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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: October 2nd, 2025

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  • I have no skin in the game but I have worked professionally as both an academic scientist and a data scientist in the private sector and I can tell you that peer review is great but a lot of legitimate research is done outside the bounds of academic journals. It is entirely possible for amateurs to do real science.

    If the effect size is large enough, you dont actually need to be that rigorous about it. No one needed to do a study on whether there was a direct correlation between adverse medical outcomes and gunshot wounds to the head.


  • Schumer is part of an old american politics where there was a cordial relationship between both sides and the cost of sacrificing the interests of the constituents was largely negligible - no one knew what was going on so no one could complain (pre-24hr news cycle and pre infinite news outlets online or in public). Times changed. People notice everything. Schumer is not built for this time where everything he does is under a microscope and where consequences are seen and felt. He is acting as if he can just pretend that things are like they were in the 90s where he can show up, gladhand with donors and his colleagues across the isle, cash a check, work 4 months out of the year, and insider trade. He cant. The problem is that he is also intrinsically part of the democratic party machinery so no one can force him out. He needs to be primaried at a minimum.


  • I was late to the party, but it turns out that the NYT has always been an agent of manufacturing consent for the US govt dating back at least as far as the vietnam war but almost assuredly since the beginning of the Cold War.

    The overton window is constructed by our media and it was built in such a way that anyone to the left of the democrats was definitionally too radical while anyone to the right of the GOP was just misunderstood and needed to be accommodated.







  • I cannot now remember who said it, but it perfectly captured the problem with Trump:

    “With Donald Trump, there are many questions, but no mysteries.”

    We dont need the epstein files, and we certainly are not going to get them; not unaltered at least. Regardless, we know what is in there. Not everything, but everything we need to know with respect to Trump. At this point, his supporters do not care about the facts as far as Trump is concerned. We have to stop hoping that something is going to rescue us from Trump’s grip on our reality. Nothing will. All that is left is for us to act.


  • I’m surprisingly easy to please. You just need to semi-consistently represent the interests of your constituents. Easy peasy. Jeffries has been called to endorse Mamdani since July. He waited until the last few days before the election, instead of actively dissuading Cuomo from running by endorsing the clear primary winner. As a result, Mamdani spent the entire summer having to deal with attacks from someone in his own party rather than expounding on his (extremely popular) platform.

    It is generally a bad sign for a party that wants to call itself ‘Democrat’ to reject the clear democratic will of the people in your own primary. Call me unreasonable for noticing.



  • Strong disagree with your characterization. I went to a crunchy liberal arts college in upstate NY. I came in as a republican and left as a libertarian. I went hard left years later after entering the workforce and learning about how the world really works. K-12 did way more damage to my understanding of the world and college didnt really do a lot to change that. The idea that college is some kind of propaganda machine is itself propaganda. Of those who come out liberalized it mostly just has to do with exposure to people from different backgrounds and classes. Said another way, people get disabused of their parochial upbringing which can look like indoctrination from the perspective of small-minded yokels back home.

    No, I do not regret my college education. It gave me the tools to understand the world around me, and to be a successful and more complete person. The cost is too high, but what else is true in the US?