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Halloween Jack posted:Taleb strikes me as one of those rich businessmen who think that because they made a zillion dollars, they are now an expert on every subject imaginable. He claims to hate guys like that, but everything he does paints him as one of those guys. The worst part of people liking him is the fact that Taleb has alienated himself from most actual sources of support with his insanity. MIT cut his group, etc.
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Dec 22, 2015 19:25
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Taleb has blocked me on twitter and Facebook. Dude believes everyone that disagrees with him is bought off.
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Dec 22, 2015 19:30
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Mitchicon posted:Taleb has blocked me on twitter and Facebook. Dude believes everyone that disagrees with him is bought off. To be fair, you were sending him dick pics at the time.
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Dec 22, 2015 19:54
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Discendo Vox posted:To be fair, you were sending him dick pics at the time. Yea. But my dick is all natural and not genetically engineered.
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Dec 22, 2015 20:01
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Mitchicon posted:Yea. But my dick is all natural and not genetically engineered.  pictures of your all natural dick
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Dec 22, 2015 20:10
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Please keep your dick pics out of this thread.
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Dec 22, 2015 20:10
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Dick pics.
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Dec 22, 2015 20:20
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Actual dick pics?
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Dec 22, 2015 20:33
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Muscle Tracer posted:Actual dick pics? Says so right on the tin.
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Dec 22, 2015 20:41
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Halloween Jack posted:Taleb strikes me as one of those rich businessmen who think that because they made a zillion dollars, they are now an expert on every subject imaginable. He claims to hate guys like that, but everything he does paints him as one of those guys. That's exactly it. And I'm saying it as someone who pre-ordered Antifragile and was drinking the kool-ade for a bit.
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Dec 22, 2015 21:24
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Mitchicon posted:Taleb has blocked me on twitter and Facebook. Dude believes everyone that disagrees with him is bought off. A while ago, he posted a TED talk on the scientific mainstream (iirc) given by an anti-vaxxer. Then he blocked everyone who pointed out she's an antivaxxer and maybe not the best authority on the state of science for saying she's an antivaxxer and unscientific. Obviously, since multiple people were using similar language, Big GMO had sent paid shills to shitpost on his facebook wall.  Goon project: crowdfund professional help for Taleb's paranoia. CommieGIR posted:The worst part of people liking him is the fact that Taleb has alienated himself from most actual sources of support with his insanity. MIT cut his group, etc.  , is there a link for that?
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Dec 23, 2015 09:07
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!|
Worth mentioning that Taleb was the headline speaker for the national ASBH meeting a few years back- 2012 or so. ASBH, for the uninitiated, is the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, the central(pretty much only) professional organization of bioethics. Says something about the field, doesn't it?
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Dec 23, 2015 10:15
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Discendo Vox posted:Worth mentioning that Taleb was the headline speaker for the national ASBH meeting a few years back- 2012 or so. How well-grounded in reality are most bioethics arguments anyway?
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Dec 23, 2015 13:37
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blowfish posted:How well-grounded in reality are most bioethics arguments anyway? Well it's ethics, so it generally falls into the freedom vs. safety and feelings vs. physical survival loops. There's lots of purely subjective and highly mediated cultural stuff. I'm wildly prejudiced because I'm in public health but I generally prefer public health approaches to bioethics, which emphasise the bioethical choice is in the context of all the other bioethical (and other ethical) choices, and they tend to avoid flashy people like Taleb. His 'precautionary principle' was analyzed long ago in public health as 'regret analysis' and it's the worst way to think about solutions to a problem because it weights the negative side of the coin massively. It's also presented by him so subjectively as to be not applicable by anyone.
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Dec 23, 2015 13:57
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blowfish posted:How well-grounded in reality are most bioethics arguments anyway? Bioethics as a field isn't coherent enough to for me to easily classify "most arguments"- it has origins and major stakeholder groups in religious, legal, philosophical, medical, and scientific fields, and significant corruption problems. (click that link for some actually decent reporting by scientific american, a rare and beautiful creature never to be seen again). Bioethics as a field resists any sort of theoretical underpinning or strong professionalization (the term "bioethicist" is unregulated, for example, and that ain't changing anytime soon). The dominant ethical construct system in the field, "principlism", is very well developed for what it is, but it's this weird cosmopolitan pluralist kludge that's so vague, broad, and un-anchored that its dominance prevents discursive development. My general career goal on the bioethics side of things is to improve that situation a bit by creating a set of ethical practice frameworks that explain the normative necessity of understanding and communicating descriptive facts and uncertainties within the bioethics discourse. It's a tall order.
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Dec 23, 2015 20:00
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blowfish posted:How well-grounded in reality are most bioethics arguments anyway? I would like to cite the groundbreaking 1993 essay by Cavalera et al "biotech is Godzilla".
