sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
He was referring to what the protesters did, not what they were specifically charged with. Even if protesters who did no more than trespass were charged with "Treason" that would not undermine his point about them being treated differently from how trespassing protesters are usually treated. As it happens, what a lot of them was charged with was "Obstruction of an official proceeding", an incredibly broad law created for people trying to interfere with criminal investigations/trials that had never been used in this way before. The Wikipedia article is divided into "Use prior to 2021" and "2021 U.S. Capitol attack" for a reason. And then, even if you think that undermines the point somehow, the specific guy he linked was just charged with "entering a restricted area", which is even more overtly about him trespassing.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Not quite since Hamefura didn't come first. Like modern isekai in general, most "villainess" stories originate from the endlessly-derivative world of Japanese webnovels. HameFura ran as a webnovel on Narou 2014-2015, then a light-novel series from 2015 to present, then a manga adaption starting in 2017, then an anime. I think that's fairly early on but I know there were still several prominent villainess webnovels that came earlier, and presumably even more that never attained prominence and/or were abandoned incomplete by their authors.
I think a good comparison is to fanfiction in the English-speaking world, except that instead of people doing fanfiction of a specific work they do their own version of a stock premise. This is why isekai often has some sort of distinctive twist on the idea right at the beginning (the original idea the author had to differentiate it from the other isekais a click away on Narou), weird pacing because it was being written and uploaded a chapter at a time, etc.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Would it be any less a matter of luck if intelligence and personality was entirely determined by your kindergarten teacher, your pregnant mother's folate consumption, the people you happened to make friends with in school, and whether your parents read to you as a child? It seems like the only advantage of environmental explanations in this matter is obscurantism, it seems less like luck if you can't name the exact mechanism. But regardless of specifics the kind of person you are is going to be 100% luck by definition, because the only things we don't define as luck are the products of the choices you make, and your choices are in turn determined and preceded by the kind of person you are.
Even if the way personality worked was at the age of 18 you pressed a button to choose either "I want to spend the rest of my life intelligent and highly-motivated" or "I want to be stupid and lazy", it would still be 100% "luck" determining the social/genetic/coincidental factors that made you choose one button or the other. It would be good due to more people pressing the first button and all the very real benefits that would bring to humanity, in the same way that a successful genetic-enhancement/embryo-selection/sperm-donation/lead-abatement program would be good, but it wouldn't stop your nature from being a matter of "luck".
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower
Note that there have been studies trying to control for this, like this admixture study:
Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability
Using data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we examined whether European ancestry predicted cognitive ability over and above both parental socioeconomicstatus (SES) and measures of eye, hair, and skin color. First, using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we verified that strict factorial invariance held between self-identified African and European-Americans. The differences between these groups, which were equivalent to 14.72 IQ points, were primarily (75.59%) due to difference in general cognitive ability (g), consistent with Spearman’s hypothesis. We found a relationship between European admixture and g. This relationship existed in samples of (a) self-identified monoracial African-Americans (B = 0.78, n = 2,179), (b) monoracial African and biracial African-European-Americans, with controls added for self-identified biracial status (B = 0.85, n = 2407), and (c) combined European, African-European, and African-American participants, with controls for self-identified race/ethnicity (B = 0.75, N = 7,273). Controlling for parental SES modestly attenuated these relationships whereas controlling for measures of skin, hair, and eye color did not.
So black people with 30% European ancestry do better on the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery than those with 10% European ancestry, which is already some remarkably fine-grained racism. But people do talk about "colorism" and so they look at genes linked to skin/hair/eye color, but those genes don't seem to have an impact when ancestry is accounted for.
