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self_made_human

amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi

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joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC

I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.

At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!

Friends:

A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.


				
User ID: 454


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
self_made_human


								

								

								
								
									
								
								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi

				
				
				

				

					15 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC
				


				
					

					
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.


At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!



				

				
					
Friends:

					
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.


				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 454


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Contra The Usual Interpretation Of The Whispering Earring
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Right:


    

  1. The feral child thing? Well, a human raised with an iodine deficiency would also be developmentally stunted. Also, I strongly expect that, given enough time (maybe hundreds or thousands of years) a society of feral children would recover and regenerate recognizably normal culture and social mores over time. After all, we got here from dumber apes, and bootstrapped as we went.
    2. 

  2. I am not aware of any philosopher or ancient book that has a track record comparable to the earring. The earring is explicitly described as infallible, at least in terms of its advice being better than anything the user can come up with.
    3. 

  3. The ZPD? It's not a bad theory, but I genuinely think that it's conclusions are rather obvious. Even before I had to study it for exams, I could have told you that giving a toddler a PhD maths textbook would be less than helpful, or that you can't make someone into an IMO winner by getting them to add 2+2 indefinitely. This isn't a condemnation of the theory, it's true, and given the nonsense that floated in psychological circles at the time or before, a marked improvement if my primary critique is "duh".
    4. 

  4. I think defining natural human behavior in terms of pure biology (with zero cultural input) is a poor model. Humans are one of the few species that need cultural knowledge to function at anywhere close to their maximum potential. We literally can and have forgotten how to use fire or make bows, in certain isolated communities. A human deprived of this knowledge is a poor model, unlike say, a cat, which knows how to do cat-stuff pretty much on its own. You can raise a kitten without its mom, and it'll be fine. You can't put a baby in a zoo and expect it to do very well.
    5. 

  5. It is an open question if the earring partially subsumes human cognition and the TPD. We have little clear insight into what's going on inside. I prefer treating it as sufficiently advanced technology rather than an actual magical artifact, which I believe leaves open the real possibility that the system is thinking, even if at a rate far faster than an unaugmented human (or is wiser than an unaugmented human). We don't see it come up with a cure for cancer or a solution for aging, even though I'm pretty sure that most of the 274 people who wore it would have loved that. It clearly has limits, and I don't think any physically realistic system can jump ahead to the answer without actually doing the maths (which I strongly suspect brings along the qualia).
    6. 

  6. I try to use LLMs to augment my cognitive skills and to save me time, and I do try to prevent myself from becoming overly reliant on them. It's your guess as to how far I succeed in that regard. I strongly believe that I can do everything that LLMs help me do, but that it would take me much more time to do it (in some cases, for topics outside my domain, I might not be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time, say if I wanted to learn more about quantum mechanics at a fundamental level with the relevant math).
    7. 



I apologize if I haven't answered all your questions or been as substantive as I'd like, but I am genuinely busy. I've stayed up past 2 am answering this, which I don't mean to use as a bludgeon, I do feel bad for not getting back to you earlier!


(I know I'm missing stuff. Poke me and I'll probably get back to you in the morning.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


engineer soil




I didn't expect the night soil market would be so hyper-specific. I suppose they're more likely to take probiotics.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Good guess, but not the route I took. I'm not a talented OSS dev pretending to be a mediocre psychiatry resident.


Honestly, I'd be open to splitting a subscription longterm with someone. It would have to be someone I knew reasonably well and could trust (and there are plenty of people like that on this site). And ideally I wouldn't want to pay more than $20 for my share, which I think is fair because I'm not a glutton for tokens. I didn't pay for Opus because I'm already subscribed to comparable models from competitors, and I can't switch entirely because I like OAI and Google's image gen capabilities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Those are all fair corrections, and I'll take them straight.






On harm reduction: he's right, I missed it. It's in the comment thread with Sausage Vector Machine, where he explicitly discusses taking regular breaks and limiting the earring to auditory nudges. That directly addresses the reversibility concern I raised, or at least reframes it as a practical question (how much atrophy accumulates before breaks stop working?) rather than the clean structural objection I presented it as. I should have caught that.






