domain:alakasa.substack.com
kky
3d ago
Yeah, I think we've seen this coming down the pipe for quite some time. The main limiting factor of the tech is that it relies on IVF, which is pretty unpleasant to use (from what I've heard) compared to the natural process, and is additionally quite expensive. For that reason I expect this particular enterprise to be a very slow burn. Perhaps costs come down over time, but I suspect that reduced costs will march right along with reduced quality, and the inevitable lawsuits for implanting the wrong couple's child are going to be very culture-warry.
That said, I'm of two minds on the overall concept of human genetic manipulation, or rather of one slightly more subtle mind that doesn't take a simple yes/no.
The great advantage of genetic manipulation is that it allows us to clean out bad mutations in the absolute gentlest way possible. For instance, Jews are absolutely loaded down with genetic disease, and currently have to do pre-mating genetic testing to find out if they're at risk. Nature's tender way of keeping the rates of the most serious disorders down is to kill the child, typically in a fairly slow and painful fashion. I would understand anyone who had a recessive gene for those disorders paying to make sure that their children carried none at all, to spare them the heartbreak of having to worry about their own children. To make it more personal, my own eyes are extremely bad and I am currently slowly going blind, although surgery should ameliorate the worst of it. If I could, with a wave of my hand, ensure that my eyes die with me and do not burden my children, then I would. Who would want to saddle their children with such burdens, save that they are (as of right now) unavoidable? Natural selection is a powerful force, but it is not a kind one, and one of man's duties is to rise above the worst of nature.
(For anyone personally opposed to IVF specifically on pro-life grounds, imagine that we develop superb gene-editing technology such that it's possible to replace selected genes in a naturally implanted embryo. Very sci-fi, I know, but I hope the thought experiment explains the above sentiment.)
On the other hand, what I expect the technology to be used for is stupid, arrogant decisions about who the child shall be. This seems to be what Nucleus is trying to offer: height, weight, and even down to eye color. These traits are obviously superficial, and reflect the desire of a parent for a "better" child while only looking at the very vague surface of what that means. But, as anyone here is likely to know, random traits are randomly distributed (often on a Gaussian scale), and the more you filter your results on one axis the more you'll have to tolerate imperfections on the others. So if you filter the child on height, BMI, eye color, you'll have to make some compromises on ADHD and IQ, most likely. Compounding this is the problem that extreme outliers in a given trait are increasingly likely to be compromised in other traits (as the height starts to undermine bodily integrity, say), and so anyone who just picks out the max IQ baby is likely to have some unfortunate genetic weaknesses. Personally, I also have my money on our understanding of many of these traits being much weaker than we think, and whatever we think we're getting is not going to be what we actually want, but that's a different argument.
My central objection to this kind of picking and choosing, however, is that much of the power of natural selection comes from its inherent randomness. Without prejudice (okay, maybe with a little prejudice in sexual selection and some genetic integrity mechanisms), a candidate is randomly assembled and evaluated. Their success is purely on the merits; there is no intelligent force with an axe to grind, there is no finger on the scales. Regardless of what anyone thinks, a given set of traits and genes does or does not work, and the next generation codifies that. When we step in, we are assuming knowledge over the entire enterprise. The feedback loop gets limited to what we think we want, not what works or doesn't. You see this time and time again in any situation where human guidance is put over some kind of development or evolution without external validation, where the decisions made get increasingly fashionable and decreasingly connected with real results. The classic example is military developments during peacetime, where illusions about (say) the efficacy of the bayonet charge or static artillery or the battleship get built up year over year until the actual test of war comes and shatters them. I suspect that human self-selection of traits is going to enter this same internal cycle of arrogance. The feedback cycle for success or failure is so slow that it exceeds the lives of the people responsible for the earlier decisions, and worse yet, the evaluative capacity of later generations is going to be shaped by those earlier generations. Don't get me wrong, feedback WILL come, nature WILL reassert herself, just as she will inevitably do for our current fertility crisis, but the longer the illusions hold the uglier it's going to get for everyone. And what's at the core of it, I believe, is the human intuition that we have reduced to a science a domain that is frankly beyond our analysis. We must be humble, and recognize that the best we have is heuristics, and that going further than that is arrogant and foolish.