Skin color (assessed genetically with the highly accurate predictor [79, 93] was associated with cognitive ability (Model 1b, Table 5), but made no significant incremental contribution when ancestry was also in the model (Model 2, Table 5). Results could still be due to phenotypic confounding from other appearance variables. To test this possibility, we fitted a number of models including skin, hair, and eye color. We found that none of these features had significant effects on their own, except for brown eye color, which was positively related to cognitive ability, but with a large standard error.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Because the Rothschild family features in a lot of conspiracy theories due to being enormously wealthy and influential during the 19th century. You really don't need any additional explanation for why a family that had that level of wealth and influence over governments for a century accumulated conspiracy theories exaggerating their power further. Look at the conspiracy theories that have accumulated about Bill Gates in just a couple decades. Someone did the usual conspiracy-theorist thing of playing Six Degrees of Separation and noticing they were connected to PG&E, and then MTG read and repeated it.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
If SCOTUS explicitly clarifies the Civil Rights Act as protecting all races equally
Are there rulings saying it doesn't? I'm not familiar with the subject but I would have guessed that it is already interpreted that way but the selective enforcement happens at some other stage of the process.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Right, I was wondering if he was referring to something other than affirmative-action itself. But I guess the affirmative-action carve-out is already broad enough that it can be used to justify most relevant forms of discrimination against whites and asians. Compared to employment it doesn't much matter whether restaurants are allowed to refuse to serve white people.
I was thinking about how the lawsuit against Youtube regarding their employment discrimination against white/asian men was apparently considered worth attempting, but that's probably because the methods used were so overt (like the recruiter plaintiff being told to "immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black or Hispanic") that they thought it might fall outside the carve-out. Plus looking at the lawsuit it's all based on state-level laws. (Though there's a mention of the plaintiff telling them "it violated state and federal law".)
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
That's about what I would expect from UN Women, I assure you they're quite sincere and behave with similar intellectual rigor in more consequential ways than just tweets. Off the top of my head their responses to the 2014 Ebola outbreak comes to mind, a search finds this blog post summarizing it. Archive of their report:
In Ebola-affected communities and quarantined areas women should be prioritized in the provision of medical supplies, food, care, social protection measures and psychosocial services.
Women are "vulnerable" and thus need to get priority, you can count on that being their conclusion regardless of situation. Some news articles reported this as if they were more medically vulnerable, but mostly UN Women meant they were vulnerable in some vague social sense, along with implying they might be more medically vulnerable based on some dubious early data (ebola deaths by gender ended up being around equal). That blog post also has some links regarding the UN's decision to only distribute food to women after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Good luck getting food if you don't have any living and friendly female relatives.
On a lighter note, the "Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls" report from the UN Broadband Commission with "editorial inputs by teams from UN Women, UNDP and ITU" was laughably terrible. Most blatantly regarding the citations, which ranged from "literally blank" or "citing a file on your own hard drive" to referring to "Recent research on how violent video games are turning children, mostly boys, into ‘killing zombies’ 118" based on citing a 2000 article published on a LaRouche website raving about "killings which are caused by the use of Nintendo-style games, such as the game Pokémon,", "satanic video games", etc. For whatever reason feminism within the UN seems unusually incompetent and written without considering potential criticism, the tweet doesn't seem too surprising with that history.
As with other gender diverse individuals, eunuchs may also seek castration to better align their bodies with their gender identity. As such, eunuch individuals are gender nonconforming individuals who have needs requiring medically necessary gender-affirming care (Brett et al., 2007; Johnson et al., 2007; Roberts et al., 2008).
I think the biggest takeaway here is exactly how little evidence is required for WPATH to declare something a "gender identity" requiring "medically necessary gender-affirming care". I've read academic papers from forum posters talking about their forum buddies before, but I've certainly never seen a case where the resulting paper was considered notable, let alone sufficient basis to create a medical standard of care. I previously wrote a post about otherkin/transracialism/plurals as a control-group for gender-identity, in the same way that parapsychology can serve as a control group for science. This serves a similar function, but on the medical institution side of things.
