self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
I tried stuffing my friends into this textbox and it really didn't work out.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
9hr ago
When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
Is it devalued? Maybe. But it's hard to write a novel that takes the reader's time and intelligence seriously if you don't do some research. At the very least a wiki lookup or asking an LLM doesn't hurt.
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
Absolute nonsense of the "sounds deep, makes no sense if you think twice about it" variety. If your work is "pure" invention, then I struggle to see how it can be autobiographical. I expect most objections to be quibbling about what counts as pure invention.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
13hr ago
"I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question."
-Harun Yahya
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
13hr ago
One of the few poems that reliably induce frisson in me. I felt it again just reading it.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2d ago
I would never play the Pathologic games but I'd certainly watch Mandalore review them for hours. They can get wild.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2d ago
I had the same experience with RDR2 for what it's worth. I chalk some of that to being excessively immersive to the point that I wished I could just get around and do things easier.
Hmm.. Definitely EVE Online. I'd much rather read stories about the game than play it. Debatable Factorio, because I feel like I'd need to be on stimulants to enjoy it.
I've recently been playing Arma Reforger, and it's this close to being too boring and slow for me. In Arma 3, I have the majority of my 3500 hours in the Zeus mode, where I'm managing a mission for anywhere from a handful to dozens of players, and there's always something to do. Setting up the next objective, micromanaging AI, listening to the players chat. It beats driving for half an hour or standing on guard for ages not to see anything, which is both a realistic depiction of warfare, but also boring (I do my best to have my players not end up there).
The map in Reforger feels too large even for 128 players, it's less restrictive than something like Squad, where the game mode channels you into lanes (even if you are technically free to faff around anywhere). The spawn points can easily be tens of minutes from the action, and God help you if you forget where you parked the car. I still play Reforger because I enjoy the novelty of an Arma game that doesn't look like it was made in 2013 and also runs way better, but sadly the Zeus/Game Master mode is atrociously half-baked. Bohemia learned nothing from the mods that made Zeusing in Arma 3 a million times more fun and useful.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
I shudder to think of low the probability of guessing the perfect values would be at random. I'd start attending church with Pascal.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
Sigh.. Shame I never got to see things at their true peak. Not that we've done poorly here, I think The Motte has outlasted the initial pessimism and then some. And in the end, our migration off Reddit was because of Reddit turning the Eye of Sauron towards us with a frequency too high to bear.
If I had a Christmas list, I'd put Scott reversing his decision and/or regularly signal-boosting us pretty high up there. He attempted to smother something beautiful, and he acknowledges that.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
Forget? I wasn't even alive at the time!
(That's illuminating, I had presumed it was controversial from the word go)
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
I decided to look around some more and the more I read, the worse an idea this seems.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31100715/
When GH and IGF-I are secreted in excess, bone remodeling is enhanced leading to deterioration of bone microstructure and impairment of bone strength. Indeed, acromegaly causes skeletal fragility, and vertebral fractures are reported in a remarkable number of subjects exposed to GH and IGF-I excess.
In other words, you'll have thicker bones. But they'll be unhealthy bones, that'll be more prone to fracture under stress. That seems entirely counterproductive for your goals.
By all means see that doctor if you're keen to have a definitive answer, but from where I'm standing, this probably won't have any positive results even if you have a strong risk appetite. I see no evidence of threshold effects, where there's an amount of HGH post-puberty that-
- Noticeably thickens bones
- Makes those thick bones actually stronger
- Doesn't cause acromegaly.
Be very careful with the stuff.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
I can see them just fine on my Reddit app. It's one that's been modified to hide ads, but I don't think I ever touched anything in the APK that affects the mod list.
Our very own Zorba is still on there, but from memory he isn't active. I believe Bakkot does most of the modding there.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
If you're looking to have it:
thicken bones like your feet, hands, wrists, ankles, vertebrae
You're basically into acromegaly territory, and I don't think that's a very good idea, unless your lover is into the Neanderthal look.
