(biologist - artist - queer)

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You’re the only magician that could make a falling horse turn into thirteen gerbils

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Joined 1 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月10日

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  • It must be different in different places. I went from a renter in one area, to an owner in the same area, to a renter again in a different area in the period of 5ish years (long story).

    Rent in the first area was about the same cost for a two bedroom, two bath, 1000 sq ft apartment as the entire mortgage on a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1200 sq ft house, including principle, interest, and taxes. The only reason people would rent there is because they don’t have the money for a down payment.

    When we left that area, we could have become landlords and rented the house out. We could have easily gotten twice the entire mortgage in rental income, but we felt that being a landlord was unethical (especially since we were relatively wealthy for that area, although we made less than the US median family income). We sold the house and broke even.

    Now, we live in a much higher COL area. It’s true here that renting is much cheaper than buying, but that’s because you can’t get a SFH for less than about $1.5 million here. My rent on my 1 bed, 1 bath, 700 sq ft apartment is more than twice my mortgage in my previous area. Our incomes have increased, now we make slightly above the median family income. But our leftover at the end of the month honestly went down a ton. If we weren’t here to get an education, we’d be gone by now.

    Just saying… As someone who has both rented and owned, I definitely feel more like I’m shoveling money into a fire as a renter. Owning was the best financial situation I’d ever been in.





  • I will do my best! :)

    There are a couple different concepts at-play here, and finding a single resource that summarizes everything I mentioned would be quite difficult. Moreover, given the information dissemination problem I mentioned, you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-academic description of this stuff (I.e. written for a non-biological or social researcher audience)…

    But, I don’t think that should prevent anyone interested in trying to learn more!

    Here’s some papers that discuss some of the issues at play here:

    Is the cell really a machine?, discusses some of the issues with relying too much on genetics/molecule scale biology knowledge for determining the emergent nature of traits/phenotypes (with specific respect to the machine model of the cell… This paper is heavy on molecular biology)

    Conceptualizations of Race: Essentialism and Constructivism, a sociological overview informed by clinical and biological research discussing constructivist vs essentialist conceptions of race (heavy on sociology)

    Addressing Racism in Human Genetics and Genomics Education , reviews several papers specifically addressing the information dissemination problem I mentioned, going back to the “source”, which is education. This paper focuses on studies in undergraduate biology education but others are looking at education in at the k-12 level, also.

    If you wanted to do a database search yourself, some keywords I’d use would be: race essentialism, genetic essentialism, (really just “essentialism” would get you somewhere), race in biology education, race in medicine


  • I’m copying my comment from elsewhere as a jumping off point:

    Hi hello I am an expert in this

    We do have these studies. We have tons of them. At the research level, the essentialist bias of healthcare is well-documented.

    Basically, not only do we know that there are very, very few (really, none, when you come right down to it) areas where we can accurately predict a person’s underlying physiology based on their apparent race-- we also know that it is underlying bias (and not biological evidence) that makes some healthcare workers and researchers think otherwise.

    In fact, these essentialist biases are documented along other dimensions of identity than race, also. These biases are found whenever healthcare workers treat individuals with different sexes, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, and body sizes, too (not an exhaustive list).

    You probably aren’t doing it intentionally, but this idea that “we just need more studies” is a common refrain of resistance to change from people who have a vested interest in the biased status quo-- calling for further study is seen as uncontroversial, even if there’s a mountain of evidence already (see: climate denial).

    Moreover, it actually misses the point of how epistemologies of biology are constructed. In reality, there are many things we know on the research level that are not efficiently disseminated to the relevant expert populations. The truth is that we don’t really need more studies-- we need to figure out how to get the current best information into the hands of doctors, nurses, and clinical researchers.

    To address your comment about red heads, I’d like to point out that it isn’t the red-headed-ness of a person that creates the effect you’re describing, it is the presence of specific alleles for the creation of pigments that both provide tint to our hair and skin and are also involved in pain/drug metabolic pathways.

    Sure, that means that red-heads almost always have the effect you describe, but people with semi-functional or single recessive copies of alleles of the same genes may not have red hair but might have the same pain-pathway dysfunction. These mutations can pop up in individuals of any ethnic background, meaning that it is impossible to rule out the presence of the pain dysfunction based on race, skin, or hair color.

    Moreover, in red-heads, individuals may possess mutations in other gene pathways (or epigenetic variation in gene expression regulation) that partially or fully eleviate the effect of the pigment allele mutation. In simple terms, all red heads might have the pain mutation associated with red hair, but some of those individuals might have a separate mutation (that doesn’t change their appearance) that decreases their pain or anesthesia threshold, making the net effect zero. This again means that we can’t be certain of someone’s underlying physiology based on their appearance or race.

    source: senior graduate student in epigenetics, gene expression, and with a specific research foci in essentialist beliefs among experts in the biological sciences


  • Hi hello I am an expert in this

    We do have these studies. We have tons of them. At the research level, the essentialist bias of healthcare is well-documented.

