self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
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!
User ID: 454
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
What the hell is going on in Russia?
I've been following the Russo-Ukrainian war since the livestreaming of the first tank that spooked some poor border guard, and frankly speaking the whole affair has been great for calibrating my epistemics.
Did I expect the "3 days to Kiev" thing to work out? Yes. I thought Ukraine was fucked.
I was also wrong about the duration of the war, for reasons little more than vibes going off war exhaustion, I expected the fighting to wrap up in a year. Still going.
Did I expect the UA counteroffensive to be a success? Yes, I was sufficiently inundated with pro-Ukrainian memes and their anti-Russian counterparts that I thought the Russians would fold to a stiff breeze.
Turns out that attacking is a lot harder than defending, especially when the offensive was widely telegraphed and even your relatively incompetent adversary had plenty of time to prepare accordingly.
My takeaway from the above is that forecasting something as anti-inductive as war is incredibly difficult, and that's it far too easy to fall for a cheerleader effect. I wanted Ukraine to win, and badly, and not only was this desire reflected in the sources of news I peruse, but the sheer hatred for the Russian side was sufficient to bury most evidence of them ever doing anything right. The Just World fallacy is hard to avoid personally if all your sources of information fall prey to it.
On /r/CombatFootage, anything remotely pro-Russian, or even depicting their success without obvious bias, gets buried. While I'm fond of /r/NonCredibleDefense, its NAFO sympathies make a honest calibration impossible, and as the name suggests, its members aren't particularly focused on academic rigor or epistemics.
But with that said, the whole Wagner affair confuses me.
Prigozhin managed to get within 2 hours of Moscow, prompting a panicked evacuation, and then suddenly stopped and took his ball home.
What the fuck? In normal circumstances, I'd say he just signed his death warrant, is Putin really going to forgive him for his quasi-coup? Wagner shot down around 7 Russian aircraft in the process!
And there I was thinking Lukashenko was largely a lap dog, unable to exercise agency except when it came to desperately avoiding sending Belarusian troops to Ukraine since it would upend the only thing keeping his dictatorship going. How did he become powerful enough to mediate a truce between Prigozhin and Putin?
It's not like the dust has settled, even leaving aside more questionable rumors, I've seen footage of the VDV cartel-killing one of their own for expressing sympathies for Wagner. Even if Prigozhin himself manages to avoid most consequences of his actions, his men are going to be making their pants desert-camo'd.
So far, I've only come up with one model that I think reasonably fits the evidence, albeit it's more consistent with the era of warlords and medieval feudalism than what I expect to see even in a failed state today:
Prigozhin is actually loyal, or at least he thinks of himself that way, and came to believe that Putin, like the well-meaning Emperor kept in the dark by a coterie of eunuchs (Shoigu and Co), simply wasn't involved in the attempts by the Russian MOD to swallow up Wagner whole.
Thus, he embarked on his crusade more as a demonstration of his ability to perform a coup, rather than a genuine desire to do so. Like an indecisive general crossing the Rubicon, shaking his fist in the direction of Rome and then high-tailing it back.
Cause some chaos and embarrassment, but stopping before what he thinks the red lines are, namely an occupation of Moscow.
I'd also wager that Lukashenko has more agency and freedom than most suspect, or rather Putin's power has declined relatively, such that he can credibly offer to shelter Prigozhin and fend off the dogs.
As far as I can tell, his gambit only partially worked, because Shoigu hasn't gone anywhere, and Prigozhin ended up like a dog that finally caught that damn car but isn't sure what to do with it.
"Sure, let's try and Thunder Run to Moscow, I'm sure we'll run into some real resistance along the way, and we can both rattle sabres at each other and go home."
"Huh. This is awkward, everyone is just giving up and letting us walk right past them. Might as well shoot down a few helicopters, they're the only things that have directly engaged us."
"Uh.. We're about two hours away from Moscow. Now what?"
I'm not going to weight my assessment heavily since I claim no particular expertise, but I'm outlining it here for the more knowledgeable to poke at.