I doubt there's much concrete evidence out there, but I found this:
There are few controlled studies on the effectiveness of GH on the performance of top level athletes. In general these studies have been performed with supraphysiological dosages but not with the large amounts claimed to be effective, for instance, by bodybuilders. The results of most of these controlled studies are generally less impressive than the claims of those who misuse the substance. A study of volunteers under heavy resistance training found decrease of free fatty mass but no difference in the muscle strength.23 With weight lifters, it has been shown that short term GH treatment does not increase muscle protein synthesis more than placebo24 or other factors such as maximal voluntary strength (biceps or quadriceps).25
The long term risks of hGH use are not well known since epidemiological data regarding this type of treatment in healthy sportsmen are unavailable. Acromegaly, which results from a pathological increase in endogenous production of GH, is often cited as one of the major risks associated with excessive use of hGH. The major symptoms are swelling of the hands and feet, coarsened facial appearance, dentition problems, arthralgias, fluid retention, and excessive sweating. Acromegalic patients have an increased risk for diabetes mellitus and hypertension that can lead to premature mortality from cardiovascular diseases.26 It can be argued that long term hGH doping with high dosages will probably result in misusers experiencing symptoms of fluid retention and increased risk of development of diabetes mellitus and hypertension. There is also a risk of cardiomyopathy, osteoporosis, menstrual irregularities, and impotence. Some of these side effects are reversible after withdrawal of the drug.
You're in the peculiar position of wanting thicker bones as opposed to more muscle. I don't know how you can get that just in your peripherals without fucking up your face. If you want an actually well-informed answer, you probably want the kind of sports-physician who has a cult following in the powerlifting community and isn't overly afraid of losing their license.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
India is a lower-middle income country?
LOWER-MIDDLE INCOME ECONOMIES ($1,146 TO $4,515). [51]. Angola, Honduras, Papua New Guinea. Bangladesh, India, Philippines. Benin, Jordan, Samoa
We might disagree on the criteria for being a "functional" one, but it matches my own standards in a way most of Africa doesn't.
Is it high-functioning? Hell no, but it's also not Sub-Saharan Africa, and better than Nigeria and the like (I happened to have a nice chat with a Nigerian doctor who joined my workplace)
I expect that in a decade or two, if AI didn't steal livelihoods, we'd reach Thai or Eastern European standards. Think of how the average middle-class American looks at how impoverished the middle-class Brit is (and the latter really isn't starving to death or has a absolute dearth of consumer goods) and perhaps that's how they'd look at the middle-class Indian.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
Well, Scott seems to be defending and crediting Lynn quite vociferously. It doesn't really get much earlier than that for the modern, data-based HBD movement, though sadly for Lynn he happens to be dead before the tides turned.
I know Scott has endorsed Cremieux (or at least drew attention to them) and the latter was doing HBD before it was mainstream. And is, more importantly, alive to celebrate.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
I think the average /r/SSC mod seems to have thrown up their hands at this point. They can't censor the topic very well if even Scott is talking about it, and he was the one who had the old CWR thread forced off (if memory serves, I only frequented the subreddit and The Motte's sub when it had been a year or so since the declaration).
I know that they'd have banned you for that, and even banned people for saying it can't be discussed and that they should go elsewhere (that happened to me, though they were nice enough to reverse it when I brought it up in the mod mail).
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
I do think it’s suspicious and bad that everyone is suddenly becoming transgender, and I support efforts to figure out why and stop it at the root, in some way which will prevent so many kids from wanting to be transgender. But it seems cruel to fail to figure that out, let lots of kids become horribly depressed about their gender, and deny them access to treatment.
I think that's quite outspokenly anti-trans (or at least against the mainstream of trans activism, and likely the cultural milieu that Scott personally resides in as a Rat in SF).
Even if it seems like a very restrained argument, keep in mind that many (?most ?the most outspoken) trans people think that an increase in absolute and relative numbers of trans people is a victory, that the percentage of people de-transitioning is minimal, and that the idea should receive more share of the memplex and every effort should be made to have people frequently reminded that transitioning is an option and coax them to do it if they show the slightest inclination or anything that can be interpreted as dissatisfaction with their current gender.
I will caveat this with the disclaimer that I might be unfairly maligning the average trans person or trans activist. The UK, and certainly not India, have very little of that compared to the hotspot that is the US. If the majority of trans people just want to be left alone, or if most activists only endorse the right to choose and not be discriminated against, I can't say with certainty. I see things from a great remove, after all.
