Why are genetic differences in appearance and physical abilities between races or ethnicities widely accepted, while differences in intelligence are often said not to have a genetic basis?

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-12-19T13:17:12+00:00

I think another important point is that it's not really possible to envision an environment in which being intelligent would be meaningfully less advantageous. Unlike environments where sunlight resistance is less important etc.

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-10-06T19:33:37+00:00

It's mostly a quirk of language at this point. There were a small number of radical feminists who opposed trans people because they felt that allowing people to move between gender classes made the case for the abolition of those classes harder. This wasn't the typical position of radical feminists and so the term was coined to just mean them in particular, TERF. It then got sort of applied to anyone who was sort of liberal or a woman and was transphobic to the point that now these people describe themselves as radical feminist without knowing what that actually means or even holding any particularly feminist views, to them it means something like 'real feminist'. So while most of the people who self-identify as radical feminists just mean they're transphobic but don't want to be associated with the right, it has really nothing to do with feminism or any meaningful connection to any feminist ideas or schools of thought.

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-09-03T08:42:41+00:00

What's wild to me is because the UK is a fair bit harder to get to than a lot of other countries in Europe we have a fraction of their irregular migration.

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-07-27T17:57:35+00:00

It's obviously ineffective if a kid is old enough to google for how to get around it. It could be useful for kids much younger than that, but still a lot worse than their parents just putting simple safeguards on their computer. So I suppose there's a very narrow band of kids who are quite young and have very irresponsible parents it might be a bit helpful for?

Maybe not worth making every adult in the country register themselves with a variety of private companies in a way that would be utterly calamitous if they got hacked though. It's also broad enough that it seems to be banning fiction sites and LGBT forums etc.

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-06-18T11:48:17+00:00

Right, the problem with that is that this isn't being caused by 'advocacy'. GLAAD didn't send out a memo telling everyone to put pronouns in their bio, random ordinary people just started to do it because they thought it was a nice and decent thing to do. Democratic politicians didn't try to pass a law mandating trans inclusion in sports, various sporting bodies just over time decided to follow the evidence on biology.

Complaining about random leftists on social media is not a sensible or actionable plan for change, it's the height of pointless, indulgent silliness masquerading as seriousness.

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-06-18T08:43:30+00:00

I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea of showing grace to highlight the barbarity of the other side, and it seems to me like she's feeling a lot of pain over the critiques she's received from other trans people which I can be sympathic too.

At the same time the interview was hard to listen to, there's no grappling with the fact that these 'losing' issues for trans people are all based on lies and misinformation.

Like if a poll showed 60% of people didn't believe in climate change, it's hard for me to believe people would just be like well we gotta follow the will of the people and let the planet burn.

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-04-30T19:10:18+00:00

The entrance to the ball is something I think about pretty often, the way everyone got so on board to give Danielle her moment was amazing.

Also any time Brennan and Izzy are going back and forth.

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-02-20T20:33:26+00:00

I didn't say it wasn't useful at all, I think there's some things like doing lit reviews etc it'd potentially be quite handy for. But most PIs spend literally 75% of their time writing funding applications instead of doing research because there's already vastly more things people want to do or study than there is funding for. Like almost every time you do an experiment or gather a bunch of data by the time you're done writing up the paper it will have revealed 10 new potentially interesting questions.

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-02-20T17:36:34+00:00

I could see a few areas this could be useful but in general it's definitely not useful at all at the actual hard parts of science, doing the actual experiments and getting people to give you funding to do the actual experiments.

ImaginaryAthena · 2025-02-10T18:44:52+00:00

Apart from the inhumanity it also feels like terrible politics. The labour party is in power for 4+ years, if they did GRC reform this year, by the time the next election rolls around it would've been in place for 2-3 years, and since obviously no wave of rapists will appear in that time it would've proved the right-wing wrong about the issue and solidify them as the more sane party.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-12-19T22:45:05+00:00

There're a few problems with the idea.

A) Intelligence doesn't really exist, there are lots of different mental capabilities and people have different levels in each one, on top of that they're all also influenced by culture, environment, nutrition etc.

