erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Usually between fifteen hundred and three thousand in the safe, plus another two or three hundred in my wallet. Enough to get me through a month or two of room and board, and also useful for unexpected expenses.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
From "The Struggle to Conceive with Frozen Eggs":
Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”
Adams remembers feeling a wonderful sense of freedom after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost. Her plan was to work a few more years, find a great guy to marry and still have a house full of her own children.
Things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.
In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor.
Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed.
Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground.
“It was one of the worst days of my life. There were so many emotions. I was sad. I was angry. I was ashamed,” she said. “I questioned, ‘Why me?’ ‘What did I do wrong?’ ”
This egg-freezing meme needs to die.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
The neurochemicals are just the causal mechanism behind love. There has to be one; what would it mean for there not to be? Your brain just started wanting to be with another person for literally no reason? But any other casual mechanism could be just as easily dismissed.
I am reminded of the argument that it is immoral to hold someone accountable for their low intelligence because intelligence is genetic and they didn't choose to get bad genes, and all I can think is, as opposed to what? If intelligence is instead caused by the environment, nobody chooses how they are raised. And if intelligence is caused by the soul, then nobody chooses what soul gets put into their bodies. And so on. The objection is not to genes, but to any casual mechanism which can be understood.
Falling in love was the single most important experience of my life, though it was 20 years ago. Knowing that the feeling was triggered by neurochemicals in my brain does not change that. Nor does knowing that my brain was executing an adaptation that was selected for in the ancestral environment because it made my ancestors pair-bond and therefore more likely to successfully raise offspring who would survive in turn to have offspring of their own. Chemicals and evolution explain love; they do not explain it away.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
(I also think your examples aren't provenance. Even for transwomen, if we had Culture-level technology or magic that could completely change someone's sex so that the only difference was that transwomen had different provenance, the trans issue would be very different.)
What about psychology? The male brain is very different from the female brain, in multiple ways. At the level of transhumanism we are talking about, you could give transwomen a female brain as well, I guess, but could they still be meaningfully said to be the same person after that?
From "Changing Emotions" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
What about sex? (Somehow it’s always about sex, at least when it’s men asking the question.) Remapping the connections from the remapped somatic areas to the pleasure center will… give you a vagina-shaped penis, more or less. That doesn’t make you a woman. You’d still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.
What would it take for a man to actually become the female version of themselves?
Well… what does that sentence even mean? I am reminded of someone who replied to the statement “Obama would not have become President if he hadn’t been black” by saying “If Obama hadn’t been black, he wouldn’t have been Obama” i.e. “There is no non-black Obama who could fail to become President”. (You know you’re in trouble when non-actual possible worlds start having political implications.)
The person you would have been if you’d been born with an X chromosome in place of your Y chromosome (or vice versa) isn’t you. If you had a twin female sister, the two of you would not be the same person. There are genes on your Y chromosome that tweaked your brain to some extent, helping to construct your personal identity—alleles with no analogue on the X chromosome. There is no version of you, even genetically, who is the opposite sex.
And if we halt your body, swap out your Y chromosome for your father’s X chromosome, and restart your body… well. That doesn’t sound too safe, does it? Your neurons are already wired in a male pattern, just as your body already developed in a male pattern. I don’t know what happens to your testicles, and I don’t know what happens to your brain, either. Maybe your circuits would slowly start to rewire themselves under the influence of the new genetic instructions. At best you’d end up as a half-baked cross between male brain and female brain. At worst you’d go into a permanent epileptic fit and die—we’re dealing with circumstances way outside the evolutionary context under which the brain was optimized for robustness. Either way, your brain would not look like your twin sister’s brain that had developed as female from the beginning.
So to actually become female...
We’re talking about a massive transformation here, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses rearranged. Not just form, but content—just like a male judo expert would need skills repatterned to become a female judo expert, so too, you know how to operate a male brain but not a female brain. You are the equivalent of a judo expert at one, but not the other. You have cognitive reflexes, and consciously learned cognitive skills as well.
If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman—not in body, but in brain—I don’t think I’d call her “me”. The change is too sharp, if it happens all at once.
Transform the brain gradually? Hm… now we have to design the intermediate stages, and make sure the intermediate stages make self-consistent sense. Evolution built and optimized a self-consistent male brain and a self-consistent female brain; it didn’t design the parts to be stable during an intermediate transition between the two. Maybe you’ve got to redesign other parts of the brain just to keep working through the transition.
What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life’s memories distant and alien things? How can you remember, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?
Well… maybe we could retain your old male brainware through the transformation, and set up a dual system of male and female circuits… such that you are currently female, but retain the ability to recall and empathize with your past memories as if they were running on the same male brainware that originally laid them down...
Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? It seems that to transform a male brain into someone who can be a real female, we can’t just rewrite you as a female brain. That just kills you and replaces you with someone re-imagined as a different person. Instead we have to rewrite you as a more complex brain with a novel, non-ancestral architecture that can cross-operate in realtime between male and female modes, so that a female can process male memories with a remembered context that includes the male brainware that laid them down.
To make you female, and yet still you, we have to step outside the human design space in order to preserve continuity with your male self.
And when your little adventure is over and you go back to being a man—if you still want to, because even if your past self wanted to go back afterward, why should that desire be binding on your present self?—then we’ve got to keep the dual architecture so you don’t throw up every time you remember what you did on your vacation.
Assuming you did have sex as a woman, rather than fending off all comers because because they didn’t look like they were interested in a long-term relationship.
But then, you probably would experiment. You’ll never have been a little girl, and you won’t remember going through high school where any girl who slept with a boy was called a slut by the other girls. You’ll remember a very atypical past for a woman—but there’s no way to fix that while keeping you the same person.
And all that was just what it takes to ranma around within human-space, from the male pole to the female pole and back again.
What if you wanted to move outside the human space entirely?
In one sense, a sex change is admittedly close to a worst-case scenario: a fixed target not optimized for an easy transition from your present location; involving, not just new brain areas, but massive coordinated changes to brain areas already in place.
It might be a lot easier to just add one more emotion to those already there. Maybe.
In another sense, though, a sex change is close to a best-case scenario: the prototype of your destination is already extensively tested as a coherent mind, and known to function well within a human society that already has a place for it (including companions to talk to).
It might be a lot harder to enter uncharted territory. Maybe.
I’m not saying—of course—that it could never, ever be done. But it’s another instance of the great chicken-and-egg dilemma that is the whole story of present-day humanity, the great challenge that intelligent life faces in its flowering: growing up is a grownup-level problem. You could try to build a cleanly-designed artificial grownup (self-improving Friendly AI) to foresee the pathway ahead and chart out a nonfatal course. Or you could plunge ahead yourself, and hope that you grew faster than your problems did.
The person most likely to submit it is still you. It's the same principle behind an egosearch.
If I am an AI, and someone asks me to identify the author of a random internet comment, my prior is at least 50% that the person asking is the author.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Based on the first paragraph I though it might be "Kindness to Kin" by Eliezer Yudkowsky, but when I read the rest I realized that could not be it. So I tried AI and GPT cracked it; it's "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" by James Tiptree Jr. Very New Wave.
Robert Fitzgerald's 1961 translation is the standard modern version of The Odyssey (or, at least, the one all the school textbooks seem to have):
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all—
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell us in our time, lift the great song again.
But if you're looking for something a little more trad, Alexander Pope's 1725 translation is excellent:
The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;
Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall
Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall,
Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray’d,
Their manners noted, and their states survey’d,
On stormy seas unnumber’d toils he bore,
Safe with his friends to gain his natal shore:
Vain toils! their impious folly dared to prey
On herds devoted to the god of day;
The god vindictive doom’d them never more
(Ah, men unbless’d!) to touch that natal shore.
Oh, snatch some portion of these acts from fate,
Celestial Muse! and to our world relate.
And whatever you do, don't read Samuel Butler's 1900's translation (which is, inexplicably, the most popular version on Project Gutenberg):
Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, oh daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
It’s definitely not at the level of GamerGate, which in turn was less important than the average games journalist suggests.
GamerGate was a huge battle in the culture wars. An entire generation of nerds was redpilled by the realization that:
- Game journalists were coordinating with each other as a class to put out a unified media narrative.
- Those same game journalists absolutely hated gamers.
And, of course, this lesson was readily generalizable to other fields, such as cinema, or politics.
There is a reason that Scott Alexander had to censor the term, reducing us to talking about reproductively viable worker ants.
To this date, the Wikipedia article on GamerGate starts with "Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture." Anybody who reads that sentence and remembers being there knows that Wikipedia is not to be trusted on political matters.
erwgv3g34
16d ago
Finished watching Jaws on Netflix before it went off the air. I found it disappointing, which is surprising considering its reputation (the first summer blockbuster, recommended by both Roger Ebert and Critical Drinker, etc.)
I think the problem is that I couldn't connect to the characters. Chief is too much of a coward, both morally (fails to stand up to the Mayor) and physically (afraid of water). Quint has potential, but in the end he comes across more as a greedy asshole than as a truly passionate shark hunter. And the research dude is just there. I don't care what happens to these people; none of them are awesome enough to keep my interest. Combine that with the slow pacing (the shark is famously not shown until the final act to build suspense) and I was left looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie would be.
