I took pre algebra and can confirm 100% that Weinstein is a pedophile allegedly.

Should we really have a thread for this?

Lots of people listen to podcasts. If a bunch of people have a shared interest in one specific podcast, sure. But if you're just here to be like "Hi guys doncha know he - like uke_master - has a MATH PHD so I totally trust him" then what on earth is the point?

-This is something I posted in another thread/forum, but interesting I think. I'll put it here too as Brett Weinstein is definitely an associate of Eric Weinstein (his brother), and I look forward to seeing how the usual suspects will dismiss/denigrate the information along partisan lines.



This is a bit of an aside, but interesting I think. Anyways, I am in the middle of a podcast by Bret Weinstein and his wife, who are both evolutionary biology teachers, and he is talking about this from an evolutionary biology perspective. (If you recognize the names, they are known as the professors who were run out of Evergreen State by woke, student lynch mobs, but this podcast isn't about that at all)

Anyways, he said in a respiratory virus that normally spreads via droplets, the historic tendency would be to mutate to be less serious, which is what has happened with all the endemic coronaviruses that have been in the human population a long time, and are nothing more than minor annoyances at this point.

The reason being that in a natural setting people laying in bed sick/dying aren't going to transmit virus, whereas people walking around more or less healthy will. And the goal of the virus is to spread, not kill you; although if it can do both it doesn't really matter if you live or die. (An example of a pathogen that doesn't mind if it makes you very sick is the parasite that causes malaria, as the transmission vector is mosquito, which can draw blood easily from a very sick person laying in bed)

He also said it might be useful to know the host species this came from, as the viruses lifecycle is probably correlated to the behavior of the host animal, to maximize transmission.

Of course, in our modern setting sick people are all brought into rooms together with healthy people who can bring it back out into the world (health care workers), so not clear how this would effect how this virus may evolve.

If nothing else it is something interesting to think about.

He also said that even covering your nose/mouth in public with cloth, like a bandanna, would offer some protection against coronavirus, although obviously less than a N95 respirator. He said the CDC recommendations to not wear masks in public is complete negligence. Everyone should be wearing some form of mouth, nose, eye protection in public; and this should have been the recommendation from the start.

That seems like a lot of fairly obvious stuff that while interesting doesn't really offer any criticism/suggestions regarding the way things have been handled, with the exception of the dubious criticism of the CDC recommendations about face protection.

My understanding of the face mask stuff is that it's somewhat effective at reducing spread from patients with the virus but at best marginally effective at preventing uninfected people from becoming infected. The main reason for the ineffectiveness is that a very common consequence is that for people who are unused to wearing any sort of face protection it will feel unnatural and drastically increase the frequency of touching their face. Given that non-medical masks aren't hugely effective in the first place, the benefits are often more than counteracted by the fact that it causes more face-touching.

The point of the podcast isn't to criticize the way things are being handled. It is to provide information and give advice how to go about living your life. And I only repeated a small part of what they covered.

Also, since so many people are walking around asymptomatic while contagious, even a mask that reduces spread from patients with virus would be a big help at the population level.

In the countries controlling the virus well, everyone is walking around in public wearing surgical masks, which are known to be much less effective at stopping getting infected than they are at transmitting infection. Clearly "non-effective" mask wearing is part of any workable solution in the real world.

And by all accounts our own CDC is going to reverse their recommendations and tell people to start wearing masks in public. At which point all the public health and news outlets that are telling us mask wearing is ineffective are going to to a 180 and tell us how essential it is.

Finished the Brett Weinstein podcast looking at coronavirus through an evolutionary lens. Some interesting tidbits, including one which help explains in part why the virus will most likely evolve to become more mild.

Brett said that the vast majority of the virus lineages today are dead ends. Maybe a specific one they will infect 5 more people, maybe 100, but eventually most will dead end. So there is actually fierce competition within the virus population to be the rare lineage that will project itself far into the future. And for a respiratory virus that travels through healthy people having close contact with eachtother and spreading mainly through exhaled water droplets, the best strategy is usually to become a mild annoyance for the host vector, which is exactly what all of our current endemic coronaviruses have done.

He also made the point that we are the viruses environment, and so our actions will dictate the course of viral evolution. So the harder we make the virus to transfer through our behavior, the more pressure we will put on it to evolve to a milder form (theoretically). So theoretically, this actually supports aggressive containment/sheltering as opposed to allowing the virus to roam free and herd immunity.

And if the virus cannot evolve into a mild form that is nothing more than a mild annoyance, it will fail to make itself endemic (the goal) and die out, aka SARS-1.

