Their system is designed to push engagement. My guess is that COVID conspiracies generated this engagement, and their system automatically pushed it to the top. We already know that a lot of dishonest but emotionally charged speech gets pushed up by the algorithm.
IF COVID conspiracy theories got pushed up by this algorithm, as opposed to what would be produced by a 'dump pipe', then yes, with the power that Zuck has over facebook, he supported conspiracy theories, in the interest of making money.
This winter in my neck of the woods I hear a lot of people saying "oh, what great weather this year", because it's warm and without snow.
If they had taken enough math to understand chaotic dynamic systems, they would need be as anxious as I am. It's less that I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, although there are definitely things that we are certain of, like riskier hurricanes.
What keeps me up at night is that farmers have no idea what the next season will look like because we have altered the conditions of the function of climate, and therefore will enter a new state. We do not know where it will land and what it will look like getting there, and that very likely means reduction in food production.
I think this is a funny attitude too, like personally, I don't know why people aren't upset about losing winter, it's a beautiful time of the year. Economically valuable too. Taking a walk on a snowy morning or doing some cross country skiing is completely beautiful. I feel like as a human, we're supposed to just accept more and more outrageous things. Loss of winter? Oh well...at least it's sunny.
To me personally the loss of the seasons is one of the most tragic things I've witnessed.We've had 1/10th of the snow we usually have, it's almost all melted already and everything looks kind of depressing. But I know the lack of snow melt will have an impact on farming too, all this for for what? So resources companies were able to profit a bit more?
In Kyoto, Japan last year year, which is famous for the "red leaves" in Autumn which attracts huge swathes of tourists, had no red leaves. To me the loss of the beautiful spectacle is one thing, like, but also concerning as you said, we've tipped some type of scales but who knows how far...maybe it will be ok, maybe it won't.
I'm working out how to grow food hydroponically because I'm concerned food prices will just keep getting more expensive as this worsens and don't want to be left relying on "global trade" for my sustenance.
I dairy farmed for 14 years, and my wife and I got out in the winter of 2023. We've seen ever increasing scarcity of water in our region, because the surrounding mountains don't get enough snow pack whose melt feeds the streams through spring and summer, and we don't see the spring rains nearly as much anymore either. We used to be able to irrigate our hay fields all summer long with no issues, until fall rains returned. Now the rains stop in April, we irrigate until the water runs out (which last year was in June), and then hope for the best. When we need to buy hay for our animals, prices have nearly tripled in the last 10 years.
So you live in a region that has significantly less snowfall than what can be expected based on the normal variation that occurred 25, 50, or 100 years ago?
I don’t know where parent commenter lives, but in Central Europe, this definitely happened in a radical way. There is basically no snow. A day, or if you’re lucky three days a year maximum. This is going on for the past 20-25 years continuously. This didn’t happen in the past millennia at all. In the mountain village where I lived is totally unimaginable the winter for kids nowadays, how was in the 90s for me. And that was normal for centuries.
Also 40 Celsius is the new 30 in the past 15 years. This didn’t happen since we measure temperature. And 10 degrees are a lot, and the change happened in a decade.
Also summer wind patterns completely changed in the past 5 years, due to the weakening currents in Atlantic Ocean. This is something which is also highly unusual the past millennia. We know this for sure, because all of our towns were built wind from West in mind. We have wind from that direction less and less.
This is way over normal variation.
But looking at other examples, for example Norway. Thawing permafrost bogs are not something which can be explained by normal variation.
Maybe be a bit more realistic about the situation. It's not that we should go around being depressed, but we should go around demanding more action. More solar, more nuclear, more forest rebuilding.
Not just accepting that it's 72 out and that it's nice, nothing to see here, move along.
Like you said, people aren't stupid and should be a bit more conscious of the actual implications of this.
I think what you're describing is actually denial because facing the reality is scary at first.
I think guilt and fear might be warranted as people have had a history of willingly being idiots regarding climate change. Best of a bad situation is one thing. Best of a bad situation which you are party to is another
Last few years hurricane seasons in the US have been less bad, because most really bad hurricanes have turned north further east than normal, avoiding coastal cities.