Also, take a moment and consider exactly how big the gap is between the quality of evidence and the boldness of the claim. Presumably the author thinks gender identities are fixed/inborn:
Like other gender diverse individuals, eunuch individuals may be aware of their identity in childhood or adolescence. Due to the lack of research into the treatment of children who may identify as eunuchs, we refrain from making specific suggestions.
So apparently for all of human history some people have been born with a eunuch gender identity (separate from actual eunuchs who generally had no choice), and we're only now finding out thanks to the guys writing the WPATH standard of care happening to post on a related fetish forum. And that's just it as a scientific claim, but this isn't even about whether a hypothesis has a 51% chance of being true, it's about medical care. Medical care carrying severe and permanent side-effects demands use of the precautionary principle and very strong evidence that it will benefit the patient. But it goes beyond even that because of course this isn't him treating a specific patient he has met, it's him establishing a medical standard of care. His internet surveys of his forum buddies are sufficient for WPATH to declare that patients diagnosed as having a eunuch gender identity (which is presumably any patient who claims to identify as a eunuch, which I suspect would go up orders of magnitude if psychiatrists started telling patients about the idea or the it got any cultural traction) will benefit from "gender-affirming care".
This tells us very little about eunuchs, but it tells us a lot about WPATH's decision-making processes. It also tells us important information about the institutions that continue to reference other WPATH recommendations as if they're significantly more meaningful than a sheet of paper with "Yes X is a gender-identity, prescribe gender-affirming care." printed on it. Or for that matter institutions that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Surely a philosophy professor should be familiar with the paradox of the heap? Does he avoid using the word "heap" because of it? What about "hot" or "biped"? The vast majority of words have various levels of vague boundaries.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.
An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit. It's like if, for example, someone criticized the National Organization for Women for giving Mattress Girl their Woman of Courage award even after the text messages came out discrediting her rape accusation. And then you responded with "Sure it looks like she falsely accused him in retaliation for him breaking up with her and/or for the personal benefits, but NOW has 500,000 members, can you prove the majority of them share her motive?" Clearly they don't need to, the relevant members of their organization hold to a "Believe Women"/"Believe Survivors" ideology and so a single liar with sufficient skill at invoking the ideology was all it took. But instead of just being a response to a single incident, it's WPATH establishing a medical standard. And instead of being an openly non-neutral activist organization, it's the most prominent independent organization setting standards for trans healthcare, one that countless medical institutions listen to.
This then provides valuable insight into the validity of WPATH's decision-making processes, like knowing a medical/scientific organization wrote the conclusion of an argument first. And as I said in my other post, it also gives us valuable information about the processes of institutions that continue to take their recommendations seriously or "that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect". For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to. However, many other authorities like the American Medical Association have not. If a lot of institutions are making decisions on the subject are heavily influenced by social justice ideology, that is valuable information in judging this split. And yes, I already knew that so it's not going to shift my opinion very much, there's already been varying levels of other evidence like the mass-resignations complaining about ideological pressure a few years ago at the NHS's only gender clinic for children (since shut down as of a few months ago). But a lot of people think things like the shift to maximally "gender-affirming care" are just about following the evidence rather than ideological pressure and so this provides a valuable test case.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I've also never heard of a hate crime hoax meant to implicate a specific person at all, because that's legally dangerous.
If we're including threats sent by people attempting to be anonymous, back in 2014 one of the two threats that got Anita Sarkeesian to cancel her USU speech unless they agreed to forbid guns on-campus while she was there (which they legally couldn't do) was false-flagging as MrRepzion, a youtuber who had recently made a pro-gamergate video. The email itself came out in the FOIA release, page 16 and 78 with slightly different redactions, his name is redacted but the release provides enough information to confirm that he was the one mentioned:
My name is [MrRepzion] I am the [Redacted] of the hacking group known as 4chan and the official leader of Gamergate.
It is my understanding that a loverly young women named [Redacted].
