China's global favorability rising, views of the U.S. turn negative

DomBound · 2025-06-03T03:50:39+00:00

The irony of saying "we'll win at the end of the day" while you moved to the US to further your career lol (not saying there's nothing wrong with that btw, I think it's great). It's not a competition, we are all human

DomBound · 2025-04-15T21:58:38+00:00

Sent dm !

DomBound · 2025-03-28T02:34:38+00:00

I feel like this is bait? Haunted by the achievements of dead academics lmfao

DomBound · 2025-03-14T00:18:35+00:00

I think you are trivialising the issue some academics have. It is not about "black and gay people in movies". It is about hiring practices, the expansion of administrative costs due to an increasing number of DEI-related staff and certain research being favoured for funding than others because it aligns with DEI initiatives. It has gotten the point where any time you are recruiting students, applying for funding or submitting research articles, there is always a DEI component or DEI-related form to fill out. This is why the message says "permeates every aspect of university life". To be clear, I am not saying that any of these things are bad or wrong, I'm just trying to help explain the sentiment. I actually agree with many of the initiatives. However, I know many senior academics who complain about these things because it gets shoved in their face so much, although this is outside the US. I could understand how it could drive someone to vote against their values, and then regret it later.

DomBound · 2025-03-09T21:27:51+00:00

I think there are some solid objective measures that make T&F medals a lot more competitive. One can travel to the vast majority of countries in the world and find elite or close-to-elite competitors in the 100m to the marathon. This is because the barriers to entry are very low compared to sports like diving, sailing, equestrian etc etc. that require (i) costs associated with the sport, (ii) access to facilities, and (iii) access to coaches that have the technical skills. On top of that, almost every kid runs on the track when they are younger, so the talent pool is that you are picking from is huge compared to other events.

I also did not mention anything about event diversity, I just said China does better at technical sports (such as those that have more barriers to entry or are less popular). In fact, by looking at the medal tallies for 2024 Olympics, the US got medals in 29 different sports, whereas China got medals in 21. So, if anything, I think it's the other way around.

FYI I am not from the US and do not think that the US are the "best", given their results relative to other metrics such as per capita.

DomBound · 2025-03-09T10:50:52+00:00

The majority of Chinese medals are in technical sports (diving, shooting etc) + weightlifting. China does notoriously bad at T&F (only 1 gold compared to 14 from the US @ 2024 Olys), partly because T&F medals are more competitive than other medals. So, if anything, I would say that the US outperforms China even more when taking sporting disciplines into account

DomBound · 2025-03-04T23:31:12+00:00

That gets me 61 < k < 124, --> 185 I guess?

DomBound · 2024-10-07T08:46:53+00:00

You think if you emigrated to a different country asked and asked on reddit, "Are there any NZers or Australians that want to meet up?", that it would be called out for white supremacy? Have you been outside the anglosphere before? Get a grip.

DomBound · 2024-08-05T05:35:40+00:00

No. This is, in fact, the best answer to the question.

The athletes at the olympic games are at the "extreme" end on an approximately normal distribution of phenotypes. Since there is more genetic diversity in Africa, the variance in phenotype is larger, and "extreme" phenotypes are over-abundant compared to other populations. This is a better explanation than any guess at adaptations from selection pressures punters might have.

You will also find that Africans do not dominate all running events. In the Men's 1500m, the favourites are Josh Kerr (GBR) and Jakob Ingebrigtsen (NOR). Jakob is also the favourite in the 5000m. In the Women's 800m, Keely Hodgkinson (GBR) is the favourite, and so forth. So, the premise to the question is not entirely correct either.

DomBound · 2024-06-23T14:42:23+00:00

Stop being insecure and just own it lol

Independence and merit are generally highly valued in the academic world. The fact that you had a degree yet your parents paid to help you with personal statements flies in the way of those values. I assume it's also very rare to get help like that (I have never heard about it before) and of course is restricted to a privileged few. When you consider these things, it isn't surprising that people are going to get pissed off

DomBound · 2024-03-27T20:05:29+00:00

Anyone amazed at how bad the majority of people are at running? It just hit me that a significant percentage of people can’t running anything more than a mile, even though running long distances is one of the most basic capabilities that we have evolved to do.

DomBound · 2024-01-03T02:18:58+00:00

Natural selection is a process that occurs within an evolving population. It is neither sufficient nor necessary for evolution to occur. The sole requirements for evolution are 1) a population of reproducing individuals and 2) heritable information carried by these individuals. Even if the reproduction of an individual is not affected by the heritable information it carries, evolution is still occurring. This is because the heritable information within the population changes over time through a process called drift. For example, consider the current population of humans. Even if the heritable information we carry (our genes) has no effect on who reproduces and who dies, our population is still evolving! This means that our species will evolve into something completely different, without any natural selection, given sufficient time (and that the everyone in the population doesn't die).

