domain:jessesingal.substack.com
anti_dan
7hr ago
That's like saying that medical care is pointless, because even I save a child from dying of anaphylactic shock, they'll grow old and die anyway. Then they might have kids, who will, if they're not prone to atopy, still inevitably die.
That makes little sense. The child has great potential, if saved, to do things that are positive and good, like have children of their own, like start a business or work at a business. If you are talking about old age care, correct. The government should not be in that business, medicare, despite being highly popular is probably the worst program ever implemented by the US Government.
I'm not an EA, and I don't particularly care about people with HIV in Africa, but I still find this a weak criticism at best. They believe that extending/saving lives is good, which I can't disagree with on a general principle. I'm certainly not on the shrimp welfare train, but I must concede that if you care about that inane cause, you might as well make sure your money is as effective as it can be.
But keeping people alive with money is just bog standard charity. If you want a modifier like "effective" you should earn it.
anti_dan
7hr ago
So its just like a normal charity. It keeps people alive who cant keep themselves alive. Its a charity you anticipate will no longer exist in 70 years due to scientific advances wholly unrelated to the charity and the people who benefit from it, other than the fact they will also incidentally benefit from those advances.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
Ah, I remember a period when people in India, overly indexing on the name, thought Chikungunya was spread by poultry.
GoofyGoose
7hr ago
Can someone explain what alienation means? I can’t seem to wrap my head around it. It might be one of those “universal human experiences” I am missing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
Do you imagine there is some kind of "diplomacy" slider in the Knesset that the Israelis just refuse to toggle?
Yes, obviously. Their whole modus operandi is knocking down Palestinian houses, playing divide and conquer, supporting Hamas to split up the Palestinians (Bibi is on record calling for this as part of the strategy to prevent a Palestinian state, before it backfired massively), progressively annexing more land, conducting the most insanely bad faith negotiations, often bombing the Palestinians to make them break things off. Gunning down hundreds of peaceful protestors in 2019 is not very 'diplomatic'.
And then they whine about even the slightest reverse hysterically.
I can see why Israel doesn't like the Palestinians, they're very irritating. But the cost of being a 10 million size country is that Israel lacks the freedom of action to massacre with impunity like China or Russia could.
maybe they couldn't and then they'd suffer more casualties
There's no 'maybe'. It's physically impossible for Israel to maintain its high-tech industries and tax base if they're sanctioned. They don't produce much steel or oil, they're not sanction proofed, they don't have the necessary resources. They do R&D and some advanced manufacturing, not all the basics and precursors for those weapons. The average Rhodesian or South African soldier was worth 10x or 50x their number in black insurgents. Overwhelming qualitative superiority was totally irrelevant to the outcome of their wars.
Israel is heading towards sanctions today. Intensifying the conflict would only hasten sanctions, which can destroy the country in a way that Palestinians can't.
phailyoor
8hr ago
Acktually the whole Epstein saga isn't related to pedophilia because 16 year old girls are sexually mature so there is nothing wrong with being attracted to them.
You are again purposely ignoring and denying what people mean when they talk about the situation. It's a ring of geriatric men trafficking and abusing a bunch of underage girls. Most people would agree that such a thing can be described as a pedo ring.
Nobody cares that technically, abusing 16 year old girls does not meet the criteria for a DSM-5 diagnosis for the mental disorder. People are still going to call them pedos.
Hieronymus
9hr ago
I think you misunderstood me. Most of the concern in my post is directed at the unimplanted embryos at the end of the process. That is also where polygenic screening becomes a focus of discussion.
I do think that the post-fertilization attrition rate is morally relevant insofar as it compares unfavorably with natural conception, and I said so, but that's not what I meant by destruction.
Magusoflight
9hr ago
That escalated quickly
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
MAGA is pro-positive balance of trade. Not anti-trade.
Quantumfreakonomics
10hr ago
Real civilization has never been tried.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11hr ago
It's not just grandstanding, the administration has done remarkable things like detaining and attempting to deport students who committed no crimes for simply criticizing Israel.
"Students". A guy who has spent more than 10 years as an undergraduate, mostly stirring up shit on campuses. A better description than "student" might be "foreign agent",
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11hr ago
It's the old established areas of Europe that have an allergy (or ideological objection) to A/C, not the ex-communist countries.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11hr ago
Those economies were a pittance compared to the world of today
Irrelevant even if true (and I'm not sure a meaningful measurement is possible).
Slavery and other similar rent seeking behavior is less of a detriment in a weak economy with weak competition than a global one with more competition.
There was plenty of competition in Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea... but slavery still persisted.
But personally unproductive leeches are a drain on society whether they be a slave owner or a union worker demanding busy work.
Being a slave owner doesn't make you a personally unproductive leech, any more than being a factory owner does.
Supah_Schmendrick
11hr ago
The rich and powerful are expected to get away with some crimes. Sex trafficking children is not on that list.
Err, the west covers for sex trafficking kids all the time, and you don't need to be rich and powerful to get away with it (though it helps). Popular entertainers get away with it. Politicians cover massive-scale abuse - far beyond what Epstein is accused of - up and journalists look the other way to avoid having their foreign policies outed as idiotic, avoid having to be on the same side as icky migration restrictionists, or to avoid being called racist.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11hr ago
It's anti-international trade.