I think there are so many cultural pathways that lead to anti climate science today (and anti-vaxx, etc.) that it's impossible to list them all.
Generally they feed narcissism, and they must: in order to believe the anti-climate change rhetoric, you must first believe that you have hidden knowledge that makes you smarter than climate scientists (and more knowledgeable than them in something they have been studying for decades), or have some hidden knowledge that they are all lying, basically mind reading. You have to avoid the empathy and reflection that might make you understand their position, or cause you too question your own. Nowadays you even have to commit "doctrine over person" and deny the warming you see out your own window.
I think that is a bit common in programmer circles, and I have guesses as to why, but I would love to see a study in the space as to why.
Maybe you should read your message first before talking about narcissism. God forbid someone question something these days or even have the slightest need for a conversation, that you automatically become a whatever denier and a non believer in science. Comments like yours and others similar attitude turned all of this into a new cult or religion in which anyone who doesn’t 100% align with whatever views you have is dismissed and considered an idiot and the enemy. What do you want people to do, should we all live whatever lives we have in doom and gloom waiting for the apocalypse. Read the comments here, it reads like some doomsday cult of people proclaiming their superiority to the filthy peasants that don’t believe in science. Yeah, I’ll ride my bike and be a vegan so that half the people on this forum that work in companies that pollute and destroy this planet in one day more than I would do in 100 lifetimes can feel good about themselves living in their condescending bubbles.
To sum up another comment: it's cultural, not biological.
Race is not a useful scientific guideline for any kind of scientific study. For example: there is as much biological diversity in sub Saharan Africa as the rest of the world, but racially, the best we can do is "Black", or "African". It's a useless, dated concept that we, as species, find it difficult to work past because our brains are categorical engines.
I'm as politically "leftist" as anyone you'll ever meet, but we have to be able to do better than "Asians are good at math" to make effective decisions about education, amongst other problems. This is of course impossible with the current world and thinking. Even though I know race isn't real, I still see it. It still has an impact on my day to day actions, because my stupid brain is all too happy to categorize people on how they appear.
Taking another route: to say that Asians are good at math is categorical error. The word "Asians" represents something abstract, and abstract things cannot take action. Categorical error is basically the starting point for the various "isms" like misogyny, misandry, racism, etc.
I don't believe it's cultural only, the same way I don't believe ethiopians or kenyans excelling at marathons and long distance runs to be a cultural thing. Genetics play a factor, why can't math skills be influenced by genetics as well?
The difference in marathon times between Ethiopians or Kenyans and people from other countries is very very small, in the order of ~2%. How do you know it's not cultural? For example, in running, no one thought you could run a four minute mile, then as soon as one person did thousands did as as well. It could easily be explained that too athletic talent is far more likely to go into marathon running instead of other disciplines in those sports, as is the case for regional dominance in many other sports, so in reality the actual advantage is even slimmer if it isn't null at all.
I'll end with a question - competitive cycling requires the same abilities as marathon running, that is, optimal oxygen intake and usage, and great endurance in the buttock, leg, and foot muscles. Why are Ethiopians not dominant there?
I am pretty sure the effort characteristic of endurance running and endurance cycling are very different. You use your legs for both, but the muscle groups are different and they way the muscles are used is different.
Also, to present a possible answer to your rhetorical question: cycling is a sport for rich people. A good bicycle, that a kid that wants to pursue the sport must get early in their life, is very expensive.
Not as much as you'd think, many of the muscles are in common when you use clipped pedals.
The most important factor in either sport in any case isn't the muscles, it's oxygen intake and use efficiency.
As far as your argument, by effect of selection, doesn't that meant that top runners are more likely to come from poorer countries? You also don't really need a good bicycle to train, just to compete, but even that's pretty expensive so I take your point.