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Dec 24, 2015 20:30
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I definitely have never understood what "bioethics" is supposed to add on top of, you know, just ethics. It always seems to be some variation on "You may think your research procedure harms no one and may lead to revolutionary new therapies, but have you considered that genes are very scary and life starts at conception?" My all-liberal-arts college class invited a bioethicist to speak at our graduation and I'm still annoyed.
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Dec 24, 2015 20:43
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Doc Hawkins posted:I definitely have never understood what "bioethics" is supposed to add on top of, you know, just ethics. It always seems to be some variation on "You may think your research procedure harms no one and may lead to revolutionary new therapies, but have you considered that genes are very scary and life starts at conception?" Bioethics as a field has its origins in the general failure of researchers or clinicians to be even remotely ethical (we're talking "give the patient a placebo and tell them it will cure their cancer, charge them triple/infect these children with AIDS, it's for science! levels of behavior). These were also powerful groups used to operating with minimal to no oversight, and interacting with a number of fields with conflicting ethical systems. A lot of bioethics problems don't have quick answers, and even when they do, stakeholders involved (including patients) don't want to hear those answers. A lot of bioethics, in my (minority) view, is the painstaking process of translating ethics into forms that are persuasive and enforceable in these settings, for these audiences. Regardless of its problems (which I could go on about for days), ethics oversight through IRBs and other regulatory regimes is absolutely necessary. Even with the current regime there's still plenty of horrible stuff going down in clinical research and care, to say nothing of problems in the general scientific enterprise. Is your graduation speaker Art Caplan, by any chance? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Dec 24, 2015 |
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Dec 24, 2015 20:51
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Discendo Vox posted:Bioethics as a field has its origins in the general failure of researchers or clinicians to be even remotely ethical (we're talking "give the patient a placebo and tell them it will cure their cancer, charge them triple/infect these children with AIDS, it's for science! levels of behavior). Even the US did some Mengele-level poo poo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment There's no question that it helps to have ethics experts in medicine and biological sciences, and there are a lot of current questions out there that deserve attention, particularly in human genetics. It can be a goofy field (if you can call it that) for reasons already explained by DV, but there's definitely value there, even if a lot of so-called "bioethicists" spend their time on futurist garbage, are anti-technology, or don't have any training in/understanding of biology. BRAKE FOR MOOSE fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Dec 24, 2015 |
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Dec 24, 2015 22:04
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Discendo Vox posted:These were also powerful groups used to operating with minimal to no oversight, and interacting with a number of fields with conflicting ethical systems. A lot of bioethics problems don't have quick answers, and even when they do, stakeholders involved (including patients) don't want to hear those answers. A lot of bioethics, in my (minority) view, is the painstaking process of translating ethics into forms that are persuasive and enforceable in these settings, for these audiences. Well, count me among your minority: i found this a very convincing explanation for why a particular specialty of ethics is so, uhh, special, that it deserves its own name. quote:Is your graduation speaker Art Caplan, by any chance? It was Leon Kass.
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Dec 25, 2015 02:08
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Doc Hawkins posted:It was Leon Kass. Well, you pretty much got the worst case scenario, then. Kass was basically W Bush's personal buffer to the bioethics community, and not particularly representative of the field- he's pretty heavily reviled by people who view him as an instrument of that administration who politicized the President's Council on Bioethics (although honestly that was always a political entity).
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Dec 25, 2015 03:16
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Doc Hawkins posted:It was Leon Kass. Haha no wonder. I read a paper of his about how cloning is awful and his wonderful phrase...the wisdom of repugnance.
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Dec 25, 2015 04:28
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Felix_Cat posted:Haha no wonder. I read a paper of his about how cloning is awful and his wonderful phrase...the wisdom of repugnance. Considering the wisdom of repugnance leads to arguments like this...  Presumably he'd find maggots cleaning wounds icky too; maybe he'll be enchanted by the "all natural" aspect of it; who knows? It's not as if repugnance is consistent amongst people even if so many moralists take it as read that it is. Munin fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 16:03
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Found a great belated Christmas present for the agrichemical business supporter in your life: http://www.monsantostore.americanid.com/ProductDetail.aspx?did=2085&pid=11713 Anybody want to start a pool for the 50+ discount??? I'd fund it but I spent my allowance on a drum of glyphosate
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Dec 28, 2015 21:09
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Discendo Vox posted:Bioethics as a field isn't coherent enough to for me to easily classify "most arguments"- it has origins and major stakeholder groups in religious, legal, philosophical, medical, and scientific fields, and significant corruption problems. (click that link for some actually decent reporting by scientific american, a rare and beautiful creature never to be seen again). quote:"There's blood in the water now," McGee wrote in an e-mail that Steinbock received on Thursday and forwarded to ScientificAmerican.com. "I have enjoyed Albany but clearly I'm not going to be around here much longer—and even more clearly, having spent my literal last dollar on lawyers and divorce, and now labor law, I am going to be entering a new phase of my career in which I am a dartboard." lmao im the dart in his balls
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Dec 28, 2015 22:28
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Obdicut posted:Well it's ethics, so it generally falls into the freedom vs. safety and feelings vs. physical survival loops. There's lots of purely subjective and highly mediated cultural stuff. Which better alternatives to precautionary principle overemphasis do public health people use?
