Hi, I don’t really code besides computation stuff in Python. You seem to be really knowledgeable, could I ask, what does the future of the web look like? Is it Rust and WASM? Or will JS and TS always have a place even a decade from now?

Yeah I think what you mentioned makes sense. I would argue your characterization falls into the often encountered issue with any cartesian, syllogistic, or otherwise self-described ‘rational’ logic & reasoning [1]. Essentially anything with only 2 truth states, while not intrinsic, appears to be tended towards.

I hadn’t actually encountered those parts of vygotsky’s work, thanks for the suggestion!

[1] Emotions are completely rational, see Randolph M. Nesse’s seminal paper (though he is an evolutionary psychologist/psychiatrist so take what he says with a whop of salt) and perhaps watch a lecture by him, there are several recorded seminars on ytube. I’d have to find the one I like, if you want a suggestion I can def find it for ya.

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The more fundamental liberal point of view espoused as far as I understand (please feel free to correct me, I don’t claim to have a genuine understanding of your argument) is the lack of engagement with the material reality of emotions, their function, and adequate descriptions of their specific role without dismissing them out of hand. This leads from the ‘Age of Reason’/‘Age of Enlightenment’ thinking, and deviates towards the kind of fantastical liberty argues by Stuart Mill, Madison, etc.

Nesse’s explanation of emotions–which appear ‘irrational’ or ‘inappropriate’ insofar as they do not appear to give the best outcomes for the emotional individual–as ‘smoke detectors’ works quite well. It ascribes function and meaning and makes the debate not one on qualifications of emotions as something to dismiss readily. To clarify what I mean, let me quote you, emphasis and footnotes are mine:

[…] …aimed at the tone of an argument instead of its factual or logical content [2] in order to dismiss a person’s argument. Ignoring the truth or falsity of a statement [3], a tone argument instead focuses on the emotion [4] with which it is expressed. […]

Instead the claim levied is erroneous on the parts I footnoted. The first [2] is the argument is the qualification of ad hominem which I disagree with. To keep it short, if the tone is relevant to the conditions in which the argument is made, then it is prima facie possible to affect the content of the argument. Arguments regarding it must be investigated, to use a phrase by Mao.

Then the one highlighting the tone themselves may be pointing out a subtle and apparently non-rational aspect. The difficulty in understanding the claim by the recipient or other parties is then for the sake of convenience considered ad hominem as it is not considered central to the argument. You can see here and you must know that fallaciousness is circumscribed and used as a useful heuristic, they are interpreted and not as clear as for example you have used it. The claim of fallaciousness obviously needs to be argued (which you certainly did, I am not claiming you did not) and a simple claim towards it is not sufficient in the least unless we will say it is agreed upon by the parties engaged in argument. Dismissal by arguing it is ad hominem does not disqualify all arguments with emotions as a focal point, and neither does dismissal of the ‘null hypothesis’ or particular case necessarily lend positive enforcement to other theses espoused.

Then I vehemently disagree with the categorization of ‘factual’ or ‘logical’ made, with a few qualifications. I understand factual as meaning an evidential claim with empirical evidence, or a claim which can be argued naïvely, and readily agreed upon. The common refrain is:

1. Socrates is a man
2. Socrates is a philosopher
3. Therefore all men are philosophers

I consider this for the purposes of an argument, to be considered true only for the purposes of the argument, i.e. to further elucidate some point. Another example with an emphasis on on the empirical aspect:

1. There is a cat
2. There is a mat below the cat
3. The cat is sitting
4. Therefore the cat is sitting on a mat

Then if the fallaciousness is circumscribed as follows (again please correct me, I assume I am incorrect and wrong, I just want to show where my thinking is to make it easier for you to share with me & to correct and brainworms):

