LuckyR

If one is interested in exploring the differences between human and nonhuman animals eating habits, you cannot ignore the impact of cooking/preparing meals vs eating organisms as they lie.

Hhhmmm... I experienced the opposite. As a 14-16 year old (8th to 10th grade), I ran with my expanding group of friends especially my core group of close friends but I still had a fair amount of left over childhood self absorbtion. It was a balancing act. In addition, I was living at home, with all of the repression associated with that.

By the time I was 25-30 years old (residency, marriage and early practice) I had developed my personality fully (which was significantly more social) and had my spouse matched my social interest, I'd have been even more "out there" than I actually ended up being.

If you're okay with cameras read by humans I'm not seeing a substantive difference between that and a system whereby the first pass is by AI then verified by a human. Sounds like a way for small towns to raise revenue during hard times. Thus the concept isn't to my taste, while the methodology is unimportant.

16 hours ago, swansont said:

It had a big impact, but it’s not like there was no impact on adult life expectancy.

Here’s an example: life expectancy of a 20 y.o. in England and Wales was ~60 in 1850. It’s now >20 years longer

https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-improved-at-all-ages

We're in agreement, improvements in infant and child mortality was "largely" responsible, I said. You said it had a "big impact". Your reference's chart clearly shows improvements across all age groups, with the lowest ages showing the most gains.

It's all good.

Several points:

First, deleterious genes that aren't lethal by age 30, are going to be passed along to the next generation regardless of modern medicine curing or treating them or not. The common lay example in this area is: are eyeglasses contributing to worse eyesight, genetically? Well before eyeglasses folks with poor eyesight commonly lived to reproductive ages (just as they do currently with eyeglasses) thus there was no evolutionary pressure selecting against any genetic causes of poor eyesight that is correctible with eyeglasses.

Second, the doubling of Average Global life ecpectancy in the 20th century was largely accomplished by lowering infant and child mortality through sanitation, antibiotic use and vaccinations, not treating diseases afflicting adults.

On 8/5/2025 at 6:20 AM, Otto Kretschmer said:

Note that just because someone with Antisocial PD is not a violent criminal doesn't mean they're harmless - in corporate environment they cause massive losses to both companies and workers alike, for various reasons - increased risk taking, corruption/fraud, lower shareholder trust, poor mental health of workers due to toxic work environment etc.

Oh really? Please list the categories of humans who are in fact "harmless".

On 8/3/2025 at 1:29 AM, Otto Kretschmer said:

The issue with ASPD folks is that they simply don't feel broken at all. Humans need to feel bad becuase of their actions in order to feel the need for change, ASPD people don't feel that. This is due to two things:

• Their amygdala is severely underactive. This causes a profound lack of fear, sadness, guilt, remorse etc.

• The amygdala-PFC connection is broken, causing an inability to learn from mistakes and punishment.

  If other people's feelings have zero emotional impact on you, your own goals become the only ones that matter.
  

Even if true as written, having a higher than average risk of criminal behavior is not the same as being a criminal.

The ethical issue involved is, of course, patient autonomy. Thus in order to compel treatment the patient must be unable to exercise their autonomy, typically either becsuse they are incompetent or, in this case, if the state has assumed control of their medical decision making. Such as with Typhoid Mary or when rapists are offered Depo-Provera treatment (emphasis on "offered").

For skin care products (as opposed to cosmetics), Dermatologists used to prefer Neutrogena back in the day. Currently many of them prefer La Roche-Posay.

Longtime user of honey/borax and peanut butter/borax (most ants alternate their diet between sugars and proteins I'm told). The key is to not use too much borax so it kills the foragers, you're looking for a 24 to 48 hour kill time. 1 tsp borax to 2 Tbsp bait works for me.

Another vote for apologizing to the guy. The time in between is ultimately of no importance. Whatever pain you imagine will be brought up by your doing so will be outweighed by the apology (assuming it's genuine). More likely he's gotten over it, no pain, no relief. But even then it'll be good for you.

7 hours ago, Phi for All said:

You're so welcome, I hope it revealed to you my attitudes towards generalizing me and deciding for me what I like.

Ah so, you took my observations (about the marketing of media) personally. I get it. Now it all falls into place.

Good to know. I'll file that away for the future.

On 6/29/2025 at 9:30 AM, TheVat said:

Can't decipher what you mean by "heterosexual appearing," or "appeared to be lesbian,” here. Naked people look like naked people, AFAICT, they don't come with tattoos designating sexual orientation.

Are you saying that "gaydar" is a myth? But seriously, of course I'm referring to stereotypes. Essentially all entertainment media deals in stereotypes, regardless of their accuracy or inaccuracy. I am not aware of lesbian sex visual media made for consumption by heterosexual men, that uses stereotypical lesbian appearing model/actors. Perhaps your experience can prove me wrong. You do agree that stereotypes exist, right?

On 6/29/2025 at 11:08 AM, Phi for All said:

It's rare that anything meaningful comes after these five words.

Thank you for your thoughtful addition to the discussion, your comment reveals much.

The best reason to patronize McDonald's is when on a road trip with a dog, all McDonald's (that I've run across), have some area of grass on the grounds.

Several things. First, nowhere near "all" babies cry after birth. Most folks attending deliveries will encourage noncrying babies to cry for the reasons noted above. Lastly, we adults associate the act of crying with great pain, either physical or emotional, but I'm not convinced crying is limited to that role in newborns.

