wlxd
1yr ago
Housing in Europe is much more expensive than in US, so this is hardly a reason to stay in Europe.
For a concrete example, apartments in Paris are something like 12k EUR/square meter, so a one bedroom 600 sq ft (55 m^2) apartment will set you back 660k EUR. Meanwhile, in NYC, you’ll pay something like $1500/sq foot, so comparable apartment will be $900k.
Now let’s compare wages. A postdoc in Paris will be lucky if he makes 30k EUR a year, so it’s 20 years of toil to buy a one bedroom. A full professor will take 50-70k EUR, so that’s 10 years for 1 bedroom apartment. Meanwhile, in NYC, a postdoc will make at least $50k (typically more like $60k), and full professor will make at least $100k.
And that’s the worst place in the country! Most places are much cheaper than NYC, whereas most European cities have atrocious ratio of pay to housing cost.
wlxd
1yr ago
You know the joke about the communist dissident arrested by secret police for handing out blank sheets of papers in public?
wlxd
1yr ago
This makes sense, but you’d need to do some randomization to check for causation. If, for example, there are people who are “prone to get addicted to nicotine”, it is possible that they would have taken up smoking anyway, even without vaping first. Indeed, that’s what people did when vapes didn’t exist.
wlxd
1yr ago
That’s because the reasons that actually motivate people’s response in those cases are not what they are allowed to argue for in today culture, so that they are forced to make argument in the accepted framework, that is, framework of consent.
I wrote about it at the previous place:
What happens here is the conflict between traditional norms of sexuality, and the ones that have arisen during sexual revolution. This is really simple: a guy who uses his fame and status to pump and dump naive girls is seen as morally repugnant, according to traditional norms of sexuality that most people still hold, either consciously or subconsciously. That’s because traditional norms focus on stability, responsibility, and equity. However, in modern liberal take on sexuality, the core value is individual choice. Ability to choose is what empowers humans, and choosing is ultimate way to express sexuality. The confusion stems from the fact that people laud the norms of the latter, but make moral judgement based on the former set of norms. Hence, the guy is wrongdoer, because he wasn’t supposed to just pump and dump them: instead, he was supposed to validate them, by expending his efforts to signal she has high value. That she chose to do it and consented to the act is irrelevant: that’s not the deal she had in mind when consenting. She was hoping to get traditional deal, but instead she got the modern one.
The context was slightly different, but the point is the same.
wlxd
1yr ago
Literally nobody is starving to death on the streets, so to put is as the only available alternative to renting your womb and selling your baby is fundamentally dishonest.
wlxd
1yr ago
I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.
Please excuse my poor grammar. What I was trying to convey is the following: you said that "[you are] modeling her as »one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, (...)«", which implies that you consider her highly competent on the basis of her deep association with a highly regarded group. Thus, if she turns out to be not so competent after all, this will cast doubt on whether we should continue regarding that group as competent.
Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy?
No, but that's beyond the point. Professional ethicists are not any more ethical than regular people, and progressive liberals somehow keep buying houses in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, after consulting with their peers as to where the "good schools" are. She will almost certainly not express any philosophical objections to surrogacy, and she probably will not even verbalize any explicit objections to it in her head. She will, however, feel deeply repulsed by the idea that she will need to give up such a fundamental human female experience, and hire a random person to do the job. This is very natural, so natural in fact that it probably hasn't even occurred to her that this might be her own fate when she was freezing these eggs in the first place.
wlxd
1yr ago
I'm modeling her as "one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, and who happens to be a woman".
If, say, in 4 years, she is still unmarried and childless, how will that affect your perception of the grasp of the reality of the "founding members of the bay area rationalist circles"?
wlxd
1yr ago
When she was freezing the eggs, do you think she was planning to have another woman carry them for her?
In any case, I think that the medical establishment and media, if they were honest, should really repeat ad nauseam how low success rate IVF has above age of 35, so that women are less delusional about their future. Instead, medical establishment has every incentive to play down the low rates of success, given that they are paid for each attempt. Media, of course, keeps pretending that every woman can have it all, because of course she is a queen that deserves nothing less, and that’s all that matters.
wlxd
1yr ago
At her age, success rate per cycle is around 30%. This means that she’ll almost certainly require a couple of tries before she gives birth, which means that the second pregnancy attempt will almost certainly not happen sooner than 2 years later. By then, the chance of success will halve to less than 20%.