1. Person A is making an argument
2. Person B comments on the perceived qualitative expression of Person A, i.e. on their alleged emotional state, i.e. on a physiological process which intrinsically has communicative affects towards others
3. Person B states or attempts to argue the emotional state has some importance in the context of the argument made by Person A
4. Person A states that this is not true, that their emotional state is unrelated, and that Person B is committing the fallacy of ad hominem

Here is where I have a problem. Stating that it is unrelated or untrue is the beginning of an argument or the thesis and it does not stand on itself, truthfully here I consider the statement [3] to be relevant. Truth or falsity may not be correctly argued by Person B, and it is not as though there cannot be an argument which is readily arguable by means of the emotive state of an involved party. For example:

1. Person C states that they hate migrants entering into the country which they have citizenship of and which they reside
2. Person C appears to Person D that they are afraid and angry
3. Person D asks why Person C is afraid or angry
4. Person C says it is not relevant in any meaningful way to their prior statements
5. Person D asks why they hate migrants entering into their country of residence
6. Person C states they take jobs away from the citizenry of the country

Here we can say hopefully without too much disagreement that the argument Person C makes is rational and logical apropos. The oft quoted saying, “You cannot reason a person out of something they did not reason themselves into” is necessary to keep in the back of one’s head and with kept with due consideration. Why? The premises that Person C has are faulty. A consequence of that is 1. the logically sound argument (at least as it appears) and 2. the emotive states which Person C appears to have.

Then how does one know if emotions are involved or not? As far as I am considered, they always are, whether it is to a meaningful extent needs to be determined in the course of argument. Any immediate dismissal is for convenience’s sake and likely due to faulty or erroneous premises the dismisser has. That is they do not really know much about emotions, and they employ a naïve rationalist framework in their thinking and argumentation. As materialists, the material conditions of even an individual must be taken into account, that includes qualitative states which may very well have a meaningful influence. Then [4] is rather unhelpful, as it precludes any discussion of an empirical affect, or, the material reality which can be observed and reasoned on itself.

Sorry for the wall of text, and for the late reply, I just thought of this a bit recently and wanted to share.

yo been a while cde, i wanted to ask: have you read any other ancient greek/roman authors? i’m looking at iamblichus and his work on pythagoras, and lucretius and his works. i’m not really acquainted (i only read socratic dialogues and not the mid or later platonic works, and parts of aristotle like organon and working through nicomachean & eudemian ethics) and i’m wondering if you have any tips or advice (｡◕‿◕｡)

honestly super impressed with stalin’s writing in general, kinda unbelievable that someone could be so good at as many things. i’ve met savant’s and their fantastical ability is typically restricted to a narrow domain, for some it’s almost as if they don’t have any special ability, and they could likely choose an area and excel at it. maybe not the absolute best, and still really really good.

any others come to mind?

you managed to sum up what i was thinking (was trying to use a polite & snarky tone)

Oh my, that’s genuinely awful. My mom had (and still has) chronic pain and so does my best friend. I had to give massages at night after they couldn’t bear the pain and they wouldn’t ask me because they didn’t wanna burden me or something like that. Since they were always in pain, they didn’t wanna feel needy!! So they’d wait until it was at its worst!

Really hope there’s something out there that can help you somewhat immediately. My best friend did physio (still does… consistently for 4ish years now) and the prescribed exercises & stretches really helped her out.

Medical staff won’t give you what you need when you seem too ‘needy’, it’s awful, it has a long precedent, and it’ll keep happening for the foreseeable future until contemporary medicine changes their modus operandi from zero-sum marginal-numbered positions to allowing anyone dedicated to become a doctor/medical professional.

kept on a leash

It’s crazy, Monsanto is like there wherever GMO’s are.

I think there are interventions that might work, e.g. golden rice which has more of some vitamin, creating hybrids of crops to make them disease resistant, I mean it’s already done, crops are sequenced and changes in their genome can be understood, modelled, and changed. It’s not trivial. Look at the wheat genome, it’s 16 Gbp (giga base pairs), which means letters like ATGC, for context the current reference human genome is around 3 Gbp. I recall when the wheat genome was sequenced, it was a mess of complexity,it’s been bred selectively so many times and has exaggerated features you wouldn’t find in nature. Understanding it to make major modifications might take some time. At the very least for now artificial selection can be done which is proven and works rather well.

