• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • is now, in large part, a referendum on genocide

    No, it isn’t. Part of the problem with articles like this is the idealogical bubbles so readily afforded by modern life to the author. Nearly twice the percentage of Americans are fine (or think more should be done) with the USs arming of Israel than think it is a problem. The percentages within parties aren’t even that far apart. The average American doesn’t care about brown people dying half a world away. Anyone who has been paying even the tiniest bit of attention for the last 50 years should already know this.

    But when you hang out in leftist spaces online, have leftist friends IRL, and read mostly leftist news sources, you lose sight of the fact that the average American is politically much closer to your problematic uncle you only see on the high holidays, than you.

    a vote for her is the best/only way to register a “no” to genocide vote. To state, as liberal Democrat supporters tend to do, that Trump will be worse when it comes to Gaza, obfuscates this point.

    No it isn’t. Doing whatever it takes to keep it from getting worse is in direct service of this point. It sucks that the only outcomes are the status quo or make it worse, but as long as that is the case, then not choosing to not make it worse is a moral failing.







  • Among all the moral problems, there is also a technical problem: we don’t know that much about the relationship between IQ and genetics. Not even close to enough. We can’t even reliably predict something as straightforward as eye color outside of very simple situations and that is far clearer than the genetics of building and operating brains.

    Not only is the genetics that underlie human intelligence complicated, so too is understanding intelligence itself. It’s not even clear that human intelligence can sensibly be reduced to a single number, or even a set of numbers, let alone ones that can be used to ordinaly rank people.

    The situation isn’t much, if at all, better for any of the other traits they list. There may be some useful screens for specific mutautions that result in particular diseases that are well understood, but when it comes to the full understanding and subtlety of more complex traits, human genomics just isn’t there yet.