marchenko

>What? This is simply a lie. You know it.

This statement is highly uncharitable to your interlocutor above and frankly ignorant of the history of sexual assault prosecutions in the US. There has been a longstanding and documented strategy of defense attorneys trying to paint the alleged victim unsympathetically to try to elicit a just world theory-based response: "she was engaged in dangerous behaviour - that couldn't happen to someone like me".

It is important to distinguish the high-profile Title 9/social media kangaroo courts with the workings of the actual US justice system.

I suspect that turtl appeals to a lot of users with a large directory of plaintext notes who would be enticed to adopt the service if bulk textfile import were also streamlined. I hope the next release is a success!

I use Brackets and Typora to edit .md files on pc/mac/linux. I find image handling in .md files fairly simple as long as you maintain an appropriate folder structure on the backend. Typora makes this especially easy.

I would like to build a better self-hosted tagging/viewing program for my huge cache of notes - something like Google Keep without being, well, Google. Turtl comes closest to my needs, but the lack of import/export at this point is a problem. I do not wish to be tied to a particular format or storage space.

This is why a strong prior, developed through traditional policework, is necessary to increase the reliability of DNA results - most results obtained through database trawling will be false - and these will be numerous if the database is large enough. It is also part of the reason why exonerations are more robust than identifications.

This particular case may not suffer from these statistical problems, but they are worth keeping in mind, as it sets a precedent.

I wonder if the 2 physiology studies noted in the review are at all influenced by the fact that they were carried out in populations of ~100 college students before Return of the Jedi was initially released?

I tend to believe that this argument is generally true, but some researchers have argued that it is very sensitive to the specific endpoints chosen. In his preface to A Farewell to Arms, economist Greg Clark argues (about the world circa 2007):

> "Prosperity, however, has not come to all societies. Material consumption in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, is now well below the preindustrial norm. Countries such as Malawi or Tanzania would be better off in material terms had they never had contact with the industrialized world and instead continued in their preindustrial state. Modern medicine, airplanes, gasoline, computers—the whole technological cornucopia of the past two hundred years—have succeeded there in producing among the lowest material living standards ever experienced. These African societies have remained trapped in the Malthusian era, where technological advances merely produce more people and living standards are driven down to subsistence. But modern medicine has reduced the material minimum required for subsistence to a level far below that of the Stone Age."

Clark also argues that:

>"Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world’s population was poorer than their remote ancestors. The lucky denizens of wealthy societies such as eighteenth-century England or the Netherlands managed a material lifestyle equivalent to that of the Stone Age. But the vast swath of humanity in East and South Asia, particularly in China and Japan, eked out a living under conditions probably significantly poorer than those of cavemen. The quality of life also failed to improve on any other observable dimension. Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: thirty to thirty-five years. Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800. And while foragers satisfy their material wants with small amounts of work, the modest comforts of the English in 1800 were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery. Nor did the variety of material consumption improve. The average forager had a diet, and a work life, much more varied than the typical English worker of 1800, even though the English table by then included such exotics as tea, pepper, and sugar"

A lot of present arguments seem to center on the shape and AUC of the progress curve, and whether that has any implications for predictions based on historical data.

This is my main reservation about the Better Angels thesis: we may be replacing regular threats of (relatively)limited scope with existential threats. It seems like we are building a complex ratchet mechanism made up of entangled components. Many of these threats don't actually disappear, but are held in abeyance by continual technological progress, resource substitution, or our own fears of upsetting the ratchet.

I think Pinkerian thought is strong when it argues that we are currently in a much better time than, say, the Plagues of Justinian, where war, disease, and famine affected a huge part of the western hemisphere. But I wonder if our present condition is more fragile than our large population and social/technological advancement would lead us to believe.

The researchers made a strong effort to obscure the goal of the study, but if you are an academic participating in an artificial candidate search, you are likely to suspect that one of the variables being tested is either sex, race, or both. The experiment where evaluators rated a single candidate addresses this somewhat, but even in that case the participants are almost certain to have known that there was no job search in progress, and very likely to have realized that there was a socially desirable response possible to be given at no cost. By no cost, I mean that this person is not going to show up and take space and resources that could go to your preferred candidate/collaborator.

The best defense to the current threat landscape (privacy violations related to insurance, employment, and the law) is to define your genome-related queries as narrowly as possible and type/sequence only those relevant loci/regions.

Yodsanklai appears to have been referring to the availability of healthy prepared foods, particularly restaurant foods. It is entirely possible to live in an area well-served with supermarkets and bodegas and only have 'unhealthy' restaurants to choose from due to the peculiar demands of that area. You can drive through parts of the US and see nothing but greasy spoons or pub food, while the local at-home cooks have access to a wider variety of healthy foods from the markets.

This is not only false, but dangerously false. We are in the process of discovering that certain classes of popularly-prescribed drugs (eg ACE inhibitors for blacks, certain chemotherapy drugs for Asians) are ineffective or even toxic for populations not represented in the relevant drug development research cohorts. It's not identity politics to note that pharmacokinetics can differ between individuals and populations. These differences do not explain all of the population-level morbidity and mortality differences between ethnicities, but they are significant when investigating differences between groups on the same course of treatment.

Now I feel dated. I think there are a few of these still circulating through the younger branches of my family.