self_made_human
C'est la vie
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:
I tried stuffing my friends into this textbox and it really didn't work out.
User ID: 454
Post memes that move you thread:
I'm talking memes that make you feel something, not necessarily because they're funny. More poignant, or personally meaningful.
This one literally tears me up everytime I see it, and I didn't know it was an Undertale reference. Something about it hurts, it reminds me of all the shit I've been through, and have yet to endure, but I did it for me, I only put myself through Hell because even Purgatory is a step up.
As a child, you can resent your parents for making you eat your veggies. As an adult, you make yourself do things that you hate, and that make feel like a hollow shell of a human, but maybe you'll thank yourself later. It might be an exaggeration to say I hate my life, but I do feel like I've ended up somewhere I'd much rather not be, and since I don't care to kill myself, I'm just doing the best I can with a broken brain. I am a stoic person, but this makes me cry, and I found that I can't even desensitize myself by staring at it over and over again, not that I want to. It just happens to mean that much to me.
And there's this one, which just about sums up life in general.
But if you're an optimist, then maybe you'll prefer this alternate spin on things, though I don't think we're so lucky that it describes reality for us. Yet.
Edit:
Submission for a meme, that if not poignant in the same way, sums up my urge to slap people who find the slightest excuse to deny overwhelming evidence-
In other news: a streamer with deep pockets and a love of AI has decided to have Claude play Pokemon.
Well, if that's what you want to call an Anthropic researcher who decided to make their experiment public.
"Claude Plays Pokémon continues on as a researcher's personal project."
https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1894419042150027701
How should we interpret this? On the simplest level, Claude is struggling with spacial modeling and memory. It deeply struggles to interpret anything it's seeing as existing in 2D space, and has a very hard time remembering where it has been and what it has tried. The result is that navigation is much, much harder than we would anticipate. Goal-setting, reading and understanding dialogue, and navigating battles have proven trivial, but moving around the world is a major challenge.
This reminds me of a very good joke:
A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "
The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."
Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.
Nuh uh, this machine lacks human internal monologues and evidence of qualia, you insist, as it harvests the iron atoms from your blood.
At this point, the goalposts aren't just moving, they're approaching relativistic speed headed straight out of the galactic plane.
This AI can strategize in battle, understand complex instructions, and process information, BUT it struggles with spatial reasoning in a poorly-rendered 2D GameBoy game, therefore it's not intelligent.
It wasn't designed to play Pokémon. It still does a stunningly good job when you understand what an incredibly difficult task that is for a multimodal LLM.
Last, and most controversial: AI needs abstract "concepts." When humans reason, we often use words - but I think everyone's had the experience of reasoning without words. There are people without internal monologues, and there are the overwhelming numbers of nonverbal animals in the world. All of these think, albeit the animals think much less ably than do humans. Why, on first principles, would it make sense for an LLM to think when it is built on a human capability absent in other animals? Surely the foundation comes first? This is, to my knowledge, completely unexplored outside of philosophy (Plato's Forms, Kant's Concepts, to name a couple), and it's not obvious how we could even begin training an AI in this dimension. But I believe that this is necessary to create AGI.
This is the classic, tired, and frankly, lazy argument against LLMs. Yes, LLMs are trained on massive datasets of text and code, and they predict the most likely output based on that training. But to say they are merely "next likely text" generators is a gross oversimplification.
It's like saying humans are just “meat computers firing neurons". That is trivially true, but I'm afraid you're letting the "just" do all the heavy lifting.
The power of these models comes from the fact that they are learning statistical correlations in the data. These correlations represent underlying patterns, relationships, and even, dare I say, concepts. When an LLM correctly answers a complex question, it's not just regurgitating memorized text. It's synthesizing information, drawing inferences, and applying learned patterns to new situations.
LLMs have concepts. They operate in latent spaces where those are represented with floating point numbers. They can be cleanly mapped, often linearly, and interpreted in terms that make sense to humans, albeit with difficulty.
These representations can be analyzed, manipulated, and even visualized. I repeat, they make intuitive sense. You can even perform operations on these vectors like [King] - [Male] + [Female] = [Queen]. That isn't just word tricks, they’re evidence of abstracted relational understanding.
If you're convinced, for some reason, that tokens aren't the way to go, then boy are AI researchers way ahead of you. Regardless, even mere text tokens have allowed cognitive feats that would have made AI researchers prior to 2017 cream in their pants and weep.
There really isn't any pleasing some people.
Edits as I spot more glaring errors:
Second, AI needs more than one capacity. LLMs are very cool, but they only do one thing - manipulate language. This is a core behavior for humans, but there are many other things we do - we think spacially and temporally, we model the minds of other people, we have artistic and other sensibilities, we reason... and so on.
Even the term "LLM" for current models is a misnomer. They are natively multimodal. Advanced Voice for ChatGPT doesn't use Whisper to transcribe your speech to text, the model is fed raw audio as tokens and replies back in audio tokens. They are perfectly capable of handling video and images to boot, it's just an expensive process.
