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Jordan Peterson is going full retard about Ukraine. I feel quite sad about it, because I have quite enjoyed his lessons on Jungian psychology. I suppose it is inevitable that when people get famous, they become overconfident about things outside their expertise. Here is the youtube video, and the comment I wrote below it (which will likely get deleted).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxdHm2dmvKE

Dr Peterson, I find it fascinating how you could get so many things wrong.

* You say we made a mistake by not inviting Russia to NATO. But that's exactly what we did; it was called "Partnership for Peace".

* What do we gain by stopping Russia now? For example, we avoid a future conflict with Russia that is half million square kilometers larger and has extra 40 millions of cannon fodder.

* The thing when you mention 3 perfectly logical reasons for Russian aggression... and then conclude that it actually must have been something else, is an interesting leap of logic.

* You say that Putin is better than Stalin, because Putin supports Russian Orthodox Church? First, it is the other way round, Russian Orthodox Church serves Putin. Second, did you know that Stalin started supporting Russian Orthodox Church in 1941 when he realized it might be a useful tool for his war efforts? (Please read the Wikipedia page about Patriarch Sergius of Moscow.)

* You praise Putin for being anti-woke. Yeah, but so is ISIS, and is it also deeply spiritual, so I wonder if you are going to express your support for them, too.

* I find it interesting that you consider mandatory trans pronouns use a worse crime against free speech than literally killing journalists who expose government corruption. Just because a person opposed one specific form of speech control, it doesn't make them a supporter of free speech in general.

* You see Russia, Hungary, and Poland as motivated by opposing wokeness. Have you noticed that Poland is anti-Russian, even more aggresively than USA? Assuming your perspective that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war about wokeness, that would put deeply catholic Poland on the hypothetical Team Woke, which sounds kinda weird.

* You talk about devastating consequences of ignoring Russia as a part of global economy. Can anyone here mention three things, other than oil and gas, that Russia exports? Most people would probably have a difficulty to find one. Russia is going to keep selling oil, because their entire economy completely depends on it. The only difference is that they will sell it to someone else, so the total amount of oil on global markets will remain approximately the same. Please notice that recently it is Russia talking about reopening Nord Stream 2, and Europe saying no thanks.

* You describe the politics of Ukraine as some kind of conflict between Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers. Have you noticed that Zelenskyy received a majority of votes from each side, and is actually a Russian speaker himself?

Most importantly, from the spiritual perspective, what happened to the advice to stand up straight with your shoulders back?

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Funny thing... periodically YouTube crunches my viewing habits and decides I'm likely to be a huge Jordan Peterson fan, and puts his clips at the top of my home feed.

I hadn't known (or perhaps had forgotten) who this guy was and what was his schtick.

Finally one bored afternoon I broke down and clicked... On screen came a stereotypical (though somewhat fit-looking) middle-aged white man who was crying, as he said, tears of joy over the realization that his work had brought such great joy and comfort to so many people. For some inscrutable reason it seemed clear to me that by "people" he meant mainly middle-aged white men.

Swipe left. YouTube, update your priors.

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YouTube recommendations are weird (and become even weirder when your little kids start using your account, haha). That said, I do not see any problem per se with someone having "middle aged white men" as their target group, nor with providing joy and comfort for that group. It's just, you are clearly not interested in that, and YouTube is too stupid to notice, despite Google having more data about you than KGB could have ever dreamed about.

I keep getting recommendations to see "Sadhguru" who seems like some kind of wise old Indian spiritual man who expresses his opinions on all kinds of topics. I truly do not care. My guess would be that YouTube selects him as an intersection of "politics" and "India", because I have been watching some videos about cooking Indian food. But maybe I am wrong here and the reason is something else, possibly something incomprehensible to humans.

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Seems like a generalized version of https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21

Receiving a strong feedback that you are right about something important (in case of a scientist, by academia; in case of internet celebrity, by their fans) seems to mess up human brain, making you overconfident about *everything*. Like a halo effect, applied to yourself.

And if you are a contrarian, you priors for "I am right and everyone else is wrong" were already quite high, so this probably makes you completely incapable of admitting that you might be wrong about something.

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Oct 14, 2022·edited Oct 14, 2022

Thanks to Amazon *throwing* free trial of Prime at me (and ignoring that where previously it was all "oh sorry, you can't watch Prime videos because you're not in the correct region" but now mysteriously I can watch this show), I'm watching the finale of "The Rings of Power".

Uh, I guess I should warn for SPOILERS AHEAD, AND COPIOUSLY, if anyone hasn't seen this yet/wants to see it.

Episode eight, season finale, titled "Alloyed" (or, for its effect on me, "Annoyed").

So ten minutes in, and Halbrand *is* Sauron. Damn it.

It started well! Opening shot of rain and plants, which I liked. The white cloaked mystics have shown up with the Stranger and they think he's Sauron.

Celebrimbor finally, in the eighth and final episode, gets something to do. There is the vestige of A Plot happening! Then we get Galadriel arriving in Lindon with Halbrand. He gets Elvish healing, Elrond apologises to Galadriel.

Galadriel still only has one facial expression, whether she's angry, sad, arrogant, thoughtful, whatever.

And here's where Halbrand gets to show he's Sauron (because if he's not, who the hell is he in reality?) He's up and about and walking around after being at death's door, starts flattering Celebrimbor about his forge ("THE Celebrimbor?") and yeah, this is where the "Annatar" part is going to start, because Celebrimbor laps it up like a cat with the cream (to be fair, the poor guy has been hanging around for eight episodes ostensibly based on HIM forging The Rings Of Power with nothing to do, so of course he's going to respond to 'finally someone remembers what I'm here for').

And now he, thirty-something mortal, is giving smithing advice to thousand-year old grandson of Feanor. Yup, he's Sauron.

But heck and darnation, I did not want Halbrand to be Sauron,

Back in Númenor, Elendil's invented daughter is somehow allowed to be with the king, is sketching him, and then of course starts snooping around and is messing with the palantir. Excuse me while I roll my eyes at this terrible cack-handed shoehorning in of "we invented this character to add female energy, so we have to have her *do* something more than just stand around looking at things".

Back to "Oh no Sauron is corrupting Celebrimbor!"

So finally they have the idea of creating rings (not overtly stated but that's what is going to happen) out of the small chunk of mithril ore Elrond managed to keep after being kicked out of Khazad-dum, and Celebrimbor does some OMINOUS LINES QUOTING about "this is a power of the unseen world". Galadriel gets to have 'look of dawning comprehension and horror' (as much as her one expression will stretch to it) since "power of the unseen world" is exactly what everyone to date has been talking about Sauron searching for. Gil-galad says he can't do whatever it is, so naturally we all know he's going to go ahead and do it.

I'm skipping ahead at this point (20 minutes in) because I. DO. NOT. CARE. ABOUT. GALADRIEL. AND. HALBRAND. (Except that it's going to be a richly deserved kick in the pants when she discovers she's been cuddling up to Sauron).

The Stranger is having a time with the Mystics. They're encouraging him to use his magic so he will get his memory back. I like that one of them has a head dress shaped like bat ears, in an obvious reference to Thuringwethil, but this story line bores me, I like The Stranger as a character, and it's great that NO MORE HARFOOTS (as yet) but he's not Sauron and it's dumb to have him be Gandalf or even Radagast.

