neurobama

I engaged primarily in arguments of fact. I did my best to cite sources and outline rational arguments. I was immediately condescended to, insulted, and slandered as racist and a liar. I admit I got testy in response, but you can see that I didn't fire first and was repeatedly provoked. None of the others users involved appear to have been silenced or banned.

This isn't just some academic comments section argument, it affects real policy and real people and real lives. Where on the whole Internet is open and honest discussion of this subject, who commits crime in America and why, permitted? Not Facebook, Reddit, very soon likely not Twitter. I had hoped HN of all places would be one such forum. I see now I was wrong. Your biased moderation is noted and a great disappointed.

Your tone clearly indicates skepticism; "racist rants", "allegedly."

PS: Moralizing condescension isn't conducive to a positive response.

What are the advantages of Whisper over a custom app running on a cheaper Andriod tablet? How much benefit is derived from the dual microphones, for instance? Are there hardware-level APIs that Whisper offers which a custom Android app wouldn't be able to access?

I don't mean to nitpick, this looks really cool. I've just got a few old tablets lying around, and I'm trying to decide whether to spring for one of these instead of trying to make something work on what I've already got.

Guess I'll stick with spectacles. Safe, inert, strong, transparent, recyclable, cheap, and abundant... glass is truly a Bronze Age wonder material!

In fact it is not true: https://www.city-journal.org/article/is-the-criminal-justice...

"Made-up race categories" are visible to the naked eye, to principal-component analysis of alleles, to measures of genetic distance, to surveys of visible and invisible traits, to even the smallest child who's only begun to speak.

What was the Human Genome Project for? Your mockery and denial, I guess. Why have scientists spent lifetimes improving DNA sequencing technologies, carefully gathering data, and drawing conclusion based on the evidence? So you could laugh it all off, I suppose.

Your refusal to acknowledge reality fails to budge reality. The natural world doesn't care about race or sex solipsism. Policy founded on reality-denial will always eventually fail and be replaced. Whether it fails hard or soft and what is allowed to replace it is the question of our time in America.

Enzymes don't care if you believe in them or not. I don't care whether people are sympathetic to my comments or not. I care what is true and what is false, in the real world where it matters to real people. You can read the decades of high-quality and well-replicated research in this area or not. Either way you will live with the consequences.

And just so we understand, these are some institutions you imply have somehow misrepresented the science they funded, performed, peer-reviewed, and published on this topic: the National Institutes of Health, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Australian National University, University of Southern California-Los Angeles, Sam Houston State University, University of Cincinnati, University of Texas at Dallas, Iowa State University, and St. Louis University.

Family structure is part of it too, but I figured my comment was already too long. Yet if somehow you return black family structure to its pre-1960s state of harmony, you will still face the problem of disproportionate violent crime rates. This article is from 1958, years before extra-marital birth rates took off in the US black community:

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,810...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...

The only solution is to face facts, apply equal standards of justice without regard to race, and keep that single-digit percentage of violent black criminals away from regular black folks and everyone else so good people have a chance to succeed. Over time with consistent and fair law enforcement, improvements in medicine, and effective universal public education, I am confident people of all races can live together in harmony. That is the objective of the American idea, and its success or failure will make or break this country.

I could say that no one has seriously proposed "eliminating ALL violent crime perpetrated by immigrants," and you're using this absurd strawman as some sort of shield to avoid discussing race, and that people generally accept other groups who commit violent crime at similar rates to their own, and it's just one group in the US in particular who falls way outside the bell curve (per link theme)... but it's clear you aren't here for earnest or honest discussion, so I'm out.

>Except if they were accepted in the way racists wanted race to be accepted, we'd crack down hard on freedom of movement for men.

Bananas. Where do you find this stuff?

>A consistent racist would want us to pull our head out of the sand and more rigorously police the violent criminals that are, almost always men.

We already police men way more than women, what's your point?

>The data on the outsized violence of men is much more consistent, and dramatic, than the violence of any "ancestral genetic group".

