sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
15d ago
That's why I suggest doing them in one of the countries that no longer recommends puberty-blockers - the choice would be between a 50% shot at blockers as part of the study or a ~0% shot as part of the general public. Theoretically some could go doctor-shopping internationally, but hopefully not enough to ruin the study. An unblinded RCT would still be a huge step up from the evidence we have now.
sodiummuffin
15d ago
Those sorts of concerns are why I emphasized the sheep RCT more despite it being in sheep. Unfortunately this is the state of the evidence regarding puberty blockers.
Though regarding your specific suggestion the IQ test was conducted as part of the puberty-blockers study, so they would already have some symptoms of precocious puberty. The study actually speculates that the early puberty was boosting performance relative to other children the same age and the drop was the result of stopping it (which is itself a concerning idea regarding using puberty blockers to stop puberty entirely):
The results on IQ measurements in children with precocious puberty showed elevated scores, with higher verbal than performance scores, and this was interpreted as a possible effect of sex steroids, especially on the left hemisphere (4, 30). The initial total IQ score in this group was not different from normal—comparable with the data of Xhrouet-Heinrichs et al. (4)—and a decrease of about 7 points was observed during the treatment period. Although significant, doubts exist about the clinical relevance of this decrease. One hypothesis for the decrease in verbal IQ scores is that withdrawal of exposure of the brain to sex steroids brings the child back into a more age-appropriate IQ range. The lower verbal scores in this group, which was in contrast to results in girls with central precocious puberty, could be explained by the adoption status of the children; as in other children from foreign backgrounds, it is known that verbal intelligence is lower than in children born in their own country. In primary school, mathematics, which is part of verbal IQ, was problematic in adopted children, especially in boys. The authors concluded that a deficient development of visual–spatial organization and, to a lesser extent, poorer concentration, may be due to the lower achievements in mathematics rather than to intelligence or fluency.
Who knows if this is meaningful at all though, it's speculative and sounds pretty dubious to me.
sodiummuffin
15d ago
What are the actual requirements for getting prescribed puberty blockers?
I think there's a lot of clinical discretion so it varies. I remember reading news articles about some prescribing them after a single appointment that you could try to look up, and here's an extreme example in Canada from a couple years back, where the "Gender Pathways Service" advises family doctors on prescribing them before a single appointment with a specialist:
“Given the distress that can be associated with Gender Dysphoria, we have also included information on puberty blockers that can be started prior to their initial appointment. We have included a Lupron Depot® Information sheet.”
Children’s Hospital, London, Ontario.
If they're willing to do that presumably they are also willing to hand them out readily themselves.
What are the probabilities of serious consequences from puberty blockers?
Copy-pasting the last comment I wrote regarding the state of the evidence for puberty blockers:
Puberty blockers both lock children onto the transgender pathway (making them largely equivalent to prescribing HRT in actual outcome) and have very serious and poorly-studied medical consequences of their own, including potential damage to brain development. In children the "watchful waiting" approach used to be standard, meaning the children were not given any "gender-affirming" medical or social intervention, just treatment for whatever other psychological issues they had. Did they continue to want to transition into adulthood or did their gender dysphoria desist on its own? Some studies on this were conducted, and according to this meta-study and this blog post the desistence rates they found ranged from 61% to 98%. If you just add the figures from the studies listed in the linked study it would be an overall desistence rate of 85%, or 80% for the studies listed in the linked blog post. By contrast 97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38). The lack of any randomized control study makes it difficult to be sure, but this seems indicative of a very strong "lock-in" effect.
The lock-in from social transition also seems very strong even for children not on puberty blockers (and may be a large part of the lock-in associated with puberty blockers), with this study finding the persistence rate of "binary transgender identity" to be 94% 5 years after social transition. The study mentions that persistence was less common for children that were transitioned before the age of 6, which significantly affects the results because they were 124 of the 317 children in their study, but still 90.3% compared to 96.4% for those 6 or older. 5 years isn't really long enough to know long-term desistence of course, but the explosion in rates is recent enough that it would be difficult to do much longer.
