> If you think the Roberts court would have let Joe Biden have this much power well then I have a bridge and some student loans to sell you
Yes, I do think the time horizon of every SCOTUS member is longer than four years. I believe Gorsuch when he says:
I appreciate that, but you also appreciate that we're writing a rule for the ages. -- https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2023/23-939_3fb4.pdf
I think that they all have the hubris to see themselves as part of history and write their opinions for future generations. Not that they aren't biased by current events, but that they see themselves as larger than that.
If Humphrey's Executor goes down, "independent" becomes effectively unconstitutional under the current SCOTUS. It's awkward to have an unconstitutional goal hard wired into an agency's mission, and could be used against it in court. It's a bit of a presumption that Trump v Slaughter will turn out this way, but given the tone of the oral arguments, not a lot.
Now that YouTube is labelling some videos as AI generated, I'm in despair at how many of them are perfectly unexceptional and believable. Like, someone saying hello to their dog, that looks like they just pulled out their cell phone, and has 5 likes. I can no longer trust myself to discriminate between real and whole-cloth fake, at all.
On the other hand it's a bit liberating to no longer try to discriminate, and simply trust none of it. It's all fiction until proven otherwise. I don't have to get outraged at all on first impression.
True to an extent. But why would you want to create (e.g.) a movie if you don't think watching movies is worthwhile in and of itself? You're putting effort into creating something that you don't think is truly valuable. To a person with this mindset, the desire to create is cynical—they're only making movies in pursuit of extrinsic rewards such as money, fame, or success. If watching movies is thin to them, then making movies is also thin.
Conversely, an authentic filmmaker is someone who values movies in and of themselves; therefore, the authentic desire to create a movie must be downstream of a passion for watching movies. I don't think you'll find many artistically inclined filmmakers who would denigrate the act of watching movies as "thin." It's the thickness they feel in the experience of watching movies which inspired them to devote themselves to making movies in the first place.
The article's definition: "A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it."
This definition is compatible with watching some films and not others.
I think Alan Watts said something like that his job was that you no longer needed him. This implies that consuming his work would be thick until it wouldn't.
I think, perhaps because the creation is the goal in itself, not the consumption by others. Because it is the change/improvement that the author mentions that we seek.
I think that leans toward a mistaken veneration of productivity. You don't have to make something to enrich your life. It's also valuable to connect with the things other people make, or with the world around you.
It's more like Thin is when the consumption is one directional. Like when you browse social media it is one directional. Social media goes towards you and you just experience it, everything is dumbed down into bites that require 0 effort or cognition to consume.
When you read a challenging book it is bi-directional. You will get out of it what you put in and it will be indecipherable if you just let it wash over you mindlessly. So I disagree about creation, I think the effort is what is important.
I'd argue that there's probably a disproportionate ratio of thin:thick, and that the majority of creators have to consume significantly more than they create to find their perspective, voice, purpose and inspiration for their creations. And those that created that which was consumed, consumed that which was created to feed their fire as well.
It's the whole thing about writers and comedians can't craft anything without having first lived, observed, contemplated and been confounded by orders of magnitude more than their output represents.
I think there's thin consumption and thick. Reality TV and YouTube/Tik-tok shorts being thin. Slow cinema or a documentary being thick. One is primarily entertainment that is easy to digest and acts more as a way to fill the time and quiet thoughts. The other requires deep engagement and confrontation with new ideas and a build up of contemplation through deep prolonged focus.
The first mode of consumption is understandably popular given the amount of noise in the world that distracts us. So many people are trapped in dopamine holes. It's mental withdrawal to try to attempt a sudden switch to thick consumption. They are so opposite of each other.
I don’t understand, you know what I will ask next.
And broadcasting on FM radio is then what?
You’re just redefining words, there’s no need for this. We agree it would be better from a privacy point of view if Signal did not require a phone number but you’re nit picking: it’s a one time thing, and you can take a public phone that no one can associate with you for this. And then never need it again if you have proper backups.
