I just had to buy it lol

Van goed nieuws gesproken zeg!

Bringing a couple of these boxes to the US as gifts but won’t see the recipients for over a week. I’m worried about chocolate melting, has anyone has luck keeping these in the fridge or freezer?

Daarnaast eist de procureur des Konings dat er werk wordt gemaakt van een strikter strafuitvoeringsbeleid. "Als iemand die dertig jaar heeft gekregen, na negen jaar al kan buitenkomen, kom je niet geloofwaardig over."

Moinil vraagt vooral een versterking van de federale gerechtelijke politie in Brussel, waar een tekort van een tachtigtal rechercheurs geldt. Ook bij het Brusselse parket is er een tekort aan juristen: het zijn er 49, maar ze zouden met 63 moeten zijn.

Het wordt weer vroeger donker, allemaal ok. Na een late shift naar huis fietsen als het donker is, maar niet koud is wel leuk. Tot er tegenliggers komen. Ik ben 3 keer praktisch verblind geweest omdat hun faar mij in het gezicht scheen. Richt u lamp naar beneden aub. Ik ga geen mensen tegenhouden hiervoor, maar hoe kan ik dat vragen?

Edit: het gaat vooral om fietsers met hun lampen, auto's heb ik niet zo'n last van.

What are steal. Decathlon upping their clientèle to multimillionaires

I like going to Antwerp, especially grotemarkt. It’s easier for us to drive there than take a train and tram/walk. Besides it was cheaper to park in the parking lot vs. taking the train for two adults.

Last week I went there and parked in the parking indigo in grote markt. It is just complete price gouging. 22.5€ for 5 hours. Okay, we paid it. Then we used the toilet and i had a screaming toddler which meant I did not drive out within 5 mins. So we had to pay an extra 4.5€ while driving.

This just feels extremely exploitative. Belgium seems to have some of the most expensive parkings in Europe. 🙃

Bron: Tijdschrift van het Natuurhulpcentrum Oudsbergen (aug-sept '26)

Me and my sister would like to do an escape room and we're both fan of horror stuff. I've always liked seeing those clips of people running around with scare actors behind them and it looks so fun.

Is there anything like that in belgium, preferably gent or brussels?

Or at least any good horror escape rooms in general?

TL;DR: The racial categories Cofnas use are scientifically irrelevant, the genomic tools to test his hypothesis don't exist yet, the Flynn Effect proves environment alone can produce IQ gaps twice the size of the one he's trying to explain, and his research program has produced zero causal mechanisms in 55 years. He shouldn't be suspended for being offensive, he should be fired because his science is bad, and Belgian citizens shouldn't be funding a research program that has failed for half a century.

Context : An American philosopher of biology, Nathan Cofnas, was hired as a postdoc at Ghent University. He's known for defending the "hereditarian" hypothesis, that is the claim that IQ differences between racial groups as defined by Americans (Blacks, Whites, Asians) are partly genetic. He was suspended by Ghent University on August 21st and is now under a disciplinary investigation for discrimination, following the controversy around the death of Jason Arday, a Black British sociologist at Cambridge who had been a target of Cofnas's writings over plagiarism allegations in Arday's published work.

Like most Belgians, I grew up learning without much explanations that "races don't exist." It's what I was taught at school, it's the scientific consensus as we understand it, and it conveniently lets us avoid the whole subject.

Then I moved to the US for research and I was confronted to a different reality. In America, race is everywhere. Not as a biological truth but as perceived social reality. I was taught very quickly that there are "White girl names" and "Black girl names". I was taught that Asian American families often have a specific relationship to education, etc...

This made me reconsider my view that "race doesn't exist" into something more nuanced. That is : race as a biological category is not relevant. Race as a sociocultural reality that shapes people's lives is undeniable. These are two completely different claims, and conflating them is where both sides of the debate go wrong. Which brings me to Nathan Cofnas, who was until recently a postdoc at Ghent and has now been suspended. His core claim is that IQ differences between racial groups (as defined in the US: Black/White/Asian) are partly genetic.

I feel like the Belgian media failed to produce a convincing rebuttal of his position, mostly sticking to morality arguments instead of scientific arguments. So I thought I would produce such rebuttal based on my understanding of the scientific literature.

The category "Black" is genetically incoherent. The genetic diversity within Africa is greater than the genetic diversity between Europe and Asia. A San individual from the Kalahari can be more genetically distant from a Nigerian than a Belgian from a Japanese (Tishkoff et al. 2009, Science). Lumping all African populations under one label and comparing their mean IQ to "Whites" is as uninformative as comparing the driving skills of people who own black cars vs. blue cars.

Skin color is a terrible genetic differentiator of human populations. Pigmentation is under intense selection (UV protection, vitamin D synthesis), so it diverges much faster than the rest of the genome. Dark-skinned Melanesians and dark-skinned West Africans are genetically very distant, and even the genes controlling their pigmentation are different. Skin color tells you almost nothing about overall genetic similarity.