Meanwhile regarding the side-effects of puberty-blockers themselves there is very little high-quality evidence (e.g. randomized control trials in humans that track the things you want them to track), and essentially none for using them to avert puberty entirely rather than stop precocious-puberty for a few years. But this randomized study in sheep seems to indicate permanent damage to brain development:
The long-term spatial memory performance of GnRHa-Recovery rams remained reduced (P < 0.05, 1.5-fold slower) after discontinuation of GnRHa, compared to Controls. This result suggests that the time at which puberty normally occurs may represent a critical period of hippocampal plasticity. Perturbing normal hippocampal formation in this peripubertal period may also have long lasting effects on other brain areas and aspects of cognitive function.
In humans the best we have seems to be this study in which a 3-year course of puberty blockers in girls with precocious puberty is associated with a 7-point reduction in IQ from what they scored before beginning the puberty blockers. However without a randomized control trial and/or a longer-term followup it is difficult to know if this is meaningful, which is why I mentioned the sheep study first.
The NHS's independent review mentions a similar concern:
A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.
This all seems completely backwards and the opposite of the precautionary principle. A treatment as far-reaching and poorly-understood as preventing puberty should not be adopted as standard practice without conducting the research required to know if it is safe and effective. It should not be critics of the treatment looking through sheep studies and comparing desistence rates between different studies to find indications that it causes brain damage and treats gender dysphoria worse than doing nothing. It should be advocates having to do randomized control trials showing it actually improves outcomes relative to no treatment and that the damage to brain/bones/etc. is minor enough to be worth it. (In the U.S. it doesn't have to pass FDA approval because it's an off-label usage of drugs approved for precocious puberty. Unsurprisingly the trials conducted for that have little relevance to the way it is used for gender dysphoria, and frankly seem pretty questionable even for precocious puberty.) Instead it might be difficult or impossible to get ethics approval for such a study, since you're denying a now-standard treatment, particularly if you actually do it properly by advising your control group to not socially transition either. Since Sweden, Finland, Norway and the UK have in recent years advised against most or all usage of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, hopefully someone in one of those countries will be able to conduct a proper randomized control trial?
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Why? It's riffing off religious arguments about faith, where the reason there isn't proof of God is that he's testing our faith or whatever. "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” and all that, so even though God wants us to believe in him and created the world he deliberately made it look like a world created by unthinking natural processes and restricted his miracles to unverifiable anecdotes. This is an argument that exists precisely because God isn't real so there's a demand for backwards logic where the lack of evidence to believe in God is itself a reason to believe in God. He humorously inverts this into an argument where, if there was actually proof of God's existence, it would be proof of God's nonexistence. This is then compared to proving that black is white. In real life, of course, he didn't think that the lack of evidence for God is a reason to believe in God (or that there is evidence of God which means we shouldn't believe in God). He thought that the lack of evidence that God exists means that God actually doesn't exist.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
I don't see how bisexuality changes that. If you're a woman with two bisexual boyfriends, how does being interested in other women affect whether you're "by definition not invited" to M/M sex? Without adding a girlfriend you're not having sex with women either way. Bisexuality isn't required for a woman to be interested in two men having sex, as seen by (for instance) the market for yaoi.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
He meant that, if you have 1 heterosexual and 2 bisexuals of the opposite sex, everyone can still sleep with everyone else. If there's nobody else of the same sex being heterosexual doesn't affect the number of combinations.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
A recent development I just found about while writing is, the man who made the video had the rape charges against him dismissed 'in the interest of justice'.(local news link).
The charges were dismissed 2 months ago, March 14th 2025. The reason listed is "Dismissal by Prosecuting Attorney". Per a quick internet search, "Dismissed in the interest of Justice" is a catch-all term whenever they dismiss a charge for whatever reason. The news article was only updated yesterday though, presumably related to the attention it was getting.
Found by inputting the case number from your link 55-CR-22-817 here:
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Or did hundreds of people read the headline and drop a snarky comment, and not a single one bothered to read the article?
