cae_jones
1yr ago
FTR, my reaction to the idea of medically altering the identity bits is something like "Could you kill me in a less horrifying way, please?"
That said, my issues are more age than gender, and the mental aspect is a significant part of that (which only grows more ... perplexing... over time). The trouble though is that it's hard to define what fixing that would look like. If I'm imagining a magical mind-alteration solution, I like to include a daily "revert the alterations, reflect on how they work" period, because that crap is scary and I expect easier to get wrong than not. I have no idea how this could be accomplished in reallity, other than simulations. But I'm not sure much of mine could be resolved outside of simulations. Ugh. Reallity is better than not existing, but I still complain.
All of which is to say, I get the vicious reactions you get for suggesting altering it mentally rather than bodily. I'd prefer people not be so vicious about it (I'm here and not there for reasons), fwiw.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I am at least down with giving the Sun something of a lipectemy (heliectemy?) to extend its life. Would prefer it never be completely dismantled, for sentimental reasons. Maybe convert it into a constellation of red dwarves.
cae_jones
1yr ago
<Pedantry> Actually, blind people can feel the heat from the sun, and use it to navigate. A better example would be the moon, stars, or planets.</pedantry>
cae_jones
2yr ago
Maybe we should ask GPT4 for a solution? Or at least, whenever someone wants to try a large-scale intervention, they should start asking GPT if it can find any likely downsides.
cae_jones
1yr ago
This. When 9/11 happened, it was abundantly clear to me that the hijackers were villains, fullstop. But it bothered me more when the Bush administration used every excuse in the book afterward to justify invading not one, but two countries, though neither seemed to hold up under scrutiny. Evil people doing evil is bad and tragic, but not that weird. The alleged good-guys turning into trigger-happy invaders, though, is almost like betrayal.
Please notice that I have not expressed any opinions on Israel Vs Palestine, here. Just citing an example of the explanation for disproportionate judgment.
cae_jones
8mo ago
hydroxyapatite is literally produced by your body. It's in your teeth and saliva.
cae_jones
1yr ago
The first guess that comes to mind is that height is plainly visible, and IQ is not.
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
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
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
1yr ago
My inner LLM thinks this is where someone should bring up the possibilities of using AI to level the playing field, at least somewhat.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Fair. I do think there is a preferable middleground between Communism and law of the Jungle, but finding it without painting the planet red has proven challenging.
cae_jones
1yr ago
[citation needed]
I did just learn that it only takes one sentence and a slight amount of context to make me utterly despise a total stranger, so that's ... worrying.
... You're the "you hate it because it's true" type, aren't you?
I hate it because it's evil. True things can be evil, in which case, reallity and we fight until something changes. Reallity has a rather stronger W/L ratio than hunans in general, much less this particular human, and yet, somehow, I'm still not surrendering.
And now I need to find a way to express why I said it's evil. While I generally prefer equality to status hierarchies, I'm not so sure I find hierarchies in general evil. So somewhere between amoral hierarchies and dick-up-your-ass, the problem manifests.
cae_jones
1yr ago
As I recall, you rather dislike HPMoR, but this discussion reminds me of the one time it did make an argument in favor of deontology. ... in chapter 108, and I'm not sure if we have spoiler tags, here?
It's much easier to make a convincing-sounding argument to violate a rule, than to find a genuinely good and acceptable reason to violate the rule. Even profoundly intelligent people are vulnerable to deception, biases, temptations, etc, and that makes deontological injunctions a valid defense against those failure modes.
In my experience, the downside is that, when breaking a rule fails to have any noticeable negative consequences, it becomes easier to break the rule in the future. One might argue that this is a sign that said rule wasn't worth having in the first place, to which I must point out that the way the brain associates actions with outcomes can only predict so far ahead on incomplete information. See also: the crack and opioid epidemics, small lies that turn into a house of cards you're forced to live in, how the whole free love and hookup culture things turned out...
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
1yr ago
There's a way to get into your Google profile and view what it thinks of you, and make changes if you wish. I don't remember how, exactly; the last time I tried, I got so annoyed that it thought I only graduated high school that I nearly added my education history, before remembering that I don't actually care for Google knowing everything about me. I think it's something something accounts.google.com, but, it's also Google, so there's probably some encantation that will convince the search box to send you there.
cae_jones
2yr ago
Ability to orgasm seems orthogonal to the quality of one's shape to me. Inability to reproduce seems more relevant, if we're talking about sexual function.
cae_jones
2yr ago
I pretty much exclusively use my iPhone to do internet things, unless I need to upload or download files (and sometimes I'll just download those to a cloud service via my phone and get to them later).
