CharonY

Not to mention that in social animals hierarchies are often far more complex than anticipated. For chimpanzee there were a few fairly recent papers highlighting non-linear properties of their hierarchies, for example. I would need to find the papers again, but I think that funnily there were some similarities to what you describe. There was a theoretical dominant individual which beat most others up but was not beaten in return. But socially that individual was rather isolated. Which might indicate that chimpanzees have a more differential social view than quite a few humans...

It does not have to be adversarial, which adds to the exhaustion. Often the issues can be subtle. Some common examples in my area are collaborative settings, it is always assumed that the typically senior (white) male is actually the mastermind. If they say no it was actually a [similar or junior female, or minority], it can be often seen as generosity. Subsequent correspondence still goes to the perceived lead. It is a small thing but if you bring it up yourself folks get defensive, they did not meant it that way. Which could be driven by the fear that they could actually offend the perceived actual leader. I.e. they just act in a system of familiarity where the project leads used to be mostly male and white, and they may not be flexible enough to adjust to changing situations. This is of course not a PC situation as such, but an example how perceptions clash with changing situations. The person not adapting to these situations is almost automatically defensive as from their perspective they were just conforming to norms. And because of that, a person speaking up may just be overly sensitive. Yet from the other side it means you need to careful modulate your responses so that folks slowly get used to the idea that you are actually running the show without making folks feel bad about their behaviour. The first time I across his name all this years ago I had a similar image. Just a more a giant teacup situation. That is again based on context, isn't it? In various groups that is entirely acceptable. If I called a student love or a student called me sweetie, it could cause issues. That is the issue for things considered socially acceptable, all rules are basically made up and society kind of (but not really) agrees on some of them for a given period, before perception shifts. PC going wild is then basically a descriptor for a situation where different groups assume different things I think the real issue is that many things are hard to resolve now as they travel quickly outside our area of influence.

In certain (rare) circumstances they can. It is an in-vs outgroup situation. Among folks who know you and can contextualize your action certain otherwise egregious behaviour can be accepted and even endearing. E.g. you might use insults among your friends, but that can turn ugly if you use the same with random folks you don't know. The use of words like "nigger" have been specifically used by white folks in order to denigrate and subjugate black folks. Theoretically a group of black folks might be comfortable with having a specific white friend use the term around them, but it is so loaded that even the white person might feel uncomfortable using it (as it invokes a power differential). I am also not sure whether random black folks calling each other that term is acceptable under all circumstances. There is certainly more nuance to it (i.e. slightly more acceptable but still can be used in an insulting way). I think the worst thing about it is that it is tiring. There is always some mental overhead used for navigating these situations where you somehow need to demonstrate you belong (e.g. you need to show competence without appearing uppity) but ignore rather obvious slights (especially if they are done unconsciously). Highlighting issues usually makes things worse, so one needs to keep it bottled up. Of course it is only related to visible characteristics (there are also more subtle social cues in certain areas) but it is often one of the hardest to hide. The thing is that it has become less socially acceptable, which gives rise to the PC nonsense. But again, it is the same thing as it has always been, just the topic and mechanism has changed.

Depends on the country and setting, actually. In the US and Canada it has become very unusual to address folks with their last name in class. Or even in semi-formal correspondence. That being said, students (mostly affluent ones) threatening lawsuits has (based on anecdotes) increased by a fair bit for all sorts of reasons (often by claiming that it would inhibit their otherwise stellar careers). While most of these threats are empty, administration tends not to want any hassle. I think it is also fair to say that this issue was meant to be pushed before court, effectively the stakes were low, from what I understand. The student threatened, the provost reprimanded, but from what I see, it was basically a threat of corrective actions and there was no termination in play (yet). It is important to note that the whole thing is (as I understand it) connected to first amendment rights that are specific to issues of academic freedom. After all, a corporate employee might get fired far more easily for any range of stupid (and less stupid) reasons.

