Interesting Links for 11-05-2022

[andrewducker]

1. In the dating market, people compete ferociously for mates with qualities that do not increase one's chances of romantic happiness.

(tags:relationships happiness psychology dating )

2. What issues do competitors to Dark Matter need to overcome?

(tags:physics space )

3. How Neal Adams demanded a black Green Lantern

(tags:comics race history dc )

4. Covid study shows death risk doubles for diabetes patients with uncontrolled blood sugar levels

(tags:diabetes Pandemic death )

5. Cow House!

(tags:cows housing UK )

6. Inside the battle on the Eastern Front

(tags:Ukraine Russia war )

7. Psychopaths are more likely to have larger striatum region in the brain

(tags:psychology brains psychopath )

8. How to fix social media

(tags:socialmedia socialnetworking regulation )

9. What is the point of a protest?

(tags:protests violence )

Comments

What issues do competitors to Dark Matter need to overcome?

[jack]

It's so useful (and uncommon) for the clear "this is the evidence that fits X and not Y" to be listed out. I don't understand most of it, but I can see why it makes sense to physicists (and my impression is that people are invested in dark matter because they think it has to be true, not because they've invested lots of effort in it and would be upset if it turned out it was all explained by no physical existence but some numerical adjustment).

Re: What issues do competitors to Dark Matter need to overcome?

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it's great to know what the barriers you need to hit are in order to prove your rightness.

[simont]

"Black Green Lantern" is a nice phrase – sounds paradoxical if taken literally, but turns out to make perfect sense.

Reminds me of the first time I encountered a "red route" road in London as a child, and without thinking, exclaimed "Oh look, red double yellow lines!"

[andrewducker]

Hah!

And yeah, I think similarly. Once something is ingrained, it's tricky to move it.

[simont]

My other even sillier example of a contradictory-colours noun phrase is that I once encountered a gluten-free analogue of pink wafer biscuits. Unlike the original, they were yellow. (Perhaps so it's easy for a coeliac to make sure they're eating the right one? Or perhaps just to avoid trademark law or some such, who knows.)

I decided at the time that "yellow pink wafer biscuits" was a much better name for them than just "yellow wafer biscuits", because the former communicates much more clearly to someone hearing it for the first time "like pink wafer biscuits which you already know about, but yellow".

[andrewducker]

Makes perfect sense to me. If you said "Yellow wafers" people would be confused as to what kind of thing you meant. "Pink Wafers" isn't just a pointer to "Wafers" with the colour property set to "Pink", it's a specific thing all itself.

[simont]

Exactly. And I think you could make the same argument about "red double yellow lines" – if someone didn't already know the context, it would do better than "double red lines" at hinting that they might be painted down the sides of a road.

(But when I said "red double yellow lines!" as a kid, I didn't do it deliberately for that reason. It just came out of my mouth before I even thought.)

[andrewducker]

I just checked to see if there was a more official name for them, but it doesn't seem that there is!

[redbird]

That one-sentence summary of the first article could also be "nobody can predict who you'll be happy in a relationship with, so you might as well keep choosing the way you already are." Alternatively, it suggests that people who are having trouble finding partners should try loosening one or more of their criteria, and it doesn't matter which one. This is a problem with real-world studies: can you get people to (for example) swipe right on every seventh person, regardless of height, occupation, or religion, or go on dates only with people whose initials are different from their own? (That last, maybe, because it's not something people think they care about.)

There's no practical way to compare the happiness of (say) women who preferred tall men and married one, to women who preferred tall partners but married a short man, or one of average height; it seems plausible that there are women who would be happier with tall partners than with short ones, many of whom aren't even considering short men, so the comparison is among all women with partners of different heights, but not between women who cared about a possible partner's height who are now with partners of different heights.

[andrewducker]

"There's no practical way to compare the happiness of (say) women who preferred tall men and married one, to women who preferred tall partners but married a short man, or one of average height"

Surely there is? And that's what they pulled together the research from, with a sample size of thousands?

[redbird]

It sounded like they were comparing "people say they prefer X and Y" and "observationally, they also prefer p and q" with "do any of traits X, Y, Z, p, q, r, s, or t predict relationship success?" The "observationally" covers both the people who want someone of their own race but won't tell a researcher that, and the "did you know you're more likely to swipe right on people who share your initials?"

[skington]

Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as Cow house!

[andrewducker]

Hah!

[simont]

A minor ambition of mine for the last few years is to one day hear my sister talking about going to the local Parkrun and not immediately get that earworm.

[calimac]

#1: I agree with the inanity of choosing dates based on height, hair or eye color, etc., and hope that it's only used as a form of triage to choose among otherwise equal-valued possibilities.
But I disagreed when it said that people who reported themselves happy before they had a partner are likely to be happier with a partner. That depends on why you were happy/unhappy. Chronic depressives probably aren't going to be less so when they get partnered. But if you're depressed because you're not partnered, you're liable to become deliriously happy on becoming partnered, and stay so. I know, it happened to me.

#9: Depends on the kind of protest. The writer has a very limited perception of what protests are for. The women's marches in response to the Trump inauguration were not threatening to burn down his house.

[anna_wing]

What a nice, clear explanation for a layperson of the whole Dark Matter Thing! Thank you!

Surely the purpose for which one dates would also be highly relevant. Not everyone is actually looking for a permanent partner, after all. In which case there would surely be nothing wrong with preferring shiny.

[haggis]

I love that the new research on relationships is exactly as useless as every other bit of relationship research. At least it makes a stab at looking at meaningful outcomes. (Other studies that I have seen drew deep conclusions from showing pictures to US freshers and asking them how attractive they found them and then treated that as a universal truth. Amazingly, it turns out that the freshers' opinion stuck fairly close to mainstream media's standards of attractiveness - who would have thought it?)

However, did it occur to the researchers that people might be seeking qualities that cannot easily be turned into data points? Nah, must be insufficient machine learning.

[jducoeur]

3: That's delightful to hear, and not at all surprising -- that run of Green Lantern still stands as a high point for its era, in many ways. And John Stewart has, pretty much from the beginning, been IMO the most interesting of all the GLs.

8: Yeah, sounds about right. The other possibility, of course, is to craft something so distributed that the lawyers are left playing an impossible game of whack-a-mole trying to shut it down, but it would be too dangerous to be the person leading such an effort, and probably too challenging to make available to the mass market.

[andrewducker]

Mastodon is pretty much that.

[jducoeur]

True, although I'm not aware of anybody building the sort of FB-to-Mastodon gateway/archiver that the article is proposing -- has that been done?

(Good reminder that I need to my ass in gear and get set up on Mastodon -- I've been looking at it for years.)

[andrewducker]

I'm fairly sure that anyone writing an FB->Mastodon gateway would fall foul of their terms of use and be shut down really quickly.