Im a FunGuy

The perception of unfairness or injustice is the ultimate cause of most, if not all, anger. In fact, we could define anger as the emotion which corresponds in a one-to-one manner to your belief that you are being treated unfairly. from Feeling Good - David D. Burns M.D.

a right is something society should protect my possession of from Area screenshot of John Stuart Mill on Justice - YouTube

Human beings are ends in themselves, not means to the ends of others, and ought to be treated as such. An individual human being belongs neither to family nor community nor church nor state nor society nor the world. A human being is not property. from The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem - Nathaniel Branden

The Belmont Report identified three basic principles relevant to the ethical conduct of research involving human subjects: Respect for Persons Beneficence Justice from CITI - Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative

Different accounts, same meeting. China's state TV says the UN human rights chief admired the “efforts and achievement China has made in the areas of poverty elimination, human rights protection.” But the UN readout says no such thing. 4/10
https://t.co/oAoN3F5Jj4 from All of This Happened In... - @SofiaHCBBG on Twitter

Ruth Bader Ginsburg strongly favored affirmative action. Antonin Scalia strongly opposed it. Even so, both agreed on a basic set of criteria for how the Supreme Court should evaluate programs that give minority applicants a leg up. As the Supreme Court held in Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Peña, the Fourteenth Amendment “protects persons, not groups.” This creates a strong presumption against any attempt by public authorities to treat members of different groups differently from each other: “Government may treat people differently because of their race only for the most compelling reasons.” Any government program that distinguishes between different people on the basis of their race must therefore meet three stringent criteria. First, it must serve a “compelling interest.” This means that distinguishing between different citizens on the basis of their race must serve an essential or necessary purpose of public policy, not merely be motivated by considerations that are reasonable or rational. Second, these programs need to be “narrowly tailored” to accomplish that compelling state interest. This means that the relevant government entity needs to have made a serious effort to serve the compelling interest that is at stake in a way that does not require an explicit distinction between different people on the basis of their race. And third, the courts need to apply “strict scrutiny” to any such governmental programs. As the Supreme Court wrote in 1989, “We apply strict scrutiny to all racial classifications to ‘smoke out illegitimate uses of race by assuring that [government] is pursuing a goal important enough to warrant use of a highly suspect tool.’ ” from The Identity Trap - Yascha Mounk

interracial dating from 🎞️ shitposts.mp4 🎞️ on X: "https://t.co/XxJMIzkhoS" / X

In this view, any principles and rules that fail to distinguish between the historically dominant and the historically dominated are inherently suspect. Instead of holding on to the universalist aspirations of movements like the struggle for civil rights, governments should explicitly start to treat citizens differently depending on the group of which they are a part. As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic write, “Only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery.” For a long time, it looked as though such a radical break with established practices was unlikely to win many adherents outside campus. But gradually, calls for state institutions to make how they treat people depend on the groups to which they belong began to influence the mainstream. They were increasingly voiced by activists, endorsed by major grant-making foundations, and even championed by presidential candidates in primary elections. By the time Joe Biden was preparing to take on his new responsibilities as the forty-sixth president of the United States, the incoming administration repeatedly touted its commitment to bringing about “equity” through “race-conscious” and “race-sensitive” public policies. Both at the federal and at the state levels, some such policies have quickly been implemented. From government guidelines giving nonwhite patients priority for scarce COVID drugs to basic income programs reserved for trans people, government institutions have started to adopt schemes that explicitly distinguish between citizens on the basis of their membership in particular identity groups. from The Identity Trap - Yascha Mounk

More generally, errors of commission generally get weighted more heavily than errors of omission, a tendency sometimes referred to as omission bias. from Maxims for Thinking Analytically - Dan Levy

It is entirely acceptable for judgments of similarity to be unaffected by base rates and also by the possibility that the description was inaccurate, but anyone who ignores base rates and the quality of evidence in probability assessments will certainly make mistakes. from Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

fungi are indeed a danger to humans, citing that 1.3 million people die every year due to fungal diseases. But Ophiocordyceps “jumping from ants to humans and then onward [to other people]…that probably requires too many [improbable] circumstances to happen. from How The Last of Us Made Its Zombie Fungus So Much More Real (and Terrifying) - ELLE

Naughty Dog developers created the idea for the Cordyceps brain infection after they were inspired by an episode of the BBC documentary Planet Earth titled "Jungles", narrated by Sir David Attenborough. In the episode, it features an infected ant being killed by Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, as well as showing a variety of other insects and arachnids that were killed by different species of the fungus.

On this scene, creative director Neil Druckmann said: "it was all based on the idea that the more numerous a species becomes, the more likely it is to be preyed on by this fungus." In reality, it is quite impossible for humans to be fatally infected by the Ophiocordyceps genera but may undergo behavioral change or 'disorder'. Since humans are easier to dissect (in terms of removing foreign substances or matter) than insects (also body size can also have a different outcome for the infection), normal Cordyceps would take weeks or months for it to be fatal from Cordyceps brain infection - The Last of Us Wiki

Cephalotes pallens is a species of arboreal ant of the genus Cephalotes, characterized by an odd shaped head and the ability to "parachute" by steering their fall if they drop off of the tree they are on. from Cephalotes pallens

For Bayes, this assertion provoked a natural, one might say Holmesian question: How much evidence would it take to convince us that something we consider improbable has actually happened? When does a hypothesis cross the line from impossibility to improbability and even to probability or virtual certainty? from The Book of Why - Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

The improbable should not be confused with the impossible. If enough chances are taken, even rare events are expected to happen. Some people do win the lottery and some people do get struck by lightning. A one-in-a-million event happens quite frequently on a planet with seven billion people. from Super Thinking - Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible, and the notions of coherence, plausibility, and probability are easily confused by the unwary. from Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

The highest level is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” This is the standard of proof needed in criminal cases because there is widespread agreement that a false positive (convicting an innocent person) is much worse than a false negative (acquitting a guilty person). It is also the standard editors and reviewers use when evaluating statistical evidence in papers submitted to scientific journals. We usually operationalize this level of skepticism as “p < .05” [pronounced “p less than point oh five”], which means (in the case of a simple experiment with two conditions): The probability (p) that this difference between the experimental and control conditions could have come about by chance is less than five out of 100. from Why Some Researchers Think I’m Wrong About Social Media and Mental Illness - Jon Haidt

The world is a fundamentally Uncertain place. Unexpected things happen—some good, some bad. You never know when Mother Nature, Lady Luck, or a hungry predator will decide that today is not your day. from The Personal MBA - Josh Kaufman

Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionist science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can’t optimize; we don’t even know what to optimize. We can’t keep track of everything. We can’t find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror. from Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows

fungi are more closely related to humans than they are bacteria that cause infections; in other words, their “cell machinery is the same as ours.” That makes antifungals much more difficult to develop than antibacterials, as antifungals need to target fungal cells without also hurting human cells. This could be the issue Dr. Neuman is citing during the talk show. from How The Last of Us Made Its Zombie Fungus So Much More Real (and Terrifying) - ELLE

Is it ringworm? Signs and symptoms - American Academy of Dermatology from Is it ringworm? Signs and symptoms - American Academy of Dermatology

fungi can’t survive in hosts whose internal temperature is above 94 degrees. That’s why they aren’t a threat to humans and our higher body temps. But Dr. Newman provided the exact scenario where fungi would pose a threat to humanity. And it’s a scenario that sounds far too plausible from How THE LAST OF US Made Pop Culture’s Scariest Zombies Even More Terrifying - Nerdist