I agree. Scott seems to be doing his best to mollify the anti-HBD crowd, by claiming that a partially genetic and partially environmental explanation for IQ is actually the anti-racist position. It gives them a graceful out, with the option of acknowledging the evidence without entirely overruling their worldview in one fell swoop.
If you take anti-racism seriously, this should make you breath a sigh of relief! This finding on its own doesn’t disprove a genetic component to racial IQ gaps. But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%. Practically nobody ever claimed it was 100% (Charles Murray estimates 50%), so this doesn’t refute anyone in particular. But it’s consistent with what both sides of the debate say, and a natural prediction of the environmentalist position.
Which is definitely misleading, because what's commonly accepted as the anti-racist stance is that IQ is 100% environmental, and that the IQ figures for much of the world are bogus. If they accept the substantial amount of evidence for lower IQs of African Americans, that's entirely environmental and thus proof of concerted and active racism. If a trillion dollars are spent to eliminate all inter-group differences and fails, then you've both not spent enough money and there's subtle structural racism that eats up the gains.
I'm pretty sure that most anti-racists would outright deny that if environments were equalized, there would be any significant difference between races.
Edit:
after all, he's can claim he's not saying that some groups of people are inherently less intelligent than others.
Seems to me that Scott would balk at saying it out loud, but also simultaneously not deny that he believes it. In a "that's not what I said" versus "I don't believe that" sense.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
You have a fair point, but I do think there's a difference between candidly and affirmative Lu endorsing the controversial position that there are IQ differences between countries/races and his tone of "I'm confronted by large amounts of evidence in favor of that hypothesis, and I would love to have it debunked but, alas, that's not the case":
Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I've never read it. But that's kind of cowardly too - I've read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?
This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away".
Not to mention:
(Feel free to talk about the rest of the review, or about what DeBoer is doing here, but I will ban anyone who uses the comment section here to explicitly discuss the object-level question of race and IQ.)
I take this as Scott desperately contorting himself so as to not lie, while also doing the equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears in case people want to talk about it.
Contrast that to his current comment section, where he happily engages in debate on the same topic.
He was, in fact, cowardly, not that I can judge him too hard. This is far more of a flag planted in the sand.
I'm surprised that more people here aren't talking about Scott ripping off the bandaid in his latest series of posts, which very much take an IQ-realist and pro-Lynn stance, and without really mincing words about it.
Scott has tip-toed around the topic in the past, largely playing it safe. There was some minor controversy almost half a decade in the past when his "friend" (one who had ended up marrying Scott's enbie ex Ozzy) leaked private correspondence between the two of them where Scott explicitly acknowledged that he believed in population-wide IQ differences but felt he couldn't speak up about it. Going back even further, on his now defunct but archived LiveJournal, he outlines his harrowing experience doing charity work in Haiti, where the sheer lack of common sense or perverse and self-defeating antics from the populace knocked him speechless.
I note (with some pleasure) that Scott raises some of the same points I've been on record making myself: Namely that there's a profound difference between a person who is 60 IQ in a population where that's the norm, versus someone who is 60 IQ due to disease in a population with an average of 100.
What's the wider ramification of this? Well, I've been mildly miffed for a while now that the Scott of ACX wasn't quite as radical and outspoken as his SSC days, but now that he's come out and said this, I sincerely doubt that there are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend. It's refreshing, that's what it is. He might not particularly delve into the ramifications of what this might mean for society at large, but he's not burying the lede, and I have to applaud that. It might we too early to celebrate the death of wokeness, but I think that the more milquetoast Scott of today being willing to say this matters a great deal indeed.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4d ago
If you struggle with glasses sliding off your face, you can buy for ~negligible sums rubber grips/hooks that curl around your ear and keep them in place. In conjunction with fogging, and the awkwardness of getting someone else to adjust your glasses without disturbing the sterile field, I couldn't have made it through a surgical rotation without them.
(Also those prices you've mentioned strike my Indian sensibilities as fucking insane, not sure how much the cost of labor factors in)
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5d ago
I'm deeply jealous that antidepressants actually worked for you, and the very first one you've tried!