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Jan 2, 2016 12:40
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blowfish posted:Which better alternatives to precautionary principle overemphasis do public health people use? Cost benefit or cost effectiveness analysis.
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Jan 2, 2016 19:13
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Obdicut posted:Cost benefit or cost effectiveness analysis. So the basic means by which much policy can (arguably should) be evaluated. What do you say to someone who cannot be convinced by any realistic amount of evidence and keeps going on and on about unquantified ruinous risks?
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Jan 2, 2016 20:10
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blowfish posted:So the basic means by which much policy can (arguably should) be evaluated. What do you say to someone who cannot be convinced by any realistic amount of evidence and keeps going on and on about unquantified ruinous risks? What do you mean, what do I say to them? Are they the governor, or a co-worker, or a schmuck on the street, or what?
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Jan 3, 2016 03:46
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The list of things that could entail "unquantified ruinous risks" is only limited by imagination so I would want to know why I should take his specific claim more seriously than, for instance, the people who believed the LHC would end the world via a black hole or the physicists that think the universe will end if we observe dark matter etc etc etc. The thrust of his argument is fearful vagueness but he still has to demonstrate that this particular technology is worse than any other we pursue. For a higher profile example, some people are worried that AI will lead to the apocalypse - Musk, Gates, Hawking etc. - and they are similarly vague. None of them has proposed a credible mechanism by which it could happen. It just maybe will, somehow. If we took the cautionary principle to heart and did to IT research what people propose we do to GMO research, we would simply ban programming or computers. Most people would agree that would be unreasonable but it's consistent with his position.
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Jan 3, 2016 04:34
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According to the precautionary principle we should probably stop researching mad cow disease because of the infinitesimal risk that (through some unknown mechanism) scientists create a novel prion disease that can become airborne and kill a million people.
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Jan 3, 2016 04:38
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blowfish posted:So the basic means by which much policy can (arguably should) be evaluated. What do you say to someone who cannot be convinced by any realistic amount of evidence and keeps going on and on about unquantified ruinous risks? You write a letter thanking them for their comments and that it's an important topic and some other formal language depending on audience.
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Jan 3, 2016 05:01
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The precautionary principle keels over and dies as it takes its first step, because you can just invert it and think about the worst possible outcomes of inaction. If you're dealing with anything actually complex or interesting you're not starting from a tabula rasa.
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Jan 3, 2016 05:37
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Obdicut posted:The precautionary principle keels over and dies as it takes its first step, because you can just invert it and think about the worst possible outcomes of inaction. If you're dealing with anything actually complex or interesting you're not starting from a tabula rasa. Unfortunately, most people consider inaction as not being an action.
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Jan 3, 2016 06:00
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blowfish posted:So the basic means by which much policy can (arguably should) be evaluated. What do you say to someone who cannot be convinced by any realistic amount of evidence and keeps going on and on about unquantified ruinous risks? Tell them that they're relying on the precautionary principle, which is based on a precarious pillar of logical fallacies. We can't be certain that there aren't invisible aliens from another dimension watching our every move, and what if these aliens are insulted by too many people holding anti-GMO stances? These aliens could wipe us out in an instant, so clearly that kind of ruinous outcome is simply not worth the risk of having an anti-GMO opinion. Or what if it's Jesus and he'll loving wipe out everyone if too many people read NaturalNews.com? gently caress
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Jan 3, 2016 07:01
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Freakazoid_ posted:The zealous lawsuits against farmers with bits of GMO in their crops, and their involvement with farmers in india being driven to debt. Well this has more to do with business practices and little to do with GM technology so it's of little interest to me. Nevertheless, I do have a few comments. There is no evidence that Monsanto sues farmers for trace amounts of their patented GMOs. Monsanto has been sued by a group of farmers asserting that Monsanto might sue them for trace amounts and seeking protection from such theoretical lawsuits but the case was dismissed when the plaintiffs failed to produce a single example of this ever happening. This misapprehension likely stems from the much publicized and oft misrepresented Schmeiser case back in '99 which Monsanto won as it was conclusively proven that the farmer intentionally planted patented GMO seeds on his land. As for Indian farmers there is very little hard evidence that GM tech and farmer suicides are correlated. Indian farmers are, contrary to popular belief perhaps, not idiots. They understand farming and the benefits technologies can have in their work. If GM strains are not useful they will stop buying them in short order, regardless of what Monsanto may or may not promise them. Anyway, Monsanto being an evil company has no bearing on GM as a technology, anymore than the VW diselgate is an indictment of cars as a technology.