It only really gets good in the last twenty minutes when they are directly battling the shark, and by then it is too late.
erwgv3g34
19d ago
- Charlotte's Web (1973)
- The Hobbit (1977)
- Castle in the Sky (1986)
- Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
- The Lion King (1994)
- Anastasia (1997)
- The Prince of Egypt (1998)
- Mulan (1998)
- The Road to El Dorado (2000)
- Titan A.E. (2000)
erwgv3g34
23d ago
Im gonna sound authoritarian here, but this shit needs to straight up be banned. There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way.
Your predecessors said the same about jerking off, or gay sex, or interracial relationships.
Yes, and they were right!
erwgv3g34
24d ago
Assuming that the US passed a war powers vote, or otherwise just decided just to drop everything and go home, what next? It's a total capitulation, and to me it seems braindead obvious that Iran isn't going to stop harassing and extorting nearby shipping. I mean, what have they got to lose, meanwhile the more they extort the more money they get.
Does a politically-viable path to victory exist? If, not--if this is going to be how it ends anyway-- isn't it better to get it over with as soon as possible, rather than after years of fighting that don't actually accomplish anything? The decapitation campaign has clearly failed to break the Iranians. What's next? Boots on the ground? Bombing civilian infrastructure? Nukes?
erwgv3g34
26d ago
Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends has an absolutely fantastic ending that explains all the mysteries and ties up all the narrative threads; it's like the antithesis of The X Files. But it only went on for one 40-episode season, so I'm not sure it counts.
Tons of single and double-cour anime (Erased, Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Azumanga Daioh, etc.), but again, not sure they count.
What about the idea of making a separate thread? I'm very interested in AI, but it's a poor fit for the Culture War Roundup. If "Transnational Thursday" and "Tinker Tuesday" can get their own weeklies, surely this deserves one, too? We just have to decide on an alliteration! (Claude recommends either "Machine Monday" or "Singularity Saturday")
erwgv3g34
29d ago
Calling the fertility crisis "essentially voluntarily" is disingenuous.
From Kevin Dolan's 2023 Natal Conference speech:
A consistent 95% of Americans say they want kids but it looks like only about 60% of Millennials will get there and it's much worse for the Zoomers. Fertility decline often gets characterized as inevitable: you give people the freedom to choose and it turns out parenting just isn't a desirable choice.
But that's not the story that you hear from childless people. In surveys only about 10% of childless people say it was a conscious decision. Another 10% deal with some form of medical infertility. But in 80% of cases it's what demographer Steven Shaw calls "unplanned childlessness". You'll hear more about exactly what that means, but bottom line: the infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated employed paired off and raising kids has just broken down.
So I view this is fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding we wouldn't say "wow I'm so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health" or "they're spoiled; they're just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors". And we certainly wouldn't say "good there's too many Bengal tigers; Bengal tigers are ruining everything". Instead we'd look at their environment and try to figure out what changed; what's disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative.
But would they rather be a random horse 130 years ago, or not exist at all? Because that's what happened to the majority of horses that would have been here today; they were simply never born.
erwgv3g34
29d ago
It's what Scott calls a "fighting a rearguard attack against the evidence", where whenever a member of a favoured community does something atrocious, we have to exhaustively dig through every single thing they ever said, wrote or posted about to find something to pin it on other than their membership in said community.
The term "fighting a rearguard action against the truth" was coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
erwgv3g34
30d ago
I've still got the old AOL Instant Messenger (remember that, kiddos?) logs from when I used to chat with my high school girlfriend right up until she broke up with me
Same (well, MSN Messenger logs). I'm planning to use them along with other sources of information (photographs, memories, etc.) to create a fork of her after the singularity. Which, now that I think about it, would also make for a pretty good Black Mirror episode!
When I read Charles Perrault as a boy in Spanish, several of his tales would talk about "escudos". I admit it was a little confusing, but it was obvious from context that they meant some kind of currency (I would imagine them trading heraldic shields). Maybe "monedas" (coins) would have been clearer, but "pesos" would have been a bastardization.
Trump would totally be Gendo. He became president as part of a larger plot to reunite with his dead brother, but first he needs to support Israel and wipe Iran off the map in order to fulfill a prophecy from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Get in the fucking bomber, Barron!
(Who would make a better Miasto, Kristi Noem or Tulsi Gabbard? Kristi is hotter, but Tulsi has actual military experience.)
"My steak is too juicy and my lobster is too buttery".
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