An issue with golden rice and all gmo’s are their ties to industry. Golden rice I think was opposed by local farmers because they may have been displaced or at the beck and call of who owns the IP and rights of the crop. I don’t really recall and don’t want to go searching.

I’m only against gmo business practices, and it’s hard to decouple the publicly funded research with cruddy profit-seeking behaviour.

Just recall that there’s more than enough land to feed the entirety of the world’s population. Companies need to stop discarding & wasting food. People in the Global North would have to eat less meat to open up agriculture from feed & domesticated animals to food which can directly feed humans. There is significant energy loss in the Plant>Animal>Human pipeline.

A genuine problem is the effect of climate change on agriculture. Many crops and arable land will be lost.

No, I don’t think I will.

I made a response above, it is complex, and not that complex if enough subjects and enough data is attained. The more time goes on the more trivial it becomes.

The genetic component need not be the determiner for whether people of a faith, a culture, are discriminated against. Period. One need not react negatively to scientific claims, a good measure is, what if this limitation was overcome? What exactly would that change?

As far as I am concerned, with respect to genetics outside of medical use, or few other areas, nothing.

I completely agree with genetics being useless.

Your point about ‘most generalized’ is unfortunately not accurate. Perhaps in the past, there were for example major issues with the reference human genome which overrepresented people from western eurasia, and only have a handful of ethnic groups from Africa (recall, any two random people chosen from Africa will be more genetically distinct than any two other humans; Papua New Guinea might be an exception and other parts of Micronesia; at least to the best of my knowledge). Since for example there were many people from Amerika also sequenced, it only added to the bias towards western eurasians.

The current reference human genome is very very much improved over the initial attempts. Not perfect of course, however more specific databases and other references which are specific to other regions/groups/etc (really whatever grouping of genomes may be of interest), one which is not really related to ethnicity is the neanderthal genome, the Human Pangenome Reference tries to take care of the issues with any kind of bias by having a collection of genomes. There’s also the African Variation Reference Genome.

What does this mean? The resolution is increasing, note earlier that if only western eurasians and certain ethnic groups from Africa, like Mbuti, Yoruba, etc. if one was not of that population, say a Nuxalk Nation individual, enough would be different that it would be hard to say maybe if they were closer to western eurasian population A or B. Which says nothing of how they relate to the people living in close proximity, say Inuit to the northish and Anishinaabe to the east.

That isn’t the case now. There are single point mutations, groupings of a few bits of DNA, haplotypes (seminal paper here), which one can look at and say with confidence, “This genome belongs to a person who is very likely from this geographic region.” This doesn’t mean people don’t have variation, only, the genome is conserved, i.e. it doesn’t change all that much especially in some areas of the genome which are like super important. Such as the genes related to DNA Replication, making tRNA; stuff where if it wasn’t there the cell couldn’t grow and replicate at a high enough rate for the organism to be viable.

You can imagine there can be a test, like a pH strip, which only checks for one of several characteristic haplotypes or combinations of haplotypes if additional resolution is needed, and the result would be quite accurate. Enough to discriminate at least. Enough to arrest and test more thoroughly, which is only getting cheaper by the day.

You need to accept that this stuff is getting better, and outside of medical use, mapping migratory paths, etc. there need not be any application in a way which is discriminatory. Denying the effectiveness is denying scientific progress, maybe not now, but at least in the future. If we are to be dialectical materialists then it must be considered that a compound with a given causal history may have the ability to inform those who study it of its history, and, that ability will change over time. The incoming nefarious uses can only be countered if they are accurately anticipated. Humans exist and have existed in a specific physical space at specific times, like layers of sediment or the wear on a rockface, it can be analyzed and information of interest can be determined with great accuracy.

