testingdeepwaters.bsky.social

Science needs crazies, with each one included to the extent that they get things correct. Scientists should have no problem with shutting out outsiders who do little but lie, but because they shun weirdos like me en masse, they risk both missing genuine insight and misunderstanding the liars.

29 Nov 2025

Again, way too many to list, but until recently in even the UK, sex was often about "gender identity" in legal and identification contexts, which is how "sex reassignment" made any sense at all.

Extending this, for each procedure on a given sample or set of subsamples, there'll be relationship between the DISTRIBUTION of results for your measured variables M and the DISTRIBUTION of true values for the outcome variable O. (If M isn't O, M's a set of proxy variables.)

testingdeepwaters.bsky.social@testingdeepwaters.bsky.social

In cases like that, a good question to ask is: when should we heighten our standards for what counts as a sufficiently reliable instrument or procedure?

As for what I was talking about in OP: if you can control the distribution of M as a proxy for O, then you should have an idea of what makes M better fit O. Wanna minimize M's variance? Want a particular average of M to be close to an average of O? Some mix of both? There's a summary stat for that.

That summary stat S will be a random variable whose distribution depends on your procedure. If you can parameterize parts of your procedures, you can argmax your way to the best distribution of outcomes for S. e.g. what point in the bias-variance tradeoff is best for you?

testingdeepwaters.bsky.social@testingdeepwaters.bsky.social

In cases like that, a good question to ask is: when should we heighten our standards for what counts as a sufficiently reliable instrument or procedure?

Crucially, you should at least have a rough idea of how to transform M into O. Why care about distributions? People might not just care about the absolute displacement from the mode of O and the transformed mode of M. The same gap might be more significant to them if the distributions are narrower.

So it's not generally good to pin all standards of significance onto the same measure of some difference between the two distributions. Someone's gotta choose one, maybe even make one. For my example, take a standardized mode difference.

link.springer.comFrom survivors to replicators: evolution by natural selection revisited - Biology & PhilosophyFor evolution by natural selection to occur it is classically admitted that the three ingredients of variation, difference in fitness and heredity are necessary and sufficient. In this paper, I show u...

10 Nov 2025

Not sure if you even need NCT. Genes are not the fundamental parts of biological organisms, because they merely secure the upkeep and reproduction of patterns in cell metabolisms. Culture can't just affect genes and/or relative and absolute reproduction rates. I've written briefly about it before.

testingdeepwaters.bsky.social@testingdeepwaters.bsky.social

As for reproduction: after reading link.springer.com/article/10.1... I much later got the idea that in proto-life, survival begat growth which then begat reproduction, all to maintain and spread sub-biotic trends over bigger scales. So a REAL reductionist would have to talk in terms of that.

9 Sept 2025

If you're working in a politically salient science (like sociology and biology), then you gotta examine the most dissident-coded positions as well as the currently most popular ones. If you haven't studied "cranks" comprehensively, you're probably underestimating their reliance on the mainstream.

9 Sept 2025

Like it or not, elitist "cranks" are more ascendant than ever, and your beloved institutions and disciplines aren't safe unless they support them. They're using widespread untruths (conceptual and empirical) and mistakes, and taking them to "honest" conclusions. You wanna stop that? Then fight it.

8 Sept 2025

I'll try to attract a scholar's attention again about something I wanna talk about. @pelagictom.bsky.social How supportable are the claims that: -to sense and react to environments, humans (sometimes unconsciously) predict, prepare for and actively search for relevant parts of environments...

8 Sept 2025

-organisms (and maybe also parts of them, like brains) model environments instead of being affected by them, as if passively reacting? I don't think that organisms or evolutionary processes literally anticipate anything, but is it precisely true or otherwise useful to say they actually do?

8 Sept 2025

Since the microblogging part of this website isn't designed for long and potentially nuanced discussions I'd prefer to talk about this over direct messages, some instant messaging app or even emails. I got nowhere with a tangle of related philosophy and biology issues and I want some help.

12 Aug 2025

Certain seemingly metaphysical or logical statements may just be methods or very confident bets. For example, physicalist metaphysics is unfounded like all metaphysics is, but if you're not spiritual, have you ever seen any entity that isn't at least physical or a hallucination?

12 Aug 2025

And strict "genetic" "reductionisms" and "determinisms" are often extremely silly: non-genetic influences DO have impacts, and we're no more gene vessels than sub-genetic chemical pattern vessels. But what about saying "behavior's just genes plus stuff there's no scientific reason to care about"?

