@isleofpuffin Yes. Watch what people do, not what they say.
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W. Les Kendrick
210 posts
W. Les Kendrick
@les_kendrick
Love good scholarship and tennis, not necessarily in that order. Christian. Do everything you can to improve your local community.
Katılım Ağustos 2019
77 Takip Edilen32 Takipçiler
Why are birth rates low? People don't want kids. Why is this so hard?
60 Minutes@60Minutes
“We've stopped making babies. We've decided that being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time. Not if you're a full human," former Sen. Ben Sasse says in an extended interview. cbsn.ws/4cA1Jrp
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@JosiahHawthorne Birth rates not number of births. There are a lot more young people in the US now than in 1965. Fertility rate is around 1.6 children per female whereas it used to be 2 or higher
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3,606,400 babies were born in the US in 2025.
3,900,089 babies were born in the US in 1995.
3,760,561 babies were born in the US in 1985.
3,144,198 babies were born in the US in 1975.
3,760,358 babies were born in the US in 1965.
Who stopped making babies?
60 Minutes@60Minutes
“We've stopped making babies. We've decided that being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time. Not if you're a full human," former Sen. Ben Sasse says in an extended interview. cbsn.ws/4cA1Jrp
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@tishray Survivor bias. What about all the people of the same age who didn't do anything special? You need to show that a large group of people of a certain age did a lot at a young age. I think you could make a case for people starting and managing families at an earlier age.
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There is something fundamentally wrong with how we educate the young now.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at 18.
Tolstoy published his first novel at 24.
Napoleon was a general at 24.
Pascal invented a calculator at 19.
Mozart composed symphonies at 8.
The common factor? All classically educated and trained. They were immersed in Greek and Latin, philosophy, mathematics, music, and history before adulthood.
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@musingmymind @kenklippenstein You are exactly right about this, but people refuse to believe what the data shows.
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@kenklippenstein The studies on this are worth reading, as the findings are often
counterintuitive. Most suggest that lower childcare costs and more generous paternity leave merely incentives couples to have children sooner, but it likely does little to change couples’s minds about having them.
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unfathomably rich people baffled at why people aren't having kids is always good for a laugh
x.com/60Minutes/stat…
60 Minutes@60Minutes
“We've stopped making babies. We've decided that being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time. Not if you're a full human," former Sen. Ben Sasse says in an extended interview. cbsn.ws/4cA1Jrp
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@TouhouPrisoner No one will listen. People will have babies if they want to. You are not going to find a lot of childless people who are letting money stop them. There is just no evidence of this in the data.
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I dunno bro but I think living in a climate where both parents have to work to just barely scrape by might be a factor. If we lived in a climate where one working parent's salary is enough to live comfortably & the other can raise the kids, then maybe our fertility won't be shit
60 Minutes@60Minutes
“We've stopped making babies. We've decided that being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time. Not if you're a full human," former Sen. Ben Sasse says in an extended interview. cbsn.ws/4cA1Jrp
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@thomaslhorrocks The affordability argument is not supported by any data. Demographers track this all the time. It might contribute on the margins to some decisions about having more kids, but there is no data to suggest it's the definitive factor. There just isn't.
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Imagine believing that Candy Crush is more significant driver of lower birth rates than skyrocketing costs of healthcare, childcare, and housing. Remarkably tone deaf.
60 Minutes@60Minutes
“We've stopped making babies. We've decided that being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time. Not if you're a full human," former Sen. Ben Sasse says in an extended interview. cbsn.ws/4cA1Jrp
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@DanielDiMartino @JonahDispatch It’s why you know it is a cultural issue, not a financial one. You can have policies you think are good but don’t assume they will raise fertility rates.
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You know Europe has a lower fertility rate than the U.S., don't you?
And blue states lower than red states?
Fish Stark@fishstark
All right @BenSasse, let's make a bet. Let's divide the US in half. I'll let you pick which half. In your half, you ban Candy Crush. In my half we institute 16 weeks of paid parental leave, universal childcare, & a restored child tax credit. Let's see which has more babies.
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Partisan gerrymandering is bad for democracy.
Breaking911@Breaking911
BREAKING: The Florida House passed Gov. Ron DeSantis’s redistricting map in an 83–28 vote, a plan that could boost GOP House seats in 2026. It now heads to the Florida Senate.
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@AriFleischer This seems like over analysis of a simple statement. People read into it whatever they want to see. I think it's fine for people I like or don't like to put out statements like this. Who cares. Oh right, clicks on the platform.
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This is another example showing how Barack Obama is one of the most divisive figures in American politics today. So many of our divisions were caused by the smug, demeaning and narrow-minded way he treats his opponents.