Spoke too soon: here come the Harfoots on a rescue mission. The leader of the mystics does the fire-breathing trick and sets flame to the entire forest (oh, this is meant to be Greenwood, by the way) but even this is dull because I. DON'T. CARE. ABOUT. THE. HARFOOTS.

The Stranger can now suddenly speak complete English sentences and does magic to banish the mystics. To no-one's surprise, he is not Sauron. He's Gandalf (again, damn it).

The episode finally remembers Elendil and Miriel, and we get a scene of them on the ship home to Númenor chit-chatting, which I am skipping because (once again) I. DON'T. CARE.

(Are you detecting a thread here? This show has managed to have me not caring about characters and events that I should care about, and need to care about for the purposes of the show).

They get back to Númenor and the king is dead (Pharazon standing beside the death bed saying nothing but clearly Plotting). And that's it. No, really, nothing more.

Celebrimbor is having trouble working with the mithril as it keeps blowing his forge up, but then he gets inspiration. Him and Halbrand are having a great time being forge-buddies, but Galadriel stands there glaring, because now (finally!) she has Suspicions about this King of the Southlands (remember, she is the one persuaded everyone he was the real true king and Númenor should provide an army to help him fight off the Orcs and retake his lands, when all he wanted was to stay in Númenor and work in a forge).

Cue the confrontation between Galadriel and Halbrand where (to no-one's surprise) yup he's Sauron. They have a mental tussle where he casts her back into her memories of Valinor and pretends to be her brother, trying to convince her Sauron is a good guy.

Yadda yadda yadda, he disappears and she finally knows what is going on.

Back to Nori and the Stranger, who can now speak fluently and is determined to find out who he really is. Just in case we can't tell, the show hits us over the head with it; the mystics called him 'istar' which he explains to Nori means in her tongue "wise one, or wizard". GEE THANKS I WOULD NEVER HAVE FIGURED OUT HE WAS A WIZARD IF YOU HADN'T TOLD ME, NOT WITH THE FALLING OUT OF THE SKY IN A METEOR AND DOING MAGIC AND STUFF. I really hope he turns out to be Radagast, not Gandalf, but if we can't see where this is leading then we're all blinder than Míriel.

It seems like Sadoc is dead, since Malva (who wanted to take the wheels off the Brandyfoots' cart and leave them behind to die) is now in charge. I'm sure that having a killer in charge will go well. The Harfoots go off on their migration and Nori goes off with the Stranger.

Back to Lindon, and Galadriel has to give up her/her brother's dagger to be melted down in order to mingle it with the mithril. Why? I don't know, I think I skipped that dialogue. Anyway, when they mix in the mithril, the resulting molten pool resembles a fiery eye (are you getting it? do you? is the show hitting you over the head hard enough?)

While a long scene of crafting goes on, Elrond goes looking for Galadriel but can't find her, but he does find the genealogy scroll proving the last "King of the Southlands" died without issue a thousand years ago. He hastens back (presumably to call a halt to the crafting) but the Three Rings have finally been created!

(Nothing about the Nine and the Seven, of course, because the show doesn't care about them. Sauron/Halbrand will make them, or something). We end on a shot of the Three reflected in Halbrand's eyes as he looks at Mount Doom and walks down into what is now Mordor, and then the final credits as some bint warbles the Ring song.

Thank God it's over.

Rating? Five out of ten - something finally happened, but the curse of slow pacing still haunts this episode, and it only told us what was already bleedin' obvious. As a spectacular finale, it falls flat. And I really don't care about several of the main characters that much - I like the Stranger, I like Adar, and I am kind of rooting for Pharazon because at least he knows what he is doing and how to do it.

Enough to keep people hooked for the second season? No idea, especially as the show runners said that it would be a couple of years while they made the second season (though the studio seems to have walked that back).

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Oct 14, 2022·edited Oct 14, 2022

When I read other people's summary's of the episode, I knew that I wanted to read your reaction after I saw it.

And yeah. It was not good. Unlike Gandalf, who decidedly is good, so the dialog tells me.

Annatar should have been an entire season. This season, in fact. Instead we get half an episode. Sauron doesn't get to look like a master manipulator because no one has time to have complicated motivations to manipulate.

I think the show could have been good, even with endless departures from canon. Galadriel's arc was a good idea. Adar was a good idea. Shippinh Galadrial and Sauron was... well, it was an idea. I've encountered actual people on the internet who enjoyed it.

It feels like the show has nothing to offer but mystery boxes and references to the Peter Jackson movies. That and astounding beautiful shots, but a show shouldn't just be eye candy. It has lots of lore details right, they drop a lot of the right names, but none of the structures are there. Numenor exists and doesn't like the elves, but I think there was only one line, total, that even hinted at the actual reason being bitterness at their own mortality.

There is one thing that could get me back into it. That would be to kill Isildur for real. A permanent, irreconcilable break with the canon of both the books and movies. Then tell their own story. Force them to stand on their own feet or not at all.

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Oct 15, 2022·edited Oct 15, 2022

I first heard this was meant to be ten episodes, which I considered very short for a season. Then they compressed it down further to only eight episodes.

Then they futzed about for six episodes with nothing happening, then had Galadriel surviving a volcano (after being directly in the path of a pyroclastic flow, this show made me dumber by at least 10 IQ points after that little stunt) and now in the finale they cram everything in.

They built up "who are these whitecloaks?" and then threw all that away in ten minutes, instead of expanding it over a couple of episodes as to what they were doing with the Stranger when they finally caught up to him. I swear, if they come back as Nazgul in season two, I will genuinely explode.

I did enjoy Halbrand and Celebrimbor being forge buddies! After seven episodes of standing around twiddling his thumbs doing sweet feck-all, finally, FINALLY Celebrimbor got to do smith crafting! Again, this was something that should have been built up over a few episodes as Galadriel gradually suspects something is wrong - though this flew in the face of all she had been doing all along. It would have been better to have Gil-galad or Elrond be suspicious, investigate, and find out the truth, so Galadriel would be forced to face the poetic justice of the consequences of her stubborn insistence.

But noooo, we have to shove everything into the last forty-five minutes, and yet *still* they managed to have it very slow-paced, due to skipping from one location to another. The Númenor scenes didn't even get developed! What was it Elendil's imaginary daughter saw in the palantir, if she looked in the palantir? We don't know, tune in for the second season to find out!

Again, they've managed to drop in hints (like the Thuringwethil ears) which show that *somebody* involved with this has read the other volumes like "The Silmarillion" and "Unfinished Tales", and that Sauron did not start out wholly evil and did have a moment of genuine, if shallow and fleeting, repentance after Morgoth's defeat, but all this is wasted by them cramming in their own stupid made-up characters and made-up lore and retooling of the time line.

So that's why I can only give it five out of ten. After all the build-up, they wasted the reveal of Halbrand being Sauron, and now (very funny and ironic) it's all Galadriel's fault that he has decided to go on the path of evil (the conversation he had inside her mind on the raft memories was all true - she did say and do all those things) and it's *her* idea to create three Rings 'for balance'.

Oh, and the ripping-off of the movies was *blatant*, what with the lines about the sun and the Sea and the foundations of the Earth. They have no shame, but then again neither do they have imagination, talent, or originality, so they have to steal.

It's infuriating. I have very mixed feelings about the second season, if I want to watch it or not; I do want to see more of Adar, and at this point I'm rooting for Pharazon and even flipping Sauron, because they at least have their shit together. What a triumph, show, to make the villains more appealing than the heroes!

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A joke from today’s Garrison Keillor Substack.

