedom always necessarily a good thing, no questions asked? I hear so many people keep going on about their “right to free speech”, but very few ever talk about their corresponding responsibility to engage in ethical speech. People like freedoms, but they don’t like the responsibility that comes with it. If I say or do something that is deeply hurtful to a lot of other people, and is not conducive to peace, prosperity and well-being of society as a whole, in what sense is such a freedom to be considered ‘good’? Much has been said about people’s freedom to engage in whatever speech they want - but what about people’s freedom from forms of malicious or otherwise hurtful speech that is simply not compatible with a civilised and peaceful society that values the well-being of all its citizens?

Before anyone responds, I’d like to point out that I grew up under a communist regime in the former Eastern Bloc, so I know first hand what it is like to live in a society that does not grant freedom of speech (well, theoretically you could say anything you wanted of course...but some things you were only ever going to say once, so effectively the freedom was severely curtailed). It isn’t just an academic concept to me, I’ve experienced it, and it is not a good thing.

[...]

 

I think a speech regulation paradigm that revolves around limiting a person's air-time could incorporate that.  Nobody should have more freedom to speak than anybody else does, and one potential solution could be that listening to a person's speech should always be a consensual choice.  This would also increase the dialectical quality of speech by limiting most one-way proselytizing scenarios.  I do think any regulation of speech should be democratic rather than authoritative, but the systems that are supposed to enact the democratic will will always be manipulated from the outside in ways that virtually guarantee the desired outcomes of the powers that be.  Thus I have to fall back on individualistic libertarianism in this case.  I just don't trust the antagonist, ruthless, power-hungry people.

I do think socialist principles are generally aligned with progress in social justice, and that there are certain things which should not be comodified.  Forced child marriages in exchange for dowry payments was an awful idea, and so was slavery and so is wage slavery.  Natural resources aren't the same as mass produced commodities.  Moreover, I think a case could be made that speech shouldn't be commodified either.  Look at the Festinger and Carlsmith peg turning experiments for example.  In that case it was a good outcome, because the people who were paid had an out that reduced the experience of cognitive dissonance.  Alas, maybe there are other cases where this might manifest as moral wrecklessness.  I didn't kill those people who died from what I said; I was paid to say those things and therefore I am not responsible.

> I.e. everyone should be an honest actor who is responsible for the effects of what they say.

On 9/1/2020 at 6:09 PM, Airbrush said:

Ole B:  "It is hard to believe. It's also uncomfortable to believe. I sometimes wish I could unthink this shit and go back to normal life. It's hard to be happy knowing Satanists have been ruining the world on a scale I could've never imagined. I had hope for the future 3 months ago now I expect war anytime soon. Keep your family and friends close bro. Stay safe. Peace.

There’s nothing I could provide as solid evidence. Just a bunch of coincidences and gut feeling. I didn’t believe this stuff either but one night 3 months ago I discovered some disturbing things about actors while watching interviews on you tube. In the comment section of those videos there were strange comments and repetitive use of certain symbols ex:🤔🤫👌🦋🍕.

I followed the people posting those comments to other channels on youtube where people seemed to be recently systematically causing chaos around the world. I followed some names mentioned in these videos and in the comments to social media accounts of what appeared to me to be Cartel members that seemed to be selling and kidnapping children. Advertising things suspiciously, sort of in the same way Wayfair later came under suspicion for their overpriced cabinets.  I was distraught, my whole world was changed that night.

I'm not a man of faith but I prayed for the first time in over 20 years. I mentioned what I found about the actors to a few friends the next day at work. Leaving out the stuff about the children till I could do further research. The day after that I was approached by a man I knew for 4 years who called me a sheep and threatened my life. The four years I knew this man he was one of the kindest and politically smart people I knew so I was absolutely shocked. I looked into his social media that night and I see the same symbolisms, the same odd advertisements like a fruit for $500 with a small brown child sitting on it.