This problem is, of course, only compounded by the fact that doctors will be regarded as the experts on human trait selection, when in fact they are only experts on identifying gene clusters and giving vague approximations of what they do. I hope people will not confuse the two, but based on how we confuse doctors' technical expertise for moral or strategic guidance already, I don't have high hopes for the future on that count.
Cooking, typing and surfing the web on kindle
- Cooking
I will be making Thai curry again. Last week I made it for the first time since it's the easiest curry to make, given it takes 10 minutes if you exclude the prep time, which also includes making coconut milk. I will be making it with boneless chicken this time around. I got the curry paste via a delivery app as making it yourself is a can of worms I wish to avoid. You blend up the coconut flesh with as little water as possible for a few passes and strain it to get the milk, take a little bit of it and heat it, add the paste, cook till the oil separates and then add half-cooked chicken or veggies. Thai food reminds me of the good parts of my bad times there.
- Typing
On the occasion of getting 15k XP in math academy, i got a redragon mechanical keyboard with cherry reds, I have been taking typing lessons on ratatype to type faster properly, so typing properly with my keys on the home row and stuff cuts my wpm down to 10-20, I am fine with that since I will have a much better time once I can touch type at 60-90 wpm without straining my fingers, my previous keyboard was super cheap so this is a great step up and a really nice gift from my friend. Typing on a good keyboard is amazing.
- Surfing the web on kindle
In a bid to reduce mindless surfing, I switched to keeping my phone locked, my laptop has site blockers, so I use my Kindle to read blogs or articles. Since it's 10 years old, most sites do not work. My reading there is a lot more mindful. Instead of catatonically going from site to site to consoom, I realise how much more fun actual books are. Reading books, at least decent ones, is not the same as going down internet rabbit holes. In order to become a better programmer, I need to write more code, and for my spiritual journey, I need to meditate more. I do not need any advice on these topics. My mentor is enough, most good, successful programmers are writing code, not making infotainment, you get better by doing. A lot of our reflexive internet usage comes out of a fear of loneliness, potentially losing out on good info and just bad habits,
No, seriously, I cannot text girls to get validated or read gossip about some tech thing that I may have an interest in. Last night I used my grandad's old Android phone to look up something, and it just felt overwhelming and fucking lightspeed fast. Most links, text are not worth it. I had gotten so scatterbrained that I had to use Microsoft Edge for its TTS so that I could consoom Substack and open hundreds of links. It did not work on majaro so I picked up my Kindle as reading text there would not hurt my eyes. I read some and kinda realised that even well-polished, well-written pieces do not add much to my life. Retarding your web surfing by sticking to an old Kindle exclusively should make life better. I would use a text-to-speech thing since I was never fully cued into what I was reading.
This works in my case, at least. I need to exploit more than I need to explore.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
3d ago
Books should be structured as expandable trees. One-paragraph summary of each chapter, expandable into summaries of component points/stories, expandable into the full text. Can read the whole book in five minutes or five hours.
I hope the author means nonfiction books.
Soviet levels of power were not granted by God of Thought Experiments from above, they were achieved by mobilizing large numbers of people to violence with arguments such as "this guy over here is better off than you - it was at your expense, go lynch the kulak". I do not think shrimp welfare is as persuasive an argument.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3d ago
Yeah, you're advertising your substack. That's not my idea of quality motte content but I guess nobody else gives a shit so whatever.
Hieronymus
3d ago
From a consistently pro-life perspective, I think the gravest moral concern here is the potential to normalize and expand IVF.
In vitro fertilization involves creating more embryos than you intend to implant and then destroying the rest. If you are, as I am, a consistent prolifer, you recognize those embryos as people. IVF as practiced is therefore already a moral nightmare. If you were to fertilize one or two embryos and then implant them with a level of safety similar to natural conception, the moral valence of IVF would change dramatically.
Embryo selection does just the opposite. It doubles down on creating and destroying embryos – people – to select the one that seems to have the best genes.
As bad as current IVF practices are, they are mostly restricted to couples who cannot have children naturally. Embryo selection changes that dynamic. It encourages any couple who can afford it (at apparently less than a year’s college tuition!) to produce ten children and then slay nine of them. That’s why Scott’s reassurance rings hollow:
I think the strongest objection to selection would come from someone who is anti-abortion. If they think life begins at conception, then actual harm is done to a frozen embryo if it is not selected (and so probably eliminated).