Look at this database, this population, Ecuador Cayapa has a 45.8% chance of having the haplotype DPA101:03-DPB104:02. You might say, “The sample size is only 183” and you would be right. What you aren’t including, is the hundreds of thousands sampled (this is only for high quality data which meets the needs of this database, there is much much more; typically the data needs to be de-identified and meet a laundry list of requirements to even be collected, let alone shared) which represent thousands of different populations spread out across the globe. And, though the haplotype I gave had ‘only’ ad 45.8% chance, and if you check it out other populations have it too, you’ll notice on the page there are three haplotypes which have a very high frequency. That makes it very precise. Here is the associated global map, there aren’t very many places where you would find an individual with the given haplotype.

This doesn’t include all the haplotypes which this population likely or very likely does not have. With that it’s rather trivial to determine where an individual is likely from, than to infer the migratory pathways and history.

Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to convey that I knew a bit about what I was talking about. Not too much, others who do this for a living or have advanced degrees would know much more.

For some good news, look at this database which has data on which haplotypes are associated with adverse drug reactions.

A note on variation. There is a genome, some areas vary a lot, some don’t as much. There are other 'omes. Omics captures the entirety of the field of this kind of computational biology. Transcriptome is more or less a time-series analysis of the level of RNA transcript of interest at given points in time. Epigenome is the epigenetic stuff, so like, there are molecules/complexes, the usual example is a methylated site. A methyl group is attached at some point along the genome and it changes how a gene is exposed. That changes how often it gets transcribed, how often a gene is expressed. You can’t necessarily look at the genome to determine which sites are methylated. I don’t remember the inheritance, it was sorta complicated and it’s been a while. mtDNA, or mitochondrial DNA can also vary, there are some diseases which lead to a non-viable fetus or a baby which will not survive past a certain age because their body doesn’t like produce enough energy needed.

Yeah, I would not like the precedent it would set.

The claim for this paper is that it is a necessary consequence of determining the medical nature of a condition which Ashkenazi Jewish people are at risk for. I read about the increased risk before, the author also lays it out well. In class we learned it was called a ‘founder effect’, when a population has it’s size greatly reduced and then there is less variation present.

The issue is any existing conditions, say an increased risk for a disease, propagate as the population grows and can become ‘fixed’. It isn’t as much of an issue for a large population, since if like, 10 out of 10 000 000 have the increased risk then it’s not too bad. If it’s 1 out of 10 000, that is troubling. When that population grows more and more people will continue to have the condition :(

Jewish people are discriminated against, that is rather obvious, finding out using diagnostic tools is helpful to anyone who might have an adverse condition and not know about it. Uh, unfortunately, medicine/research sucks and is chalkful of stuff like Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment, whenever ethnicity or specifically people from a given geographic region are focused on…

Ashkenazi are a population which are studies a lot (there are a ton of population genetics papers, those are the ones I am familiar) because there is an established history and it is fairly accurate.

Hope this stuff isn’t used by anti-semites (obv it will, I’m hoping the harm is kept at a minimum…)

I’m gonna try, I assume I’m wrong and someone can hopefully correct me…

India has a friendlier or neutral stance towards Russia due to its history with the Soviet Union. Something about a ship nearby some decades ago during the cold war scaring off some antagonistic ships?

I think India is also part of the non-aligned movement? The recent thing was a UN vote where India abstained? Something about recognizing something about the conflict… I think after that there was a statement by Ukraine or the Ukrainian President saying something like uh, wow I can’t believe you didn’t like super support us.

I wonder how much of it is more regional (i.e. say at present the number marching/protest are similar and they are distributed rather than concentrated, I’d need to see rough total counts for time periods to get a good idea, stuff the appropriate authorities have I’m sure…)

:snap

you’d love to see it

in with the clutch, thanks cde

oh yeah that makes sense, seems like my frame of reference was off