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.
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.
8mo ago
Because horse-trading is necessary to achieve anything in politics no matter how strongly you feel that your political opponents should just give you what you want with no concessions on your end?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
shouldn’t you be more worried about white nationalists using sophisticated and high-effort argumentation in order to make our side look respectable and interesting
I personally think attempts to recruit by stating and a clear thesis and defending it by engaging with the central points of the counterarguments would be a significant improvement over the current trend, which seems to be "copy/paste kinda incoherent rants and hope it resonates with someone".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
and some of them will become rapists and murders. Maybe they already are. Have you stopped to check? Are they worth saving as well despite the harm they have done / will do?
Yes. Is this supposed to be a trick question? "Some people in a group might become rapists, or might even be rapists, and thus most of the people in that group should get malaria and maybe die of it" is the sort of position a children's cartoon villain would hold. If that's your sincere considered position based on the things you have seen online, I suggest touching grass.
I think it worked better for progressives
Most EAs are sympathetic to progressives, but most progressives are vehemently opposed to EA ideas like "you can put a dollar value on life" and "first world injustice doesn't matter much compared to [third world disease / global extinction risk / animal suffering, depending on exactly which EA you ask]".
It feels too inhuman for most.
I am aware of that. I think most EAs are aware of that. The question is, is the marginal discomfort of a few people feeling more inhuman than they otherwise would worse than a few kids in Mali dying of malaria when they could have lived.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
"I support everyone else following principles that benefit me, but I don’t want to follow those principles myself because they dont benefit me" is like the definition of hypocrisy.
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.
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.
5mo ago
Tuskagee was a spit in the bucket compared to what's happening, not to mention George Floyd, or MeToo. If you can link to making that s sort of argument about these cases, I'll believe that you actually made this argument in good faith.
Huh, apparently reddit is more of a tire fire than I thought, because I definitely made the "what exactly do you hope to accomplish, how does what's currently going on accomplish that, and are there any downsides to normalizing looting unrelated businesses and homes in response to injustice" point during the 2020 riots. But apparently it's been memory-holed. IIRC it was my second most downvoted comment ever.
I've got quite a lot of "measures to contain covid have costs as well as benefits, and I've seen no evidence that the benefits exceed the costs and quite a bit of evidence of the reverse" of you're interested in that.
Honestly though, you will probably not have much success modeling me as "on your side" or "against your side" - I would like to grill, and I object to moral busibodies who get between me and my grill with their schemes to make society better. And I especially object when those schemes aim to solve tiny problems that affect a few thousand people in a country of hundreds of millions, or when those schemes obviously won't help with the problem they're supposedly trying to solve, or when the cure is clearly worse than the disease.
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.
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.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
What happens if there's a crisis and the bulk of the population is economic migrants?
Empirically national solidarity seems to increase when there's a crisis. Unless the crisis is economic, I suppose - if lots of people moved to your country because of the promise of prosperity, and then your country started doing worse economically, those people might go seek their fortune elsewhere.
But yeah, losing the possibility of national solidarity based on centuries of common ancestry is a cost, at least for places where that was ever on the table. I expect the benefits are generally worth that cost, especially in a context where you can only control immigration and not emigration, but it is a cost.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo 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.
4mo ago
I can't prove it but assuming that other minds exist sure does seem to produce better advance predictions of my experiences. Which is the core of empiricism.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
I don't want monopolies (i.e. I think that people should be prohibited by law from colluding with other providers to increase the market prices) of goods that I buy, but for I want other people selling the same thing I sell (labor) to be forced by law to collude with me to raise the market prices.
Fair markets for thee but not for me.
If their presence would make you uncomfortable independent of the factual correctness of their claims, and also your response to that discomfort is to call for them to be banned (rather than leaving yourself), I think you would fall into the "pearl clutching scold" category by the ideals of this space.
I don't think that actually describes you, but it does describe a particular type of poster that I have run into numerous times, and I worry that it would describe the friends you are hesitant to introduce to this space.
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.