Moses came down from the Mount with the tablets in his hand and he told the Israelites, ‘Okay, I managed to talk him down to ten, but I’m afraid adultery is still in there’

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If you still want to win the bet this year, you might look into "composable diffusion": https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HoZL7rR80DfLJCohSQ1L6vtbwdFuuSgs7OP-ZRuaUxA/edit?usp=sharing It's an add-on to stable diffusion that learns to compose two separate prompts (separated by AND in all caps) into a single image.

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I hear it's included in Automatic1111's webUI for SD: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui

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Today, I found the most hilarious and bizarre place to shoehorn Diversity and Inclusion statements : the commandline outputs of a hardware simulator.

Synopsys VCS is an EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool to simulate HDL (Hardware Description Language) code. In plain English : it is a program that runs textual descriptions of digital circuits on simulated inputs and obtain their simulated outputs, to aid the engineers who are designing\studying them.

Which raises the question, why the hell would Synopsys VCS (version 2021) print :

>Inclusivity & Diversity - Visit SolvNetPlus to read the "Synopsys Statement on

Inclusivity and Diversity" (Refer to article 000036315 at

https://solvnetplus.synopsys.com)

Every time you start it ? Like, I kinda get the copyright spam that programs like these always print in the beginning, But... why the fuck would I care about how many women are in your HR departments, Synopsys ? I just want to run a Wallace Adder bro.

Things like these always come to mind when people want to interpret woke bullshit charitably. If you forget about all the bad and cynical explanations, that these performances are just the pathetic throes of the HR-Managerial class as they status-compete the shit out of each other and other people (especially the engineers and future-engineers who are the primary users of these tools), what would be your reasons for why someone sane will make a circuit simulation tool rattle off DIE catechisms seemingly for no reason, at the startup of the program ? for female hardware students\engineers ? who are apparently all so fragile and insecure that they need constant reminding that Synopsys is there for them every single time they start a simulation tool ?

Hypothesis : Every attempt to explain woke performance without appealing to status or power is either (1) Occam-dull, meaning it multiplies entities and reasons out of proportion to the phenomena it's trying to explain (2) More slanderous\insulting to the groups they claim they want to help (3) Doesn't make any sense.

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Anyone else following Thaddeus Russell here?

He's very much a contrarian and sometimes interviews interesting people.

I think he's wrong that the US and NATO should just let Russia have Ukraine-- his arguments seem to be that the war seriously bad (true), but also, implausibly, that Russia isn't all that bad and its ambitions are reasonable and limited.

His Unregistered University is classes (some in person) with various of the the people he finds interesting/plausible, and might actually be making money. I suppose it's in the same category in some sense as Khan Academy. Any other non-standard education that's interesting?

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OK, I don't want to get involved in polemics: the relative lack of polemic is one thing that has attracted me to this site and its predecessor over the years. I don't intend to make any more posts on Ukraine.

But for those who may be interested, I'd suggest a few sources, all western, which I have used and which help to explain what's going on.

One is the communiqués of what's known as the Ramstein Group, which coordinates western arms deliveries , and from which you can see what is being sent to Ukraine. A meeting is scheduled for the next few days. A second is the regular background press briefings from the Pentagon, published online, which have on the whole been quite realistic.

In the last 4-6 weeks, a number of western newspapers, including (in English) the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian have published substantial stories from the front lines in Ukraine, including interviews with soldiers and commanders, giving a very sober view of how things are going.

The semi-official Ukrainian site liveuamaps.com is obviously biased to some degree, but you can follow the progress of the war from day to day if you can read military symbology. The picture it gives seems to be broadly realistic.

Finally, for those who like to follow detail, the best source is probably the Military Summary Channel on Youtube, hosted by a Belarusian who makes great attempts to present things fairly. He's very good on tactical level stuff (yesterday's video explained how Russian missile strikes were partly aimed at key railroad junctions for example) but not so good when he gets on to strategic/political issues. He also tends to swerve around quite violently in his estimate of how the war is going.

I hope that's helpful.

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Probably a stupid question, but why wouldn't evolution select for high-intelligence? I understand head size and birth canal are the bottleneck everyone points to, but brain size appears to be weakly correlated with intelligence in humans, and what about calories? It seems to be the case that more intelligent brains have better efficiency in terms of energy expenditure, so, given that calories have been hard to come by for much of our history, why not select for the kind of energy efficiency that come with intelligence?

Are smarter brains a lot more energetically expensive to create or something?

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Not a full answer. But Joseph Henriech (The Secret of our Success) points to the brain size arms race as less about intelligence and more about storage space for cultural evolution. Basically, humans didn't get significantly smarter than apes in general. Rather they gained an amazing ability at copying from one another and culturally evolving leading to a feedback loop of "amount of cultural information that can be stored in an individual.

I'm just guessing but maybe raw processing power doesn't require bigger brains but storage space (via cranium folding and large heads) does.

This doesn't answer your question of why evolution doesn't select for higher intelligence at the same time. My guess would be that much higher levels of intelligence didn't actually help much in the context of environment in which we evolved. It's not like the cavemen were solving maths problems on the cave walls. It's simply far more advantageous to select for people who can learn tips and tricks from other apes.

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In other words, the things you can *learn* are a greater advantage than the things you can *invent*, because you can invent a thing or two, but you can learn a thousand things.

Inventing things can also give you some respect etc., but the greatest selection pressure is about whether you can efficiently use things that everyone else is using. Inventing is an inherently risky business; you could spend a lot of time and calories without actually figuring out anything useful.

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I don't know, but it's observable that the big flightless birds don't have the brain efficiency of smaller birds, and I have no idea why.

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Why do you think that smarter brains are more energetically efficient? I was under the impression that human brains are roughly at the energy optimal speed, and while you could engineer much smarter humans given modern calorie abundance, we're getting pretty much the most "thoughts per calorie" possible in our current form, which matter in times of caloric scarcity

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Neuronal efficiency hypothesis: basically, more intelligent human brains use less energy for thinking generally.

To give an example, if we're both given a moderately hard problem to solve and you're significantly smarter than me your brain will (probably) use less energy than mine for that task.

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So far this worked for 3 relatives of mine : back and knees pain for one, neck and back pain for the second, back pain for the last one. Once a student in biology, I still can't believe this works... But no more complaining from people nearly crying on a daily basis is the perfect evidence for me, I will continue convincing people around to at least give it a try. But what an incredible brain process...

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> So far this worked for 3 relatives of mine

What worked?

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sorry, this worked. I hadn't posted before and sent the wrong link to Karine to reply- as she said it's been successful for 3 of her relatives. My original post is below

Helen Gibbons & Stuart Wiffin

Writes The Sheep that thinks it's a Wo…

Oct 10

I read Dr David Hanscom's book on Chronic Pain. It seems that we don't really understand chronic pain at all but it is an inappropriate and useless response. His method is to write down your thoughts about the pain, rip up the paper and throw it away. It works fast and it's free.

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I'm trying to find a post from about 2 months ago. In it, someone was asking whether anyone could suggest a diagnosis of his symptoms, which were -- let's see -- attacks in which he had pain at the base of his skull, felt disoriented and exhausted, and become sort of incoherent or inarticulate. Certain things brought an attack on immediately, but I forget now what they were. Anyhow, I'm asking now because I just randomly ran across info about a condition that might conceivably be what he has. I'd like to get in touch with him, but just do not have time to page back through all these threads, especially since I can't think of any words in his post that are rare, and unlikely to be in many other posts, so I can't even do CMD-F in each open thread. ( By any chance does the Substack app allow you to search a whole blog + comments at once?)

