cae_jones
7mo ago
Way I remember from the last time I did research, elephants are in the top 20 (or is it top 10?) killers of humans, but a lot of those are accidental. Some elephants (especially adolescent males) deliberately target humans, especially in retaliation for humans killing elephants ... but I remember one story where some young elephants drank from some barrels of fermenting alcohol on the outskirts of a village, got super drunk, and destroyed the village in their drunken rampage.
So, uh, mostly peaceful but simultaneously way more dangerous than the majority of animals humans are likely to interact with in general.
cae_jones
3mo ago
Were there a way to mad science up some reproductive capacity without requiring puberty, would opting out then become acceptable?
I half suspect that, between cloning and the Monkey testicular transplant experiment, the mad science could have been there by now, had we been performing the mostly-unethical experiments to master the tech.
cae_jones
4mo ago
agents, given scaffolding that allows them more human reasoning (long-term memory storage, frequent reminders of their objective, plugins that give them access to the internet etc.) are generally pretty useless and incapable of solving even very basic programs. And they usually go mad eventually.
In fairness to AI, the internet drives many humans mad, too.>
cae_jones
4mo ago
Over 30. Was way more sex negative before. Pre-Lesswrong me would respond to such a comment ... either as if personally attacked, or by glibly retorting "At least someone agrees I am not a man."
...
At least someone agrees I am not a man. ::P
(I italicized "someone"! That makes it different!)
I think this has become known as asexuality,, among psychiatrists. Mostly because SJ pushed it hard in response to the strictness those of your view insist upon its functional universality.
FWIW, I have lots and lots of notes and posts and maybe some IM conversations from the 00s and early 10s, if you want verification of my mindset at the time. But TLDR, Dr. K's description of asexuality describes me more or less to a t.
cae_jones
5mo ago
My understanding of timeless decision theory is that you are deciding for every entity sufficiently similar to you. So, you’re making decisions for yourself at different points in time, as well as anyone else who might be sufficiently similar to you at the same time. Well, technically, this would make backwards causality… Kind of a thing you could think about, it really doesn’t seem all that relevant to how you would use it to actually make decisions. Instead, it adds weight to the decisions you’re trying to make, by spreading the consequences farther than you would normally expect them to go.
But that was from over a decade ago. It’s entirely possible that it’s become a lot more insane since then.
cae_jones
6mo ago
Perhaps more to the point, considered in the context of hunting, it really doesn't make much sense to be talking about 200 mile races. Men are faster at every distance that a human would plausibly have covered during a normal day and this difference widens if they're forced to carry any sort of kit with them.
The way I've always heard it, endurance running is exactly what made human hunters OP, not speed. It's why we traded fur for excess sweat capacity.
cae_jones
6mo ago
Is there an option to download the conversation? I know when Claude's ressponses show up in the code area, they're in markdown, so you can just copy or download them and get the same formatting here. Not sure about the main convo.
cae_jones
8mo ago
$67 sessions? I have a sudden urge to talk to a lawyer about the thousands I spent, only for it to turn out I had enough greys left over to just look mangy and artificially aged. ... supposedly with an 80% off coupon which I am not convinced was properly applied.
In any case, I don't know the laser details. The procedure sounds the same. I experienced pain, but it doesn't sound as intense as what you described. More like getting repeatedly slapped in small areas. Although, it grew more painful with later sessions, presumably because they increased the power.
cae_jones
8mo ago
And Chronicals. It opens with an enormous family tree, almost as though that was part of its original purpose for contemporary readers.
cae_jones
25d ago
I've spent more time on the floor praying for mercy from heartburn and constipation. Toe-stubbing is worse than ball busting, IMO, although it's easier to stay upright afterward.
Getting hit in the balls is like 30s of ache. Gut stuff is Hell.
cae_jones
7mo ago
That sounds more dangerous to me, but it really depends on the amount in the bottles. AFAIK, the only known death from fluoride poisoning was a 3-year-old chugging a bottle of fluoride solution, but it was a bigger one at a dentist's office.
The main thing is that swallowing fluoride is fairly useless, and where the risks are. You want it to stay in your mouth.
cae_jones
7mo ago
hydroxyapatite is literally produced by your body. It's in your teeth and saliva.
cae_jones
10d ago
I'd say it's more "emotionally abusive MLM" than Jim Jones. It isn't the affection that gets me; it's how much it reminds me of the legendary Bay-area Rationalist cuddle culture.
