sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
"Bowdlerize" has had strongly negative connotations for more than a century. And that's despite the fact that Bowlder's editions were meant for children, rather than trying to push them on everyone or replace the original.
sodiummuffin
27d ago
Not all randomized control trials are blinded randomized control trials. All you need for a randomized control trial is to randomly assign a group of patients that gets the treatment and a group that doesn't. As far as I know, no long-term randomized control study of gender transition has ever been conducted, in either children or adults.
Non-RCT's are if anything even worse than euphemisms like "moderate-quality" make them seem, reading something like Scott's ivermectin post might help give a sense for it. 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 a result of the GRADE approach, we read things like this in the report:
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.
No, it's way worse than that, the high/moderate/low quality ratings were based on the cited meta-study and seem if anything too lenient. Reading the meta-study, many of the studies only looked at physical outcomes like "is puberty suppressed", they made no attempt to measure psychological outcomes to determine whether suppressing puberty actually provided any benefit. This is the supposed single "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. And then here are the detailed explanations of why they considered the other studies to be even worse.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
You're comparing diagnoses per year for those 6-17 to number of children. You have to multiply the yearly figure by 12 for the whole time period. The U.S. population 6-17 is apparently 49,466,485, which would put the percentage who end up with gender-dysphoria diagnoses before the age of 18 at 1.02%.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Your summary of the Grayson/Quinn conflict of interest is good, and illustrates some of the video's overt misrepresentations, but I'd note there is also dishonesty through omission. GG uncovered a lot of cases of game journalists engaging in undisclosed conflicts of interest, alongside other complaints like sensationalism and ideological witch-hunts against developers. For instance, very early on they discovered that Kotaku's Patricia Hernandez had repeatedly given coverage to both her friend and former roommate Anna Anthropy and to her former girlfriend Christine Love. Hernandez is now Kotaku's editor-in-chief. This image was circulating days before the Gamergate hashtag was even coined. (The expansion of the scandal beyond Grayson/Quinn is part of why people were eager to jump on the Gamergate hashtag when Baldwin coined it rather than continuing to use "Quinnspiracy", other hashtags were already being brainstormed and various strawpolls posted in the days prior to Baldwin's tweet.)
The articles on Deepfreeze are a decent summary from the GG perspective, with the one titled "Unfair advantage" being the one focused on personal conflicts of interest.
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.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
The way you're grouping and valuing people seems fundamentally nonsensical. What does it even mean to talk about cleaners hypothetically vanishing? If you need a cleaner and don't have one then you put out a job ad, with the wage increasing as necessary until someone accepts, until you add cleaning duties to some other job and find someone willing to accept (perhaps yourself), or until you have to go out of business because you can't afford to get it done. People who have some job are not a fixed group with fixed properties, and they certainly don't have fixed wages, fixed value, or fixed levels of unnecessary employment across different societies.
The value of low-skill labor varies widely based on the opportunity cost of accomplishing it some other way in your society. If a job has a low skill floor and a low skill ceiling it tends to hire the less competent members of society, but that is relative competence. If there was a mass genetic-engineering/eugenics program such that the least-competent bottom 10% of society had an average IQ of 130, high conscientiousness, and low rate of mental or physical illness, and that society hadn't completely replaced cleaners with robots, then presumably you'd be hiring those people as janitors since that would be a lower opportunity cost than hiring from the other 90% (so they accept lower pay). The only differences are that they would do a somewhat better job (such as less incidents of janitors destroying cell samples, to reference a post linked here a while back) and you would have to pay them much more because the overall prosperity of society would have increased and even the bottom 10% would have better options you need to compete with. Of course, the overall prosperity of society increasing generally also means you can afford to pay them more. They're only going to vanish if there are alternatives preferable to the additional expense, like how personal servants have largely vanished in first-world countries.
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
For instance, women seem more able to put themselves in the shoes of male protagonists in fiction, while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists.