I remember some years back someone posted a fake article headline to /r/politics with a link that just went to a 404 Not Found page on a news website (I think Salon?). It got hundreds of upvotes before people noticed, though it did get voted back down to 0 once the top comments were pointing out the article didn't exist.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Having never read Yahoo Entertainment I have no idea if it's all slop or was semi-legitimate entertainment journalism at some point but I'm going to be extremely skeptical if I see it again.
Yahoo aggregates articles from other sites, with the source displayed in the top left corner. This one is from "Where is the Buzz".
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
A majority reject the following: DEI discriminates against white people: 33% - 41%
It's hard to interpret survey answers like this, presumably the 41% are expressing support by picking the more positive-sounding answer but how durable is that support? How they would respond to additional information or a different context? How much of this is pure partisan affiliation that doesn't translate into supporting specific policies at all?
Lets say they were working as recruiters and their managers said "The DEI report indicates our numbers aren't good enough, please trash all applications in the hiring pipeline from candidates that aren't female, black or Hispanic." What percent would respond with "Sure! Some bigots would call it discrimination to throw out the white/asian male candidates, but DEI isn't discrimination against white people."? What percentage would say "I thought DEI didn't entail discrimination! This is wrong and I won't do it."? What percentage would be somewhere in between? And of course most aren't going to be personally involved in implementing DEI policies, so how would they respond to more distant narratives, like a political debate about a discriminatory policy that has more specifics than just the DEI label?
The opposite, it was institutional investors selling and retail investors trying to "buy the dip". To a record degree during the first big selloff on Thursday.
Individuals made $4.7 billion worth of net equity purchases on April 3, meaning value of shares they bought outpaced the amount they sold by $4.7 billion. This is the highest daily inflow over the past decade, according to data from J.P. Morgan.
Which makes sense. For one because retail investors have more of a gambling mentality where they aren't obligated to avoid risk and can bet that Trump will back down or get overridden by Congress. For another they aren't necessarily knowledgeable about markets or economics, when 50% of the population voted for Trump I'm sure there's plenty of people who default to partisanship and assume he knows what he's doing. And even in left-wing communities a surprisingly common line I saw was that "Trump is deliberately crashing the market so that billionaires can buy it up cheap", people tend to assume that it must be to someone's benefit.
I harp on RCTs because most of the time I read non-RCTs (in fields like healthcare and sociology with complicated and frequently opaque mechanisms) they end up utterly failing to adequately compensate for their disadvantages. Though of course this is a biased sample, I'm generally not reading studies on obvious and non-controversial subjects. It's always stuff like "we controlled for X" where X is whatever arbitrary handful of factors the authors thought of (leaving whatever residue is left as the "effect", or conversely erasing the effect with Everest controls), or "we matched with a non-random pseudo control group" (like the puberty blockers study I discussed) where we're supposed to trust how well matched they really are and there's often obvious differences between the groups. It is with good reason that in applications like clinical trials where RCTs are possible, they are considered the "gold standard" and are often required for approval by organizations like the FDA.
It's bad enough that I think anyone trying to argue the contrary needs to very specifically justify why the non-RCTs in the case in question actually work, not vaguely gesture at the fact that sometimes we can gather adequate evidence without RCTs. Otherwise I think it is very easy for people, including medical professionals, to assume that (for instance) just because 50 studies on puberty blockers have been conducted and they have become established clinical practice we now know whether they are better or worse than nothing. Sorry, 5-HTTLPR and depression had 450 studies and turned out to be completely fake, you need the very highest quality of studies to know whether the thing you're talking about is even real. There are of course plenty of ways to mess up RCTs too, the replication crisis is filled with them, but my impression whenever I see RCTs on a subject compared with non-RCTs (as in Scott's posts I linked in the prior post) is of a huge and often unbridgeable difference in baseline reliability. Sometimes conducting RCTs really is impossible (and in those cases I expect our understanding of the issue to be much worse) but if they're possible then conducting a high-quality RCT is going to be my go-to recommendation for both understanding the issue and creating evidence compelling enough that it can potentially convince others.
