faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
So literally some takes from 5 years ago and a different account, which, if I'm correct about which name you're implying guesswho used to post as, are more saying "in practice sexual assault accusations aren't being used in every political fight, so let's maybe hold off on trying drastic solutions to that problem until it's demonstrated that your proposed cure isn't worse than the disease".
Let he who has never posted a take that some people find objectionable cast the first stone.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Me personally? No. If the US government had given a single known sociopath a license to kill 5 people, though, trying to get them to change that decision would not be a very high priority for me.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Rephrasing - is it a big enough problem that the disease of having ~1k kids/year go on puberty blockers is worse than the "cure" that would be implemented by the political apparatus would be? Being realistic about what historical political "solutions" have looked like.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
... I don't think puberty blockers are as damaging as lobotomies, and also puberty blockers in the context of gender affirming care are like 10x less frequent than lobotomies were at the peak of that craze. I think people 50 years from now (assuming the world of 50 years from now substantially resembles the world of today) will probably think of it similar to how we think about high schoolers smoking or using tanning beds (i.e "basically not at all").
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
I don't think the once-ascendant ideology is particularly entrenched anymore. The anti-woke/anti-trans movement at this point feels very similar to the way the atheism community felt in the 2012 era, as they ran out of defensible causes and started to turn to indefensible causes and on each other. Had they packed up and gone home once their original goals were met (e.g. no prayer in schools) I think the world would be a happier place.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Lots of societies have had to deal with some folly of youth causing some number of kids to ruin their lives in one way or another in their quest for status and acceptance. In ancient Rome, kids seeking social status joined gladiatorial schools, and many of those kids ended up crippled or dying. In Victorian England, girls wore incredibly tight corsets which caused reduced lung capacity, skeletal deformations, and abdominal muscle weakness, which led to lots of health problems (including much higher chances of miscarriage or death in childbirth).
Just because something is a problem doesn't mean a political solution exists. The politician's fallacy ("We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this") is frequently cited as a fallacy due to the third line, but the first line is often also wrong - we don't actually have to try to solve every problem.
I think the use of puberty blockers is a problem of small enough scale and low enough severity that it's probably better to just let it ride.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Which line of that grant application says "no white boys allowed in our science club"? Be specific.
Mind that those numbers are over 2 years or half the term. Unless you're saying there were 6M+ distinct people who immigrated illegally during Biden's term?
Edit: also, for the claim that over half of all illegal immigrants came here in the last 5 years to hold up, we'd have to say that the census under Biden was underestimating in a way that previous censuses didn't. In the absence of better data, I'm inclined to trust the census to at least get the relative proportions correct.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
I live in California, I interact with people who are not here legally on a quite regular basis. Thinking about e.g. the people I know who have a new partner/housemate, or got a new nanny/gardener, and then filtering down to those that are not here legally, they're mostly people who have been here for a while. Substantial selection effects, obviously.
But also census data says, of foreign-born non-citizens, the distribution of dates of entry as of 2023 was
Entered 2010 or later: 12.8M (56%)
Entered 2000 to 2009: 4.9M (21%)
Entered 1990 to 1999: 3.0M (13%)
Entered before 1990: 2.1M (9%)
Total: 22.9M
As of 2021 the same data was
Entered 2010 or later: 10.2M (48%)
Entered 2000 to 2009: 5.3M 24.79%
Entered 1990 to 1999: 3.3M 15.66%
Entered before 1990: 2.4M 11.32%
Total 21.2M
So that's an increase of 1.7M non-citizen immigrants in the 2 year period from 2021 to 2023, with an increase of 2.6M who entered after 2010 (and a decrease of ~900k non-citizens who entered before 2010 over the same time period, who left/died/gained citizenship). And keep in mind that in a normal year 700k to 1M green cards are issued. So I don't see space for half of illegal immigrants to have come over later than 2020.
Where are you getting your data, aside from vibes?
If @do_something had looked at their posting history they would easily have seen that and the length to which @SecureSignals goes to follow the rules of the forum and to engage in constructive discourse.
"Goes to great lengths to engage in constructive discourse" is definitely not the pattern I have experienced when interacting with SS (nor, for that matter, has "follow the rules of the forum", though on that count I'm not sure he's actually worse than the median strongly-opinionated-poster here).
Example of the non-constructive discourse pattern of "throw out a bunch of claims, then when those claims are refuted don't acknowledge that and instead throw out a bunch more expensive-to-refute claims" here.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Most of the 1.5 million trans people in the US are not minors, and the fraction of the trans minors who go on puberty blockers is about 3%, not "only 10%". Unless you're talking about what they do once they reach adulthood, but if you want to forbid adults from doing things they want to do with their bodies, trying to add regulations around what kids can do probably won't help.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
I do see the difference, but moral panics over "think of the children" have a history of having the reactions be cures that are worse than the disease, and I see no particular reason to think that this time is different. Do you have a reason to think that this time is different?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
Huge relative to the number of illegal immigrants already in the country? I will repeat the question I asked Dean:
If you were to go to a home depot parking lot at 7 am and talk to the workers there, what do you think the median time the undocumented subset of workers have been in the country would be? I predict 8 ± 3 years.