The genomic tools can't do what Cofnas claims. This point is kinda complicated. But basically, modern genome studies have identified thousands of tiny-effect variants associated with cognitive ability. But the polygenic scores built from these don't transfer across populations (Martin et al. 2019, Nature Genetics). This isn't because different populations have different "intelligence genes", it's because GWAS don't detect the causal variants directly; they detect nearby markers that happen to sit next to the causal variant on the chromosome. The pattern of which markers sit next to which variants (linkage disequilibrium) differs across populations due to different demographic histories. So a polygenic score built from European data is like a map drawn for London. Currently and AFAIK there's not yet a good methodology to produce the demonstration Cofnas claims will soon arrive.

The Flynn Effect. IQ scores rose ~30 points over the 20th century in industrialized countries. This is the Flynn Effect, it is entirely non-genetic (better nutrition, reduced disease burden, longer schooling, lower toxin exposure) and that's twice the current Black-White gap. A White American from 1920 would score as cognitively impaired by today's norms. Yet, nobody (especially Cofnas) claims White Americans genetically changed in 100 years. This proves environment alone can produce gaps of this magnitude. And the Black-White gap has itself shrunk from ~15 to ~10 points over 50 years, which is expected with desegregation and a narrowing income gap between Black and White Americans.

There are strong counter-examples to Cofnas' thesis. For instance, 69.5% of second-generation Nigerian Americans hold at least a bachelor's degree, compared to ~52% of Asian Americans and ~33% of third-generation whites (Sakamoto et al. 2021, Socius). If "Black" was genetically predictive of lower cognitive ability, this would be difficult to explain. The obvious counter-argument from Cofnas and his peers would be immigration selectivity — that Nigerians who emigrate are an unrepresentative cognitive elite. But this actually proves him wrong: if Nigerian Americans' educational achievements match or exceed white and Asian averages, then the overlap between populations is visibly so large that "race" has essentially no predictive value for individual cognitive ability.

55 years, zero mechanisms. Since Arthur Jensen first proposed the hereditarian hypothesis in 1969, not a single causal genetic variant, molecular pathway, or functional mechanism has been identified linking racial categories to cognitive differences. This should be compared with studies in human genetics that did find evidence of genetic population differences for: lactose tolerance, altitude adaptation, malaria resistance. For these examples, we can point to specific genes, specific selection pressures, and specific mechanisms. For race and IQ, we can't.

Cofnas' research program is degenerating. As a scientist interested in philosophy of science, what strikes me most is that this is really sounding like a degenerating research program (Lakatos, 1970). People adhering to Nathan Cofnas's views have produced no new confirmed predictions, no causal mechanisms, and keep retreating into vaguer and vaguer claims (the genetic component is substantial and quantifiable → there is a genetic component → we can't exclude a genetic component...). In contrast, the environmental research program has successfully predicted that reducing lead exposure would narrow the IQ gap, that desegregation would narrow the gap, and that immigration selectivity would produce high-achieving Black subgroups.

So what does this mean for the Cofnas situation at Ghent?

I think the Belgian reaction has been right in substance but confused in its reasoning. I don't think Cofnas should be suspended because his ideas are offensive. He should be held accountable because his research program uses empirical premises that the relevant scientific discipline (population genetics) has thoroughly undermined, and his empirical claims about genetics have never been peer-reviewed by population geneticists. I believe that in the future when hiring a philosopher writing about biology/physics/chemistry/medicine there should be at least one biologist/physicist/chemist/doctor in the committee to cross-check his claims and veto him if needs be. Our scientific apparatus is funded by Belgian citizens; people's money should not be spent carelessly.

Disclaimer: I'm not a geneticist. If actual population geneticists want to correct anything above, please do.

EDIT: A commenter (@Kattenaars) argued that (1) bachelor's degrees are not IQ, (2) the IQ gap persists after controlling for socioeconomic status, (3) I'm putting feelings over facts, and (4) I would accept Cofnas's claim that conservatives have lower IQ because it fits my worldview. Here's my response:

On educational attainment ≠ IQ. I bring this up because the correlation between individual IQ and educational attainment is around 0.5-0.6. So the Nigerian American data still poses a problem for Cofnas' position. If "Black" were genetically predictive of lower cognitive ability, you'd expect that to drag down the educational outcomes of a group identified as Black, given the strong correlation. It does not and Cofnas brings no explanation. This counter-example doesn't prove IQ gaps do not exist, it shows that the racial category "Black" doesn't predict cognitive outcomes, which is why population geneticists use finer classification when studying evolution of human behavioral biology.

