Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Do you think you're better than him?
Nope.
The point in your favor for suggesting moderation is balanced by your politely-phrased smug tone.
As someone who supports some of the causes he decries to varying degrees, how do you think I'm supposed to participate in this conversation exactly? I could respond in kind and we could fling feces at each other while you tut tut and enjoy the show. Or more realistically I'm buried in feces by the largely right-leaning commentariat.
I could craft a thoughtful response to some of his individual points, but what kind of conversation do you think he and I will have?
I could be the apologetic, liberal whipping boy who takes his lumps for That Bad Thing The People I Don't Like Did This Week.
I've done enough of all three. At a certain point a spade is a spade, and a bad post is a bad post. I can link you to massive exchanges I've had extending weeks and tens of thousands of words with FcfromSSC, gattsuru, professorgerm (now desolation, I believe?) and others so clearly I'm capable of having a decent conversation with people who hold very different beliefs. The process certainly changed my worldview.
That hasn't happened in...upwards of a year, I don't think? I'm sure you could make the argument that I changed rather than the space, but then I'd challenge you to show me any interesting and civil back-and-forth between a real liberal and conservative here that's happened recently. At a certain point, what exactly am I supposed to do with OP?
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening? You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.
What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane? Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?
Consider that in writing mindkilled screeds about how terrible everything is, you're probably part of the problem. Maybe engage in a bit of self-reflection. Consider compromise. Read the aspirational text at the top of the culture war thread. Do something that makes you happy. Touch grass?
More realistically, Trump gets elected, Republicans suddenly stop caring about deficit spending and cut taxes and voila - all of your problems are magically solved. Instead of crying about how bad everything is you'll be crowing about the liberal snowflakes losing their minds over Orange Man Bad and TDS.
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good?
I used to. When the people like you were diluted by those who were well-meaning, who wanted to have actual conversations and maybe learn a thing or two from someone with a different perspective.
How about this? If you can manage to write a measured and polite post about any of the topics above, I'll respond in kind. If the though of trying to do that is so abhorrent, then maybe this isn't the place for you.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I'm not certain how popular it is, but I've seen it come up in a few contexts in the circles I travel in. People around here will cite obscure Larry Niven books fairly frequently ('On the gripping hand'...thankfully the much more crass 'Rape my lizard!' from the same novel never caught on), so I thought there were decent odds that Beggars in Spain was also well known. Particularly given the themes of transhumanism.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
The main argument against repealing the Civil Rights Act is that if people have the option to discriminate against racial minorities in jobs, housing, and school admissions, they will do so.
What is the main argument in favor of repealing the Civil Rights Act?
In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.
I can guarantee you the general population has absolutely zero interest in this fact. Maybe it would help you win some arguments on the internet. That's likely why this isn't a priority for Libertarian think tanks, and if it is, is probably symptomatic of their general ineffectiveness.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Huh, are you one of those rootless millenial types?
Not entirely sure what you mean by this, but my family and childhood social groups slowly scattered over the last decade or two as Quebec continues to hemorrhage anglos. I had to move a couple of times for grad school, but I have a family/house and I've been in the same city for the past five years or so.
Oddly enough I don't think anyone I knew growing up would watch Don Cherry or even hockey games that regularly. But then, I was also the only kid in the advanced class that played a sport, and I was never that close with any of my hockey teammates so could just be a function of my social circle.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Not something I would normally listen to, but maybe I'll give one a try to see how demented he is! As far as I can remember he pretty much always talked like he does in your clips -- maybe it's a sort of Trumpy thing where you need to be on his wavelength?
It's true, I played one for a minute and he didn't sound half bad.
My record of listening to Cherry is pretty sporadic. He seemed much more coherent in some of his older legendary rants I've listened to, but I definitely wasn't a tune-in-every-week kind of guy.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Females develop eggs after 20 weeks so you could make 1000 per generation, polygenically screen them all, pick the best and iterate.
Those eggs are immature. I'm not a developmental biologist, but would you expect in vitro maturation protocols to work on eggs forcibly harvested from a 20 week old fetus?
