self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
Possible? Yes. Very many things are possible, more than this textbox has the room to catalog or contain.
Plausible? No. More importantly, the more epicycles you tag on, the worse the theory gets. UFOs = alien visitation is rickety enough as is, tacking on "monkeys that found a spaceship" doesn't help.
I do agree with you that aliens seem pretty unlikely, I’m just pushing back on the idea that advanced technology implies advanced other things.
You're conflating implies with requires. I'm keeping those things separated. It would be very curious if the operators of this sufficiently-advanced technology were just incompetent enough to get caught so infrequently, with such plausible deniability.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
There is a difference between being skeptical and being hostile. I am immensely skeptical, but I am perfectly willing to accept the proposition that "advanced alien civilizations exist in the observable universe". Unfortunately, the balance of evidence is against it. Our telescopes would have spotted Kardashev 3s. The universe has had plenty of time for even a slightly temporally privileged civilization to make a dent in their astrographical vicinity, to a degree we can see from here.
Why rely on the Kardashev scale? Because energy-consumption, while imperfect as a scale for gauging technological progress, is far better than alternatives in the sense that it would be something we could observe, and what we would expect to observe barring a dramatic upsets. Moar energy = Moar good. Why leave all those stars alone, wasting perfectly good negentropy shining into empty rooms?
Then thermodynamics itself imposes constraints in the form of waste heat. It would be extremely implausible that an advanced, older civilization wouldn't make use of available resources, or that it could completely disguise their heat signature.
K2 and below? They still be very likely to leave obvious signatures on interstellar travel. They don't have the same resources, though interstellar travel is hardly out of the question if you own even a thousandth of a Dyson swarm. The question is why you aren't something useful with that capability, instead of engaging in glorified voyeurism on primitive neighbors. For a more mundane example, the CIA could gang-stalk a random farmer in sub-Saharan Africa. But they don't, because they have better uses for their time and energy.
If there are aliens out there, then they're most likely to be pond scum if they're in our galaxy. If they're more advanced, then they're almost certainly further away, and we have pretty decent limits on what is plausible. If you want more, read up on Grabby Aliens (and lack thereof) as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
The point of all of this is that there is a very long list of observations that do not comport to known phenomenon.
Length and verbosity is a very poor metric for quality of evidence. You can collect a million people willing to swear on the benefits of homeopathy, still doesn't best placebo.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
It is a joke. But I do appreciate the accidental nerd-snipe, that's an interesting tit-bit tidbit!
I have no idea if these ladies came from OG Mormon stock, or if they were made in a lab in Scotland. Presumably plenty of Utah Mormons came from here in the first place, and there's no shortage of (fake) blondes in these parts.
I'm unimpressed. The "they're here" hypothesis is a stack of conjuncts you have to price separately. I say this every single time this topic comes up, because someone has to.
Physics first. For aliens to be in our atmosphere, getting here without us noticing, physics has to break. Hard. Either FTL or energy budgets that make Kardashev-I civilizations look like loose change. Getting even a 1,000 kg probe to 20% of c needs something like 10^18 joules of kinetic energy, and that's a one-way trip. Sub-luminal crewed travel runs into interstellar hydrogen turning into ionizing radiation past ~0.5c, with deceleration costs equal to acceleration.
The energy costs are far from impossible, but the bigger issue is that deceleration would be a dead give-away. There are plausible approaches to stealth in interplanetary space, such as the Hydrogen Steamer, but when we're talking interstellar travel that doesn't take a gazillion years (especially from outside the immediate stellar neighborhood?). Fuck no. You'd be brighter than most stars from our perspective.
The easiest way to get around detection (for a non-standard definition of "easy") would be to get as close to the speed of light as you can, without bothering to slow down. That minimizes the temporal delta between your emissions giving you away and your arrival in system.
There is, however, a serious problem with that. I hope the keen-eyed reader can parse it. If not? Well: what I've just described is a Relativistic Kill Vehicle. Very different from something carrying a cargo you want to survive a journey, to a planet that you also would prefer mostly intact.
I can hear the response: "our physics is incomplete!" Yeah buddy, I know. It came free with the dark matter and dark energy. But if we grant FTL, reactionless drives, warp bubbles, exotic matter etc etc, then all bets are off. But once you've blown off the cost of the trip, you've blown up the priors on what these beings can do.
