Crowstep
1yr ago
Have you considered not worrying too much about it and just going with your gut?
The chance that your vote is the deciding one is effectively zero. You shouldn't think too much about it.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Sounds like a potential for some arbitrage. If my understanding of it is right, someone could buy 100 shares in Harris to lose (M53) and 100 shares in Trump to lose (M40) for a total of M93. Then win M100 regardless of which candidate wins.
When I originally wrote that comment I used dollars, before realising that Manifold doesn't use actual money. My guess is that this explains the discrepancy. Nobody really cares about arbitrage if the only prize is pretend internet points.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I guess a young woman who identifies as queer or bisexual doesn't have to actually do anything. She doesn't even have to dress any differently. All she does is collect a cool new identity label that her peers will praise her for. Combine that with the fact that most women are a little bisexual anyway (but usually don't act on it) and I can see why these labels are popular. For a young man, it's similarly easy to pick up one of the many bespoke identity labels and not actually change anything about his behaviour or even dress.
By contrast, actually acting on a minority sexuality actually requires them to, you know, act. For straight men (of whom I think most are instinctively repulsed by the idea of sex with a man) this isn't going to happen. And for bi-curious women, this requires her to either take the initiative (which women hate) or wait on a lesbian to come and try to convert her (many such cases, but I doubt there are enough lesbians to make a difference in the stats).
Crowstep
1yr ago
We have not seen "peak woke". We probably won't live long enough to see "peak woke." It's going to just keep getting worse for the rest of our lives.
There's a lot of data suggesting that we really have passed peak woke. 2020 seems to have been the inflection point.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I'm really talking about walkability. It doesn't matter if the residents describe the commercial area as part of the suburb if they have to get a car there. Once you're driving, it may as well be in another town.
Crowstep
1yr ago
'Amidst the houses' is the suburb. If there's a zone for housing and a zone for commercial, then the housing bit is the suburb, from the perspective of the residents.
By contrast, in the UK there are pubs and shops nestled in between houses. To take a random example, the suburb Jesmond, in Newcastle. Look at it on Google Maps. It includes two metro stations, bus stops, pubs, restaurants, playing fields, hotels, parks, churches, allotments, schools, cafes and small businesses. You can easily walk from any part of the suburb to any other part, and you can get public transport to the rest of the city.
When I look at (also randomly chosen) Rio Rancho in Albuquerque, I see vast tracts of houses, many located in cul de sacs (so you can walk to the end of your road and that's it) and all of the shops and restaurants are limited to the big road that surrounds the suburb.
Crowstep
1yr ago
The most frustrating part about this is that it's still possible to have walkable suburbs. We have them in the Europe. The problem is that US zoning laws usually make it illegal to build anything except houses in suburban areas. In the UK, suburbs have shops, parks, schools and pubs and it is possible to walk to all of them.
Crowstep
1yr ago
and it’s obviously in the public interest to keep them on a tight leash
In the UK? Hardly. The country has a tiny number of highly vetted, very well trained firearms officers, supporting a mass of unarmed ordinary police. We have one shooting by police marksmen every few years, and it's almost always a guy who is deep in with armed gangs. Armed police are not a threat to the public at all.
'Keeping them on a tight leash' (i.e. taking the side of criminals they interact with) has the second order effect of emboldening those criminals, which is definitely not in the public interest. We see this every few years when some bright spark in the Met decides that stop and search is racist. The police stop using it for a while, the black on black murder rate spikes, and then they quietly go back to using it because it works.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Even at a meetup, you still have to ask her out and court her yourself. Just because she's in the same room, doesn't mean you're playing with cheat codes.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Interesting, I would say that gregarious and shy are both much stronger words than introverted or extroverted.
Crowstep
1yr ago
My understanding is that, in the developed world, IQ (or at least, earnings and education as IQ proxies) are positively correlated with male fertility but negatively correlated for female fertility.
Basically, smart men earn lots of money and so can attract a wife more easily, while being able to afford to house more children.
Smart women spend their most fertile years in education and 'greedy' careers, leaving little time for babymaking.
High fertility among low IQ people was previously driven by teenage pregnancy, but that has mostly disappeared in the past couple of decades
Crowstep
1yr ago
Seems a pretty bold claim to state to a self-described introvert that introverts don't exist.
The fact that a trait exists on a spectrum doesn't mean that the words we use to describe the ends of the spectrum 'don't exist'. Someone who feels social nine times out of ten is different in a meaningful way from someone who feels social one time out of ten. Why shouldn't we have words to describe them?
I'm not sure what framing you have in your head, but I know people personally who, if I were to not describe them as extroverted would require a deliberate lie on my part.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Honestly I think this is just confirmation bias, like how people think short men are easily angered. You notice the smart people with poor social skills because they are good at everything else and it stands out, perhaps with a touch of the wishful thinking that leads to 'there are different kinds of intelligence and people who are good at one are bad at another'.