7mo ago
Externalities are a very valid point, and one I am sympathetic to in some cases, if the case is actually made that the externalities exist and are not being addressed. However, KMC's statement was
I don't want monopolies for the same reason I don't want foreigners: it's bad for me. No hypocrisy needed.
That does not sound to me like an argument about societal costs and benefits.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
You know more than 1 person, and you know of a lot more people than you know personally. A typical American knows something on the order of 500 people, and knows of probably 20x that many. If there was exactly one person on puberty blockers out of 300 million Americans, you'd expect ~10k / 300M or 0.0033% of Americans to know of them. To get to "0.1% of people know of someone on puberty blockers" you'd only have to have 30 such people in the entire country.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
Elective sterilization.
Fair point. I note that birth control is allowed for minors, and has the same effect while taken as the permanent intervention has permanently. If there were something equivalent for transitioning, I would support allowing only that equivalent prior to the age of majority (if it were actually equivalent, and assuming that the way that regulation was implemented was sane and not batshit-crazy-like-the-rest-of-the-US-medical-system). I think puberty blockers are supposedly this -- I have my uninformed doubts as to their safety/efficacy but I have not actually done any research on this.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
Ah, I read it as "bad for me (personally, because it will lower my wage personally)".
if you're the person who gets to pay slave wages and ignore worker protection laws you don't really notice the costs that you're imposing on other people
And likewise if you buy products where part of the supply chain of that product involved the labor of people who do not receive the pay or worker protections that American workers receive, you don't notice those costs, but you do benefit from the reduced prices. And if the labor involved was voluntary, I think that's basically fine.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
I think if people choose their preferred policies purely on the basis of whether or not those policies personally benefit them, and choose whether to advocate for those policies based on how much they personally will be helped or hurt by those policies, we'll end up with some pretty bad protectionist policies (e.g. the Jones Act, rent-seeking licensing regimes, and other ways of burning the commons for personal gain).
If that makes me a neoliberal, well then I guess I'm a neoliberal.
Intelligence isn't caused by a few genes, but by thousands of genes that individually have a minuscule contribution but, when added up, cause >50% of existing variation in intelligence
I would bet good money that taking a genome, and then editing it until it had every gene which is correlated with higher intelligence, would not get you a baby that was even a single standard deviation above what you would naively predict based on the parents.
Consider a simple toy model, where
- Human intelligence is modulated by the production of a magical protein Inteliquotin (IQN), which causes brains to wrinkle.
- Human intelligence is a direct but nonlinear function of IQN concentration -- if IQN concentration is too low, it results in smooth brains (and thus lower intelligence), while if the concentration is too high, it interferes with metabolic processes in the neurons (and thus also results in lower intelligence). Let's say the average concentration is 1.0µg/mL.
- The optimal IQN concentration for inclusive fitness in the ancestral environment, and the average among the human population is 1.0µg/mL. However, the optimal concentration for intelligence specifically is 10% higher, at 1.1µg/mL (between those concentrations, improved fitness due to increased intelligence is more than offset to decreased fitness due to, let's say, "increased propensity for Oculoumbilical Tendency leading to elevated predation rates")
- The production of IQN is modulated by 1000 different genes IQN000 - IQN999, with the high-IQN variant of each gene occuring in 10% of the population, and where each gene independently causes IQN to increase by 0.01µg/mL.
If you have this scenario, each gene IQN000...IQN999 will explain about 0.1% of the variance in IQ, and yet using CRISPR to force just 5% more of the IQN genes to the "good" variant will lead to poorer outcomes than just leaving the system alone.
All that being said, you should be able to squeeze some results out of that technique. Just not multiple SD of improvement, at least not by doing the naive linear extrapolation thing.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
If it's not politically possible to take both the factory of origin and also the test results into account, it would be worth doing the math to see whether the "use only priors" approach or the "assume uniform defect rates across all factories and calibrate your test accordingly" will yield better results.
Though it would definitely be worth checking if that constraint actually binds you. For example, if you live in a country that sets immigration quotas on a per-origin-country basis, that is not a constraint your country is operating under.
"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.
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