I'm also not confident that there's enough genetic diversity starting from one person to get a true 1 in a billion; won't there be a bunch of alleles where neither parent has what you want? I admit that this may be a nonissue if most of the alleles you want are relatively common, I don't have a good handle on the numbers here.
Put it a different way - Do any of us have a 1 in a billion chance of giving birth to Shaq? I would tentatively guess no, modulo some genetic conditions like acromegaly. Do you have evidence that this is true?
In just over a year you have 3 generations and the pick of 1 in a billion (of descendants of your starting stock)
But what then? You have one embryo. Somatic cloning? Things are getting pretty complicated my man.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Are you sure? Could anyone predict forty years of ethics-department-free AI progress like that?
It's true, predicting the future is a fool's game and betting against progress doubly so. We'll never be able to resolve our bet given the near certain continued existence of the FDA.
That being said:
- biologists (and I count myself in this camp) are morons who can't do math, code or do anything beyond draw pointless arrow diagrams. Moreover, the incentive structure actively pushes us away from solving any of these issues and instead focusing on shorter timelines, smaller scales and splashy headlines instead of any kind of substantive understanding. PGS gets around all of this because you can let biology do the work for you, but it comes with a host of other problems. You mentioned CRISPR though, so let's go with that.
Say you want to use CRISPR to...I don't know, increase the size of your gut to accommodate the caloric needs of the giant brain your 250 IQ Chinese supersoldier is going to have. There is no 'gut size' gene that you can just augment the expression of, there are massive, interlocking transcriptional networks who need to be turned on at the right times and in the right cell types. This is likely to be far beyond our capability to understand ever, so the only reasonable path forward is building an AI oracle to understand it for us. It's either going to 1) Need monstrous datasets that we probably can't generate in a reasonable way yet 2) Molecular dynamics simulation is impossibly computationally expensive, so figure out some other abstracted simulation method 3) ??? someone else tell me how they'd envision this working, my imagination fails me.
-
There is no 'gut size' gene; there are dozens if not hundreds of genes you would need to alter, and moreover, alter in ways that are temporally, spatially and functionally correct. CRISPR just isn't capable of doing that with the precision or reliability you'd need; it's great at knocking out 1 to a handful of genes, mediocre-to-bad at activating genes, and mediocre at silencing genes - and these latter two functions are transient, so you'd need to find a way to keep expressing the CRISPR and gRNA. Probably we're again going to rely on godlike AI designing new methods for manipulating gene expression on broad scales, or maybe some Kwisatz Haderach breeding program over generations as we slowly introduce the changes we need.
-
Delivery to somatic tissues isn't currently possible in a meaningful way, although I'm optimistic we might actually solve this in a reasonable timescale. And I suppose you'd want to edit germline cells regardless, but I thought I'd point it out.
I'm most pessimistic about (1), and moreover a decided lack of interest in TPTB (to be clear, the academic establishment. I doubt the deep state cares overmuch) in understanding these systems in a way that we could build or intelligently edit them ourselves. Godlike AI is the wildcard, but at least so far, all AI can do is hold up a mirror and regurgitate the same garbage that we write in review papers. And Eliezer tells me we're all dead in that scenario anyways, no?
I'm not a developmental biologist and only tangentially touching on human genetics so I wouldn't say this is authoritative. But that's been my impression over the last decade or so.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.
Did you miss GATTACA? Beggars in Spain? Hysteria around designer babies when Dolly was cloned, or the human genome draft was published?
change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ.
That's just not anywhere close to realistic with our current level of technology and understanding. You could try cloning Shaq or whoever you think is smart, but we're laughably far away from editing your fertilized embryos for traits in that way. Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
You're going to have to cite your sources if you want to make blanket statements about American announcers being terrible, especially when Hockey Night in Canada featured the grating Jim Hughson for so many years.
Source: Me, after living and breathing hockey for a decade and a half growing up and then moving to America as an adult. Maybe things are different in Pittsburgh, but watching games for the local team in one of the smaller hockey markets (i.e. outside the original 6 and the midwest) was excruciating. Announcers were explaining relatively basic rules, clearly had no grasp on the strategy, positioning or how the game is played and just shoutcasted goals.
