183300+ entries in 0.055s
mircea_popescu: No one in the behavioral sciences discovers something, and then constructs policy recommendations. "We learned that people are like this, so..." It's the other way around. The policies come first; the money is spent on the research that supports them. In questions about evolutionary psychology and behavior, the question they want to answer is always of the form, "how is it not the individual's fault, but we can medd
mircea_popescu: say that behavior is "innate" and out of our control, while still leaving us the door to intervene in people's lives for their benefit."
mircea_popescu: "The question that they are answering isn't "does environment matter more than genetics?" It's a more subtle, sneaky, social-policy questionr: "since we now know that genetics isn't as deterministic as we hoped, is there something else that we can focus on which is equally out of our control? What about the goings-on in utero? So that the environment factors matter only at that time, not later? Then we can safely
mircea_popescu: sort of like once shit dries enough, you can just pick it out of the hair of the African in question, leaving behind "clean" hair.
mircea_popescu: by now the stupid "reporting" thing is so much a kabuki of its own you can often separate it from the actual event it parasitizes
mircea_popescu: punkman i always wondered if he actually deliberately chose his nick that way
mircea_popescu: so does any half-ass decent teacher. give a kid a pile of unplugged computers, pick the best one.
mircea_popescu: Aristotle was smart, but there is nothing he could ever learn about computers from his investigations. His science is all wrong for what he was doing. But Aristotle would think he knew a terrible amount about computers from his studies. In fact, he'd probably be considered an expert. "To fix this computer, we need to make it more rectangular. Get chopping, malaka."
mircea_popescu: If you gave Aristotle ten thousand unplugged computers of different makes and models, no matter how systematically he analyzed them he'd not only be wrong, he'd be misleadingly wrong. He would find that they were related by shape-- rectangles/squares; by color-- black, white, or tan. Size/weight; material.
mircea_popescu: in the nazi us, all kids have to have the same result : spend 50 minutes fucking with x.
mircea_popescu: in my world, all kids are equal : gotta do this much work.
mircea_popescu: not "oh, you finished the work, now do this stgupid shit" like us
mircea_popescu: "you have to come to school every day!" but but mircea hasn't showed up this month!" "i am affraid of him."
mircea_popescu: i come from a land where intelligence is luxury, and i gaze upon this land where intelligence is merely alternative boring in amazement.
mircea_popescu: Born in Tehran, Iran, he immigrated to the US at the age of 5 with his family and was raised in McLean, Virginia by his father Kamal Ghaemi MD, a neurosurgeon and neurologist, and his mother Guity Kamali Ghaemi, an art historian. A graduate of McLean High School (1984), he received a BA in history from George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia, 1986).
mircea_popescu: interestingly, the focus of hate for ballas seems to be this Nassir Ghaemi douche. i put him on the list, expecting who knows what wizened old ass.
mircea_popescu: So yes, I would have liked to have posted day one; but I would have liked it better if someone else on the inside said, "umm, wait a minute? Really? We're going to CNN with this?"
mircea_popescu: Please don't misunderstand me, I am not blogging for money. I'm showing you that so much of what you think you know, what you think is fact, is established not by the force of evidence but by the absence of resources for the opposition. The ones with the money are all unanimously in agreement.
mircea_popescu: The people who get paid to look at ADHD are all unanimously on the same side, that's what conveys the illusion of objectivity. Pretending to be divided pro- or anti-Pharma, or "dopamine hypothesis" vs. "noradrenergic hypothesis" makes it look like there's a lot of vigorous debate, but debating what color is a ki-ran just means ki-rans are real.
mircea_popescu: What do you think would happen if the NIMH paid astrophysicists to look into psychiatry? Ain't never gonna find out, they have their own problems. Specialization doesn't mean I'm the best, it means stay off my lawn. Since I/us/astrophysicists don't have the resources to publish at all/as fast as Pediatrics or CNN, they get to decide what's true.
mircea_popescu: t it; I'm saying that those who thought it, or could have thought it, are busy with other things, and the people who should have thought of it physically can't.
mircea_popescu: Had it not been for the little money I do get from this blog, maybe I would not have written this post at all, because... why bother? And so all you are left with is their dogma. Search the internet, the Letters To The Editor. Anyone else saying what I just said in this post? You may not agree with my post, but you are nevertheless better for having read and considered it. I'm not saying I'm the only one who though
mircea_popescu: y constraints. If I need money for rum, do I spend an extra hour at work, or write a post?