After that I started research into conspiracies like pizzagate and the Illuminati. I can’t prove it but I'm 100% sure of what I believe and I urge everybody who’s ready to accept it to look into it for themselves. I believe a mass awaking might stop this satanic insanity and I also believe it might be part of such an elaborate and well thought out plan that it may be beyond our power to stop it. From what I've gathered they are trying to create a new world under communism run by Satanist and pedophiles. Many people need to die for this to happen. They are trying to destroy and rewrite history."

There it is, from a true believer.  Could Q be a Russian troll sewing chaos in the US?

Anyone want to share what they know about Qanon?  They like Trump, so Trump likes them back.

Does the message strike anyone else as psychotic?  I suppose some people, with schizotypal and paranoid personality disorder, do have some baseline level of psychosis that does not worsen with time.  Maybe asking them to explain how they got into it could help them get out: schizophrenics, schizotypals and paranoids all have lower than average theory of mind skill, which is related to self-monitoring skill and emotional intelligence et cetera—Think gorillas looking at themselves in mirrors.  In any case, the conspiracy theory might already be about to get some "oxygen".

I've switched to Majority Report recently (R.I.P. Michael Brooks).  Majority Report had two recent callers who were  worried about QAnon.  I don't know how pervasive QAnon belief actually is, but Michael Flynn posted a video endorsing QAnon a few months ago, and now a few Republicans who have voiced support for it have won their primaries.  The candidates Marjorie Greene and Lauren Boebert are expected to win the general election.  It is hard to say whether this family of conspiracy theories is propelling itself or is something being peddled by neoconservatives, but having those candidates in congress will increase whatever aura of credibility it already had, and that could be the point.  Both parties deserve scrutiny and both constituencies have an obligation to scrutinize their nominees.  The whole of congress has been taken over by corporatism, and I can't wait to watch the conspiracy theories jump the partisan divide too.  P.S. Trump definitely colluded with the Russians.  We understandably have a hard time proving something so difficult to prove, but it's there, we just know it.  Who is Guccifer 2.0!?  Who is she!?

As much as I love empiricism and science, these mass delusions show that we are social first and empirical second, and that even what we call "history" is a record of what people believed at the time as it includes, by extension, what people knew and/or believed about whatever was really happening at the time as it happened.  In social contexts we largely do whatever the crowd is doing, say whatever the crowd is saying, and simply assume all of it to be reasonable by proxy of being popular.  This makes us all too easy to manipulate because it creates a positive feedback loop, and the problem can be expected to worsen as the size of the crowd increases, e.g. the massive crowd sizes seen in modern contexts.  This undoubtedly interacts with the social psychological phenomena that researchers call deindividuation, diffusion of responsibility, and the false consensus effect + pluralistic ignorance, to name a few.  We are, intentionally or unintentionally, negligently or maliciously, being repeatedly gaslit by our own sources of information.  Thus we are all compromised agents, the victims of gaslighting, unless we can cautiously contemplate whatever the simpler alternatives to whatever the prevailing wisdom might be might be.  A perversion of the simplicity principle is actually one of the virtues of a lie, a lie which is false enough to achieve the ends of the liar but still true enough to seem functionally 'good enough' to the dupe... sorta like Rutherford's atomic model / nuclear model of the atom.  Alas, that is in an idealized model of how we should operate, not how we actually operate.  In truth, it is tautologically true that we don't know how we operate when we aren't paying attention to how we are operating, and that we may not be able to know what a lack of scrutiny looks like if a lack of scrutiny cannot be properly scrutinized.  One thing social psychology told me was that how we really think is very different from how a philosopher might think a person should think, and that we may be optimized for group behavior at the expense of critical thinking functions.  Moreover, I think groupthink might be a bigger problem now than it ever was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors two-hundred-thousand years ago.