Even in Boston, if you go to a Bruins game the presumably CTE-riddled fanbase seems to operate on two principles: if a Bruins player has the puck, yell SHOOT THE PUCK at the top of your lungs. If the other team has the puck, yell HIT HIM. If the Bruins lost, it's probably because they didn't shoot the puck enough.
I grant that things may have been better in Pittsburgh.
As for Fox and the glowing pucks, I wasn't a fan of them either, but it wasn't because they thought Americans were incapable of keeping up with the game.
I mean, maybe I just fell for the Canadian 'hurr durr America dumb' propaganda, but it sure seems a lot of people talked about it that way:
In 1994, Fox won a contract to broadcast NHL games in the United States. David Hill, the head of Fox Sports at the time, believed that if viewers could easily follow the puck, the game would seem less confusing to newcomers, and hence become more appealing to a broader audience...The FoxTrax system was widely criticized by hockey fans, who felt that the graphics were distracting and meant to make the broadcasts cater towards casual viewers; sportswriter Greg Wyshynski stated that FoxTrax was "cheesy enough that it looked like hockey by way of a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers production budget",[5] and considered it "a sad commentary on what outsiders thought of both hockey and American hockey fans". Acknowledging that Canadian-born journalist Peter Jennings (who was interviewed as a guest during the 1996 All-Star Game that introduced the technology) stated on-air that Canadians would "probably hate it", Wyshynski suggested that FoxTrax was an admission that American viewers were "too hockey-stupid to follow the play" or "need to be distracted by shiny new toys in order to watch the sport."[2]
Edmonton won't win a cup in the foreseeable future because they haven't figured out that you can't put your superstars on the same line. Especially when one of them is a center.
I watch far from every Edmonton game, but I'm pretty sure they've experimented with splitting up Draisaitl and McDavid a few years back and I don't think it went well for them. At that point, you can trade Draisaitl for some depth I guess - but man would it take some massive balls to try and explain why you traded one of the top scorers in the league and one half of the most productive duo in the NHL for some solid second-line players.
Kane and Nugent-Hopkins should be able to match Geno on paper. But maybe I'm too deep in the hopium. Perhaps McJesus was the false prophet all along and Brock Boeser will bring Lord Stanley's cup back to the motherland.
There's a reason the Pens won three cups — when you have Sid on line 1 and Geno on line 2, it doesn't matter if you're feeding the puck to Chris Kunitz or Ruslan Fedotenko or fucking Max Talbot.
The Pens won three cups because they had a hell of a lot more than Crosby and Geno. Letang and Fleury were pretty damn good too, and Kessel was on an eldritch hot-dog fueled rampage just to spite the Leafs (which I fully approve of).
The rest of the team is scrubs and has-beens. Defense and goaltending are decent but not stellar. They might make the conference final, but overreliance on offensive firepower killed many a team. This is why the Penguins traded John Cullen in '91 and Mark Recchi in '92.
Dude, their defense and goaltending are ass. They averaged over 3 goals against this season with a franchise record winning streak. But they're also fucked by cap space; how are they going to improve their back end without trading their stars? See comment above about massive balls required to trade some of the best scorers in the league.
All that said, I'm just a meathead who played a lot of hockey growing up and beer leagues as an adult. I have no idea what makes a good NHL team, but thankfully, that seems to be fairly universally true. See the Golden Knights for the entirety of their existence, somehow this year's Canucks.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Wat? In my timeline he was coherent enough to complain onair about 'you people' who won't wear a poppy on Remembrance day, resulting in rapid cancellation due to 'anti-immigrant dogwhistling'.
I don't know man. Things were pretty grim there at the end (the whole channel recommends itself). But man, was it great television.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
He discusses the calls on Hockey Night in Canada Broadcasts as though they were the definitive icons of the game, even if the game involved two American teams.
They were though. Don Cherry is a legend and the announcers were an order of magnitude better than any of the American ones who knew (and still to this day know) absolutely nothing about hockey. Like, lacking basic terminology about the game and substituting generic folksy expressions for their ignorant viewers. Then there was the FoxTrax glow puck debacle, because American sports fans were apparently incapable of keeping up with a game that wasn't 75% advertisements and breaks in play a la NFL/MLB.
