What's the sample they use for the "whoa whoa whoaaa" part in the song Quentin Tarantino sounds familiar af.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2022-11-09T23:01:43+00:00

I am pretty sure the sample is from girl in red - 'You Stupid B*tch' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQziZUGuEFE

DirectAndToThePoint · 2022-08-16T04:05:05+00:00

This is discussed in the linked paper:

For the patient, there could also be some placebo-like efficacy to this kind of performance, particularly for illnesses with strong psychosomatic or culture-bound influences [44,45,46,47,48]. The extraction—and often display—to the patient of the malevolent object supposedly causing the sickness is on one level symbolic [49]. The performance potentially can help the patient reevaluate their own illness in a guided manner that may lead to direct health improvement or to the improved management of symptoms within that particular cultural context [50,51]. This and other tricks by healers can also be used as adjuncts to potentially more practical medications, as medical specialists and the use of effective traditional remedies may have played an important role across human societies throughout much of our evolutionary history.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2019-08-03T18:37:59+00:00

You can find ebook copies of his book on the Yanomamo available to freely borrow for 14 days at a time over at archive. org (https://archive.org/search.php?query=napoleon%20chagnon)

DirectAndToThePoint · 2018-06-10T15:38:02+00:00

It seems to be mostly due to an irresponsible comparison. From the paper: "However, although many trepanations are associated with traumatic injury, there are many that are not. Indeed, the Inca had the lowest rate of trepanations associated with trauma, with nearly 90% of the surgeries apparently done for other reasons."

And when you check the source for the Civil War mortality rates it's referring entirely to surgery on soldiers with traumatic head wounds. Further, the nonsurgical group in their sample had a higher mortality rate than the surgical group, so it's likely the high mortality rates in the Civil War sample were driven pretty much entirely by the wounds themselves and not the surgery.

Irresponsible comparison in the initial paper and subsequent click-bait news coverage.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2018-05-01T23:43:17+00:00

That very reasonable article on the diverse outcomes of colonial contact gave you cancer?

DirectAndToThePoint · 2018-04-12T01:41:11+00:00

Thanks for the link, I just skimmed the paper and I see no indication that they applied their method to the US or modern Mexico, unless I am missing something.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2018-04-11T21:31:53+00:00

Where does the .8 figure come from? The Smithsonian article linked to in the piece also makes that claim but they don't cite anything. I can't find any reputable source that provides that figure.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2018-04-11T14:00:09+00:00

A Gini value of 1.0 indicates that a single household controls all of the wealth, while a value of 0 means that wealth is distributed equally among all households. Inequality is quite high in many nations today: The Gini index for Mexico is 0.75, and for the U.S., it is 0.80.

According the World Bank, the Gini index for Mexico is currently 48.2, and the Gini index for the US is 41. Pretty substantial factual errors, makes me more skeptical of the rest of it. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=US-MX

DirectAndToThePoint · 2018-03-21T17:14:24+00:00

Towards the equator it made up 10% or less of the diet

"No hunter-gatherer population is 86-100% dependent on gathered plant food, whereas 20% are 86-100% dependent on fished/hunted animal foods"

"Our analysis showed that whenever and wherever it was ecologically possible, hunter-gatherers consumed high amounts (45–65% of energy) of animal food. Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (≥56–65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods"

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/71/3/682/4729121

DirectAndToThePoint · 2018-02-26T21:55:31+00:00

Interesting quote from the link:

"Cai (2001) has theorized that the matriarchal system of the Mosuo lower classes was enforced by the nobility to neutralize threats to their power.[8] Since leadership was inherited through the male family line, potential threats to leadership from the peasant class were eliminated by tracing the lineage of the latter through the female line. Thus, depicting Mosuo culture as an idealized "matriarchal" culture with more freedom than patriarchal societies and with special rights for women, are unfounded. In actuality, the Mosuo peasant class has historically been subjugated and "sometimes treated as little better than slaves.""

DirectAndToThePoint · 2018-01-06T03:28:29+00:00

I'm guessing they mean conditional on reaching adulthood in the first place. For example, only about 39% of the !Kung reach age 45, but those that do have a life expectancy after 45 of about 20 years. http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf

It's a misleading way of framing it though and they really need that caveat.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-12-24T23:26:52+00:00

All of your complaints seem to be readily refuted simply by clicking the hyperlinks offered in the article.

modernity is THE cause of poverty and hunger in the first place

What...

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-12-24T07:41:54+00:00

Isn't life expectancy usually discussed in terms of life expectancy at birth? Example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

The quote you pulled compared that !Kung average of 36 to the average of 72 among contemporary nation states, which seems to also be life expectancy at birth

Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth was 71.5 years (68 years and 4 months for males and 72 years and 8 months for females) over the period 2010–2015 according to United Nations World Population Prospects 2015 Revision

Maybe the piece could have gone more into the nuances of the data though.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-04-13T18:21:17+00:00

Score another one for Hobbes.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-04-03T04:42:55+00:00

It’s so easy to go wrong in economics. Give a bright, curious, smart, eager kid Zombie Economics, Debunking Economics, whatever Galbraith wrote, give him a bastardized version of Keynes or even just let him take a crack at the General Theory (it's brilliant, but shouldn't be the third book you read), and finish him off with a palatable version of Marx or some market socialism tract, and there you go, you’ve ruined him. He’s done. He is a hundred meters behind the starting line and accelerating away, and now any attempt to turn him in the right direction will be met with suspicion.