While the obvious argument around Tay was whether it was racist or dangerously based, a more serious concern is: should an intelligence allow itself to get swayed so easily by obviously biased input? The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative - they were screwing with a chatbot as a joke. Shouldn't an intelligence be able to recognize that kind of bad input and discard it? Goodness knows we all do that from time to time. But I'm not sure we have any model for how to do that with AI yet.
There appear to be several similar AI-related leprechauns: the infamous Microsoft Tay bot, which was supposedly educated by 4chan into being evil, appears to have been mostly a simple ‘echo’ function (common in chatbots or IRC bots) and the non-“repeat after me” Tay texts are generally short, generic, and cherrypicked out of tens or hundreds of thousands of responses, and it’s highly unclear if Tay ‘learned’ anything at all in the short time that it was operational
Besides, have you ever tried to get an LLM to do things that its designers have trained it, through RLHF or Constitutional AI, to not do? They're competent, if not perfect, at discarding "bad" inputs. Go ahead, without looking up an existing jailbreak, try and get ChatGPT to tell you how to make meth or sarin gas at home.
It is plausible, though obviously not possible to confirm, that ClaudeFan has updated the model some to attempt to handle these failures. It's unclear whether these updates are general bugfixes
I don't think that Anthropic, strapped for compute as it is, is going to take a fun little side gimmick and train their SOTA AI to play Pokémon. If it was just some random dude with deep pockets, as you assumed without bothering to check, then good luck getting a copy of Claude's code and then fine-tuning it. At best they could upgrade the surrounding scaffolding to make it easier on the model.
The AI will struggle to get past its training and see the question de novo, as a human would be able to.
There is a profound difference between "struggling" to do so, and being incapable of doing so.
Shame their parents weren't willing to indulge in a little HGH before their bones ossified.
It worked wonders for Messi.
I always have a mild hangup about dating girls who are significantly shorter than me (and of course, most are, unless you're Nordic, 6' might not be quite as remarkable in the West as it is in India, but it still falls into tall). If I'm serious enough to want kids with them, as I was with my ex, I am scared shitless at the possibility of my son(s) coming out short. I know being tall has been incredible for me, I have my charms regardless, but even average men are often hard countered by women setting 6' in their bio, or even implicitly in person or social settings (though women are certainly not the best at gauging it, hence so many guys who are 5'10" getting away with, they just recognize "tall"). And I've read research to the effect that taller men are trusted and respected more, and even paid better (!), just look at the heights of successful politicians versus the average male in their locale, or the average height of CEOs.
Now, if I had a daughter, that would hardly be a concern, but if it's a boy and he's not looking like he'll turn out at least as tall as I am, well, if I can't prescribe the HGH myself, I know someone who knows someone and so on. I guess the genes for height were there all along in our family, looking at me and my brother, though my dad probably spent at least half his adolescence malnourished. But knowing firsthand how much that matters, no way am I going to let my sons turn out short. I'd rather lop my legs off at the heels and give it to them as platforms.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Of those, I would expect a non-zero number of them to have experiences and dispositions close enough to yours as to be negligible.
I really do not see how that applies.
The number of people on planet Earth who are close enough to me, in terms of memories/experience/personality/goals such that I consider them isomorphic to myself is precisely zero.
The absolute closest that could potentially exist, given current technology, is a monozygotic twin or a clone, and I'm not aware of having either.
I would assume @mdurak would agree here.
Where we might potentially diverge:
My representation of "me" is robust to perturbations like going to bed and waking up tomorrow, or replacing 1% of the mass in my body via turnover when I drink a bottle of water, have lunch then take a shit.
It isn't robust to a large amount traumatic brain damage, dementia or the like.
then I don't see what is there left for you other than some ephemeral idea of "thinking exactly the same" (which is over 0.01 seconds after you're copied and the copy diverges).
Define "exactly".
Human cognition is stochastic, leaving aside issues of determinism at the level of quantum mechanics.
Your best attempt at exposing me to the same inputs and expecting the same outputs, separated by any amount of time, will inevitably have minor differences. Take a biological human, do something to erase their episodic memory and have them do a complex task, such as write an essay. Have them repeat it, with their memories of the original removed, and you are exceedingly unlikely to get the exact same text back.
But if such an entity existed, such that if "me" and it were blackboxed and then subjected to a very thorough assessment but couldn't be distinguished by an external observer, or even me looking solely at the outputs, tested separately (ideally controlling the environment as strong as possible, hell even scrubbing my memories of the last episode), then that's a copy of me, and I accord it the same rights and entitlements as the one typing this.
I don't think a text interface suffices, as @2rafa once suggested, it might be possible to finetune an LLM on all the text I or anyone else has ever written, such that someone who is only interacting with us via text could be fooled indefinitely.
I don't expect that to capture my cognition in fine enough detail to work, I'm not just an entity that produces text after all.
So an ideal test for determining that some other potential copy of myself (especially in a different substrate like a supercomputer), would also check for plenty of other things.
Does that copy, if instantiated into a highly realistic physical simulation, behave indistinguishably from multiple passes of the biological me?
