domain:aporiamagazine.com
JarJarJedi
12hr ago
Oh no, you are not fair to them. They built a lot of infrastructure. Every school, hospital or mosque had under it a bunker for storing arms, hiding troops and supplies for Hamas. Every schoolyard and hospital grounds double as missile launching site. Miles of tunnels have been built, and not just some rat holes, but tunnels you can live in for months, with ventilation, facilities, food storage, multiple exits in private houses and businesses all over the place. It's a lot of infrastructural work, and they have been very busy for two decades. It is true that this infrastructure has only one goal - war with Israel - and is completely useless otherwise, but I don't see the citizens of Gaza to mind too much. Surely, when they are losing the war, they don't like it, but the whole concept of being in eternal war with Israel, even if this means living in medieval conditions and spending all the money on building more war infrastructure and sacrificing all their kids to the war effort - they are completely fine with this concept. They actually want this, more than anything. Maybe not 100% of them, but about 90% for sure. Their only problem with the war is that they are currently losing badly.
prungus
12hr ago
Most doctors have some combination of research, teaching, administrative, and managerial duties all of which bleed outside of traditional work hours in the usual ways.
I have a few doctor friends, most in family med, 1 in ophthalmology, 1 in podiatry (debatable) , and my wife's family are mostly doctors, including radiology, physiatry, and neurology.
Ive never heard of any of them doing any "research, teaching, administrative, or managerial work" past residency. They all seem to work 30-40h a week doing pretty much "doctor stuff" only.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12hr ago
I’m not going to say it’s impossible that this one is the one, but I think as far as putting money down, I’d wait a year or so to see if the hype is just hype or if it’s real, or if there’s not going to be issues with side effects making the product only “worth the risk” for people who are either going to lose several hundred pounds or die. If the product is only going to be used on the population of people who weigh 300+ lbs, that’s a much smaller customer base than if it can be used by every woman looking to lose ten pounds to fit a swimsuit or wedding dress. If it’s just morbid obesity, it’s life changing for those people, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to spike the stock price like if you cured a common and deadly disease like cancer
Disease is defined somewhat tautologically, since we usually define health (or the WHO does) as:
a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity
Google tells me that they haven't bothered to define disease. Well, a disease is anything that impacts you negatively and isn't something like a car crash or a bullet to the head.
Wikipedia goes for:
A disease is a particular abnormal condition that adversely affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism and is not immediately due to any external injury
This has plenty of room for arguments, even if I find some deeply stupid or misguided. Some deaf and autistic people claim that trying to cure their conditions, or that of their children, is medicalizing a "normal" or equally valid state of being, and tantamount to genocide.
I have no sympathy for such a position, sure, mild autism isn't that bad, but if they're non-verbal and low-functioning, almost everyone wants them cured. At best, I support individual autonomy enough that if a deaf person insisted that they wished to remain deaf, they have the right to refuse treatment. I begrudgingly concede that they should have the right to make that decision for their children, even if I think it's a really dumb one.
Fortunately, the sufferers of most diseases seek cures. There's no movement to redefine psoriasis, fungal feet infections or heart attacks as a manifestation of the human condition that shouldn't be eliminated. Doctors just nod at the dumb stuff, and keep doing what seems sensible. Or at least I do.
Tree
12hr ago
I don’t know how your friend managed that; In the original thread, the OP of little faith had given the put he dared us to buy – CCL was trading at 42, the 30 put a year out was 1.35. The next month the stock fell to 12 ; so that ‘s 13x, then it fell even further to 8, before rebounding, so if held till expiration, 7x.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases
I don't see how this implies that any user must submit the literal first draft they write.
Consider the following:
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You write a comment or essay.
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You do an edit pass and proof read it. Corrections happen.
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You might ask your buddy to take a look. They raise some valid points, and you make corrections.
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You post. Then people come up with all kinds of responses. Some thoughtful and raising valid concerns. Some of them that make you wonder what the fuck is going on. (You must be, to some degree, a rather masochistic individual to be an active Mottizen)
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You either edit your essay to incorporate corrections, clarifications, or start digging into topics in sub-threads.
The place where LLMs come in is stage 2/3, at least for me. I ask them if I am genuinely steelmanning the argument I'm making, if I haven't misrepresented my sources or twisted the interpretation. If you do not objection to having a friend look at something you've written, I do not understand why you would have concerns about someone asking an LLM. The real issue, is, as far as I'm concerned, people simply using the ease of LLM issue to spam or to trivially stonewall faster than a normal person can write, or to simply not even bother to engage with the argument in the first place. I think I've framed my stance as "I don't mind if you use ChatGPT in a conversation with me, as long as your arguments are your own and you are willing to endorse anything you borrow from what it says."