Do you predict otherwise? If not, that means that most illegal residents of the US are not recent arrivals.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
If you were to go to a home depot parking lot at 7 am and talk to the workers there, what do you think the median time the undocumented subset of workers have been in the country would be? I predict 8 ± 3 years.
Do you predict otherwise? If not, that means that most illegal residents of the US are not recent arrivals.
The patients in question are minors, respectfully, they don't know what the hell they want.
And then when they turn 18 they become legal adults, famous for making good decisions that align with their long-term interests.
Some guardians approve it, but many have their arm twisted into it by dishonest statistics about risk of suicide. Doctors also mostly wash their hands of the responsibility...
Yeah this is pretty terrible, and the "the statistics on how things actually tend to go in practice are shit to begin with and then further obscured by biased parties on all sides" bit means that it's very hard to make a well-informed decision here. Such is life in an environment of imperfect and sometimes hostile information, but it still sucks.
Why is it beyond the pale to regulate an industry that functions this way?
I don't think it's beyond the pale, I just expect that the costs of regulation here, as it is likely to be implemented in practice, exceed the benefits. I don't actually think it's a good thing that a bunch of teenagers feel like they're trapped in the wrong body and that their best shot at happiness is major medical interventions, I just expect that any attempts by our current regulatory apparatus to curb the problem will cause horrible "unanticipated" problems.
If you have some statistics that show that, actually, regulation here is likely to prevent X0,000 unnecessary surgeries per year, which in turn will prevent Y,000 specific negative aftereffects, I might change my mind on that. But my impression as of now is that this is a small enough problem, and regulation a large and inexact enough hammer, that it's not worth it.
You are not the main problem here, no. Although I don't know who you're referring to as someone who both substantively agrees with you and also engages with difficult questions (rather than e.g. changing or dropping the topic when challenged and then coming back with the same points a week or two later).
Edit: or at least I don't consider you to be the main problem. I don't speak for everyone.
If she's still unmarried and childless in 4 years, I would be pretty surprised (call it 3:1 against). I am not sure how that would affect "my grasp of the reality of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles" because I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.
Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy? Because I generally expect "transhumanist enough to support cryopreservation" would very strongly correlate with "willing to use 'unnatural' solutions like IVF and surrogacy".
Whether or not you can perform a cremation without additional fuel will depend on how much heat is lost to the environment (plus the question of achieving ignition in the first place). My contention is that body mass contains sufficient energy to perform a cremation. This is based on the following logic:
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Humans are made of meat
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Meat with a nontrivial fat percentage contains enough energy to boil all of the water in the meat.
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Meat without the water is called "jerky".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2yr ago
Burning bodies is in fact energy-positive, as worked out in my other comment, and as you could have worked out yourself if you had done the math.
"That's rich coming from someone who is arguing that bodies are flammable and cremation is an energy-positive process" is quite a hostile take. It would probably be a good idea to be damn sure that burning bodies is not an energy-positive process before you drop a take like that.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2yr ago
How is the government in question distinguishing "cooperators" from "defectors" here, such that they are specifically taking the stuff of "defectors"?
If "defector" is a broad enough category, it might still be better to take only some of their stuff rather than all of it, even from the perspective of a government that only cares about obtaining resources for itself.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Or loses a malpractice suit when they do malpractice, yeah. Again, 40k kids a year start "gender affirming care", only 1k of those 40k start puberty blockers. I really don't think puberty blockers warrant special attention here.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
At all. If you cared about corruption by anyone as much as you claim, you should already have investigated the claims against the previous administration, and you would have had no choice but to conclude that it at least looks fishy, and therefore you would have investigated it and you would now have bulletproof arguments that it wasn't corruption
Which specific claims are you talking about here? Hunter Biden? Stolen election? Biden's "fuck all y'all I'm pardoning everyone" end-of-term pardons? The congressional insider trading thing? Or is there some other specific, credible, and concrete accusation of corruption that you are referring to?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
Is your claim that there haven't been substantial changes since Trump took office?
Look like puberty blockers were prescribed for trans reasons to about 1400 kids in 2021, with that number increasing by about 200 kids / year. Puberty blockers were additionally prescribed to about 20,000 kids in 2021 for central precocious puberty (puberty starting before age 8 for girls or age 9 for boys).
As a point of comparison, about 3100 teens between the ages of 12 and 19 died in car crashes in 2021.
Is there a reason you think that puberty blockers, specifically, are a big problem?
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