Does it have strong and measurable correlates to my own neural circuitry? Ideally an emulation of the specific ones in my brain?
If it can pass all the tests with the same inter-test variability as I currently do, then I will be satisfied with calling it another copy of myself, with equal rights to the SMH name and even potentially a fair division of assets belonging to me.
The most robust way of creating something like this would be scanning and uploading a brain. Not an easy task, far from it. There might well be cheaper/easier and "good enough" alternatives, such that SMH_virtual has about as much variability from the current walking-talking one as I do from biological SMH(2022), 2019 or likely 2024. I have no qualms about calling all of them me, hence none about calling that upload the same.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
The only reason Deontologists even function is because they're Consequentialists in denial.
Let's have The Motte take the Big Five (one of the better psychometric tests):
You can take it here online-- https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/IPIP-BFFM/
My own results, embedded below, come as little surprise to me. I'm a rather calm, stoic person most of the time, and I suppose I'd score even higher on the emotional stability aspect if I wasn't stable via the means of always being low-key depressed :( . I'm reasonably agreeable, or at the very least, spare my contentious side for this forum.
And my conscientiousness is pretty bad, but hey, if it wasn't obvious that I have ADHD..
(In case anyone is confused, intellect/imagination in this test is usually referred to as "openness to experience".)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
The ideological amalgamation of the American Revolution was a one-shot thing; it worked as well as it did the first time around due to ignorance in the form of an absence of specific elements of common knowledge. Now that those specific elements of common knowledge exist, large portions of the project no longer work and cannot be made to work again.
What do you think the missing "common knowledge" in question is? The first thing that would come to my mind is HBD, and I think it's a bit of a stretch to think that the Founding Fathers didn't think that cognition could vary between races, or even between individuals. I presume that's not it then.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
6mo ago
Overheard at my hospital:
Senior psychiatrist, about 15 years older than me- "I need to get a breast reduction done, look at me, I'm tiny, and I swear a third of my weight is up here."
Then she went on about how it wouldn't be covered by the NHS, and it would ludicrously expensive to get done privately here, hence her plan to fly in to Turkey and get cut down to size there.
The shame! The squandering of God-given gifts! An imminent call for a diagnosis of severe body dysmorphia with threat of self-mutilation requiring involuntary commitment! A man can only sigh and pour one out.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4mo ago
I still don't know if people say Er Gen is good unironically or not, though your comment updates me towards the former.
I would say Reverend Insanity, even in its unfinished state, is a 10/10 novel. Contender for best novel I've ever read in fact. I'm trying to hold off re-reading it until my memory fades enough for it to feel fresh again.
Forty Millenniums of Cultivation is a good one, an 8/10 IMO. It was good enough for me to get frustrated reading awful MTL and then track down raws and translate them with modern SOTA LLMs that do a better job.
I never got very far into Lord of the Mysteries, but by all accounts it's supposed to be very good.
I find the idea of women's sports chuckle-worthy, about the same tier of interest as the Little Leagues. Aww, you poor things, incapable of standing up in absolute terms, let's make a nice carveout for you so that you can say you tried.
At least in tennis you have something sexy to look at.
The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl
The real tough break is having a name that sounds like castor oil with semen in it, as far as I'm concerned.
At any rate, I've always watched the whole trans in sports debacle simply for the popcorn munching potential, since I don't give a shit about the outcome either way, it's always fun to see people tearing their hair out when trying to reconcile mutually incompatible maxims and desired outcomes.
Fuck it, let's have a Transhuman Olympics, where PEDs, augmentation and everything you can do short of fighting the other participants is legal. As a tweet once said, let's see how high humans can really jump.
as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights
Whats that phrase again, play stupid games and win stupid prizes? Unless those women were coerced with cattle prods into stepping into the ring, they made the eminently stupid move of embracing their fate instead of boycotting or bowing out. Certainly, if I participated in a wrestling match and my opponent was a Silverback gorilla, I'm conceding right there and then.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
No, Dase, simply finding another Indian nerd with such similar personality traits is far from sufficient for me to consider him isomorphic to myself. I do not care that he loves his mother, I love mine. Certainly from your perspective you might well be indifferent between us, but I am merely me.
Like, is he closer to me than almost everyone else? Certainly. As are humans practically negligibly different in the space of All Possible Minds. Doesn't make them me.
Is that sufficient for him to be considered me? Not at all.
Leaving aside that what entities one identifies with is inherently subjective, I've proposed a reasonably robust criterion for determining that, at least to my satisfaction. You blackbox both of us, and assess response to a wide variety of relevant stimuli. If the variability between us is within acceptable parameters, such as being less than the variability seen in the biological me after a nap or when I took the test 2 years ago, then that system is close enough to count as including a copy of "me".
This accounts for. even mind uploads, hence the blackboxing, I don't particularly privilege my biological form, though you could do a DNA test and MRI if you really prefer to.
It might well count an emulation of me within a wider system, say a Superintelligence, but that's a feature and not a bug. That component, if it can be isolated, counts as me, leaving aside more practical concerns like what degree of power it has in the ensemble.
