The DoomYoshi Musings thread

[DoomYoshi]

DY, have you ever read the DaoDeJing?

No. The only Chinese stuff I have read are I Ching (many moons ago), Journey to the West and Romance of the 3 Kingdoms (partially).

[mrswdk]

Ooh look at you. You still get a seal of approval for that.



Can you read Sima Qian's Records of a Grand Historian and let me know how it is plz?

[mookiemcgee]

So they are certified to be used in legal cases in the United States. Note that they offer both a "legal test" which is one that is admissible in a court of law in the United States, and a Home test, which is not.

I believe also that US regs mean that prenatal tests are not "legal tests", in that they can't be used in court.

However, iirc most Maury episodes are filmed after the child is born. Once a child is born, there is no controversy. Just take the child's blood and everything is easy. It's the prenatal tests that are controversial.

Thanks Dr. Doom(Yoshi)

[DoomYoshi]

The market, such as it is, is figured on what is called the crude death rate—the number of deaths every year out of every thousand persons.
Here is how it works.
Imagine a large room into which you coax one thousand people. You slam the doors in January, leaving them plenty of food and drink, color TVs, magazines, and condoms. Your sample should have an age distribution heavy on baby boomers and their children—1.2 children per boomer. Every seventh adult is an old-timer, who, if he or she wasn't in this big room, would probably be in Florida or Arizona or a nursing home. You get the idea. The group will include fifteen lawyers, one faith healer, three dozen real-estate agents, a video technician, several licensed counselors, and a Tupperware distributor. The rest will be between jobs, middle managers, ne'er-do-wells, or retired.
Now for the magic part—come late December when you throw open the doors, only 991.6, give or take, will shuffle out upright. Two hundred and sixty will now be selling Tupperware. The other 8.4 have become the crude death rate.
Here's another stat.
Of the 8.4 corpses, two-thirds will have been old-timers, five percent will be children, and the rest (slightly less than 2.5 corpses) will be boomers—realtors and attorneys likely—one of whom was, no doubt, elected to public office during the year. What's more, three will have died of cerebral-vascular or coronary difficulties, two of cancer, one each of vehicular mayhem, diabetes, and domestic violence. The spare change will be by act of God or suicide—most likely the faith healer.
The figure most often and most conspicuously missing from the insurance charts and demographics is the one I call The Big One, which refers to the number of people out of every hundred born who will die. Over the long haul, The Big One hovers right around . . . well, dead nuts on one hundred per¬cent. If this were on the charts, they'd call it death expectancy.

[jonesthecurl]

Who's driving vehicles around in this room? And hasn't anybody been shot by the police?

[DoomYoshi]

Twitter is a really inappropriate news medium:
https://twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/stat ... 3320222721

[DoomYoshi]

4 men and 2 women are killed in clear evidence of violence against women:
https://reason.com/2020/07/10/steven-pi ... re-attack/

In their fourth point of indictment, the letter-writers focused on the 2014 rampage killing by a male student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in which the murderer posted a clearly misogynistic rant. The virulence of the manifesto provoked some commentary asserting in the U.S. that the "expectation that violent misogyny in young men is normal and expected." The LSA critics say Pinker downplayed "the actual murder to six women as well as systems of misogyny," via a 2014 tweet in which he declared, "The idea that the UCSB murders are a part of a pattern of hatred against women is statistically obtuse." When the letter-writers accuse people of bad faith, they should be more careful to get at least their basic facts right: In this case, the shooter/stabber killed four male students and two female students, not six female students.

"I think to credit rampage shooters as part of a system [of misogyny] is statistically obtuse," says Pinker. He points out that rampage shootings are responsible for a tiny fraction of homicides and consequently he is "opposed to over-interpreting rampage shooters" as evidence that the patriarchy endorses the idea that "innocent women should be murdered by shooters" and is "a rather poor way to understand cultural trends." In fact, a 2019 review of the motivations of mass shooters in the U.S. found that misogyny was the leading factor in only one case—the Santa Barbara rampage. Pinker notes the cultural trends with respect to violence against women in the U.S. are happily the opposite implied by the letter-writers. "In general, the trend for domestic violence is downward," he says. "It's a triumph of the women's movement that fewer wives and domestic partners are killed and there is less spousal and girlfriend abuse."

[DoomYoshi]

Tomorrow's News (actually a census) Today!
http://gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p1/2020/2020 ... t-eng.html

New questions on gender and indigenous. Everything else looks standard...