At this moment, we have over 9000 bombs that we will use to blow up the TSC auditorium when [Redacted]. You dun goofed by inviting that stupid feminazi to give a lecture. You're fucking dead, kiddos.
We of Gamergate, or GamerGators, as we prefer to call ourselves, are sick and tired of you stupid feminists ruining everything by saying it's sexist. You all need a hug, some tea, and maybe a gentle back massage, and what better way to pacify you than by burning your faces off with high-ordinance explosives?
You can try calling the FBI to come areest me, but I'm behind 7 proxies and you'll never be able to backtrace this IP. Can't lulzback the [Redacted]
Oh, and I'm also fapping to all of your pictures right now. You're hot. It's a shame you're about to get blown up.
Sincerely,
[MrRepzion]
Glorious Winged Faggot Extraordinaire"
Sarkeesian mentioned the threat and that it claimed to be from gamergate, but not that it also claimed to be from MrRepzion:
Unlike the other email none of the text was released or quoted by media outlets except for the word "gamergate". (Even after the FOIA release in 2016 I remember seeing articles mention the USU threats but none mention the MrRepzion part or otherwise take information from the release.)
The FBI did end up knocking on MrRepzion's door and asking him about it 10 months later, he tweeted and made a video about it. This then matches up with the date that the FOIA release mentions:
03/18/2015
Seattle interviewed [Redacted] Seattle considers this lead closed.
And the details of the interview mentioned on page 33:
informed Agents that he would be posting a video on YouTube about the Agents' visit to his house as soon as the Agents left.
The actual sender was never found, sending emails anonymously is trivial. Sending phone-calls anonymously is less trivial but I think it's still possible, so apparently the Jewish bomb threat guy messed it up somehow. Anyway I mostly just bring this up because I think it's an interesting part of culture-war history that people should know about, but to bring it back to your post I think once someone is trying to send illegal threats anonymously he's relying on not getting caught rather than avoiding additional illegality.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
They have a portrait of Stalin hanging in their office and gave thanks to Marx and Engels during their VGA award acceptance speech. Maybe some part of it is ironic and/or they're like the portion of /pol/ who like to use Hitler and the swastika as edgy symbols despite not being neo-nazis themselves, but it's not as straightforward as just being anti-Soviet anarchists.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I rest my case
Do you have any evidence more compelling than a few anecdotes about Jewish fraudsters? Fraud statistics that control for likelihood of being in an appropriate industry and/or being in a position with opportunity, that sort of thing? Because if you're going by individual anecdotes then you're just at the mercy of whichever anecdotes you pay attention to.
By comparison if you were trying to avoid getting mugged you might sometimes get some benefit from crime statistics or (in their absence) at least a sufficiently large and unbiased set of anecdotes. You wouldn't get any benefit from listening to a few media anecdotes and deciding the main criminal threat in the U.S. is white men committing mass-shootings and hate-crimes. Sometimes stereotypes are based on fact but sometimes they aren't. Jewish over-representation in the financial industry is already sufficient to explain an anecdotal over-representation in financial fraud, to show it's more than would be expected based on that you would need a more precise method of analysis.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I had no idea how bad the hero worship had gotten. Both among EA and big financial institutions.
You say both but link only a venture capital fund. Doing a Google site-search of effectivealtruism.org and Lesswrong excluding the past couple weeks I don't really see any hero-worship. There's some mentions of him as a guy who donates a lot of money to effective-altruist causes, some mention of the FTX Future Fund, and some discussion that maybe his example means sufficiently talented EAs should pursue "become billionaire entrepreneurs" as a strategy more often. He wasn't some kind of thought leader within the EA community, he was a guy who donated a bunch of money and came up in discussions of ultra-rich EA supporters. I think people, including effective altruists themselves, are overstating his involvement in retrospect.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
EA obviously deserves some egg on its face, especially outlets which were evangelizing for SBF (like @TheDag's Sequoia article).
