Samuel Taylor Coleridge had an opium addiction too. We should legalize drugs and help people who get addicted, not just ban substances that some people use responsibly.
Yes, there is. Is it the norm? Not at all, but that doesn't change the fact that some people do use heroin in moderation and without it drastically impacting their lives.
This polarized look at heroin use further stigmatizes drug users and leads to those with problems (and casual users who are having trouble not letting it get out of hand) not getting the help they deserve.
Playing russian roulette isn't responsible just because you don't get shot. There are many people who use it in moderation... until they don't. Until they make one too many "bit more won't hurt" type decisions. Or they lose their job or a family member dies or they just have a shitty day.
"responsible heroin use" is probably the stupidest phrase I've heard all day, and I've been watching CNN.
EDIT: And, by the way, calling a spade a spade and naming heroin as the scourge it is is not stigmatizing users.
I thought most overdoses are the result of variable potency which is the result of the prohibition. Are you saying that accidental overdose would be a significant danger for addicts if they had a reliable supply of predictable potency? If that is what you're saying, do you have any evidence to support that?
I do agree that easy access to powerful opiates is a recipe for disaster for people at risk for suicide. And I concede that the danger of a negative feedback loop is obvious.
That's like asking, "Does that mean you don't believe in responsible knife juggling?" One is going to kill you a lot more surely and quickly than the other, but neither is a good idea.
To say heroin and alcohol/tobacco are equivalent would be stupid. To say an addition to heroin has no similarities to an addition to alcohol/tobacco would also be stupid.
No, because it's completely true. Repeated use of either tobacco or alcohol cause definite harm - cancer for tobacco (note, not nicotine...), brain and liver damage for alcohol. Heroin doesn't. Long term opioid use can cause hyperalgesia for _some_ people, but by no means all, and that's really if you take them every day at high doses (and heroin is actually not so bad for this - it differs from opioid to opioid), which is a little weird since morphine is quite the opposite - I suspect this is because the active metabolite responsible for the primary effects (heroin is really a prodrug) is morphine-6-glucoronide (M6G), not actually morphine as many would expect.
With heroin you should still legalize possession, just not sale. Instead do what they do in Switzerland and the Netherlands: Have safe injection sites where the government gives you free heroin. Those who are diagnosed with addiction can come once a day and get a dose of heroin under medical supervision. The clinics often help find jobs for the unemployed as well, further helping them with their addiction. Typically once someone gets their life back together they'll be able to quit.
More likely, I think, is that it contradicts the feminist narrative that every gender disparity that disadvantages women is the fault of the patriarchy and every gender disparity that favors women is evidence of inherent female virtue.
This belief is accurate. Men and women have similar IQ means, but men have greater variance. This difference implies that there are more low-IQ men than there are low-IQ women, and also that there are more high-IQ men than high-IQ women.
Denying reality, even with the best of intentions, ultimately does everyone a disservice. We should of course encourage intelligent and driven women to succeed. We can do that while acknowledging that, yes, brilliance is more common in men.
I don't know, right off. May well be there isn't any such "measure", for the higher end. Especially none as highly contention as that provided by so-called IQ tests (which in any case were initially intended to sift out mental retardation or developmental disabilities -- not for stack-ranking cognitive performance in upper-tier adults, for which their applicability is even more suspect).
The bigger point is that it doesn't do much good to just pretend that it's a valid, object measure of "brilliance" when most likely it isn't.
So children's opinion is possibly accurate. However if current state is not the desired state we may choose to educate children in a way that does not reflect current state of affairs but rather such that will lead to the desired one.
IQ is not boosted much by intensive education, especially in adults. Intensive education can raise IQs during childhood, but by the time these children mature into adults, their IQs are roughly where you'd expect by extrapolating from demographic factors.
Education is a prerequisite for making best use of one's intellect. Do you propose witholding education from boys so that adult outcomes are more equal?
IQ tests only measure one's ability to perform IQ tests, are widely criticized as flawed indicators of performance and are at best tangentially related to what most of us would describe as genius or brilliance.
Your assertion that brilliance is more common in men than in women is unsupported.
>IQ tests only measure one's ability to perform IQ tests, are widely criticized as flawed indicators of performance and are at best tangentially related to what most of us would describe as genius or brilliance.
May I ask what measurable yardstick of brilliance you would use, if we are to eschew the most widely accepted yardstick?
Or are you just moving the goalposts because you don't like the current answer?
I don't think there exists a reliable yardstick of brilliance. For example IQ tests do not and are not capable of assessing creativity, a trait I would strongly argue is a necessary component of brilliance.
You are free to assume whatever you like about my motives, and you can claim it's moving the goalposts if you like: There's also a racial bias in IQ test performance. Would you therefore argue that e.g. black people are less brilliant than whites? Or Asians?
It will serve you better to deal with the fear/reality that people are not equal and racial differences do exist, not just on the surface but they manifest in group averages of intelligence, performance. Group averages are not an individual.
If you can accept that there are people smarter and not as smart as you, more athletic or not as athletic, then you understand that people are different. The illusion that races aren't different is just part of a passing PC culture fad. Better to accept reality, better for everyone involved.
>I don't think there exists a reliable yardstick of brilliance.
I'm afraid that's not an acceptable answer. I'm rejecting your viewpoint in favor of currently accepted mainstream psychology until you can back it up with measurable fact.
IQ correlates very well with all sorts of things, including career choice (e.g. physicists have very high IQs) and lifetime earning. By any objective measure, IQ is at the very least a prerequisite for brilliance.
