#reblog2019

[argumate]

if you believe that rocks and rivers have minds and that trees hear prayers and that the ancestors are still mentally present after death then you are not an atheist in any meaningful sense, today.

#reblog2019

[hymneminium]

One day I'll have an embarrassingly incoherent IRL conversation about world news because I got tricked by #reblog2019, I just know it

[kata4a]

#personal #kink #I guess it's too late to pretend that I'm not talking about my sex life here

remember when I thought “i’m a sub” was oversharing

#reblog2019

[thesiskindeffect]

@argumate re: your reblog2019 of nostalgebraist’s post on IQ here.

(I appear to be blocked by them)  So IQ discourse is stupid for many reasons and even for people who exemplify Dunning-Kruger to the extent that Race/IQ folks do it's honestly incredible that they could dismiss Shalizi and Glymour. 

That aside, @nostalgebraist in their imagining of such an individual who would dismiss Shalizi and Glymour implicitly characterizes Gould as a debunked ideologue who cared more about his politics than science

being simply more mathematically sophisticated versions of Gould, telling the public what it wants to hear

Sounds like somebody has neglected to read Michael Weisberg's excellent "Remeasuring Man" (2014)  

Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) was the most highly regarded American scientist of the early and middle 19th century. Thanks largely to Stephen Jay Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man, Morton's cranial capacity measurements of different races is now held up as a prime example of and cautionary tale against scientific racism. A team of anthropologists recently reevaluated Morton's work and argued that it was Gould, not Morton, who was biased in his analysis. This article is a reexamination of the Morton and Gould controversy. It argues that most of Gould's arguments against Morton are sound. Although Gould made some errors and overstated his case in a number of places, he provided prima facie evidence, as yet unrefuted, that Morton did indeed mismeasure his skulls in ways that conformed to 19th century racial biases. Gould's critique of Morton ought to remain as an illustration of implicit bias in science

(Available on sci-hub ofc at https://scihubtw.tw/10.1111/ede.12077)

#Stephen Jay gould #the mismeasure of man #michael weisberg #argumate #nostalgebraist

[thetransintransgenic]

Hold ON a second @argumate​ what is THIS you never even reblogged it ONCE before. And now it’s #reblog2019? Just what are the RULES here, exactly..,

[yvfu]

hey, way to evoke emotions on the internet! #reblog2019 just made me physically instinctively flinch back from the computer screen

Sorry, I just thought it was clever.

#furthermore google is evil and must be destroyed

[argumate]

it’s awfully sexist to think of women as a distinct category for hiring purposes and it’s also awfully sexist not to be focusing on your proportion of female hires literally 100% of the time.

#reblog2019

[argumate]

people who obsess over the demise of one sect in particular can be a little off-putting, even if they don’t start ranting about the Papists getting what they deserve when the Whore of Babylon burns, or the Mohammedans falling to the sword of the new crusade, or whatever.

besides sectarian triumph, the default liberal position is the status quo will continue with a free market of ideas and religions may ebb and flow with the times, much like the way Anglicanism is becoming an African religion instead of an English religion; as long as nobody is being forced into worship or not worship than it’s all fine.

the stronger atheist position is that over time people will realise which parts of religion are useful and founded on important truths and which parts are merely the legacy cruft of history and founded on baseless superstitions and redeem the former and jettison the latter, but that has similar implications for all religions and does not target any one in particular.

#reblog2019

[argumate]

I think people get hung up on attraction; I mean, no one would say that your preferences for music or movies or stories are what makes you a moral or immoral person– what’s that? they would? seriously? wack.

#reblog2019

[argumate]

it is kind of weird but undeniable that openly stating a preference for large breasts marks one as a creep, openly stating a preference for small breasts marks one as a double creep, and ostentatiously having no particular preference at all simply marks one as a creep with no standards.

#reblog2019

[argumate]

there is the weak AI gloom hypothesis, that the creeping algorithmisation of every sphere of human activity will have unexpected negative consequences on quality of life thanks to Goodhart’s Law, this seems relatively uncontroversial.

then there is the strong AI foom hypothesis, that a couple of Java hackers can accidentally trigger armageddon back in 2002, this has slowly fallen out of favour.

#reblog2019

[argumate]

Apple spends about $6 million a year on lobbyists and $1,800 million a year on advertising, so it appears that lobbyists contribute at most two cents to the cost of each iPhone sold.

accumulation of capital is a bigger barrier to entry than patents: Apple spent $16 billion dollars on R&D in 2019 alone, and a lot of that is going into the development of custom silicon that is very difficult and costly to duplicate.

Apple R&D spending is up to $18.75 billion for 2020, that’s a pretty significant investment for anyone who wants a cut of those profits.

#reblog2019

[argumate]

Every damn group of delusional whackos relying on religion for emotional support insists that they’ve found the one true law underlying the entire universe and conveniently it relies on divine revelation, aka argument from authority, so it can’t be disproved or indeed challenged in any way, so you either have to listen to them or you’re being manipulated by evil itself, and while they don’t want to persecute you once they’ve established that frame it’s sort of inevitable, innit.

#reblog2019 #religion

[argumate]

broke: we should imprison the royals in fancy zoos like chimpanzees

woke: future generations will condemn us for exploiting the royals for tourism

#reblog2019

[argumate]

a market is much like an orgy in many ways: lots of people involved, some you’d rather not get too close to, plenty of energy, people do things they might regret, many transactions are bordering on anonymous, that kind of thing, but currently our “market” has three people in it, and three people is not an orgy, three people is an awkward booze-fuelled hookup or possibly just two people boning while their roommate plays League of Legends with headphones on.

#reblog2019

[argumate]

Coca-Cola’s death squads were paid for by investors on a consensual basis, avoiding the violence inherent in taxation.

of course if the targets of the death squads preferred remaining alive to being liquidated then they were at liberty to negotiate with Coca-Cola, or better yet hire a private security firm to arrange their defence!

ho ho

#reblog2019