Sequoia Capital is an ordinary venture capital firm with zero relation to EA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Capital
As I mentioned in response to his post, a search of the EA forum and Lesswrong doesn't find any evangelizing for SBF or FTX. He got occasionally discussed as a major EA donor and EA-supporting billionaire, and that's pretty much it.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
We are talking about charities accepting donations, they're not the ones providing the gold. We're not talking about Sequoia Capital, the 50-year-old venture-capital firm that gave FTX hundreds of millions of dollars, had access to internal information, and actually had a duty to their investors to try to avoid this sort of thing. We're not talking about any of their other institutional investors like the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan, Tiger Global Management, Third Point, Altimeter Capital Management, or Softbank. Since when has it been the job of charities to investigate the businesses of the people donating them money? "Failed to do unpaid amateur investment analysis trying to beat institutional investors at their own jobs for the sake of refusing donations that might turn out to be from a criminal" isn't exactly a test of quokkahood, especially if the label isn't being applied to the institutional investors who actually invested and lost enormous sums of money.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Some people are asking whether people who accepted FTX money should have “seen the red flags” or “done more due diligence”.
I find this stuff really obnoxious. Since when has it ever been the job of charities to investigate the businesses of the people donating them money? EA or not, what charity does this? It would be a ridiculous waste of time and money, it's not their job and specialization exists for a reason. People are talking like it's some deep failing that they didn't find him suspicious and refuse his money, but just how many legitimate donors should they be willing to refuse as "suspicious" for the sake of avoiding a criminal? Not that it would have been practical anyway, EA-endorsed charities are not some unified group and a lot of his "EA" donations were stuff like directly supporting political candidates who promised to do something about pandemic preparedness
We're not talking about Sequoia Capital, the venture-capital firm that has now written down $214 million in FTX equity, had access to internal information, and actually had a duty to their investors to try to avoid this sort of thing. Similarly we're not talking about their other institutional investors like Blackrock, the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan, Tiger Global Management, Softbank Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Temasek. We're not talking about the state of Miami selling them the naming rights to a stadium for $125 million dollars, giving them a lot more advertising than some blog posts saying "this billionaire supports EA, great!". Somehow EA is held to a much higher standard than any of these, even though it seems obvious to me that accepting donations should be held to dramatically lower standards than investing teacher's retirement money. EA should focus on effective charity, that is already a sufficiently-ambitious specialty, it shouldn't focus on doing unpaid amateur investment analysis trying to beat institutional investors at their own jobs for the sake of refusing donations that might turn out to be from a criminal.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
That's a fairer defense, and the Ontario Pension Plan admins should be facing serious scrutiny, if not potential review of their licensing (if they have any), as should any who make serious crypto investment with other people's money and no extremely clear disclosure.
Should they though? I think the standard should be higher for institutional investors than for charities accepting donations, but that doesn't necessarily mean the standard for investors should be significantly higher than it already is. They're an easy target because they're partially sponsored by the government, but they were just doing the same thing that the entirely private investors were doing. And the private investors have an appetite for risk because ones that were too risk averse would get outcompeted and replaced in their roles by ones that pursued a more successful strategy. Sequoia Capital is a 50-year-old firm managing $85 billion, and while you could speculate that their employees have recently become less competent or too reckless it seems perfectly plausible that their decision-making here was just the same kind of decision-making that led to these investments:
Notable successful investments by Sequoia Capital include Apple, Cisco, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, PayPal, Reddit, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and Zoom.
Meanwhile, charities accepting donations both have less to lose, since rather than outright losing an initial investment there's just any money/time wasted by planning around future funding that doesn't come and vague reputational concerns potentially affecting future donations, and more to gain, since you're outright getting money for nothing rather than trying to get a return for money you already have. There's a direct tradeoff between the two, if it's 35% of your funding you risk having wasted more money if it evaporates, while Sequoia obviously doesn't invest that much in a single company - but if you refuse you know you're out a whole 35% of your potential funding, whereas Sequoia can just invest their money in something else. If it's 100% of your funding because you've been soliciting funding for your new charity and they're the first donors to say yes, there's certainly a risk the money will dry up and destroy your charity if you can't find a substitute, but if you refuse there's a risk you won't find enough donations to begin with. You talk about it killing charities, but if a sudden loss of funding can do that how much is because of "less funds than expected" vs. just "less funds, same as if you had refused"?