A civilization that solved interstellar travel has, with overwhelming probability, also solved stealth, signal control, and not-getting-photographed. Conditioning on "crossed several light-years" and "doesn't want to be caught by humans" should not leave you predicting "keeps getting caught on jet FLIR looking like fuzzy tic-tacs." The more advanced you demand the hypothetical aliens to be, the more evidence you need that the cryosleep has given them brain damage bad enough to explain the terrible OPSEC.
I'm not picking one explanation for what's in the released material. Far more likely, ridiculously more likely that it's several things compounding. Sensor artifacts (Sean Kirkpatrick, who ran AARO until 2023, has consistently argued the famous clips are jet engines doing weird things at long focal lengths). Tired pilots, going off a culture that treats every blip as anomalous. Black programs where one arm of USGov tests toys it didn't tell the other arm about. Adversary hardware misclassified, because, at least in theory, China might have some fun toys. Foreign and domestic psy-ops. Plain grift and running cover. A classified drone test, witnessed by a fatigued pilot, captured on a wonky sensor. This can all give you roughly the corpus we have, for far cheaper evidentiary cost.
Aliens? C'mon. I don't rule them out categorically. I just notice that "we're in a simulation and the admins are messing with us" buys roughly the same explanatory power at roughly the same cost in violated assumptions, and nobody treats it as the modal explanation. Pick your absurdity.*
What would move me is something an advanced interstellar civilization should find trivial. Hijack global comms and broadcast a coherent signal in every language at once. Live-stream a constructive proof of the Riemann hypothesis. Set an undeniable craft on the White House lawn at noon, on every camera. Drop asteroids in the Sahara to spell "ssup?" in characters and craters legible from orbit. None of that is demanding for someone who cracked star travel. The action-to-evidence ratio of "do something unambiguous, once" massively dominates "occasionally appear as a fuzzy shape humans argue about for decades." Our tech has gotten better since the 60s. It would be very awkward if theirs has improved at just the right pace to keep getting caught at the same rate.
So you've got a dichotomy. Either they want us to know they're here, in which case the demonstration is trivial and we'd already have it. Or they don't, in which case routinely showing up on cockpit thermal cameras is a level of opsec failure inconsistent with the engineering required to be here at all.
I don't think the evidence forces me to pick either. I advise that everyone chill the fuck out. If you're going to update, then update at the rate of installing Windows 11 from floppy disks.
*I'll dwell further on the fact that the simulation hypothesis and the alien hypothesis are explanatorily isomorphic in the relevant sense. Both posit an agent with effectively unbounded capability who is, for unstated reasons, choosing to interact with us via low-bandwidth ambiguous signals rather than the high-bandwidth unambiguous ones available to them. If you state your reasons, that really doesn't help, since the usual explanations I've heard are really bad. Embarrassingly so. I'm a hard-SF nerd, so if I can't salvage your argument, who can?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
I'm told by reliable yet confidential sources, that the trek to Utah provided ample eugenic pressure. Mostly by killing off the women with inadequate fat stores.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
I had my third encounter with the Mormons of the Bridge.
For the second time running, two bubbly blonde girls intercepted me as I was hustling my exhausted ass back to my apartment. I wasn't paying attention, had earphones in, and assumed I was being asked for directions. I popped out a bud, made the mildly inconvenienced face one gives lost tourists, and was instead asked if I would like to find God and attend church on Sunday.
What I really, really wanted to be doing was lying in bed, dissociating, queueing up another dose of stimulants, and grinding my nose against my exam notes. But I wanted to be polite. So I told them the main thing God could help me with this weekend was exam prep.
The two of them looked at each other and communicated telepathically (as Mormons do), then informed me, with the cheerful assurance of customer service reps reading from a flowchart, that this was no problem at all. God wears many hats, and is a first-line service worker for the academically distressed.
I considered asking whether He might sit the exam for me, reconsidered on grounds of basic civility, and told them I'd be spending the weekend at the altar of an entirely different kind of book.
By this point the exchange had run unusually long. Normally I dispatch them inside fifteen seconds with a polite "thanks, but I'm not interested." It seems my willingness to engage past the standard cutoff registered as encouragement, because they then asked for my number, so they could send a friendly reminder once exams were behind me.
