Day: August 1, 2020, 11:41 PM

Control For What

Chill Uncategorized

I see and note this. I haven’t read the paper and probably won’t soon (too much else to read).

I am very suspicious, though, of studies where factors are “controlled” out. It’d take more time to examine than I have, however. Just all too often scientists “control” for the very thing they should be examining, befitting the biases of the time. I do think there is anti-obesity bias in health care. I’m not saying it’s there for a good reason, but I understand why it’s present: obese people have worse outcomes across a wide range of diseases and conditions, and many conditions could be vastly improved and sometimes eliminated by just losing weight (examples: diabetes, PCOS, asthma, etc.)

I know to the fat acceptance types all of this can be explained somehow by bias, but that seems just excuse-making, considering The Health Effects of Overweight and Obesity.

All that said, obese people should get equitable treatment in health care and elsewhere, too. But I don’t want it to become a “dangerous truth” that there are risks to obesity. We already pretend that too much that is the case is not — let’s not allow this to become yet another area of absurd pantomime.

Masking Out

Chill Regular-ass Post

The risk of outdoors spread is very, very, very low, especially with incidental contact. Someone would literally have to exhale strongly directly in your face (from less than a foot) outdoors for you to have a large chance of catching Covid-19.

Why do people always seem to worry about the wrong things?

There is basically no chance of a jogger running by you and giving you Covid-19. It’s not impossible, but it’s so very unlikely that you have more risk from crossing the street.

GPT-3

Chill Regular-ass Post

Everyone should read Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds by Murray Shanahan. He writes a lot about Wittgenstein and “language games,” and many other related areas.

I don’t even agree with a lot of it! But it’s well-thought and a great intellectual effort that will you lead you down paths where you can then do your own cogitation — and that’s what makes it a great book.

It’s the exact opposite of the worst pseudo-scientific book of the 20th Century, the detestable Gödel, Escher, Bach. I am still angry about how much time that piece of shit doorstop stole from me.

Shanahan’s book is the exact opposite. Do read it.

Options

Chill Regular-ass Post

I think the main difference between me and most modern people is that my goal is not to minimize risk and never has been.

My goal is to maximize optionality while achieving the biggest gains (in time, enjoyment, money, etc). This looks reckless to many people but isn’t. When your goal is not to make the risk as small as possible, but to achieve the maximum gains while preserving choice with the smallest risk within those parameters, your behavior become much different.

More people used to behave more like I do — I wonder why it’s seen as next door to crazytown now?

Franchise Terminated

Chill Regular-ass Post

Terminator: Dark Fate was not a very good movie. It shouldn’t have been made; that story has been told and thus it was pointless.

Linda Hamilton, though, was great even in the face of lots of bad writing. How rare is it that an actress is actually allowed to look her age? Pretty damn uncommon.

And Mackenzie Davis is pretty good too, and has facial scarring as a “good guy” character and a woman. That’s pretty rare. Movies always seem to use facial scarring as a sign of a definite baddie. Yeah, it’s not much scarring, and tellingly it’s been airbrushed out of all the press stuff, but I liked it.

Other than that, not much to say about this fairly-boring film.

The scenes where Grace is using the chain are pretty great, though. The only parts of the film that felt visceral and real:

(She’s human, but augmented, so that’s why she can move it so quickly. So short but really well-done. The rest is CGI crap.)