I get what the OP is saying, but the options he's offering are the two ends of a spectrum, where various encounters between a couple fall at various points on the continuum. The median of these ppints will vary between couples, but it is an oversimplification to suppose the entirety of any couple's interaction will reside upon either extreme. Of course toxic relationships devoid of love exist, but are likely statistical outliers.

On 6/29/2025 at 12:46 PM, Phi for All said:

I don't understand why that's "funny". The default for humans is not murdering each other, and that predates all religions. Same with stealing, you aren't supposed to take things that aren't yours. We didn't need Abraham's god to tell us this.

There is an awful lot of evidence that we survived our prehistory just fine without the 10C. Perhaps the moral codes of the early atheists were copied by Judaism, then Christianity, then Islam?

I don't disagree with your analysis, but that calls into question whether religious folk actually (ultimately) derive their moral codes from their religion.

On 6/29/2025 at 4:52 PM, swansont said:

But if the religious folks knew for sure that there was no supreme being and no eternal damnation, would their behavior change? How much of the behavior is driven by fear of divine judgement/punishment?

If I understand you correctly you're stipulating that these religious folks aren't, in fact, actually religious (any more). Just about all of the religious people I know personally, have a mile wide and inch deep religiosity.

On 4/30/2025 at 9:42 AM, Sohan Lalwani said:

It can be personal morality. I for one accept and embrace the teaching of Jesus Christ, I do not accept the bible as an origin. I believe firmly in evolution as it is objectively provable. Perhaps they use religion as a moral source rather than believing it literally.

Exactly. Everyone uses a set of personal codes of behavior to assist with decision making. Those are moral codes. Most don't come from a religion, in religious folks, but some do. In the case of atheists, none come from a relious source, BUT the funny thing is, the moral codes of atheists are commonly identical to those of religious folk who DO cite religion as their source. For example, a religous person may cite the Ten Commandments as the source of their moral stand against murder. Atheists don't follow the Ten Commandments, yet commonly are morally against murder.

Well in general men don't really like viewing "lesbian sex", they like viewing two heterosexual appearing women mimicking lesbian sex. Or to put it another way. I can't remember seeing "lesbian sex" that featured models/actors who appeared to be lesbian.

Two different sets of statistics/concepts are being cited and referred to in this thread, typically interchangeably, but they're very different. Namely, polling data on women patients who "prefer" to be cared for by a woman, and those who refuse to see a man. The latter number, of course being much smaller than the former.

The reason this difference is notable is that workplace discrimination of this type is currently acceptable in society, whereas if someone repeated the poll and asked if patients "prefer" to be treated by a Jewish or Asian or thin doctor, no one would consider honoring this "preference".

Lastly, looking at it from the opposite side of the equation, knowing ahead of time that a potential client has bias/discrimination issues and avoiding interacting with that individual is actually a benefit to the provider of healthcare, so in my experience honoring "preferences" is a good idea.

Well first of all it is an error to think of "cancer" as a single entity, just as it would be to lump the common cold and ebola into a category called "infections".

Probably for the same reason that human breasts are larger than gorilla breasts.

2 hours ago, CharonY said:

I am mostly with MigL on this one but I would add two more stipulations. One, which can be tricky in today's atmosphere, is that folks are going to discuss in good faith. This is fairly common in scientific conferences and roundtables and expert panels, where at least quasi-consensus can be reached. This does not meant that there is a singular answer that all can agree on, but rather there is a consensus regarding the current state of knowledge regarding a particular topic, frequently with a list of open questions, areas of uncertainty or disagreement and knowledge gaps to be addressed. In these contexts, experts basically outline their viewpoint and tend to calibrate it with additional information gained by the other experts on the table.

However, with a random assortment of folks who just happen to have expertise in the area, but might have different motivations (e.g. if someone works for the government and doesn't want to get fired), things may be different.

The second is basically what I mentioned above already, and is related to how well a system is understood and what degrees of freedom the question offers. If the question is broad (like the overall impact on the US economy) there is likely going to be a clear consensus on immediate and well-understood effects (e.g. increase in consumer pricing), probably more variability in areas with less data (e.g. how will individual companies react in the long-term) and so on. Also, the more granular the answer is supposed to be, the less consensus is likely as often detailed knowledge is needed. For example, tariffs can increase competitiveness for domestic manufacturing based on standard models, however, it might not be true in all industries which could be specialized knowledge. And again, I think that certainty depends less on the format of discussion, but how well a system is understood in relation to the question under discussion.

 

 

Exactly. It is an error to assume that possessing expertise on a topic necessarily lessens the role of partisanship in a quasi-competitive venue.

On 3/30/2025 at 2:13 PM, CharonY said:

General speaking, when it comes to risk management of biological agents, the models are typically not quantitative. If you run a biosafety lab, for example, it is expected to be as close to zero risk as possible. The categories you deal with are usually qualitative in nature, e.g., high vs low risk, rather than precisely quantified, which, in many cases is simply not possible.

For personal care products, including soap, there are regulatory standards in terms of bacterial counts that have to be met. Because of the precise definitions, laundry does not fall under that category, but considering that laundry is in close contact with skin, it is a plausible risk. 

We're basically saying the same thing in different wording, thus I don't disagree. 

9 hours ago, exchemist said:

But there is a real, scientifically based health threat to at least some of their customers. That was explained in the thread. Legal liability, in this case at least,  is not disconnected from scientific reality.

Yes, there is a finite theoretical risk. However, we all know that there is no risk-free path in this life. The quantity of this risk was NOT "explained" nor demonstrated in the thread. And likely cannot be accurately and reliably quantified, which is common and perfectly fine. Hence the role for learned opinion and reasonable disagreement. Ad hom attacks notwithstanding.