You realize cycling is one of the sports that is most under scrutiny when it comes to doping, right? Unless the advancements in doping have produced a method that is undetectable chemically or through a rider's bio-passport, doping is much less of an issue now than it was any time in the past 5 decades.
Question: if race isn’t real, are you fine with medical research continuing to being dominated by studies on “whites”, and ignoring whether it applies just as appropriately to other (not real) races?
If race isn’t real, then as a white person, my bone marrow should be just as compatible for transplant at the same probability for blacks, asians, and “mixed race” people as it is for other whites, right?
I totally agree that monitoring every single human being on the planet, and recording and analyzing their individual DNA and second by second logs of their biomarkers and external environment from womb to death would definitely be “ideal”. But we aren’t there. Yet.
In the context of trying to manage finite resources and time, broad messy abstractions have been and will continue to be crucially important, despite not being pure. Trying to erase things like race with an ideological handwave is harmful.
I have no idea if its cultural or genetic, but the difference is there in the classroom. Its pretty clear that various programs run by the state aren't making much of a difference. If you need to change the culture of kids to make them better at math, then we should do that. Although I have no idea how to quantify what that culture is and how to apply that change across a school.
edit: also, note, you've said a lot of stuff about categories. But categories can blend into each other and cause ambiguity at the margins. But that doesn't remove the validity of there being categories. When I look at the kids who come in to competitive math programs, and these are kids who are more than a standard deviations above the mean in performance, I see a lot of uniformity. One can try to construct various explanations for this, but you can't tell me that there were NO kids from underrepresented ethnicities that had two professional parents and good exposure to mathematics early. We have plenty of racial diversity in the early math programs. And in the Bay Area there are plenty of professionals sending their kids to these programs from all ethnicities. And still, ten years later its the Chinese and Taiwanese American kids that are in the Olympiad team. And even at a lower level, say SAT math, we see the performance skewed by race in the same way. I am ethnically Indian. And Indians are as interested in math as Chinese. We all send our kids to math tutoring. We are mostly engineers in the Bay Area. And even so, at the very top of the distribution, there are some Indian kids ... but far more Chinese American and Taiwanese kids. These are just facts. I don't take it as a slam against my ethnicity that we don't do as well in math as the Chinese. There's more to life than math after all.
Hi. I did my master's in computational biology focusing on androgen independent prostate cancer. After that I worked in an autoimmunology lab. My projects included rheumatoid arthritis GWAS and b-cell phylogeny. To demonstrate that we did case-control matching correctly, I looked at how well self-reported ancestry corresponds to hapmap populations. The mapping is very noisy. "Race" is a social classification, sure it's correlated with biological markers but there are better measures. So, yeah, "race" as such isn't important.
I don't follow the conclusion that you're trying to draw. It sounds like you're saying that people do not self-report their own ancestry accurately better than chance.
On the surface of it this sounds absurd, because (unless adopted) people do not determine their ancestry by looking at photos of themselves. I can see getting proximal affiliations wrong, confusing or missidentifying oneself as being half Italian when they're actually half Iberian, or or confusing turkic ancestry with Persian. But I don't think people are going to not know whether they are primarily of say East asian, african, or european ancestry.
"Race" is a social construct. We assign "race" based on physical and cultural traits, not genetic. We back into the relationship of "race" and "genetics".
You could easily have a genetic predisposition to prostate cancer without being a certain race, even though that "race" may have a higher propensity for that genetic trait.
>We assign "race" based on physical and cultural traits, not genetic.
Not really, everyone knows that an albino African is still an African. Physical traits are just the most visible aspect of genetics. And your second point is just explaining outliers, it doesn't say anything.
Race is entirely a social construct. You can't do a genetic test and with certainty determine someone's race. Certain genetic traits are common among what we call races, but not exclusive.
Take a look at services like 23andMe or other services, the genetic components of race are entirely based on self-reporting, that is, we call certain genes "Asian" because people who identify as Asian had those.
Suppose you are looking at a 52 card deck, and members of each of the four “shapes” self-identify (with some random noise, and maybe even systematic deviations — like sevens and aces are identified differently from just their shape, etc) as different “suits”.