I was expecting Biden's latest gaffes (and now the new accuser) to quickly squash the momentum Biden seemed to have on Super Tuesday.  Between March 3rd and March 10th, the state-by-state composition shifted from mostly blue to mostly red, and yet Bernie still made gains in the popular vote.  Unfortunately the popular vote gains were masked by the red-blue balance and red superdelegates, and maybe even red state voter suppression (Alabama & Mississippi epitomize the red skew).  Then the popular vote shifted when the pandemic hit, which could be a real change in turnout or some kind of malfeasance, like what happened in Iowa, enabled by the shortage of staff.  I don't like the idea of voting amidst a pandemic, but I also think the pandemic was well timed to give the illusion of Biden-mentum rather than a Biden burnout.

I am seriously considering whether the wealthy megadonors keeping Biden afloat really want a Biden presidency.  The campaign almost seems designed to implode:  Biden campaign will float through the primaries on superficial name recognition and then implode during the general election, imploding because (A) any cognitive decline will only become more apparent and (B) it will become apparent that the media was protecting Biden (albeit during the primaries) after it is already accused of an anti-Trump bias (despite being pro-corruption in a way that coincidentally benefits Trump).

11:06AM 3/28

Lastly, the new research that challenged Bernie's electability was awfully well timed, and its verification would require a roughly five times larger sample size.  They compared each candidate to Trump separately because they thought Bernie supporters were intentionally skewing the results by lying, lying that they would ONLY support Bernie against Trump and nobody else.  My response to their research is the above paragraph.  11:17 AM

I have actually arrived at an even more interesting issue, that a self-ingratiating tendency can warp a person's reality in ways that may go uncorrected.  The person with impulse control problems recognizes the failure afterward, but some self-ingratiating tendencies might correct themselves with a much larger delay, or never.  The result is sustained self-fulfilling expectations and self-fulfilling perceptions/investigations/interactions that resemble an economic bubble except that the purchased is a perception of reality rather than a real thing.  These what I'll call self-serving (bias) narrative bubbles might be more difficult to correct if there is no standardize measure of worth like the standardization of economic value.  This is a problem because some people actually do profit from an economic bubble if they sell their stock sooner, and some people might profit from these narrative bubbles too.  Ironically, these bubbles might actually be preying on pro-nepotistic processes that might otherwise promote positive family relations, and doing it in a way that temporarily exacerbates the negative side-effects of narcissistic, self-esteem-based reward systems.  If the repetitions of the pattern are not recognizable, we might be in for a round of these bubbles.  The good part is that the bubble depends on wide-spread participation to create a more satisfying illusion of reality.  If the process of awakening is accelerated, a domino effect could result.

December 14th 1:50 PM CST

Here's a couple politically incisive shorts that I am thinking of.

Secular Talk: British People SHOCKED By American Healthcare Prices

Al Jazeera: Guterres warns UN may not have money to pay staff next month

PS, Kyle Kulinski is apprehensive about a dilution of the potential charges, others progressives think Trump is (regardless) screwed.  Mission (partially) accomplished...

Secular Talk:  Trump Keep Admitting War Crimes on Camera

I should have spotted my double plural.

Keeps!

18 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

I'm not sure "spandrel" is the correct term for it, but I'm inclined to see the absence of a distinct fertile season as having favoured a stronger sex drive that is not clearly targeted.  The change enabled homosexuality as a side effect to increasing the overall urge for more frequent sex that is required to better ensure conception in a species with low fertility and fecundity.

Strong sex drives without a specific trigger or target may have led to raised rates of homosexuality, which might have been detrimental but because our ancestors were social - as per my previous comment - I think increased variability and flexibility for sexual attraction helped prevent that heightened sex drive from exacerbating conflict over mates by allowing other outlets for satisfying it.

The problem is that both homosexuality and heterosexuality tend toward an exclusivity of preference.  Your hypothesis would imply a normal distribution or a skewed distribution, but penile plethysmographs show a U-shaped distribution.