In anime and manga there are entire genres, most obviously slice-of-life comedies, where it is typical to have nearly 100% female casts (and a 50% or higher male audience). Female characters are a publishing requirement at plenty of manga magazines, and not for ideological reasons. Here is a relevant extra from the comedy manga/anime D-Frag, which ended up with a main cast that looks like this. The same is true for anime-style videogames, in particular gacha games which have an emphasis on character design. Even aside from the subsets of Japanese/Japanese-inspired media doing their best to tile the universe with cute girls, plenty of stories from times and places unconcerned with feminism have gone out of their way to incorporate female characters into roles like "warrior" which would realistically be all male, from ancient myths to modern fantasy.
If a subset of modern western characters like the female Captain Marvel aren't appealing to men, perhaps it is because none of the people involved with creating them designed them to be. That doesn't mean they can't be "strong" or whatever, female anime/manga characters are varied and include those with nearly every kind of "strength" imaginable, both the kinds of strength primarily associated with men and the kinds that aren't. But it does mean they shouldn't be designed by people who view "making a strong female character" or "making sure not to incorporate misogynistic tropes" as primary goals in character writing, which often takes precedence over concerns like making the character likable or interesting. Indeed, most of those strong female anime/manga characters were written by people who have probably never encountered a phrase like "strong female character" in their lives, let alone having them as important categories shaping how they think about writing fiction.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
An obvious but unmentioned reason for 4900 people to text the number is that they wanted to see if doing so would provide a continuation of the joke. Texting the message didn't provide an automated response, but it easily could have, and trying it out lets you see if it does. The same way that, for example, when Grand Theft Auto marketers spread around phone numbers of in-game business/characters, the vast majority of the people calling those numbers did so because they wanted to hear a funny answering-machine message, not because they thought they were real.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
I thought this was about a different study which went around months ago, in which a modified COVID-19 strain caused a 100% fatality rate in humanized mice. So I was going to point out that according to the same study stock COVID-19 had an extremely high fatality rate as well, so it said more about the mice than the virus. But looking it up apparently it's a different recently-published study about a pangolin coronavirus:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.03.574008v1.full
It sounds like a lot of things cause 100% death rates in humanized mice without nessesarily meaning that much regarding humans. Note that in this case 100% means they infected 4 mice and all 4 died.
Mizhena from Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, a 2016 Baldur's Gate expansion from Beamdog, the publisher for the Baldur's Gate remasters.
It's particularly out of place in the high-magic medieval-fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms, since not only is the idea of having an inborn gender identity that makes you "truly a woman" all along a very specific recent concept, but it's hard to square it with a setting where a mid-level character (and healing-spells seller) like Mizhera could buy actual transformation magic like a Hat of Disguise, a casting of Polymorph Other, the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity which you can find in the original game, etc. Other highlights include five different ways to say the same thing and having Minsc make a Gamergate reference. This attracted controversy, and some of the remarks by the writer didn't help:
If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism, [we tried to address that],” said writer Amber Scott. “In the original there’s a lot of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife and that was played for comedy. We were able to say like, ‘No, that’s not really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.
https://archive.is/4HIow#selection-4337.0-4337.268
I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's "forced" or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I'm happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many Social Justice Games in the future.
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
Now the lethality is only in humanized-lung mice not primates and the sample size for this particular part of the test was only 10, so 80% = 8/10.
Note that these mice are much more vulnerable to COVID than humans, in the same study 100% of the mice infected with wild-type COVID died. It would presumably still be a worse variant than anything going around now, but not 80% fatality levels of worse.
Since SARS-CoV-2 causes fatal infection in K18- hACE2 mice3, we leveraged this situation to compare the animal survival after viral infection. In agreement with the results of body-weight loss and clinical score, WT and Omi-S caused mortality rates of 100% (6/6) and 80% (8/10), respectively. In contrast, all animals infected with Omicron survived (Fig. 3c).
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater
How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.
Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.