Anyways, then Hockey Night in Canada they sold the trademark music to RDS and Don Cherry's dementia progressed to a point where Ron Mclean couldn't drag him through the weekly programs. RIP.
I hope Canadian teams lose and lose early for every year here on out because the Canadian media deserves it. I'd like to talk about how Canadian hockey fans suck and most Americans parrot the same bullshit because they assume the Canadians know better, but that's a rant for another day.
This is the year. McJesus is bringing Lord Stanley's cup home.
But yeah, fuck the Leafs.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Boston isn’t a shithole; Back Bay is probably second only to Greenwich Village / Lower Manhattan in terms of quality walkable neighborhoods in the US.
You literally said:
The financial district seemed fine enough, and in general the hobo problem, while worse than Manhattan, was no worse than Boston was late last year, and I thought Boston was still liveable, probably.
So Boston is only 'probably livable' and equivalent to San Francisco, in your eyes. You said this about San Francisco:
Not that it wasn't a dump, because it was, but it didn't really appear worse than it was before 2020. SF was (laughably) considered a "Tier 1" city (and had a weirdly cheap Four Seasons), so I stayed in the FS by Union Square, famous for shithole status and close proximity to the Tenderloin.
So you say San Francisco is a dump (and by extension, Boston is the same). I assume now you'll try and wriggle out of having used the word shithole by saying you were only talking about Union Square, so whatever.
I was willing to suspend disbelief, never having been to Seattle or Portland myself. But when you start going off on cities I've lived in and indeed bike commute through everyday and call them 'barely livable' I know you're either so snobbish and rich as to be out of touch with the reality the rest of us live in or playing it up to try and make an argument about how we're all ugly people leaving in ugly cities. Granted, I'm not a (presumably) 5 foot something Jewish woman but I can't deny what my lying eyes see every day.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
In context I'd defend it as 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion'
Indeed; mask mandates are also pro-liberty as they give people the freedom to not worry about getting COVID in the train. Censorship gives LGBT and minorities freedom from hate speech. Jailing Donald Trump will give us freedom from fascism and neo-nazism.
Censorship is inherently illiberal however you try and dress it up. That doesn't make it bad. There's such an aversion to censorship that when we actually decide we want to engage in it we have to lie to ourselves and dress it up as some freedom or another.
school is mandatory and funded by all sides of the political spectrum after all.
Better argument for the curriculum. Bad argument for book bans. Nobody is forcing your child to look at those books any more than anyone was forcing the other high school kids to go to that party.
I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a neutral curriculum
Whew. Good luck with that one, man.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
But the content they object to is often political in its aims and coded blue-tribe. I don’t see how you can position your side as apolitical, when they proudly proclaim political aims for their own changes, endlessly purging curricula on grounds of sexism, racism, hetero-and-cisnormativity, etc .
I wouldn't claim it as apolitical, and I wish you wouldn't call it my side.
In some cases I'd agree with you, in others I would disagree. In still others we would get bogged down by semantics about 'making things political.' I could argue that children sitting at desks is a weapon of the white supremacist state to keep down PoC and that they need to go, and MFL would fervently oppose that. In this example I'd argue that the MFL position isn't political at all, it's just...keeping desks in school. The same way that for some of these books, I don't think it should be controversial at all that they're available in the library.
But all of that is somewhat beside the point. The comment I replied to was describing MFL as if they're some objective and principled group that supports liberty and freedom of choice. The reality is that they're anything but.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
It says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin
And yet, most of their advocacy revolves around banning books and curricula discussing LGBT, trans and civil rights issues:
Accompanying that letter is an 11-page spreadsheet with complaints about books on the district’s curriculum, ranging from popular books on civil rights heroes to books about poisonous animals (“text speaks of horned lizard squirting blood out of its eyes”), Johnny Appleseed (“story is sad and dark”), and Greek and Roman mythology (“illustration of the goddess Venus naked coming out of the ocean...story of Tantalus and how he cooks up, serves, and eats his son.”) A book about hurricanes is no good (“1st grade is too young to hear about possible devastating effects of hurricanes”) and a book about owls is designated as a downer. (“It’s a sad book, but turns out ok. Not a book I would want to read for fun,” an adult wrote of the owl book in the spreadsheet.)