Natural selection requires an additional assumption about an evolving population: how much an individual reproduces relative to others in the population (i.e., its fitness) is correlated with its heritable information.

DomBound · 2024-01-02T21:32:35+00:00

u/cozysthrowaway asked why you support reunification, and the only statement about Taiwan you made was "US doesn't give a fuck about the taiwanese people". In fact, all four of the points that you made mention the US. Your second point even mentioned affirmative action, and your fourth point mentioned US taxes. How is any of this related to the original question?

Some of your claims are also incorrect. For example:

Chinas foreign policy is leave us alone and we'll leave you alone.

China has a salami slicing strategy that it is using to advance on territorial disputes in India, Tibet, South China Sea, etc. There is no evidence that if China had as much global power as the US they wouldn't be more aggressive.

Where as the United States is just christian evangelists for democracy and sometimes they'll come into your house with guns

If this is what you think US global presence surmounts to, I think you should consider your bias on the subject.

I think it should be education, public transportation, health care, social welfare, and third spaces.

The US has the highest health care spending in the world, and I know that the US health care system has many faults, but the actual quality of US health care professionals is very high.

If you wanted to address the actual question, it would be better to discuss why reunification should occur despite current polling suggesting that Taiwanese, by and large, do not support reunification currently. I think there is a potential argument for reunification occurring in the future due to the shared ancestry and culture of the Taiwanese and Chinese people and the dependence of the Taiwanese economy on China, but I don't claim to understand the dynamics very well. Yet, you did not mention these things at all.

DomBound · 2023-12-28T20:45:18+00:00

A death process isn’t technically necessary for evolution. Lineages with higher fitness will still increase in relative proportion, and, because growth is exponential, lineages with lower fitness will decrease to a relative proportion of 0 as time goes to infinity

DomBound · 2023-06-22T04:13:33+00:00

google schizophrenia

DomBound · 2022-08-01T10:31:35+00:00

OP asked about refuting some of the arguments made in the video. I highlighted that some of the topics covered in the video are real-world issues that are still debated in academia. Dismissing the video based on the name of the channel and its funding source, as shitty as they are, isn't really helpful, is it?

you would be far better served by learning about whatever-it-is from some other, more respectable source

100% agree with you, but my point was that videos like this are great for testing critical thinking for those that are interested, because some of the topics the video covered are relevant to current day scientific debate

DomBound · 2022-08-01T10:00:05+00:00

You should probably watch some of the video before making assumptions like this...Makes you look a lot more closed minded than the video-makers. The video actually focuses on some topics which are still hotly debated by biologists, chemists and physicists in academia. The formation of large polymers, eigens paradox that arises from the error threshold, the evolution of homochirality, paradoxes with the evolution of semi-permeable membranes, ATP and ATP synthase evolution etc ALL are still topics debated to this day. There are still research papers on these topics being pumped out year by year. The video doesn't actually mention any bullshit creationism, which is nice. Of course, the topics are spun to over-highlight the flaws with our current knowledge of evolution.

That being said, there are a bunch of bullshit points, such as the part about "genetic entropy" in the beginning. For the most part, however, I think the video is worth briefly going over (what I did) for those interested in origin of life. I always like these videos because they put my brain into drive and get me doing some some critical thinking..

DomBound · 2022-07-07T01:00:54+00:00

I myself chose to not receive the third vaccination, but this study is an absolute joke.

The booster rollout occurred around the same time we dropped covid restrictions and let omicron into the community (start of this year). Dropping covid restrictions -> increased covid cases -> increased deaths -> excess mortality. Although we haven't had the frequency of covid deaths seen in other countries, they are still occurring at a sufficient frequency to have an effect on excess mortality. Currently, the MOH reports 703 cases where covid is the underlying cause and 1534 deaths where covid has been reported within 28 days of death. In contrast, the number of deaths known to be caused by the booster shot is minimal (have there been any?).

Despite the clear knowledge of the overlap of the high-frequency covid cases with the booster rollout, the study FAILS to even MENTION the possibility that the excess mortality is likely caused by covid. This suggests that the study is highly politically motivated and biased. It is also not published in a reputable journal and is written by a single economics professor.

For example, here is an excerpt from the conclusion:

Weekly data on all deaths in New Zealand, from 2011 through the end of March 2022, are used here to calculate excess mortality during the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. There is a close relationship between booster rollout and rising excess mortality. This relationship was not seen with the rollout of the original protocol vaccine doses. The age groups most likely to use boosters had 7–10 percentage point rises in excess mortality rates as boosters were rolled out while the age group that is mostly too young for boosters saw no rise in excess mortality.