I'd like to see everyone at least attempt to make concrete predictions about the near future. Does Prig make it out of this alive and with his power base intact? Does Putin slip him some unusually heavy and radioactive teabags?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
My views on the whole affair can roughly be summed up with "Israel based, Palestine cringe", and since someone asked me if I was being ironic last time I said this, far from it.
Israel is an oasis in a hostile desert, about as glaring evidence of HBD as could be desired, not that there's a lack if you have eyes to see and a mind not blind to inconvenient truths. Arabs have and do much worse to each other than the Israelis ever have, and the average Palestinian is better off completely desisting from violent resistance, since I expect they would have a much better life as integrated citizens, even if they're of a tier below the Israelis, without voting rights and such. I can't see how they'd be accepted otherwise, since they outnumber them.
While I have no particular hatred of Palestinians, even if I view the whole Middle-Eastern memeplex with disdain, given how far it lies from my preferences, it's certainly obvious to me that their best bet for a peaceful existence would be to avoid poking at the lion that could swat them out of existence were it not for the optics.
Oh dear. You just gave them a reason to fuck optics, or at least the kind of optics that aren't thermal sights on F-16s and drones.
I guess massacring civilians and gangraping dual citizens who post on social media about supporting Palestine has that effect.
I like Israel, and the Jews as a whole when they aren't self-sabotaging by supporting ideologues who would end them. They're smarter than average, and the Ashkenazi (despite the Nazi in the name, which I always found mildly amusing) have more Nobels to them than most of the world put together.
What most civilizations would find unbearable and deserving of an outright war of eradication, such as regular bombardment of population centers by rockets, the Israelis make tolerable through technology, even if it involves sending missiles a hundred times the expense to blow them up.
They desalinate enough water to thrive in a desert that hasn't had far better days since the Bronze Age, when human-caused desertification ruined most of it.
They have chip fabs, and while I didn't bother to look it up, I doubt that even the Gulf States with their trillions have the technical capacity to build the same, at least not while having locals in charge. I emphasize it because they're close to the pinnacle of human technology, as complex as any supercollider, but profit and power generating in themselves. We build cathedrals these days, but to turn sand into thinking rock.
You don't forge a technocratic marvel like Israel in the midst of hostile territory without much in the way of natural resources without human stock that are several cuts above the average. I respect that enough to ignore the whole religious ethno-state deal, or even the occasional human rights violation.
And if there's a way to end this whole mess without human rights getting wedgied and worked over by Mossad, the Palestinians certainly burnt that bridge yesterday.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
7mo ago
Trudeau accuses India in killing of Sikh leader on Canadian soil
First of all, I want to state that my epistemic status is huh, rather an informed opinion, but I struggle to think of anyone in a better position on The Motte to discuss this, so bear with me.
India has had its share of irredentists, separatists and good old fashioned terrorists over the years. You have the Maoists still lurking in the north east, playing hot and cold with the government via their jungle boogaloo. Islamic terrorism was a serious issue in 2010s, though it's died down. There were the Tamil Tigers down south, who proved a severe PITA for a decade or so, and then the Khalistanis, who have been largely neutered in-country but find refuge in the numerous, prosperous Sikh diaspora abroad.
The last two have had the dubious distinction of getting confirmed kills on two Indian Prime Ministers (relatives to boot).
Khalistan is the supposed homeland of the Sikh peoples, largely surrounding Punjab in the west. Unable to get it during the original Partition of India, they waged a brutal war against the Indian government for decades, peaking in the 70s and 80s. There were quite a few pogroms and riots, with Hindu on Sikh violence in the rest of India, and vice versa in their population centers.
These days, the movement is moribund within India itself, most young Sikhs don't really pay it any heed, and the older aren't the demographic to go planting bombs for the large part. Sikhs are well integrated into Indian society, and haven't had that consistent friction that the Muslims have had with their Hindu co-ethnics.
Not that you'd know this abroad. Much like IRA sympathizers hanging around in New Jersey bars, the exodus of Sikhs in the 70s and 80s ossified in amber a large migrant population with a grudge to bear against the Indian government.
I'd draw a distinction between these first-wave migrants, and a more recent influx of Sikhs who are drawn more by the prospects of making it big in Canada, or the West in general, rather than any real grievance.