For you it's "purely for pleasure," for me it's for money, health and fire protection. I heat my home with my wood stove to bypass about $1,500/year in propane costs, to get exercise (and pleasure) out of cutting and splitting the wood, and to reduce the fuel load around my home. If those reasons went away I'd stop.
That's a good metaphor for the rapid growth of AI. It is driven by real needs from multiple directions. For it to become evitable, it would take coercion or the removal of multiple genuine motivators. People who think we can just say no must be getting a lot less value from it then me day to day.
You may be saving money but wood smoke is very much harmful to your lungs and heart according to the American Lung and American Heart Associations + the EPA. There's a good reason why we've adopted modern heating technologies. They may have other problems but particulate pollution is not one of them.
> For people with underlying heart disease, a 2017 study in the journal Environmental Research linked increased particulate air pollution from wood smoke and other sources to inflammation and clotting, which can predict heart attacks and other heart problems.
> A 2013 study in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology found exposure to wood smoke causes the arteries to become stiffer, which raises the risk of dangerous cardiac events. For pregnant women, a 2019 study in Environmental Research connected wood smoke exposure to a higher risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include preeclampsia and gestational high blood pressure.
I acknowledge that risk. But I think it is outweighed by the savings, exercise and reduced fire danger. And I shouldn't discount the value to me of living in light clothing in winter when I burn wood, but heavily dressed to save money when burning propane. To stop me you'd have to compel me.
This is not a small thing for me. By burning wood instead of gas I gain a full week of groceries per month all year!
I acknowledge the risk of AI too, including human extinction. Weighing that, I still use it heavily. To stop me you'd have to compel me.
Cow A: "That building smells like blood and steel. I don't think we come back out of there"
Cow B: "Maybe. But the corn is right there and I’m hungry. To stop me, you'd have to compel me"
Past safety is not a perfect predictor of future safety.
I'm burning dead wood in a very high wildfire area. It is going to burn. The county takes a small percentage away ... to burn in huge pits. It really isn't possible that much if any of this wood will just slowly decay. All I'm doing is diverting a couple of cords a year to heat my home. There is additional risk to me, but I'm probably deferring the risk to others by epsilon by clearing a scintilla.
Probably the risk involved in cutting down trees is more than for breathing in wood smoke. I'm no better at predicting which way a tree will fall than which horse will win.
That is only true if you're using an extremely idiosyncratic definition of gender. As far as 95% of English speakers are concerned, gender is defined by the body you possess.
As far as nigh on 100% of Bugis speakers are concerned there has always been five genders and they'll tell you the words in their language they have for them.
You and the other person are probably talking past each other. For most people, "gender" is merely the polite way of saying "sex", and that's probably what the other commenter was referring to.
Gender in the sense of "the social roles and norms on top of biological sex" is indeed a construct, though heavily informed by the biology that they're based on. Biological sex is very much real and not a construct.
Technically correct, but to be specific sex is binary, not merely bimodal. Sex is entirely defined by gametes, and is binary in anisogamous species such as humans. Isogamous species don't have sexes, they have mating types (and often many thousands of them).
There's actually an ideological movement to try to redefine sex based on sex traits instead of gametes, but this ends up being incoherent and useless for the field of biology. Biologists have had to publish papers explaining the fundamentals of their field to counter the ideological narrative:
That's why I thought it was worth mentioning. Many people are confused because of the culture wars. To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable. Storing cultural constructs like gender as anything other than an arbitrary string is asking for trouble, though.
Reproductive sex is determined by gametes .. sure.
Not all humans are born with the attribute of reproductive sex via gametes.
Hence "biological sex is real and strongly bimodal with outliers" (in humans, it gets odder elsewhere in animal life on earth) it's just not all reproductive sex, nor is all just strictly M or strictly F despite it mostly being one or the other.
> To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable.
Not in Australia, via a decision that ascended through all levels of the national court system, nor is sex, as you've chosen to define it ("entirely defined by gametes") binary.
Biology is truly messy. It's understandable not everbody truly grasps this.
Colin Wright is pretty much a prop up cardboard "scientist" for the Manhattan Institute (a political conservative think tank).
