Right. And how do we know his paper wouldn’t still have been accepted without his self-censoring?
I’m not saying I don’t believe him, or that we shouldn’t take such concerns seriously, but he could at least have acknowledged that this is effectively unfalsifiable conjecture.
I don’t quite understand how you’re able to acknowledge the rarity of such a sensationalised case as Isla Bryson’s, yet still use it to justify your support for policy that would hurt the trans people you know.
Acknowledge? It is unclear whether MtF transsexuals have an incidence of commiting rape more similar to biological males or to biological females. So whether it is in fact "rare" (relative to the male base rate) or "frequent" (relative to the female base rate) is not established here.
More research is needed, but I think it's not an unexpected conclusion. I mean, the only difference between these men and other men is that they're calling themselves women. Most of them keep their genitals intact, and most are driven to identify as women due to a paraphilia.
On the other hand, other parents may well wish to have access to cherished stories from their childhood to read to their own children _without_ first having to re-read them all in advance and prepare their own annotated versions.
I'm not even necessarily agreeing with the publisher's approach here, but I can certainly see there being a market for "modernised" versions of older books that tired parents can relax into reading aloud as a bedtime story, without that constant low-level unease about the possibility of some dodgy dated stuff popping up out of nowhere.
I don’t think this necessarily is evidence of his not being smart, as it could just as well be ascribed to malice.
Perhaps this will finally prompt Paul to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt though. I’ve long been flummoxed as to why he had continued to, long after it becoming obvious to most that it was not deserved.
Proposes that black on white text stimulates a pattern of expression in visual system that may contribute to myopia:
> Using optical coherence tomography (OCT) in young human subjects, we found that the choroid, the heavily perfused layer behind the retina in the eye, becomes about 16 µm thinner in only one hour when subjects read black text on white background but about 10 µm thicker when they read white text from black background. Studies both in animal models and in humans have shown that thinner choroids are associated with myopia development and thicker choroids with myopia inhibition. Therefore, reading white text from a black screen or tablet may be a way to inhibit myopia, while conventional black text on white background may stimulate myopia.
Doesn't your quoted passage say the opposite? Reading white text on a black screen may inhibit myopia, and black text on white background does the opposite?
> Their FAQ on the topics simply says they'll block "medical misinformation" which they define as anything the WHO disagrees with
This seems entirely sensible to me.
> As the WHO has repeatedly disagreed with itself
Unless I misunderstand you, you're saying this as if it's a bad thing. No one's saying the the decision-making processes at the WHO are perfect, but shifts in stance and advice in response to newly available evidence is not "disagreeing with oneself". It's fundamentally how science works.
In fact, most of the criticisms from credible experts have been that the WHO have been too resistant to updating their positions (in the face of the increasingly overwhelming evidence last year that the virus is airborne, for example).
> this is pure authoritarianism. No fact-finding has gone into this decision.
You consider their policy of deferring to an internationally recognised public health body to inform their content guidelines to be an example of authoritarianism?
If so, what alternative "fact-finding" approaches would you suggest?
Because if we imagine for the sake of argument that YouTube somehow had the means, resources and competence to conduct their own rigorous studies and research, in such a notoriously complex field as public health, and used this to inform their content moderation decisions instead of information from the WHO, how would this be any less "authoritarian"?
The WHO hasn't changed its views due to "new science", the shifts have all been for political reasons, as was sometimes admitted by their own staff. Additionally this notion that it's ok for "experts" to set policies and claim science as justification then totally change them on a dime largely voids the whole original justification. It implies their original "science" was totally wrong in ways they couldn't detect and thus they presented it with absolute confidence, then they discovered they had badly screwed up but never admitted to it or investigated what went wrong.
In the end, science is respected because it claims to reveal universal truths about nature. If those truths are constantly being announced to be obsolete such that the new truths aren't mere refinements but totally different, what use is science?
As for authoritarianism, preventing people disagreeing with a global authority is a pure example of it, no? YouTube shouldn't even bother trying to figure out the truth here, they aren't able to do so. Just let people thrash it out amongst themselves.
> I have yet to see genuine criticism of [Jordan Peterson] which stands up to scrutiny.
I don't believe Peterson is alt-right, but I do think there's a fair case for dismissing him as a source for anything but his specific field of clinical psychology. His sudden rise to the position of "public intellectual” (on the back of his alarmist and widely disputed take on Bill C-16 [1]) is troubling when his unwavering single-minded crusade against what he considers a global cabal of “postmodern neo-Marxists” colours nearly every view he has [2][3].
Examples of this can be seen in his bold proclamations against feminists, Disney films, the concept of white privilege, but also in his occasional habit of linking to junk-science blogs to inform his position rather than peer-reviewed research (such as when he propagated the debunked[4] claim that contrary to what nearly every climatologist, atmospheric physicist, geologist, glaciologist and oceanographer has been telling us, Earth's climate sensitivity is actually trending towards zero [5]).
He’s also demonstrably not one to allow gaps in his knowledge to get in the way of proudly displaying his confirmation biases [6][7].
So as a trained clinical psychologist, I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about when he stays in his own lane, but for an academic and supposed advocate for scientific rigour he seems remarkably lax in applying the same care and scrutiny to his positions on social issues.
I've often wondered to what extent my own password mnemonic "system" is either sufficiently secure or woefully misguided.
Each of my passwords is made up of the same eight-character non-dictionary word, plus the alphabet-position numbers of the first three characters of the name of the site I've made the password for (A -> 1, B -> 2, that old trick).
So for example, say the common word I was using in my passwords was "pizzadog", then my Hacker News password would be "pizzadog813" (H -> 8, A -> 1, C -> 3)
I admit my goal is convenience, as it's clearly only one step up from using the same password for everything, but with the added numbers making me feel a little better in the event of one of them being compromised. But is there any reason why this approach might be considered a bad idea?
Now the bad guy has to crack two sites which you register on. (Or just make you register on two of his sites). Bam, all your passwords are effectively 3-letters long.
This scheme is pretty common, so yes they would think of that. They might not try and figure out the alphabet position thing, since the password is laughably easy by now.
Or, they have you register on just one site they control, and figure out the substitution trick. They now have all your passwords.
Now that you made the post it's even worse: we all know your password here is 8 lowercase characters + 813. If that's really true, I recommend changing all your passwords everywhere, NOW.
It's an extremely, extremely tiny step up from having the same password everywhere.
I think you're being a bit alarmist, the most likely attack is that someone compromises one password and then logs into a higher value site with it. They can't do it in this case.
That's not going to happen with that scheme.
As long as you're not also using this for email/banks, it's not that silly, I use a similar scheme myself, it means you can log in from computers that aren't your own to certain services without having to install anything or carry round a bit of paper.
Raphael is great at what it does, which is to provide a graphics framework -- a layer of abstraction in order to easily manipulate SVG to create custom shapes and graphics.
Where D3 differs is in its focus. It's not just a graphics library, but a means of manipulating the DOM to facilitate data visualisation (often via SVG, but data-based manipulation of simple HTML elements is equally feasible).
This reliance on standards such as the W3C DOM and SVG APIs means that, unlike Raphael, there is minimal proprietary markup to learn, and it also brings a lot of flexibility and power: anything you can do with SVG and HTML you can wield with D3.
I’m not saying I don’t believe him, or that we shouldn’t take such concerns seriously, but he could at least have acknowledged that this is effectively unfalsifiable conjecture.