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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Objective truth is an oxymoron, to have objectivity you have to remove the subject. Thus eliminating the dichotomy entirely and making the argument collapse. To have true-false value arguments and statements, you need subjectivity and a frame of reference. This is a logical constraint, without anyone to observe and judge the truth, there’s no objective reality to be judged. Minerals and crystals, despite our best efforts, do not elaborate moral judgements, and they definitely don’t conduct science.

    So when the tree falls in the forest and no one is around not only does it not make a sound, but the forest and the tree don’t exist at all in the absence of a subjective observer?

    Reality exists and continues to exist regardless of analysis or even consideration by any human. Science is a methodology invented by humans for trying to understand said reality. The earliest examples of scientific thinking are ancient and the social and moral frameworks they operated within are not at all similar to or very compatible at all with that of western Europe and North America in the early 21st century, yet underlying reality continues unabated. And yet we can continue to build off of their discoveries, despite them operating under moral and political frameworks that are abhorrent by modern standards.

    You are confusing the map with the territory - the territory cares not that the mapmaker decided parts of it were immoral to include on the map the territory is what is, regardless of anyone’s perspective on it. Reality does not conform to the Overton window, only what we can say without running afoul of social, political or moral issues does.



  • This feels like some medieval shit from over a millenium ago

    I don’t think you realize how new a lot of the current situation is. When that article was written, it was still legal for children to perform in commercial pornographic films in parts of the West. A year before this article was written feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir signed a petition against the age of consent (there were a bunch of these in France in the late 70s and most of the French philosophers of the time signed at least one).

    It only took a couple of decades for sexualizing children to go from a bit creepy but it happens to the way we see it now.


  • The notion that we suck at choosing the good genes is entirely misled, even if it is just sarcasm.

    If we didn’t, we’d be talking about eugenics as that nasty unethical thing we tried once upon a time that eliminated say Huntington’s disease from a population, but we decided wasn’t worth it because of the ethical issues in actually doing it, rather than as just “racism in a lab coat”. The fact that eugenics in practice was about race at all is an example of us being bad at choosing “good genes.”

    The final question is also morally misled because science and the notion of truth is not amoral. Science, without humans, doesn’t exist. And humans are moral beings (constrained by social and moral considerations).

    Reality exists, and continues to regardless of whatever moral framework you subscribe to. Moral frameworks are specific to time and culture, what is acceptable politically even moreso. There are and will always be things that are real and are true and perhaps even useful to know or launching points for further understanding that are outside the range of current acceptable social, moral or political considerations, but that doesn’t make them less real.

    Truth is not limited to the Overton window.


  • To provide a counter-example, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate are combined into a single dose as a treatment specifically for black folks with heart failure (initially sold under the brand name BiDil), because the combined drug treatment in general works measurably better on black folks than white folks, to the point that the combo drug was rejected by the FDA based on initial trials (that had a majority white patient base), but was later approved specifically for for black patients because that specific pair of drugs worked enough better in that population to be approved after further trials. It’s fallen somewhat out of use as a treatment, not because it was ineffective or “racist” to approve a race-specific treatment, but because better options have been developed in the last 20 years - the drug combo remains approved specifically for heart failure in black folks, however. It’s just no longer the first choice.

    common social categories of race (scientists use ethnicity, because of eugenics),

    Literally, they use ethnicity because of negative political associations with race as a term, and also because from a practical standpoint ethnicity is like race, but with more narrow groupings in modern parlance (as noted in the past “race” referred to much narrower groupings, closer to how ethnicity is used now).

    Also, eugenics would totally work if we weren’t terrible at deciding what “good genes” are and instead inevitably make it about something dumb like skin color and there weren’t the massive ethical issues in actually doing it.

    Here’s a fun question: If you had to choose a hypothesis that would be functionally impossible to properly test because of ethical or political issues but that you strongly suspect is true, what would it be?


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world"Erased"
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    5 days ago

    Also, dog breeds exist because humans have actively bred dogs to have certain traits

    Selection pressure is selection pressure, whether being done by environment or by the active efforts of another species. There’s a reason why whether or not you are lactose tolerant has a lot to do with where in the world your ancestors are from, as does your likelihood of several diseases and likelihood of certain resistances/immunities, there are even certain drugs that will work better or worse for people dependent largely on where their ancestors came from. Short of doing thorough genetic testing, “race”/ethnicity is often a good-enough broad brush proxy for where a majority of your ancestors came from for a variety of purposes.


  • They couldn’t do that from one photo though, they’d need several examples all believed to be the same guy. A swirl like that preserves some of the information and you can reverse it, but the lost data is lost. Do that for several photos and you can get enough preserved bits to piece something together.

    Same idea for some other kinds of blurs or mosaics. Black boxes, not so much - you e got no data to work with, so anything you tried to reconstruct would be more or less entirely fantasy.









  • The minimization is CRAZY. Like people are saying “Oh, no, he didn’t rape the kid he just had sex with her.” Like the child CONSENTED to it. Sex, by definition, is engaging in sexual pleasure with both persons consent.

    They’re just extending to elite men almost the same level of rhetorical gentleness that is typically directed at women sexually assaulting boys. It’s only “almost” because they aren’t also playing up how attractive these men are like they tend to when a woman sexually assaults a boy.