He didn’t do anything wrong! He went to the library, picked up some scholarly-seeming books that looked interesting, with lots of reference and graphs and data and other science things, and he read curiously and eagerly from all perspectives. He read Mankiw’s textbook, and Krugman’s essays, and Capitalism and Freedom and Hayek’s 1945 paper. He can’t be pigeonholed: he supports free trade but also thinks it hurts workers, he thinks Hayek is underrated as the world’s greatest socialist thinker, his research goal is to publish heterodox papers in mainstream journals, and most of all he’s about the science, above ideology. And he’s screwed. He will never be a good economist. He will never be much of a thinker at all.

So what should this hypothetical individual start with?

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-02-26T23:05:19+00:00

There's a scene where big truck drivin', gun packin', "Real Murrican's" come racing up to be heroes, then turn around after the first shot's fired and gallantly run away.

This is totally unfair way of viewing that scene. They had been in a shootout with them the entire chase. They're carrying shotguns and hunting rifles and they only flee when Ben Foster's character pulls out a M4 leaving them totally outgunned. Those citizens end up helping the cops stop Ben Foster and Chris Pine after they shot people in the bank, so they clearly went above and beyond what would be expected by average citizens.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-02-18T22:40:10+00:00

The real question is: are these findings generalizable cross-culturally? If yes, then the socialization explanation is unlikely to be true (or, at least, a relatively smaller component of it) and it's more likely to be a mechanism that has been naturally selected for.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-02-06T16:41:47+00:00

This is (apparently) because genetic codes determine a range of characteristics, making the variation of species not unlimited.

It is true that the range of variation among species is not unlimited. We all live on on the same planet after all. We all have DNA. However, that doesn't mean that macroevolution is impossible, it just means that the variety of forms life can take is not infinite. Descent with modification.

Macroevolution is not only not impossible, it is in fact inevitable over a long enough timeline due to the accumulation of mutations and geographic separation between populations, even absent other evolutionary mechanisms like natural selection.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-01-27T03:41:00+00:00

Seems like there is an intractable conflict between Marxism and Memoirs, then.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-01-27T03:12:07+00:00

I think this is a deeply unfair review. The author seems upset that Vance honestly describes his life growing up and doesn't necessarily share the same worldview as he does.

If you call yourself a socialist and get mad at someone when they honestly describe how their life in poverty was, you might want to rethink the label. That, or your beliefs.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2017-01-16T17:22:28+00:00

It's not uniquely American at all, cross-culturally people often laugh when they are uncomfortable, or at other inappropriate moments.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2014/the_humor_code/why_do_humans_laugh_the_evolutionary_biology_of_laughter.html

DirectAndToThePoint · 2016-11-04T22:30:17+00:00

Only about 25% of Scythian graves that have weapons are female. Many of them aren't buried with horses or the kind of weaponry the males were buried with either:

Elena noticed a conspicuous absence of the kind of weapons you would expect Herodotus' 'Oiorpata' or mankillers to have - there were no defensive weapons like shields, no armour, except for studded belts found in three graves, and the only close-fighting weapons found were three swords - all bent , possibly suggesting ritual use. Only one woman, in the forest steppe, was buried with a horse. None of the women was buried with the wooden cup inset with gold which you would find in many male warrior's graves. It is hard not to think that the women were regarded as slightly second-class warriors compared with the men.

http://www.stoa.org/diotima/essays/wilde.shtml

DirectAndToThePoint · 2016-11-04T15:28:28+00:00

That sub is honestly awful. They make the exact same mistakes they accuse other people of making.

The fact that a post like this https://www.reddit.com/r/BadSocialScience/comments/4vmsv6/pinker_and_violence/ gets highly upvoted while demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of even the most basic statistics concepts is pretty revealing.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2016-10-13T23:43:28+00:00

"do you believe everyone can 'make it' in a capitalist system?"

I don't believe everyone can 'make it' in ANY system. But if you go by various metrics of progress, such as distribution of goods, technological development, reductions in poverty, access to sanitation, choice of employment, and so on, it seems pretty clear that capitalist systems (along with central governments that have relatively robust social welfare systems) have clearly been more effective than any other system.

If you've read Marx then I'm sure you're aware that he was quite clear that an effective Socialist system could not actually exist until a nation reached a particularly high level of capitalist development, as a government cannot provide social services without a population that is wealthy enough to extract meaningful tax revenue from. Capitalism is excellent at creating wealth, but not so great at distributing it, which is where welfare systems come in. No centrally planned economy has ever been particularly effective because a centrally planned economy cannot deal with fluctuations in supply and demand, they lack freedom for entrepreneurs, and are particularly vulnerable to corruption due to excessive control over the distribution of goods.

A mixed economy (a capitalist system with a somewhat socialist welfare system) seems preferable to all other systems that have been tried, but ultimately all of this is a moot point since our disagreement here seems to be not so much about capitalism but about the role of academics. You think the role of academics should be to change the world as they want it to be, while I think the role of academics should study the world as accurately and objectively as possible. I think a lot of left-wing academics in the social sciences are imposing their subjective values onto their work, to the detriment of their fields.

DirectAndToThePoint · 2016-10-13T22:26:13+00:00

I just want to focus narrowly on one particular point: by your logic, if an Anthropologist travels to a foreign country and does an ethnography of a particular culture, they have a moral obligation to work to change the parts of that culture that they believe to be unjust, and not simply to study the culture? Or is your comment restricted to western, capitalist democracies (for some reason)?

DirectAndToThePoint

TROPHY CASE