But even this isn’t an argument against polygenic selection. It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term. …
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3d ago
I'm sure random kids can't do professional sumo, but several decades back, I was convincing my buddies to let me draw a circle in the dirt with stick and then to shove each other till one of us lost our footing or fell out haha.
Corvos
3d ago
AFAIK the number of places for non-ethnically-Japanese is capped at 10% to maintain the character of the sport.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3d ago
Sumo is a very fun grappling variant. The folks who host Heavy Hands do sumo coverage on their Patreon, you would really like it since you like sumo. Jack Slack too.
BlindDeafRat
3d ago
I would be very interested in reading a longer post about Sumo if you wrote it. Or if you know of any blog posts that talk about it in general.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
As a fan of Andor, I would suggest that one of the reasons it got produced is that in some ways it checks all the appropriate boxes: There is a female character (more than one) in fairly big, plot-driving roles. The eponymous character is a man of Mexican heritage. In the show he, as a child, was adopted by a white woman (Petunia Dudley from the Harry Potter films, amusingly) whose own husband was a black man (who has only a very small role before he is basically written out of the storyline.) There is a lesbian couple. An Indian woman who is also an assassin. Many, many of the progressive boxes are ticked--but not at the expense of a story. And that story, which drives two seasons, is compelling. White men are not all seen as bumbling, or evil, or both (though there are both bumbling and evil white men in the show.) One of the most complex characters is, arguably throughout his whole character arc, a white dude whose story is so believable it could be a documentary. You don't have 115 lb. females flipping 250 lb. men through plate glass windows, though true enough the cast is quite diverse.
Yet it works. (At least for me.) Seen from one perspective, the rebellion against the Empire (what drove the first films in 1977) can now be seen as "Le Resistance" à la the Force Awakens trilogy. The Empire is Trumpism. But this is a facile reading. Big government of any sort (including one run by democrats) can just as easily be substituted for the Empire. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum who like the series, both having very different reads on it. And this is what filmed entertainment (it's not a film, after all, it's a TV series) should be. Political, sure, but not propagandistic. The moral messages are complex. Nothing is a clear cut-out for current events unless you really, really stretch. Yes the show does present some behavior some might find grating as unquestionably normal (pre-marital sex, etc.) But it does have a moral core, which I mean in the John Gardner sense.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
I've seen the film twice and I am not sure characterizing it as selling Sapir-Whorf (soft or hard) is entirely accurate--is at least not what I'd get out of it, or did get out of it. Admittedly I did not read the novella, so maybe there's something more obvious there that was removed or de-emphasized by Villaneuve. I dislike at least the hard version of Sapir-Whorf as well (to say I dislike it means I simply don't buy it--the hard version of course the suggestion that language determines thought, that some thoughts simply cannot be held in the mind in certain languages--one of the common weapons in the arsenal against the supposed linguistic imperialism of, say, English) but the soft version (e.g. that a language one speaks/reads/thinks in at least influences their thoughts or their thought patterns) is to me self-evident. You, as a multilingual, must have some thoughts on this as well?
TowardsPanna
3d ago
Why would you hope for that? A normie flood into piracy would probably bring more government attention to it, and they'd try harder to stop it.
PokerPirate
3d ago
The Ludditism stems from spending so much time on the computer for work... but here I am on a Friday night replying to a forum post instead of doing luddite things...
Lizzardspawn
3d ago
See - it is already working
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
3d ago
It's also less efficient at distributing labor, a large slave owning operation is functionally a mini planned economy.
And now you know why all planned economies are indistinguishable from slave-owning operations.
It doesn't matter if you're less efficient at distributing labor when labor is not the limiting factor in your economy's growth. When labor is so worthless that laborers are actively competing to give it away, you (as a seller of labor) will find you must abide by more and more restrictions to sell that labor. This can include working longer hours, suffering quotas and beatings, not offending the master, actively making your job harder, and so on and so forth.