I tend to run with people with actual field credentials doing real biology and medicine; Michael Alpers, Fiona Stanley, Fiona Wood, et al were my influences.
If Colin Wright scratches your itch for bad biology then by all means run with the one hit wonder who reinforces a preconception untroubled by empiricism.
If you decide to redefine sex as a collection of traits, the problem with that is it's dependent on the specific developmental mechanisms of each species. Then the question is, how do you decide which traits are female and which are male? Especially in as yet undiscovered species. And how to classify species where each individual is both male and female?
The answer to all of this is to remember that sex is about reproduction, so it must fundamentally be based on gametes.
The question of classifying human births is larger - not all humans born have gametes. Some have two sets.
For people interested in actual observed birth cases there's a lot more going on than a moronically over simplified two buckets cover all cases when it comes to attributing sex [] .. clearly M or clearly F with everything aligned (physical form + chromosones + gamates) covers most cases .. and then there's the rest.
It gets even broader when including mammals such as rabbits and pigs as they express cases that are potentially possible in humans but not (as yet) observed or on record.
> so it must fundamentally be based on gametes.
Wishful thinking stemming from a strong held preconceived idea of how the workd must be rather than field based observation of that which occurs.
You can't legislate reality away. If you're tracking biological sex, then it doesn't matter what a court decides. If you're tracking legal fictions then you might.
I look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the list here of people affirming the same stance:
You should ask the people you run with why no human is born with a body not organized around the production of gametes. You'll notice that when you read about conditions like anorchia or ovarian agenesis, the sex of the person with that condition is not a mystery, it's literally in the name.
Biology is messy indeed, and that's why finding such a universal definition was so useful.
> I look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper.
Just look to his reputation in the field .. it's up there with Jo Nova on climate physics .. laughable.
> You should ask the people you run with why no human is born with a body not organized around the production of gametes.
So you're implicitly admitting that humans are born without gamates then? You've certainly dodged that question multiple times in your comment history.
You're also not admitting to yourself the existence of those humans born with conflicting organisation re: sexual reproduction - when the physical form, the chromosones, the gamates, et al don't align.
From an empirical PoV for people in field work here it's simply silly to claim that only two cases cover all variations - it's a mystery why any one would work so hard to force it.
The gamete-based definition of sex is merely a description of reality.
I continue to look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper, or the other links I provided that affirm the same stance. Ad hominems are boring, don't you have anything?
You unfortunately don't really understand the point here, but to reiterate, just because someone is born with nonfunctional/missing gonads doesn't mean their body isn't sexed. As an analogy, if someone is born without a hand, we don't just shrug and say that it could've been a fin, or antlers, or a firetruck. That's the point of saying that their body is organized around the production of one of exactly two gamete types.
There's no conflict, physical form and chromosomes are variations within a sex, which is entirely defined by gametes. Chromosomes are part of how sex is determined, but gametes are how sex is defined.
I look forward to your citations of these people doing field work that support your points.
You must be living under a rock if you've missed out the past 140 years of debate on this subject.
There has been multiple definitions put forward, they all fall at a few (very few out of nine billion) edge cases.
I look forward to your explaination of why you feel that every human on on the planet must be assigned as either [M] or [F] at birth with no recognition of the real circumstances in the actual edge cases.
Not even the class of South African hermaphrodites cleanly all fall one way or the other.. there's furious individual by individual debate over which of the two potential gamate producing mechanisms is less mangled than the other - as you should be aware given your apparent singular obsession here.
I'm curious as to why so recently so much money has been spent on pushing Colin Wright as the new prophet of an old idea that doesn't provide a complete classification.
Does that mean hundreds of years of English-speakers referring to sailing ship as "she" were all part of a conspiracy to hide that ships have jiggly bits? :p
Wait until you find gendered languages (like most languages in Europe) and realize that grammatical gender usually doesn't have anything to do with biological sex :P
The only real states of matter are solids, liquids, and gases. Everything else is just woke lunacy.