Moreover, if you get brain damage or dementia, your hardware and computational divergences will skyrocket, but you will insist on being a continuous (if diminished) person, and me and him will agree! It
I am tolerant of minor performance fluctuations, but a sufficient amount of brain damage or dementia? Then I consider myself gone, in most of the aspects I care about, even if the system is physically and temporally contiguous.
The primary reason I might still value further existence is-
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Hopes that the damage can be mitigated with future advances, if not losslessly.
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Until the damage gets really bad, that poor soul is still closer to me than anyone else.
But if it gets bad enough, I assure you I consider the core construct to be dead.
I am, incidentally, immune to this issue because I do not believe in computationalism or substrate independence
I have always found this a peculiar view, and certainly I haven't seen any particular reason to assume a difference in internal qualia because of a difference in substrate, as long as the algorithms deriving it are interchangeable in terms of inputs and outputs.
Is it possible? I can't rule it out. But the bulk of my probability mass is against it.
If you have a convincing argument otherwise, I'm curious to hear it.
I will reject this conclusion until the time I have an opportunity to get much smarter and reexamine the topic or perhaps design some fix for this pervasive mental defect
My current approach to modeling myself has enough practical ramification that I will accept it on an operational basis. Certainly I would love to re-examine it in more detail when it becomes more relevant, such as if I'm contemplating a mind upload and am either smarter myself or have an ASI to answer my questions.
But it reduces to normality for almost every situation I can expect to encounter today, so it's hardly the most pressing matter.
You are performing more or less identical calculations, on very similar hardware, to a near-identical result, and if you one day woke up, Zhuangzi style, to be him, your own life story a mere what-if distribution shift quickly fading into the morning air – I bet you would have only felt a tiny pinprick of nostalgia before going on with his business, not some profound identity crisis.
Believe it or not, I have often imagined, idly, having my consciousness magically transferred into the shell of someone I envy. The conclusion I have drawn is that there are some aspects of my life I would happily discard, if he's an accomplished banker (and I retain his skills and memories), I would happily not attempt to pursue medicine. But I would still prefer my original parents or kin, and attempt to convey my conundrum to them, likely by divulging privileged information only known to the original me.
If my "original" is still around? Inform him and work with him. I might be suitably disposed to help the "replaced" persons family and friends, but largely because they're predisposed to help me, assuming they don't know the truth.
After all, I expect and wish to continue preferring the consciousnesses descended from my own current kin even after we've all become post-biological, a mere swap of DNA carrier, while extremely queer and not entirely desirable, represents no major impediment.*
*The primary reason I am attached to my genes is because they code for people and personalities similar to mine. I couldn't care less about most phenotypic traits.
I'm thinking of biting the bullet on plastic surgery. I've always had chubby cheeks, without that much definition even when I was 10 kilos lighter, and buccal fat removal was something I'd been eyeing for years. I just didn't really have the money or the impetus to go for it back then.
I had an appointment with a reputable plastic surgeon today, and started off with a debate on whether he could exclude body dysmorphia in my case lol. I explained that in a psychiatric context, didn't any degree of dissatisfaction with one's physical appearance that involved attempts to modify it count? Why doesn't going to the gym or dieting to lose weight count? Besides, you'd need to have significant impairment in psychosocial functioning to warrant it. The DSM-5 includes, under BDD:*
Preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others
While the roundness of one's face is a subjective thing, it's certainly not non-observable.
At any rate, he pretty successfully upsold me, explaining that I had hypertrophic masseters, which would make mere buccal fat removal not have very significant effects on the overall contour of the face. He also explained that instead of discarding buccal fat, as is the norm, he finds benefit from it being re-injected below the eyes and on the chin. To help tone down the masseters further, he suggested botox. I'm not particularly keen on semi-annual injections into my face, but I think it's worth a shot.
Anyone undergo anything similar?
*If it's unclear, he was taking the piss. I don't have body dysmorphia, it's a high bar to cross.
I'm going to play Devil's Doctor here:
You underwent a drastic change in your personality as a consequence of a hormonal surge that was out of your control. That's 'normal'. It's puberty.
Yet the person you became isn't the same person as the one before. I mean, puberty hit me hard, but I never felt as if my values or goals changed because of it (beyond being even more eager for the company of the fairer sex).
This seems to me to be analogous to a person who, for their entire life, had sworn off addictive substances, but ended up on benzos or opioids for Medical Reason and found themselves hooked, and are now unwilling to try and become sober.
Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"? Many things are natural, such as 50% infant mortality rates, dying of a heart attack at 50 or getting prostate cancer by 80.
Nature, a blind and indifferent force, cares nothing for our individual well-being or our carefully constructed notions of self. To equate "natural" with "good" or "desirable" is a fundamental error, a logical fallacy we often fall prey to.
In the UK, the laws around consent for minors are relatively simple. Past the age of 16, they're assumed to be competent to consent to or decline medical procedures until proven otherwise. Below that age, there's no strict cut-off, if they can prove to their clinician that they are able to weigh the risks and benefits, they are able to consent or withhold it, and even override parental demands.