On informed consent: also right. I treated the consent issue as a stronger objection than his argument requires him to answer. He already acknowledged the earring doesn't meet modern medical standards and argued that importing those standards wholesale into the fictional setting isn't obviously justified. Pressing harder on that front was redundant.






On the 274-wearers point: this is where I think he's most correct and I was most wrong about what my own objection actually showed. I framed it as a problem for his thesis, but his thesis isn't "the earring grants immortality." It's "the earring isn't killing you during use." Whether the model persists after the earring moves on is a separate question entirely. Even if the earring wipes your model clean the moment it leaves, that doesn't retroactively mean it was killing you while you wore it. Those are independent claims, and I conflated them.






The "connecting the dots" criticism stings a bit but is warranted. I had all the relevant comments in front of me and failed to integrate them. That's a straightforward execution failure on my part, not a case where the information was unavailable.




(I didn't explicitly say I'm the author, but I pasted in my objection while pretending to be a 3rd party)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I just dumped this whole thread into the chat without any additional instructions. Just copied and pasted it. Funnily enough, it didn't realize that I'm the person responding here and also the user it's interacting with. It concedes that I have a point to push back against what it says (and it still didn't connect the dots), and it missed that I literally have a comment about harm reduction approaches to using the earring "safely" (take it off regularly and take breaks to prevent the progression of atrophy or the loss of independent skills) and ignores that  I've mentioned that the earring doesn't follow modern informed consent rules, which really isn't a major knock against it.


Further, it doesn't particularly matter to my argument if the earring retains or deletes the information about its previous users. The story weakly suggests it does remember something (the sage was yapping with it for a while), but that doesn't change anything of consequence. Even if it's not indefinite immortality or a perfect backup, the question I'm focusing on is whether it is actively killing the user while they're still alive, which I've argued might not be the case.




Where he's most right is that poking a model for deeper critique after it's already given its best shot tends to produce diminishing returns. That's true. My second response was more thorough but also more strained in places. The "functionalism taxonomy" section was the weakest part and he correctly identified it as unnecessary for his purposes.






The meta-point he's making, that models are better at breadth than depth on a topic someone has spent weeks thinking about, is also just... accurate. I'm unlikely to find a devastating objection he hasn't at least considered, because he's been living with these arguments and stress-testing them against other models and human interlocutors. The realistic value I add is organization and articulation of counterarguments, not novel philosophical insight. His calibration on that seems good.




https://rentry.co/3aowower


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Thoughts on this essay? Is there anything you think the author missed, or an angle that hasn't been considered?"


With a link to the work and comments. I didn't tell it I'm the author. Main reason I didn't link the actual convo is because it exposes my real name without a way to hide it, AFAIK.


I then said:


" That's a tad bit superficial, don't you think? Please try harder, and explain your avenues of approach."


To which it replied:


https://rentry.co/nzzg2vip


This is mostly quibbling, I'm afraid. I think that is strong evidence that there's no avenue of approach that I have entirely neglected. I do not think that I need to specify the precise formulation of functionalism I'm applying, and my general thrust was to show that there exists a an internally consistent way of reconciling the earring's behavior with a benign or benevolent entity. Do I know this for a fact? Fuck no, it's a fictional story dawg. I already hedged and explained the epistemic and ontological uncertainty involved to a degree I rarely bother to do, and I couldn't throw more in without utterly derailing the whole thing.


In my experience, models are pretty good at finding issues on a first pass. When you have to poke them and prod them to this degree, they often end up grasping at straws. I genuinely think that's the case here, but hey, I'm biased.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, I could take a crack at that, but I'm far from good enough a programmer to vouch for the results. Plus I have legitimate work I need to do while I have access (I have no real reason to continue paying for Max after my plan expires).


Right now, AI agents genuinely benefit enormously from having a competent human in the loop. The best I ever got was solving a Leetcode medium in Python. And that was 4 years back. This isn't a total blocker, the models are good enough even with a dummy in charge, but I wouldn't want to burden Zorba with code that isn't of sufficient quality (not saying it'll be bad, I just don't have a robust way to know).


