There are many other countries where I have experienced more societal meddling with neighbors' business. Ignoring the obvious authoritarian countries, many western european countries have a culture of making sure you are doing the normal or right thing. Germany is the easiest example.
Well that is exactly what Formula 1 is. Unlike NASCAR or Indycar where everything is prescribed, there is a formula which sets the outlines of the box and teams are free to play within that box. The box has just gotten really small in the past couple of decades.
F1 has had very few years where one team didn't totally dominate. Some of those years were the best ever and showcased the drama, technology, power and talent which makes this such a great sport (88-89 is one example).
I loved the movie when it was released, and felt it was true in spirit to the book. Sure, some of the details were missed or altered, but that was to be expected in a movie adaptation of a book with so many details. Herbert was on the set and at least had some input. Baron Harkkonen has to be one of the most memorable movie characters ever.
His son Brian and Kevin J Anderson did write the last installment based on detailed notes from Frank Herbert, so at least the story is complete.
While their writing is not as brilliant as Frank Herbert's, the books they wrote, mainly the prequels, have helped me understand just how big the original vision was and have helped me enjoy the sequels more. God Emperor is truly as masterpiece, but it took a couple of reads, and the sequels, for me to appreciate it more.
Correction: Brian and KJA had access to detailed notes from Frank Herbert, and used none of them in favor of KJA's "improvements" to the Dune mythos.
The same way KJA "improved" Star Wars.
His wife, incidentally the editor-in-chief of the publishing imprint that then owned the publishing rights to the Star Wars and Dune literary universes, is to blame for unleashing his word vomit on mankind.
There seems almost zero chance that the notes will be released. Brian has been increasingly adament about it, largely because a lot of people are vocal about suspecting they don't exist.
(I personally do believe that some notes were left, but I suspect they were not complete, and were utterly ignored by Brian & Kevin. Because they is no explanation which makes more sense. There's no way he would have tied up with series by referencing characters never-before introduced from before the previous books.)
I dunno, when you re-read Heretics and Chapter House after knowing how it ends, you can see some set-ups for the ultimate big-bad. And Sonia's vision in God emperor does also link up.
So, maybe? I lean towards thinking there were notes myself, as I can't see anyone making up that ending de-novo.
I can kinda see the argument, but the fact that the Butlerian Jihad was so rarely referenced in any detail makes me skeptical that the long-overthrown machines could arrive spontaneously and be the big-bad.
It seemed to me that the two figures in Duncans visions were going to become important, but they'd be rogue/evolved/advanced face-dancers rather than representatives of the machine intelligence.
I guess we'll never know for sure unless the notes are published.
Seriously, Sonia's vision in God-Emperor is of humans being hunted down by machines - this is what the Golden Path was to avoid. So, I'm inclined to err on the side of the notes existing and mentioning machines.
Siona's visions were about the danger of presience and the need for mankind to become free from those who would use fate/predestination as a means to control mankind. Avoiding the predestination paradox was literally the reason Leto created her.
Given the lengths that Frank Herbert went to avoid having computers in Dune, it would not make sense for his big bad to be a computer revealed in the last few pages of the series, especially when his big bad was always intended to be Destiny.
The Meaning Crisis is John Vervaeke’s term for the Western breakdown in religion, community, family, and ultimately a “meaningful life”, which he traces back to various uniquely Western historical factors. It’s not just an analysis, however, as he makes a heroic attempt to reassemble what was lost with religion, without religion.
Really profound lecture series. Opens your eyes to what we’ve actually lost in the modern world.
Are you saying he presents a new theory somewhere around item 27 or 28 in the playlist? Because prior to that it looks like a survey of Western philosophy, just judging by the titles of the videos.
That's a slippery slope. Who gets to decide who lives and who dies? Who should we abort or sterilize? We all suffer to some degree, then we all die. It's the human condition.
Doctors do all the time, they even have their own word for it: triage. When resources are insufficient to cover the needs of everybody, difficult decisions need to be made. Or as the case may be, easy decisions...