Note that, as you've identified, this labor isn't actually free to a buyer- you need to provide food and shelter (or the option to acquire those things). You don't even have to post guards if labor is sufficiently worthless (you do need them to ensure you're extracting the maximum potential from your slaves' labor)- there's nowhere for them to go, no better deal to be had, and they know that. It's more economically efficient if you provide these necessities yourself at the lowest resource cost possible, but they must be provided.
A minimum wage under slavery can be (especially when slaves are captured through conquest) zero, but zero is the lowest it can go. When the minimum wage for labor goes negative in an environment like this your slaves have no choice but to come after you for what's stored in your pantry- once enough people die of starvation, the supply of labor contracts, the wage goes back up to zero and equilibrium is restored.
Now, you might think that if something happened that grew agricultural productivity by an order of magnitude that the minimum wage would fall out, but it turns out that's not the case- instead, it freed up so many people to do so many different things that the supply of labor, then educated labor, started to become a limiting factor.
You may know that period as the Renaissance- typified by abolitions of slavery in European nations, AKA the first society-wide minimum wage law. Slavery wasn't abolished in the colonies for obvious economic reasons: the cost of labor was still basically zero there (and subsidized by colonial governments' conquest of those places).
Then add on that the market distortions of "free" labor adds less individual incentive for owners to invest in new technology that could clear up the workforce to do other economically productive things for someone else who still needs labor. Why spend hundreds of thousands investing in automation when you have a free work force subsidized by the police state? And yet this automation is what we need, so workers can go do jobs that can't be automated yet.
No, slave societies invest in automation as much as they're physically able. The reason a slave society becomes a slave society is to get enough food that the most powerful are able to fund this, because if it is unable or unwilling it quickly finds itself enslaved by a rival society. That is why
and one lazy layabout who captures most of the gains for themselves
is ultimately bullshit. While it is a meme for a reason, and market distortions such as 'no rival powers' can result in this- eventually a stronger society comes along and destroys them. The Confederate States lost to the Union because the Union outproduced them, and they outproduced them because their society was more industrious.
Finally, note that the inverse of that statement, "a system with five lazy layabouts who still get paid and one person who does the actual work", is an accurate characterization of unionized workplaces.
stuff like this is the balance shifting too much towards workers.
Note that the market forces that workers' ability to completely capture the regulatory apparatus also leads to depopulation- because said capture will always eventually make it too expensive for workers to produce more workers. This is the real reason TFR was an order of magnitude higher 200 years ago.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
It is true that the US is a strong ally of Israel and spends money on Israel, and it is also true that the US government strongly opposes anti-semitism, including giving grants to some groups dedicated to fighting it.
It's not clear that 1) being critical of either of those things is anti-semitic, 2) that a university punishing a student who harassed a Jewish student is evidence of either of those things or is convincing other people that they are true, or 3) that this is convincing people to be anti-semitic in some further or additional sense.
That is, to the first, it is wholly possible to believe that the US alliance with Israel is wrong and that the US shouldn't spend money on minority issues without being anti-semitic. So even if this incident influences people to believe those things, it's not clear that increases anti-semitism, or reveals the criticisms made by anti-semites to be true.
Presumably anti-semites oppose money being spent on combating anti-semitism, even though it's possible to believe that money shouldn't be spent on combating anti-semitism for non-anti-semitic reasons. But you should not jump from that coincidental agreement to the conclusion that more people are supporting anti-semitism itself.
Here it might be worth the sober reminder that American rejection of anti-semitism appears to be rising, not falling. Per page 5, in 2021 60% of US adults say that anti-semitism was either a somewhat serious or very serious problem, which then rose to 68% in 2022, 74% in 2023, and then fell slightly to 72% in 2024. Noticeably this is not a significantly partisan issue - Democrats are somewhat more likely to say that anti-semitism is a serious issue, but it has equalised recently, and in 2024 70% of Republicans and 74% of Democrats say that it's a problem. Most also believe that anti-semitism has increased in recent years. This makes it at least superficially plausible, to me, that US institutions are coming down harder against anti-semitism because that reflects the genuine popular will of the country.
So the thesis that institutional crackdowns on anti-semitic actions is causing people to become more sympathetic to anti-semitism just seems contrary to the available data. It looks like the American people are becoming more concerned about and more opposed to anti-semitism.