An EA organization has to... look at other funders? Which, according to Scott's claims here, were already thirsty for good causes to give money to?
The reason why there was more funding than EA charities knew what to do with in the short term was because of FTX suddenly showing up and throwing around a bunch of money, if everyone had refused that wouldn't have been the case. If those other donors don't materialize for the current funding crunch would they have done so to begin with?
It seems like the tradeoffs here pretty strongly favor not being particularly picky about who you accept donations from. Sure if you know someone obtained money from criminality you don't accept the money, but if a dozen institutional investors and the police/SEC don't have a problem then why should you? Now, you could try to mitigate risk in other ways than refusing money outright, like saving more of the money rather than finding ways to spend it immediately, or better yet persuading them to give you a larger endowment rendering you more self-sufficient. But obviously this might not be possible and carries significant disadvantages, for one donors (especially EA donors) want to see actual results from their donations and evaluate your performance, not "we'll do some charity with this money someday". It transfers the risk of the donor having problems to a risk of the charity having problems, like becoming The Wikimedia Foundation with an enormous pile of cash and a huge stream of donations coming in while meanwhile only a tiny fraction gets spent on anything of value. That is after all one of the big problems EA sought to address, and unlike an incompetent/fraudulent for-profit company which eventually collapses to remove the problem, an incompetent/fraudulent charity can continue to waste people's donations indefinitely. I'm not saying that no improvement is possible, for instance maybe there are measures to be more resilient in case funding is lost, but I don't think it justifies extremely costly measures like outright refusing funding because the donor is in a risky field, and I don't think it reflects some deep problem with EA.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
perhaps the most prominent advocate of such giving in the minds of the general public. SBF, in a sense, was EA’s face to the normies.
As far as I can tell this isn't true. I was somewhat familiar with EA and I'd still never heard of him before, though I think I saw a mention of the FTX Future Fund in a Scott post or something. Not that long ago I remember reading people worrying that perception of EA was being too driven by longtermism due to the publication of What We Owe the Future, if that was true maybe William MacAskill qualifies as the public face. But more likely it's still just Peter Singer. SBF donated a pile of money and got mentioned in some news articles because of it but he wasn't writing books or articles about EA, he wasn't giving talks about it, he wasn't representing the EA position in panel shows. Searching old news articles the main place his support for EA got mentioned was in puff pieces about him personally. Now, they might get associated in the public imagination in retrospect, since what happened with FTX is big news and there's some articles about him and EA, but back when he was just some philanthropic billionaire I don't think he was a big part of the public perception.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
And now they're "when we told you to forget your suffering neighbours in favour of the malaria-stricken children in Africa, now we're forgetting the malaria-stricken children in Africa because AI RISK!!!!" Guess those kids can just go die now, right?