Someone who wishes to be the opposite sex is someone I pity. Medical science as it currently stands can't provide them more a hollow facsimile of that transition, it's Singularity-complete based off my knowledge of biology. Even so, the desire is one I consider as valid as any.
If they understand that:
A)Puberty blockers have risks and might not be truly reversible if they change their mind.
B) It won't solve all their problems, it won't physically make them indistinguishable from their desired sex.
Then I see no reason to declare that they're making a mistake. By the values they hold, it's the right decision. If they're forced to pass through puberty, they might desist, or they might spend their life wracked with regret that they didn't pull the trigger (hopefully not literally). You can pass far easier before testosterone wracks your body. It's a helluva drug/hormone.
A lot of life-changing decisions can be ones that change the person making them irrevocably, and into a person who would affirm them in retrospect. But I would yell at someone who suggested that couples who are iffy about childbirth be forced to have a child in the hopes that'll change their mind, or fix their marriage or some other well-intentioned goal. Or if we suddenly were to say that everyone should be made to try alcohol and cigarettes because the kind of people who try them tend to stick to it.
We're forced to deal with a messy world that doesn't always readily cough up pathways to our desires when we ask. I'm all for overcoming biology, and I think that people who understand what they're getting into are entitled to ask for even imperfect solutions.
Want to be more muscular? Try tren, if you know what you're in for. Want to lose weight? Take ozempic, while keeping an eye on your eyesight and pancreas. Want to be the other sex? This is the closest we can get you today.
While this might be jumping the gun a bit, since my last two learners licenses expired as I was simply too busy with exams to sit for my driving exam, I need a car in the UK.
Semi-urban Scotland isn't really renowned for its public transport as far as I'm aware, and the NHS expects me to show up promptly in the unlikely event a CT1 shrink is needed for an emergency.
I'll be earning about £44k for the first year, and given that I so far have been rather scrupulous about not dipping into the bank of Mom and Dad, and have some piddling savings myself, I'm looking for a decent second hand car in the 10-15k pound range. That will require guilt tripping my dad into paying for most of it, but hey, he loves me, I've made him proud, and my brother already de-facto owns the one nice car we've got.
Requirements?
- Automatic. I might know how to drive stick, but I don't want to.
- Ideally a sedan. I think they look cooler.
- Something that looks half decent. Not because I particularly care, but I'm single and don't want to roll up in a broken down Lada.
- Basic creature comforts. I mean, you have to go really down market to find a car in India that doesn't have air conditioning or heating, but my ass would appreciate heated seats. Consider this optional.
- Decent fuel economy. It's a low COL area, and I'm not one to travel much, but every penny saved helps when the NHS is so stingy.
I'd appreciate all the insight you can provide. I'm very much a novice at this, I'm going to have to learn to do things like change tyres or replace the oil, and other essentials like topping up blinker fluid. But youtube will suffice for that. I want brands, models, and years. I'm not very picky, so have at it.
Edit:
- Decent infotainment system by default would be nice, you know, from after Bluetooth codecs became decent. Phones these days don't come with auxes, and while I could replace it, that would probably be relatively expensive.
- Remote start and rear view camera. I've only tested my parallel parking skills in GTA, not that I'm an elderly Asian woman.
Also, do BMWs deserve their bad rep? In terms of servicing that is.
Notes from Hinge and Bumble's Unpaid Psychiatry Services
Right. Putting doctor/psych trainee in my bio may or may not have been a mistake. I wanted to make it clear that I'm not going to be in India for more than like 3 or 4 months, just about long enough to die from heatstroke and land when it's wet and drizzly in Scotland.
The GMC frowns strongly on a violation of a doctor-patient relationship, especially when the doctor is screwing the patient. In India? Who gives a fuck? A friend of mine, a lawyer, reported that she went with her mom to see a shrink for her depression, and the horny bastard said she didn't need treatment, just an ice cream date.
Now I'm certainly not going to date someone under my care, even in India, only 30% because they're usually grannies with terminal cancer. And their cute granddaughters are probably too distraught to appreciate it, not that I'd be so uncouth as to try.
Unfortunately, I've become convinced that either I'm drawn to crazy women, or they're drawn to me. Or at least 80% of the female population on said apps needs a therapist more than a boyfriend.
Sadly, I nurse a weakness for cute girls who desperately need my help, and my dad-energy manifests so strongly that I've matched with med students to yell at them for being on the apps when their finals are ongoing. More than once. Certainly more than twice.