But mostly, after attending a couple workshops and listening to the other people there, I'm increasingly convinced that it's stoking suffering while claiming to improve situations, kinda like what therapy has become, only worse by using charismatic church tactics and emotional intensity to convince people it feels amazing and must therefore be working.
cae_jones
3mo ago
Getting overloaded with low quality info on the state of anti-aging products. What actually works for what? Senolytics? Memory thingies? Else?
cae_jones
3mo ago
There are lots of ways to read and write text other than the default font by unaided eye. There are laptops and stuff. If you have access to windows, check out the Ease of Access Center for the freebies.i
cae_jones
6mo ago
I feel obligated by existing to respond, but all I've got is "my dad is the exception in his family. We were not dragged down by the others." Which just feels weak.
Also, whenever a cousin wants a path out, either for themselves or their children, they've historically tended to go to my dad in some capacity, be it hiring (on condition of not committing any drug-related crimes recently), or assuming custody of his nephews when their parents wound up in prison. The wider clan has basically fallen apart with the death of Grandma ~18.5y ago.
And while I expect my dad would have found a way to thrive regardless, getting involved in his father-in-law's business made a huge impact. I'd also note that this had nothing to do with the reasoning behind the marriage; my dad was trying to get into white-collar work until my sister was born, and FIL offerred him a job as an electrician. At no point did he want to turn that into a career, but it turns out that it's reliable, pays well, is less depressing than paper-pushing, and being able to spot a building he personally empowered on every other street is worth something. Also, the magic of giving a damn and taking whatever work he does seriously made him the obvious one to take over when FIL retired.
I kinda think demonstrably overcoming the background disadvantages of one's origins or condition can be attractive all its own. Of course, you then have to worry about regression to the mean, children getting lured into the life of the extended family, etc. FWICT, of the four of us (his two bio children and the two nephews), only one seems to be on that path, and it took until adulthood to get there.
cae_jones
9mo ago
When I was 10-13, I was not at all interested in the opposite sex, but was positively disposed to the idea of having children. That changed quietly at some point between 13 and 16, as preserved in that novel I wrote at the time where I suddenly questioned halfway through if the blatant self-insert character functionally parenting a couple of space-orphans was really compatible with my sense of identity. It could have been that abstinence-only presentation they put all the 8th-graders through, but I somehow doubt. I'd been surrounded by overpopulation memes forever; I'm really not sure what changed. Maybe the realization that I didn't have a community or social life or any fondness for the increasingly alienating environment around me? Some hormone balance suddenly shifting? Increased self-doubt? The realization that I was not sufficiently attracted to real people for reproduction to be remotely reallistic anyway?
I could go on. Lots of weird teenage crap that could tie into the rapid vibe-shift on the subject. At some point, all of that stuff went from a believable fantasy to something to fear, dread, or dislike. I like to think I was more reflective than average at the time, but clearly not enough to catch the transformation as it was happening.
cae_jones
1mo ago
My grandpa (late 80s with COPD) died from covid. The superintendant of my workplace got it and died after being publically anti-lockdown. My older cousin and her husband (both obese, and he smokes heavily) got it, but survived, though she was hospitalized.
My parents got it (after being vaccinated). Got weird neurological things a couple weeks later that got blamed on covid, including my stepmom blacking out while driving (and only avoiding swerving into traffic because my dad's cousin was in the passenger seat and grabbed the wheel in time).
cae_jones
3mo ago
Bangkok is kinda known for this sort of thing, so I imagine their are plenty of polyglots in the industry. Also nominative determinism, but I'm sure that's been done to death.
cae_jones
4mo ago
Presumably, extract useful minerals, turn the rest into salt palaces and make it a tourist trap.
I'd assumed based on prior discussion that efficient desalination would require enough power output that it'd require either lots of fossil fuels, or nuclear. Are renewables in California competitive enough for desalination, now?
cae_jones
6mo ago
An LLM cannot have a sensation. When you type a math function into it, it has no more qualia than a calculator does. If you hook it up to a computer with haptic sensors, or a microphone, or a video camera, and have it act based on the input of those sensors, the LLM itself will still have no qualia (the experience will be translated into data for the LLM to act on).
You have defined sensation as the thing that you have but machines lack. Or at least, that's how you're using it, here. But even granting that you're referring to a meat-based sensory data processor as a necessity, that leads to the question of where the meat-limit is. (Apologies if y've posted your animal consciousness tier list before, and I forgot; I know someone has, but I forget who.)
But I don't feel like progress can be meaningfully made on this topic, because we're approaching from such wildly different foundations. Ex, I don't know of definitions of consciousness that actually mean anything or carve reality at the joints. It's something we feel like we have. Since we can't do the (potentially deadly) experiments to break it down physiologically, we're kinda stuck here. It cmight as well mean "soul" for all that it's used any differently.
cae_jones
7mo ago
In spite of being exposed to a bunch of supposedly relevant data in the past few weeks, I feel compelled to ramble about myself / my family / other narcissism-flavored anecdata.
