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Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

reuters.com

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Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#391

Post by Consultant32452 »

bluntfang wrote: post #322
Consultant32452 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you say the wrong-think loud enough, Twitter will be the least of your worries. When the credit card companies and banks start refusing to do business with you, you're completely lost in modern society. This has already happened for some people.

could you point to some documentation on this please?

I know almost NOTHING about the people mentioned below. They're just names that I happened to catch in the news about their accounts being closed or they came up in a google search I just did. I'm certainly not implying support for them or their ideas.

Some comic creator https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/02/21/chase-bank-shuts-d...

Some Proud Boys leader https://bigleaguepolitics.com/chase-bank-shuts-down-proud-bo...

In his most recent appearance on Joe Rogan, Alex Jones reported that he had an excellent credit rating and had several of his accounts closed. This is a statement of fact that, if untrue, the banks could sue for defamation. So it's likely true.

Paypal (bankish) has gone after "hate groups" https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-b...

Mastercard banned Robert Spencer (white supremacist) https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ba...

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#392

Post by mikekchar »

mcv wrote: post #204
hirundo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Sarno's theory is that such pain is indeed caused by physical mechanisms ... which are triggered by psychological mechanisms. Such things are common, like a blush to the cheeks, hair on your arm raised by fright, erections and other sexual responses, etc. He was also clear that this is not always the case, and that direct physical causes should be looked for by a specialist before pursuing psychological remedies…

You mean that stress can play a factor in RSI? I don't think that's in any way controversial, but that doesn't make it in any way less real, or less physical. Although in the case of RSI, there are a lot more factors than that: bad posture, lack of exercise, and most importantly of course repetitive motions that very slowly build up strain on surrounding tissue, wrists, shoulders, back, etc.

This is only a mental exercise. In no way am I saying that this is the way it works. I'm just saying this is an interesting way of thinking about it.

Imagine that RSI is not caused by bad posture, lack of exercise, and repetitive motions alone. For example, there are many people with bad posture, who don't exercise, who use repetitive motions and do not have RSI (me, for example ;-) ). Imagine that in addition to these things a required trait is that the muscles are slightly tensed. Imagine that the tense muscles constrict blood flow. This causes an inflamation in the area and with repetitive motion (or even lack of motion) it generates an injury in the area.

Imagine that when you believe that you have solved the problem (by using a special keyboard, or changing the way you sit or changing the way you move) that your muscles relax just that little bit. Now the blood flows freely, there is no inflamation and the RSI goes away. You think it's due to your physical actions, but in reality you are cured only because you believe that what you did worked.

The idea behind the book (as far as I can tell -- I decided not to read it) is that conditions like RSI are real. The physical cause is real. However, the conditions necessary to cause the condition to occur are mental. It's a fairly compelling idea. RSI is a similar situation to the back pain that the author of the book studied. Many people suffer from it and the cure seems to differ widely -- if you can be cured at all. May of the cures don't really have convincing experimental evidence to show that it actually relieves any physical problems. The efficacy is based only on the apparent lack of new symptoms.

Now, I'm of two minds with this book. On the one had, like I said, the idea is compelling. The author believed that most chronic back pain's underlying cause was mental. The physical issues that in turn caused the pain, were in turn caused by the mental issue. The author apparently had considerable success in his practice, but I think it is important to note that his practice was for helping people who had back pain where no conventional treatment helped. So he's working from a point of sampling bias. While he may be correct that this occurs, it is hard to get an idea on how frequently it occurs.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#393

Post by tomlock »

jeffwass wrote: post #379
tomlock wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdata +1 but taking magnesium every now and then has done wonders for my leg cramp issues.

Did you take the magnesium also just before bed or morning?

I don't take it on a schedule.

I only take it when I feel a twinge in my calf. I figure I'm probably deficient in magnesium or something. Even if it is a placebo, it seems to work.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#394

Post by opan »

nradov wrote: post #302
barry-cotter wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One plausible candidate is which continent a particular individual’s ancestors came from. That’s something that can be tested for with relative ease. > Ancestry informative marker sets for determining continental origin and admixture proportions in common populations in America > ... A comprehensive set of 128 AIMs and subsets as small as 24 AIMs are shown to be useful tools for ascertaining the origin of subjects fr…

All human ancestors came from the continent of Africa if you go back far enough. Which specific ancestors are you referring to?

I thought the out of africa theory was recently challenged dye to older human findings elsewhere.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#396

Post by sattoshi »

ddorian43 wrote: post #114
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence of your claim that "These topics are so sensitive because of the current political climate that they are literally career suicide for any western scientist."? For example, an investigative piece similar to the one here, except about behavioral genetics?