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Jan 4, 2016 02:48
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Wrong thread I think? ^^^
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Jan 4, 2016 04:11
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Anosmoman posted:As for Indian farmers there is very little hard evidence that GM tech and farmer suicides are correlated. Indian farmers are, contrary to popular belief perhaps, not idiots. They understand farming and the benefits technologies can have in their work. If GM strains are not useful they will stop buying them in short order, regardless of what Monsanto may or may not promise them. "As he observed in one paper, “It is hard to imagine farmers spreading a technology that is literally killing them.”" Um... this person knows exactly zero about the history of Indian farming, Indian farmer debt peonage, or gently caress, why Indians monocrop cotton in the first place. Onerous interest on seeds - on the order of 50% to 70% - has a multi-century history of leading to farmer suicides. I don't know much, but this is like commenting on military history without knowing about WW2. First of all, the introduction of GMOs to the Indian countryside doesn't necessarily mean the people who bought the GMOs will be the ones to die. Cotton prices are set on a global market. If GMO growers do well, it can drive down the cotton price, which is a disaster for the farmers who couldn't afford the GMO seeds (but still buy cotton seeds on credit), and suddenly also can't afford food. This guy's a loving idiot but such an insight about new technologies driving down prices, with obvious consequences to those without the technology, should have been available to even the most dimwitted neoliberal scumbag. He probably thought of it, but preferred the strawman. edit: at least according to this, Bt cotton has lowered the market price of cotton. That's great if you're like us and buy cotton, but if you're an Indian farmer on the edge of existence, that could be the difference between paying your seed debt and not. I like the cute side comments about their agricultural inefficiency, too. If you're an Indian subsistence farmer and have a choice between buying new-fangled, expensive seeds on credit and hoping for cotton prices to be high at harvest so you can sell the cotton to buy food after of course paying down your village moneylender whose parents robbed your parents, going back generations, or just loving growing food, you're going to pick the "inefficient" one that doesn't show up in GDP statistics. Most farmers on the edge of existence make the same choice, or grow only small amounts of commodities for market, unless forced to grow crops for market in a sharecropping arrangement or a debt trap. I agree: Indian farmers aren't dumb, they're just up against a wall. The whole contemporary conversation in the business press about "fixing" the "inefficiency" of the countryside is code for the multi-generational effort to make Indian farmers grow commodities. And lol that these two lines exist in the same essay: "And so the narrative persists, firmly embedded in popular knowledge, against all evidence to the contrary." + "Not only does there seem to be no evidence that farmers using Bt cotton seed are more likely to commit suicide than others". Which is it: is there evidence to the contrary, or no evidence? He doesn't even know. loving idiot. For the record, it's not Monsanto's fault, per se. They're just the latest in the line of seed peddlers bringing horror to the Indian countryside. And just like before, some farmers will be able to afford the seeds, some won't, and those who won't will watch their crops fail at a slightly higher rate, and also watch their children starve at a slightly higher rate. gently caress these scum, I can't believe I share air with them. Mofabio fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 06:49
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That isn't the actual evidence against it though - which is that the suicides don't line up timewise with introduction of GM Cotton, either globally or in India. drat those time-traveling GM peddlers! Waste of air! (IIRC, the suicides rates do match pretty well with droughts, though.) P.S. "No evidence that x is true" and "evidence that x is false" are not mutually exclusive, and are in fact commonly used together all the time. They are two complementary pieces of a coherent argument. If your epistemological system is not based on weighing the evidence for something against the evidence opposing it, certain things are falling into place. Please be more careful in your pedantry or you might be called a Mofabio posted:loving idiot. Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 08:05
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Etalommi posted:That isn't the actual evidence against it though - which is that the suicides don't line up timewise with introduction of GM Cotton, either globally or in India. That's fine. The problem is ultimately the pressure on farmers to grow crops to sell on a market. Selling on the market exposes farmers to price risk at harvest and default risk. Monsanto is one of many groups profiting off that arrangement, instead of the decidedly unprofitable ("inefficient") growing of subsistence crops. I doubt the much-touted payoffs for Indian cotton farmers will last, as more and more switch to Bt cotton. They'll be back to subsistence income soon enough.
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Jan 4, 2016 08:24
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