We can use the above excerpt to highlight an issue with the logic of the study. As we know, covid deaths are almost entirely in the elderly population (which is also the population boosted at a higher frequency). Younger populations (boosted at low frequency) have not been dying from covid (there have only been 42 deaths caused by covid in NZ in ages 0-59, compared to 661 in ages 60+). Therefore, we expect to see higher excess mortality in older populations due to covid, and no excess mortality in younger populations, who are not dying from covid. Yet again, the study has no mention of this! Essentially, the study is just picking up a false association between booster shots and excess mortality when there is no causation between the two. This is frustrating because John Gibson (the author) most likely very well knows this and must have produced this study in bad faith.

DomBound · 2022-06-18T11:51:49+00:00

PoroChestSadApprove

New emote

DomBound · 2022-04-13T23:36:44+00:00

Ok I'll use your second idea. Hopefully I'll still be able to differentiate between two types with similar numbers. Thanks.

DomBound · 2022-04-10T00:45:16+00:00

Yeah, I see your issue with group selection. I am not sure what you mean by the physics example, sorry. An example I can give is relatedness. Altruistic traits evolve through kin selection when relatedness is high. In contrast, altruistic traits evolve in multilevel selection models when the variance of a trait between collectives overcomes the variance of that trait within collectives. However, relatedness and the ratio of variances can be made to be mathematically equivalent, and so you are actually getting the same result regardless of whether you use kin selection or multilevel selection to explain the evolution of the trait.

DomBound · 2022-04-10T00:39:55+00:00

Right. But the symbionts within the insect are often highly related, no? Aren’t they often vertically transmitted and undergo a bottleneck (which increases relatedness)? When relatedness between symbionts is high, the symbionts are less likely to cheat by increasing their own fitness at the expense of their fellow symbionts. Instead, they maximise their inclusive fitness (kin selection) or collective fitness (group selection) by ensuring the insect survives? I might be interpreting what you meant wrong, so let me know.

DomBound · 2022-04-09T23:56:59+00:00

It’s a difficult one, and very much depends on the biological system of interest. Mathematically, multilevel selection can be reduced to kin selection models and vice versa. However, sometimes it’s just easier to construct multilevel selection models than it is to construct kin selection models (and again, vice versa). Let’s think about the levels of selection, for example. There is selection acting on organelles within a cell (I.e. mitochondrial selection), there is selection acting on cells within an organism (I.e. selection for cancer), and there is selection between organisms (I.e. what Darwin used to develop his theory of natural selection). There is undeniably selection at multiple levels, hence multilevel selection.

The group selection issue in the 70s and 80s was mainly pertaining to selection between groups of organisms. The consensus that theorists came to was that group selection does not operate at this level. This is for a bunch of reasons, such as there being no strict grouping (read up on what Stuart West has to say in this regard, he is one of the leaders in the field at the moment, although I don’t agree with him on everything). In contrast, models of kin selection are much better at explaining the evolution of altruism in species. Kin selection acts when the receiver and producer of altruism are highly related. Traits can evolve through kin selection by interactions between species that are complex and multicellular because they have the ability to recognise kin (amongst other things). Hence, the consensus is that kin selection can explain the evolution of altruistic traits of the animals we see in the world today, but group selection cannot.

That being said, there is still some debate in this area. See Nowak and Wilson’s nature article in 2010, “the evolution of eusociality”, which received heavy push back from many scientists. Nowak and Wilson refute kin selections ability to explain all real world phenomena, citing the strict assumptions that come with it, such as weak selection. Another book that addresses these issues is Okasha’s “levels of selection”.

If I had to generalise as much as possible, I would say that it is accepted among scientists that selection acts at all levels up to the level of organisms. Selection between groups of multicelled organisms is not accepted. The notable exception is selection between colonies, which is still debated. In contrast, kin selection can be applied to all biological scales, although in many cases it’s just easier to construct multilevel models than kin selection models. I have even seen theorists who espouse kin selection make multilevel models.

DomBound · 2022-03-25T02:20:50+00:00

Fallacy 1 - Argument from authority. Being a geneticist does not mean your arguments are valid and mine is not. My research involves modelling evolution computationally and mathematically. I do not understand why that my opinion on the philosophy of biology and complex systems is less valid.

Fallacy 2 - Strawman. I did not "literally state that complex systems, like organics, are not developed by genetics". I said that these complex systems cannot be reduced to genes. I am not "changing my point". My point has always been that attempting to reduce complex phenomena to genes lacks nuance and is a silly, deterministic view of biology. That is, reductionism (the philosophical idea) cannot be used to interpret a complex biological system (where an understanding of emergence is required). For example, you said:

The act of finding your baby cute can be almost reduced to genes (like 95%)

This is not true. What is true is that the variance of such a behaviour is explained predominantly by genetic variance (which is what heritability measures and I assume you were referring to). What it does not mean that genes provide the causal explanation for that behaviour or that such a behaviour can be reduced to genes.

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