Read the last part again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35943243

A highly-enriched uranium fission bomb is conceptually and practically simple to construct. The hard part is getting enough HEU. That part isn't even hard to achieve (North Korea managed it after all), just moderately expensive and hard to conceal. This process and the bomb design is explained in detail in the nuclear non-proliferation documentary, "Countdown to Zero" (2010): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572769

The amount of HEU needed for a device of this type with a yield comparable to Little Boy could fit in a shoebox. Seal it in some lead pipe, stick it in a shipping container and no one would know. The above documentary illustrates this powerfully with animations and expert testimony. Strongly recommended, especially as a companion to "Command and Control" (2016): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5598206/

Yes, they do. Here's why:

No one believes that since most imprisoned murderers are men, there's systemic anti-male bias in the justice system. The relevant biological differences between sexes are acknowledged and accepted. I'm asking HNers to accept similar well-studied differences between ancestral genetic groups.

Refusal to acknowledge and accept these differences has already led to bad policy, such as de-policing America's black communities, which has cost hundreds of black men their lives in just the last few years. A minority of this minority is allowed to run wild and victimize their neighbors and society at large. This is plainly unsustainable. We can take our medicine now and accept the need to police violent criminals, even if they are black, or we can keep our heads in the sand until something far worse boils over. This is the core message of all my comments on this link and race issues at large.

That heritable factors which correlate with race significantly impact rates of violent crime, including large differences in crime rates between groups; that these differences matter more than sex differences, particularly given taboos around race; and that this knowledge should drive expectations for fair criminal justice policy.

This YouTuber scratches that itch for me: https://www.youtube.com/@IndigoTraveller

As you surely know given your profile, testosterone is a hormone with many critical functions unrelated to aggression. Lack of sufficient testosterone causes osteoperosis, cognitive problems, fatigue, anemia, memory problems, hot flashes, and many other symptoms in men. It's essential for men's overall health and cannot be clearly disentangled from this role.

We do regulate the use of injected testosterone due to risks such as "roid rage" and enlarged heart among others. In the US testosterone is considered a Schedule III federally-controlled substance, i.e. a drug with medical uses that also has potential for abuse:

https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/schedules/

If a genetic mutation were known to code for impulsive violence, reduced IQ and little else, the story would be different. We wouldn't keep it around. MAOA-2R is such a gene. I know of no benefits to carrying this mutation versus its 3R or 4R variants. It causes a milder form of a disease called Brunner Syndrome, which confers a reduced IQ as well as increased violent aggression and reduced impulse control:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunner_syndrome

MAOA-2R lies in the same category as cancer-causing variants of BRCA1 or the allele for sickle-cell anemia in Western populations. We should treat it as such. There may also be non-genetic treatments for MAOA deficiency in the future. These should be explored and offered to those who might benefit. In the meantime we must accept reality. This gene, its effects, and its relative prevalence among racial groups (or "ancestral genetic populations" if you prefer) must factor into relevant public policy.

Given your comments thus far, I suspect that instead of engaging on the topic at hand you'll try to draw me further into some debate on whether men, seeing as they're so violent, should even be allowed to exist. Suffice it for me to say that the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis makes sense for humanity, and before "gender theory" reared its head we did a fine job keeping men in social spaces and structures where their more-aggressive tendencies were managed and expected.

>Can you not just accept that "white" (however you like to define the term presently) men commit significantly more murders in America than in Germany?

Sure, I agree and I'm pointing out reasons as to why that is. I have never before heard gun policy lumped in with "socioeconomic factors."

My original point is that socioeconomic factors alone don't explain the gap in murder rates between e.g. black women and white men in the US and in other countries. Your argument to the contrary is woefully insufficient. Comparisons between the same race and sex in two similar cultures at similar income levels isn't enough.

We already know wealth and income correlate somewhat with crime. This effect is seen within racial groups. What we don't know is why large gaps exist between different groups at similar income levels. The effect is particularly stark and peculiar when it comes to violent crimes e.g. rape which have nothing to do with stealing to feed oneself.

Hundreds of black men have died violent deaths because of bad policy written by those who, like you, avert their eyes from reality when it suits them:

https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1651437800842223616

Granted, they don't always do it with a droll non-sequitur.

Yes, and also perpetrating. Most murders are intra-racial.