Less facetiously, we have no RCTs demonstrating that HIV causes AIDs, but we can still be pretty confident about the link between the virus and the disease.
What do HIV and parachutes have in common? A much clearer mechanism of action. With gender dysphoria what we instead have is the murky waters of people creating narratives about their own subjective experiences based on whatever memes their culture has lying around, something people are terrible at doing accurately. Such introspection provides a wide range of insights: miracle supplements or faith-healing producing amazing boosts in well-being, subconscious reasons for your problems accessible through dream-analysis, neurasthensia, suppressed memories, etc. So yes, I'm sure you can make the case for HIV without a RCT, but that case would have to focus specifically on evidence particular to that case, my default without such evidence is to be skeptical of non-RCTs and look for the many ways they can go wrong.
All I'm trying to say is that your original post overemphasized the importance of RCTs in medicine.
By the way, based on you posting this in reply to someone else I think you mistook his posts for mine.
In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new.
The CASS report predominantly based its conclusions on the lack of high-quality research, a point it reiterates often, not on high-quality affirmative evidence against treatment. There is some such evidence - for instance see this Reddit comment I wrote about puberty blockers and the indications that they both lock children onto the transgender pathway and permanently damage brain development - but like all evidence on the issue it isn't very good. In the absence of evidence that a treatment is safe and effective, the burden is traditionally on those advocating for the treatment to prove that it is. However, even aside from new studies actually providing information, "gender-affirming care" now has both established practice and a political ideology behind it, so abolishing it in any sort of permanent and widespread way seems likely to require more evidence. Without new evidence you might see some governments abolish or discourage it specifically for children, but others will continue to feed a fraction of every new generation into the trans pipeline and even places that get rid of it could easily flip back in a generation. The medical consensus turning against it would be a much more effective and stable solution, and something like a high-quality randomized control trial showing gender transition failing to outperform the control group would be a big step in that direction.
If anything "lack of high-quality research" understates the case. There is not a single randomized control study of gender transition, in either children or adults. It's incredibly easy for non-RCTs to give false results even if you do a reasonably good job, and most don't do even that. Read through something like Scott's Alcoholics Anonymous post or his ivermectin post and imagine how much worse it would be if only the non-RCT subset of the studies he looks at were available. That's why fields like nutrition, where long-term randomized control trials are impractical, are so terrible despite far more quantity and quality of research than a small field like gender dysphoria.
As an example, here's an excerpt from the Cass Report I've looked into previously:
The systematic review on interventions to suppress puberty (Taylor et al: Puberty suppression) provides an update to the NICE review (2020a). It identified 50 studies looking at different aspects of gender-related, psychosocial, physiological and cognitive outcomes of puberty suppression. Quality was assessed on a standardised scale. There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.
Here is the meta-study being cited, the classification into high/moderate/low quality was not done by the Cass Report but by the meta-study. Note that many of the studies only looked at physical outcomes like "is puberty suppressed". At the time trans activists complained about the CASS report excluding a lot of studies, but among other things that includes studies that only investigated whether puberty blockers stop puberty and made no attempt to investigate whether stopping puberty provided any psychological benefit. This is the single supposed "high-quality" study. It isn't a randomized control study, it compares patients who have been given puberty blockers to ones who just started the assessment process. (It also compares to a "cisgender comparison group", such comparisons tend to be even more worthless.) Among other potential problems, this means the results are very plausibly just regression to the mean or benefits from the other mental-health care provided. If you think the parents of children with worse self-reported "internalizing, suicidality, and peer relations" are more likely to seek treatment than the parents of children who are currently doing fine, which the study itself shows, then improvement over time is the expected result even if you don't do anything. Plus they did do other things, it specifically mentions "the care provided in the present study also involved the offering of appropriate mental health care". It also mentions that the "control" group has an average age of 14.5 years and the treatment group 16.8 years. And that's the only "high-quality" study the meta-study could find on puberty blockers, here are the reasons given for why it considered the other studies to be even worse.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
Well, the fact that is the one quote always cited to make that argument certainly makes it seem like an outlier. And even it only says that they are not "purely white" since they are supposedly darker in complexion. That doesn't seem like a quote from a society where "French people aren't members of the white race" was a mainstream view, and indeed that wouldn't make sense with how people interpreted laws and rules explicitly referring to "White" people. It seems like him drawing a novel distinction between the different white races based on skin-tone to argue some of them are more white.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
As I said:
The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats.
