A few miscellaneous questions/points (would love it if koreindian responds! Others obviously also welcome to share thoughts ;) )

Let me preface this by stating a couple obvious things that bear repeating when discussing such a touchy subject. People's value is not determined by their physical attractiveness. I wish for the flourishing of all people.

1. Have you read Halwani's piece "Racial Sexual Desires", or any of the other literature in applied ethics concerning this topic (e.g. Robin Zheng's paper, Stephen Kershnar's response)? Do you and Halwani just define racism differently, or do you have substantive disagreements?
2. Regarding the racial×gender disparities in interracial romantic pairing, what is wrong with the theory that it comes down to physical attractiveness? You ask "Asian men are under-masculine, Black men are over-masculine, but White men are *chef’s kiss* just right?" Whether white men are "just right" is in the eye of the beholder, but in aggregate, based on the data, they are preferred (in the countries where these studies are done), and I see no reason this preference could not be based on holistic physical attractiveness.
3. I would describe the "masculinity/femininity" axis as just one (albeit important) axis among many axes along which people might differ in attractiveness. Height, strength, blemishes, symmetry, and averageness, are a few others, but that list is still not exhaustive. Even if (as is true) the psychology literature doesn't provide a strong answer as to whether masculine faces are more attractive in men, that alone would not invalidate a physical-attractiveness-based account of racial×gender disparities.
4. You may find interesting Ting, Takahashi, and Wu's paper "Incipient speciation by sexual isolation in Drosophila". The authors find that "When given a choice, D. melanogaster females of the Z race (from Zimbabwe and southern Africa) mate only with males from the same race, whereas females from the cosmopolitan M race (M for melanogaster of the common type) mate with males of both races indiscriminately." This strikes me as similar to, albeit more extreme than, what we see between different human populations. I take this as a proof that culture, stereotypes, bigotry, racism, etc., are not necessary for asymmetric physical sexual preferences to arise among semi-isolated subpopulations of a species. (Or, we could bite the bullet and accept that the Z-race D. melanogaster females are also bigoted!) The authors even explain, at a genetic level, how this race×sex asymmetry arises. What I suspect is that a similar explanation, perhaps involving a few more loci, underlies human asymmetries.

Very nice piece, and thank you for your service

"cloudy brother of bacteria" should probably be "cloudy broth of bacteria".

Do you understand mathematically what operation we're doing when we say two species or organisms have xx% similar genomes? Each genome is, I guess, several sequences of ATCG, but how do you get a percent similarity for two sequences of different lengths?

The VARIANCE of a random variable seems like one of those ad hoc metrics. I would be very happy for someone to come along and explain why I'm wrong on this. If you want to measure, as Wikipedia says, "how far a set of numbers is spread out from their average value," why use E[ (X - mean)^2 ] instead of E[ |X - mean| ], or more generally E[ |X - mean|^p ]? The best answer I know of is that E[ (X - mean)^2 ] is easier to calculate than those other ones.

Dear CraigMichael,

I am by no means a guru. It seems like you prefer Apollo Creed problems to Clubber Lang problems because you're more able to motivate yourself to do Apollo Creed problems. I feel the same way. I find it exciting to start new projects, and grueling to continue my existing projects. My advice:

If you need to solve a Clubber Lang problem, then in moments of clarity, you should establish habits/systems to solve the Clubber Lang problem that don't require you to be motivated on any given day.

 E.g. go for a jog even when you're not feeling motivated to go for a jog, because you set out your jogging clothes and shoes the night before, & you made a program to pay your rival $5 on venmo if you don't log your jog on MapMyRun.com

Wishing you the best,

CTVKenney

Money should be able to guarantee that, over several periods of play, you perform not-too-much-worse than an actual expert. Here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15859-f11/www/notes/lecture16.pdf is a paper about an idealized CS-version of this problem. 

With regard to the rootclaim link, I agree that it would be good to try to adapt what they've done to our own beliefs. However, I want to urge some caution with regard to the actual calculation shown on that website. The event to which they give a whopping 81% probability, "the virus was developed during gain-of-function research and was released by accident," is a conjunction of two independent theses. We have to be very cautious about such statements, as pointed out in the Rationality A-Z, here https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5g5TkQTe9rmPS5vvM/p/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ

I mean to include all the alternatives that involve the virus passing through a laboratory before spreading to humans; so all the options you list are included. There's nothing wrong with asking about the probability of a composite event.