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'Skull' is a rare word. Highest open-thread ping for it so far is 3.

Saw one post in 239 that might have been referring to the one you're talking about, didn't see anything in 238 to 235. Would it be in the hidden threads?

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Thanks, you're right, it is a real word. I think it's most likely not in the hidden threads because I did not recognize person's username at the time. I'll go hunt right now.

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Yes, but there's a limit to the amount and kind of structural problems that can be present without causing pain. Bulging discs heal on their own with time, and even when they look godawful their presence or absence does not correlate with amount of pain the person is having. That doesn't mean that there's *nothing* that could be going on in a back that would cause pain. For example, let's say you lay down on the floor with your back on a hard wooden ball the size of a tennis ball right under your spine-- or a bunch of forks with their tines curving up towards your back -- or did a back really extreme backbend, the kind limber young gymnasts do where their hands are actually touching the backs of their heels -- those are just going to hurt, right? Or how about if somebody stuck a thick spinal tap needle into your spine? Or hit your back with a mallet? Think you could make that pain go away? If you doubt it, how about trying the hard wooden ball experiment, or try lying on some forks. So the point is, some kinds of back problems -- not bulging disks, but other things -- are very much like the hard wooden ball, the backbend, the needle, the mallet: Things are being pierced, pressed on, and squeezed in ways they were not meant to be. It fucking hurts. And I do not agree the pain is useless and pointless, at least not in the case of situations like mine. My back pain is a stream of information about things that are pressing on things they should not. If I pay attention to the info, my back stays in decent shape.

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Oct 12, 2022·edited Oct 12, 2022

If you investigate ways herniated disks can cause back pain, what you find is that whether they cause pain depends on a bunch of stuff: For example, If the annulus fibrous tears the liquid that oozes out irritates spinal nerves and causes inflammation — however, the AF doesn’t always tear, and when it does the AF doesn’t always ooze onto spinal nerves. Because not all herniated disks cause nerve inflammation, the correlation between the presence of a herniated disk and the experience of back pain is positive but low.

So now do a thought experiment: Imagine somebody doing various things to your back: Forcing it to arch way more sharply than you ever arch it. Inserting objects the size of a ping pong ball that compress flesh or press on nerves, or force tissue to stretch far more than it normally does. Piercing parts of your back. Injecting irritating substances into muscles.. Some of that is just going to hurt, right? So while it’s true that things like bulging disks are not well-correlated with back pain, it’s not true that there isn’t anything that you can do to a back that will reliably make it hurt.

So there are some conditions that are more like the back tortures I described than they are like herniated disks.They do stuff that’s just gonna hurt. They compress the facet joints and the nerves inside them. They stretch or compress nerves and muscles that are not meant to be stretched. They compress organs inside the torso. I have one of those conditions: scoliosis, an s-curve in my spine as it is viewed from the front or back. And my curve is getting more extreme as I age.

Here's info from a quick google. It's from a random source, but fits well with what I have learned from high-quality sources and my doctors:

"What does scoliosis pain feel like? Children or teens who have scoliosis don't generally experience pain. However, degenerative adult scoliosis can cause symptoms such as achiness or stiffness in the mid to low back or numbness and weakness in your leg."

"What triggers scoliosis pain?

What causes scoliosis pain? Typically, the pain you experience with scoliosis is the result of pressure on your spinal disks, pressure on facet joints, and muscle pain. But scoliosis can cause pain for other reasons. The curvature of the spine can stretch or irritate nerves."

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Well, you may be right and the Russian General Staff and experts on Russia may be wrong, but that is what the Russians said they were doing, that is what they appear to be doing, and that's what Soviet/Russian doctrine says they should do. As I understand it, the point is that if you destroy an enemy's military capability, you dominate the country. If you just capture terrain, especially when it has no military value, you have to tie up forces guarding it and you extend yourself and open yourself to counter-attacks. That's why Russian doctrine has historically been about destroying the enemy's forces.

The Ukrainians can't "rebuild", any more than the French could, say, after 1940, although not all their country was occupied. They don't have a great deal of defence industry, and much what there is has been destroyed. As we've discussed, NATO has only dribs and drabs to send them, and the Russians can target any attempt to recreate a defence capability. On the other hand, if you've ever been to Ukraine, or just looked at a map, you'll know that it's an enormous country by European standards: the current line of contact extends a thousand kilometres from north to south. There was never any prospect of the Russians taking physical control of the whole of the country, and I doubt if anyone except a few fanatical nationalists in Moscow ever thought they should. They don't need to anyway. This doesn't exclude, of course, attempts to take the capital by a coup de main and finish the war quickly, as seems to have been tried at the start of the war. Nor does it exclude massing troops near Kiev to force the Ukrainians to keep troops to defend it. There are rumours that th Russians might try this trick again, by massing troops in Belarus, such that the Ukrainians have to remove some of their forces from the Donbas to cover the capital. But all of these manoeuvres, feints etc. are routine in wars of this kind. It's just that the West hasn't fought a war like this for so long, that we've forgotten.

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founding

What Soviet doctrine says they should do, and what the Russian army actually can do, are two entirely different things. Soviet doctrine never said "land paratroops and Spetsnaz behind enemy lines, then have them unceremoniously wiped off the map an hour later". Soviet doctrine never said, "Drive through repeated ambush and barrage until you reach the outskirts of the enemy's capital, then run away". Soviet doctrine never said, "watch your artillery supremacy go bye-bye because your ammunition dumps keep exploding". Soviet doctrine never said, "give your enemy a free tank in good working order for every one of his you destroy".

Soviet doctrine, is a thing that was only ever successfully implemented by the Soviet Army, and then only when its logistical tail stretched to Detroit. Yes, the Russian Army has spent the past thirty years pretending it was the badass continuation of the Soviet Army, but now we know better.

If you try to understand this war by assuming the Russian Army is successfully implementing Soviet doctrines, and conjure up some strained explanation as to why all of this must be part of some clever plan out of the old Soviet playbook, you're going to be led laughably astray.

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"that is what the Russians said they were doing"

They have also said that the whole of Ukraine is theirs by right, and that they are just trying ot denazify.

"that is what they appear to be doing,"

That is what they are appear to be having done to them.

"The Ukrainians can't "rebuild", any more than the French could, say, after 1940, although not all their country was occupied. They don't have a great deal of defence industry, and much what there is has been destroyed. "

So the Russians are going to destroy their military, then withdraw ... then NATO/EU/west does nothing whatever?

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Kiev has been the standard English name of the city for more than a century. Now we're supposed to change it just because the etymology of the word is Russian? There's a difference between disapproving of the actions of the Russian government in 2022, and hating Russian language and culture overall. Your comment gives off the vibes of the latter.

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>now the standard English spelling has changed

Not How Language Works. Language is a distributed inter-subjective fiction, trying to force changes on it through many impressive-sounding authoritative-claiming institutions won't work, never has, and never will. Even if the organizations are neutral linguistic authorities, not a bunch of nakedly biased news outlets and the odd volunteer encyclopedia. The [Words] Were Made for Man, Not Man For The [Words].