Like, let's consider well-known geniuses. Here's a quote about Richard Feynman:
He arrived with a huge friendly beaming smile, more cheerful, I might add, than all the other lecturers put together in our department had ever been. Smiling, he stated, “ you don't need this list, lets just chat freely amongst ourselves" and he screwed the piece of paper up with his hands and threw it in the wastepaper bin beside the lecture table. He talked freely about anything we liked to ask from the deepest theoretical ideas of modern physics, people he'd met and worked with, UFOs and pseudoscientific thinking and he loved jokes and joking around. I've NEVER met anyone so down to earth and so friendly as that. He was lovely! All of us graduate students were at ease and he gave us THREE hours of his time; freely! We didn't know at the time that the staff had asked to attend too. He refused saying this was the students' time..he didn't want us to feel ill at ease. My supervisor told me later he told our head of faculty off saying the staff were probably more interested in paying off their mortgages and worried about their next publishing than fundamental physics..lol. As the organisor, I met him later. I'm part Maori and he was very interested in the New Zealand Maori. He was lovely; nothing was a problem, he was ‘at home' with us students. I remembered seeing him sweat as he expended enormous energy with us. I thought, he's truly human! The most complicated theoretical ideas were made to appear so commonplace and simple, as if you were putting together an extension to your garage. Incredible! The terms in the various differential equations of physics were reduced to seemingly just the different sized nails you needed, with the purposes clearly recognised. Gosh he made it all sound joyful, fun and deceptively obvious. Truly a highlight of my student days. He wanted us students to take him out to a night club. The faculty closed that one down as they'd already accounted for his evenings at other professors' homes. Ohhh .the lost opportunities.
How about Terence Tao:
Tao, by contrast, is, as one colleague put it, ‘‘super-normal.’’ He has a gentle, self-deprecating manner. He eschews job offers from prestigious East Coast institutions in favor of a relaxed, no-drama department in a place where he can enjoy the weather. In class, he conveys a sense that mathematics is fun. One of his students told me that he had recently joked with another about the many ways Tao defies all the Hollywood mad-genius tropes. ‘‘They will never make a movie about him,’’ he said. ‘‘He doesn’t have a troubled life. He has a family, and they seem happy, and he’s usually smiling.’’
"Einstein was a total rogue in his personal life," Isaacson said. "He was a runaway. He always got in trouble with his teachers. Falls in love with this wonderful physics student. They have a child before they're married. All of these things are this rebellious, impudent nature, which I think also leads him to challenge the basic tenets of science."
In conversation, Savant steers clear of fancy remarks. She is overtly normal. “People expect me to be a walking encyclopaedia or a human calculator,” she says, or to “have very unusual, very esoteric, very arcane gifts and I’m really not that way at all.” Instead, she talks with the practised clarity of her columns, the pedantry of someone wary of misinterpretation.
His nickname at the institute of advanced study was “good time Johnny”: he often organized parties in his large home in Princeton, whereby fine wines were consumed, served by a butler, while “Johnny” would divide his time between meeting friends, telling politically incorrect jokes, talking higher math, and telling the occasional dirty joke.
I promise I didn't select these deliberately. Einstein seems to have been an asshole, the same to a lesser extent seems to be true of Von Neumann, but these were not autistic nerds who didn't understand people.
Crowstep
1yr ago
That stereotype is, as far as we know, incorrect. Intelligence is positively correlated with empathy, prosociality and morality. Academic success also seems to correlate with empathy.
Which makes sense, if you look outside of carefully curated bubbles. Who do you think is more empathetic, university graduates or unemployed members of the underclass?
Crowstep
1yr ago
I noticed that too. Also that the story came out in the Guardian, Britain's main left wing newspaper.
What I really want to know is, what does the median Guardian reader actually think about this? I'm sure that most would reflexively condemn it, but a significant portion of those gladly send their children to private schools to give them an advantage or will have used IVF themselves. I wish the comments section was left open.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I'm seeing a few comments like this but they're all frustratingly vague. What specific negative traits do you mean?
Crowstep
1yr ago
We've had IQ tests for about a century now. Don't you think we would have noticed if there was actually some advantage to being stupid in that time? Why would another 20 years make a difference?
What kind of positive traits would you expect to find?
Crowstep
1yr ago
I do agree that I don't expect this to change the world drastically. Most babies will continue to be born the old-fashioned way.
But you're assuming that this technology doesn't change the kind, or number of parents that get IVF. Think about tiger parents who send their three year old children to pre-MBA programmes. Do you think they wouldn't be willing to do something that actually makes a difference to their future children's outcomes? Even if it is only 2 IQ points, that's worth more than violin lessons or debate club.