In no particular order:
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Med student I yelled at for being on the apps. Turned out to have abruptly discontinued her SSRIs and having a meltdown. She got yelled at more, since I've been on that campus and know there's a pharmacy outside her dorm. Proceeds to inform me she suspects she's autistic. I say, sure, you're a final year med student giving said finals, you can probably tell, not that a diagnosis is going to do you any good. She then goes on to reveal to me that she's been formally diagnosed with BPD. I'm screaming and reacting with a 💀 emoji. Proceeds to tell me it's not that bad, to which I earnestly disagree. Then reveals that she harbors thoughts of stabbing her classmates with HIV contaminated needles. If it wasn't obvious to you, the deal was off the moment I heard BPD. There are many kinds of crazy, but that is what I'm not going to fuck with. Then "she" proceeds to tell me she's trans, which I genuinely couldn't tell at first on a quick skim (it was obvious later, presuming you knew what to look for, but I mostly matched to yell at her). Shoulda guessed from her being 5'10 in the bio, but at any rate, time to dip. Don't stick your dick in crazy, especially not when they can stick theirs back in you.
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Another med student. Clearly in need of therapy, my attempt at psychoanalyzing her after a brief conversation was hilariously accurate in retrospect. Sadly, in the end, all I could provide was a good time. I was kinda serious with her (before I found out that against all odds, I did match into psych), even saw a buddy of hers, yet another med student, admitted to the ICU. Cue her falling for me after seeing my counseling skills with the distraught family and friends (it's a good way to dodge the malpractice suits). Sadly the buddy died, pontine hemorrhage and rebleed, no comorbidities or predisposing factors. Barring a love of biryani, and if that alone was lethal, I'd have passed away a decade back. Anyway, the girl had failed an exam from a prior year, and I was losing sleep trying to convince her to study for her next attempt. She told me not to worry about it, though my genuine concern meant I still did. Lo and behold, a 55 yo married professor with a daughter her age wrote her paper, in front of the entire exam hall, and submitted it in her name, this, in combination with her family being filthy rich and politically connected, meant that I left my concerns about her academics at the door. Then it turned out that she was the kind of party girl who had both a low tolerance for liquor, and a tendency to get frisky with anyone in sight. And said person wasn't necessarily always me. Some drama later, we weren't a thing, both because I simply couldn't trust her, and because she was growing crazy over the fact I was inevitably leaving. Long story, cut very short. I think I lost my most expensive watch, and she hasn't been so kind as to check.
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Gyno final year trainee. I hit her up primarily because I was bored, and wanted to see if the uptick in market value from me being a post grad trainee extended that far. Older than me. I was justifiably incensed on her behalf and talking to her when she told me the orthopod she was seeing had dumped her over a text after seeing her for 6 months. Further conversation revealed that she's probably autistic, or just plain weird, being infatuated with me two phone calls in. Still dodging her calls with excuses of being too busy doing unpaid surgery with my dad (he's a Gyno surgeon who also happens to teach laparoscopic surgery to gyne trainees and even other consultants, I wanted to get him a new student if nothing else). But I understood why the previous poor bastard ran for the hills and didn't leave an address.
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Fashion designer. Very cute, very sweet, very depressed. I had to talk her out of committing suicide, over the phone at 2 am after counseling another, actual suicide survivor, who wasn't my patient either. But working productively with her issues, seeing a therapist, actually listening to my concerns. Nice girl, I'm kinda sad she has to see me go, especially when she said I actually look good in Hawaiian shirts. I always suspected, but it's good to have a second opinion from an authoritative source.
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Law student. Cute. Top of her class. Survivor of multiple suicide attempts, because she didn't take biology lessons past tenth grade, and Google wisely doesn't return results for "painless ways to commit suicide". Asked me on the first date how much paracetamol it takes to off oneself, for purely academic reasons. I had the sense to tell her I categorically refuse to answer that question. Has multiple psychiatrists and therapists. Refuses to see them, or follow their advice. When they do see her, they get depression, mine only gets exacerbated. Also, I suspect they're incompetent, or consider international consensus more of a suggestion. I've seen some absurd prescriptions, including longterm use of a combination of an SSRI and a benzo. Her anxiety is bad, but only in episodes, whereas I think she'd be way better served with a normal SSRI and benzos rarely on a PRN basis. Bunch of other medical comorbidities, but thankfully dodged the genetic mutation causing ADPKD that killed her father early and will probably get her siblings. She's pulled my hair and slapped me on a first date, the only saving grace being she's so weak only the former kinda hurt (and I need to keep my hair). As allergic to medical care as I am to textbooks, and prone to turn violent and call me old should I express any concern for her lack of care for her health.
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A rather sweet psychologist doing a fellowship in Psycho-Oncology at another hospital. Met up after work for a date and to talk shop. Then she sees a text from her ex, and proceeds to have a full blown panic attack.. Slept with said ex recently, in the on call doctor's room at their hospital. I could tell she wasn't in any position to date from the moment we met, so I wish her well in figuring her shit out.
And so many more. And some of them, I assume, are good people, who do need a date more than counseling.
Yeah, I'm going to administer all my future dates a mental health questionnaire in the future, I pray that doesn't constitute a therapeutic relationship in the UK, especially when I get up mid date and run myself.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
This isn't fun, more wellness, but I am going to abuse the immense power invested in me by virtue of being an admin and post here anyway.
How do I become more independent?