While Khalistan is dead in the water, it's a popular rallying cry there, with Western governments treating it with a mixture of bemused tolerance and kid-gloves for fear of pissing off the strong Sikh voting bloc. Speaking ill of them is, from what I've heard, a surefire way of losing a narrow election, but they're otherwise model citizens and nobody wants to press the issue.
Now, Modi stands accused of the shooting of this dude sometime in June, when he was shot by unidentified gunmen in the parking lot of a gurdwara in Surrey. If there's more substance to the accusation, they haven't been made public, but the heads of state have met to hash it out.
From what I can tell, Modi's response was "we didn't do it, but if it happened, he had it coming", strongly protesting the accusations while demanding Canada be less lenient in harboring terrorists.
Modi also stands accused of the assassination in Lahore of another Khalistan leader, not that anyone particularly cared at the time, and that's just the usual India-Pakistan bhai-bhai at play.
That's the gist of it, on one hand, we have the fact that India has largely refrained from extraterritorial assassinations, certainly not to the degree that the US, Russia or Israel are fond of. I struggle to think of a single example, not that I'm an expert.
On the other, who the fuck else has a motive to whack the dude? I don't think relations between India and Canada are bad enough for the latter to make entirely unfounded accusations, and they've even roped in a few other countries like the UK and US to bring diplomatic pressure to bear. The Head of Foreign Intelligence for India was kicked out from Canada, and some bloke named Oliver Sylvester was the tit to that tat.
I'd wager 50% odds that India was responsible based on the balance of evidence, and I wonder if this will be a flash in the pan that peters out when the Sikhs are mollified, or if Canada really wants to pick a fight with an otherwise neutral/positively inclined major nation.
But if you're curious, this means zilch in terms of impact on Modi's popularity of home, you think supporters of a strongman are going to be mad when he strongmans? Even the libs over at /r/India who foam at the mouth at the sight of Modi are of the opinion he had it coming.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
They have no concept of reason or truth.
I earnest disagree. If you check the GPT-4 white paper, the original base model clearly had a sense of internal calibration, and while that was mostly beaten out of it through RLHF, it's not entirely gone.
They have a genuine understanding of truth, or at least how likely something is to be true. If it didn't, then I don't know how on Earth it could answer several of the more knotty questions I've asked it.
It is not guaranteed to make truthful responses, but in my experience it makes errors because it simply can't do better, not because it exists in a perfectly agnostic state.
They are literally p-zombies. They are a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
P-zombies are fundamentally incoherent as a concept.
Also, a million monkeys on a million typewriters will never achieve such results on a consistent basis, or at the very least you'd be getting 99.99999% incoherent output.
Turns out, dismissing it as "just" statistics is the same kind of fundamental error that dismissing human cognition as "just" the interaction of molecules mediated by physics is. Turns out that "just" entirely elides the point, or at the very least your expectations for what that can achieve were entirely faulty.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
If you're so intent on having flesh and blood humans about in extrasolar space, it's still much more convenient to digitize them in transit and then rebuild a biological brain for them at the other end. I suspect that that's going to be more difficult than the initial scan and uploading, but hardly outside the scope of singularity tech.
I don't really get the appeal of continued biological existence myself, at least when we do get other options.
In other words, GPT-4 has just been beaten, about time I'd say, I'm getting used to the pace of progress in AI being blistering, and it was threatening to slowdown to just mild rash levels.
However, both my hands-on time with it, and the official benchmarks Google released suggest it's a minor, incremental improvement, one that doesn't stand up to the drastic improvement that GPT-4 represented over 3 or 3.5. [For clarity, I, like the rest of you, can only use Gemini Pro, the second best model]
Which is fine, because for a while now, people have been lambasting Google/Deepmind for being too incompetent to ship, or at least ship a competitive product, given how shitty Bard was when it launched, even after being upgraded once or twice.
However, Bard, now running the Gemini Pro model, seems to be roughly as good as paid GPT-4 on ChatGPT, or the free GPT-4 in Bing Copilot (previously Bing Chat). I have yet to spot any new use case it enables, in the sense that GPT-4 can reliably do tasks that simply had 3.5 flailing about in confusion, or worse, hallucinate incorrect answers, such as more involved questions in coding, medicine and everything else really.