Per this report from Givewell, the largest effective-altruist organization, the funds they've directed towards anti-malaria and other global healthcare causes is at an all-time high. In 2021 their total funds raised was $595 million, compared to $35 million back in 2014. The top recipients of that money were Malaria Consortium (22%), Against Malaria Foundation (17%), GiveDirectly (6%), Hellen Keller International - Vitamin A Supplementation (5%), New Incentives - CCTs for immunization (4%), SCI Foundation - Deworming (4%), Sightsavers - Deworming (3%), Evidence Action - Deworm the world (1%), and END fund - Deworming (0.16%). The only one of those not dedicated to health is GiveDirectly, which just gives money to poor third-worlders. If your perception doesn't match this, maybe you're basing it too much on the controversial things that people argue about online, rather than on what they are actually doing.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Yes, I don't actually think it would be good if states selling stadium naming rights were expected to do that sort of investigation. Leave it for their investors and law enforcement. But I see people making arguments that EA charities accepting FTX's donations gave them advertising/credibility and this reflects EA being naive or short-sighted-utilitarians or whatever. Well a lot more people heard about FTX from the "FTX Arena" than by reading articles about philanthropy, and I'm not seeing articles on how the state of Miami must have been horribly naive to accept FTX's money.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
You're claiming rationalism thinks that philosophical debates about "free will" are meaningful and have relevance to assigning personal responsibility? By "rationalism" meaning LessWrong people? I don't believe you. And sure enough, I searched on LessWrong and found that not only does Eliezer Yudkowsky not agree with those like Barbara Fried, in 2008 he called it so trivial that it served as a "practice question" for aspiring rationalists, then later elaborated on his solution at further length.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/free-will
It's not like this is even restricted to one of the more obscure "sequences", I've seen "Dissolving the Question" cited elsewhere. Look, I'm sure there's people on /r/badphilosophy who would mock the arrogance of thinking you have easily dissolved a famous philosophical dilemma, and that would be annoying in its own way. But at least it would display at least some surface-level engagement with what was said. Grouping LessWrong in with a philosopher arguing that some inane sophistry about "free will" means we should adopt her preferred criminal-justice policy positions reflects an incredible lack of understanding of what they believe and how they think. Barbara Fried is engaging in the exact sort of thing that makes LessWrong people have such a poor opinion on the health of philosophy as a field.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
This is just "The Pyramid and the Garden". People aren't good at properly adjusting for the level of cherrypicking and degrees of freedom possible when you have thousands of people scouring a large world for evidence matching their pet theory.
A photoshoot for a fashion company reuses a "legal documents" prop from the shooting of a television drama as "office documents", the same company sells fashion that is vaguely leather-daddy inspired and didn't segregate it from photoshoots with children, and you conclude that "we are ruled by satanic pedophiles". (And they are deliberately embedding evidence about this in fashion photoshoots for some reason.) If you lived in a tribe of a few dozen people and happened to personally notice two coincidences like that about a single person, maybe that would be reason to be suspicious. But you don't, you live in a society of hundreds of millions where thousands of people spend time hunting down and broadcasting stuff like this for your perusal. As a result this doesn't even really tell us about Balenciaga's marketing department, let alone "society". But people's brains don't adjust like that, so give them a few coincidences like this and they'll either come to believe false things or dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory. And then the ones who do the latter are still vulnerable to the same mistakes in reasoning when packaged in ways that don't register as "conspiracy theory", especially ones spread by mainstream media sources.
The selection effects wouldn't be that straightforward because the second link is to a meta-study of studies by clinics on outcomes for all the children they diagnosed with gender dysphoria, none of whom were given puberty blockers. There unfortunately aren't many studies like that and the children in question were diagnosed before use of puberty-blockers became widespread.
Now, that definitely raises its own serious problems in comparing the two groups. In particular, the number of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria since those studies has risen enormously. At the recently-closed Tavistock/Gender Identity Development Service clinic in the UK, the NHS's only gender clinic for children, referrals rose from 94 in 2010 to 2,519 in 2018. So there's not a lot of reason to believe those diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the earlier studies included in that meta-study are representative of more than a small fraction of those diagnosed today. But it seems difficult to justify that those diagnosed with gender dysphoria before the increase would be more prone to desistance under a watchful-waiting approach than those who seemingly wouldn't have been diagnosed if they were born a decade earlier. It's possible to construct a narrative like that - I've heard arguments that the ability to diagnose gender dysphoria has become more accurate, or that the desisters would be better-off as trans but were forced back into the closet by a transphobic society. But it certainly doesn't seem safe to assume, let alone prescribing puberty-blockers based on that assumption.
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