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Oct 12, 2022·edited Oct 12, 2022

I'm with Thor and Dionysus on this. The names our own culture has evolved are almost always preferable and the replacements are normally done for stupid, pious reasons. I'd never use "Beijing" or "Mumbai" except in this exact type of sentence, so I'd be a hypocrite to complain about somebody saying e.g. "the Russian bombing of Kiev is a filthy atrocity".

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To be honest, I have switched over with regard to Peking and Bombay because the new names are better understood these days. The transition was successful. And I'm happy enough to say Kyiv for political reasons.

City names are the least of my concerns with regard to the ever-expanding NewSpeak Dictionary.

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Eh, that really isn't the only reason. I tend to use older names for lots of places, because I am generally just reluctant to have to relearn any names I learned as a kid. I wholeheartedly support Ukraine in its war against Russia and am appalled that the nuclear powers didn't come to its aid back in 2014, to honour the treaty they'd signed when Ukraine gave up his nuclear weapons.

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Or I have a strong preference for speaking the language I grew up with, and strong objections to changing the language for political purposes, especially at the behest of a foreign government. (Kiev, as far as I can tell, did not become the English name because Russia told us to call it that.). I have *especially* strong objections to the media policing my language, and that is in no way due to my stance on the current war, on which I'm as pro-Ukrainian as it gets.

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Oct 12, 2022·edited Oct 12, 2022

I'm not Dionysus, obviously, but as already noted, I do say Peking. I actually think Chinese is a particularly bizarre case of this renaming vogue, because pinyin is a romanization created for the use of native Chinese speakers, while Wade-Giles is far superior for the use of Westerners in understanding what Chinese words actually sound like and so on. ("Peking" specifically predates Wade and Giles as well, of course; I think they render it Pei-Ching. Still...)

The obvious analogue is Kunreishiki vs. the modified Hepburn system, and there I've genuinely never seen anyone advocate the adoption of Kunreishiki for cultural sensitivity reasons or whatever; when was the last time you saw a map that said Toukyou or Hirosima on it, or called the system Kunreisiki rômazi for that matter?

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I wrote a brief writeup on the practical considerations of unilateral gene drive release for the purpose of eradicating malaria-carrying mosquitos. Could you guys give me your thoughts? I would love input from those familiar with gene drives, those connected with EA, and people interested in working on such a project.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jp7BDb6bEWrZLmqPi/i-can-t-stop-malaria-in-the-next-few-years-but-ea-can

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Some of us are getting together to read The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker. We are optimizing for time zones in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Africa (UTC+0 to UTC+12) and will meet weekly for at least four weeks, starting Saturday, October 15th.

The reading group is aimed at meetup organizers, potential meetup organizers, and any ACX/Rationality readers interested in organizing ACX or adjacent events, meetups, etc. Everyone's welcome.

Details: https://chivalrous-kayak-82a.notion.site/The-Art-of-Gathering-How-We-Meet-and-Why-It-Matters-6057bf7a44d3429b8abe8addc117c015

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I am in entirely the wrong time zone but this is relevant to my interests and thanks for sharing.

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Oct 12, 2022·edited Oct 12, 2022

I am glad. It was my first time posting on an open thread and I was a little worried.

P.S. The Waterloo organizer just started one for other timezones. Perhaps this would fit your schedule. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MaaB6xfRdagoEMx-WWnzwWTadx1h19qwerlyOXxVVSw/edit

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Oct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022

I've been thinking about trying to make a star constellation Halloween costume (specifically Aquila), and thought about buying something like this (https://www.amazon.com/idyllight-Submersible-Waterproof-Wedding-Decorations/dp/B09987M2S5/) and wearing a black hat and jacket and tying or fixing the lights in the appropriate places somehow, and then I guess cutting out construction paper stars to stick around the lights so that people realize they are actually supposed to be stars.

Does anyone know if this would actually work? Are there any better ways to do this? Also, what would be the best way to fix the lights in place?

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I tried a DIY LED constellation for a “Close Encounters of Third Kind” TShirt using TTL back in the dark ages. It was pretty easy to gin up a sequencer to flash the LEDs one after another but the wiring and battery required at the time made for ‘nice blinking’ but ugly flippin shirt. Never wore it in public.

Technology has improved a bit in the last 40 years tho. Good luck and have fun!

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How about these beauties? https://tinyurl.com/2p8njzpd

If they're not perfect, I know where there are others.

To fix them in place: you could use safety pins. Start from inside the piece of clothing star's going to be attached to, bring the point out to the outside, over the piece of wire right below the star, then back to the underside of the garment. To prevent slippage, put one right above each star too. If you don't want to worry about the safety pins popping loose and sticking you, use a needle and black thread, and sew the stars in place, looping over the wire both above and below the star. You could also use hot glue, but I think the hot glue might damage the electronics of the light string. If the hat is really stiff, you can still sew through it -- but you might need a bigger, fatter needle to pierce it.

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So I just looked up Aquila in google image, and there are some very attractive images with the actual constellation superimposed on a stylized drawing of an eagle. You could copy one of the drawings onto your black clothes, too, with luminous paint, then pin the starts on top. (Can you tell I like making costumes?)

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In this layman's eyes, it seems that a few branches of supposedly-scientific study stand out as routinely *worse* (from a 'seems to be on a firm foundation empirically') than others. I'm not even talking about theoretical underpinnings, just studies that are

* low power

* non-replicable

* prone to methodological wtfs (and generally don't have stable, well-developed methodological traditions, with everyone seeming to go their own way)

* make HUGE claims that aren't backed up in any significant way

* constantly overturned/ignored by the next fad that sweeps through

Specifically, I'm thinking of *education*, *sociology* (in its less grounded forms), and *nutrition*. I can understand sociology (especially the psychological aspects) and, to a lesser degree, education. People are hard. And those things end up relying heavily on self-reports. Diagnosing things based on the self-report of a system that is suspected to be broken is...fraught with difficulty.

But nutrition seems to me to be the outlier. Nutrition studies are like froth--they come, they go, they form fad diets, but seem to have enormous variance for something much closer (in principle at least) to chemistry than psychology. There are a lot more empirically-measurable elements there, it seems to me.

Am I just out to lunch/misinformed? Or is there some reason nutrition studies are particularly bad?

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Part of the problem is that it's hard and expensive to be sure of what people are eating, especially over long periods.

I looked into whether "organic" food is better for people. I wasn't expecting the lack of information and confusion.

Organic has a legal meaning.... the pesticides and herbicides are derived from a biological source. In other words, they might be chemically the same as what you get from a conventional source. Or they might be riskier.

How can you tell whether what you're eating is organic or not? There's mislabeling in both directions.

What diseases might be expected from pesticides eaten in plausible quantities? Damned if I know.

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I've seen the problem with nutrition studies being put as this: your study can be controlled, long, or on humans, pick any two. You can't make humans to consistently follow your diet for years - which is kind of necessary to prove long-term health effects - so you're stuck with either using animal models, or short studies, or observational studies. The problem with the first two is pretty obvious, the problem with the latter is that 1) people are extremely bad at reporting what they eat 2) good luck correcting for all possible confounders. In fact even in a controlled study good luck correcting for them! Say your team found that red meat consumption doesn't affect LDL levels, but another team found that it totally does, you both did controlled experiments, but yours was in France where everybody eats a lot of olive oil which turns out to be protective from this effect (completely pulling this out of my ass, to be clear).

Add to this small effect sizes and strong biases, and it's not surprising dietology looks a bit of a mess.

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I think you're lucky to get two of them.

