today I started a list: things I'll do when I'll have a lot of money.

I understood how used I am to being so close to poverty when I wrote stuff like a 20 bucks bluetooth speaker and a set of screwdrivers.

@arteteco the difference between a rich person and a poor person is that a rich person spends most of their time trying to think of ways they could spend/invest money they don't have yet, a poor person thinks up ways they will spend money they don't yet have :)

Though I think this applies a bit farther above the poverty line than you are dealing with too. Obviously you gotta cover the basic needs first. but someone told me that once and it stuck with me.. how you spend (in your head) the money you dont have yet says everything about your financial future.

@freemo I don't think I understood this, a rich person spends time thinking of ways to invest and the poor on ways to spend, you mean?

@arteteco Pretty much yes.. basically how you have mentally ear marked the money you dont have yet whether it be mentally earmarked as a means to create some new company or project, or on indulgences.. basically as you say investment vs personal spending.

@freemo Oh, I see now, makes sense. I don't have a rich future ahead of me, it seems =D
I think in the US you people are more attuned to that kind of entrepreneurship and personal economic growth, which is something I appreciate and I should learn from.

To be sure, as long as I have the basics and a bit more I'm alright, I'm not complaining, was just playing with my mind 😁

@arteteco @freemo

We like stuff that works so well it pays for itself.

We don't like ideological quests.

Generally.

@amerika

I dunno, I think america has become the HQ for ideological quests in many ways. I generally see americans as being extremists in everything. Most americans are radically ideological, while others dont care much at all about ideological quests, there is very little middle ground.

Contrast that with europe where most people tend to be centrist with a small minority at the ideological extremes.

@arteteco

@freemo @arteteco

Only because "centrist" in the contemporary European definition is Leftist: market socialism + civil rights + democracy.

Americans are more prone to like that which demonstrates itself over that which is merely popular. It's an important distinction, probably impossible to explain.

@amerika

that has not at all been my expeirnce as someone who lives in both america and europe. Though it is what you hear most often.

The leftists in america in my experience are **far** more extremist than anything I've ever seen in europe. In fact most europeans I know who have spent any real time in america tend to mock american leftists for their absurdity. Same is true for our right leaning people, also generally considered extreme.

@arteteco

@freemo @arteteco

Relativity, what is it?

When the center is Left, extremes will appear either redundant or dangerous, as you note.

American Leftists are generally single people, crazy people, or minorities.

@amerika I'm not sure, I don't think I know enough about the US to speak, either by statistics or by personal experience. From the biased internet view, US seems more "ideologist" than most countries I know, arguing a lot about principles. If the matter was what works and what not, I'd see very different political debates, more based on science and facts

@freemo

@arteteco @freemo

I disagree that it's not. However, America seems to have woken up first to how corrupt the scientific establishment has become, a.k.a. the replication crisis.

Principles are fine if realistic; if not, they're ideological (like the drive toward "equality," a non-factual notion).

@amerika @arteteco @freemo I've heard of this replication crisis. Is it occurring much in actual real science, or more in the secularized Jewish -ologies? Is scientific fraud widespread or committed more by certain ethnicities?

@TradeMinister @arteteco @freemo

In my view, it's likely hitting all fields

The need to "publish or perish" has a high cost, and much research being pushed through is cherry-picked and/or filtered.

@amerika @arteteco @freemo There is that, and the self-perpetuating dogmas. I've read that if you're getting a degree in theoretical physics and want to work, you need to do string theory, not loop quantum gravity or anything.
Still, peer review and others reproducing hard-science should continually preen the knowledge base, if it works right.

@TradeMinister

there is an expectation that you know certain theories and schools of though before you go onto more obscure or complex ones for sure. but that isnt dogma. Studying a thing doesnt inherently create dogma for the thing.

I study religion in some depth and while there is plenty floating around in the way of dogma when it comes to religion I have never adopted that dogma because I only study the topic, I dont adopt the faith.

I also never experienced teachers pushing too much dogma. Generally they care if you prove your point using logic and data, they dont force your conclusions. Most teachers not just accept dissenting thought they encourage it and want you to try to disprove theories, they even tend to promote projects where you attempt to do so.

the only reason scientific thought tends to align is because we have all went through the science and tried to disprove it and ultimately found we were wrong and could not.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @amerika @arteteco Consider the case of the 1918 influenza and Bacillus Haemophilus, an excellent example of dogma wasting careers and a decade or so of research. I'm sure that still happens, and I expect it will happen to String Theory in the fullness of time: my (unprofessional) guess is it will not be fundamental even if it is accurate at certain energies.