Mocking someone's beliefs or taboos does not mean you like the thing you are mocking, even though if it vanished that would remove the assumed context for your work. Making Postal 2 doesn't mean you want people to believe that violent videogames cause violence, rather the fact that they already believe that is part of the premise and context. Chris Ofili can make The Holy Virgin Mary and sell it for £2.9 million regardless of what his own views might be on taboos involving pornography, dung, or christianity.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
Subliminal messaging doesn't work, ideological messaging does. Both the "look at Falwell saying crazy stuff about Tinky Winky" rhetoric and to a much lesser extent the "look at Tinky Winky being a gay icon" rhetoric presumably contributed to strengthening the social-justice ideological framework in which homosexuality is high-status, leading people to identify as gay and then sometimes even have gay sex. But there's no reason to believe the character himself did, because whether his supposed gay associations were intentional or not (probably not) the vast majority of people looking hard enough to see it already had strong ideological views on the subject. The existence of a character like that does nothing to strengthen those views, while a news story about how one of the enemy is stupid does. Same way crossdressing stories like Mulan aren't what caused the massive surge in transgenderism. Or antifa people attacking people at conservative protests and claiming to be inspired by Captain America or historical WW2 veterans - what inspired them is the antifa memeplex itself.
It is fundamentally missing the point of the recent surge in social-justice "identities", because for the most part it isn't even about the actual features of those groups, it is about the ideology itself. Thus the popularity of things like "grey-asexual" identities that let you be asexual while having sex or "non-binary" identities that let you be transgender without transitioning. That doesn't mean the surge in those identifications isn't connected to behavior, there really are a lot more people having gay sex even if they're a smaller percentage of those identifying as gay. This increase is of course most dramatic with transgenderism, where it's looking like (contrary to the concept of gender identity) there isn't much stopping people from transitioning when their ideology and social circle pushes them towards it. But this transmits through the ideological memeplex, not fictional characters being vaguely non-masculine.
Elections are a bad gauge because, if sufficiently democratic, they are close to being public-opinion polls. When people talk about wokeness being powerful, they usually mean it is disproportionately powerful compared to its popularity (or at least compared to its success, if they think public opinion on something is being driven by dishonest media coverage). It routinely gets institutions to act as if its dictates are universally popular, just the way society has decided things are done nowadays, even when they are unpopular or at least highly controversial. By comparison, essentially nobody talks about how pro-agriculture ideology is influential. When a public opinion poll finds that colleges discriminating against white/asian people is unpopular, but they do it anyway, that isn't cited as evidence that wokeness is weak. Now, it is true that elections have more direct impact than public-opinion polls. But lots of sources of power aren't elections - corporate policies, sympathetic media coverage, unelected government bureaucrats, etc. It didn't take an election for hospitals to ration healthcare based on racial "equity" or for the CDC/ACIP to recommend a COVID-19 vaccine-distribution plan that they estimated would result in thousands of additional deaths so that a larger fraction of those deaths would be white. So long as wokeness holds such a disproportionate influence over unelected institutions, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to assume it is waning just because it is unpopular with the general public and thus sometimes loses elections.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Like your prior posts about Chinese people, this amounts to you presenting a few anecdotes to make an argument so weak that it borders on incoherence. You seem to to saying a few cases where Jews were lawyers in supposedly important cases is proof of some sort of phenomenon, but what even is that phenomenon? Whatever it is, how could this incredibly meager evidence prove it, and shouldn't there be much better evidence available which would result in a more useful discussion?
Is the phenomenon that you are trying to prove that American Jewish people are more left-wing than the general public even when you control for "elite" status? Or more specifically, that they are more aligned with the sort of racial politics popular among the left in the U.S., perhaps because they were allied when discrimination against Jewish people was widespread and it became culturally self-perpetuating? Then why try to prove this with some random anecdotes about Jewish lawyers and support for Nixon rather than much stronger and more direct evidence like public opinion polls asking about those issues? And why treat "Jewish people are more left-wing" as some novel phenomenon you have to guess at from scratch, rather than demographic differences in politics being a well-known phenomenon that pollsters gather data on all the time? (Incidentally, left-wing "privilege" discourse and the assumption that differences in outcome reflect discrimination carries some unintended implications about Jewish success and arguably has similarities with some of the resentment that fueled historical anti-Jewish discrimination, not to mention specifics like Harvard admissions policies. A survey asking equality vs. equity questions might get some interesting results by seeing how much difference it makes to apply the same logic to Jewish people as part of the survey.)
