Tag: culture

Bioethics will kill us all

We have ideological biases that say, “we shouldn’t be meddling with nature” In China, 95% of an audience would say, “Obviously you should make babies genetically healthier, happier, and brighter!” There’s a big cultural difference

As of 2021-07-01, things are even worse:

Probably the biggest mistake was not intentionally infecting vaccinated volunteers. This could be done in 1 month, vs 6.5 months for the ecological trials that the entire world did out of misguided PR ethics. (2.5 is probably more realistic given signups, approvals, and big pharma’s slow data analysis and reporting. That’s still 100K of lives.)

1DaySooner wrote a letter. The world’s foremost consequentialist signed. The world’s foremost deontologist signed. 2 of the most prominent bioethicists in the world signed. 15 Nobelists signed. 10s of philosophers who otherwise agree on extremely little signed. But they’re unethical.

Rarely do I so strongly feel the boot of others on my neck, and humanity’s neck.

The one distinctively courageous thing about the UK – the human challenge trials which got 40K volunteers – actually eventually started!.. In January 2021, with n=90.

Travels with My Censor

Very interesting essay on the media landscape for books in China. It’s rare that you get insights like this.

The issue that once concerned me—the blunt portrayal of poverty—no longer seemed sensitive, because China had changed so quickly. “With the distance of time,” Emily wrote me, in 2011, “everything in the book turns out to be charming, even the dirty, tired flowers.” On the recent book tour, reporters often mentioned nostalgia, and the relentless pace of life in China made it hard to document details. “Sometimes in China you have this feeling of suffocation, and it’s hard to notice all these things”. Maybe because you’re a foreigner, you can be a little separate. Maybe it’s easier to be still. We have a phrase, yi bubian ying wanbian”—you cope with change by staying the same. “If you don’t move, then you notice everything moving around you.”

Child Bride Mother

In Guatemala, the legal age of marriage is 14 with parental consent, but in Petén, in the northern part of the country, the law seems to be more of a suggestion. Underage brides are everywhere. They parade endlessly through Petén’s hospital in San Benito, seeking medical care. Most have traveled from the villages along the mud-soaked roads that flow out in all directions. When I visited the hospital, there were no fewer than 4 babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, all born premature to 14-year-old mothers.

The rise of fake engine noise

this is so dumb, but how else can you be sure you’re compensating properly for your penis? reminds me of Rolling coal

Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away.

Decent cops are possible

unsurprisingly, if cops don’t act like dumb thugs, things improve.

The outpouring of community support has deep roots. Since Magnus became chief in 2006, 2 remarkable things have happened: violent crime is down an estimated 33%, and property crimes are down 36%. At the same time, he has curbed the use of force by police.

Foreign pageant queens

I was hired to cruise around in a fake gold Mercedes golf cart with 5 other girls for 3 days, to lure investors for a miniature replica of Versailles. Pageants serve as infomercials: “Visit Ordos, or Dunhuang, or Dalian, or Chengdu: wealthy enough to import foreign pageant queens!”

in a fully globalized economy, you are now exotic.

The Substance of Style

this was one of my favorite books in the last 5 years, and it has aged pretty well. as more of our world is eaten by software, it will become both easier and more impactful to have good design.

From airport terminals decorated like Starbucks to the popularity of hair dye among teenage boys, one thing is clear: we have entered the Age of Aesthetics. Sensory appeals are everywhere, and they are intensifying, radically changing how Americans live and work.

We expect every strip mall and city block to offer designer coffee, a copy shop with do-it-yourself graphics workstations, and a nail salon for manicures on demand. Every startup, product, or public space calls for an aesthetic touch, which gives us more choices, and more responsibility. By now, we all rely on style to express identity. And aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes.

Lifting Men

I thought it was hilarious at first when Mallory declared in a comment thread that it was her fitness goal to be able to pick up and lift a grown man over her head. Afterwards, I started noticing that other Toasties were declaring this in a tongue-in-cheek way, and I started thinking, “well, why not?” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t any more ridiculous or unlikely than any headline or superlative you catch on a mainstream fitness magazine, like “Get Amazing Abs in 16 Minutes!” I figured any program written to help a woman pick up a man and lift him overhead was going to lead to better overall health and fitness than any program written to “reveal your abs” in short period of time. The scenario I gave everyone was this: any woman, trying to pick up a 84 kg man any way she can, lifting him overhead any way she can. I chose 84 kg somewhat arbitrarily: although 90 kg men seem very normal to me, I spend a lot of time in powerlifting and olympic weightlifting gyms and realize that my concept of “normal” is very skewed. Also, the median weight class for men in those sports seem to float around 84 kg.