I disagree with this. The human body is a replicant writ large based on a very tiny amount of informational DNA. Most of that matter is replaced regularly, you replace it a bit faster with the right stuff and...poof, you have a new person.
No, this is not true. This is what many people think, that all the information is in the DNA, but that's not exactly right. There is a whole, extremely complicated process of gene expression above that. Part of information is encoded in the environment, maternal hormones help orchestrate the development of different tissues and organs in the growing fetus. They play a role in the development of the nervous system, reproductive organs, and other essential structures. The brain of the fetus is differentiated with respected to gender as early as in the twelfth week and after that there is no way to undo the changes.
Most of the large-scale gene expression happens in embryo and when we are young. Changing the DNA in reproductive organs doesn't make them vanish or change, there is no biological process that taps into this.
A virus can do it. They can kill you, they can certainly change you instead.
It is extremely easy to kill a human, and unbelievably difficult to apply some very sophisticated changes (we need highly specialized surgeons and something can still go wrong). Wolbachia bacterium can feminize some species of insects and this is the limit of complexity that it can handle.
I hope you know something about this, because I would like to learn more. Loosely related, this funny youtube video is the best introduction to evolutionary developmental biology for a layman I know.
Morgenland
8mo ago
If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?
I don't think this will be possible in the near future, maybe it will never be possible, or at the cost so high that in practice the whole procedure will be undoable. I mean a perfect 100% (or 99%) sex change. Today's sex reassignment surgeries work at least on hormonal level and are sufficient for some very small number of people.
It's not only the problem of changing DNA in all 37 trillion cells of human body, that would maybe even be possible in some very distant future, but humans would need the ability to generate and kill cells arbitrarily in every place of the body and with remarkable precision. And it's not only a matter of adding some cells here or there, we would need to generate the whole extremely complex patterns. Maybe you can fit the uterus in a male body, but how can you change the shape of the pelvis?
Human body is not a machine or a Lego set, where you can add and remove parts arbitrarily, but it is generated by a set of remarkably difficult rules, many yet unknown. It is generated from the embryo like a flower is generated from the seed. And the process of generation takes many years, even decades. Looking from the perspective of developmental biology it is almost impossible to build human from the scratch and this is what would need to be done from the perspective of a perfect sex change: the bone structure between men and women differs, the skin structure differs, muscle structure is different.
Probably it would be more reasonable to swap consciousness between two bodies (how?!) then to rebuild a male into a female or otherwise. I cannot think of any physical or biological process that could be reasonably used in such a transformation.
I don't think it's good that such a transformation seems extremely difficult, it would be even interesting to under go a perfect sex change. I just make some observations based on my knowledge of biophysics and developmental biology.
Morgenland
8mo ago
I associate 'Puritans' with one of the most productive groups that ever existed, but I'm not from US.
Morgenland
8mo ago
I sometimes too dwell upon this aspect of EA. Your argument is similar to the Utility monster argument. If the goal is to minimize suffering then maybe some neurotics in rich western countries suffer more than Africans, for whom malaria is a tamed aspect of life. But never tried to make it precise.
Morgenland
8mo ago
there must be an individual difference in response.
From my subjective experience, an individual difference is everything when it comes down to psychoactive substances. People tend to differ much more neurologically then physically, which is unpleasant truth for many. But we cannot see this on the first sight, so this thought rarely comes through our minds. For my part, I get almost no pleasure or kick from drinking alcohol. And I come from heavily-drinking culture, so this is a huge social burden. I have drunk hundreds times and most of the time I get instantly sleepy and then heavily depressed. And I know people who are extremely aggressive and psychotic when drunk, so the response is indeed deeply varied.
Morgenland
9mo ago
Now I see your point better! I would suspect that many people nurture the grandiose thoughts of self-importance and would even dream of the government taking interest in their usual life. Though sometimes cloud services can suck and while iCloud is smooth, my institution uses Outlook and I'm struck with OneDrive, which is sometimes so slow, that I usually carry around external HD to not get frustrated every couple hours or so.
Though I must admit, that I don't know many people of the type you're writing about, since in general I don't know that many people.
