The modern anthropological view is that it doesn't matter. The success of one population does not invalidate the history of another, just like with environmental conservationism. The fundamental problem with scientific racism is that being the pinnacle of evolution is impossible; leading civilization today is no guarantee you'll be leading it tomorrow—and not the only way to live a happy life anyway. It is perhaps no surprise that a lot of Americans in particular, poisoned by centuries of pressure to conform to the stereotype of the omnipotent entrepreneur, have trouble grasping this.
The proposal is just a bonus feature for people who'd rather not install Steam and/or Steam OS. You'd still be booting a Linux distro, too, not the game directly.
That's simply a lack of education on your part—genes are whole programs that define a mutation, and gene variants are a polite way of referring to very common mutations found in those programs. Popular science writing is profoundly inaccurate when it conflates the two, since humans generally have very few differences in what genes they actually possess.
On the other hand, when I say a study's rejection of the null hypothesis shows strong support for the alternative hypothesis, that simply means I have confidence there are no plausible alternative hypotheses that might better explain the dataset. No abuses of terminology are made and nothing inaccurate has been said. If you would like to present evidence that their controls were inadequate, by all means do so; otherwise you're attacking the validity of their research without basis.
No, it's not that narrow; materialist realism, for example, can exist entirely without supporting any notions considered idealist. (And I guess the other AC is right about solipsism.) The point is that it's just believing something is real, it's not about having a tempered perspective.
And yet Yohimbine is prescribed when SSRIs cause sexual dysfunction. It seems a lot of drugs cause random sex drive side effects; Ritalin can either increase or decrease libido, too.
Just so we're clear—you're misusing "realist" there. There is a (somewhat disproven) psychological theory called depressive realism that argues that a certain amount of negativity compensates for wishful thinking, but to take it as a generic label is to presume correctness. You might be better off saying "cynic" or "sceptic."
The general philosophical term "realist" is just an antonym of solipsist; i.e. someone who believes the world exists (although there's also an artistic term called "realism" which is about producing authentic depictions.)
Agreed, though it might still be a way to convince people to install the full Steam OS desktop environment. It seems to me like it'd be an easy gateway drug to lure console gamers with.
Actually, sexual dysfunction is usually about seeing negatives in oneself, not one's partners.
Personally, I'd like to believe that parents would be too cynical to prescribe anti-cynicism drugs to their kids, but that logic might be a little too convenient to be reality.
I find your level of pedantry staggering, and probably better-utilized in professional arenas where it has an actual impact of changing something. What are you trying to actually say? That you have no faith in their ability to control for confounding variables, and that I'm a bad person for believing they did?
Well, no, obviously not; even at the most pessimistic extreme, you'd have to convince a lot of cynics just like yourself that thinking negatively is necessarily a bad thing and that they should shell out biggish bucks to fix it. That's not exactly going to happen, now is it?:)
Realistically, the utility of understanding this gene variant and producing pharmaceutical remedies is in helping people with clinical depression break down barriers—people so cynical and miserable that they can't function normally. Yohimbine is currently prescribed to people already on antidepressants, though, so I would tend to guess it either doesn't address the effects of the mutation, or fixing it doesn't affect much once you're already on an SSRI.
That all being said, I do agree with you that cynicism can have its advantages—I have an ongoing hypothesis that childhood isolation and depression encourage the development of independent reasoning skills and hence improve intelligence, although it's a bit untestable still. I was inclined to proposition earlier that perhaps this allele has a meaningful relationship with the development of Western civilization, but that line of inquest gets very Social-Darwinist-sounding very quickly, and isn't exactly a great conversation piece. The reason for this is that as many as 50% of Caucasians are believed to have this allele (much more than other populations), so either it's completely meaningless in the long term and just happened by chance, or it conferred some relevant advantage.
That's a neat thought; another one (that's been tossed around here before) is to put games on boot CDs, so your PC behaves more or less like a console.
Not a gene—just a mutation. Perplexingly, there is a drug that blocks the receptor in question, but it's for treating sexual dysfunction. Possibly a goldmine for witty remarks.