    Basically, not only do we know that there are very, very few (really, none, when you come right down to it) areas where we can accurately predict a person’s underlying physiology based on their apparent race-- we also know that it is underlying bias (and not biological evidence) that makes some healthcare workers and researchers think otherwise.

    In fact, these essentialist biases are documented along other dimensions of identity than race, also. These biases are found whenever healthcare workers treat individuals with different sexes, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, and body sizes, too (not an exhaustive list).

    You probably aren’t doing it intentionally, but this idea that “we just need more studies” is a common refrain of resistance to change from people who have a vested interest in the biased status quo-- calling for further study is seen as uncontroversial, even if there’s a mountain of evidence already (see: climate denial).

    Moreover, it actually misses the point of how epistemologies of biology are constructed. In reality, there are many things we know on the research level that are not efficiently disseminated to the relevant expert populations. The truth is that we don’t really need more studies-- we need to figure out how to get the current best information into the hands of doctors, nurses, and clinical researchers.


  • Just because it isn’t as bad a joke would imply doesn’t mean it still isn’t really quite bad

    Base 12 vs base 10 is pretty much the only objective advantage of USC, and it only uniquely occurs in USC for small construction-scale tasks (i.e. the inch-to-foot scale).

    I don’t think people critiquing USC are unaware of what this video is saying. We just think it’s still worse.

    source: 8th gen American who would rather switch to SI


  • Your starting premise relies on the idea that the costs associated with making drugs are justified. In essence, this implies that the insane rewards are justified because risks associated with not producing a drug are so high.

    Most of our science is funded via taxes and controlled by the government, given to researchers through grants that are awarded based on merit as determined by their peers. We’ve developed an adjacent system where drug discovery is funded by capital and investments from non-scientists based on the idea that “striking gold” in the medical world could make them rich.

    Why not just remove the cost-barrier to entry? Require all drug discovery to be funded through grants like other research? Pay people working on drugs whether they discovered a new drug or not, as long as they provided proof of their efforts? Researchers would not need to please those with money (banks, investors) to give them funds for a drug, and so would be free to work on drugs that have a low likelihood of being profitable (such as for forgotten illnesses, or using cheap and widely available medicines in novel ways). And when an amazing drug was discovered, our society would be free to use it efficiently and at-cost, since there wouldn’t be stakeholders hungry for their massive payout.

    The grant system is a mess, also. And in an ideal world those whose ideas and research led to amazing discoveries would be rewarded extensically somehow, both with appreciation and a reasonable amount of money (the staff of an entire research organization could be set financially for life for a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of money we shovel over to pharmaceutical company stakeholders). And all of this is also tied up in the clinical medical industrial complex, with all its own neuroses.

    So there are barriers to implementing something like this… But holy shit do I hear this idea a lot, that high risk justifies the insane rewards. I think it’s bogus!







  • "if you can’t afford to leave, or you or your family have medical needs and can’t relocate, or if all your friends and family and social spheres are here, or if your job is context dependent, or if you’re undocumented, or if your spouse or family disagrees with your desire to move, or if you’re enrolled in in-state college, or if you’re elderly and have lived here your whole life, or if you have a farm, or if your ancestral home is nearby, or if you’re homeless, or if you have a strong sense of duty to your community, or if you’re a military service member, or if you’re a kid…

    …that’s on you!"

    edit: also, many marginalized people know and will tell you-- there isn’t a place on this earth for people like us with 100% safety from violence


  • I know you’re at least partially talking about labels in general, but since this is in reply to a poll about queer identities, I am taking your comment to be related to LGBTQ+ labels.

    I don’t think most individuals with an LGBTQ+ identity think of themselves as only that identity. Race, class, religion, ability, and other dimensions of identity ultimately combine to create the whole person. In fact, most discourse surrounding identities involves some analysis of intersectionality, as coined by Kimberle Crenshaw. In essence, she illustrated how being both black and a woman brings different experiences and struggles than being a white woman or black man. As an extension, the queer identity a person has and the other identities a person has interact to inform their experiences in ways that are different than having any one of those identities alone.

    If some people externally equate a queer person’s whole self and their queer identity, that isn’t the fault of the queer person. In fact, this is another reason why having a label (as inadequate as it might objectively be) can be useful. Queer people need those labels so they can maneuver in society to build coalition and obtain equal rights. If we squabbled over the differences between subjective experiences of queerness, our groups would be smaller and have less bargaining power.

    I might be way off about what you meant in your statement, but i figured it was worth throwing this out here anyway!