Also, people vary genetically, so what it good for one person might be neutral or bad for another. There may be non-genetic effects, too.. There's people becoming allergic to meat from the Lone Star tick. It wouldn't surprise me if there are more subtle random effects from people's life histories.

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I think Melvin hits the heart of the matter. You're looking for tiny, tiny effects. Eating cabbage for 50 years reduces your chance of having a heart attack at age 65 by 8%, that kind of thing. The sound empirical studies with sufficient statistical power -- duration, numbers, quality of control -- to thoroughly test anything in nutrition are exceedingly scarce. Theyr'e scarce even in medicine, where $100 billion in drug sales can ride on them, and there's no such potential reward in nutrition.

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I think these chain of comments (Carl Pham, Melvin, and yours) explain a lot about why nutrition studies tend to not produce very good results. Thanks.

And maybe the key to the "ok then, why do they overhype things to the max" question is the money--starting a fad diet and cashing in is the only way to make serious money on nutrition.

One other consideration I've thought about is that maybe there are a few different "groups" of basic biochemistry as far as diet goes--sure, we all need the various macros and micros. But exactly the "right" mix is much more individual. Maybe there are people for whom the keto/Atkins/whatever (low carb, etc) diets are the summum bonum of diets. And others for whom that's *horrible*, and for whom the whole-foods, low-fat diets (and similarly for all the other big variants) are the best.

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I think the main problem is small effect sizes.

Contrary to popular belief, we know a lot about human nutrition. We know that humans can't digest rocks or sand. We know that humans can't digest grass or most leaves. We know that humans require ~2000 kCal/day of easily-digestible foods, and that we also require small amounts of dozens of important vitamins and minerals. This is all important stuff, and we've known it all for a while.

The problem is going beyond that. It turns out that as long as you satisfy all of the above requirements and don't eat too little or too much then pretty much any reasonably varied diet of reasonably human-compatible foods is pretty nutritionally similar to any other. Some are probably better than others but the effect size is small and the studies are long, expensive and difficult so you don't get as much value as you'd hope out of them.

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Expanding on Unsigned Integer's ideas (that are mostly money-focused): moral and philosophical biases. If you're overweight, the studies show it isn't your fault because <importance of genetics/XYZ food is bad but unavoidable>. If you're vegetarian or vegan, then meat-based products are that much worse for you and plant-based foods are that much better. If you're really into naturalism then the paleo diet is the best and you should avoid processed foods. If you're short on time or can't cook, then fast food isn't as bad for you as it's made out to be. If you worship the Roman warrior way of life, then you're a failure at life if your diet is any less than 80% red meat.

These are all bad examples and/or strawmen, but the basic idea is confirmation bias.

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That doesn't explain why the *studies* are objectively (as far as I can tell, and I may be wrong) poor quality. It may explain why individuals seek out ones that tell them what they wanted to hear. But not why the research itself seems sub-par *even compared to other soft sciences*. But it feels like nutrition should be closer to a hard science, as it has much firmer and closer physical grounding.

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Which raises a question. Why is *this* scientific field so captured by conflicts of interest, compared to all the rest? I mean, I'd expect a substantial amount of funding coming from government agencies (<sarc>which never cause conflicts for anyone else, after all</sarc>), interested NGOs, insurance companies, etc.

And much of the research is done at universities, where the professors have the same underlying conflicts in any area of study. They're all getting paid by *someone*, and *no one* has clean hands. Yet this area is particularly (as far as I can tell) bad.

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"Why is *this* scientific field so captured by conflicts of interest, compared to all the rest?"

All of those agencies, universities and companies are full of fat people, none of whom want to hear an outcome on nutrition where it's their own fault. Doesn't matter how smart you are, this is apparently endemic, maybe the mental blind spot that *causes* people to become fat in the first place. Just look at that classic/notorious Yud screencap from Facebook about weight loss.

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I think it's mostly no worse than medicine generally, or fields with political implications. the key here is that the main rewards for most actors come from *convincing people that you're right* rather than *finding out how reality truly works*

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'Why don't people think cryptocurrency is the greatest thing ever and all adopt it?'

Possibly because of crap like this - yet another attempted blackmail spam message, about the fifth one that got through an old work email address. This one is slightly different in the body of the text from the usual run of them, but it's the same old same old:

"My modest consulting fee is 1700 US Dollars to be transferred in Bitcoin. Exchange rate at the time of the transfer.

You need to send that amount to this wallet: 15QaVNGaQsQfgPH8mL3TM1S7YBESTVfwQC"

Probably there are people who can be taken in by this, but I'm tired of these messages by now, is there any way to track down or do something about these wallet numbers and get them taken down? Since this is blackmail or extortion or fraud or something, is there no way to stop it?

This is why people think crypto is only for criminals.

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While we’re on the subject of crypto, is the practice of putting a Bitcoin purchase machine next to the ATM at the corner Kwiki-Mart now common?

The place around the corner from my house has one and it seems like a grift of some sort to put in a place that does major trade in lotto tickets sold to mostly low-income folks who are unfazed by the fact the the state lotto is about as bad a bet as you can make. IIRC they pay back only half of the money they take in prizes.

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I'm not a crypto maniac (it's sad that I have to say this in 2022, but the crypto situation has become extremly religious on both sides in recent years), but I really love the elegance of the idea purely from the Computer Science perspective and I believe there are good things underneath all the trash and ash.

>Since this is blackmail or extortion or fraud or something, is there no way to stop it

If its fraud or scam, believe me, it's not Bitcoin that is making it go round. There is an entire Youtube genre of "Scammer-Scamming", where anti-scammers scam scammers on the phone. The sheer size of this genre alone and the number of scammers should tell you all what you need to know about how easy it is to scam people by phone, by email, by whatsapp, by facebook. Humans just suck, Bitcoin is just a tool that allows them to suck more efficiently, if we remove it most of them will find another tool and continue to suck.

The case of blackmail and extortion is more subtle, I believe Bitcoin greatly enabled a specific type of blackmailing called ransomware (fuckers encrypt your data and ask for money to give you the encryption key), empirical data seems to support that the rise of Bitcoin made it incredibly easy to do this shit. But again, fuckers always find a way, I'm a big believer in humans' ability to suck and fuck, it's really not Bitcoin's fault, they will find another way if you ban it. Ransomware existed before Bitcoin, the growth the data shows could just as easily be because of the general growth of internet and internet-connected people and money.

>is there any way to track down or do something about these wallet numbers and get them taken down

Technically ? No, that's the entire point of Bitcoin. Essentially, there is an entire distributed fleet of machines that is always "listening" on the internet to anybody who says they want to transfer money, and if that someone manages to prove (in a very fancy computer-sciency\cryptographic way) that they *do* have the money to pay, the machines are very glad to take the money and pay it to any ID that the someone says. As long as this fleet of machines is alive, Bitcoin is alive, and with it the Bitcoin protocol and all its IDs and wallets and numbers.