@TradeMinister

Not sure that is a great example.. Your not talking so much about dogma or wasted careers as you are talking about observing scientific progress where competing ideas and theories are over time refined and confirmed.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @amerika @arteteco You should maybe read up on it. One eminent German scientist insisted for decades that that irrelevant bacteria caused influenza, so at least one career and decades of work were wasted trying to prove that.

@TradeMinister
I am very familiar with it. Individuals have wrong theories all the time, and thats how science is suppose to work, thats how we learn we are wrong and ultimately what is correct.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @TradeMinister @arteteco

And every generation, we find out that settled science from the previous was nonsense.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html

@amerika @freemo @arteteco Which is a good thing and how science should work. Unfortunately the weight of Authority and control of funding mean that the scientific process is frequently impeded by old senile fucks who should have packed it in long ago but are Important so they control the funding and research: office politics wins again.

@TradeMinister

Sometimes funding can derail science and create some issues, no doubt.. A prime example of that is the whole autism vaccine nonsense where basically someone paid a bunch of money to a small minority of crooked scientists to produce a easily debunked paper. Even though the whole of the scientific community quickly rejected the paper its very existence was used as fodder by some for years to come. So yes a person with some money can certainly use psudo-science to cause some harm.

But these sorts of situations never get very far, they certainly dont pass any comprehensive peer review, and generally is not what we see from the majority of the scientific community.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @TradeMinister @arteteco

Lots of areas are not explored because they are politically incorrect.

Let's look at IQ research.

@amerika

There has been a great deal of research around IQ, even going so far as to investigate IQ differences among cultures we think of as different races, alot of that research is ongoing. Better IQ tests designed to be suited for tribal cultures with little contact with the outside world have been developed over the years for exactly that reason.

The issue is simply certain assertions have been made so often in the past and debunked so thuroughly, and almost always done under extreme bias, that most scientists arent going to rehash the same old nonsense unless someone actually comes up with a compelling high quality science, which is rarely the case in certain areas.

Every once in a while I come across some moron with a clearly racial bias trying to argue blacks are inherently lower IQ than whites, and every time when i give them the time and effort to review the evidence of their claim it is completely laughable the lack of evidence and the amount of bias they employed to collect it. Obviously when 99% of people arguing a particular point are always crackpots even if there is a valid point somewhere among them it isnt going to as easily get attention. Extraordinary claims take extraordinary evidence.

@TradeMinister @arteteco

@freemo @amerika @TradeMinister @arteteco so I have no interest in arguing that there are racial IQ differences between different groups, especially that black people may be less smart. That said those sorts of studies are the kind of study that you couldn’t publish if you found anything other than no difference, and where the researchers are only looking for one answer. I don’t think we can say we know whether there are IQ differences, and it might be tempting to think it’s possible since IQ is in part determined by genetics, and genetics vary between races.

@manarock

Hard to say. I mean we see studies that suggest black people have genetic deficiencies other races do not all the time. for example it is well known and established science that blacks have a much higher incidence of sickle cell anemia than non-blacks. Despite this effectively looking like they are genetically inferior in that regard, and thus would be something you might think couldn't get published, it tends to be free published and fairly well accepted science.

The reason such studies stand little chance of getting published isnt so much about the biases in the industry, its about the fact that we have tested the hypothesis for over a 100 years in great depth and never once have found anything to support that assertion. So naturally its not something you will see getting published unless there is some pretty solid and reproducible data, and there never is.

@amerika @TradeMinister @arteteco

@freemo

If I can chip my humble 50 satoshis on this, African people have way higher genetic diversity than the rest of humankind, not having experienced the bottleneck from getting out of Africa.
It's easier, therefore, to find higher diversity of problems too, and the sampling can wildly affect the results of any research. Talking about "black people" or Africans is really like putting together all the rest of humankind, papuasians, native americans, latins, australian aborigenal people etc, and say "see, they have this and that".

My main point is, we can't talk about "African people" as a group and pretend it makes sense.

This is something that until more recent genetic discovery was not well known, so a lot of studies even from a recent past have a huge bias in that sense

@manarock @amerika @TradeMinister

@arteteco

Well said, agreed. Even from a non genetic standpoint anyone who has ever though "African" was some sort of singular race and culture is clearly ignorant of the reality.

Tunesians for example clearly have very different physical, cultural, and genetic qualities than someone from Nigeria. They dont even look similar, let alone what else.

@manarock @amerika @TradeMinister