Here, he pretends to not know the truth about the would-be assassin, although the facts of his left wing views were public hours before Obama’s tweet. It’s classic Obama - pretend to be conciliatory while he is the one who creates the divide.
You would hope that Obama would condemn the left after the left tries to kill a President.
But that’s too much to ask.
Once again, Obama proves himself to be a classless divider of our country.
Barack Obama@BarackObama
Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy. It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them – and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.
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@filippoc1970 @matthew_labosco Too often people take a cause and connect it to a specific outcome and ignore all the steps in between one and the other. Behavior is very much a long extended process of steps in many instances. Best to you.
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@les_kendrick @matthew_labosco "The free will presumption is a philosophical premise not a scientific one."
I leave space for some version of this👆. I'm not always sure how to square it with the fact so much occurs outside our conscious awareness and is determined by things outside our control.
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Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroscientist who proved chronic stress is the silent killer doctors ignore.
On Chris Williamson's podcast, he revealed 10 "normal" habits you do every day that wreck your sleep, mood, and nervous system:
1) Replay conversations in your head
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@filippoc1970 @matthew_labosco To say that we are not completely effective in our actions and that those actions intersect with others' actions seems clear. But if you've ever created something from scratch or learned something that takes time, you know all the stops, starts, and reflection that takes.
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@TheTennisLetter The system is still doing a calculation so it could be wrong in the same way that lines people were sometimes wrong. It's a tough problem to solve. There is not perfect solution.
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Elena Rybakina in a disagreement with the umpire in her match against Qinwen Zheng in Madrid.
Qinwen hit a serve that was called in by electronic line calling.
Elena shows the umpire the mark, which is out.
Elena: “Are you kidding me? This is not a joke. The system is wrong. This is not a joke. It is not touching. It is absolutely wrong.”
Looks like electronic line calling got this one wrong…
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@filippoc1970 @matthew_labosco Free will exists, even if we are influenced by things. Those influences (genes, environmental signals, experiences) are formative, not determinative. The free will presumption is a philosophical premise not a scientific one. There is order and the possibility of reordering atoms.
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@les_kendrick @matthew_labosco you suggested that his views on determinism are incompatible with change.
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@filippoc1970 @matthew_labosco Who said anything about predestination? Did I bring Calvin into the mix? Huh?
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@les_kendrick @matthew_labosco Predestination is not the same thing as the argument of Free Will vs. Determinism. If you agree with his above suggestions, the suggestions are more likely to nudge you (deterministically) in a particular (new) direction.
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@atrupar Good Lord. Learn how to do math. It is an 83% drop. Our public officials should hire math people if they don't know the basics. It's okay to admit math isn't your strong suit.
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RFK Jr: "A Democratic senator claimed it's mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. I said, 'Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.'"
Trump: "Right"
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@TPCarney Blah, blah, blah. Just block gerrymandering already. It's the right thing to do.
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There was no national ban on gerrymandering for Republicans to ban.
There was a provision, in a much larger radical bill, that some Dems called a national ban on gerrymandering.
Journalists, however, shouldn't repeat dishonest partisan messaging
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Actually, red states gerrymandering is good/bad and blue states gerrymandering is bad/good is a perfectly logical and defensible position that flows through from principled belief in a set of policy commitments.
More people should just admit instead of dancing around it!
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@nadalprop_ I love Nadal, but this is dumb. He beat Federer ONCE at Wimbledon and lost a TON of matches to Djokovic on the hard courts. He was the King of Clay and one of the best, but let's not get carried away here.
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“Dad, was Nadal actually as good as they say?”
“Son, he defeated peak Federer at Wimbledon. Beat prime Djokovic in two USO finals. Olympic Gold in his first try. Won AO from 0-2 down at 36... he was the best.”
“Wow! But that's all on grass & HC. Was he not that good on clay?”
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@phl43 John Searle went down this path and no one listened to him. I expect the same response now. Intelligence is perhaps the wrong word to be using here. AI does not have our self-reflective, self-awareness, and most animals do not either and that makes a huge difference.
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Once again, regardless of whether you think that ChatGPT understands anything or not, I think this argument is confused. To say that it can't possibly understand anything because it was only trained to "predict the next word" is just as idiotic as saying that humans can't understand anything because they were "trained" to survive and spread their genes.
This line of argument seems to boil down to the idea that, unless something works roughly in the same way as the human brain, it can't really be intelligent, but just as the same software can run on very different types of hardware there is no reason to think that human-like intelligence couldn't be implemented in very different ways.
Big Brain AI@realBigBrainAI
Oxford AI professor Michael Wooldridge: "ChatGPT doesn't understand anything. It's essentially doing some fancy statistics."
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