See anyone who has touched "differences of iq between races".

There is this weird phenomena which can been from the replies to this comment. I can easily tell someone’s race by looking at them and I can make rough rankings of people’s intelligence after knowing them for a while.

But the scientist insists that I can’t. Instead they tell me that race doesn’t exist and “what is intelligence anyways?”

These are distractions.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#397

Post by eee_honda »

jeffwass wrote: post #379
tomlock wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdata +1 but taking magnesium every now and then has done wonders for my leg cramp issues.

Did you take the magnesium also just before bed or morning?

I have the same issue as above. Right before bed is typically suggested for bruxism, etc. Magnesium has also been shown in a study to improve sleep quality, though I don't remember the exact mechanism.

I might have an absorption issue though. Magnesium salt topical spray (less costly than pills) helps intantly unclench my neck/shoulders, and theres extant literature on that being an effective method of administration.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#398

Post by barry-cotter »

nradov wrote: post #302
barry-cotter wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One plausible candidate is which continent a particular individual’s ancestors came from. That’s something that can be tested for with relative ease. > Ancestry informative marker sets for determining continental origin and admixture proportions in common populations in America > ... A comprehensive set of 128 AIMs and subsets as small as 24 AIMs are shown to be useful tools for ascertaining the origin of subjects fr…

All human ancestors came from the continent of Africa if you go back far enough. Which specific ancestors are you referring to?

On the coarsest basis the groups that existed 3-5,000 years ago. The major continental ancestry groups of today were pretty much done by then, whether you divide them at K=2 and have SSA and everyone else, SSA, West Eurasian and Asian at 3, add the Americas at 4, and Melanesians, Papuans and the various ethnoi that resemble them from the Aboriginals in Australia to the Andamanese or Negritos at 5. 5,000 years ago those groups all existed in a somewhat recognisable form. Plenty of the modern variety in them didn’t. South Asians didn’t, Northern Europeans, didn’t. Both emerged as a result of population movements and adaptation after that. 5,000 years ago Europeans were blue eyed but either brown or black skinned and the population of the Indian subcontinent were more like modern Andamanese than any other group. Ancestral South Indians are a mix of that group and Iranian plateau agriculturalists and Ancestral North Indians were horse riding milk drinking central Asians.

If you go back far enough all humans come from Africa, and most (at least 90%) comes from the latest Out of Africa expansion, ~200K years ago. But all non SSA humans are 2% Neanderthal, on average, and there’s other archaic hominid introversion that varies by geography. The Tibetan high altitude adaptations are probably 2 million years old.

Which ancestors one refers to will depend on the question you’re asking.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#399

Post by Nasrudith »

tomp wrote: post #180
Nasrudith wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behavioral genetics is perfectly safe - if they deal with actual genes instead of the utterly unscientific proxies of race that have been long discredited. There has been no public stir over say ADHD or psychiatric prevalence, hell theories in either direction for "gay genes" failed to move the needle. The Warrior gene" research ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A ) didn't despite a crime link and t…

> utterly unscientific proxies of race I cannot but laugh every time someone mentions this. It's very simple: can you measure it? (Yes.) Is the measurement persistent? (Yes.) Then it doesn't really matter whether it's "scientific" or "unscientific" or "mezo-scientific" or whatever, it's a valid concept. Then people say that it's "socially defined" (yeah, all words/concepts are) or that categories are not clearly sepa…

Yeah but part of good scientific practice is to isolate the variables as much as possible with the control groups. One can work with less controlled variables but it increases noise generally and should be avoided as it is more likely to produce entanglements that fool even the most honest of scientists. The data tends to be noisy and messy when it involves free human populations in even harder sciences with tight qualitatives.

Before blood-typing trying to go with an ethnic system is fair enough as a guess and could potentially be a slightly better match rate (more likely to have similar blood types - especially in more homogeneous populations). There are better tools and groupings now so it raises the question 'why bother with a rough proxy when there are more precise alternatives'?

If looking at just light level one doesn't just go with 'night' or 'day' for light levels when specific times for measurements are possible, controlled temperature and calibrated light controlled rooms would specifically testing for a /different/ aspect and even then the point is to try to figure out what is the missing aspect from the more controlled simulation.

Sickle cell anemia may be found more in those of more immediate African descent but taking prevalence of oxygen carried by whole population and concluding African blood carries less oxygen because some have sickle cell anemia is unscientific. One should be grouping by what is actually germane - characteristics of the blood itself and how it is capable of holding more or less oxygen. Not the pigmentation of the sources.

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