Prediction for what US conservatism looks like in 2060, based on current trends

- ambivalent towards LGBT rights as defined today, but strongly favoring "parental rights" in whatever contexts they can get away with it
- extremely antivaxx - extremely conspiratorial, with syncretic conspiracy theories that include those believed today by mostly left leaning people
- largely syncretic religiously, vaguely Manichean with a strong emphasis on being anti devil etc
- not very concerned with economic policy

The fact that antivaxxers seem to think they're vindicated despite (1) the vaccine working as promised (2) their various predictions of doom regarding vaccine safety never happening is probably not a great sign for them ever coming around I'm generally pretty positive on the long term future of politics on social and economic issues alike due to generational turnover, but there's a couple issues where things will probably get worse and conspiracism in general and antivaxx in particular are examples of this

Approximately what percentage of wars¹ with over 1m deaths² happened prior to 1900? ¹ conflicts that lasted <25 years
² geometric mean estimate as on wikipedia

The reason the conventional rainbow has seven colors (it's a blackbody spectrum it doesn't have any discrete colors) is that the colors were named by a Christian (newton)

He had to invent the cope color of indigo in order to make it work

https://twitter.com/mattxiv/status/1667614610030055424

Heard of indigo in any other context? No? Yeah that's why lol

Wait baby gronk is real? I thought this was a meme

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1667171963469549570

Also wow that is really bad. This should be borderline illegal

The thing I always find fascinating about this kind of stuff (and the more old school "religion gives your life meaning" stuff too) is that like,,, once you know this is an option you're making your own meaning in life no matter what Like you can choose to imagine a spiritual world, or you can choose not to. The meaning you get from one or the other is the result of a choice either way

I feel like the leftist defenses of religion on here are really defending some version of religion they've made up Like making up a guy to get mad at except you're making up a guy to defend

I'm not immune to judging people on aesthetic nonsense, like I do find it rankles when people don't know how to use keyboard shortcuts, or how to touch type properly, or don't organize and close their tabs Like while these things feel important to me, they clearly don't actually matter in terms of computer productivity for 90% of people (frankly including me). And yet I find myself reflexively judging

There's this annoying tendency where when you don't think something is important (e.g., architecture/mode of dress) people with strong views on the thing assume everyone has strong views on it and think that you're trying to enforce something else And the answer is no, I'm not a Wario of you. I simply don't care about these things much, and I think it's silly and bad to try to criticize stuff for being bad at it

This kind of thing, even if it goes nowhere, will slowly destroy universities in red states. Nobody wants to work someplace where your entire field of study could be banned because it hurts conservative legislators' feelings

https://twitter.com/deonteleologist/status/1659706867658944512

@lxeagle17 To address two common objections. First, "the academic job market is terrible, people will still take the jobs". This is true to some degree, but I think people are underrating the extent to which PhD holders can and do get jobs outside academia

The US America Local Elections and what they mean for the progression of North America. 🧵 Last week, there were a few major elections in large local municipalities in US America. These elections are called "off-cycle" as they happen outside the regular 2-year cycle of National Elections

1/

Issues with the LA sombrita bus shelter thing

• the fact that they were blocked from doing anything useful but burdensome permitting requirements
• the fact that they decided to try to reinvent the wheel instead of use an off the shelf solution • the fact that they didn't scrap the project once they realized there was no cost effective fix that actually worked and satisfied the requirements
• the fact that they at no point reevaluated if their project had anything to do with gender, even if that was the starting point

Legitimately do not understand why people like this guy so much; he is transparently interested in socially enforcing standards of dress that lead to spending time and effort on meaningless signaling in an area (menswear) where most people are pretty chill in today's age Just actively making the world a more superficial place, for no gain whatsoever

I'm broadly sympathetic to the anti-gentrification cause's goals of reducing displacement but they legitimately do not seem to have a plan other than an American Hukou system and that seems, uh, bad? Like the only real solution to the problem of rich people moving into poor areas and causing displacement other than a broad flattening of wealth inequality. Which sucks since that's probably not happening anytime soon

Intercity rail competes with plane travel in situations where the train ride would be under 4h

Trains don't require showing up early or leaving time for boarding, and stations are central. So it becomes 5h door to door

At minimum flights are 4h door to door Because the flight is 1h, then you need to show up to the airport an hour early, then getting to and from the airport is usually an hour on each side

Tried to go to back bay trader Joe's. The line was literally halfway around the store. Gave up and left This has never happened to me in the one in Cambridge lol

I'm pretty sure transplants in general are left of the country by PVI, it shouldn't be surprising when this applies to individual states The idea that transplants to Texas were right of Texans was always very dubious and seemingly entirely based on a combination of a single exit poll and contrarianism

I think stats is really important (and more valuable than HS calc) and that it shouldn't be marginalized

But I've come to the disappointing conclusion that a lot of contemporary stats boosters like it mostly because of the effects of it having been marginalized Specifically, high school statistics is currently the "easy math" track because nobody respects statistics. So like you spend an entire semester going over basic descriptive stats you should've learned in middle school. That makes the class easy

A lot of people are getting the cheating with chatgpt on essays thing wrong, stuff like "oh whatever chatgpt can automate isn't useful"

Like, if you wanted to "automate" the process of writing 4000 words on the fourth crusade, that's trivial, copy any of the many essays online The purpose of the assignment is for you to do that, in a context where the answer is well known so it can be checked. The idea is the skill you learn from that can be transferred to areas where the answer is not well known

The average STEM major takes far more humanities classes in college than vice versa, and it's very odd that the discourse seems to reverse this To take an example, it's 7 humanities/English classes and 3 science/math classes for L&S students at Berkeley (including some CS students, and science students), and 6 humanities/social science classes for engineers

I agree that the 538 model was good work and that Nate silver is well above replacement level as we have nowhere near enough statisticians in journalism.

However, the clear narrative expressed by 538 in the lead up to the midterms was that they did not believe their own model

https://twitter.com/PunishedLink/status/1617709744160112640

and thought there would be a red wave. it is entirely reasonable to judge them by that standard, since they would certainly be discussing it if there had in fact been a red wave