I understand when discrimination can get one fired. However, I wanted to know from MigL a situation when someone could be unjustly fired due to the bill. And how it differs from other anti-discrimination laws at workplaces. Because the way he sets it up it almost reads as if he is in favour of discriminating against folks, which I know is not what he means. I therefore think that he is misunderstanding some aspects of it. So I wanted to see what kind of realistic situation he can see where not acknowledging someone's presented gender would be justified and should not result in legal troubles. And again, the only possible scenario I have seen if that behaviour is part of discriminatory actions which could be ground for termination well before C-16. Also, when it comes to places like universities, the general rule I have seen across the board is to make accommodation by students, provided they are made in good faith. So no "your majesty" or similar nonsense some folks like to propagate.

Draw me a scenario where you think it can result in someone getting fired.

Actually you are right. The social morality outrage in the past has actually resulted in discriminatory (morality) laws, which includes sodomy laws (targeting homosexual men). So I was wrong, the past was far more restrictive than things are today. So the question here is do you purposefully misunderstand the law (as Peterson does it) or do you really just lack good info on it? There are good articles that one could read but fundamentally the one aspect that limits free speech in Canada in the Criminal Code is hate speech defined as advocating genocide and the public incitement of hatred. Misgendering does not advocate genocide of e.g. transgender persons nor does it incite hatred as such. Now if we go away from the criminal code and look at discrimination, which has a very narrow domain, it would depend on the situation. If you refused to call the hypothetical "Anna" by her or address her by her gender it could be considered workplace harassment. The question is then is are you against legislation against workplace discrimination or harassment? Or do you think that transgender person should be subject of harassments? Or do you think there should be no anti-discrimination and harassment laws to begin with as they would interfere with free speech?

Except of course there are no bans, even if you imagine there are. You are still able to yell at folks for talking in their own language, folks are able to talk back (though less so in the past) and some folks yell at the yellers. None of which would result in legal challenges in whatever shape or form. You keep forgetting that these are social, not legal pressures (and note I was referring to your bit about how everything got more PC, which again, squarely falls outside the legal domain). Anti-discrimination laws are only applied in a very narrow field (I think almost exclusively labour laws). The whole thing Peterson espouses (and which you seem to insinuate) is pure fantasy , as legal scholars and actual lawyers have repeatedly explained. I almost feel it is part of the victimhood complex that the dominant part of the population (i.e. the groups that traditionally determined social norms) feels now that certain social constraints are also applied to them and not exclusively to marginalized and/or otherwise powerless folks.

Fundamentally that has not really changed. Just go back a few decades and see how many folks are offended when, say you hold hands or publicly kiss a partner from a different race (or *gasp* same gender). In the 80s in Germany talking to my parents in our native language was offensive for many natives causing with frequent backlash. Realistically, two things have change. One is what is considered offensive. Especially as you get older it seems to get more and more, but really it is more of a change of what. The second part, which I suspect really creates the sense of impacting society is where the domain where the causing offense is facing social pressure. In the past, social pressure was either only locally (i.e. folks around you that feel offended and let you know, which can easily be minimized by surrounding you with folks you know) as well as in areas of public domain such as press and media. We all know that there are groups limiting (or censoring, if you will) what is considered acceptable on TV (e.g. violence nudity and so on) and other media. The big change nowadays I think is the rise of social media. Now everything that would normally only be regulated in mass media has been filtered into our daily lives (if it includes a social media presence). Folks still do their being offended bit just as decades ago, but now they can reach far and wide. I.e. I think society has not changed that much, but our tools. And I think we are utterly unprepared to what it really means. You are getting it backwards. Discrimination laws require that the victim demonstrates systematic discrimination against their person, which is often very difficult to prove. The employer can simply claim underperformance. You do not defend against it, if you do not deliver materials (such as a well-documented set of discriminatory behaviour). So basically you are saying that you want to be an employer but be able to say things like e.g. black people are lazy without any repercussion. Under that law, that may actually not be enough, provided you still pay them the same and give them the same job opportunities. However if you repeatedly state the former and pay them worse, there might be a case stating that you are in fact discriminating against black workers. Do you think that such a law is just or not? Second scenario: a person with the legal name of Anna who was born male but presents female works under your direction. What do you call her? Do you try to figure out her original (male) name so that she would not force her identity on you? How would calling her her legal name forcing anything on you, for example.