In short, my personal experiences with men. Many times different men in my life have helped me despite having no personal interest and me being an underdog and having nothing to offer them in exchange. They pulled me out of dire straits many times. I recall one story with a father of my friend borrowing me a car for a couple days, fully fueled and asking me to take care of myself. This story brings me to tears almost immediately, even now. My father died quite young, and my mother took all the money I should have inherited and spent it all lavishly on herself. So this is deeply personal and heavily based on my experience, but as I emphasized, this is what I have observed in my life and probably least important part of my post. I have met also selfish, cruel men, and there is a lot of them, but in general men are great, really great. Thus, I will defend patriarchy to my last breath.
And I don't think that papers are being suppressed, not at all. This is just women-are-wonderful effect. People want to know how women are great and so these papers are well known. I don't think that papers are suppressed, they are just difficult to find. And I don't have energy and patience to find them today. I also don't base all my beliefs on reading scientific papers, I'm far from rationalist philosophy.
Morgenland
9mo ago
I will provide you with a low-effort post, waving vaguely in some direction, as I lack the resources within myself to build a more coherent argument. First, I would start from the defense of the patriarchy, since I find feminism not well-defined, basically more a multi-layer motte and bailey construction. I think it is safe to say that the patriarchy is the Nemesis of all feminists and no feminist supports patriarchy. First I define patriarchy (following Wikipedia) as
Patriarchy is a social system in which men are the primary authority figures in the areas of political leadership, moral authority, and control of property.
Some possible arguments in favor of patriarchy:
-
Evolutionary argument - basically all known societies, starting from the most primitive ones share the patriarchy as a founding order. Evidence for matriarchal societies is very scarce, and if there was such evidence it would be very well known. Thus, there must be something to the patriarchy so that it allowed for the proliferation of the civilization.
-
People are emotionally skewed against men due to women-are-wonderful effect. Thus, the society in general views men as worse and women as better then they are in reality. Because of this bias, we need to be very careful when considering the feminist agenda trying to ascribe to men all the worst qualities like selfishness, violence, greed and lack of morals.
-
Great variability of men - Feminism has a tendency to narrow the masculinity to the set of controversial traits of violence, selfishness, greed etc. (toxic masculinity). Looking at the historical records and greater men variability hypothesis one can conclude, that this set of traits was only characteristic to the very narrow group of men. Men were also: farmers, artisans, poets, saints, pacifists, socialists, martyrs, hermits, merchants, monks, singers, dancers, philosophers, dreamers and librarians. There is no single trait that men share, although there are some tendencies. There is no essence of man that makes him less valuable or more socially suspicious then woman.
-
Great creativity of men - one can trace almost all works of art, all scientific breakthroughs, all architectural feats, all architectural miracles to men and their work. These creations benefit all of mankind and men who were freed from the pains of child-bearing and rearing by the patriarchy, have been proven by the millennia of civilization to be able to raise the standard of living for everyone.
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Evolutionary bottleneck - Men went through a tighter evolutionary bottleneck then women and developed some traits that make them better at cooperation. Thus, they are able to build complex organizations and engage in large-scale enterprises. Without these traits modern societies would cease to exist.
Ok, so these are five exemplary arguments, approximately from the least subjective to the most subjective, or from the most evidence-based to the least-evidence based. I also personally think that men are more loyal, generous and less cruel then women in certain circumstances, but it is extremely hard to find any papers that would paint men in better light then women. I run multiple queries in multiple search engines and had hard time finding barely anything, (I encourage to do this as a simple exercise) which shows how strong are prejudices against men (see 2.). But this is my subjective musing, so I end here.
Morgenland
9mo ago
I think you are taking a bit different take here, but I haven't seen my argument considered by you or anyone else here. Why do people encrypt their personal notes, self-host their e-mail servers and use VPN with Tor? Because their can. Similarly, why people climb Mount Everest? Because it's there. Himalayan mountaineering is one of the deadliest activity one can think of and yet, there is no shortage of people who want to give it a try.
