faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
No bio...
User ID: 884
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.
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.
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.
1yr 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.
1yr 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.
4mo ago
You were off by a year.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I don't think "if we save the lives of our citizens it might cause moderate financial distress to our country" is a good reason to consign those citizens to death. Obviously there exists an amount of financial distress where it becomes worthwhile. "plunge the country into poverty to save one life" is obviously a bad idea. I'd argue even the recent case of "devalue the currency by 20% to prevent the loss of an average of 2 weeks of life" went too far on that front.
But I think curing aging would be a massive boon even considering the second and third order effects. I think it would probably be worth it even if it led to a full Zimbabwe-level economic blowup, though I'm not entirely sure in that case.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Surrogates exist.
I don't happen to have any lean beef jerky on hand, but I do have some dried shredded squid, which has 0.5g of fat, 25g of sugar, and 16g of protein per serving (and also, according to the back of the packaging possibly some lead, mercury, and cadmium?!), and that burns quite vigorously. That's rather more sugar (and heavy metals) than I would expect my dried squid snacks to have.
I do expect that even lean jerky would burn pretty vigorously once it got going though. I'll actually run the experiment the next time I have some lean beef jerky (that is not, for some reason, full of sugar and heavy metals).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Do you really get the runaround on those sorts of questions? Because in my experience, if you give social sciences types any opportunity to talk about factors that could affect metrics of success by race / gender / immigration status / whatever, they will happily talk your ear off for hours. They are unlikely to mention genetic factors (outside of epigenetics and "did you know about DNA methylation [...] response to stress"), but that will not stop them enthusiastically brainstorming hypotheses and what studies one might run to test those hypotheses for as long as you're willing to listen.
Group outcomes are made of individual outcomes. Particularly in cases like "making friends with the right people", those individual outcomes may be correlated.
Not that "early luck compounded into long-term differences" can't be mitigated through social policy, but doing so transparently and fairly and in a principled manner is hard for the same reason that "controlling for" stuff in studies is hard.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I mean stonetoss being stonetoss isn't exactly funnier - here's the most recent one where it's just a low-effort dunk, vs this one, which is a bit funnier (though still low effort and not that funny).
On reflection I'd endorse both "the left can't meme" and "the right can't meme". Though is also possible that it's "nobody can meme in a way that people who don't spend all their time immersed in the same culture find funny".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
Key search terms "stylometry" and "social media":
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
14d ago
I challenge the premise "somewhat optimized", we are currently living in dysgenic age.
The optimization happened in the ancestral environment, not the last couple hundred years. Current environment is probably mildly dysgenic but the effect is going to be tiny because the current environment just hasn't been around for very long.
Alternatively, we could just skip detection on which alleles have low IQ and just eliminate very rare alleles, which are much more likely to be deleterious (e.g. replace allele with frequency below given threshold with its most similar allele with frequency above threshold) without studying any IQ.
I expect this would help a bit, just would be surprised if the effect size was actually anywhere near +1SD.
In your hypothetical bet, how would result "IQ as intended, but baby brain too large for pregnancy to be delivered naturally" count?
If the baby is healthy otherwise, that counts just fine.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Morality has nothing to do with game theory
I disagree pretty strongly with that -- I think that "Bob is a moral person" and "people who are affected by Bob's actions generally would have been worse off if Bob's actions didn't affect them" are, if not quite synonymous, at least rhyming. The golden rule works pretty alright in simple cases without resorting to game theory, but I think game theory can definitely help in terms of setting up incentives such that people are not punished for doing the moral thing / incentivized to do the immoral thing, and that properly setting up such incentives is itself a moral good.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
I mean it's more that it's quite obvious that "kys" is bad advice for you, so maybe you should examine the reasons why it's bad advice for you and see whether they're also true of a random farmer's kid in Mali.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
In practice I expect not, if they start trying to turn that military power on groups of their own people.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Or have translations made for every language, etc.
Or build tools to allow everyone to translate anything into their native language. Technological solutions to social problems are great!
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
The argument is that despite some of the questionable things EA has been caught up in lately, they've saved 200 thousands lives! but did they save good lives? What have they saved really? More mouths to feed?
Yep. Some of those "mouths to feed" might end up becoming doctors and lawyers, but that's not why we saved them, and they would still be worth saving even if they all ended up living ordinary lives as farmers and fishermen and similar.
If you don't think that the lives of ordinary people are worth anything, that needless suffering and death are fine as long as they don't affect you and yours, and that you would not expect any help if the positions were flipped since they would have no moral obligation to help you... well, that's your prerogative. You can have your local community with close internal ties, and that's fine.
More cynically I think this sort of caring is just a way to whitewash your past wrongs, it's pr maximizing, spend x dollars and get the biggest number you can put next to your shady bay area tech movement that is increasingly under societies microscope given the immense power things like social networks and ai give your group.
I don't think effective altruism is particularly effective PR. Effective PR techniques are pretty well known, and they don't particularly look like "spend your PR budget on a few particular cause areas that aren't even agreed upon to be important and don't substantially help anyone with power or influence".
The funny thing is that PR maximizing would probably make effective altruism more effective than it currently is, but people in the EA community (myself included) are put off by things that look like advertising and don't actually do it.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
Possible. My guess would be that if you took each user's comments over the past year, you would see minimal change in the decouplishness of that user's comments over the year, but if you looked at comment volume by decouplishness the fraction of comments by low-decouplers has increased substantially over that same year. Though I have not actually run such an analysis -- if anyone does, I'd be super interested in the results.
It was what I expected, based on
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
If the thing being tested is the thing I think it is, I think it's pretty exciting.
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.
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