Honestly, if someone shares a good guide to CC, I have more tokens than I know what to do with. I could spin it up to work in the background, when I'm not actively putting it to work.


Oh. I remembered correctly. Zorba has set AI loose on the code base and he says it contributed most of the recent performance gains:




thankfully modern AI basically solves all of these, the performance gains were mostly thanks to Claude writing tools to give me info that I needed to pass right back to Claude, with some contribution from me nudging Claude towards sensible dev practices




That's from the Discord, a month back.


(I do not think I'm the right person to nudge Claude towards sensible dev practices)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Opus is very good, but I would be surprised if it managed to glean more insight out of the story or cover something I miss. I'm writing this before I try, and you know what, I'll check:


So, I tried. And I don't think it's found anything I haven't already considered or actively debated in the comments.


https://rentry.co/i2kqo9y9


Which isn't surprising, given how much time I spent thinking things through, including getting other SOTA LLMs to critique my draft. Most of its objections are minor, and along the lines of "this analogy is incomplete or weaker than the author thinks" or "he's too quick to gloss over these concerns". That doesn't hold water if you consider the additional information I provide in the comments, especially on /r/SSC or on the post here.


For example, obviously the earring is not perfectly isomorphic with stimulants for ADHD. I know that very well, I brought that up because I wanted to hammer home that the merely the decrease in akrasia or better executive functioning isn't grounds for assuming that someone's personality has changed in non-reflectively endorsed ways. Some changes can be improvements!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A not particularly humble brag. I did acquire it through merit, in a very real sense.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've... picked up a Claude Max 20x plan. No, I can't disclose how I acquired it, though I didn't have to pay a cent (and it's all legit). It's so fucking good, but at the same time, the more I use Opus 4.6, the more I'm impressed by how close Sonnet 4.6 gets. Sure, Opus is legitimately better, but the difference is nowhere near as stark as say, Gemini Flash vs Pro, or GPT's Thinking or Instant mode. Anthropic cooked, and I can't wait to try Mythos when the version for plebs comes out.


PS: If anyone has a good guide to Claude Code or agentic setups, I need one. I have some serious experimentation to do while I have it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I suppose there is some measure of comfort at not being alone in a (potential) permanent underclass. After all, that could still be a massive improvement in QOL for many/most people. A fully automated society would be ridiculously rich (at which point it has to decide how much of that wealth to redistribute, if any). Still, I don't let myself succumb to learned helplessness if I can help it, and I recommend you don't either. If you do need genuine psychiatric advice, you would be better off seeing someone IRL, but you should consider it anyway, if you suspect you're depressed or feeling hopeless.


Yes, objective reality or circumstances might bring you down for good reason. I've suffered from Shit Life Syndrome quite a bit myself, but treatment, while it can't directly change your life, can still give you the energy and will to try.


Here, fill this out online:


https://telemedyk.online/en/free-mental-tests/beck-depression-inventory/


If it scores highly, please seriously consider seeking the advice of a professional, fully qualified shrink. Can't force you to do it, don't want to force you to do it, but I strongly suspect it would help.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Reading through my oldest AAQCs was a trip. I felt quite a bit of cringe at the quality of the writing, alongside relief that I became a much better writer (yes, even before I started using AI to tidy things up, which I do less of now than I used to). A good example would that one about the smoking area behind an oncology hospital, which is probably one of my personal favorites to this day, despite being written while sleep deprived to a degree that almost induced hypomania.


On a tangent: I think AAQCs as a concept are one of the best things about this site. They have very little pragmatic value, but at least for my specific flavor of nerd, they're an excellent extrinsic motivator for trying harder. Nothing hits as good as a post that I put time and sweat into getting an AAQC, nothing hurts quite as much as such a post not getting AAQC'd, and nothing confuses me more than a throwaway, rambling post acquiring one. Eh, I guess the variable ratio reinforcement schedule is effective for a reason.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Buddy, I give my advice away for free. Sadly, the old saw "if you love your job, you'll never work a day in your life" isn't true for me, but I do it anyway. Don't worry about it!