Alternatively, is the proposed phenomenon something more specific or controversial than Jewish people having different political demographics for whatever reason? Are we talking about genetic differences, and if so what kind? E.g. if you propose Jewish people are genetically higher in Openness to Experience which got them allied with the left historically, wouldn't you again be better off with surveys rather than legal anecdotes? Are we talking about Jewish people (or some elite subset of them) getting secret nightly marching orders from the Elders of Zion, and if so shouldn't leaking or intercepting those orders be much better evidence? Are you even consciously thinking about the specifics of the phenomenon you are proposing, or are you just grouping together Jewish people as a unit and treating them as you would an individual? "I don't like George because look at these 3 cases of him doing something I dislike." might be a compelling argument about an individual, but when talking about groups of millions of people much better evidence is available and is required to determine anything meaningful.
As far as I know as an ignorant non-expert, the genetic separation between Han Chinese people and Japanese or Korean people is pretty small, small enough to make genetics not seem like an obvious explanation for things not shared between those populations. Especially if you're going to characterize it as a millennia-old difference, rather than some more recent bottleneck like who survived under Mao (or at least civil wars postdating the separation). Something like conscientiousness or conformity I could buy, those seem similar between East Asian subgroups, but dramatically lower empathy is a much harder sell. Even if you think East Asians in general harbor a lower level of empathy that the high-intelligence and conformity is compensating for in some subgroups, it means the primary driver of conflict is cultural and political rather than racial. Certainly the racial differences don't seem to have stopped Japan from rapidly becoming an ally after WW2. Even pre-WW2 Japan doesn't seem to have been particularly cruel to each other like current Chinese culture stereotypically is, especially not when compared to pre-modern cultures of any race. Even if we buy the argument that Europe's heavy use of the death penalty made the population more genetically empathetic quite recently, either Japan benefited from a similar phenomenon or the difference isn't big enough to stop them from riding their high intelligence (and possibly conscientiousness) to one of the lowest crime rates in the world anyway.
If you want to do population genetics, even speculative amateur genetics, then you should actually do population genetics. Look at when populations split off from each other, research whether it's plausible there was the appropriate genetic bottlenecks, see what work has been done of the subject. Actually try to disprove your hypothesis, don't just go looking for things that fit your story. Don't just point to some anecdotes of Chinese culture being low-empathy and assume it must be genetic. A glance at history shows quite a lot of low-empathy behavior in every population group, and meanwhile you haven't justified why they would have such a large genetic difference from other East Asians, so cultural explanations seem quite plausible. And while I share your impression that Chinese culture is unusually low-empathy, you didn't even try to establish that beyond some scattered anecdotes. Objective measures like crime rate, while worse than other East Asian countries, aren't that bad compared to white countries, especially similarly poor or low-trust countries like Russia. I don't even know how many of the "Chinese society being weirdly sociopathic" anecdotes I hear are the product of actual differences vs. it being a product of how China views itself, like how Japan is more preoccupied with low birth-rates than various other countries that have since declined until they are even lower. Or something like Chinese people playing up low-empathy explanations for their actions because being a compassionate 'sucker' is low-status, while people in other countries do the opposite.
Other areas of human life like the ability to be moved by beauty seem similarly lacking in a civilization whose pre-1800s painting and sculpture never approximated that of Ancient Rome, much less Michael Angelo, when portraying human subjects (as opposed to landscapes were they admittedly excelled).
This is particularly silly. Japan has of course been spectacularly successful at exporting anime, an art form especially focused on human beauty. There don't seem to be any notable differences between populations in the ability to appreciate either it or beauty in general, let alone between population groups as closely related as China and Japan.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The 13/53 figure is for murder not crime in general. Which is something the rest of your post should be taking into account. For instance there aren't a lot of murderers being let out of prison to commit murder again 4 more times, though I suppose you could have an altered but similar hypothesis like "failing to sufficiently catch and punish black criminals before they commit murder" or black career criminals being more severe in that they escalate to violence more often.