It pained me to decline such requests from reasonably attractive young women, particularly the taller one. But academics come first. I told them this. I didn't tell them that God has nothing if not time, because that would prompt them to argue that I'm the one with limited time under the sun, with the stakes being my immortal soul. However, I plan, eventually, to outlast Him from inside a Matrioshka Brain, at which point the sun has finite time under me. None of which I said aloud, on the grounds that what I was facing was, functionally, a sales pitch, and they'd been rather polite so far. Nor was a windy, windy bridge the best place for a debate about applied transhumanism.
They took non-disinterest as a green light and pressed further. They volunteered the address of their church and helpfully clarified that they belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yeah. Couldn't have inferred that from physiognomy alone, let alone the badge. I'm genuinely impressed by how they mass-produce these people from a single template perfected somewhere in Utah: clean shaven, soberly dressed young men; clean skinned, soberly dressed young women, big honkers as standard issue. The willingness to press without quite tipping into overbearing serves them well in respectable sales careers and at the CIA. I'm less impressed by their theology, though I've seen worse from people far less well-groomed.
In fairness, the operation is well-oiled. The median LDS missionary baptizes 3 to 5 converts a year, which is more impressive than I'd thought.
Why do they keep approaching me? On 2/3 of these encounters I've been the only human on the bridge, so it was me or the seagulls, who are Anglican and not open to conversion. Maybe I look like a particularly lost lamb. Maybe I look like a lost lamb because I am undercaffeinated, in which case they are correctly identifying a state I'm authentically in and misattributing it to spiritual rather than circadian causes. In fact, becoming a Mormon would probably make the coffee-problem worse. Maybe a brown Indian man scores well on diversity-funnel metrics. I'm sorely tempted to attend one Sunday just to see what happens, which is, of course, exactly how they get you.
I told them I'd keep it in mind, and that I knew where to find them. Which I do.
I kept walking.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
Without DNA tests or another man to claim fatherhood, there is no way to conclusively prove you did get played.
A shame, because those exist? That's like claiming that we wouldn't need speed limits on the interstate highway if motor vehicles didn't exist. They do.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
Whatever you do, don't come to Scotland. I'm fine with nail polish, in general, but the nail extensions you can see in the trashier parts of the country are so long and garish they should probably count as edged weaponry.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
Yup. If it's an old injury, and there are no glaringly obvious signs of ongoing inflammation/disease, physio would be the first port of call. I imagine it's easier to go to a physio and then a doctor if they so advise, instead of the other way around.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
Yeah, it really shouldn't taste like fried rice, in the same sense that fried rice shouldn't taste like risotto.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
It's a bit late to be praying that that's the case, but I'm not going to risk it again.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
Not at all. You can spend your entire career as a psychiatrist without ever having to worry about whether you need to use ANOVA instead of MANOVA. I dare say most psychiatrists don't need to know any of this, I've never seen a senior of mine sit down and calculate PPVs or positive LRs while working with a real clinical case. If they ever knew, they've probably forgotten, and it doesn't seem to hurt them.
In theory, this information might come in handy if we need to do critical appraisals of a new paper or engage in research. That's the theory anyway, the practical aspects of it were already iffy, and these days? Everyone is going to check ChatGPT. There are zero clinical scenarios involving a real patient where this specific question matters.
Or, putting it in another way, if I learned psychiatrists are being taught and examined on wrong statistics, how scared should I be?
Don't lose sleep over it. That's my job. I'd rather be unemployed.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
I'm not sure, it didn't taste raw at the time, though I can't that I've eaten raw chicken on purpose to take notes. I threw it in a microwave at maximum heat for 3 minutes before consumption, it came out hot, and didn't taste awful. That's the main reason I even came back looking for it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
Yes. It's even something I order it to do in my user prompt, though it's pretty good about doing it my default.
I tell people to always ask for citations or double check the work when doing anything mission-critical with LLMs, and my professional trajectory counts. I usually ask both ChatGPT and Claude at the same time, to reduce the risk of error/hallucination being correlated, and if they disagree, I dig into it (assuming I haven't reviewed their sources and confirmed things to my own satisfaction). Of course, for less important topics, I don't go that far.
Here, SPMM is remarkably wrong. They're so wrong that they disagree with the original authors of the paper they've used for the question. In fact, every single fucking time I've asked, it's SPMM that's wrong and the LLMs correct (when they do disagree, my bullshit detector isn't perfect either).
So I'm studying for the MRCPsych again, and the standard resource everyone uses for this is called SPMM. SPMM costs money. If you pay extra money, you get mocks. If you feel desperate, you can pay even more money, for a "stats crash course,".