How can the American people be getting more opposed to anti-semitism even while, at the same time, they believe that anti-semitism is becoming a bigger problem? Probably there is a range of understandings of the term (e.g. a Republican might say that anti-semitism is a big problem while thinking of pro-Palestinian protests; Zohran Mamdani says that anti-semitism is a "crisis" that "we have to tackle" but presumably does not have those protests in mind). But it's also possible - in fact, I think likely - that the very small number of militant anti-semites in America has become bolder and more assertive lately, and taken more actions. Thus it can simultaneously be true that anti-semitism, at least as measured in anti-semitic incidents, is increasing even as opposition to anti-semitism increases even more rapidly.
anon_
3d ago
It’s the interiors and user experience that has always bothered me about Teslas. Fragile paneling, that big ugly screen
Must just be a different perspective. I have a fairly new Tesla (2022) and the interior is, in my mind, perfection. None of the stupid buttons everywhere. Just a clean invocation of what you need to drive. There isn't even an "ON" button because you don't need one. Get in the car, hold the brake, get in drive. No off button either, just leave, and it turns off and locks behind you.
By comparison, I got in my buddy's luxury car, and the saturation of useless controls is mind boggling. There is a dial for turning up and down the intensity of the fog lights. How in the world is this an affordance that needs to be in front of a driver? Why should that take up space?
It's not that I'm even against twiddling. But the beauty of software interfaces is that you can put all that stuff in a searchable place.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
I don't know of any outcry of anyone "upset" as such, because many of the yokozuna of the past have been not-fully-Japanese, but I think after such a spell of Mongolian powerhouses (Asashoryu, Hakuho, Harumafuji, Kakuryu, Terunofuji, etc.) having a Japanese yokozuna brings in fans who like to root for a wrestler who is fully Japanese (though he sucked this last basho as I'm sure you are aware).
FtSoA
3d ago
PEPFAR is bad. It keeps people alive for the sole purpose of spending money to keep them alive.
I suppose if you place zero or negative value on the lives saved by PEPFAR, then yeah, obviously. End it yesterday.
Not sure I'd agree with that proposition, however. I'm not much of a Christian, but I do think George W. Bush had his heart in a charitable place when he got the program going.
The program is obviously unconstitutional.
Congress allocating funds? Is all foreign aid unconstitutional by definition? Generally, the constitution is far more free-wheeling on doing things for foreign policy than it is for domestic policy.
This is a worthwhile comparison in that obviously subsidizing sexual deviancy is bad.
And being able to build houses would also be bad? Like what on earth do you think you're arguing by comparison here?
Those are very different things, to me, personally. Like, sure, most sexual deviancy probably happens in houses, which someone had to build, but that's true of a broad range of human activities. Am I to understand that building more houses would lead to more sexual deviancy?
Like houses are not inherently bad, right? And training locals to build their own housing gets around the classic problem of just providing a good such that the local market demand is satisfied and domestic production gets hurt. Now such training may or may not be a worthwhile charitable intervention, but it's not obviously terrible by default.
You can argue that PEPFAR is not just ineffective, but bad for reasons of sexual deviancy or whatever else without talking about African housebuilding, I think.
GBRK
3d ago
but to an entire population of superhuman Han Chinese
Expecting this to be applied uniformly over an entire population is just entirely wrong. We already have a problem with the overproduction of elites now. There are societal benefits for having widespread high IQ, but the personal benefits are mainly from having a relative advantage. If the current elite class doesn't heavily restrict how proles can use this technology, then a out of the upcoming genetically enhanced generation, ambitious lower-class climbers will seize control of the governing apparatus and then shut the latter behind them. In the "best case" scenario (scare quotes because IVF involves abortion and abortion bad), this technology will be restricted to removing disease-causing variants from the population. (With "diseases" expanded to cover genes that cause aggression and ambition. "Testosterene-linked Psychopathy" or somesuch will be the new "Schizophrenia.") In the "worst" case, this technology will be illegal in a way that remains accessible for only the elites.
FtSoA
3d ago
I could have made it worse and use the ol' LMGTFY.
There are some people in this conversation on various topics, like air conditioning units in Europe, that seemingly want to endlessly debate a relatively minor point that could be resolved with a quick google search and it baffles me.
There is much weaker association between personal IQ and personal income, than between group IQ and group income.
More options
Context Copy link