I am confident in this fact because I learned it in elementary school decades ago and it is impossible for humanity to discover new information that updates our world model. Every English speaker knows that “plasmas” and “Bose-Eisenstein condensates” are made up.
I assume you will be one of the advocates for my nobel prize
edit: I'm sorry you specifically mentioned gametes, we can talk about diploids and haploids if you wish and how our bodies are such complicated machines that any sort of error that can occur in our growth is guaranteed to at scale
XXY/etc are all variations within a sex. The above poster is correct to point out that sex is defined entirely by the gamete size that one's body is organized around producing in anisogamous species like humans, and is binary.
Intersex is a misleading term, the better term is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development. There are male DSDs and female DSDs. Even in the case of ovotestes, you'll have one gamete produced, and the other tissue will be nonfunctional.
And yet, the original person I was responding to spoke about gender.
If you are going to step into this argument, please do not move the goalposts
edit: I've triggered the HN censor bot, so editing to apologize to EnergyAmy, they are correct on their point. I am still going to throw back at brigandish that they moved the goalposts
I'm responding specifically to your comment in regards to "but if you want to talk about biology then" followed by a list of biological variations that don't dispute the sex binary. The goalposts are exactly where you've left them.
Not only have you undermined your claim to a Nobel award by showing a spurious understanding of biology, you wrote, quite sarcastically "it is impossible for humanity to discover new information that updates our world model". Well then, we will all await your discovery of that 3rd gamete, or some theory so innovative that it tips this well studied, well understood, uncontested (by any valid competitor) model to the wayside and humanity can revel in this new information, the better model of reality that you promise.
While you're at it, you could tell us all what the scientific discovery was that made gender separate from sex, who found it and when, and what the defining difference is. Did they win a Nobel for that?
I request that in any reply, you refrain from spamming me with Wikipedia links to articles you don't understand and probably haven't read.
I was being sarcastic, the thread started about gender and you moved it to gametes. Gender is a social construct as we can observe by the fact that what gender _is_ isn't consistent across cultures.
I keep addressing your points and you keep moaning about other people. Since sex and gender are not different until you are able to provide some reason that they are beyond bare assertion then gametes are relevant.
> you could tell us all what the scientific discovery was that made gender separate from sex, who found it and when, and what the defining difference is. Did they win a Nobel for that?
Take your time, but please avoid making me restate what I've written along with the obvious implications simply because you find it all too inconvenient to address.
> Since sex and gender are not different until you are able to provide some reason that they are beyond bare assertion then gametes are relevant.
Sex is a parameter of biology, gender is a parameter of social constructs.
You are also having bare assertions that they are the same. Gametes are not relevant. You are unable to discern between different values.
Also stop bringing up the Nobel prize like it matters for the conversation. You are the one who interjected it into the conversation.
Edit: added after the post. To make sure I am not speaking to a bot, can you tell me who the first person in this thread was that mentioned the word “gamete”
I've yet to see a definition of gender that isn't based on restrictive and harmful sex stereotypes, or is circular and empty. It's not a helpful concept.
* built a lithium refinery
* produces its own battery cells
* makes its own motors and drivetrains
* makes its own car seats
* owns and operates a fast-charging network
* sells direct, bypassing dealerships
* offers insurance integrated with vehicle data
* develops its own autopilot AI
Great point, and to drive it home -- TSLA is the only competitive non-Chinese company in the EV space. You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms, considering the whole U.S.-Taiwan stranglehold on chip mfg
> You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms
Except it's not winning on that at all. It's "winning" because Chinese EV brands are barred from selling in the US. You can't buy an Avatr if you want. It's in fact protectionist regulations that allowed Tesla to retain EV dominance in the US, in the face of Chinese competition.
Tesla was very popular in the Chinese market and globally, including in markets where Chinese EVs aren't banned, until literally this year, which I'd argue is due in part to the trade war.
Yes, I do think the time horizon of every SCOTUS member is longer than four years. I believe Gorsuch when he says:
I think that they all have the hubris to see themselves as part of history and write their opinions for future generations. Not that they aren't biased by current events, but that they see themselves as larger than that.reply