Is a decission reserved to parents, in this case. Triage is a term that aim to save the maximum number of people in disasters with many victims. Not to decide if somebody dies or lives.
People is classified in colors black, red, etc after its state. If you are in an accident and you cry and shout repeatedly you are classified in a lower priority than the quiet person that do not moves.
Between population growth not slowing anywhere near fast enough and rapid environment loss due to climate change, there is a good chance we'll see the mother of all triages. Not something to look forward to.
I thought this discussion was about prioritizing care to children that have a chance at a normal life (e.g. are not "a blind, deaf and mentally retarded baby with a chronic heart condition"), not killing the poor. My bad.
Yes, but it's an unavoidable slippery slope forced on us by nature, that we can affect with technology and that won't be going away until we can eliminate death and suffering. It's not a new slippery slope, doctors/parents/bureaucrats have to make decisions like this every day already and have for most of human history.
It's where we draw the lines on this slippery slope that constantly evolve.
Ultimately the parents should get to decide, but we should make all means necessary available to them to give them the option so select, or engineer, a healthy embryo.
It's great when women win these races, and I wish there were more, but don't get the misperception they are somehow faster in this sport compared to men than in other sports. It all depends who shows up on the start line. Elite women are faster than nearly all the men, so if an elite woman shows up, but no elite men do, she will likely win.
List of ultrarunning records: https://ultrarunning.com/featured/ultrarunning-magazine-all-...
Normally awards are for "First Place Male" and First Place Female." Not sure why this race had an award for "overall."
To be fair, the differences here seem to be smaller than in other sports, suggesting that while testosterone is a factor it may be less than it is in other sports. If 90% of the competitors in these races are male, that would further impact this discrepancy.
Why would that matter? They're not running as a group; if you're the fastest then you win. This isn't a probabilistic thing. Lots of slow men crowding the starting line isn't going to impact who finishes first.
I'm not sure I even understand your argument. It's possible we're saying different things? What I'm saying is that if X people try a sport the records they set won't be nearly as good as if 100X people are trying it. Winners are by definition outliers, and the larger your population, the more (and more extreme) outliers you will see. So if there are five times fewer women than men () competing in a sport, that will impact comparisons between women and men, even at the top levels, at least if you want to compare innate ability. Almost certainly, the women's records and top female performances would look better if there were five times as many women trying the sport as there currently are. Do you disagree with that?
I pulled up the most recent Ironman race; there were 5 men for every woman in the competition. So I'm using that as a rule of the thumb. But the same logic applies to any population imbalance at the top of the funnel.
That's quite the leap of logic hiding in that deceptively small "all else equal", what leads you to believe that everyone in a race has an equal chance of winning it?
>what leads you to believe that everyone in a race has an equal chance of winning it?
I made no such assumption.
If you pull runner speeds from any distribution, and label 90% of those numbers "male" and 10% "female", 90% of the time the highest speed will be labelled "male".
Even if you are pulling the female runner speeds from a slightly faster distribution, if most of the people running are men then men will still win most of the time.
Failing to normalize by the population sizes at the start of the race is a blatant mathematical error. Until you fix it your argument is flawed and if you don't fix it you're willfully wrong.
You literally wrote "all else equal" in your comment.
> pull runner speeds from any distribution
Not true. If I pick a distribution of elite women and non-athlete men, all of the top finishers will be women. You're assuming speeds are normally distributed; they are not.
Where is this data that you're citing here? It doesn't line up with any data I've seen, nor with my extensive experience in amateur racing. Most races are won by the same small group of elite runners. The size of the field is immaterial as the majority of racers have no chance of winning.
Normalizing for population size might make sense if you actually had to beat everyone independently. Fortunately, you're only racing the person in first so everyone else can be safely ignored.
Put another way, if Michael Phelps is racing he's going to win. You can only win by beating him, the rest of the field doesn't matter.
>>You literally wrote "all else equal" in your comment.
That's different from the assumption that all competitors are equally likely to win.
>You're assuming speeds are normally distributed
No. Any distribution will work.
>Where is this data that you're citing here?