Of course, humans are always the weakest link in the security chain. The fallible humans who made Bitcoin couldn't anticipate a number of fuckups :

1- Bitcoin "mining" (the process whereby 1 of the listening machines aggregates a bunch of pay requests together and tries to convince the entire network that it's valid to finalize them with fancy math) is massively computationally intensive. By 2012-2013, ordinary CPUs were no longer cutting it, and miners began using GPUs. By 2013-2014 (these dates are rough because I wasn't there when it was happening), even GPUs weren't cutting it, and miners began using even more specialized circuits called FPGAs. Then, finally, by about 2014-2015, FPGAs gave up, and miners began literally custom-ordering their own chips, called ASICs. Every step along the way incurred a massive loss of accessibility and decentralization : Everybody have a CPU but only gamers and machine learning researchers have powerful GPUs, FPGAs are even more specialized and scarce, ASICs are literally ordered from a special vendor. So the overall result is that Bitcoin mining is extremly centralized and high-barrier-to-entry today at its bottom-most layers, and you can probably shut it down by banning or otherwise disrupting the sales or even the manufacturing of certain hardware to certain individuals.

2- Even without the hardware debacle above, Bitcoin miners began merging themselves in "mining pools" of their own for greater profitability and risk-mitigation. A mining pool is when a goup of miners come together to share the wins (every time one of them manages to convince the network that their pay requests list is valid) and withstand the losses (when all the other miners fail) together. This is really bad for Bitcoin. Very Very Very. The original Bitcoin paper assumed this won't happen, but it happened. Now only 2 or 3 mining pools control more than 51% percent of the total computing power the Bitcoin fleet has, this means those pools literally decide how much everybody owes everybody.

3- Bitcoin mining is scandalously power-intensive (a consequence of point #1), people estimate it at the country-level, and I'm not talking developing countries, I'm talking Argentina and the Netherlands. Due to this astonishing cost, mining pools and miners generally tend to concentrate in areas with cheap electricity, famously in China where Coal is legal. You can disrupt those locations pretty easily, and you can always detect any new locations by the sheer amount of electricity going in and not out of a Bitcoin "farm" (i.e. a datacenter full of ASIC computers mastuarbating their brains away).

4- Bitcoin is essentially a program, specifically written in C++. You can disrupt it by, say, disrupting their github hosting or targeting the most active members of their development team or intercepting every communication involving Bitcoin on social media and technical discussion sites and etc. etc. etc...

5- Bitcoin is a network program, you can trivially disrupt it if you cut off the internet.

6- Bitcoin is used a lot from non-decentralized interfaces, like mobile apps uploaded on centralized app stores, and centralized web servers, and centralized institutions called "Exchanges" (which trade Bitcoin against meat currency). You can always disrupt\ban those interfaces and institutions, and although that won't affect the "actual" Bitcoin (which is just a distributed fleet of machines running a single C++ program), it will greatly deny access and convenience to those who use it.

And so on and so on. Basically, Bitcoin, aside from being a piece of Computer Science genius, is an experiment. It asked "What if we used computers to say a big 'fuck you' to the state in one of its most intimate and exclusive activites, money-printing?", and it hypothesized that the answer will be "The state will go pound sand and leave us alone". The experiment failed, the state turned out to be much stronger than expected, the Internet weaker and more centralized than expected, and humans turned out to be more shitty than expected (not me though, I always expect that humans will be as shitty as they turn out to be). It's still a good experiment.

But Bitcoin exists today entirely by grace from any number of extremly un-de-centralized and evil institutions, and if enough of them get mad at Bitcoin, yes, they can shut it down.

>This is why people think crypto is only for criminals.

Bitcoin is part of an ideal, a Utopia if you will, and that ideal is that social structure is entirely individual-focued. Like : look at the Sun, it doesn't refuse to shine on criminals, even the worst rapists and pedophiles enjoy the Sun on their skin, the Air in their lungs, Water inside their stomachs. We *can* still make those people suffer for their crimes, but we don't do it by making the Sun and the Air and the Water has machines in them that can make them refuse to do their functions, we do it by getting *the criminals* into a place where they can't enjoy them.

This is a somewhat subtle distinction. The first perspective implicitly says that every human is "leasing" the Sun from the party that controls the shutdown machines, any time this party wants to deny you the Sun, they can turn on the machines and deny it. The second perspective is saying that every human deserves the Sun, merely by the fact of being human, justice is enforced elsewhere, at another level of interactions.

I'm not saying one of those perspectives is unqualifiedly better than the other, I can imagine lots and lots of Utopias and Dystopias in both, I can imagine any number of situations where I would thank the heavens that one perspective is in control and absolutely rage if the other was. But it's important to realize that those who support one or the other do so because they imagine more Utopias in one than the other, and (intelligent, good-faith) Bitcoin advocates support the second one. Finanical transactions are like the Sun, it shines equally on the rapist and the raped, the devil and the saint. Justice is still (hopefully) enforced, but elsewhere, not at the level of denying and allowing financial transactions. I'm not against this perpective but I'm also not supporting it to the end, but life is complicated and this comment is very very long already.

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Interesting point about C++ and github. Is a really secure computer language even theoretically possible?

At this point, I think of cryptocurrency as an effort to make a trustworthy system which includes a lot of untrustworthy people, and people are too clever to make that work.

We have a shortage of Arisians.

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>Interesting point about C++ and github. Is a really secure computer language even theoretically possible

For a mind-blowing and Inception-like further exploration, see Brian Kernighan's Reflections On Trusting Trust[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9].

It basically argues that, until you audit every single line of code in your entire software system (the compiler, the OS, the bootloader that loads the OS, the hardware ROM memory that contains the bootloader, the firmware\drivers in your keyboard and screen, even the editor you use to write program text, or the commandline shell that you invoke the compiler from), you're not truly secure. Who knows, maybe the completely innocuous g++ compiler that translates tens of thousands of C++ programs daily around the globe actually contains special-case logic for detecting the Bitcoin program and inserting maleware. The maleware is completely invisible in the source, because it isn't there, the compiler inserts it in when it's translating to machine code. The speech itself is just about Compilers, but you can easily argue that any piece of code in any of the software that I mentioned can easily and trivially violate your security. Hell, Anti-Virus software is given a free pass to open up binaries and play with them, how can we be sure that it's not *them* that are injecting malicious code in the secure binaries ?

This is why some people have tried (http://bootstrappable.org/) (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0/) to decrease the amount of magic binary that people depend on without auditing. But you're still depending the extremly opaque and magic processor and associated hardware, did you know that Intel runs a tiny computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine) inside every single computer you buy from them ? It's always on as long as there is power in the motherboard, runs its own operating system, and is connected to the network.

[1]https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ7lOus1FzQ

[3] https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/

[4] https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/

[5] The section on Compiler Trapdoors in https://web.archive.org/web/20030410095057/https://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics.pdf

[6] https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-coders-worst-nightmare/answer/Mick-Stute?srid=RBKZ&amp;share=1 and its discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606226 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2642486

[7] http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack

[8] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html

[9] https://blog.dave.tf/post/finding-bottom-turtle/

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One unexpected impact of having a child is an internal shift with regards to what I consider 'long term'. Whilst I was previously certainly a long-term person than most, and cared about what happened in the future, the year 2100 still seemed very far off. Recently, looking down at my daughter sleeping in my arms, I realised she's very likely to be alive in 2100.

One could perhaps argue that this is simply a semantic rejigging, or that one should care about people in 2100 regardless, but for me, at least, it matched an emotional resonance to the logical conclusion I had already reached. It has also made me slightly less sceptical of efforts to impact the year 2100 than I was before (other than through direct ways which also impact the near-term, e.g. pollution/environment) - if there are people alive now who will be alive then, then maybe it's not so crazy trying to improve norms/governance/culture for the next century.