Why is it that whenever I try to defend someone, they don't like me much? Do I go too far? Am I THAT scary?! bsky.app/profile/test...

testingdeepwaters.bsky.social@testingdeepwaters.bsky.social

You COULD'VE said: "There were many signs that Stock was a crank culture warrior, and lots of people saying things about it because of how important it is. We gotta see and react to these signs quicker to stamp out this sadism."

I chose to use Bluesky because emails never worked for me before with other scholars.

12 Aug 2025

Should say I'm attempting to be a scholar in a broad sense, and I never am nor currently wish to be a scholar in a formal academic sense.

Why is it that whenever I try to defend someone, they don't like me much? Do I go too far? Am I THAT scary?! bsky.app/profile/test...

testingdeepwaters.bsky.social@testingdeepwaters.bsky.social

I chose to use Bluesky because emails never worked for me before with other scholars.

This is what happens when I get distracted and pretty desperate. If you think you're an outsider, try using me as a benchmark. (And no, it's not just other people's fault. There's a reason I don't do marketing.)

Why is it that whenever I try to defend someone, they don't like me much? Do I go too far? Am I THAT scary?! bsky.app/profile/test...

testingdeepwaters.bsky.social@testingdeepwaters.bsky.social

A scholar feels let down by Kathleen Stock, someone else jumps in and aggressively blames that feeling of betrayal on the scholar, saying they should've cared about transphobia more, and then I fire back, noting this familiar variant of the "I told you so, idiot" rhetorical routine.

But that scholar reacts by... blocking me...? Not a fan of drama? To be fair, I've been trying for a while to get their attention, on the surface to give them some very pessimistic thoughts on context about topics, but really because I wanna ask them about some stuff they study in private.

30 July 2025

Awfully weird that I've had no notifications for a while. Wonder if that's someone deciding at some distance that I'm one of THOSE folks who needs the silent treatment!

Since I wrote the above, someone DID show some engagement, but that might just be an obligatory crack in the system just to give the impression of no action being taken. So far it's just one person!

So it looks like there's no imposed radio silence after all. That's great!

Maybe asking people about issues I have no idea how to solve this way will help. Let's try it. @evoroseman.bsky.social "Reductionisms" and "determinisms" in evolutionary biology and sociology. I have no idea where to start on this conceptual mess. At most, I know what certain people WANT out of it.

I can at least answer this with a transhumanist response: if we want to preserve our personhoods and psychological powers, we don't strictly need bodies that contain replicators (e.g. DNA variants). We can already modify our bodies and even change our motivations with procedures and medications.

But is that warranted? If so, could I go much further? Have I just been thinking about metaphysics all along? Does any form of this "reductionism" make any sense? I would prefer to discuss this elsewhere since I can't provide so much nuance in a Bluesky thread. You got emails or instant messaging?

And even flexibility in behavior, ultimately directed towards reproduction, has to be facilitated by genes, ever more with each generation. So goes a particularly extreme form of "it's just genes and noise" evolutionary biology.

That might spell doom for human freedom and flexibility in any way that doesn't just reinforce successful means of reproduction, which would already be biased towards behaviours and social structures massively conserved in our species's evolutionary lineage. Families, sex, hierarchies, more.

Or more broadly, we directly or indirectly increase reproduction of similar genomes over widening ranges of scales of time and space and across greater diversities of environments. And that's all we try to do, consciously or not. And our environments and cultures mainly reinforce that.

The reinforcement's not just because our environments are largely the products of biological systems which differ ever more due to direct and indirect genetic effects (e.g. extended phenotypes), but also because organisms with the most successful behavior as predisposed more by genes reproduce most.

Ambitious and aggressive "reductionists" really like their "real" reasons for what we do and why, and some takes on evolutionary psychology will strongly prioritize "ultimate" explanations. They at least imply that all we effectively try to do is make kids in our own specialized ways.

30 July 2025

Awfully weird that I've had no notifications for a while. Wonder if that's someone deciding at some distance that I'm one of THOSE folks who needs the silent treatment!

And the silence continues. This being chance is getting increasingly unlikely! Who's behind this?

OF COURSE I'm sad that I can't just email or approach busy scientists and try to learn things with them, or at least learn where they go wrong. I can stick my head in books until I remember to breathe, but I'm far from perfect at extracting legit understanding. The size of literature worsens this.