The MRCPsych Paper B is heavy on statistics. Most of my colleagues find this difficult because most of my colleagues went to medical school, where the stats curriculum is approximately "p < 0.05 means good." I find it less difficult, which is not the same thing as enjoyable.
The problem is that SPMM's stats teaching is bad. I read a passage, frown, screenshot it, send it to ChatGPT or Claude, and ChatGPT says "yeah, this is wrong." This has happened enough times that it has stopped being surprising and started being a sort of recurring bit. The remaining percentage of the time, the notes are oversimplified to a degree that would make an actual statistician put their head in their hands, which I'll grudgingly accept as the cost of doing exam prep.
Now, I present the question that broke me today.
There's a study, presumably real, looking at childhood trauma and hallucinations in adulthood. There's a graph. The y-axis is the probability that someone has childhood trauma somewhere in their history. The x-axis is "number of hallucinatory modalities," running from 0 through 5, because apparently the authors decided five was enough senses and shipped it. Sure, I guess we can skip proprioception, vestibular positioning, and the other minor crap.
The question: "The predictor that emerged as the statistically significant variable is most likely to be..."
I pick ratio variable.
Let's examine my reasoning. The variable is a count. Counts have a true zero, where zero modalities is a meaningful and non-arbitrary absence rather than an arbitrary point on some scale. The intervals between values are equal: going from 1 to 2 modalities is the same conceptual distance as going from 3 to 4. And the ratios mean things, in that a patient hallucinating across four modalities is doing so across literally twice as many modalities as someone hallucinating across two. This is the textbook definition of a ratio variable. Stevens 1946. Every introductory stats book ever written.
SPMM informs me that the correct answer is "ordinal." I wanted to die.
I tried to be charitable. Maybe SPMM is operating from some idiosyncratic but defensible framework I'm not seeing. Maybe there's a niche position that count variables with low cardinality should be treated as ordinal because of how they behave in small-sample inference. Maybe somebody, somewhere, has a real argument.
I went to ChatGPT and laid out my case. ChatGPT said my logic was textbook, my answer was correct, and SPMM was wrong, but I should still pick whatever SPMM said in the actual exam because the exam doesn't care about being right, it cares about agreeing with whoever wrote the answer key. This is very sound career advice and also makes me want to lie down on the floor.
I pushed back. I said no, I have standards, I want to know whether there is some technical sense in which SPMM could be right and I am wrong. ChatGPT politely declined to manufacture one. After some pushing, it concedes, and says that I should go with my original answer if this specific question comes up in the actual exam. I screamed internally, because screaming externally would wake my neighbours.
The really insulting part is the upsell.
SPMM, having taught me statistics with the precision and care of a man hammering a nail with a banana, also offers a paid crash course in statistics. I will let you guess how I feel about paying them additional money to clear up confusions they themselves introduced.
There are two hypotheses.
Hypothesis A: SPMM is teaching stats badly on purpose, so that you have to buy the crash course to fix what they broke. This is the version I want to be true, because at least it would mean someone, somewhere, is in charge.
Hypothesis B: at some point, an underpaid registrar was handed a brief that said "write 500 stats questions, here's £500, you have a weekend". They paid peanuts, and the monkey just offered me a banana.
Hypothesis B is overwhelmingly more likely. It is also worse, because at least under Hypothesis A there's a coherent villain. Under Hypothesis B there's just a pipeline of tired people producing slightly wrong content for other tired people, who then sit in their flats at midnight wondering whether they're losing their minds or whether the material is in fact wrong, and there is no one to be angry at, because everyone in the chain was doing their best with too little time and not enough money, and the result is diffuse ambient wrongness that lives in PDFs forever, gaslighting trainees into doubting whether ratios still mean what they used to mean.
Anyway. Number of hallucinatory modalities is a ratio variable. It will continue to be a ratio variable on the day of the exam, and if it doesn't, the number of homicide victims in a future study will remain a ratio variable.
Edit:
The study is "Association between childhood trauma and multimodal early-onset hallucinations" in the BJPsych. The authors ran a hierarchical binomial logistic regression with childhood trauma as the binary outcome and number of hallucinatory modalities as a numeric predictor, reporting OR = 2.24 (95% CI 1.16 to 4.33) per additional modality. You can't meaningfully report a per-unit OR for an ordinal predictor. Reporting that OR is exactly what you do for a count variable on a ratio scale. The original authors treated it as ratio. SPMM has marked me wrong for agreeing with the people who wrote the study.
