magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
16d ago
I mean, I'm fairly certain germline-engineering humans with CRISPR is indeed forbidden.
As for "dangerous", well, two reasons.
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CRISPR has a tendency to sometimes misfire and fuck up other stuff than what you intended. When tampering with plants or animals, no big deal, do more than necessary and dispose of the defectives. With humans, more of a big deal.
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CRISPR itself can be encoded into inserted genes. This allows for gene drives - super-heritable traits that are always passed on to offspring (because you inherit one allele for the trait, and then that allele itself overwrites its counterpart from the other parent so you now have two copies and will always pass one of them to any child). One of the more obvious uses of this is in pest control: you introduce engineered versions of the pest species that are super-heritably of one sex, causing extinction when it wipes out the other sex. If such a gene drive were introduced to humans, genocide would be necessary to save the species. More generally, attempts to unilaterally alter the human gene pool this way open up a giant squirming can of worms that we'd all rather remain closed.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
· Edited 17d ago
I have limited experience with Machiavellian manipulation, but my understanding is that the normal pattern is for the cackling villain to tell everyone that X is abusing Y except Y. This is because Y is the one person who has the knowledge and the credibility to publically debunk the false accusation, and it's in the villain's interest for that to be delayed as long as possible.
I suppose it's entirely possible there was such a villain upstream of the people calling.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
Thus I would phrase it more as "Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."
Sure, there's no reason to treat a bisexual in a heterosexual marriage any differently from a heterosexual in a heterosexual marriage. Actions, not thoughts, must be the basis of rewards and punishments, but "cohabiting with someone of the same sex" and "cohabiting with someone of the other sex" are different actions.
(If you extend "membership in a group" to include actions, this statement would seem to preclude locking people up for being in the group "murderers"; I'll presume you didn't intend that.)
'Nurturing of genetic offspring' is also, while easily pattern-matched to the legitimate government interest in ensuring that children are cared for by someone, not a valid argument against same-sex marriage, as a same-sex couple can adopt children or conceive via surrogacy or gamete donation, and opposite-sex couples in which one or both members are infertile are not excluded from government marriage.
Same-sex couples are not equal to opposite-sex couples in child-raising capabilities. There is, for starters, the issue that a same-sex couple trying to raise a child of the opposite sex is not intimately familiar with the biology of that sex and may not recognise developmental abnormalities. There are also biological issues; girls go through puberty earlier without a dad around, for the example I have to hand. Furthermore, human instincts against cuckoldry are strong, for obvious evolutionary reasons, and outside of dubious techniques involving making girls out of two eggs, it is certain that a same-sex couple with children involves at least one cuckold or cuckquean; this does pose a risk, if a small one.
They are still, overall, superior to single parents, but yes, there is a societal interest in there being more opposite-sex couples in particular, and non-recognition of same-sex marriage seems like a lever that could affect it given the far-greater prevalence of bisexuals than true homosexuals. It's not remotely a strong enough interest to justify sodomy laws, but we have government subsidies for many prosocial things without this being considered a heinous sin against those who do not do the prosocial things and thus do not receive the subsidies.
So, cards on the table: I'm a bisexual who's had a homosexual relationship (albeit a long-distance one), and I regret voting for same-sex marriage in our plebiscite due to having been convinced that bisexuals like myself ought to be somewhat incentivised and encouraged to pick an opposite-sex partner. Do I stand accused of animus against myself?
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
I'm not disputing that this is a state of affairs that's a major problem in need of solution. The fact that the Pyro thinks he's helping does not remove people's right to avoid being incinerated - in that case, if perhaps not this one, lethal force in self-defence is perfectly acceptable.
But "know thine enemy" is a basic principle, and there's a difference between some loon who thinks you're an evil alien out to eat his brain and a Mary Ann Cotton.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
Depends on your definition of "evil". I generally require malice, and a malicious actor probably wouldn't try to confirm the situation with the wife before spreading rumours or making false reports to the police.
Not saying there aren't malicious people on that side of the aisle, of course - I'm not an imbecile - but this behaviour isn't something I'd take as evidence of it. With that said, severe delusion without malice clearly can suffice to produce major problems for others; the meme example is of course the Pyro.
magic9mushroom
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20d ago
If one can make claims about my comment history without the most convenient way to “systematically look through” it, one can back it up too likewise.
It's much easier to remember posts than the URLs of those posts, and theMotte doesn't allow searching for multi-word quotes or for filtering a search by a private-mode user.
drive-by
TBQH, most of my posts are on subthreads that showed up on the volunteer page; browsing theMotte is tedious. In this case, @Quantumfreakonomics' post got reported.
moving the goalposts
exact same comment every single time regardless of the subject matter
would be a
pattern in your posts
but the latter is notably shorter and I'm habitually concise.
