Who makes false rape accusations? Unfortunately limited, because many (perhaps most) rape cases are he-said she-said cases that can’t be reliably classified as true or false. Nevertheless, very interesting.
Man mocked online for shaving on public transit turns out to be homeless and struggling with mental illness. Cringe culture is evil.
Zetetic explanations. It’s hard to explain precisely what this is, which I think is why Hoffman gives us a worked example, but if you click on the link you will maybe acquire an interesting concept and definitely learn a lot of interesting things about yeast.
Moral systems with the same goals can recommend wildly different behavior day-to-day.
A really nice review of the science of obesity, by… the Huffington Post? Okay then.
Thing of Things 
I’m really a fan of zetetic explanations, ever since I saw Connections on PBS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) ). It’s not enough to know how a lightbulb works. Knowing how you get there makes the whole thing more easily digestible.
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re the “wildly different behavior” link:
“So in both cases the universe is better converted into computronium than”
I’m really not so sure this holds. While it’s a belief I hold, the belief that a simulated brain matters as much as a physical version of the same brain probably counts as a fringe belief in most of society and most cultures and most religions.
Most religious people I know would view turning the universe into computronium as basically murdering everyone with a side order of re-ordering the universe on a scale that they’d probably consider arrogant and an attempt to supplant god or ignore the implication that he might want a universe that looks kinda similar to the one we have filled with hydrogen and stars.
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Also, it seems to me that what kind of program the computronium is running is a pretty titanic difference. Simulations of flourishing humans and simulations of euphoric rats are hugely different, even if they are being run on the same kind of machine.
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Most religious people aren’t systematic theologians – that’s just not the division of labor of any religion except for Utilitarianism. They correctly reject any practical proposal to replace human beings with calculating machines, and correctly ignore any extremely improbable stipulations as probably irrelevant lies for all practical purposes.
But, it’s a mainstream Christian belief that the souls of the saved uniformly experience unembodied bliss on an unspecified but probably purely formal substrate (sometimes expressed as the mind of God or some similar plausible metaphor for Computronium at the end of time). Competing opinions are mostly on the basis that this wouldn’t be sufficiently complex to be morally worthwhile and that instead God will need to compute meaningful virtuous happy lives for the Saved.
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Who runs the simulation and gets to do this?:
delete * from computronium where race = ‘Jew’
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I insist that before we consider “put more kids into gym classes” as an intervention, we should first make gym classes non-abusive. Mine were so horrible that it took me years to recover to the point of even considering that exercising can be something that I can do voluntarily, and I’m still massively triggered by group sports activities.
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As a non-american this always seemed weird to me. I wasn’t the most sporty child but Gym/PE/School Sport was never *traumatic*. Tiring sometimes but not something to be dreaded.
I see american movies with gym teachers trying to pretend they’re the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket and assume it’s just a teen-movie thing where everything is a caricature… but is gym class really like that over there?
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My suburban American experience was that gym classes were generally boring, rarely good exercise, and often as not didn’t really even involve playing the nominal sport (especially for team sports). There were a couple of notable exceptions – my school had a surprisingly good climbing class and had enough of a pool that it could do decent swim classes (although one of the swimming teachers was noted for creeping on the girls in his classes, obviously capable of ruining the class for some people independent of the quality of the instruction). By and large, though, gym classes were about the quality level of “health” and drivers’ ed classes, and taught by the same people.
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Well, I’m not American either, so I don’t know how it is in the US, but in Russia, yeah, they are in fact quite literally running foot drills. Here’s a typical beginning of a gym class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLSujv6xWhY
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The only thing I remember from gym is liking dodge ball in elementary school and that they might have attempted to teach weight-lifting in high school.
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The Japanese do gym class six days a week.
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I agree. I’m American, and gym class was always deeply unpleasant and just made me feel ashamed of being fat. And as you say, it was rarely “good exercise” but that’s a good thing because we were not given time to shower afterwards.
I took me until late college to realize I should just go to the gym and exercise. I always felt like I needed to lose weight *first*.
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I have trouble getting into the mindset of someone who is like: “Adults aren’t doing X enough. Schools should force children to do X so they’ll keep doing X when they are adults.”
It seems obvious to me that if you force kids to do something at school, be it exercise, or anything else, they will resent being forced to do it. They will grow to hate doing X on general principle and do it less as an adult.
Isn’t this how the majority of human brains work?
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No, I don’t think it is how most brains work. It’s not uncommon in my experience for me or the people around me to be initially uninterested in something we’re forced to do, but once we do it for a while and develop some amount of competence, it becomes enjoyable. I think people who pay enough attention to principles to hate doing something because they are/were forced to do it are rare.
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“many (perhaps most) rape cases are he-said she-said cases that can’t be reliably classified as true or false.”
I’d say in the vast majority of those cases, the assertion is true.
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How on earth can count false accusations? Like, don’t the ones that work go unnoticed by definition? It doesn’t seem like you can get the all important ‘this many succeed for each one we discover’ figure.
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Easy! You substitute an easier question and answer that one instead.
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More specifically, usually the easier question is, of accusations reported to an org likely to investigate them (or perhaps of accusations fully investigated), what % were found to be false?
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“(or perhaps of accusations fully investigated)”
You would hope but not quite. Unfortunately I have to work from memory here — I believe I read the same study linked to by the Quartz article (link now broken), and in their study they found out of all reports 6% were fully investigated and found to be false. But that doesn’t mean the other 94% were true. In fact in almost half of them the investigation wasn’t completed. I see no reason to assume that uncompleted investigations are less likely to be fake, so your suggested statistic would be closer to 11% of fully investigated reports are fake. And the rest? I believe there were also fully investigated but inconclusive reports, and yeah, most are probably real but that doesn’t mean the fall rate couldn’t be, say, 20%. Bottom line, if you read the methodology behind these numbers, it is clear they are at best a lower bound.
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There really isn’t going to be much of an appetite for a full Shabbat. The full Jewish Shabbat or the Sabbath as understood by Protestants involved basically nothing most modern people would see as fun. The difference between the two is that the Rabbis thought that Shabbat should be a joyous occasion while the Protestants saw it as a day of intense religion devolution with happiness being out of place. Most modern people like time off from work but they want to do things like watch TV, engage in hobbies, go shopping, etc. All of these are not permissible if you were really observing Shabbat under Jewish law or the Protestant version.
In Judaism, the Rabbis decided that the work you weren’t supposed to do should be the type of actions that God might have done when created the universe. They came up with a list of thirty-nine types of actions that accompanied creation. This list prohibits nearly everything people would see as fun. There really isn’t a market for this type of complete rest in modernity.
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I hate using this term, but it’s really culturally appropriative of our marvelous host to use a Jewish law prohibiting doing nearly anything people would see as fun Saturday to justify resting each Saturday.
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Plot twist! The penalty for a gentile observing the Sabbath or any other weekly day of rest is death.
https://www1.biu.ac.il/indexE.php?id=18690&pt=1&pid=14212&level=0&cPath=43,14206,14211,14212,18690
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