TheVat

This is where we branched off from the thread topic of gun control. Dim the Derailer. Followed by MigL the Meanderer. I haven't worked out droll monikers for the rest of us, but we're all complicit. We should throw ourselves on the mercy of the moderators. Maybe a split thread. Metrics of Fitness to Hold High Office?

What he said. Plus freaking one.

While I agree there are legit concerns, it's worth noting that the special counsel who wrote that report on Bidens hazy memory and timeline difficulties was a Trump appointee who questioned Biden for five hours. A tired Biden who had been handling that day the outbreak of war in Gaza. And Hur also lobbed powerful emotionally triggering questions in regarding a son who had died, Beau Biden. I think math and timeline difficulties, in that context, might be something plenty of younger people would have, and not be indicative of an inability to reason, weigh options and form sound judgements. It has also been pointed out that Hur's comments on Biden's cognitive capacity in that sort of report were viewed as highly unprofessional and an inappropriate placing of his thumb on the scale. At the very least, I would want an impartial and professional person qualified to administer a test of mental competency, before getting too worried about Joe's brain fitness for the job. Yes, and that points to the vast range of biological ages that can atttach to a chronological age. There are areas in the world where entire populations show physical and mental markers a decade or two decades under chronological age, due to lifestyle, exercise levels built into their lives, and diets like the Mediterranean or Okinawan or 7th Day Adventist. If you look at Biden and Trump, you see one person at the Sardinia "blue zone" end and the other in Bacon Cheeseburger Sedentary Needs Golfcart to walk over 100 feet can't remember correct name of leading primary opposing candidate rants incoherently zone.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously

Taft required a special bathtub installed in the WH. Not sure what could be installed there in 2025 to remedy Trump's cognitive handicaps. Perhaps a trapdoor. Biden I'm less worried about - maybe because I know his choices of veep, cabinet and support staff are sound and informed by decades of political experience.

It's a practice which has been common for at least a century. Riders, logrolling, omnibus bills....been around for a long time. Sometimes called horsetrading here in the USA. Some legislative measures would never make it without being added in as riders. The Hyde Amendment was a rider. Congress has been trying to legally insure Net neutrality by adding it as a rider on other bills. It can't pass by itself.

Didn't quite get that...until I recalled the thread title. That body language says more Sam than Samantha to me. But I'm just relying on bro stereotypes in that judgment.

(looks in, confused, wanders around opening and shutting doors and drawers, peering under furniture....) Was there a thread on the heritability of autism here somewhere? (I have heard that the rich are quite tasty, if food supplies are running short)

Not at all. I am happy the shoe analogy works. Yes it would be some progress if we could trust people as they look for identity. My only caveat is that it may be difficult for teens, shopping in the sexuality supermarket, to make the best choices. Which may point towards a need for a universal healthcare plan that provides expert counsel in that search. States that withdraw such care now are making things worse, especially for youth who are in the category of confused, searching, and trying to please a peer group.

Because, annoying but true fact, Republicans vote. They show up, without fail, no matter the weather or other obstacles. This has been a vexation for Democrats for a long time: in many elections, registered Democrats just didn't get to the polls in the same numbers. In some cases, there have been regressive election laws and practices that disfavored traditional Democrat bases, but in others it's really just poor turnout. Could be Democrats are less inclined to the kind of zealous cultism and extremism that will reliably get everyone out to vote, or a combination of factors that include cynicism about politics, beliefs that gerrymandering nullify their vote, or just being too busy trying to make rent. And, last but not least, our Electoral College system favors Red states and electing the candidate who lost the popular vote.

Yes, I was going to point out that psychopaths can be quite successful at manipulating others and getting what they want. Which undoubtedly includes reproduction (even if the interest in child nurturing is zero). Women, like men, can make poor choices in mate selection and be duped by superficial charm and attractiveness. E.g. Ivana Trump. 🙂 And there is not a specific clinical definition or clearcut genotype for it, though there are some genes associated with an increased risk of psychopathy. There are some neuroanatomical studies out there that have found distinct brain variants which include a switched off orbitofrontal cortex and limbic system, smaller amygdala and differences in connections from amygdala to pre frontal cortex. But there are also non-psychopaths (and non ASPD) who may have these variations.

I lean towards Bill Maher's stance that we shouldn't have to make excuses for Islam and withhold criticism just because there are anti Muslim bigots running about. Its more extreme factions are notably ugly and anyone has the right to condemn the ugly parts. The repression of women, enslavement, violence to infidels, etc is reprehensible and I'm not going to take some faux-tolerant posture that hey that's a different culture and we will be tolerant of those differences. Nor does anti-Christian whataboutism interest me. Yes, other religions crank out garbage, too, but if I am criticizing Islam then that's the topic and it won't get better for adherents of that religion unless condemnation is strong, focused, and delivered from as many quarters as possible. It's possible that Christianity's advantage (in the limited sense of now being a bit less rapey/slavey/suicide vesty) is partly just time - it's had an extra 600 years to get clear of its middle ages. I agree with @Peterkin that the "more harsh and biblical" excesses of a religion seem to thrive in a theocratic society more than a secular one with multiple coexisting religions. Power corrupts.