As evidence I've shared suggests, all arguments are my own. I have made sure to carefully double check anything new LLMs might have to add.
If the LLM's at any point are able to completely correct your argument then why post it here at all? We 're supposed to argue to understand, so if the LLM gets you to understanding then literally the reason for the existence of this forum vanishes. It's just a blog post at best.
Is that how it works? Nobody told me!
On a more serious note: Do you actually think that writing a well-reasoned, thoughtful and insightful essay is a guarantee that nobody here will come and argue with you?
I wish that were true. At the bare minimum, the population of the Motte is extremely heterogeneous, and someone will find a way to critique you from their own idiosyncratic perspective.
That is the point. That is why I come here, to polish my wits and engage in verbal spars with gentleman rules at play.
A perfectly argued and buttressed position would probably not get much discussion engagement because what is there to say? You may be far from that point right now, but maybe just keep it in mind.
I genuinely think that is impossible in practice. There's a reason for that saying about every modus tollens having a modus ponens. Someone will come in and challenge your beliefs here, even if the topic is what anime you like. There is a lot of fundamental difference in both opinion and normative, epistemic and moral frameworks here!
In the limit, values are orthogonal to intelligence. If I was relying on some ASI to craft the perfect essay about how fans of Tokyo Ghoul should seppuku, then what's stopping someone from coming in and using their ASI to argue the opposite?
We do not have ASI. An LLM cannot replace me today. The day has yet to come when shooting the shit with internet strangers is made obsolete for my purposes. I would be sad if that day actually comes, but I think it's a good while off.
In the meantime, I'm here to dance.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
12hr ago
Well, the lipostat theory would suggest that the obese already suffer from disrupted homeostasis via leptin resistance. Under that paradigm, GLP-1s are more akin to insulin for diabetics than more tolerance-building substances.
cjet79
12hr ago
People are not allowed to express an interest in committing suicide without being subject to a whole of oversight and interruption to their life. This can be a good thing to prevent suicide, but it makes all survey data about suicidal willingness a little suspect.
I'd also say that every suicide that happens via someone torturing themselves to death via one of the harder methods is something that could have been prevented with more painless methods being available. At least they could have had a more peaceful death.
SSCReader
12hr ago
I also, simultaneously, feed them into a more powerful reasoning model such as o3 or Gemini 2.5 Pro for the purposes of noting any flaws in reasoning. They are very good at finding reasoning flaws, less so at catching errors in citations. Still worth using.
But isn't that the point of posting here?
"This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases"
If you're testing your reasoning against an LLM first then you're kind of skipping part of the entire point of this space no? We should pointing out flaws in your reasoning. You're making an arguably better individual post/point, at the expense of other readers engagement and back and forth. Every time the LLM points out flaws in your reasoning you are reducing the need for us, your poor only human interlocuters. You're replacing us with robots! You monster! Ahem.
If the LLM's at any point are able to completely correct your argument then why post it here at all? We 're supposed to argue to understand, so if the LLM gets you to understanding then literally the reason for the existence of this forum vanishes. It's just a blog post at best.
It's like turning up for sex half way to climax from a vibrating fleshlight then getting off quickly with your partner. If your goal is just having a baby (getting a perfect argument) then it's certainly more efficient. But it kind of takes away something from the whole experience of back and forth (so to speak) with your partner I would suggest.
Now it's not as bad as just ejaculating in a cup and doing it with a turkey baster, start to finish, but it's still a little less...(self_made_)human?
Not saying it should be banned (even if it could be reliably) but I'd probably want to be careful as to how much my argument is refined by AI. A perfectly argued and buttressed position would probably not get much discussion engagement because what is there to say? You may be far from that point right now, but maybe just keep it in mind.
TeknOShEeP
12hr ago
Lol, options are so much fun. They will fuck you 99.99% of the time. But the one time they dont... your broker calls you on January 27 about that Gamestop $10 call you bought 6 months ago on the advice of some idiot degen who's math actually penciled out. "Dude... you gonna exercise or what?"
Crowstep
12hr ago
It's not definitive evidence, but it's definitely evidence. The fact that no country on the planet except the UK has something like the NHS is good evidence that a single, national health service is a bad way to run things, because if such a system were good other countries would have copied it.
Similarly, the fact that the entire world has looked at US gun culture and laws and nobody has decided to copy them is evidence that they aren't worth copying.
