10 Comments

All the fuss about the XYY kid seems so weird. As far as I can tell XYY syndrome has very mild symptoms and isn't a big deal at all. Even the Chinese Wikipedia page says so. Why are so many people claiming he's guaranteed to be a psychopath or whatever?

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I honestly don't know if it's just because I hang out in rationalist communities, or if Chinese people are just less educated on the various forms of fallacies. But I find there's very little concept of selection bias and Chinese Robber Fallacy and stuff like that on the Chinese internet. It's very hard to communicate to people the concept that if one in a thousand men is XYY, that means there are certainly millions of them in China (especially from back in the day, when we didn't have testing technology). And out of all of them, one did a murder. That doesn't mean anything.

And even if they have increased crime rates, that doesn't mean they have increased murder rates. Misdemeanors count as crime rates too. And murder is just such a rare thing, that it's far more likely your perfectly normal child will grow up to drunk drive and accidentally run a guy over, than that an XYY child will grow up to be an actual murderer, if you actually look at the statistics of traffic accidents versus homicide. But most traffic accidents don't make it onto the news. It doesn't get talked about. And people don't pay it attention.

I think this just comes down to bad education about statistics, and how repetition of statistically meaningless events can heavily influence your perception.

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why didn’t you translate the caption of the video that shows the woman beating up the hospital robot? it said the woman attacked the robot because the robot came up to her and tried asking her if she wants to hear a joke, even though she was grieving the sickness of a loved one. i feel like that’s important context

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Oh, it's because I covered the same story in yesterday's blogpost, where I already explained the context. But yesterday, all I had was a photo, and today, I actually linked to the video. I didn't repeat myself, because I thought people would've already read yesterday's post. But I really should've realised that sometimes, people skip days or forget details. I'll make sure to recap the details in the future!

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Hi, I really enjoy your Substack but do you think you could make a weekly roundup edition? It’s really too much content to get every day in my inbox

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I could definitely try to experiment with that starting next week!

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Interesting not hearing anything in Chinese astronauts in the media I see

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I think that's pretty ordinary, isn't it? China doesn't mention anything about American astronauts really. And like the blogpost today said, Korea's been sending rockets to space too, and I don't know anything about their astronauts.

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I guess I feel like even when America sends astronauts, except Shatner no one really cares

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I like to think this is a good thing! It means that we're going to space regularly enough that it's become a routine thing! It's not super risky and dangerous and unknown anymore!

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