So first of all, divorce would appear to run in my family. My maternal grandmother maried at least thrice, and my paternal grandparents maried young and died single. As my parents were maried 3 months before I was born, well, grandma was starting on marriage 3 at the same time, so I'm not sure that "shotgun marriage" is accurate, but...
Then my parents divorced before my episodic memory kicks in, and I remember things (and remember remembering things) from before I was 2 (with evidence, and yeah, there were times when my memory and the evidence disagreed, but that's a whole other ramblement.) I don't remember a time when my dad wasn't dating his current wife / my stepmom, but I do remember when they were dating and vague images of their wedding. My mom took longer to find a second husband, but seemed to always be dating someone in the interim. She's currently on #3, after dating him for several years.
My paternal grandparents had 6 children, 18 grandchildren, and when my grandmother died at 71, 42 great grandchildren and 1 great-great grandchild. My maternal grandparents are harder to figure, because they didn't talk much about family members I didn't know, so ... 2 or 3? Maybe 4? I actually did meet my great grandmother on my mother's side, and it seems she had close to as many children as Grandma, ±- 1. That side of the family did a lot of migrating, so has been harder to keep track of. Stepmom is the oldest of 2, and her sister is still childless.
On my great grandmother's deathbed, my mother and her sister-in-law both promised her they'd have another child. Mom did; aunt did not. My mother's stated goal was to keep having children until she got a girl. She got 3 boys, and then a broken work/life balance, turned out second husband was abusing my brothers, ... wait did she pay for that big roadtrip we took in 2002 with divorce money? :O I just realized that makes a bunch of sense. ... anyway, then she had to have a hysterectomy, so has 3 boys and last I heard, 1 grandchild from the middle brother.
My dad and stepmom had my sister, then my dad got a vasectomy... then they got two more kids, because my cousin went to prison and they were the only family members responsible enough and healthy enough to trust with them. We've always lived closest to my dad's extended family, though on the opposite side of town. Stepmom's family are in the same general area, maybe 30min away by car. Mom's family is a lot of military people who have moved around a lot, but somehow they always arranged it so Grandma was around to help.
So going any further without tripping over my weird identity crap is tricky, particularly as I'm starting to suspect the subjects are somewhat related... But by the time I got to puberty, I defaulted to wanting children. However, I was not at all interested in finding a partner, and one of the earliest instances of me imagining myself with kids I remember, I just kinda handwaved away their mother with "we probably got divorced; everyone gets divorced." I had one flash-in-the-pan crush in high school that lasted all of until I found out she already had a boyfriend. Plus, my dad told me in no uncertain terms that I should not mess with girls until college. I got to college, and was not interested in anyone there, even though the hormones would not STFU.
By that point, I'd flipped on the subject of children. Theidea was terrifying, and luckily the antinatalists and environmentalists had given me pre-made rationalizations. It wasn't until I got out of college, was exposed to the likes of Lesswrong, and started questioning even more that I concluded that, no, I always wanted children, but when I got enough wisdom to realize how big a responsibility it is, and how antiprepared I was, and also the conflicts with my special snowflake identity crap, I recoiled in panic and took shelter in rationalizations.
Oh, and my sister has one kid, and finds it so stressful that she's got a progesterone implant and stepmom encourages brother-in-law to get a vasectomy (he is not comfortable with the idea).
My dad is the only of his siblings to avoid jailtime, avoid substance abuse, get out of the white trash ghetto, go to college, hold a long-term job and own multiple businesses, and send 3 of his four kids to college (the other took up welding and farming). Though he is a bit more pronatal than stepmom, his branch of the family appears to be an evolutionary dead-end. It kinda pisses me off when I think of it that way. He did everything right, lived the American Dream and pulled himself up by his bootstraps when that was going out of style, but unless my nephew single-handedly raises family TFR, it seems to have all just been converted into a Disney Vacation Club membership. ... OK, now I'm more sad than pissed.
But for me, personally, that "wants children, but is repelled by the things that go into making them" thing, combined with the super atomized and isolating social situation, renders that super unlikely. Even were I to go back to HS or earlier, I doubt I'd have much success overcoming that, unless a magic marriage candidate just randomly appears.
... So, about that time a magic marriage candidate appeared, and I couldn't convince myself it would work long-term, or be worth the sacrifices (she was clearly not planning to live anywhere near me, so I'd functionally be giving up everything I couldn't bring with me on a gamble that it would work out)... At a not-to-be-repeated 9-month training center that was bizarrely effective at constructing a halfway functional temporary community.
What is the unifying factor in all that mess? ... IDK; economics? Social pressures? Too much aspiring to travel? Parenting failing to adapt productively to the changes in technology resulting in Boomers, GenX, Millennials, and GenZ all having unique excuses that are probably manifestations of an underlying unifying principal?
Yes this.
But also yes to the "puberty is part of the process" catch 22. Why do you have to die to appreciate who you were/are/will be?
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