Your arguments against doing science in this case seem fully general to me. They could be used by anyone promoting their brand of alternative medicine no matter how bizarre their claims would be.
And indeed it turns out they are: this is a pretty standard part of the alternative medicine anti-rationalist toolkit.
Big pharma also has a business model where they can outspend chiropractors by a huge margin when it comes to lobbying and PR to establish memes in society.
Big pharma versus big placebo: one of these is constrained by expectations of evidence, the other to people opposed to joined-up thinking.
Are you seriously claiming the medical opposition to chiropractic is a big pharma conspiracy? If so, do you have actual evidence rather than merely asserting it’s possible?
The health store phenomenon you observe (weird alliances) is called “crank magnetism”. People who believe one weird thing tend to believe other weird things. (This particularly applies to conspiracy theorists.) Alternative medicine advocates are highly supportive of other alternative therapies that directly contradict their own, because they’re of a subculture that defines itself oppositionally. The money flows in to support this weird alliance.
LW’s interests do indeed not necessarily hang together, except being things advanced by the transhumanist subculture. Friendly AI doesn’t go naturally with cryonics or nanotechnology as interests, for example (even if those things might plausibly have synergies).
I submit that promoting LW as material for crank magnets may not work well and will just end up infuriating those capable of joined-up thinking.
It’s a really good original story and everyone should read it.
Evidence or speculation? I saw the $300 sell wall, but that does not account for the previous week’s dip, which is when the “bearwhale” speculation started. I did see plenty of speculation to this end … but humans, particularly bagholders in a bubble, will grasp for any explanation that is not “we were foolish”.
Really, everything is based on the assumption of conspiracy:
December—Just a small market correction after bubble, soon we go up!
February—Price dropped because Mark Karpeles is an incompetent thief. (This one I’ll give them.)
May—China dropped the price, now all Chinese is priced in, we go up!
August—Wall Street dropping the price because they want to enter cheap. Hold and we’ll go up!
October—The bearwhale dropped the price, cheap coins that will go up!
It’s a cliche for good reason that everything and its opposite is “great news for Bitcoin!”
The ridiculously inflated prices peaking in December 2013 are almost completely explained by Mt. Gox’s blatant fraud and the Willy and Marcus bots. A decline from that would be the expectation.
So what was the solid evidence for (and against) conspiracy, as opposed to the null hypothesis that this is just one week in a bubble on its way down?
At least with tulip bulbs you can, like, grow tulips.
There are (or were) many, many Bitcoin advocates in the world who can’t see it being anything other than deflationary (as there is a limited supply), it does interesting things, etc. Then the world turns around and sends Bitcoins inflationary for this whole year. Empiricism beats praxeology (again).
[tangential] The price of Bitcoin has been dropping significantly in the past few weeks, and dropped below $300 yesterday. I’ve read many theories as to how this can’t happen, but it is. What’s going on?
You’re seriously raising the notion of testosterone as magical competence juice as an explanation worth taking seriously? This would make teenage males the most competent and convincing people on the planet.
I’ve been desperately in search of a good history as I seek to decrappify the RW article on the topic, which is rather too cobbled-together (and the SJWiki one doesn’t even try for a history). So if anyone has something handy …
(The stereotypical Tumblr SJW phenomenon seems to have escaped academic notice. This actually surprised me when I went looking, given I know how rabid sociology students are in seeking out new subcultural study fodder.)
The cut’n’paste not merely of the opinions, but of the phrasing is the tell that this is undigested. Possibly this could be explained by complete correctness with literary brilliance, but we’re talking about one-draft daily blog posts here.
This one from someone going MTF was interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8279058 She found the sexism ridiculously more blatant than transphobia.
Got a link on hand? (I don’t disbelieve you, I was wondering how he worded it.)
So why do women do worse in certain fields of work? It turns out you can in fact do a direct A/B comparison on workplace gender discrimination: ask a transgender person. Formerly respected scientist Barbara Barres, now inexplicably-more-respected scientist Ben Barres. Actual quote: “Ben gave a great seminar today—but then his work is so much better than his sister’s.”
Because the “biological grouping” isn’t one. It’s been a social grouping all along. You realise that groups have joined and left “white” at different times over the past few centuries, right? The historical definitions of races are amazing stuff. The Wikipedia article is a good start (and I link that in particular because you can be sure it’s been closely inspected by all interested sides).
I think the Social Justice movement came out of postmodernism
The term approximately as we know it was used by Catholics in the 19th Century, coined in the 1840s by Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli. (How we got from there to Tumblr is an interesting journey but an approximately continuous one.)
c.f. the Cathedral, which is an attempt to frame the culture that the rest of us call “Western civilisation as it is now” as a conspiracy, or something enough like a conspiracy to speak of in the terms appropriate to one.
Compared to neoreaction, libertarianism and liberalism are virtually twins, as children of the Enlightenment.
Your fallacy is: tu quoque.
You’ve made a claim and aren’t supplying evidence for it, formal or even non-negligible Bayesian.