Corvos
12hr ago
Dementia and Alzheimers disease
ischaemic heart disease
Forgive the aside, but what is the meaning of the word 'disease' in medical parlance? I suppose in the back of my mind I was aware of 'heart disease' but I would normally think of 'disease' as synonymous with 'infection'.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
12hr ago
A major issue:
Terminal illness is not strictly defined, and neither is low quality of life. It's more of a know it when you see it kinda deal.
If you're willing to settle for proxies -
Current estimates suggest that approximately 75% of people approaching the end-of-life may benefit from palliative care. The growing numbers of older people and increasing prevalence of chronic illness in many countries mean that more people may benefit from palliative care in the future, but this has not been quantified. The present study aims to estimate future population palliative care need in two high-income countries.
My quick trawl of the literature suggests that ~95% of all deaths in the Anglosphere are due to illness and not external factors. I mean, if a disease kills you, I'd certainly call it terminal at some point. Most of these patients have some combination of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, cancer and so on.
This is illustrative. I manually added all the leading causes:
Dementia and Alzheimers disease continued to be the top leading cause of death, continuing the pre-pandemic trend. There were 66,876 deaths with an underlying cause of dementia and Alzheimers disease, accounting for 11.6% of all deaths registered in 2023.
Following dementia and Alzheimers disease, the remaining leading causes of death in England and Wales were:
ischaemic heart diseases (57,895 deaths; 10.0% of all deaths, and a 2.5% decrease in deaths from 2022)
chronic lower respiratory diseases (32,106 deaths; 5.5% of all deaths, and a 7.7% increase in deaths from 2022)
cerebrovascular diseases (29,474 deaths; 5.1% of all deaths, and a 0.7% increase in deaths from 2022)
malignant neoplasm of trachea, bronchus and lung (27,923 deaths; 4.8% of all deaths, and a 2.3% decrease in deaths from 2022)
influenza and pneumonia (24,240 deaths; 4.2% of all deaths, not a leading cause in 2022)
4.2+4.8+5.1+5.5+10+11.6 (the big 6) add up to 41.2%. That leaves every other thing that kills people.
Note that is not exhaustive, and this kind of data is a pain to collate. I hope that even just going by the biggest causes makes it clear that a 5% MAID rate is nothing to write home about. @iprayiam3 is, to out it bluntly, terribly miscalibrated. People can just say things, and be wrong on the internet, while bringing no facts to the table themselves.
My own figures of 20-30% are hardly perfect, but they're certainly closer to plausible figures for people undergoing rather unseemly and painful deaths. They came from a strong hunch, and it's clear that working in medicine makes that gut feeling more accurate.
Now that I know more accurate values, I can see a plausible case for much higher rates.
quiet_NaN
12hr ago
Seconded. My father got Alzheimer around retirement age. Initially it was not too bad, but in a decade it reduced him to the cognitive level of a new-born. The end came when he finally could no longer swallow. Dying from a lack of fluids and food is not a good death. For an elderly person who is not already weakened by cancer, it also takes fucking forever. Three days without water might kill a healthy adult, but for someone who was just laying in bed before it can be two weeks. To my knowledge I have never killed a mammal in my life, but I would have gladly injected him with pentobarbital. Instead, we played by the restrictive German laws and waited for nature to take its course, never knowing if what was left of him was in pain (despite the opiates he got). 0/10 as far as ways to die go.
The trouble with dementia is that nobody will respect your living will. MAID for lucid cancer patients is one thing, MAID for someone who is no longer lucid is something entirely different. So you basically have to off yourself while your quality of life is still positive.
cjet79
12hr ago
What is it gonna take for you play underwater hockey?
I need help getting new recruits and keeping them around.
TeknOShEeP
13hr ago
Agreed only on practical grounds, and only for the moment.
It is impossible with current technology to not use a nuclear bomb and adversely affect basically everyone on Earth. Millions of people use guns every day without affecting anyone who doesnt choose to be affected (usually on the gun range wearing ear pro). When humanity spreads among the stars, if you want to make pretty flashes on airless chunks of rock utterly devoid of life, you should be able to.
cjet79
13hr ago
Knew an East Asian looking woman with a Hispanic looking last name, but an accent that only sort of seemed like a Spanish accent. Then met her white friends that she went to college with that all had the same accent.
Felt more comfortable asking them and finally got the obvious answer to her origins I should have realized sooner: Brazil.
cjet79
13hr ago
You can be a software dev in a small 100% male company in Eastern Europe that has a chat channel for sharing porn.
This is both mind-blowing and completely believable.
Corvos
13hr ago
“Well, golly, I like the leopard-pattern wallet but where’s the rest of the fursuit?”