I read Gould's paper years ago, but reviewing it I picked up the possible reference to Secret Mark via "St. Mark's Chapel".  If the structuralistic concept of a spandrel is theologically relevant, it might contradict the religiously conservative denial of the naturalness of homosexuality.  For you see, one could argue that Gould's structural approach emphasizes an opposite logical principle, namely the positive rather than the inverse (A so B, rather than not A so not B), which might give God a role in establishing these structuralistic principles which involve natural facilitators of organic structure (i.e. with any luck, A so B, B so C, C so D, ...) rather than a universal mechanism for overcoming the limitations (with natural selection and the anthropic principle, not A so not B becomes B so A).  Moreover, I would imagine that some structures which become contraining dead ends would be removed through group selection (A+...+D so no E (Dead End)).  If homosexuality and other trans-gender variations are a byproduct of human structure and human sexual dimorphism, then either these were part of God's perfect human plan or else the human plan was imperfect or even a dead end.  That is, if homosexuality is an inevitable manifestation of the human structural "plan", then either homosexuality is part of God's perfect plan or else the plan was imperfect or even a dead end.

In any case, I actually posted because I forgot to include a third interesting observation, which is that phermonal attraction is genetically synonymous with immune function (the major histocompatibility complex) and inflammation is exceptionally strongly correlated with the male-biased autistic disorder (https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS771US795&ei=fJ7uXcyhCJX_-gSxiKlg&q=inflammation+in+autistic+disorder+site%3Anih.gov).  I suppose trans-gender variations could maybe potentially be the byproduct of some kind of anti-autistic, anti-inflammatory adaption that coincidentally tends to flip the sexual preference.  I don't know, it's food for thought.  1:30 PM CST

**synonymous or homophonic, or just, being literal, pleiotropy.**  Another consideration is that we humans are accumulating mutations in genes involved in odor detection, but the waning adaptiveness of odor detection would not render heterosexuality non-adaptive.  If anything, it is the reverse that waning heterosexuality would mean waning phermonal functioning to the extent that sexual preference depended on it, ... if it depended on it.  2:00

I really wanted to note: I recently learned that birds and mammals independently evolved their sex-linked chromosome systems.  Mammalian gender is only as old as mammalia and the mammary glands that distinguish mammals (if they're female).  That was a bombshell IMHO.

Anyway, I know about the sexually antagonistic selection and kin selection hypotheses, but the presentation does seem slightly PC.  I guess it's that they are trying to show that homosexual genes could be equally adaptive rather than being these subpar genes that still lead to a sufficient, though reduced, level of fecundity that allows the genes to persist in the gene pool at a stable, but low, gene frequency.

Moreover, there might be an assumption that homosexuality is 100% genetic/heritable, but it might be closer to two-thirds or three-quarters heritable.  AFAIK the best measure of sexual orientation is the penile plethysmography, which rarely identifies middle-of-the-road bisexuals but does seem to often show some, umm, measurement unreliable and/or low-level bisexuality.  This is speculation, but if the gay gene(s) don't always result in homosexualiy, then the non-homosexual counterparts might have their own advantages.  I read that both women and gay men are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at a higher rate, and both women and BPD patients do statistically score slightly higher on the Reading The Mind In The Eyes Test, which I know isn't supposed to be a personality trait.  We also have the historical evidence of castrated men who lived into their eighties or so (and I wish the same for BPD sufferers).  Anyway, if the non-homosexual counterparts were healthier, more social, or even more appealing, then it could be another explanation for the persistence of these genes.  Out.

Spandrels are an interesting concept in this regard.

But I might be proposing some kind of adaptively conflicted phenotype rather than a spandrel.

After all, that is why we have diversity, unless you're into eugenics.

Although I appreciate this topic's importance, I worry that a wrong approach could do more harm than good.

The Damage Report: Florida Officer Caught Planting Evidence (planting drugs in cars with impunity)

The Young Turks: Why Aren't People Outraged at This NYPD Cop Planting Weed?  (and so on and so forth...)