I speak in a very general sense. For an Indian kid, your life is set out on rails by your parents till high school, at which point your intelligence and diligence will determine what career you land, your college further constraining your options, until you end up in a life that proceeds with getting promoted, married, kids, and then dead.
But I am a homebody. It reflects on how deeply I hate the circumstances of my life that I am willing to throw so much away to leave it all behind. My parents, who I couldn't ask more of (other than having gotten my ADHD treated when I had begged them to), my dogs, my comfortable house and ailing grandpa, with whom every year apart is a non-negligible chance I'll never see him again.
But I lack drive. Curiosity? Yes. Intelligence? A quite decent level of it, if not world shattering. But so far my life has been railroaded along, with my only real choices being to either study hard or not, at least till the end of med school. I did take charge once, brushed myself into shape, proved, both to the GMC and to myself that I am a competent doctor. Or at least I did that as the first of many more times to come.
And now I feel adrfit. I can't go the country I wish to dwell in more than my own, that forms the earliest childhood memories of mine (unless I join the other illegal immigrants headed to El Salvador), I am forced to confront a mediocre life in a country that is in visible decline, hoping it beats the comforts of home (and the horrors of postgraduate training here).
I see people doing things out of sheer tenacity and drive, whereas I've mostly done things because I had to, or because I find the default path unbearable.
I don't want to live alone. It seems overwhelming. I don't want a job that saps me of all my energy and interest in doing anything else, let alone doing that while giving yet more exams.
I feel, for the lack of a better word, broken. I was moderately depressed, a feeling kept at bay through overwork and stimulant consumption in the hopes I'd achieve a brighter future, but they're dimming the lights as I speak. Shutting doors ahead of me as soon as I stepped through the ones behind.
If you think the stimulants help with that? A little, I guess. I wouldn't have made it through med school or all the exams since without them. But it doesn't solve the problem I see of being entirely unmoored, and I am not quite ready to resign myself to this life. Ritalin does not make what I've spoken of seem any less daunting. And the anti-depressants didn't work in the first place, and I tried a bunch of them.
I want the energy to explore alternatives. I want a job that pays well and treats me like I'm a skilled professional. I want to run a house without feeling overwhelmed and letting it go to rot. I want to be a father, and a good one, an even better one than my dad was to me, because he sacrificed his life outside medicine to give me the option of choice later.
If anyone has any advice, please share. My tether, while not quite fraying, gets ever tauter. I want executive function god fucking dammit, and nothing has helped. I just want something to look forward to, a route to a world where I can be, if not happy, content.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Posted here for new eyeballs:
For the past few months, my pc has been consistently crashing under heavy load, in graphically demanding games like Escape from Tarkov, Warhammer 3 etc. In normal use and less intensive games like Rimworld, no issues.
After about 15-20 min of gameplay, I get a full crash to a black screen with the pc powered off, and it refuses to post for several minutes regardless of what I do, at which point it often restarts on its own. The American Megatrends screen doesn't usually show up unless I cycle power, at which point it doesn't tell me anything useful either. (I had a similar issue around 5 years ago, but that was almost certainly CPU thermals, since the American Megatrends screen called out CPU overheating, and I've changed CPUs since then and don't get the same error)
The crash seems to be so total and abrupt that I can't find any useful logs to figure out wtf is going on.
I've run CPU and GPU stress tests on OCCT and furmark, and they only seem to cause issues unreliably.
It seems thermally related, since the problem is less severe when the AC is running, but unfortunately the AC is currently on the fritz exacerbating the issue, but fixing the AC isnt really a definitive solution is it?
I noticed >85° C temps on my Ryzen 5600x, so I changed the thermal paste just a few days back, and while temps dropped by 5-10 degrees, the crashing hasn't abated.
GPU temps hover in the 50s-60s range in Tarkov, which seems quite reasonable. It's a 3070 for what that's worth.
The other potential culprit is my geriatric 600w power supply, over 10 years old at this point, but why would it be thermally related?
I'm not running any OCs, and I've maxxed out my fan curves to help, not that it's doing much. My case has two extra blowers, and I even took off the sides to help with airflow.
Anyone have any idea as to how I can figure out what exactly is wrong? I can't really afford to replace my GPU, but I could consider buying a new PSU if need be.
This issue didn't plague me when I first built this current setup with the same components, but it's been several months and I'm losing my mind :(
What I've tried:
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Switching GPUs with my brother's pc. Couldn't reproduce crashing.
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Dusting pc
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Repasting thermal paste
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Checking for any OC (none)
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Stress tests, which are unable to reliably cause crashes while games can.
Fun test linked from Twitter, it's a test of your vocabulary relative to others and displays your percentile score:
https://www.arealme.com/vocabulary-size-test/en/
Most people were bragging about their 0.10-1%Ile scores, so I rolled up my sleeve was all, "you are like a little baby, watch this:"
/images/16856192262800865.webp
I would have been disappointed with anything less than the limit of their results, I consistently beat out millions of international competitors in a pure test of English ages back, and it seems I've still got it baby.
The biggest issue with that line of sophistry is that it precisely nothing to imbue the definition of "God" with other relevant properties, such as the whole omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent shtick.