mircea_popescu: If you don't like something going on in politics, there are ways to voice that. But looking deep into a "scientific" concept requires a level of sophistication which, if you possess it, means you're probably busy with a day job. So you have neither the time nor energy to dissect articles in Pediatrics-- and, anyway, no forum. I, at least have a semi-popular blog; but even so I'm subject to the same time and monetar
mircea_popescu: You mean because the further away we get from the hot news cycle, the less you're interested in the truth? And so apathy allows it to stand as true, because it all seems plausible (face validity, bitches.) That's social science for you. But the answer to your question is simple: I don't get paid to criticize studies. I have a job and a life and an alcohol problem that doesn't leave much room for blog posts.
mircea_popescu: "Why didn't you publish this post earlier, when the story first came out????"
mircea_popescu: in 2009, the 300mn strong us spent 300 bn on PSYCH MEDS.
mircea_popescu: "total drug sales climbed to $300B (more spending on drugs)."
mircea_popescu: "stereotypes are wrong mkay, unless the government's doing it."
mircea_popescu: h people as individuals, so it deals with them as groups, types, diagnoses and organ banks."
mircea_popescu: "Just a piece of advice. If you are ever arrested, make sure to ask for a jury. As for two juries. If your lawyer says the words "bench" and "trial" at any point in the same paragraph, flee to Argentina. Those 12 idiots, imperfect as they are, are one of the only things protecting you from a top down, hierarchical, classist, flow chart wielding government clusterfuck that has no time, interest, or money to deal wit
mircea_popescu: also, they shed what, 5% ? sport is going to shit everywhere, the world is sick of it.
mircea_popescu: pete_dushenski espn was never a start-up. it was rassmunsen backed by getty.
mircea_popescu: nevertheless... a pile of rifles doth not give you even the beginning of force. it's just scrap metal.
mircea_popescu: what the derps are doing, roughly speaking, is "Becoming powerful" out of robbing monkeys of their rifles.
mircea_popescu: than there is in a satchel of a hundred gold pieces collected from the necks of a hundred dizzy cows in the field.
mircea_popescu: yes there is some value in money, for sure. but there is A LOT MORE value in a hundred gold pieces resting in a hundred pockets of men that made those pieces
mircea_popescu: now, what the scammer wants is to collect the sort of people who are dumber than him, and separate them from their money.
mircea_popescu: compare b-a and random scammer circle, "dollar vigilante" thing or the keiser radio show (hey, check it out, "Auroracoin is a cryptocurrency launched in February 2014 as an Icelandic alternative to bitcoin and the Icelandic króna. Its unknown creator or creators" < hard at work deleting the internet history of previous scams, as if THAT is how it works now)
mircea_popescu: yes. and it ended up negative roi for 'em with very little effort.
mircea_popescu: understandably, it's not clear the us fed is worth that much atm,
mircea_popescu: it went to all shit (15 iirc last, 50% over the cutoff of the bitbet), only to get a dead cat's jump yest.
mircea_popescu: ascii_field apparently they can't afford to lose 150 BTC THIS BAD. thinkaboutit.
mircea_popescu: fuyck that shit. the world women's organisation is gonna publish studies about the CAUSAL relationship between domestic beatings and happiness.
mircea_popescu: this is what has to be uprooted, fucking WHO making studies about the impact of inequality ?
mircea_popescu: but yes : do you think sumner rothstein gives a flying fuck that his car producing subsidiary paid his tv producing subsidiary a billion in advertising with no roi, when the result of this expense is that china now THINKS the truth about china is on viacom released movies and argentines think citibank is a thing that may exist in buenos aires ?
mircea_popescu: ""The evidence we have from these academic studies is that quite often [soap opera viewers in developing countries] take away different attitudes toward things like how many children they want, what is acceptable behavior for a husband toward his wife, what is the breakdown in a household of responsibilities over things like finances, should we be sending girls to school," says Charles Kenny, an economist at the World
mircea_popescu: anyway, he explained somewhere that ads aren't designed to sell the avertised product, but the SYSTEM that produces the product in question.
mircea_popescu: it destroys the "notion of payment" = all payments are grocery, bitcoin should be visa, all peopel are equal and mp should be nicer to fucktard x.
mircea_popescu: what does the queen's mineral water cost ? "it would be an honor if you drank our water!"