However, Google hasn't yet publicly released the best Gemini model, which is currently undergoing an analogous process that GPT-4 or Claude 2 went through, namely more RLHF, red-teaming and safety testing. Pro is the next step down, but it seems pretty good to me, in the sense I would happily use it as an alternative to GPT-4, even if I have no strong opinion on which is better.
There's also a Nano model, which is stripped down to run on mobile devices, and is now being used on the Pixel 8 Pro for a few tasks, potentially silencing the people who claimed it's AI specific computing components were a marketing gimmick, especially since it seemed to offload most AI tasks to the cloud.
Miscellaneous observations:
- Bard is fast as fuck compared to GPT-4, in terms of generation speed. It always was, but previously in the "I'm doing 2000 calculations a second in my head, and they're all wrong" sense. (GPT-4, at least before Turbo released, was always pretty slow compared to the competition. Far more unusable, but at the very least I read faster than it can write.)
- A quick search suggests all the models have a 32k token context window, or about an operating memory of the last 25k words it read and wrote. Good, if not remotely groundbreaking.
- This heavily suggests OAI will ship GPT-5 soon, instead of being content to milk 4 when it ran rings around the competition.
- It's multimodal, but then again so was GPT-4 from the start, the capability was just cordoned off for a bit.
To the extent I don't think the next generation (or two) of models after GPT-4 are an existential threat, I'm happy to see them finally arriving. There really isn't much more needed before even the best of us are entirely obsolete, at least for cognitive labor, and something as archaic as GPT-4 was scoring at the 95th percentile in the USMLE, so I'm preparing to explore my competitive advantage in panhandling. *
*This is a joke. For now.
Footnotes to the footnotes:
People on Twitter are correctly pointing out that GPT-4 underwent further post-launch improvements in benchmark scores, some of them pushing it past Gemini's published scores.
Also, just to be clear, the version of Gemini you can use now is not the best one, which may or may not be a modest improvement over GPT-4. Some claim it's more comparable to 3.5, but I haven't used that in ages, not when Bing makes 4 free.*
*Footnote^3 It's probably closer to 3.5. I'm sticking with Bing.
Toe-notes-
So far, it seems that Gemini is "competitive" with GPT-4. It's better at multimodal tasks, but for most people that's a minor fraction of their typical use case. For text, it's somewhere from close to roughly on par.
You can almost feel the desperation in the Deepmind researchers to find any way to massage things so that they come out ahead of GPT-4, from the misleading graphs, an egregious example to be found in a reply, to applying different standards in their inter-model comparisons, such as 5-shot prompting for GPT-4 versus Chain of thought 32 shot prompts for Gemini Ultra. At least the white paper doesn't outright lie, just mislead and prevaricate.
The MMLU is also flawed, with 2-3 percent of the questions simply broken, so a 1 or 2% improvement in score can be a bit questionable, let alone specifying performance to multiple decimal figures.
We don't see any comparisons to GPT-4 Turbo, but I don't hold that against them too hard, it just came out a few weeks back, perhaps not in time for them to finish their paper.
It you use the multimodal capabilities of Bard right now, it uses an older version that is pretty shit compared to GPT-4V or Bing.
Overall, the main benefits of Gemini's existence is largely that it shows Google isn't content to slumber indefinitely, and it can be competitive, better late than never. I expect GPT-5 to spank Gemini Ultra, and to the extent the latter accelerates the release of the former, I'm for it.
Predictions:
GPT-5 before end of 2024 - 90%
GPT-5 is superior to Gemini Ultra for most use cases, at the first point in time both coexist- 80%
A third competitor on par with either exists before 2025- 60%
An OSS equivalent of GPT-4 comes out before 2025- 70%
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
26d ago
Redacted: Bad faith posting: main intent is clearly holocaust denial Redacted: quality-contribution Redacted: Single issue poster
Sigh. This post was entirely unobjectionable till you made it obvious that you clearly wanted to use a modestly interesting prelude about recent events to lead into yet another screed on how improbable the Holocaust was.