The Irish/Jews/etc. were considered white, the idea that they weren't is a psuedo-historical myth advanced by certain activist historians like Noel Ignatiev. The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them. Being white was of real legal and social relevance, and groups such as the Irish were unquestionably included in that category.
The Volokh Conspiracy: Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)
Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?
If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage “passed” as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose “whiteness” has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
The second frames Zelensky as a conduit for his people's will. ... The average age of the fighting man is over 40.
What's with the way people use this point? Ukraine is engaging in a deliberate policy of recruiting older people because they don't want to kill off their younger generation. The minimum age for conscription was 27 until they lowered it to 25 in 2024. This is bad enough when people are using it make some "Ukraine is running out of manpower" point, which true or false is not supported by them recruiting people of the ages they are deliberately trying to recruit. However it seems even more ill-suited to make your current argument: if it's a mistaken policy, then it is one that if anything panders too hard towards the will of the people.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
the developers deny its authenticity
By "don't believe everything you read on the internet" they were presumably referring to the false rumors not the true ones. Like the "unskippable gay sex scene" rumor started by Saudi Arabian sites based on it being rejected by the government of Saudi Arabia. Of course in reality the scene is both part of a very optional romance and is (like every cutscene) skippable even if you've chosen that romance route. I'm not sure if the "unskippable" part was from bad machine translation of the Saudi sites or something else.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Because it was a plan created by a group of non-Trump Republicans and contained elements that he disagreed with, some of which were mined for political attacks by those claiming it was his plan. That doesn't mean that he disagrees with everything in it - both Trump and the authors are Republicans, so naturally they have overlap in policy. Nor does it mean that Trump considers people radioactive and unhireable for contributing to it, once again they are Republicans and agree on many things. It just means that people quoting from it as "Trump's plan" were being dishonest, an honest critic could have either quoted Agenda 47 instead or made predictions about his actions without claiming they were from Trump's published plan. I don't think this is ordinarily a concept people have difficulty with, activist groups and think-tanks publish proposals that have partial overlap with politician's actual plans all the time.
I'm guessing the very fact that it wasn't his plan contributed to the focus on it. For anything in Agenda 47 he could just say "yeah that's my plan, it's great!". Whereas the fact that Project 2025 wasn't actually his plan meant that he denied it, which looks weaker and like he has something to hide.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
"Six million people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".
"Millions of others" - other than what? Other than the 6 million jews referrred to in the first part of the sentence. This is a statement that only makes sense precicely because the speaker is not a holocaust denier and thinks it goes without saying that the 6 million refers to the jewish victims and then on top of that there were "millions of others" who were instead killed for being "Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".
That's just how people talk. It doesn't reflect anything besides the fact that the sensitive nature of the subject matter means some people on Twitter are combing through statements like these in order to complain because someone said "six million" instead of "six million jews". Similarly with the others, when someone says "all those who were murdered just for being who they were" it's because she wants to emphasize that aspect of the motive, not because she doesn't think jews were targeted.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Scott knew the truth about HBD all along, but his public position was still in compliance with HBD denial.
No it wasn't. In 2017 he wrote The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project, as well as this post that was probably the most explicit pre-AstralCodexTen:
Learning To Love Scientific Consensus:
Even things about genetic psychological differences between population groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain about 25% – 50% of variance.
I hate to bring that up, because it’ll probably start a flame war in the comments, but I think it’s important as a sign of exactly how hard it is to politicize science. Global warming skeptics talk about how maybe the scientific consensus on global warming is false because climatologists face political pressure to bias their results in favor of the theory. But scientists studying these areas face much more political pressure, and as long as you give the surveys anonymously they’re happy to express horrendously taboo opinions. This is about the strongest evidence in favor of the consensus on global warming – and scientific consensus in general – that I could imagine.