The sources they cite are clearly visible. The graphs are easier to grok at a glance than big tables. Do you have any response to the substance of my comment?

>women being the victims of violence.

What sort of violence are we talking about? Men are murdered far more often than women across the globe, at a ratio of about 4 to 1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicide_statistics_by_gender

Men are slightly more likely than women to experience domestic violence in the US, per the CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey:

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs/NISVSReport...

However, woman are about twice as likely to become victims of sexual violence:

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/sexualviolence/fastfa...

It does not. Americans have a median income roughly 10% higher than Germans, far more guns per capita than Germans, and nearly 40% of male homicide suspects in Germany are non-German in any case:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101485/non-german-crime...

By the way, if we only consider non-Hispanic whites (this is a state-defined census category) America's homicide rate is 2.2:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/05/21/how-amer...

This is a pointless observation since the male/female difference is the approximately equal for all races. In contrast, black women in the US commit more murders per capita than do white men: 5.8 versus 3.5 per 100k, as of 2021 per the FBI/Department of Justice. Black women are the only female group with this distinction compared to the male ethnic majority in the US, and all other countries of which I am aware.

By "their opponents," I meant opponents of the previous Twitter owners.

The neutral platform is gone. As we were so often and so smugly reminded, Twitter is a private company. They can ban who they like. This is the dog-eat-dog public discourse world you chose.

Like CASM, there are groups of sociopaths who share these videos in private and occasionally in public. Everything from Facebook groups to small YouTube channels to private forums. The people who hunt them down, gather evidence and send it to the cops are true heroes in my view, alongside paid Facebook content moderators.

>Is there direct evidence of Elon's personal engineering prowess?

Yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

>I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments.

Lots of ideologically-opinionated users are mad Twitter no longer censors and bans their opponents. They're upset that their patrons who enforced this got fired by Musk. Much seemingly unrelated criticism flows from this.

As to the actual Twitter experience, I've always used a chronological feed and never understood complaints about the algorithm. Step one to not being bothered by an opaque algorithm's control of your attention is withholding that control in the first place. I haven't noticed any change in my daily Twitter browsing in this regard under Musk.

>But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.

I think you'll find there's a significant split in perception between, for example, the average American and the pseudo-elites who inhabit Bluesky and Hacker News. Or the latter and the average actual hacker, for that matter.

The buyers do not approach those who have been legally deemed incompetent. As you say, such a sale would not be valid. But then again, can the isolated mentally incompetent even bring such cases to court? Vulnerable people who break a hip and can't afford surgery also don't deserve to lose their homes, especially not at a fraction of market value. There are clear gaps in the system which these buyers are exploiting and which you are repeatedly and willfully excusing. There's a chapter in the Bible about this type of behavior involving whips, overturned tables and an angry Jesus.

>or “white trash” which could both be a slur and the title of an edgy Vice documentary

It's only not considered a slur in the second case because Vice has money, you and your friends and powerful people like Vice, and the "white trash" don't reflexively assault you like beasts when they hear the words uttered. The meaning is understood and remembered regardless.

Absolutely, and I'm glad you linked them! Cool to read about applications of ML in healthcare.

>A unique two biomarker profile consisting of ANG-1/P-SEL was developed with machine learning, providing a classification accuracy for Long-COVID status of 96%.

The first paper used a random forest-based decision tree classifier built on markers in blood assays. Neat.

However, this study has a major flaw. They rated their classifier's accuracy on classifying blood marker profiles of acutely ill COVID patients, long COVID patients experiencing "diffuse symptoms" referred with "no selection process", and a healthy control group. The control group consisted of healthy patients whose blood samples had been banked prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's not clear whether they compared their classifier's results against people who've had COVID and recovered without issue, versus those who had COVID and continued to experience symptoms long after recovery. That is the entire point of developing such a classifier. This paper is worthless without that comparison.

Second paper has the same problem, and is honest about it:

>The healthy control subjects were individuals without disease, acute illness or prescription medications and were previously banked in the Translational Research Centre, London, ON (Directed by Dr. D.D. Fraser; https://translationalresearchcentre.com/). These latter samples were obtained prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in our region and therefore, were considered not to have been exposed to the virus.