Despite having AAQCs, you've been warned repeatedly for single issue posting, and you were doing better on that front too, until, well, this.
While I'd have been inclined to just warn, for now, I'm going to send you to the cold, uncaring Outside for 48 hours, so you know that the warnings aren't just a rap on the wrist you can evade by being better for a bit, partially because this doozy is in your mod log:
more Jew-posting, trying to be sneakier about it, admitted he deliberately posted as a reply in another thread to avoid catching a ban. Recommend ban next time.
Enjoy the timeout, and please for the love of Yahweh find something else to post about on more occasions.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1mo ago
I had to break the news to maybe 200 people over the past 6 months that their cancer was fatal. Including maybe a dozen children.
I had to clean out the suppurating wound in a patient who had a mandibulectomy for a orofacial carcinoma. When I removed the bandages, coated in pus, he could have played a flute both ways. I suppose his incoherent prayers and moaning were of no avail because they ended up directed simultaneously to heaven and hell. Then again, that ward has poor cellular reception.
I have heard earnest praying and fevered pleas for divine aid. It was never forthcoming.
What facile excuses for miracles you recite. If that's the standard of evidence you deem acceptable for the sweeping claims of Christianity..
What sin did a two year old child with ALL commit, such that she wasn't worthy of a miracle while your remission from UC was? Wrong deity I presume? The post-office does a better job directing mislabeled mail. Do you think a "fast" done by your family outweighs the RCTs showing that prayer, both direct and directed, is useless?
Thankfully I have not had too many cases of people thanking the Lord/Allah/Ram for their cures, or I'd have gone to jail for strangling them. Most of them are far more genuinely grateful for the actual miracle that is modern medicine, and by God we've got more to show for it.
Errr...
I just found out a distant aunt of mine is already lining up Nice Indian Girls for me in the UK. You know, eligible bachelor nephew showing from the Homeland, getting a degree worth a shit, gotta snatch them up young.
This is not a joke. And frankly I'm an idiot for not seeing it coming, given that I am Indian and know their proclivities for matchmaking, especially within their community.
Well, at least she's in London, I pray her auntie-network doesn't reach all the way north, though I'm already fishing for excuses to dodge that for now. Like, I think I'd be a good dad, and I do want to settle down soonish, but not that quick, let me fucking live a little. And while I'm not particularly picky about ethnicity, I doubt she has buxom blondes lined up.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
unless you're in the camp that thinks that human consciousness is basically just a really complex statistical model running on a biological computer
As someone vocally in that camp, I invite you to demonstrate any other model for what human consciousness could possible be. And it doesn't even matter if the AI is "conscious" if it's intelligent and capable of using that intelligence to forward ends not aligned with our goals.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Huh. I can only apologize for the relatively bare link, but I feel like it's worth drawing attention to something so widely accepted yet utterly worthless, especially when it comes up so often here.
The thing about the DK effect is that it makes intuitive sense. To extend it past the realm of typical human intelligence, an ant or a chimp isn't very good at knowing how dumb they are because they're not very good at most things. However, I suspect that the average dumb (human) person does know they're a bit dim, so it confuses me how this finding can even arise.
The problem with the Dunning-Kruger chart is that it violates a fundamental principle in statistics. If you’re going to correlate two sets of data, they must be measured independently. In the Dunning-Kruger chart, this principle gets violated. The chart mixes test score into both axes, giving rise to autocorrelation.
Realizing this mistake, Edward Nuhfer and colleagues asked an interesting question: what happens to the Dunning-Kruger effect if it is measured in a way that is statistically valid? According to Nuhfer’s evidence, the answer is that the effect disappears.
Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE? The one we know and once loved literally works for random data, so that's right out. In other words, what's the cut-off where a stupid person becomes smart enough to know they're stupid, or at least worse than their peers?*
*In a more general sense than a chimp knowing he's not as strong or big as the alpha male.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
I appreciate the nuanced take and attempt to clarify your beliefs in a manner clearer to Rationalists and rat-adjacents.