Well, no; lottery numbers are known to be random. With human behaviour you at least have the underlying assumption that there are habits being picked up on. If all big data studies were as fruitless as your friend, the investments into the necessary infrastructure and algorithms wouldn't have made it nearly as far as they have. They do, however, find a lot of stupid correlations.
But much more importantly, the desire to find these correlations is potentially profound in its ability to damage society. The whole scheme is an effort to cheat the normal boundary of personal space in order to optimize business and surveillance efficiency. If this erosion spreads into everyday interactions between people, it'll be the end of trust. To fix it, we'd need who-knows-how-many Hollywood blockbusters about noble savages re-teaching the West how to act like decent human beings.
Perhaps if these businesses and government agencies were more willing to act like your friend and actually accept that life involves risk, we wouldn't be heading down this slippery slope so quickly.
Sadly not; at best you can only exclude yourself from certain demographics. That does you no good if they're looking for those demographics. The genie isn't back in the bottle.
At worst, the category "random/unclassifiable" gets flagged as suspicious in itself. (And no points for being an avowed Communist, even if you are reverent towards the Protector of Mexico.)
You might've stumbled onto the best solution yet; ask Craigslist and other online market places to require sellers to list the serial number of the bike (frame) they're selling. If the number's been filed off, then it simply can't be sold.
For what it's worth, that was thrown on later by media uptake; the authors simply talk about theory of mind. It is safe to assume Ayn Rand has a very small chance of fostering this in someone.
Slashdot Mirror
The modern anthropological view is that it doesn't matter. The success of one population does not invalidate the history of another, just like with environmental conservationism. The fundamental problem with scientific racism is that being the pinnacle of evolution is impossible; leading civilization today is no guarantee you'll be leading it tomorrow—and not the only way to live a happy life anyway. It is perhaps no surprise that a lot of Americans in particular, poisoned by centuries of pressure to conform to the stereotype of the omnipotent entrepreneur, have trouble grasping this.
The proposal is just a bonus feature for people who'd rather not install Steam and/or Steam OS. You'd still be booting a Linux distro, too, not the game directly.
That's simply a lack of education on your part—genes are whole programs that define a mutation, and gene variants are a polite way of referring to very common mutations found in those programs. Popular science writing is profoundly inaccurate when it conflates the two, since humans generally have very few differences in what genes they actually possess.
On the other hand, when I say a study's rejection of the null hypothesis shows strong support for the alternative hypothesis, that simply means I have confidence there are no plausible alternative hypotheses that might better explain the dataset. No abuses of terminology are made and nothing inaccurate has been said. If you would like to present evidence that their controls were inadequate, by all means do so; otherwise you're attacking the validity of their research without basis.
No, it's not that narrow; materialist realism, for example, can exist entirely without supporting any notions considered idealist. (And I guess the other AC is right about solipsism.) The point is that it's just believing something is real, it's not about having a tempered perspective.
And yet Yohimbine is prescribed when SSRIs cause sexual dysfunction. It seems a lot of drugs cause random sex drive side effects; Ritalin can either increase or decrease libido, too.
Sounds plausible, if profoundly inefficient and not really worthwhile.
One of many motives to install Steam properly? It's only supposed to be a lure.
Thumb drive like an old console controller memory card? You could keep saves on it too. No idea.
Just so we're clear—you're misusing "realist" there. There is a (somewhat disproven) psychological theory called depressive realism that argues that a certain amount of negativity compensates for wishful thinking, but to take it as a generic label is to presume correctness. You might be better off saying "cynic" or "sceptic."
The general philosophical term "realist" is just an antonym of solipsist; i.e. someone who believes the world exists (although there's also an artistic term called "realism" which is about producing authentic depictions.)
Agreed, though it might still be a way to convince people to install the full Steam OS desktop environment. It seems to me like it'd be an easy gateway drug to lure console gamers with.
Actually, sexual dysfunction is usually about seeing negatives in oneself, not one's partners.