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
13hr ago
Depends which version of market efficiency you're talking about.
I just spent quite a while at work doing research for a legal case we're doing where proving the semi-strong market efficiency hypothesis is a profoundly load-bearing part of our argument.
We'll know what the judge thinks in like, two years lol
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
13hr ago
If it makes you feel any better, one of my university housemates loaded up on cruise line puts, he timed it well (somewhat) as the price did indeed drop further after he bought the puts.
However, due to the implied volatility being so high when he bought them, he still managed to lose money overall despite buying puts on a stock that fell after he bought the puts (as the IV also dropped over the same period).
I've never felt bad about not being an options degen after witnessing that lol
Twin peaks review, season 1
I wrote a personal comment two days ago, mentioning twin peaks in passing which got all the replies, so here I am putting Lynch's magnus opus here.
David lynch like me and @TowardsPanna was a yogi, I saw Mulholland drive and didn't like it a lot, blue velvet was fun, as a person he stood out to me a lot. Blue Velvet was a great movie, not just fun. Lynch refused to discuss his abstract cinema, even though there's academic papers on it.
So, why would the best American director make a TV show, that too in the 90s. Enter Twin peaks, there's loads of trivia about this which I'll skip. This is an amazing show that up until season 1 and till episode 5 of season 2 where I am, has been amazing.
You can't describe much of what lynch does, I can't, he mixes tropes of soap operas, murder mysteries with his brand of surrealism in 90s Pacific Northwestern small towns.
Spiritual journey can help describe some of what he does. I read descriptions of enlightenment or it's equivalent in Trika, the sect of Shaivism you find on tantra illuminated, I never read any of them well, skimmed them really and once I had spiritual experiences, I looked back and the details given were right down to the word.
You can't scientifically prove this stuff. It's real, it's not me retrofitting my own account or getting influenced by ones that I spent a minute on whilst laughing. Lynch's work reminds me of that, tangentially. That a lot of it is surreal, you think it's voodoo, despite that, it feels real.
Twin peaks is peak TV for me. I have never seen a director do something serious that's funny whilst interweaving tropes they make fun of via a running soap opera in the TV show. Every night, I fire up an episode and can't stop, I unfortunately for the spoilers which i urge no one posts, yet there's so much more here.
Like my spiritual experiences, I cannot describe lynch's movies. Highly recommend it a lot. On a personal note I'm facing an onset of depression in the short term due to my spiritual prsctise which should fade away soon.
I don't like the abstract, there's better, actually holy things that go deeper than any movie ever can. How Lynch manages to have a really good normal TV show like story whilst having a deep level of abstraction is extremely impressive. Every twin peak fan sounded nuts to me until I became one, Lynch somehow made my spiritual practice parallels fit here despite his death.
You feel a love for Americana, Pacific Northwest small towns feel like heaven, I'll nevrbe able to look at hills without remembering falling, the shows theme song.
My last few comments have been about my growing angst with modern tech, the show is infinitely better than whatever harebrianed things I can ever find online whilst making me appreciate life more.
One more thing, Lynch, unlike a lot of film directors or novelists like Geroge RR Martin wasn't a shut in loser who has any bitterness towards the world. He shows the dark, the surreal, mystical visions, dreams are super important in twin peaks. The shows themes are dark, somehow I only ever remember the good from it. Very few carry a true love for life, even fewer can showcase it in something that's dark, extremely grounded. This isn't LOTR where you have large fights, it's a low budge by today's standards.
Most of what I wrote is incoherent, that's alright, everyone will have their own take on the show. I don't respect box office, modern media, yet I really respect the creative craftsman that Lynch was, we're lucky he left us with a whole show. I'm gonna watch the prequel, fire walk with me after season 2,before starting season 3.
On the point about the internet and it discouraging people to live life, all gossip we see pushes us to invest more, I see the pretty girls and the surroundings in his TV and it's joyous. It makes me want to do well and do bad things to the same sorta girls. I mean that, you appreciate the good things in life. Online circles take up more and more of our lives. Watching TV unfortunately is an upgrade.
I admire lynch a lot, I can write a lot, it won't mean much, watch it.
TeknOShEeP
13hr ago
Disagree entirely. While i do not agree with them politically, many of my leftoid friends have suddenly discovered the purpose behind the second ammendment, and are wondering why our state has so many idiotic gun laws.
Guns may be fun, and they may provide a constructive outlet, but their purpose is potential violence. Thats the point. Pretending otherwise is dishonest and pointless.
I note, without comment, that my most downvoted posts on the Motte are those claiming, correctly, that the 2020 US Presidential election was not rigged.
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