Further, I wholeheartedly endorse the claim that rationality can be applied to any goal or belief system, that's what the orthogonality thesis is all about. There's nothing irrational about say, wanting to covert the universe into paperclips, and for all the insults I could hurl at a Paperclip Maximizer as it disassembled me for parts, irrational isn't one of them. It would only be so if it went about its goals in a counterproductive manner, or a grossly suboptimal one, such as, idk, building flawed Von Neumanns that make safety pins instead.
Thus, in principle, you can reconcile epistemic and instrumental rationality with religion, my point is that in practise it's about as sensible as Muslim apologists arguing that hijabs are feminist and empowering for women. Less gross hypocrisy or maybe even none on your end, of course, but the same issues apply.
If you end up in a situation where you are initialized with a prior of 1 in the existence of God/The Truth of Christianity, then you are perfectly rational in assuming all observed evidence in that light and then assuming any discrepancies or paradoxes arise from an incomplete understanding of the world.
It's still a deeply malign prior.
I don't know if the human brain, while strongly likely to be doing Bayesian Predictive Processing, is capable of having priors of literal one or zero. That being said, the religious seem close to the former.
All else being equal, a simple hypothesis or prior should be privileged over a more complex one when they are equally as good at explaining the evidence, or predicting the future. That is a basic consequence of probability theory, complexity needs to be justified. We only use the more abstruse equations for GR over simple F=ma and other classical physics because in certain very important regimes, they justify the headache and predict the world with more accuracy.
As it stands, the world as it exists today is far better explained by assuming the universe works solely according to the laws of physics without any external intervention where anyone can see it.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a sign that our existing knowledge and theories are insufficient for the task of explaining everything, but that isn't a blank cheque for believing in anything you feel like. The rational thing to do is remain agnostic on that regard, at least unless we end up with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything and yet no answers. The history of humanity is riddled with questions that seemed beyond the ability of empirical studies to explain, such as the elan vital, yet we have solved them, and Christian metaphysics is not a satisfactory explanation unless you start out with an unshakeable belief in it.
The existence of a Creator with the properties of Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnibenevolence need justification far more powerful than the word of some Middle Eastern randos several millennia ago, and it's such a shame that more objective evidence has been sorely lacking since we have omnipresent digital recording devices and randomized control studies.
Was Jesus a real historical character? Easily could have been, but that no more makes a difference than the next schizophrenic I treat who rambles about being the next prophet.
Perhaps the strong relationship between visions and speaking in tongues with something as prosaic as temporal lobe epilepsy should make the wise take a hint.
Your arguments are sound if and only if one assumes the truth of your faith as given and then works backward to justify everything else. When you scramble constantly with apologetics against all other evidence, the intelligent thing to do is consider whether or not the null hypothesis has a point!
The mere existence of complex maths or seeming paradoxes is no excuse for waving away far bigger ones with less reason to assume that the reason that the properties you ascribe to them are anything but a consequence of them being imaginary.
As I was telling @Meriadoc yesterday, if I ever meet the Omnibenevolent loving Creator who created ichthyosis vulgaris, I'll kick them in the Holy Nuts. Until then, my sheer disdain for Him is made obviate by the fact that He's fictional.
Shame, because if prayer cured cancer or brought about post-scarcity, I'd be the busiest beaver in that regard. Beats going through med school and memorizing all these doses I tell ya.
Until that happens, I'm content to watch us make our own gods, not that they should be worshipped or programmed to demand it. Maybe Lucifer would be better served creating a Heaven on Earth instead of reigning in hell, at the very least we have the means of doing it ourselves.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
To further the whiplash from my last comment, anyone here have any experience with tren?
If you're not willing to discuss it in public, feel free to DM. I have internalized LBBTQIA+^2 philosophies and my own transhumanism to the extent that I wish to transition from male to MALE.
Jokes aside, I'm just curious, and it seems trivially easy to get it here if I cared to do so.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
I saw someone semi-jokingly say that the rate limits were increasing as Elon ran into them himself, and at this point I find that distressingly likely.
Man should have stuck to rockets and electric cars, though a more based Twitter is still nice to have.
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-
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
Kai su, teknon?
4mo 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
Kai su, teknon?
5mo 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".)
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
Kai su, teknon?
4mo 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.
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
Kai su, teknon?
3mo 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.
Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
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