Though if one would take it to the level of Peterson it would mean that civil discourse with women would be impossible or at least much harder than with men, and that is clearly not empirically supported. It also strikes me as extremely funny, considering that academics (including Peterson) typically are only able to be a threat to donuts much less projecting violence. I am going to amuse myself with imagining the head of Fine Arts and the Dean of Engineering taking down the provost due to some disagreements. I tend to dislike the term political correctness as it typically is used in an antagonizing manner. Fundamentally it refers to certain levels of self-censoring based on (perceived) social norms. i.e. using lingua that is considered polite or civil (many words, phrases and topics have changed over time to become either more or less acceptable to be used in public). The problem of course is that regardless motivation, it is not always easy to hit the right tone. Often this gets amplified in organizations as they try to establish a public image and often aim for the least possible offensive stance , but depending on the folks deciding on it, it may be way off the mark. But the issue is that some folks use PC to disparage almost any restrictions required for civil discourse.

There is a recent paper dealing with thinning in Australia: https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12766

I would think that somehow folks decided to elect a twitter bot.

That is very interesting. I was under the assumption that thinning and thus removal of fuel was generally seen as beneficial. But apparently there is a huge range of answers. Depending on forest type and conditions thinning may seem to have positive or negative effects. More reading is probably needed but at first glance there does not seem to a clear answer. One of the caveats I read was that thinning is often not done well, resulting not only in insufficient removal of fuel, but in fact puts more fine fuels onto the ground. Also in certain areas, having less of a canopy seems to reduce overall moisture which can have retarding effects on fires. So my guess is that what type of measures works well is likely dependent on the geography as well as the properties of the forest. So depending on these factors either of them could be right. The trick now is to isolate those factors and apply thinning only in areas where it helps. An issue of course is that changing weather patterns will also influence the outcome, so some of the older data might need to be revisited.

Well, if you are wondering about that, perhaps you need to figure out what neurodivergence means in a given context. Is there for example a classification system? A second thing to look into is whether any of the trait scores correlate with that measure.

Yes, no, work, don't care. I am not so interested in the crazy part, as in my point of view that would be an extreme part of interactions. And to perhaps to make it clear, IMO that extreme part is not what defines all other interactions. Peterson on the other hand takes that extreme part and basically says that that part is the foundation of all interactions (i.e. we are prepared to deal with crazy with violence, ergo we need the threat of violence also in civil discourse- or rather that it creates the civil discourse).

I am not even sure whether the government releases official numbers but there are researchers looking into that but of course there is probably a bit uncertainty attached for sure.

That is a good point, the values are actually total emission. Household values are a bit trickier to get. I think that in the US residential consumption was about 20% of total emission, but I do not know off the top of my head how the sectors in the different countries look like. China would certainly be an interesting country to look into in that regard.

OK, I found my old notebook. So the assay for amphetamine testing is (I think) an ELISA test which turns positive for unknown reasons. Based on that I would assume that doing it again would create similar results, but the report did not show quantitative analyses how reproducible it was (i.e. out of 10 tests how often would it show positive vs negative?). If we do a chemical screen (using mass-spec) we can actually search for masses corresponding to amphetamines and that is what was done in the case study and that screen came up clean. Perhaps a more general answer which OP might be looking into: I do not know the precise mechanism for FP in benzoylecgonine or other compounds. The main issue is that most of the time a immunochemical assay is used, which relies on antibody-antigen binding (or more typically, competition of binding). Now false positives are typically down to something that competes with your reagent standard but which is something you do not want to test for.