...
At one juncture, the group implores the school district to include more charitable descriptions of the Catholic Church when teaching a book about astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted by said church for suggesting that Earth revolves around the sun. “Where is the HERO of the church?” the group’s spreadsheet asks, “to contrast with their mistakes? There are so many opportunities to teach children the truth of our history as a nation. The Church has a huge and lasting influence on American culture. Both good and bad should be represented. The Christian church is responsible for the genesis of Hospitals, Orphanages, Social Work, Charity, to name a few.” MFL’s Williamson County chapter also takes issue with a picture book about seahorses, in part because it depicted “mating seahorses with pictures of postions [sic] and discussion of the male carrying the eggs.”
So painting them as being about Liberty in any meaningful sense of the word, other than Liberty being a red-tribe codeword, seems patently dishonest. Their objections to content are often explicitly political and coded red-tribe. Some of the shit that was banned in Florida schools a few years ago was hilariously inoffensive.
As for the OP, whatever. I don't really care. But if people bothered to look at the context, I'd expect most to at least get a chuckle out of the fact that people clutching their pearls at the idea of their child being exposed to the idea that gay people exist then get schwasted with them on the weekend in between threesomes.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I agree overall, although I'd argue that the progress enjoyed by the current generation of Chinese adults is highly unlikely to be replicated by their children. I expect they'll go down the same path we did unless 'Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics' and endless readings of 'Xi Jinping Thought' can save them.
My money is on pessimism setting in 20-30 years from now, and foreign capital moves to Vietnam or Africa or whatever the next manufacturing base will be.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up.
I had a longer post written, but I just don't have the heart to argue about wokeness anymore. So here's an abridged version: I've been through two biotech companies at this point, so I've had exposure to maybe 60-70 young scientists who should be at the peak of their idealist phases. PhD and postdoc at some premier institutions in the USA. I've asked around, and a grand total of zero people at either company have read any serious amount of science fiction. A couple fellow PhD students did, the CSO at the second company mentioned having read Dune and a Game of Thrones in high school, I doubt any of the faculty I interacted with did. Most people don't read at all. All of this makes me sad, and lonely.
There are plenty of highly profitable activities given the existing incentive structure that do virtually nothing to move the needle scientifically or in terms of actual benefit to society - go make another monoclonal antibody to some target people haven't tried yet, or shuffle around different combinations of checkpoint blockade, or make another oncology small molecule that extends mean progression-free survival by three months. You'll probably make a boatload of money if you get a lucky pull of the slot machine lever.
So, yes. Definitely agree that we've lost the ability to dream big and be ambitious in the right ways. Don't know how to fix it when I need 7-8 figure investments to do even basic projects.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I'll preface this by saying I agree with the concerns around GoF research and that it is a real problem.
Now, to add some context: This is the preprint in question.
Don't trust '100% mortality' hyped up by a news org, it's the equivalent of hack tech writers claiming '100% cancer cure rate' in some mouse model. You can get '100% mortality' with a high enough dose of relatively benign rhinoviruses that just cause colds in humans. In this preprint, the authors infected with 500,000 PFUs (plaque forming units, supposedly one PFU = 1 virus). This may not bring much comfort to people, but the LD50 of a mouse-adapted stain of COVID is 1000 TCID50 (similar to PFUs), or two orders of magnitude lower. It's hard to get a direct comparison, but here's another paper reporting an LD50 of 1000 PFUs in ferrets.
You're probably not going to die next year of GX_P2V infection. Beware articles in the New York Post throwing red meat to the base.
I don't have time to do this topic justice, but as for 'banning GoF research' - this would not have been classified as GoF research under most paradigms. Wild virus isolates were passaged in cell culture; this is simply how you propagate virus for study. Generally, propagation in vitro attenuates viruses and makes them less pathogenic, modulo some cases (admittedly similar to this one) where you may pass viruses adapted to one species in cells from another.
We produce a lot of vaccines and gene therapy vectors this way, although even those examples contain multitudes. Maybe you want a carveout for very well understood processes that we've been doing for years, but you'd have to think very carefully about crafting it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Thanks for the reply, and sorry for being slow to get back to you. I'm not trying to give you a hard time, just understand what you're really proposing.