Perhaps it is the witnesses who really need to know how this works, if the cops already know, and I would be excited to find that a witness outwitted a lying cop.  I know that you, Moontanman have been critical of religion, and I am realizing how religion is intertwined with power.  Some kind of ancestral spirituality seems natural, but throughout history people have claimed to be god-kings or to have divine mandate, which is one alternative to a more democratic concept of legitimacy that involves a grass-roots or bottom-up consensus.  Is it any coincidence then that both our spiritual leaders and our police forces have attempted to dupe us?  They often did or said things we couldn't see personally, and used their supreme authority to make us question our what we thought we saw, what we knew.  They gave us the narratives through which we interpreted and understood the language of reality and encoded into memory its supposed meaning -- see the role of 'elaboration' in the levels of processing model of memory --, so that we would thereafter correctively remember those important things as we were supposed to understand them all along, or not at all.  Dual processing models -- you remember Norenzayan's research on analytic thinking and belief in god, right? -- might have a crucial role in disentangling the process I have described above.

How was that?  Too abstract?

12:17 PM CST December 12th

6th

Bezos aside, I liked this Al Jazeera on India's media consolidation by the Ambani brothers.  Ah, the future.  12:36 PM

On 10/14/2019 at 9:08 PM, Airbrush said:

The way I measured my jogging course is I drove circuits in an old car, with an odometer that has tenths of a mile, around my hood.  I tried different circuits beginning and ending at my driveway around my neighborhood because I wanted a circuit at least one mile.  So a nice circuit turned out to be 1.2 miles which I do almost every day.  Later I realized that 1.2 miles is 2 km.  So I do this circuit, twice for 4 km, or 2.4 miles.  My best time is about 23:50 for 4 km.  Usually I jog it in a leisurely 25 to 27 minutes.  And I'm 65.

I always time myself because I know the approx. half-way point, and third-way points, so I can estimate in advance what my time will be.

How much I run is abnormal, but what I am saying might be so important for the older people on this forum.  You stop building bone density in the latter part of your life, so you have to maintain it.  I don't know kinesiology, but I I was running ten miles per day until I ran fourteen to fifteen per day for a week before our move.

I learned that the vertical legs of a foot stool can be used for the stretch I described above, but I still strongly prefer the chair with the horizontal bars.  Also, I injured my foot on the day after we moved.  After I was running along the inclined grassy hill beside a sidewalkless road, I immediately noticed the soreness on the pavement.  Four days later, I avoided irritating the sore foot by adjusting my style, extending the sore foot farther than usual and compensating with a "springing" push from my other leg.  I just did a test run through the hallway, and I am deducing that extending the step in this way puts pressure on the fleshier parts of the foot.  The soreness is inbetween my heel and the ball of my foot, and moreover it is on the outer side of my foot.  I guess my tendency was to run by lifting my feet over and over, but extending the step seems to undercut this tendency so that I am landing on my heels and pushing ("springing") from my balls.  Alternatively, I might be directing more pressure to the inside side of the foot that has more padding, but intentionally redirecting the pressure toward the inside side had little benefit.

Also, the drawstring bag can be tied more easily, if one is wearing a jacket that provides cushioning below their neck, by simply twisting the strings around eachother.  I prefer the other tying method, which is more symmetrical via being more stable, if it isn't too tight.

I seemed to have less joint pain when I was attempting to meditate during my jogging.  This might be coincidence, for the meditation significantly slowed my pace.  Anyway, fighting with your HPA axis in this way has some unexpected consequences, if you don't close your eyes and trip and fall.  Without closing my eyes, I try to consciously detach from the visual stimuli.  One might enjoy this if they have a nice view.  Don't run along any inclined hills!

If you start extending your steps in that way, you will probably find that you are running more quickly.  The paradox might be that a faster jog is healthier.  I also jog at that leisurely pace, Airbrush, but for much longer distance.

Does anyone like a YouTube channel that frequently discusses the scientific process, i.e the procedures, math, and analysis involved? Maybe it is a channel about rationalism, or merely a science channel, but it explores how ordinary people and/or scientists analyze the world or their data.

I am sending this entangled particle into the future. Please give me a reply back, if that is possible. Is it possible? Can the future determine the past via the observer effect? Well whatever. reply back.