Coincidentally that post also addresses your point. Even with something as taboo and suprressed as HBD, you can anonymously survey experts in the field and get overwhelming support. That doesn't translate into "institutions" being automatically trustworthy, something like a public statement by a university or an article in the New York Times has little in common with an anonymous survey of experts. But I don't think he ever said otherwise. He's posted about how media outlets rarely outright lie and prefer misleading people in other ways, but that isn't the same as saying they're generally trustworthy.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
By contacting more journalists, including more prominent ones. By providing evidence such as documentation (sure it's plausible that he didn't manage to copy any - but if someone like him knew about it there should be a huge number of people in a position to leak it). By providing specifics about how exactly he learned about it, some of which could lead to collaborating evidence. Not by combining it with other grievances ranging from war crimes to personal issues and generic stuff about how the country is "headed towards collapse". That's a common tendency with delusions/lies/exaggerations, where something that should be a huge deal is treated as a side note because the chain of causation doesn't begin with learning about it but with his general state of mind manufacturing it. (See also: MeToo accusations that treat claims like "committed rape" as secondary to "was a bad boyfriend who hurt my feelings".) Not by committing suicide at all: mentally healthy people rarely commit suicide and it's a bad way to leak information compared to just staying alive and telling people all the specifics of what he learned and when/why he learned it.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Reading the first half of your post it seemed like a message from a mentally ill person. Learning that he later killed himself in a car bomb did not increase my assessment of his sanity.
I tend to find schizophrenic or similarly disordered modes of thinking very recognizable, so it's always weird to me when other people see them and don't immediately realize what's going on. You also have to consider the base rates here: mental illness is much more common than the number of people who know about "secret physics-revolutionizing propulsion systems" level information, or indeed information considerably less earth-shattering than that. And what percentage of people who know about the latter would react by messaging an obscure Instagram account, mixing in unrelated stuff about war crimes, and then bombing themselves in front of Trump Tower?
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
The issue I'm having is that the current H-1B system is does not stop at importing the top ~0.1% of engineering talent, and originally he was talking about expanding it even more.
It's a lottery system, it rejects "0.1% engineers" even as it lets in lower-skill immigrants so long as the lower-skill immigrants are above the minimum threshold. It could instead do something like auction off the slots to the highest bidder or hand them out in order to the highest wages offered and it would become dramatically more selective even if it expanded. I don't know what reforms if any the Trump administration will actually pursue, but they're not incompatible goals.
I've been thinking the same thing. AI text seems so fundamentally uninteresting to me. The reasons I'm interested in humans talking is either to find out what people think or to learn actual information/insight about the rest of the world. AI doesn't do the former at all because there's nobody writing it so it doesn't let me know anyone's thoughts or feelings, and it's not reliable enough to be good at the latter. On rare occasion I've gotten use out of it as a search engine pointing me towards information I can verify myself, and I don't doubt various other uses as a tool, but beyond that? Back in the early days of GPT-2 through to GPT-4 I was interested in the samples posted by others, but that was because of what they indicated about the state of AI. Is it that some people enjoy the act of conversation itself even if they know there's nobody on the other end? I wonder which side is the majority, and by how much?
@Fruck compared it to parasociality but it's almost the opposite to me. For example I like reading other people discuss the same media I'm interested in. So do a lot of other people, that's presumably why people read Reddit or 4chan threads discussing media, read reviews for books they've already read, watch youtubers like RedLetterMedia, watch reaction-videos, etc. People want to know what other people thought, they want to empathize with their reactions to key moments, etc. AI-generated text has none of that appeal, if people are having parasocial relationships with it then their parasociality is completely different from anything I've felt. I guess the closest comparison is to parasocial feelings for fictional characters? If AI was capable of good fiction-writing I might be interested in reading it, the same way I can appreciate good-looking AI art, but currently it's not. Especially not when the character it's writing is "helpful AI assistant", hardly a font of interesting characterization or witty dialogue, yet a lot of people seem to find conversations with that character interesting.
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