I think you are close to the core issue here. The most disingenuous part (I think) is that he drives home the nature part quite a bit, and on the one hand almost paints an inevitable picture of how our society is the way it is because of nature and then suddenly crosses the line in a sneaky way which makes it hard to spot whether it is still nature or nurture and then builds from there. A bit issue is that he kind of rejects that civilization is a construct with rules that moderates our "natural" responses. And by obscuring the line of what is our base nature and how we learn to behave (by liberally drawing from random examples in nature and implement them in humans) he almost argues that nurture is not relevant. Again it is taking a grain of truth (we are animals at base) but then wipe of all nuance and knowledge about human (or animal) behaviour in order to sell his book and ideology. And then he extrapolates it to extremes. For example: It is fine if you are pickup artist promoting a book, but again for presumably a researcher it is a bad look. That being said, I was not aware that he left University, which makes me somewhat less annoyed. That is an interesting take, however how does his claim that the threat of violence is actually what allows civil discourse? He does not say that this only kicks in at the extreme range of actions (at which point I would argue that the chance of discourse is long gone) but that it is at the heart of it? He also mentioned that folks not willing to fight would not be respected which again shows that in his view it seems that men are more civil than women since they are perhaps kept in line due to an implicit threat of violence. It is also interesting that I cannot really find something that would explain how women would function in such a society.

Fewer people would like to cause less emission, but each person using emitting less, would obviously do the same. A French person emits ca. 5.13 tons per year, a Chinese person 7.38 and an American 15.52. So if Americans were somehow able to replicate the French model they would be cutting down their effective population by a third. Affluence is an issue. Despite increase of efficiencies that you cite, only recently did US per capita consumption went back to 1950s levels. I.e. while we have more efficient technology, we seem to make up for it by using more of it. Likewise, despite reduction in growth rates, industrialized nations are also the highest consumers of products and have added the most to the overall CO2 budget. This is a trend that only has slowed down in recent years due to the rise of rise of green energy movements.

That sounds right. I am not doing urine analyses anymore but I do recall that this was something that was an issue back when we were developing assays. Not sure how common the effect is, though as I think it was more or less based on a single report.

The circumstance are those outline by TheVat and Koti, essentially situations that culminate in possible physical altercations. While I agree that those would or should be outliers in behaviour, in the context of Peterson's theories that would actually be at the basis of civilized behaviour. I.e. if the threat of violence is gone, we won't have a functional ordered system of interaction (so to speak). And I agree that regular social interactions actually do not appear to be that way, which is one of the criticisms to Peterson's assumptions. So in whole I think we mostly agree, and for the most part are just highlighting what Peterson has been writing (and talking about) does not seem to mesh with how society actually works.

I think that is the part which certainly dips into the toxic part. Due to social expectations backing down would appear weak and showing weakness is not something that is allowed to show in men (but is expected in women).

A report has been finally fully reviewed and has been published indicating high protection after 6 months for hospitalization for the Pfizer vaccine. However, protection against infection drops about by half. I.e. breakthrough infections become more common. Which in turn is especially bad news for still unvaccinated folks as well for efforts to actually curb the viral spread. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02183-8

And that is probably because your view of masculine ideals differed from mine and you might not have accepted certain toxic elements freely as I did. Remember, it is not masculinity in itself that is toxic, but rather certain elements *if* they are to your detriment. In my case I can clearly identify aspects that influenced me and where detrimental to me, though the same might not be detrimental to you. It depends a lot also on the environment, including how isolated you are in society and so on. Many of the more harmful elements are simply limited if you have sufficient exchange with peers who can help modulate your behaviour in a positive way (if you have good friends). I freely admit that I was really dumb in my youth. I would not have asked for help (though calling security would be asking for help...?) and I might have thrown the first punch or otherwise escalated the situation as I would find myself unable to back down. I am also utterly unclear how threatening violence actually manages to de-escalate situations. Perhaps it is a cultural/societal thing, but I cannot remember a time where threatening violence actually successfully de-escalated a situation. But that is the thing, isn't it? It means that if we are in a conflict situation we should start puffing up and bring deterrents to the table. Americans claim that open carry is therefore a great idea to deter violence. Looking at the actual numbers I simply don't think that is true.