And that’s all assuming she starts tomorrow, instead of needing to find a partner and getting him to commit to having children together, which will take months on its own.
wlxd
1yr ago
Accordingly, when i see some AI-doomer post about how GPT-4 has passed the BAR exam in some state or gotten an A on Bryan Caplan's mid-term economics exam, my first thought is in not "oh shit here comes the fast take-off". It's more "and just how diligent were people grading the papers being?".
Caplan had a very strong incentive to fail the AI. He publicly bet against AI passing his exams a few years back. He has a very long and unbroken streak of victorious bets, and it looks like this one is the first one that he will actually lose.
wlxd
1yr ago
And yet, after 60 years, despite the truly massive advances in both hardware and software represented by projects like stable diffusion Minsky's problem remains far from solved.
What sort of advancement would you need to call this problem "close to solved"? What kind of abilities would the models need to have? Can you give a few examples?
wlxd
1yr ago
None of the reserves in Western Europe are viable at current prices. In practice any Uranium used in Western Europe would probably be imported.
Of course you’d want to buy cheapest product you can get, but that is orthogonal to the concern /u/Southkraut raised, which is whether this would make you dependent on foreign sources of uranium. If you could mine your own uranium, at even twice the cost, you are not really depend on imports, and the final energy price will not even go up all that much.
wlxd
1yr ago
Gravity storage with water as a medium is actually quite practical, and there are plenty of operational sites already, some with GWhs worth of capacity. You don’t have to lift 1 kg of water 4000 kms, you can instead lift 40 000 kg of water by 1000 meters.
This is practical and done in production, the problem is that you need a lot of water, and a lot of space to store this water in two separate reservoirs, which also need substantial difference in altitude. Because of this, it simply doesn’t scale: good sites are already mostly used, and we can’t build many more.
Synthetic hydrocarbons would make excellent store of energy, being very dense and already integrated in existing economy. The problem with those, though, is that the round-trip efficiency is really bad.
wlxd
1yr ago
This is not a “water tower at sea”. This is something different, actually quite smarter. I read their paper, and it doesn’t seem as immediately impractical as “water tower at sea” would, though it is still very much impractical.
According to their own analysis, the construction cost is something like 2-3x the cost of LiIon batteries per kWh. It’s something like $8M for storage equivalent to 2 minutes of operation of a single coal power plant. To build enough storage to replace one coal power plant for base load for half a day, you would need to build 400 of these, at a cost of $3.2B dollars. Coincidentally, this is about as much as it costs to build a nuclear power plant reactor of a similar size, which will keep generating the energy after the deep sea storage solution runs out of juice in 12 hours.
wlxd
1yr ago
It’s basically impossible to make a closed loop hydro system with practical capacity. You need constant water replenishment. You’ll be losing 10-30 cm of water per month to evaporation and seepage, depending on weather and soil condition. Without plentiful source of water, this is not viable.
And if we exhaust THOSE, water towers at sea
This one is extremely impractical, which you’d see if you even did a back of a napkin estimate. The fact that you mention this implies that you did zero legwork to verify if your ideas have even modicum of practicality.
wlxd
1yr ago
I read Cribsheet, and while I wouldn’t exactly say I trust her, I can say that she is way more diligent, honest, and scientifically minded than most. She approaches the evidence with appropriate amount of skepticism, and is aware of many common pitfalls in scientific reasoning. I would definitely recommend her, but I still recommend using your own judgement as well, especially in areas where the social desirability bias is particularly strong.
wlxd
1yr ago
You are evading my repeated question, and unlike me, who asks for public messaging, instead ask me to give you an example of some private person’s tragedy, of a kind that mainstream media would not want to cover, as it goes against the narrative. This is in itself very telling.
wlxd
1yr ago
I know that. Do the victims of the trangenderists know that? Can you point me to an example or two of clear messaging, saying that you can only take “puberty blockers” for a limited period of time before it will lead to irreversible outcomes, with some clarity on how long is this limited period?
wlxd
1yr ago
nobody who claims blockers are reversible would claim they're reversible after 50, they're claiming blockers are reversible within the bounds of normal use, delaying puberty for a few years.