[DoomYoshi]

Last year Dorothy Bishop wrote: The 4 horsemen of irreproducibility are 1) publication bias 2) low statistical power 3) p-value hacking and 4) HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known).

This year she wrote an article about how to get over cognitive biases in statistics. It's a decent article.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02275-8

[Dukasaur]

Last year Dorothy Bishop wrote: The 4 horsemen of irreproducibility are 1) publication bias 2) low statistical power 3) p-value hacking and 4) HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known).

This year she wrote an article about how to get over cognitive biases in statistics. It's a decent article.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02275-8

Nice.

[DoomYoshi]

You can't make this stuff up...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pe ... ovid-death

[jonesthecurl]

You can't make this stuff up...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pe ... ovid-death

Isn't that the point? that she made it all up?

[DoomYoshi]

You can't make this stuff up...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pe ... ovid-death

Isn't that the point? that she made it all up?

The point is that it's always made up. The world is full of crisis actors.

[DoomYoshi]

Should it be illegal to speak about the police in a positive tone? That's what Joe Democrat is pushing:
https://quillette.com/2020/08/03/the-wo ... 2b26af01d5

Moss and O’Connor chose instead to study three sets of attitudes “falling outside of the traditional continuum,” designated by the researchers as (1) Political Correctness-Authoritarianism (PCA), (2) Political Correctness-Liberalism (PCL), and (3) White Identitarianism (WI). While the latter is a right-wing subculture (often known as alt-right), the first two are variants of leftist ideology. Both PCA and PCL are centered on protecting minorities from discrimination and criticism. But PCA adherents, unlike PCL counterparts, embrace “the belief that aggression and force are appropriate methods to achieve ideological goals.”

The questionnaire relied upon by Moss and O’Connor contained dozens of questions. One section gauging PCA attitudes, for instance, asked respondents what level of punishment should be meted out to professors who use racist, sexist, or homophobic slurs, with answers ranging from “not punished” to “immediately dismissed” to “court trial.” Another asked whether students accused of sexual assault should have the presumption of innocence.

What Moss and O’Connor found is that while right-wing adherents of WI and left-wing adherents of PCA are “thought to reflect opposing ends… of the political spectrum,” they actually shared remarkably similar personality characteristics: “Our study indicates that an emerging set of mainstream political attitudes—most notably PCA, WI, are largely being adopted by individuals high in DT [i.e., Dark Triad traits] and entitlement. Individuals high in authoritarianism—regardless of whether [they] hold politically correct or rightwing views—tend to score highly on DT and entitlement. Such individuals therefore are statistically more likely than average to be higher in psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism and entitlement.” (The authors also supply a footnote to the effect that “we also ran all analyses controlling for the Big Five personality traits—Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism—to check whether effects of [Dark Triad] variables could simply be attributed to normal variation in personality. Our results confirmed that incremental validity of [Dark Triad] traits and Entitlement remained [statistically significant] for both WI and PCA when controlling for Big Five traits in addition to age, sex, education, and ethnicity.”)

[DoomYoshi]

Oranges are orange, salmons are salmon...
consumers are coddled, humanity is destructive...

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/202 ... re-salmon/

[DoomYoshi]

Are doctors a form of societal oppression?
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health ... e-deafness

But all of that builds on the assumption that deafness needs a cure. It does not. Though our dominant cultural view of deafness needs a fix.

[DoomYoshi]

Twinkie flavored protein powder, French's Mustard beer, Busch Light Lattes, KD breakfast cereal...
August's lists of best packages is pretty impressive, but for some reason didn't include mine...
https://www.packagingdigest.com/food-be ... -packaging

[DoomYoshi]

Time for a musical interlude:

[DoomYoshi]

https://atory01.com/thoughts-for-the-new-qp-coordinator/

Interesting blog about question period in the House of Commons.

[DoomYoshi]

Honoring the dead is now seen as a crime against humanity. Apparently the golden rule doesn't apply anymore:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/lawsuit-f ... -1.5753731

[DoomYoshi]

FF on liberalism:
https://www.americanpurpose.com/article ... iscontent/

[DoomYoshi]

Can someone explain to me why this is illegal? Is this not the very principle which the US&A is founded upon?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... story.html

[Dukasaur]

Can someone explain to me why this is illegal? Is this not the very principle which the US&A is founded upon?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... story.html

LOL, those principles were buried on February 2nd, 1787.

By the time its much-ballyhooed Constitution was enacted, the U.S. had already been transformed from a hotbed of radical freethinkers to an elitist republic of rich exploiters clinging to power by any means necessary.

[DoomYoshi]

Sand:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/scie ... -soft.html