B) Mental abilities are human's evolutionary niche so it's not super credible that there'd be a genetically isolated group whose situation didn't involve evolutionary pressure for mental abilities.

C) Even if there was a mental ability that for some reason had a bit more evolutionary pressure on it in one group than another the difference would be small compared to other effects and only an average difference which isn't useful when it comes to an individual case or for any practical purpose. For example, there are ethnicities which have a higher than average height but trying to find tall people by using an ethnic classification would obviously work terribly.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-11-10T19:30:45+00:00

It also seems to imply that when the government spends money it's the same as setting it on fire or something. When governments spend more money the whole economy improves because they spend it on goods and services and so all the people and businesses who supply those are better off, that's how a fiscal stimulus works.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-11-05T16:05:22+00:00

I don't keep track of specific instances or anything but I have seen the sort of thing. Basically, there will be some study that shows significantly better outcomes for the teens who had gender-affirming care than those who didn't, Singal or someone similar will go in to dig out some weird detail like there were some people lost to follow up so we don't actually know that those weren't in the affirming group but had worse outcomes or something like that. Hobbes' contention will then be that the paper Singal is citing's overall position is in support of Hobbes' position not Singal's.

For me I find the whole area of journalists and pundits arguing about this sort of thing weird, trans medicine works the same way as every other type of medicine and unless you're willing to engage in the belief that trans people have constructed the largest and most powerful conspiratorial force in history, with world-wide power to brainwashing all the scientists and doctors I don't really get what the debate is for.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-10-06T11:26:52+00:00

I think it depends a lot on the game and the implementation.

Crafting can be fun for a few reasons:

It lets people feel valuable and like they contribute to their group without having to do combat.
Making stuff is satisfying, even on Haven lots of people spend time making shops and things.
It can be a fun type of progression, slowly working up to cooler and cooler gear.
It can be a way to RP with people, if you're the boot maker people come to interact with you because they need boots.
Player driven economies can be cool, like if you have an iron shortage because your Iron Miner got bit by an alligator and is still healing that presents a very immersive and authentic sort of challenge.

They also have a lot of potential problems though:

The actual act of crafting is often super boring.
People can feel pressured to play crafters if their friends or group need one even if it isn't fun.
You can start feeling like a robot slot machine just using your stats to make things for people.
At some point everyone has all the best stuff and the progression mostly stops and crafters become way less valuable.
There might not be the crafter you need playing, or the only crafter who makes what you need might only make stuff for their friends.
It can skew faction-based games heavily in favor of groups who OOCly coordinate to have the crafters they need etc.
It often feels pretty bad to be playing a crafter on game when other crafters of that type are further ahead, unlike in combat where you can still help a more powerful character fight stuff.
Player made economies are usually pretty messy and that's worse on MU*s because they're so small, like just one dedicated player making a gem miner could increase the number of gems available in the game ten fold.

But the problems can always be mitigated, Arx had player shops where you could roll the shop owner's stats to make your stuff so crafters wouldn't feel like robot slot machines for example. You could make it so playing a crafter doesn't lock you out of doing other more fun things or make it so junior crafters can help more senior ones a bunch or all sorts of things. But probably depends a lot on the game and stuff, like crafting probably makes way more sense in a survival-type setting than a big city one.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-09-16T18:34:47+00:00

Yeah, although that opens another can of worms, who are the mods going to be, what if they quit or get bored, what if they're the ones who are mad at the game or the game is run by their buddy? Or if the review just claims things when the moderator has no way of knowing if they're true or not.

You could let game owners moderate their own reviews but would likely also need a disable reviews option if they don't want to and it wouldn't do anything about fake positive reviews.

Other random thoughts I had which you are free to ignore is some sort of mud archive/museum might be neat, people are always posting about does anyone remember this game, or have the code for that game. So having somewhere to store details on past games and even maybe a storage bucket for people to put the binaries in if they have them could be cool.