For someone who prescribes or oversees the use of plenty, I've had shit luck with them. Fluoxetine, buproprion and vortioexetine for about 5 years in the past 10 with no noticeable (positive) effect.
I did, however, start mirtazapine last week. I can attest to the sedating effect, which paradoxically is the maximum at the lowest dose. Let's see if that makes a difference, but I did feel much better when I fled Scotland after 5 months to spend a couple weeks at home. I've been back to work for a week or two, and things have been mildly looking up.
(What I'd give to retire by 33. Ain't happening with UK doctor wages I'll tell Ya)
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6d ago
I don't think anyone knows why they hold the beliefs they do, they just fabricate a reason afterwards which sounds socially acceptable and like it might be true.
I believe the chair I'm sitting on in real because I haven't toppled over and landed on my ass. Or, to gussy that up, concordance between my priors and ongoing sensory input.
You are correct that some beliefs are fundamentally unjustified by further reasoning, but those are far fewer in number than the beliefs that are contingent on more load bearing ones.
Someone might be a Communist not just because they believe in equality, but because they genuinely believed that it was a more economically productive regime. The numbers of those who weren't True Believers in the innate glory of communism fell drastically with the wall.
He changed his belief, and that's more true than any argument could ever be.
I have met, just today, someone who is convinced he's a deep cover MI5 agent and someone who believes their mother is alive and in urgent need of their help (despite being 95 years old themselves). My profession has me running into people who hold all kinds of deeply seated beliefs that can't be dispersed by abundant evidence. They're delusional, and usually legally detained by the time I see them.
Someone holding something to be true is often a terrible argument in favor of those beliefs being true.
While the person we're discussing isn't insane by DSM-5 criteria, that's mostly because his beliefs are benign enough that I presume he's a functioning member of society.
You can try "semen-rentention", I can't think of any reasons for how it could be dangerous. Maybe you will experience something amazing, in which case, that would be interesting. The experiment seems worth doing. And now that I think about it, the search for truth is fun, isn't it? Maybe spoiling the answer would be bad taste.
Maybe doing jumping jacks for an hour while blindfolded would lead to instant enlightenment. Doesn't seem dangerous if you take proper precautions. The experiment seems worth doing for a few months for the cardiovascular benefits.
As our rules gently suggest, it's good form to affirmatively produce evidence for your claims in proportion to how controversial or inflammatory they are. Semen retention is a kooky idea, and the bare minimum downsides, not getting laid or going on a date with Rosie Palm and her five sisters, requires quite a bit of justification.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6d ago
That's the bad translation.
Here's a better one on pastebin:
The most obvious changes are that it very sensibly decides that "Land of Sin" is a better translation than "Naughty Land". A character doesn't mysteriously turn male partway through.
"Manjusaka", a type of plant with connections to the underworld, is a far more contextually and culturally appropriate translation for a location as opposed to "Red Spider Lily".
While a matter of taste, "Covenant Alliance" seems more elegant than "Sanctuary Alliance", and is what human translators initially opted for.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6d ago
I wasn't sure how seriously to take the people claiming that reading MTL actually damaged their reading comprehension (the subreddit has a lot of LARPing and shitposting), but after hearing your account I'm glad I didn't give in to the temptation!
Finding good Xianxia can be a slog. I've read maybe 4 novels, and 3 of them were highly recommended by word of mouth. Not that it's much easier to find good stuff on RR either, but at least you can expect legible grammar most of the time.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6d ago
I've actually spent about 4 hours yesterday using Gemini 1206 to translate as I go, the 2 million token CW meant I can throw in dozens of chapters and have it produce perfectly pleasant text. There are a few stylistic quirks, or perhaps they were the original translator's quirks that aren't present anymore. It certainly doesn't garble gender and do anything too funky.
I'm sure Claude would be great at the task, but even the original GPT-4 would consider it trivial.
Here's the site I've been grabbing the raw text from if you want to take a look: https://www.piaotia.com/html/7/7095/6107291.html
The horrid "official" translation can be found on:
https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html
For what it's worth, some here claim the author is female, and I've seen her referred to as "her" in essays she re-tweeted.
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