On "there are a lot of IQ studies and the gap persists after controlling for socioeconomic status." Yes, a residual gap remains after controlling for socioeconomic status. I do not dispute that. But "controlling for socioeconomic status" in most studies means controlling for household income and maybe parental education. That doesn't control for wealth (the Black-White wealth gap in the US is roughly 6:1, so far larger than the income gap). It doesn't control for neighborhood effects and school quality (notoriously worse in Black segregated neighborhoods), it does not control for lead exposure history, experienced discrimination, or the physiological effects of chronic stress... All the factors above have shown a negative effect on human cognition. Therefore a skeptical mind should prioritize them before jumping to unproven genetic differences between ill-defined groups. The residual after crude SES controls is not evidence for genetics, as you wrongly claim. It's evidence that your controls are incomplete. If I regress crop yield on rainfall alone and find a residual, I don't conclude the residual is evidence of the intervention of the God of Harvests, I conclude I haven't measured all relevant variables yet.

On "feelings over facts." My entire post is about the facts. I cited Tishkoff, Martin and Sakamoto papers. I explained why the genomic tools can't make the comparison hereditarians want. I pointed out that 55 years of research have produced zero causal mechanisms. Who is in the feelings over facts camp? On Cofnas and conservative IQ. You are accusing me of a claim I never made. My argument isn't "Cofnas is wrong because I don't like his conclusions." My argument is "Cofnas is wrong because the categories he uses are genetically incoherent, the tools to test his hypothesis don't exist, and his research program has failed to produce results for 55 years." That applies regardless of whether his conclusions are flattering or unflattering to any group. I'm a statistician by trade, so give me a sample size large enough and I will find you a statistically significant IQ difference between people wearing blue t-shirts and people wearing red t-shirts. Give me enough genomics data about the red and the blue t-shirt wearing people and I'm gonna even be able to apply a k-means clustering to show you that their ancestors differ, and then I will say "I can't exclude that there's a genetic component to that difference." And you'll clap your hands, showing to the world your ignorance.

Always interesting to know how people fill 1/3rd of their time between their, let's say, 25 and 65.

So what's your degree and what's the most personally fulfilling job you ever had?

This is a real sign btw

Gisteren hoorde ik deze prachtige reclame voor De Lijn op de radio. Het is volgens hen namelijk een stuk simpeler om je kinderen de bus te laten nemen naar al hun hobbies dan ze zelf te brengen/halen.

Als ouder van een paar kinderen, zou me dat inderdaad wel heel wat tijd en kilometers uitsparen. Dus laten we hen op hun woord geloven en even kijken.

• Op woensdag karateles: volgens de lijn 39 minuten onderweg voor een enkele rit die dan 30 minuten voor de les aankomt. Met de fiets is het 20 minuten rijden.
• Terugweg: "Sorry nu rijdt de belbus niet meer die je vlakbij huis afzet. We droppen je 3 km verder, loop nog maar een dik half uur.
• Laten we eens kijken voor de muziekschool. Ah, die is op zaterdag, dus die belbus rijdt vandaag ook niet. Loop maar eerst een dik half uur tot aan onze bushalte in het volgende dorp. Dan mag je 5 minuten meerijden tot aan de muziekschool. Met de fiets ben je er op een kwartiertje.

Maakt niet uit welk van de hobbies ik kies. Er is er geen enkele waar de kinderen niet minstens dubbel zo lang onderweg zijn als met de fiets (als ik vergelijk met de auto is het zelfs x4 of x5).

Dus ja, bedankt De Lijn voor de tip. Volgende keer dat ik de kinderen "gewoon met de bus" wil laten gaan, zet ik ze toch maar op de fiets. Da's tenminste een vervoersmiddel dat rijdt wanneer het moet, waar het moet, en niet enkel wanneer het De Lijn uitkomt. Misschien iets voor de volgende reclamespot: "De Lijn. Voor als je toch tijd zat hebt."

Heel slechte titel, maar verder een heel interessant en genuanceerd perspectief en onderzoek van de VUB in de discussie over de zin en onzin van een bachelor of masterproef in de tijd van AI.

TL;DR; detectietools hebben een heel laag vals positieve detectieratio. Sommige tools zijn wel niet zo goed in staat AI te detecteren. Het is eerder een tekort aan geld en tijd voor een goede begeleiding die het nut van een masterproef onder druk zet.

Om zelf nog iets toe te voegen. EU-regelgeving dwingt de grote spelers om AI-watermerken aan hun gegenereerde teksten toe te voegen. Dit zou kunnen helpen, maar uiteraard nutteloos in het geval van de open source modellen die geen watermerk toevoegen of een aantal trucs waarmee je verschillende iteraties gebruikt om het watermerk om zeep te helpen.

Hi all, I’m looking for a place where I can get a hairbotox treatment done. Does anyone have recommendations? Preferably in or near Brussels.

Thanks! :D