For the record, I briefly looked into embryo screening when I was trying to have children but it seemed like we're not quite there yet. And IVF is such a pain in the ass that the only people who really go through with it really want a child.
I don't think it's necessary to use for every birth, just consistent usage for people who struggle with pregnancy in the first place & people with certain known problems (I'm deliberately vague here because I think there is a wide range of reasonable policies that should be subject to debate by both the public and experts to collectively find out what we find or find not adequate to select against) is likely to be sufficient to make effective dysgenics per generation almost zero or even turn it around.
I'm seeing only around 2% of people use IVF; why would you think they're the main potential drivers of (hypothetical) dysgenics? Most people around here seem to have 'welfare queens' in mind when discussing dysgenics. Note also that prenatal screening can have a pretty drastic effect, although I suppose many of the disorders you catch would be individuals who wouldn't go on to reproduce regardless so you may discount them.
From the initial data I've seen, simple general-health PGS is likely to even substantially improve the chances for a successful pregnancy beyond what the existing standard tests do, so it's win-win for absolutely everyone.
I can believe it.
Make sequencing (again, deliberately vague because while I think deep WGS should be the goal, WES, larger SNP arrays, etc. would be a big step up compared to current practice)
I've mostly focused on Mendelian disorders, but would you still be able to generate a PGS with whole exome? Or are you just looking for Mendelian diseases? Most of the well-validated genes are already tested for, whereas the disorders with a couple dozen known patients are more likely to just return VUS (variants of unknown significance) which aren't really actionable.
Over time, success and normalisation would increase the take-up and hence costs, but - and here you can call me out I guess - I think the scaling will more than make up for it.
I'm sure scale-up will factor in somehow, I just have no idea what order of magnitude to expect. The sequencing costs would probably scale. Analyzing the data and other bullshit probably wouldn't, unless we can get AI integrated into the healthcare system in some form or another. Hiring thousands of bioinformaticians, clinicians, nurses, lab techs, etc. would be a nightmare.
I'm not against what you're saying in broad strokes; I think something like this is coming sooner or later. I think it'll look a bit different than you outline, but maybe that's just splitting hairs. We'll almost certainly have the technology in place long before the public is anywhere close to accepting genetically engineered babies. It doesn't help that the godmother of CRISPR is profoundly decelerationist.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I also wouldn't describe that program as 'trivial.'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
IVF costs 10-30k per cycle, with a success rate of around 20-30%. There are around 3.5 million births per year in the US. Even discounting sequencing costs (you want whole genome? Just a SNP chip?), assuming I'm understanding you correctly, won't your program have a roughly hundred billion/year budget? Not to mention that many women don't want to do ivf.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here?
Virtually nobody is satisfied with the moderation here, but for a plethora of different reasons. Which probably means it's as close to optimal as we can get.
For what it's worth, I have a lot of respect for all the new people who decided to be mods.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
The life sciences have the Journal of Visualized Experiments. The problem is that most protocols have a plethora of minor details to be tweaked, so getting a protocol from the literature is often more of a first step than 'plug and play.'
Ah. Was I 'gaslighting you while celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?' Slamming the Overton window leftwards on you? Or something else you edited out of your post?
I don't think my post was particularly celebratory, nor do I think I made any comment on the object level issues you raised in your post. But whatever, the one leftish leaning person who bothered to reply to your post managed to perfectly demonstrate all the problems you were complaining about. Bravo.
Alright. Forget about the black person who got taxpayer money for a moment (we can go back to it later if you like). Imagine that I'm an actual human being and I want to help your friend and people like them - what should I do? What set of policies do you think would be most helpful to your friend? Was he significantly better off when he was stocking shelves five or ten years ago? And do you think grocery store workers had it better in 1990, 2005, or 2020ish?
Hello, pot. Kettle here. You're black.
But then, give me some advice. How could I reply to your post in a way that wouldn't be 1) denying these are problems or 2) manipulating people into passive acceptance, short of agreeing with you on every point and accepting that leftists are evil? I'd invite you to sketch out a very brief outline of what such a post might look like such that you think you could have a productive conversation.
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