As far as I observed, many people concerned with privacy, usually do so on a superficial level, while their deeper motivation resolves around the temptation to do something single-handedly. Many programmers possess only a limited understanding of unix systems, operating systems architecture in general, cryptographic algorithms and other more obscure topics. They are usually happy using Windows with VS code. Do they miss something in their day-to-day life, do their actions lack utility? Not at all.
But I'm talking here about a different type of people: hackers, tweakers, geeks who just build complicated projects for their own joy, because it's in their nature to take the road less traveled. You are right that it takes a certain kind of person to take pleasure in tens of hours of setting and adjusting systems that have a high chance of being abandoned after a couple of uses, but isn't that what FOSS is all about? The famous: "Linux is free if your time is worth nothing" points to the fact, that exploring software consumes tons of hours. Is it useful? I don't know man, this is exploratory behavior, some people think that there is some utility in exploring and learning new things. Of course one should be able to find a difference between a hobby and mental issues.
I don't buy into falling prey to conspiracy theories. Maybe you know people, who are so involved into distrustful political stances or are stuck in the views of the society taken out of the '80s and 90's movies like 12 Monkeys or Fight Club, but usually it's just an excuse for DIY. Here you have a link to a blog of a person, who self-hosted her blog server as a unikernel. A cumbersome way of doing it to say the least! And she in fact mentions hacker attacks as a reason in her blog post, but it may as well have something to do with the fact that she has worked on MirrageOS, a framework for creating unikernels. This is the pattern I find among the bloggers I follow: not the distrustful schizos, but rather hackers constantly experimenting with new tooling.
Morgenland
9mo ago
No, not at all. The act of baptism purifies from all sins, including the original sin. Even on Wikipedia you can read:
In the Catholic Church by baptism all sins are forgiven, original sin and all personal sins.
After you have sinned, you can be forgiven from your sins by attending the sacrament of penance. If you have satisfied the conditions of good penance, you are free from all sins.
Morgenland
10mo ago
Probably Greece spends so much because of constant tensions with many times bigger Turkey, and UK, well, has always been the enforcer of the European balance of power.
Sure, but 2014 was precisely the year when the threshold was set, so I find your comment very misleading. This information is very plainly written in the link you have given and in the link I have given above.
During the 2014 summit, all NATO members agreed to spend at least 2% of their GDPs on defense by 2025. In 2017, only four nations met the threshold: The United States (3.6%), Greece (2.4%), the United Kingdom (2.1%), and Poland (2.0%). However, by 2021, ten countries were meeting the percentage target.
In this link you can find all the military spending of Poland as a percentage of GDP between 2014 and 2023. As you can easily see, from 2014 onward, Poland has been seriously trying to meet the spending target.
Morgenland
10mo ago
Europeans are by no means a homogeneous group. By "Europeans" you mean rich countries of Western Europe which are unlikely to be invaded and keep strong economic ties to Russia, like Germany, France, Italy or Spain (mainly Germany). But there is a bunch of CEE (short for Central and Eastern Europe) countries, like Romania, Poland and Baltic states which are fully aware of impending Russian danger and keep their military spending beyond the NATO threshold.
So we are in a position of conflicting interests. Western Europeans are reluctant to pay for the safety of their eastern neighbors, but they benefit largely from the stability given by the American umbrella. CEE countries want to fulfill their obligations, since they are in obvious risk, but stand little chance against Russia without NATO's help. Would you rather punish CEE countries for the misdeeds of their western friends, or give Germans free ride? Some statistics about NATO spending by country are here.
Morgenland
10mo ago
Those territories has been now longer under the jurisdiction of Poland (78 years), than a part of modern Germany (united in 1871), so calling them the true East Germany is a bit of overstatement.
Morgenland
11mo ago
Yes, he has a strong tendency to speak quickly and without much forethought, which is especially bad for a diplomat. That's why I don't put him in the first row of polish politicians, he is too careless, otherwise he would be truly heavyweight player. But his very impressive bio speaks for itself. I hope that Sikorski, as a conservative will counterweight left-leaning ministers in the new cabinet. Otherwise we would have the most woke government in the history of Poland.
Morgenland
11mo ago
It would be great to see this post in the Friday Fun thread instead of Wellness Wednesday, but I assume this was your initial purpose and I should put the blame on your sleeplessness.