I tried to check whether his accusation was hyperbolic, as it was relevant to rating his post and to whether I ought to chide him for it (example of me crawling up someone's arse over hyperbole within the last few days, in case you think I'm fabricating). But I hit your privacy block, and I'm not about to chide someone for hyperbole until I'm sure it is hyperbole (hypercorrection is a pet peeve of mine). And, well, hitting that block itself seemed extremely-relevant to your challenge, so here we are.
Part of my intent was to give you the opportunity to give QF a fair attempt, as I figured you may have had it on and forgotten about it. Another part of it was, admittedly, to ensure that anybody reading did not overupdate on QF being unable to provide evidence under present conditions.
magic9mushroom
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20d ago
It's a bit unsportsmanlike to dare someone to find a pattern in your posts while having private mode turned on to frustrate any attempt to systematically look through those posts.
magic9mushroom
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22d ago
It is highly polarized. And that's bad enough.
Agreed.
magic9mushroom
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22d ago
If you think the media is against you, then again that just makes it more important to not give over free wins for no reason.
You've always got to consider the alternative here. AFAICT you don't seem to be at the point of "if you don't do outrageous things, they will deepfake them" where the media reaction is fully a sunk cost, but you are at the point of "if you don't do outrageous things, most of the media time that would be devoted to them is devoted to rehashing the last outrageous things you did instead", which still significantly reduces the marginal loss, and at the point of "most people who consume the hostile media are already going to vote against you", which does likewise.
High polarisation causes a lot of incentives to flip from prosociality to antisociality.
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
· Edited 22d ago
It's unclear what, exactly, they're going to be doing.
"Is Walz about to attempt an open rebellion" is, indeed, the trillion-dollar question, making everything else pale by comparison.
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
The US is maximally polarized, but it has been for a while.
Maximal polarisation is the state wherein everyone's picked a side and will stick to it. This is rarely achieved even in civil wars, and is definitely well beyond the threshold at which one will start (notice that massacres of political enemies become an effective tactic for winning elections when there are few neutrals who will change sides against the perpetrator).
The USA is highly polarised. Not maximally.
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
Is this a typo? ICE just killed a man. Seems like, if that's what they want, then you did in, fact, just give it to them.
I think the logic goes something like this:
"The protestors want violence because they believe the optics will win over neutrals and moderate rightists and thus result in the end of the protested behaviour. However, there are not many neutrals anymore, and the moderate rightists have hardened their hearts and no longer feel for the protestors. The protestors believe it's a win condition, but we and the world have adapted so that it no longer is one."
This is not my personal view. My opinion of the Blue Tribe protest apparatus is actually considerably lower; I think that probably over 50% of them do not actually have a solid picture of what their wincon looks like and how their actions will achieve it, and are merely protesting because protesting is cool within Blue Tribe circles. I think that any in the USA that do hold to the worldview Sulla described - and I'll admit there are some - are making a mistake, but not the mistake Sulla claims (there are still a lot of neutrals); I think the mistake is in assuming that there will be free, fair and competitive elections in 2028 in which the currently-constituted Democratic Party will have a chance but not a certainty of victory, which is required for the lean of neutrals to be relevant and to backchain into present actions of the Trump administration. Civil war and WWIII would both cause that assumption to be violated, violent protests increase the risk of both, and we're getting quite close to crunch time.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
Try to put yourself in the shoes of one of them. All your friends are SJers. Your girlfriend is an SJer. Your internet hangouts are explicitly controlled by SJ, or have filter-bubbled you to the same effect. You probably went to some form of tertiary education controlled by SJ. Your workplace may be controlled by SJ-HR.
If you jump the fence, you're jumping it with the metaphorical clothes on your back. This is not an easy thing to do. In fact, the outflow overestimates it, because a lot of those who do "leave" didn't actually choose it; SJ expelled them first, and that meant they actually started talking to the deplorables leading to an eventual flip. That was my trajectory, for instance.
Well, I mean, it does double every generation relative to population growth (because it's passed on to all children, always), so you only need one to kick it off (or a few, to avoid teething problems with the first affected person happening to die childless). Not an imminent threat of extinction, but of course the longer it goes the bigger headache you're going to have uprooting the entire family tree, and you always have the twin problems of "lots of people will object to genocide"/"the necessary social changes to do it anyway over their objection are not especially pleasant and won't necessarily go away".
More imminently, I suppose there are faster-breeding species that we need that could be targetted, although I can't think of a gotcha off-hand (and likely wouldn't share it if I could; while my innate tendency is to be the Oracle, I make some attempt to be the Sage and not dump all my infohazards into public circulation).
I don't know.
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