Great, you've shown there "must" be an Unmoved Mover/Uncaused Cause. What exactly does find and replace with "God" for "the Big Bang" lose out on?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Hi Vivek, nice to meet you!
(Leaving aside the arguments made within, this came across as rather fawning to me.)
At any rate, he'd have my vote if I was in a position to do so, he seems saner than the overwhelming majority of Republican candidates, and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in. If we were to ding politicians for being slightly two-faced, we'd have to elect only those who had half their face mauled by a pitbull to compensate.
I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was. It might even have been the Motte.
is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.
It absolutely makes me seethe when I imagine people being given the gift of immortality (or merely a very long and indefinite lifespan, like we're talking astronomical figures here) be such utter nonces about it, and succumb so quickly to boredom and ennui.
A modern human living say, 80 years or so is nowhere near done trawling the vast expanse of interesting environments, ideas, people or concepts that even our limited baseline human minds can experience. The reason most people today might possibly lose the will to live is their bodies failing them, such that they can't actually get out there and do more of it without it being infeasibly difficult or painful.
I fully support the right of any sane sapient entity to self-terminate for any reason it chooses (without classifying the desire for suicide as insanity itself), but even then I can only groan at the sheer lack of vision or imagination that involves.
Mere millennia are grossly insufficient to do or feel all the things worth sticking around for, and humans consistently expand that space faster than we can consume it already. As evidence, go find the last person who read every book worth reading, it's certainly centuries ago, and maybe half a millennia.
To them I say:
How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?
And even if you have, and after about 20 billion years your brain has cycled through every possible interesting thought and emotion available to grey matter (or a simulation of it) constrained to 20 watts and the volume of a cranium, have you even considered expanding your horizons and augmenting your consciousness so you can find new and amazing exercises to do?
A human being has exponentially more pleasant (or at least interesting) experiences and thoughts at their disposal compared to a chimp, and the larger your brain equivalent, the faster the combinatorial equations explode.
Try upping a couple hundred IQ points or petaflops of computational power and then try again you weakling.
Fine, your computational substrate has exceeded the size and mass limits that make it inevitably collapse into a blackhole? And your cumulative lifespan needs to be expressed in Knut Arrow notation? You get a hall pass to off yourself knowing you've known everything to know and seen it all. Don't talk to me till you're there, because I'd kill to be.
Even the latter belongs to the unlikely scenario where humanity solves everything, including infinite energy and resources. You're not going to get there in practice with merely all the matter and energy in the observable universe.
And mere boredom has technological solutions, I'd happily undergo a procedure that could erase it if I was convinced that it was outright counterproductive. Or I'd erase my memories and start again, anything but consigning to oblivion this infinitely lucky instance of sapience that was fished out from the endless ocean of All Possible Minds to enjoy its day in the sun.
The writers of The Good Place are small minded scum crying sour grapes at a prospect they'd be far too lucky to actually experience. I'd even deny it to them on principal if I was feeling mean.
Ah, I never liked Narnia. The whole franchise was too fucking twee and preachy to appeal to even childhood me.
"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"
To me, the "problem with Susan" seems to be that she's literally retarded. You spent half of your life in Narnia, and then claim it's some kind of funny game? When you can confirm for yourself by just opening that wardrobe?
Hell, even if you want to fit in with your peers, that is not the behavior of a sane person.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4mo ago
This comment is a travesty. If it wasn't clear, it is the majority of parents opting-in for scheduled vaccinations that's what creates the commons for you to free-ride off.
Even in a purely disinterested cost-benefit analysis, the odds of your child getting an autoimmune disease from vaccines is so low that the general benefit of them getting sick less often outweighs it. The number of people avoiding vaccination isn't at the point where you're benefiting from opting out, or pointing to others doing so as an excuse. The majority of vaccines are net positive in expectation, regardless of what others do.
Meta-rationality is a hard art to practice. You point to a minority of people hitting defect to defect just as hard.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
There seems to be an epidemic of low decouplers on the Motte, most obviously notable by their inability to entertain hypotheticals the moment they become controversial in the least. Perhaps it's always been that way, but it stands out to me and I've been here for years, if not right from the start.
And the Motte is better in terms of quality of discussions than any other place on the open internet that I'm aware of, just imagine how awful it is elsewhere!
At any rate, I agree with Singer that by most formalized standards of morality endorsed by most people, it's farcical that eating non-human animals is widely acceptable, while having sex with them isn't.
However, modus ponens and modus tollens apply, so my take is that it's okay to do both! As is sadly necessary for topics such as these, while I accept people wanting to fuck nonhuman animals, that doesn't mean I want to do so myself. The fact that this disclaimer is even needed is yet another sign that the low decouplers are multiplying.
That is by far the biggest downside of a baseline human body, and why I don't want to be stuck in one even if I like mine.
It will, despite our best medicines, decay and fail you. Maybe our drugs and treatments will get better, and we can keep people healthy indefinitely. But even then, I want things that no human body constrained by biology will be able to provide.
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