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Posts
8
Comments
617
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I'm not sure that your statement has anything to do with stopping thinking of others as dummies. I think it's telling you to think of them that way, and you're just trying to push that under the rug to try to be nice.

    You're saying to understand anti intellectualism you need to understand things from their perspective.

    The lack of knowledge (especially true knowledge) and lesser ability to understand complex ideas are major aspects of that perspective.

    No matter how we define or measure intelligence, we're mathematically guaranteed that it's distributed approximately on a bell curve with a small number of intelligent people at the top.

  • No country will just let in any rando. They have to want you there. There's humanitarian programs, but largely you need to have something they want.

    That's typically special skills (MD, PhD, athletics, etc.). Or money. Money will get you anywhere.

  • There is, but banning these substances is a political process not a scientific one. It's definitely true that this should be done by experts and not politicians.

    The thing is that it's impossible to set up an experiment to show that something is safe. All you can do is collect more evidence that something is not dangerous. This leads to GRAS.

    There's also the additional fact that the dosage makes the poison. There is no substance for which a single molecule can harm you meaningfully.

    Roundup is about as toxic as tablesalt. Caffeine is vastly more toxic than that. And Tylenol, well, that simply wouldn't be approved if it were invented today. The ratio between the therapeutic dose and the lethal dose is too small.

    Then there's tradition and utility.

    Plenty of herbal supplements and even foods are quite dangerous but are sold because they always were and they are "natural".

    We can all agree that certain substances don't belong in food - either because they are useless or there's strong evidence they're harmful.

    It's the useful ones for which there is some evidence that they may cause issues when given in extreme doses, but a vast number of substances exhibit that behavior. Caffeine and Tylenol, for example. You do not think of these as poisons, but they are. Caffeine is so dangerous that you have to go through a lot of trouble to get it in its pure form.

    The fact is that those supstances are certainly more dangerous than the substances in the article, but people are not clamoring to ban them.

    And all this complexity is before people's individual interests are involved.

    This is why when you compare, say, us and eu food regulations you find substances that are on one list and not the other. One is not a superset of the other.

    Anyway, these substances are not "toxic" in really any correct usage of the term, and it's probably very unlikely that a ban will make anyone healthier or happier, despite what you may read about when you Google these substances. Even if you go to the scientific level.

    Scientists can have their own agenda. They're still people. Or they can just be bad scientists. Or they can just be churning out papers as fast as possible to increase their prestige.

    It used to be that the top paper that came up (it may still be up in the list) when you search glyphosate and bees was a bad paper. It did correctly conclude that glyphosate killed the bees when they put it in the honey, but they had to put so much in there in order to see any effect at all that the concentration was high enough to actually kill aquatic weeds. Next it wasn't properly controlled. Do you know what else will kill bees if put it in their honey? Water. And most definitely caffeine. I assure you a very small amount of caffeine in honey will kill a nest.

    It's just a political thing with good optics because who can argue with banning a "toxic" substance.

  • I agree.

    I have seen this backfire. When I was in high school ~25 years ago, the superintendent was trying to get his AP test rates up. There's the usual group of the smartest kids in school taking these classes, but they tracted in a kid none of us knew into my AP bio class.

    I'm not sure what other classes they put him in, but he struggled and ended up dropping out and not finishing high school.

    It caused something of a row.

  • Since we're doing strings around the Earth, here's the simplest, most unintuitive fact in geometry:

    Say you have a string wrapped taut around the planet (purely spherical), like a belt. You want to raise that string up so that it's one meter above ground all the way around the planet. How much more string do you need?

    I'll give you a hint. You don't need to know the radius of the Earth to know the answer.

  • Two of my lab mates got married in grad school. They had both a Hindu and WASP wedding.

    I was so pissed I only got invited to the wasp wedding.

    I've seen plenty of those. That was the best opportunity I had to see a Hindu wedding as an outsider. I doubt I'll get another opportunity.

  • Exactly. Is this not a regular occurrence to people?

    I don't keep track, but I'd guess more than 30% of the time.

    Anyway, it's not like this is actually the seeds germinating. It's something like the baby orange in a navel orange.

  • You think American universities don't already have bus systems to deal with this problem?

    You don't think that no matter where you put the university subsidized housing, that will be the university, kinda by definition?

    You don't think this model is familiar all around the world?

  • The university healthcare center is the local doctor. That's the point. They'll also be specialized for the needs of young adults.

    All the students need to sleep as well. That's not different. It's also an opportunity to provide inexpensive, subsidized housing, without requiring yet more people to enter and leave the campus every day. Transportation is the major problem of a university.

    And dude, I'm not the ones down voting you. You're just not yet getting how strange you seem despite strong arguments to the contrary.

  • Do you think they don't have GPs there? Do you think that none of the students have traveled across the world from their former GPs such that it would be impractical to return to them for every little thing? Do you think faculty and staff might also find it convenient to not have to leave the campus to get healthcare from a prestigious institute of healthcare (as all university hospitals are).?

    And, you mean the public university's hospital, which like all university hospitals are a paragon of education, is somehow a company store?

    Is the campus dining hall also part this? Are the dorms company housing? What about the bookstore and the coffee shop?

  • That a hospital at a university would offer services to the students at that university? Really?

    You don't think it would be convenient for students living at a university with a hospital to get their healthcare at that hospital?

    Like someplace they can walk, rather than getting transported someplace farther away?

    Seems like going to the closest place for healthcare would be convenient.

  • I don't know how big mount Everest is. How big a mountain is is even ill defined in geography.

    They probably should have used house cats, but capybaras are unique, and current journalism is about "viral" attention.

    I also hope you don't think that 1k capybaras are one quarter the size of Everest.

    Aside: SI units are amazing. Just only necessary for scientific use (and legal). On a day to day basis, you need to communicate. That's the purpose.