Edit: And the fact that as a human population we have normalized ~500,000 people dying each year from flu, and we don't behaviorally take very aggressive actions to mitigate it, other than some parts of the world utilizing a vaccine of limited effectiveness due to how flu mutates, we are not putting much selective pressure on flu to be less deadly than it currently is.

I've seen a pretty big increase of people wearing masks in the last couple days. Prior to that I'd seen some here and there--but this morning running a couple errands I saw a ton.

One of the interesting things Brett brought up in his "Coronavirus from an Evolutionary Perspective" podcast, was that the Coronavirus we see today isn't going to be the one we see in 1 year or 10 years. it is going to constantly evolve, especially as we enact interventions to make its job (getting into the future) harder. This of course is yet another reason why trying to get herd immunity to the virus now is probably not an ideal strategy.

In Daily Mirror I saw an interesting article about a new Chinese strain that appeared to last 45 days but have mild symptoms. Just one report (of dubious veracity) but something to think about in such a context.

But, isn't herd immunity why it would work?

It needs to stay alive so it weakens, therefore it can get passed around more freely.

If it is passed around freely it has no selective pressure to weaken until a large part of the herd has it. Just as likely it would get stronger initially. And we don't even know how long protective immunity would even last.

Also, as it is a RNA virus (like Flu), it's mutation rate will be much higher than a DNA virus, bacteria or parasite; and there is a non zero chance that it will mutate into a strain that can circumvent any adaptive protection the herd has.

Dengue is an example of a virus that exposure to one strain offers no protection against another, and in fact makes it much more deadly.

This week's episode features Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Sam Harris trying to prove that systemic racism doesn't exist when it most certainly does.

As long as the thread is bumped, Eric Weinstein had a pretty good term he used in a recent podcast to describe the current moral panic:

Left-Carthyism.

Another term I heard that made me chuckle: Recreational Outrage.



Here's a Weinstein podcast I'm halfway through. I like it so far. I thought the bearded dude from Some Other News made some good points above. Was a little too goofy at times, he could tone that down a bit. But he explained systemic racism better than anyone else I've heard so far.

That was a good pod. Interesting hearing thoughtful perspectives from people willing to talk about the issues honestly, instead of always hearing the same PC anti-racism monosperspective.

It was also interesting the point they brought up as to the public school systems. Many people would argue that failing school systems are at least as big a problem as policing, and a lot of people honestly believe it is a bigger problem. Yet, the activism and energy surrounding this topic isn't 1/1000 that around policing.

Also, in education the one small success that has happened is with opening up of charter schools, so some students can escape the public school system which is actively holding them down. And of course the Democratic Party position is to oppose charter schools and any other meaningful reform as a matter of principle.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas...=1000485374994

About halfway through a podcast Brett Weinstein has with Matt Taibbi. Very interesting, especially how Matt talks about how he realizes media is now going through what academia has already had to go through (which at the time no one in left wing journalism was taking seriously), as far as the thought police suppressing individual expression to the alter of anti-racism activism.

I would like to explore the charter school debate more. Without knowing a whole lot, I would favor improving the schools that are failing as opposed to busing kids to charter schools much further away. A lot of kids are in multiple extracurricular activities, and adding hours to their day travelling to school seems less than optimal at doing what's best to improve their education. How to increase funding for public schools in lower-class areas is the big question. But this looks like a case where the division between the have's vs have not's grows even wider.

Edit: Looking forward to hearing Bret and Matt Taibbi discussion. Thanks for the link

Not my area of expertise, but my understanding is money is not the problem per se. Lots of people have tried to throw a lot of money at the problem, with extremely little to show for it. My understanding is that the main problem is that the ideas of how to school just aren't very good.

Charter schools with good ideas have had extremely good results that throwing money into failing school systems with bad ideas hasn't.

And a lot of parents that just want the best for their children aren't really interested in sacrificing their own kids for some greater good. And that is understandable. The rich Democrat politicians that are fighting the charter school movement and advocating throwing more money into failing systems certainly aren't sending their kids to these failing schools.

wrong and misleading again.

Go on....

are you talking about the Cody Johnston video?

ya isnt it amazing that when you go to the actual source its pretty hard to refute? rather than listening to strawman arguments from Rubin, Shapiro, and the rest of those clowns.

look at just about any city. compare the budge for the police versus the budget for the school.s

No, the other video. I'll save you the time. You would probably just dismiss the panel of speakers as bootlickers.

Ben Shapiro: The left is putting the United States through a French Revolution, just without guillotines

loooooool Intellectual Dork Webbers

LOL @ this massively dishonest figure.