Last week, I bought fried chicken from an M&S nestled inside my hospital, before heating it in a microwave and then joining the other doctors for lunch. Thought it was pretty solid, and this week, I nipped in to see if I could get another helping.
I found the same dish, read the label more closely and was... less than happy to discover that it said "cook before consumption" on the front, alongside "guidance for handling raw meat". The rear only confirmed my mounting horror. I dare say I felt outright queasy. Oh well, ignorance was bliss, and it's been long enough that if I was going to get salmonella, I'd know by now. I'd rather be a victim of deceptive advertising than food poisoning.
("Southern Fried Chicken", and you expect me to think it hasn't been fried already? Fuck.)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
For the sake of my mental health, I'll assume that you've just had really bad luck. If I moved to the States and never managed to find decent biryani? I'd self-deport.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
I think you have a point. English snobbery is something I've only looked at second-hand, and I hope it stays that way.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
I'll give myself a pass mark, not because I physically went to the gym (I didn't), but because I've been doing non-zero amounts of exercise at home and bought a set of dumbbells (which I did use! I'm not using the mere act of purchase as an excuse).
The next few weeks are going to be hectic. I've got an important exam coming up, and while that's not entire incompatible with working out regularly, it makes it hard.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
You sir, are a gentleman, a scholar, and possibly a gourmet too.
Yeah. British mushy peas can stay in the dishes where they belong.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
While I appreciate the effort, they don't call it the Land of the Free for nothing. I'm sure the lowest ranked state would spank the entirety of the UK.
And I suspect that the climate map is slightly misleading in terms of presentation, if you don't carefully compare across seasons, you'll miss the dramatic temperature shifts seen in some parts.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
And now you're cooking with gas brother. In fact, you've made me incredibly hungry just looking at that, but I will resist the urge by thinking of England (and whatever passes for biryani in the wider UK).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
Plan? More like aspire. If the problem with my med school (they've been lazy about specific American accreditation, and the accreditors just as lazy) gets resolved within the next 3-4 years, it's quite likely I'll give the USMLE. If the problem solves itself later (and I'm a senior psychiatrist) then it's theoretically possible for me to seek to transfer my credentials without the USMLE and another bloody residency program.
At the end of the day, I don't have much control over the timeline. I'm also already in training, I have a good enough shot of progressing further in my career elsewhere, and the thought of sitting down and grinding for yet more competitive exams when I might have a wife and kids does not feel great. Even worse, AI is nipping at my heels, so it might become an entirely moot proposition by then.
But if I have the luxury of choice? Then California, baby. Or Texas. Or most of the US, really, probably excluding Alaska. Scotland is cold enough for me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3mo ago
Sorry dude, I'm the one who is very sleep deprived. Not your fault, and looking at it with a coffee in me, I understand the riff.
Good at apologetics? You just told me that it's not common for Mormon ladies to have massive mammaries. That is the biggest downsell you could hand me, though I appreciate the honesty.
(This is mostly a joke. Mostly. I'm fond of beautiful women.)
I suppose that missionaries are explicitly or implicitly sorted for charisma/looks. I wouldn't want to have uggos repping me if I can help it, though I have little choice in the matter. Thank goodness I mostly communicate through text.
For what it's worth, I have met a total of 7 Mormons in-person, at least that I knew were Mormon. 6 of them were missionaries. 1 of them was my driving instructor, who was a genuinely nice person. I'm an atheist, and an anti-theist, except I don't have the time or energy to get it into those debates these days. The pragmatic reason for it is that religious debate rarely achieves anything - the expected value calculation is poor, for me. I suppose that if you must know, I think Mormonism is particularly suspect as a religion because of the well-documented nature of its founding, which makes the implausible historical claims particularly jarring to me. Other, more established religions have the minor fig leaf of being founded so far back in the past that the truth is murkier, even if I still don't believe in them.
Otherwise? Uh, I have no real reason to dislike you guys. No Mormon has ever bothered me beyond asking me for a few seconds of my time. I just don't think I'm a good candidate for conversion, and I don't want to be converted. I like alcohol, nicotine through vapes, and "drugs", the last category apparently inclusive of coffee. I think I'm reasonably familiar with your religious tenets, but if you still want to explain after I've said everything above, be my guest. I genuinely don't mind.
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