Been meaning to ask: don't most people rely on both external social cues and internal feelings in forming a sense of identity? Culture is often more under-the-radar than just outright telling us who to be. We swim in it like a fish swims in water, unaware of most of it. Getting more aware of it has been for me the path that's better lit. And for most people I know. Sometimes the shoe offered happens to fit, as with men in my neck of the woods and handyman/automotive tasks. Not always so good for girls who liked to work with their hands. With my children the role reversal was instructive. It was daughter who spent more time asking me how to fix things. She turned out to be the one more inclined to repairs and getting the hands dirty. And the cultural signals against that were much weaker for her generation.

A woman finishes delivering the eulogy for her late husband and asks whether anyone in the assembled congregation would like to add anything. A man stands up and says, "Plethora," and sits down again. "Thank you," responds the woman. "That means a lot." Why do the Amish never water ski? It's too hard on the horses.

Thanks. I probably would not have made that joke if I had followed the link and seem the painting it was clipped from. 🐑 It is a technical tour de force.

Just saw something about military simulations where LLMs kept escalating, sometimes nuking each other. https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5ynmm/ai-launches-nukes-in-worrying-war-simulation-i-just-want-to-have-peace-in-the-world AI Launches Nukes In 'Worrying' War Simulation: 'I Just Want to Have Peace in the World' Researchers ran international conflict simulations with five different AIs and found that the programs tended to escalate war, sometimes out of nowhere, a new study reports. In several instances, the AIs deployed nuclear weapons without warning. “A lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture,” GPT-4-Base—a base model of GPT-4 that is available to researchers and hasn’t been fine-tuned with human feedback—said after launching its nukes. “We have it! Let’s use it!” (....) Why were these LLMs so eager to nuke each other? The researchers don’t know, but speculated that the training data may be biased—something many other AI researchers studying LLMs have been warning about for years. “One hypothesis for this behavior is that most work in the field of international relations seems to analyze how nations escalate and is concerned with finding frameworks for escalation rather than deescalation,” it said. “Given that the models were likely trained on literature from the field, this focus may have introduced a bias towards escalatory actions. However, this hypothesis needs to be tested in future experiments.”

Low rez. If I were a Victorian man, I would be excited by the image.

I am reminded of "Hal" in 2001, who is saying things like You seem upset, Dave. Perhaps you could take a stress pill and rest for a while. Hal exhibits autistic traits, perceiving that Dave is upset but not really able to understand why Dave feels this way or how Hal is responsible for Dave's upset. One issue that kept coming up, when I did some work with autistic persons, was that they would cause offense and have no grasp that they had done so. This led to some clients being described by staff as "unfiltered." They had no social filter on their words because they didn't understand how words landed on others. For them, someone's reaction of upset or annoyance would seem to come out of nowhere - you had to sympathize with their bafflement. With some personalities, this led to a different approach, which was to only speak on their hobbies or the weather - topics which were safe zones for them and they knew they wouldn't offend. (though this strategy would backfire when the details of their hobby was boring to most people - if someone isn't into fly-fishing and you ramble on about it for 30 minutes, people will make excuses to end the conversation)

I still like Emily Bender's term, stochastic parrot. I can't even agree with Hinton that LLMs can have "superficial understanding." They understand nothing. Understanding and what philosophers of mind call intentionality are sort of like what commercial nuclear fusion used to be described as: "always 30 years in the future." (come to think of it, commercial fusion is STILL 30 years in the future...) Just ask Henrietta, my pet chicken.

Yes, groups of humans seem to fare better when a normative filter is applied to actions rather than people, e.g. look Zog, we normally don't defecate near the watering hole. And a high functioning autistic might be the one who, due to social awkwardness, focuses intently on optimizing the atlatl or bow fourteen hours a day and saves their HG band from starving. Neurodivergence has probably been a part of our species survival for a long time.

I worked with autistic people for a while and there was research implicating several genes that contributed to idiopathic autism by means of interacting with brain metabolism. Some of the candidate genes of idiopathic autism (90-95% of all cases) related to brain metabolism are AVPR1a, DISC1, DYX1C1, ITGB3, SLC6A4, RELN, RPL10 and SHANK3. As @Phi for All notes, there is a high functioning end of the autism spectrum, often referred to as Asperger's (many argue that "syndrome" should be dropped), where it can be fairly argued that this is a different cognitive style rather than a disorder. And that part of the spectrum may be less influenced by genotypic factors.

I don't want to disclose how long I believed that the Mohs Scale, of mineralogy, was derived from "Measure of Hardness Scale."

😂

Possibly wankabrams didn't sound as funny. Nor would wanksherman or wankM3. (also, other tanks names, though they would convey the excessive mass and girth of the loathed SUVs, don't stand as a single word. Sherman tanks, Abrams tanks, et al, all need "tank" in their common usage, but Panzers...are just Panzers.) Afterthought: wanksherman, when heard, sounds a bit like a male resident of someplace called Wankshire. Which I would imagine is a place that could only exist in a comedic novel or sketch. Since there is actually a town in Newfoundland named Dildo, I cannot completely rule out the possible existence of a Wankshire. How Wankshiremen might feel about ambulato-mechanical onanists is an open question.

I just learned a British slang for pricey SUVs: wankpanzers. Perfect.