I didn't say anything about data. I said your argument has a blatant mathematical flaw. You said "why would it matter" in response to "if 90% of the competitors [are men]". It absolutely matters. Even if you do turn out to be correct about women being worse at this sport, you are only right in the broken clock sense.
>Put another way, if Michael Phelps is racing he's going to win. You can only win by beating him, the rest of the field doesn't matter.
The people who show up to the race are coming out of some distribution. Michael Phelps isn't showing up to every race. The probability that you win the race comes down to how fast you are vs. the max of n samples from the distribution of runners.
The list of the winner of some annual marathon is a really shitty piece of evidence. Out of all the racers and times taken, it gives us data on exactly one of them. It is especially useless to try and breakdown running ability by demographic because it doesn't even tell us how much data we have on each demographic of interest.
If you don't see why just citing the list of marathon winners fails to reject the hypothesis that women and men are about equal at ultra-marathons, then you don't understand what makes for a good data-supported argument.
This is what happens when you don't look at the data and argue from your gut. We don't just learn about one person, timed races release bib data for everyone in that race.
If you're a data nerd and a runner armed with this knowledge, it will have occurred to you to wonder if distance (in time) from the winner is correlated with gender and field size. It is not. Thus, you're proposing that we "normalize" for something which is shown to not have an effect on who wins a race.
~~All the distances in those tables are significantly longer than the 50k this article was about.~~
Edit: Ah, I missed it due to the weird order - but my original point stands, there is no point in ignoring part of someone's comment when trying to rebut them.
Interestingly, the 100m record difference is about 10%, which is roughly the same as the gap in the ultramarathon records (and in the record mile time). So the difference is fairly consistent across distances.
I don't think it's quite that close -- there may be sample size/participation factors involved here. For example, the top US women seems to be competitive with the top ~10 US men, which in more testosterone-dominant sports would never happen.
Because it does highlight what women are capable of and it is certainly something to celebrate. Also, when it does happen it creates an interesting story which brings more attention to the sport (like this one did).
That women are winning these races, is a credit to this sport. Sports have no intrinsic value that isn't somehow tied to the good they do for humanity. We should judge them by their fruits. Even so, the vast majority of sports are constructed so that, on average, men have big advantages. It could be that it's easier to construct a sport that way. It could also be that constructing a sport that way better appeals to the prejudices of society. After all, there are some sports in which women compete at the highest level. For example, horse racing, open-water swimming, and as we see here "ultra" running. It's not necessary for women to win all or even most of the top prizes, but it's great that they win sometimes. Personally, although I enjoy watching gendered sports like ice hockey and American football I definitely see them as inferior to sports that exhibit more gender equality.
Sure, running in general is basic to humans. The particular circumstances of particular races, like "so many laps over this particular course through the mountains" are very much a decision that some people made. Such decisions affect the results of those races.
It is illogical to believe that races were "constructed" by somehow varying the number of laps or terrain to make sure men win. It is far more likely that races were "constructed" to mimic the types of terrain people already ran.
No, it´s better for everybody - the human race wins.
Let´s say you had a bunch of computers, and somebody had told you a certain type always ran slowly, so you never used them for anything fast, and even put them on slower connections, because of that. And then one day, you discovered if you connected them up to faster links, they ran faster.
You now have a larger number of faster computers. As with computers, so with society, it´s not a zero sum game.
Looking at those dates in the 24 hour and 100 mile.
Most of the women records are in the last 5 years, and some of the men’s records are from much longer ago.
All the records actually show men still have the physical advantage at these distances that they do at shorter distances. It would be cool if somehow women were faster in comparison the longer the distance, but the records don't show that to be the case.
This is pedantic, even for HN! Who said anything about being "initially" faster? To win a race, you need to maintain the fastest average speed out of all competitors, plain and simple.
Not really, my point was that the typical male, while able to run faster outright, typically will slow down. Professionals of course will know their limits and run at a pace they can keep. The typical woman tends to run slower, but more able to keep a consistent speed and thus could come out in front.
But this is for the average case and not the professional case, where men tend to dominate anyway.