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
It's pretty annoying that 16 years ago Yudkowsky wrote a blog post that was deliberately unintuitive due to scope insensitivity (seemingly as some sort of test to spark discussion) and as a result there are people who to this day talk about it without considering the implications of the contrary view. In real life we embrace ratios that are unimaginably worse than 1 person's torture vs. "3↑↑↑3 in Knuth's up-arrow notation" dust specks. People should read OSHA's accident report list sometime. All human activity that isn't purely optimized to maximize safety - every building designed with aesthetics in mind, every spice to make our food a bit nicer, every time we put up Christmas decorations (sometimes getting up on ladders!) - is built at the cost of human suffering and death. If the ratio was 1 torturous work accident to 3↑↑↑3 slight beneficiaries, there would never have been a work accident in human history. Indeed, there are only 10^86 atoms in the known universe, even if each of those atoms was somehow transformed into another Earth with billions of residents, and this civilization lasted until the heat-death of the universe, the number of that civilization's members would be an unimaginably tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, and thus embracing a ratio of 1 to 3↑↑↑3 would almost certainly not result in a single accident throughout that civilization's history.
A more intuitive hypothetical wouldn't just throw out the incomprehensible number and see who gets it, it would make the real-life comparisons or try to make the ratio between the beneficiaries and the cost more understandable. The easiest way to do this with such extreme ratios is with very small risks (though using risks is not actually necessary). For instance, lets say you're helping broadcast the World Cup, and you realize there will shortly be a slight flicker in the broadcast. You can prevent this flicker by pressing a button, but there's a problem: a stream of direct sunlight is on the button, so pressing it will expose the tip of your finger to sunlight for a second. This slightly increases your risk of skin cancer, which risks getting worse in a way that requires major surgery, which slightly risks one of those freak reactions to anesthesia where you're paralyzed but conscious and in torturous pain the whole surgery. (You believe you have gotten sufficient sunlight exposure for benefits like Vitamin D already, so more exposure at this point would be net-negative in terms of health.) Is it worth the risk to press the button?
If someone thinks there's something fundamentally different about small risks, the same scenario works without them, it just requires a weirder hypothetical. Let us say that human civilization has created and colonized earth-like planets on every star in the universe, and further has invented a universe-creation machine, created a number of universes like ours equal to the number of atoms in the original universe, and colonized at least one planet for every star in every universe. On every one of those planets they broadcast a sports match, and you work for the franchised broadcasting company that sets policy for every broadcast. Your job consists of deciding policy for a single question: if the above scenario occurs, should franchise operators press the button despite the tiny risk? You have done the research and know that, thanks to the sheer number of affected planets, it is a statistical near-certainty that a few operators will get skin cancer from the second of finger sunlight exposure and then have something go wrong with surgery such that they experience torture. Does the answer somehow change from the answer for a single operator on a single planet, since it is no longer just a "risk"? Is the morality different if instead of a single franchise it's split up into 10 companies, and it works out so that each company has a less than 50% chance of the torture occurring? What if instead of 10 companies it's a different company on each planet making the decision, so for each one it's no different from the single-planet question? Even though the number of people in this multiverse hypothetical is still a tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, I think a lot more people would say that it's worth it to spare them that flicker, because the scale of the ratio has been made more clear.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
The term as a whole is stupid because almost every single person who operates a charity or is a large scale philanthropist sincerely believes they are engaged in “effective altruism”.
I don't see how anyone can closely look at real-world charities and believe this. The charity world is full of organizations that transparently don't think about effectiveness at all. The Make-a-Wish foundation doesn't run the numbers and decide it's better to grant a wish for X dying first-world children than to save Y first-world children or Z third-world children from dying, they don't consider the question in the first place. Yes if you dilute "effectiveness" to "think they're doing good" they do think that, but they don't actually try to calculate effectiveness or even think about charity in those terms. And that's by many metrics one of the "good" charities! The bad ones are like the infamous Susan Komen Foundation or (to pick a minor charity I once researched) the anti-depression charity iFred. iFred spends the majority of donations on paying its own salaries and then spends the rest on "raising awareness of depression" by doing stuff like planting flowers and producing curriculum that nobody reads and that wouldn't do any good if they did. Before EA the best charity evaluation available was stuff like Charity Navigator that focuses on minimizing overhead instead of on effectiveness. That approach condemns iFred for spending too much money on overhead instead of flower-planting, but doesn't judge whether the flower-planting is effective, let alone considering questions like the relative effectiveness of malaria treatment vs. bednets vs. vaccines.