Morgenland
11mo ago
Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński is a great book on the subject if you can get your hands on it. Kapuściński was a great observer and in the book he describes his first-hand impressions from the collapse of the USSR based on over 60,000 km of his voyages into the Soviet Union, including the farthest and most obscure parts, little known to the western reader.
Morgenland
11mo ago
I'm going to write something stupid and I hope no one will take it too seriously, but I cannot resist the temptation to point out certain dark irony in your comment. Taking into account that autists emulate social behavior and AGPs emulate women, it is hardly surprising that the people who are combination of both are simultaneously the masters of emulating software (hehe).
Morgenland
11mo ago
I would suspect the same about pedophilia, though this is such a strong taboo topic, that there is probably not enough data to investigate the question reliably. Anecdotally however, there are well documented brilliant pedophiles, for example, you can take a look into interesting story of Nobel recipient, Daniel Gajdusek on wikipedia.
He was one of the pioneers in the field of prion diseases, and he in fact did a lot to explain the transmission mechanism of kuru disease, but his sexual motivation and his scientific life are intertwined in an incredible way.
Well, AFAIK Japan is considered to be "the greatest ally" of the US, but not in terms of 'the most loyal' but rather 'the most valuable' taking into account its geostrategic position and power projection capabilities. Probably "being loyal" isn't even a good measure in the international relations.
Morgenland
1yr ago
If I understand your troubles correctly, I would strongly recommend you checking out John Vervaeke. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto (by the way exactly as Jordan Peterson) and he developed very attractive philosophical framework, trying to combine cognitive science, ancient Greek philosophy and Buddhist teachings. He presents his ideas in the youtube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I was under huge impression of the consistency and orginality of his thoughts. The whole thing strongly verges on spirituality and he explicitly states that he is trying to develop a 'Religion of no religion'. Usually I consider such attempts to be doomed to failure, but this was interesting even for me, a devout Catholic. Considering his religious affiliation I would label him a modern-day atheist, though he calls himself a Buddhist (in one of the episodes he argues that he doesn't find eternal life to be a good idea).
Morgenland
1yr ago
I would give you a different take to consider. Why do you think there's something wrong with being disagreeable? I'm personally very agreeable and I can assure you it really sucks. I have many problems trying to seriously disagree with someone or winning an important argument. Maybe you can mellow out a bit about insignificant disagreements, but I consider being disagreeable a strong card in your deck. All executives, lawyers, politicians have to be able to argue fiercely in favor of their position. Maybe you should find a company of people who are strong enough to accept your opinions. Just consider trying to find a more nuanced approach to your issue.
Morgenland
1yr ago
I fully understand that the Motte community evolved from the rationalist community, but I just don't believe that you can be a completely rational person. There's so much happening to you from the inside and from the outside and you have absolutely no clue about it, not knowing what just hit you or led you to this mood or another. I think that this whole project of rationality is too much too demand from a person. I'm perfectly fine being full of contradictions, conflicting temptations, being driven by vague emotions or ephemeral visions. I think this is more genuine and truthful way of being then trying to squeeze your whole personality in one huge framework of rationality.
No one convinced me better, and no one speaks about this view on being more eloquently and beautifully then Eric Lander, a mathematician standing behind the Human Genome Project and a practicing Jew. The link is here, please watch it, its only three minutes.
FYI I'm a Catholic.
Morgenland
1yr ago
I would go with "urban", in Europe it would count as urban for sure, since there are not so many cities with skyscrapers' districts. And sharing walls as well as having common frontage is a distinct feature of a town.
I agree with you on most points. I'm only considering theoretical possibility of a nearly ideal sex change. But I have my doubts, when you mention 'extremely high-quality surgeries'. Seriously, FtM cannot have real penis and MtF cannot have real vagina. I know that some may wonder on the latter case, but you cannot place nerve endings where there are none. The elasticity of female vagina is remarkable and cannot be reproduced during the surgery.
However, I think that on the level of sexual response it may be sufficient for many trans-people, so I don't deny that many of them will find the sex reassignment surgery helpful or sufficient.
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