2rafa
12hr ago
In a civilized society
So your contention is that there has never been a civilized society?
Tractatus
12hr ago
Nicolae Ceaușescu would dispute this. So would Stalin, for that matter; unless we're going to reduce the claim to a tautology, that the fact that all movements have leaders makes those leaders by definition "elevated factions" renders the possibility of an "uprising of the masses" defnitionally impossible.
The elite do not enforce their will by their own hand; that is done by the security state, whose ranks are filled from the very masses whose necks they are stepping on, and who stay loyal so long as they have faith that backing the elite is a better deal than the alternative. No amount of in-group cohesion will save the ruling elite if and when they decide "hey, why do we need all these lessers around," or elite incompetence erodes the secuirty apparatus' faith in the elite.
NunoSempere
12hr ago
Positive states of being are psychologically healthy
you can only be altruistic by improving yourself to be more than self-sufficient, so it's a kind of inverse parasitism.
mmmh!! top points, thanks
NunoSempere
12hr ago
I mean, we want people to be prosocial, provide public goods, play cooperative games, coordinate around positive outcomes. But you don't want this to be suicidal. Not sure if that's just a restatement. of what you are saying.
Skulldrinker
12hr ago
What's currently the most cost-effective and practical method of getting ahold of Ozempic/whatever weight-loss drug in the US without a diabetes diagnosis?
Also, is it worth messing with oral delivery, or are they flat-out less effective than the injection method?
I'm tired of people lying to me that I'm not fat when I observe the differences in the way the world treats me vs other people every day.
MollieTheMare
12hr ago
Honestly, it might be for the best for you personally. The conversion rate from in a Ph.D. program to tenured physics professor is laughably small. Even if you make it to the tenure golden land, you will have given up what will probably be the most productive years of your career in opportunity cost to make the starting salary of a quant at a B-tier fund. You'll also have to move a zillion times anyway for a very likely postdoc grind.
I don't know what the state of the art is in fusion research, but if you can manage to crank out even one marginal paper applying ML/RL techniques, call it AI on your CV and you should be able to get into the interview pipeline at some big tech or quant finance firms. Crush the coding interviews with leetcode grinding. Practice not doing anything too weird in the face to face. If you update your linkedin and are at a top 30 program, you should have recruiters contacting you regularly. They will provide interview prep. If you are not at a top 30 physics program you are never making it to the tenure golden land anyway, it doesn't matter how good you are. Something like 70% of the faculty in R1 research institutions have at some point attended one of something like 10 schools. Of the remaining, something like 90% come from a pool of the next 20. (US based, there's a paper about it somewhere on I think the arxiv)
Once you have your foot in the door, join the line of people hoping to jump to the next unicorn, or rest and vest.
TwiceHuman
13hr ago
I think that pure altruism is only impossible under the one definition that also renders "selfless behaviour" trivially impossible. You choose your own actions, so you naturally choose the ones you like the best, even if what you like the best is something like "to mistreat myself for the sake of others".
But let's talk psychology: Our mental states exist in a high-dimensional space, and one of the dimensions seems to be poverty-abundance. This is easy to miss if you haven't experienced the extremes of both. Do you know insecure people who are like black holes for compliments, affection and reassurance? That's the minus pole. But the plus pole also exists - a state where it becomes uncomfortable not to give. You'll usually have to be on drugs or to spend years doing spiritual practices in order to reach this state, but it's very real and basically a pure altruistic mindset.
And I have a reason to think that this behaviour will not disappear: It benefits the invidual, even when they do not do it for the sake of benefits. Positive states of being are psychologically healthy for the same reason that negative states of being are associated with dying earlier. And while altruism seems dangerous in that it's reverse eugenics, you can only be altruistic by improving yourself to be more than self-sufficient, so it's a kind of inverse parasitism.
On a negative note: I think it's literally impossible to protect society against exploitation without ruining every pleasant part of it. What follows from this is scary: Rules are bad. They're literally symptoms of problems rather than solutions to them. You cannot fix every loophole - you can only get rid of the type of person who would exploit a loophole.
Actually, I just realized a series of things - The way we're trying to reduce suffering is destroying all human experience. The way we're trying to minimize crime will result in the minimization of human freeedom. The way we're trying to model everything is destroying all mystery and wonder. Our attempts of reducing mistakes to zero is reducing meaningful actions taken to zero. You cannot solve all problems without killing all innovation. You cannot destroy competition without destroying growth. Many things are rotting because we refuse to let them die. I believe these are in the category of 'Complementarity Principles'.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
13hr ago
The rich and powerful are expected to get away with some crimes. Sex trafficking children is not on that list.
In a civilized society, that kind of behavior gets you executed, and not because you know too much.
70 years? 20 at the worst. I would take bets at worse than even odds at a mere ten.
I really don't understand this line of thinking. It's akin to condemning advocating lifestyle 'solutions' for diabetes right before they discovered porcine insulin. After people have been publishing papers saying, hey, this funny little trick seems to work.
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