The pairing between shapes & suits will of course be tautological because the names of the suits are cultural artifacts, but the shapes would still be distinct regardless.
> Race is entirely a social construct. You can't do a genetic test and with certainty determine someone's race. Certain genetic traits are common among what we call races, but not exclusive.
This seems confusing and contradictory. If traits are common in certain groups and not in others (needn’t be exclusive), then by Bayes rule these traits should identify groups with high probability (especially when combining multiple traits)
But genetic testing doesn't identify groups with high probability, because the overlap is so high. And it often misidentifies racial groups because of that.
This isn't a problem we have as a species. It's not biological, it is cultural. The racial categories we use today were created in the 17th century to justify the white supremacist apparatus of slavery and colonialism - prior to that, people tended to categorize humanity by tribe, ethnicity or religion rather than superficial physical traits. Asian people, for instance, didn't see each other as the same "race" until white people came along and assigned them that categorization.
You, I and everyone else are stuck in this way of thinking because we've been so thoroughly indoctrinated into a system of white supremacy which permeates the entirety of Western culture, it isn't even noticeable, like we're in the Matrix. It persists because it's useful for keeping the power centers that benefit from it entrenched, and everyone else divided.
We can move on from it, but I think the first thing we need to do is recognize that it isn't inevitable.
> Asian people, for instance, didn't see each other as the same "race" until white people came along and assigned them that categorization.
Do you think Asian people would have not come to the same conclusion, even if white peoples hadn’t said so first? I tend to think it was somewhat inevitable that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people think of themselves as having more in common with each other than with French or Mexican people.
Sure, but the racial categories do vary considerably around the world.
And even in a single location, if you look back in time, you can see how people got categorized shifting. People used to insist Italians weren't white here in the US.
This tendency is not necessarily human. There are enormous numbers of humans disinterested in control of others, or their environment, etc.
Those who want control might suggest otherwise, and they might actually believe it, but that's just lack of creativity (thinking of other possible worldviews) or empathy (realizing that others might see things differently).
Yup. In a group of 100 people, if only one wants control, guess who will probably get control? Paradoxically, it's probably the last person you want having control.
I'll answer. I have limited myself to vegan food for the last 17 years or so.
Buy good cookbooks. Bring your own food to things. That basically sums up our success sticking with it.
Health-wise, my health markers are extremely good. No B12 or iron deficiency. I attribute a ton of this success to consistent physical activity, though, particularly weight lifting.
Regarding physical activity, it comes easy, I am in way better physical health than the bay majority of my peers, if not for my asthma issues. I associate that, again, not with the diet, but with general physical activity.
Basically, the diet doesn't hurt, and statistically isn't likely to help you. The important part is the ecological cost of a diet full of meat, imo, or if someone eats enormous amounts of meat and ends up with a physical malady from it.
Lacking evidence otherwise, I would say that we have to assume the internal experience of most life with central nervous systems are remarkably similar to ours, because we are remarkably similar.
The next step is to take this into account in ethics, but I fear this is a leap that humanity in totality will not make easily.
The difference between the bison and beef cows is that the bison lived longer lives than the beef cows today. Growing new animals vs. maintaining a population has significantly different energy requirements.
I think we should fill most elected positions basically at random, and eliminate the presidency.
Populations make great quantitative judgements, but not qualitative. It seems that selecting at random would be best to get voices of folks experiencing homelessness and poverty. Rich folks would still get a couple of seats.
My guess is less war, more money for anti-poverty and education programs.
I really do think it is the only way. Everything else gets distorted.
People say, well, most people are stupid. But I'm not so sure. Juries are a sort of pseudo-sortition, and they actually fare pretty well (far better, I would argue, than legislative or even judicial bodies).
I think many positions would be admirably served by random appointment.
IF COVID conspiracy theories got pushed up by this algorithm, as opposed to what would be produced by a 'dump pipe', then yes, with the power that Zuck has over facebook, he supported conspiracy theories, in the interest of making money.