That correlation simply implies that brilliant people perform well at IQ tests. It certainly cannot be used to establish IQ as a prerequisite, that's just not how statistics work.
> It's increasingly difficult to opt out of browser autofill
Good. I hope browsers autodetect these web font tricks and pop up similar warnings. I can't stand when some random website make thinks it can do a better job of credential security than major browser makers.
I think the point is more like an HR administrator who opens a web page, containing an employee's details. They need to update the employee's home phone number, but their password manager dumps the HR administrator's password into the "Set new password" field, which is therefore overwritten.
Our application is still maintained, so we can find workarounds or restructure the form to use an extra popup (to the detriment of usability). But i'm sure many applications won't be updated, and as a result of this change, data will be silently corrupted when they are used. The browser has knowingly broken compatibility with the web application.
This is a Torvalds "don't break userspace" moment.
Fair enough, that's a valid concern. But it wouldn't be solved by allowing pages to opt-out of autofill, since they'd have to be updated to use those as well.
They lost their most skilled staff from the 1990s era due to early retirement. They fired all QA staff. Nowadays they have a big piles of legacy codebases. They outsourced or better say moved development of many products to India. Nowadays you really feel the lower skilled work force (compared to 1990s staff) and no QA to speak of everywhere in there products. Their product feel like designed by people who have little engineering knowledge, a far cry from 1990s software UI. Well it already started with WinXP that contained already HTML based UI parts like "software" control panel, and many more parts - an undocumented new UI API where the EU fined them. Plus the 1984 style spyware features their Nadella CEO introduced and forces upon end consumers like there is no tomorrow.
The crimethink goes deeper than that. IQ indeed differs by heritage. Why shouldn't other personality traits? What if one group has personality traits that on average lead to greater success getting through the process at a corporate hell like Oracle?
It shouldn't matter. I dream of a day when we look at people and people and not representatives of their identity groups.
> But the relation of those groups with what we call "race" is almost zero.
The everyday races correspond to real, observable genetic clusters. There are real characteristics shared by members of these large groups, e.g. the epicanthic fold in East Asians.
The genetic phylogeny doesn't lie. The Sub-Saharan diversity you're mentioning --- e.g., between Bushmen and the Igbo --- is about large-separation clades within the larger continental grouping.
There are some real characteristics shared by some members of those large groups. Certainly not all of them, considering the arbitrary rules. 10% of American "blacks" have majority white ancestry. Are you telling me that they still have all of the real characteristics shared by others of the "black" group?
This stuff does not line up neatly. To the extent that there are genetic differences between groups of humans, the dividing lines don't match our concepts of race.
> scientists getting behind the idea that there are clear racial lines dividing us all will not contribute to the peace-making.
I disagree. Science promulgating obvious falsehoods like "race does not exist" breeds distrust of all science. Science needs to acknowledge that race exists in order to save science from the postmodern nihilism of politics. The world is never made a better place through scientific censorship.
> 85% of genetic variation exists within local populations
That's Lewontin's Fallacy [1]. There's no logical reason to think that genome-wide diversity within populations somehow proves that large-scale impactful allele frequency differences between conventionally understood races do not exist.
They do. You can measure them. Given someone's DNA, you can identify his content-scale race. (You can actually narrow someone's ancestry much more narrowly too. Race is a cakewalk.)
"In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. It has therefore been proposed that the division of Homo sapiens into these groups is not justified by the genetic data. This conclusion, due to R.C. Lewontin in 1972, is unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors. The underlying logic, which was discussed in the early years of the last century, is here discussed using a simple genetical example."
There is also no logical reason to believe that allele frequency differences betwen conventionally understood races are in any way "impactful" relative to the heterogenity of respective groups or relative to allele frequency differences between populations not generally understood as distinct races.
We can reliably identify haplogroups associated with certain phenotypes popularly categorised as "races", but we can also [more] reliably identify genetic markers associated with other phenotypical differences which have little or no correspondence with haplogroups. The presumption of greater significance of haplogroup-associated differences is the social construct here.
I repeat, attributing more significance to observed similarities than observed differences is a social construct. One minute we're talking about fairly obvious visible differences like Korean-descended people almost invariably having paler skin and narrower eyes than Bantu-descended people. You also mentioned stature, which is rather less helpful to your thesis because there's a huge range of average heights between different Bantu subgroups and on average North Koreans are substantially shorter than their genetically difficult-to-distinguish southern cousins. Except for someone like Ri Myung-hun, who's over 7'8". Would one say his stature is best evaluated by analysis of the average height of people bearing "Korean" genetic markers or using a tape measure?
And of course, inevitably you move on to pretending that the huge and stable variation in measured test performance within a population is of lesser import than relatively small and unstable difference in average test performance between populations. Even if we grant the rather silly proposition that tests so unstable that the Dutch population improved by more than a standard deviation in thirty years are actually a good measure of innate intellectual differences unaffected by non-genetic factors, you've got the problem that it's impossible to predict with any degree of certainty what the person who took the test's genetic background actually is. I mean why would anyone interested in investigating innate intelligence choose to focus on genetic markers that predict my skin tone pretty accurately but can't even rule out the possibility of me being in the very top or very bottom percentile for results in any cognitive ability test?
> the Flynn effect changes the absolute scores, but not the difference.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that if a test indicates that me and my fellow white English thirtysomethings produce average scores a standard deviation ahead of (i) thirtysomething black people living in my country and (ii) my white grandparents' generation when they were my age, what's actually measured by the observed one standard deviation average differences across cohorts probably isn't genetic differences....