No, that’s not what they claim. I address that down the comment. They claim that it is reversible, full stop. They do not claim that they are reversible for a while until they aren’t, and if you miss this highly vague moment, your maturation will be screwed up forever.
You are of course welcome to point out to me explicit examples of messaging coming from pro child sex modification activists that taking puberty for longer than.. what exactly? (nobody really knows) will cause irreversible damage to the maturation process of your body. I have never seen this.
wlxd
1yr ago
I remember sitting at the table with an M.D. who's doing some kind of fellowship at Harvard and hearing her say airily, "Yeah, blockers are safe and totally reversible." Even with my rudimentary freshman bio understanding, this never sounded plausible to me.
Indeed, this is extremely implausible a priori, and so people repeating this must have crimestop in their mind preventing them from doing any thinking on the subject at all.
The image I have in my mind is this: we have someone who is taking “puberty blocker” from age 10 to age forty 50. He never went through puberty as a teenager (or at least, I am led to believe this is the outcome of taking these drugs). Because of this, he now looks and behaves as… well, definitely not a middle aged male. Am I really expected to believe that once he stops taking these drugs, he goes through normal puberty at 50, and his body ends up the same as if he never took these drugs, and went through puberty around 15? This is simply ludicrous on its face.
Or, even better, consider a woman in post menopausal age, who finally gets off puberty blockers. Will she now finally begin menstruating, and be able to bear normal children? Highly unlikely.
I would expect the typical retort to this from pro sex modification side to be “but you are not supposed to take this drugs for so long”, which is a tacit admission that the effects of these drugs are only reversible for so long, until they aren’t. This much makes sense, but then repeating the mantra that they are reversible without saying loudly that this is true only if you stop taking them until they are no longer reversible (which might very well only be a couple of doses!) is criminally deceptive.
wlxd
1yr ago
Gary Marcus
Wait, what? Wasn’t his shtick that GPT, DALL-E, etc are very stupid and not worth much? That there is no genuine intelligence there because it cannot draw a horse riding an astronaut, or solve some simple logic puzzle? Now he is so concerned about the capabilities that he wants a moratorium? Is there some sort of post somewhere where he explains why he got it so wrong?
wlxd
1yr ago
I have never been to a drag show, but as I understand it, classic drag shows are guys dressed as Marilyn Monroe singing show tunes.
Only time I was at a drag show was when I was getting shitfaced with my mates at DNA Lounge during a bachelor party, and suddenly, a bunch of drags went on stage and started squirting the crowd with milk from their huge-ass fake breasts.
Now, a night club like DNA Lounge is obviously not going to have children present, but drug shows appealing to prurient interest is very much not something of an exception: if you follow right wing Twitter accounts, you'll see sexually explicit clips of drag shows with children in audience on a regular basis.
Kids being demoralized by the tens of millions by reading Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers is a bridge we can cross when or if we ever come to it.
I find this to be supremely amusing, because in the country I grew up, this was in fact a mandatory reading in every single high school, as set by the Ministry of Education, which fixes the syllabus across the entire country.
I won't say that everyone actually reads the whole thing (I gave up halfway through, and skipped to the end to enjoy reading about how he offs himself, which was a consolation to me for suffering the first half), but the national equivalent of the SAT exam very much assumes your familiarity with this work. For example, in 2018, half a million of high schoolers were expected to read a fragment in which Werther recounts his meeting with Albert, during which he broke the first rule of gun safety (by putting it against his own head), and, based on this, and your knowledge of relations between Werther and Albert, write an essay describing potential causes of lack of mutual understanding between people.
Thanks for reminding me about it -- now, half a life later, I actually I want to reread it, to see if added life experience will change my perception of the work.
Here you go.
A few weeks ago, in order to get some hands on experience with this whole AI thing, I build a search engine that finds Motte comments by content. It works moderately well, e.g. for the above one, I put your name and "being assaulted on subway" as search query, and it was the top result (neither "assault" nor "subway" actually occur in this comment). When I put the same query and my name, it finds this one. I really need to polish it and publish, it's pretty useful.
More options
Context Copy link