Plus, we can reasonably expect the price to come down as more companies enter the space (there are already two that I know of). Soon enough, I expect the current 'doctor eyeballs the embryos to decide which one to implant' to be replaced with genetic testing in most IVF clinics. If you're already paying for the IVF, why not pay a little extra to give your future child a better chance in life?
Crowstep
1yr ago
I wouldn't be so skeptical. As the article says, the first embryos have already been implanted. Plus, Heliospect is not the only company offering this service. Steven Hsu's company Genomic Prediction did the same thing for eccentric pronatalists Simone and Malcolm Collins. The first embryo selected child (that is publicly known) is toddling around a house in Pennsylvania.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think you're right. Hell, I thought that until I read your post. Then I remembered that 'OK Boomer' was a meme several years before the pandemic.
I assume that Zoomer was just meant as a portmanteau of Boomer and Gen Z (which itself was based on the letter convention that started with Gen X).
Crowstep
1yr ago
Well it looks like embryo selection for IQ is here.
A US startup, using data from the UK Biobank, is offering embryo selection for “IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants”, including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness.
What surprises me most about this is that they were able to use the Biobank data, and that the head of the Biobank is defending its use. The Biobank is, as I understand, the world's best source of genetic data and I had always hoped that it would be used for this kind of liberal eugenics. However I'd assumed that doing so would be hampered by 'bioethicists' or at least the default political caution of these kind of institutions. However, the head of the Biobank seems to...think this is good?
UK Biobank … has confirmed that its analyses of our data have been used solely for their approved purpose to generate genetic risk scores for particular conditions, and are exploring the use of their findings for preimplantation screening in accordance with relevant regulation in the US where Heliospect is based. This is entirely consistent with our access conditions. By making data available, UK Biobank is allowing discoveries to emerge that would not otherwise have been possible, saving lives and preventing disability and misery.
Well that's a pleasant surprise. I guess I shouldn't be too shocked that the head of a massive genetics project actually understands the implications of his scientific field, but it's great to have my default cynicism proven wrong.
The quotes from the 'bioethicists' are maddening, of course:
Dagan Wells, a professor of reproductive genetics at University of Oxford, asked: “Is this a test too far, do we really want it? It feels to me that this is a debate that the public has not really had an opportunity to fully engage in at this point.”
Not an argument, he's just vaguely gesturing at the implication that it might be bad. It's also unclear why, in a context where IVF is already legal and accepted by almost everyone, this needs to be subject to a public debate. This is just IVF with more informed choices over which embryo to implant.
Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, in California, said: “One of the biggest problems is that it normalises this idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ genetics.” The rollout of such technologies, she said, “reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”.
Translation: This scientific advance is bad because it reminds people of facts which I am politically uncomfortable with.
If being slim, happy, kind, law-abiding, rich or intelligent is better than being fat, depressed, cruel, criminal, poor or stupid, and if these things are affected by genetics (which they are) then there is such a thing as superior or inferior genetics.
Either Ms Hasson believes that genes don't influence anything (in which case she should not be working at a centre for genetics) or she believes that all human characteristics are equally good (in which case she should not use the term 'ethicist' in her title). Or perhaps she is a bioethicist who believes in neither biology nor ethics.
By late 2023, the founders of Heliospect claimed to have already analysed and helped select embryos for five couples, which had subsequently been implanted through IVF. “There are babies on the way,”
This is probably the most important part in my mind. It will be extremely hard to argue against embryo selection when there are happy, healthy, intelligent children running around. In the same way that skepticism around IVF vanished as the first IVF babies grew up, there will one day be embryo-selected adults giving interviews on TV, eloquently defending it.
Tiger mothers of the world, rejoice. You can now give your kids a heads-up that actually works, and doesn't require you driving them to extra-curriculars all the time.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I may have misunderstood, but it kinda sound like you think that the Democrat staffers who wrote that press release were thinking 'black men use crypto to hide their drug-dealing money and avoid paying for the children they walked out on, we'd better tell them that they have our support'.
Even in politics, I think you'd struggle to find that kind of jet-black cynicism
Crowstep
1yr ago
I recall an investigation in Australia where of the 200 or so alleged druggings, none of the women actually had rohypnol in their systems. What they did have was alcohol and other recreational drugs.
We also had a moral panic in the UK a few years ago about needle spiking (rapist stabs a woman with a syringe containing a sedative). The police confirmed there were no confirmed cases at all.
That said, our country's most prolific rapist actually did rape hundreds of young men with the drug, so it has been used for that. But I think in most cases, it's an explanation/excuse for women who get black out drunk and get taken advantage of.
The irony is that the age of the big Catholic family in Latin America is over. Mexico has a lower birth rate than the USA. Puerto Rico's TFR is lower than Singapore!
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