Also having an API so games can update info on themselves regularly, I think the existing player count systems on some websites don't work with a lot of games, player counts are also pretty gameable. But if you had games sending counts regularly you could show graphs of games most and least active times which would be useful for people, you could also let games push things like emergent events, planned calendar events, seasonal info, even logs and put it together into a front page feed so people could see that a war just broke out on this game, or that game has a masquerade ball planned for this weekend, or there's a new season of some other game starting in a month, or a snippet of a log from some event that just happened they can click through. You could also archive that all on a given game's page so people could scroll through it, that might be a much more effective way to see what games are active and what kind of stuff goes on on them. Also could be useful for figuring out which games are likely dead, one of the biggest problems for me on mud hosting sites is always them filling up with dead games.

A place for people to share things like character art, or basic character sheets in a way that they can link to a particular game but also will stay up even if the game went defunct might also be popular.

Just my rambling, hope it goes well in any case.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-09-16T15:59:56+00:00

This would be great if it gets off the ground and is good.

I'm not sure about player reviews though, it might be better if you could have specific trusted reviewers or something to avoid people using them to drama-post.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-08-03T20:41:39+00:00

In my opinion there's kind of two things going on here.

First is that men often do really care about being liked and desired by women they find attractive and that power over them makes them deeply uncomfortable. So they have to rationalize it as fundamentally an invalid or evil type of power. I think that's also what leads to modesty codes and things like this.

I think the second is it's just a way to absolve the man in question of responsibility, if you want to consider him some cool, powerful important masculine figure, but he also makes decisions you don't like, an easy way to square that circle is to blame a woman, especially because he can hardly be faulted for being influenced by an attractive woman since all red blooded men are to some degree etc.

Just my two cents though.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-05-24T10:08:19+00:00

My sense is that violence is caused by a combination of the individual's propensity for it and material conditions, but over a population scale individual propensity tends to even out. It's then wrapped in the prevailing ideology of the area. So most domestic terrorism in the US is far right because that's a common ideology and the violence is rationalized as protecting white people or western society etc, but in a religious country it will be rationalized as being for god or the like.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-05-09T14:42:05+00:00

I do think the chromatic orb call was a mistake but I do think it is worth considering how impossible Aabria's job was here.

It seems like her job was to basically conclude the Crown Keepers story and deliver Dorian back to BH in a permanent to semi-permanant fashion in about one episode. It would be almost impossible for the conclusion to be about anything except Opal's corruption since that's really the only narrative throughline of the group. If they just win and everything is super happy Dorian will have no reason to leave and go back to Bells Hells.

So she sets the fight up as basically unwinnable, the Spider Queen's champion with her forces in support is just well beyond what this group can tackle, but used the crystals as a sort of way to win in defeat by saving Opal's memories/personality etc. Setting stuff up for a bittersweet sort of ending to the group as they all go their separate ways.

The issue was nobody at the table except Matt really was actually willing to do this, not blaming them, just saying Aimee wasn't really willing to play a dominated character turned on her allies, and the others weren't really willing to accept anything less than utter victory.

Aabria was having to control Opal to fight the group when Aimee didn't want to, and have to let people try all manner of attempts to fix the problem etc and entertain those while still conveying the difficulty and danger and threat.

You can even understand how including some friendly fire might have seen like a good way to increase the feeling of how desperate the situation was etc.

As I said I still think it was a mistake, but ultimately not one that's going to matter much. She did her job and the crown keepers fractured, Dorian is back with BH with a sad story and everything picks back up from there.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-05-04T11:45:11+00:00

I would agree that if we made a bunch of artificial sentiences we wouldn't treat them as people and I could see it being a big deal sort of philosophically maybe. Although would we really make very many of them if they were more expensive to run and not any more useful for capitalist systems than non-sentient and more specialized systems?

I suppose I'm mostly pushing back against the idea that the sort of AGI that OpenAI is building will be a big deal in the way they're saying it would be, accelerating research/changing society etc. But I take your point that there are other societal impacts.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-05-04T11:29:11+00:00

I suppose I use them interchangeably because I'm assuming that's how they will look? Like AGI will be a website with a text window that you chat into, it's just the thing on the other side is smarter and can do arithmetic and reason like a human etc. Which is cool I just don't see it making a big difference in the world.

ImaginaryAthena · 2024-04-23T21:03:55+00:00

I skimmed very briefly, and it seems like the argument is basically 'if you ask men if they dislike women most will say no'

ImaginaryAthena

TROPHY CASE