Don't think I could stand to type so much without Braille Screen Input. And it has had versions where the problems rendered it nigh unusable. A bluetooth keyboard would probably be better, but IDFLI.
cae_jones
2yr ago
So I need to ship a package from the US to China, and a quick search leaves it unclear which if any services do so at present, what with the COVID policy shenanigans. And distinguishing shady from legit on the first page of results seems... like the sort of thing I should seek another opinion on.
So, what should I do to get this package sent?
cae_jones
3mo ago
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them… it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.
No. This implies that everyone has evidence for miracles, and only by faith can they be denied. This is just plain false. Likewise, many who believe in miracles have only books to go on. This feels like a slightly less awful version of the "how can you not believe, when God is clearly pumping divine sensation into your system?" argument.
cae_jones
1yr ago
My original proposal was to give money to people who work 30 hours a week and get paid less than $30/hour. Because if we're doing payouts to random people, actual workers should get it, not people who took out ill-advised student loans and may often be quite privileged.
Umm. Unless that 30h/week is the maximum, I fall into both groups. And while my home is ... unflattering, I do own it and the land its on, which makes my <$14/h paycheck go pretty far.
Biden already refunded most of my college debt in the first round, which ... made me kinda uncomfortable. As much as I'd like a raise, and maybe a big pile of money to fund personal projects, something about getting pander cash handouts from both parties ... makes me want to quote HPMoR Quirrell's reply to Hermione when she told him he was evil. I think something that ends in me wanting to quote Voldemort says something about either myself or the scenario; I'm just not sure which.
OK, OK, so I'm going to try and rationalize all this pandercash on the grounds that I'm probably going to be trying to recruit blind people for accessible gamedev work, so much of it will get redistributed to blind people with less economic power than me. ... Still feels sketchy.
cae_jones
1yr ago
So, I'm working on a game where an NPC is probably trans. I say probably, because I had the character's design and the mission they're part of and other interactions mostly worked out before realizing that it kinda made sense in context.
The context is a sort of pastoralist style Utopia sponsored by fully automated luxury space communism. Clarketech abounds, but the exact limits are only defined in so much as they are plot/gameplay-relevant. The antagonist is a bio-engineer who thinks that this civilization has gotten stuck in a local maximum, and is way more transhumanist than most people in the setting (most people the player interacts with, anyway). Oh, and he thinks that whole capitalism thing isn't quite so out-dated as everyone else, but he keeps his shady dealings with extragalactic warlords to himself.
The original idea for this sidestory was based around the idea that the boss's bio-engineered minions were scowering the region for the player's party, and this NPC happened to be the local misfit who first notices disturbances the local miniboss causes. As I expanded way more on the worldbuilding and backstories for other characters, it occurred to me that the boss would totally have offered body modification services to the people with the rarest issues, especially if he could learn how to improve on longevity-extending treatments in the process, and some of the other miniboss encounters fit perfectly with said minions keeping tabs on the boss's most unique clients. Since this NPC was established as having an unsure time fitting in locally, and just happens to live within sidequest distance of one of the miniboss encounters...
Actually, what made me realize it was when I noticed that the local species had sexual dimorphic qualities, and I accidentally hinted at a mismatch with this character, and all of the above pointed toward their being trans as an explanation. FWIW, the people of this world have feathers, with males having bigger, more flamboyant plumage. This NPC was supposed to be female, but I gave her a rooster-esque red streak without considering the implications (I was aiming for evoking the image of a ponytail). So, I figure her comb must be reduced, else it'd be dysphoria-triggering, but could still have distinct coloration, and she could still have the habit of compulsively smoothing it, especially when stressed. The clarketech is very likely strong enough to enable her to pass perfectly otherwise, but after the player finds the boss's former clients/victims near all the other minibosses, and the only things that stick out about this character is her awkward relations to her community and her nervous tick, people wanting to read into it could probably draw the conclusion.
... Maybe. If that can be improved, I'd love to hear suggestions as to how. I'm not super confident about it. But it accidentally fit perfectly, so eh.
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).
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?
More options
Context Copy link