Personally, I'd like to believe that parents would be too cynical to prescribe anti-cynicism drugs to their kids, but that logic might be a little too convenient to be reality.
I find your level of pedantry staggering, and probably better-utilized in professional arenas where it has an actual impact of changing something. What are you trying to actually say? That you have no faith in their ability to control for confounding variables, and that I'm a bad person for believing they did?
Well, no, obviously not; even at the most pessimistic extreme, you'd have to convince a lot of cynics just like yourself that thinking negatively is necessarily a bad thing and that they should shell out biggish bucks to fix it. That's not exactly going to happen, now is it? :)
Realistically, the utility of understanding this gene variant and producing pharmaceutical remedies is in helping people with clinical depression break down barriers—people so cynical and miserable that they can't function normally. Yohimbine is currently prescribed to people already on antidepressants, though, so I would tend to guess it either doesn't address the effects of the mutation, or fixing it doesn't affect much once you're already on an SSRI.
That all being said, I do agree with you that cynicism can have its advantages—I have an ongoing hypothesis that childhood isolation and depression encourage the development of independent reasoning skills and hence improve intelligence, although it's a bit untestable still. I was inclined to proposition earlier that perhaps this allele has a meaningful relationship with the development of Western civilization, but that line of inquest gets very Social-Darwinist-sounding very quickly, and isn't exactly a great conversation piece. The reason for this is that as many as 50% of Caucasians are believed to have this allele (much more than other populations), so either it's completely meaningless in the long term and just happened by chance, or it conferred some relevant advantage.
That's a neat thought; another one (that's been tossed around here before) is to put games on boot CDs, so your PC behaves more or less like a console.
From TFA:
[...] it is believed more than half of Caucasians have ADRA2b [...]
So, y'know. You might have it. The noted effects are minor, but highly certain (p < 0.001 on ANOVA).
You mean gene variant, not gene. if you lost ADRA2B, you would die. All healthy humans have more or less the same genes.
Not a gene—just a mutation. Perplexingly, there is a drug that blocks the receptor in question, but it's for treating sexual dysfunction. Possibly a goldmine for witty remarks.
FWIW, those are currently called "Earth-like" planets, although the broader term "Goldilocks planet" is often used to refer specifically to Earth-like planets within a habitable distance from their suns. There was an attempt at developing a class system for planets, but it only included gas giants. It actually doesn't seem all that out of the question that someone might adopt a modified version of Star Trek's system, although letters are already used for star classification.
Well, no; lottery numbers are known to be random. With human behaviour you at least have the underlying assumption that there are habits being picked up on. If all big data studies were as fruitless as your friend, the investments into the necessary infrastructure and algorithms wouldn't have made it nearly as far as they have. They do, however, find a lot of stupid correlations.
But much more importantly, the desire to find these correlations is potentially profound in its ability to damage society. The whole scheme is an effort to cheat the normal boundary of personal space in order to optimize business and surveillance efficiency. If this erosion spreads into everyday interactions between people, it'll be the end of trust. To fix it, we'd need who-knows-how-many Hollywood blockbusters about noble savages re-teaching the West how to act like decent human beings.
Perhaps if these businesses and government agencies were more willing to act like your friend and actually accept that life involves risk, we wouldn't be heading down this slippery slope so quickly.
...in fact, on that point, you may've gotten yourself flagged as an anarchist already. Smooth.
Sadly not; at best you can only exclude yourself from certain demographics. That does you no good if they're looking for those demographics. The genie isn't back in the bottle.
At worst, the category "random/unclassifiable" gets flagged as suspicious in itself. (And no points for being an avowed Communist, even if you are reverent towards the Protector of Mexico.)
You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity.
You might've stumbled onto the best solution yet; ask Craigslist and other online market places to require sellers to list the serial number of the bike (frame) they're selling. If the number's been filed off, then it simply can't be sold.
For what it's worth, that was thrown on later by media uptake; the authors simply talk about theory of mind. It is safe to assume Ayn Rand has a very small chance of fostering this in someone.
Just so we're on the same page—you do know about OPEC, right?