Even within the realm of political activism like you're focusing on, such activism is often justified as trying to help people rather than just pursuing the narrow political goal as effectively as possible, opening up comparisons to entirely different causes. As EA discovered, spending money trying to keep criminals out of prison is less efficient at helping people than health aid to third-worlders even if you assume there is zero cost to having criminals running free and that being in prison is as bad as being dead. You can criticize the political bias that led them to spend money on such things, but at least they realized it was stupid and stopped. Meanwhile BLM is a massive well-funded movement despite the fact that only a couple dozen unarmed black people are shot by police per year (and those cases are mostly still stuff like the criminal fighting for the officer's gun or trying to run him over in a car). Most liberals and a significant fraction of conservatives think that number is in the thousands, presumably including most BLM activists. It would be a massive waste even if it hadn't also reduced proactive policing and caused thousands of additional murders and traffic fatalities per year. That sure sounds like a situation that could benefit from public discourse having more interest in running the numbers! Similarly, controversial causes like the NGOs trying to import as many refugees as possible aren't just based on false ideological assumptions, but are less effective on their own terms than just helping people in their own countries where it's cheaper. The state of both the charity and activist world is really bad, so there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for those that actually try and any comparison should involve looking at specifics rather than vaguely assuming people must be acting reasonably.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
A lot depends on how much of a filter immigration is, immigrants who go through a highly selective system are obviously going to be better than refugees or illegal immigrants who don't. Due to geographical proximity Europe has more unfiltered Muslim immigrants, and correspondingly has more problems with them. That said, I suspect that even for unfiltered immigrants a lot of the difference would disappear if you controlled for race.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
And gas is much less efficient energy-wise; not only does it shed a lot of heat in the energy transfer to the cooking vessel, it's in general less efficient than electric (but often cheaper depending on your locale).
I very much doubt that burning natural gas in a power plant, converting the heat into electricity, transferring it to your home, and then converting it back into heat is more efficient than transporting the gas and burning it for heat directly, even if electric is more efficient at transmitting the heat to the cookware. The first source I found with a quick search said the same:
https://home.howstuffworks.com/gas-vs-electric-stoves.htm
The clear winner in the energy efficiency battle between gas and electric is gas. It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to your stove. According to the California Energy Commission, a gas stove will cost you less than half as much to operate (provided that you have an electronic ignition--not a pilot light).
The potential climate-change argument against gas stoves would be that, in a hypothetical future with plentiful and very low-carbon electricity generation, a gas stove might lock in fossil fuel consumption. But unless you live in an area where the electricity is already all hydroelectric/nuclear this is a risky gamble, if during the timeframe the stove is operating your area is still using fossil fuels to generate electricity the electric stove will cause more emissions. I don't anticipate the energy-generation mix changing that dramatically early in the lifespan of a stove bought today. (If the "three times" figure is true it would have to happen less than a third of the way through its lifespan.)
I remember reading a blog post many years ago that concluded it was probably a mixture of glue with cornstarch and baking soda (multiple sets of ingredients can do the same thing) that expands into a carbon foam when heated. It pointed out that there are now commercially-available coatings that use the same principle but are more durable/practical for long-lasting coatings, they're called "intumescent coatings", though their performance is held back because they're applied in a thinner layer.
I don't have a link to the blog post but looking at Wikipedia it links a youtuber who also seems to have replicated it. He also has some followup videos using different ingredients to make it and trying it for different things. If you want to see the commercially-available intumescent coatings for comparison this video shows them in action at 7:44. Though from what he says apparently they activate at a higher temperature, at least for the ones he tested. Intumescent coatings: A review on recent progress might be of interest.
Edit: Watching the youtuber's second video he discusses commercial intumescent coatings. Also this video from a manufacturer has some good footage in them in action.
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