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What is happening in this brief clip from "The Second Renaissance, Part 2"?

https://youtu.be/WlRMLZRBq6U?t=51

It looks like an old human city in Southern Europe, right next to a megastructure built by the Machines. Given that the humans exiled all the Machines to the Arabian desert years before, why would the megastructure be there? The Machines would have needed time to build it, and it looks like they just invaded the area and are still fighting to take the region over.

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The city looks kind of coastal. Perhaps it's a gigantic warship?

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My computer has a problem, and I could use help from anyone who knows about them. About a month ago, my computer suddenly got REALLY slow. Chrome takes forever to load pages, and even if I close all browsers, running other programs is also very taxing because they open so slowly and often freeze.

Weirdly, the problem seems to disappear about 10% of the time before resuming, so I have these unpredictable windows of time when the computer runs fine.

Clearing my browser cache and/or installing any browser updates will make the computer run faster for only a few hours before it spontaneously reverts to its slow speed. I closed all but eight or nine browser tabs, but the problem persisted.

Even Windows Task Manager is no help. It is also very slow to open, and it will also freeze up and close most of the time. It will show that 90-100% of my "CPU" is being utilized, but then when I scroll down that column to see which program(s) are chiefly responsible, they are all shown as consuming 0% of processing resources. "Memory" is 49%.

What could be wrong? What should I do?

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5) I deleted a ton of files from my hard drive, defragmented the hard drive, and restarted the computer. The problem is less bad now, but my computer's performance is still unacceptable, and much worse than it was 1.5 months ago.

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Another update:

3) Per the advice I received here, I checked for Windows Updates I needed to do. There was one, I did it and restarted my computer, and it didn't fix the problem.

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Not to repeat myself, but make a backup and reinstall windows. It's not that hard, and backups are good to have anyway.

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This sort of matches an issue I had once, where I was getting 100% cpu usage despite no active applications. The solution was to reset the power plan settings - go from "balanced" to "power saver" and back to "balanced". This issue was specific to Windows. It worked fine with Ubuntu.

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4) I did it, and it doesn't seem to have helped.

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Thank you for all the advice. Here's what I did:

1) I restarted my computer. It had no effect on the problem. Right after restarting, before trying to open any programs, I opened Task Manager. Already, my computer was utilizing 100% of "CPU." Task Manager itself had problems running, and would spontaneously close before I could look around inside of it much.

2) I downloaded and paid for McAfee Anti-virus and used it to scan my computer for viruses, malware and trackers. It found nothing. The problem persisted.

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Process Explorer from Sys Internals is way better with more detail and also trips less viruses which usually only look for task manager.

If you were going to pay for anti-virus I'd recommend the newtop level Norton because they also do performance checks and registry cleanups and crap.

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I would install something like SysInternals Process Explorer because it is superior to Task Manager IMO. Then I'd sort by memory usage and by CPU usage. See if you can't dig up the actual issue.

This does seem like it could be a CPU issue as some people suggested but you can verify this by making sure you aren't sucking up CPU or RAM somehow. Task Manager is really not meant for any serious non-normie use.

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founding

This is kind of a shot in the dark, but I understand that a possible cause for this is a failing CPU temperature sensor. When the sensor stops sending back temperature data, the system automatically slows the CPU down to avoid overheating and damaging it. Sometimes (I know mac does this, not sure about windows), this will show up as "phantom" CPU usage, which actually represents the fraction of the time that the machine is forcing the CPU to sleep, in order to cool it down.

See e.g. https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/260977/Intermittent+Temperature+Sensor+Failure (on macs I guess the phantom CPU is attributed to "kernel task"). I can't find any description of this behavior on windows, so it's possible that it's unique to mac.

The other classic handwaving explanation for behavior like this would be "malware" -- something running that is deliberately hiding itself from you. But I would think it would be unusual for it to run so hard that it slows your computer to a crawl at some times, and then nothing at other times.

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Like Medieval Cat says, it's a good thing to train yourself to stop caring about knowing the problem. Modern software is shit, that's all what I can say. Knowing the problem over text is hard, you need interaction, likely physical.

Make sure everything you need to see again is backed up and kill Windows entirely, reinstalling it. If it doesn't help, I would go further than Medieval Cat and say install Linux, if you're just using browsers and the office, you won't feel a single thing.

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If you click where it says CPU in task manager it will sort by CPU and you will be able to see the processes that are using a lot (you may need to do something else to get it to show you background processes, but I can't remember what). That amount of CPU usage usually means you have an overzealous anti-virus, or a virus.

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Have you restarted your computer recently or made sure your OS is fully updated?

I'd also try using a different browser to see if that helps. You can use all the same extensions on Firefox if that helps ease the transition.

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Well I won't let not knowing about computers stop me from giving advice. Anything notable happen a month ago? New downloads, trouble in meatspace that would mess with the internet providers? If you disconnect it from the internet, does it run any better?

Try killing everything in the Task Manager that doesn't clearly need to be running regardless of supposed CPU usage. There's some weird relationships sometimes. And you can add more Task Manager tabs by right-clicking up in the CPU/Memory section; Power usage is a nice one to keep track of.

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Best guess is updates or background stuff. You may need to run task manager as an admin to see some hidden/system processes.

Easy ways to check is to start it in Safe Mode (with networking) or just unplug/disable your internet connections.

Some other basic troubleshoots - check to see if any disks are near full, run chkdsk (assuming windows) to see if there's any harddisk issues, disable startup programs.

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No idea what's wrong. Backup your stuff and re-install windows, it will probably help and if it doesn't, neither will most other things.

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You say Alexandros offered 25k to a charity if you can get the big trials to release their data. Here were your exact words: "offers to donate $25,000 to a charity of my choice if I can get them to do so."

But this isn't want Alexandros said. Here were his exact words: "To put some of my own skin in the game, if Scott helps, by public advocacy or otherwise, to get the raw data for the ivermectin, metformin, and fluvoxamine studies available in a way that I—or someone I trust—can access it without undue limitation on sharing any findings, I commit to making a $25,000 donation to Scott’s ACX grants. Happy to discuss reasonable alterations of this offer."

In other words he is offering the 25k if you could help get the data released. It's not tied to the outcome of that helping.

What you said was really misleading.

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Seems to me Marinos has a very easy way out of donating$25000 if Scott assists in getting the raw data released to him. Marinos is saying that it must be released "without undue limitation on sharing any findings." How much chance do you think there is of the data being released with absolutely no limitation on sharing findings? And can you think of anyone more likely than Marinos to claim that whatever limitations there are are undue? I can imagine him rejecting data that was entered into the computer, saying that he must see the handwritten pages some of it was originally recorded on, because he suspects that whoever entered the data tampered with it. Then if they won't give him their hand-written notes, that's an undue limitation. Seems like his whole game is to claim that people studying Ivermectin treatment of Covid withheld information, lied, made mistakes, massaged the data, etc. Handing him the results of a big Ivermectin study is going to give him enough material to keep the game going for a couple more years --and in the process thoroughly wrecking any clarification the new research brought to the matter. If I had been in charge of the final leg of one of the big Ivermectin trials I wouldn't want to release data in a way this guy can access it, even if I was absolutely sure there were no errors in it and that the conclusion we had drawn was rock solid. By the time he had run our Ivermectin research through his digestive track and aimed the result at a fan, the entire topic would be irremediably trashed.

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"In other words he is offering the 25k if you could help get the data released. It's not tied to the outcome of that helping."

Isn't the outcome "get the data released"? If Scott helps to ask for the data to be released, but it's not released or not released "without undue limitation on sharing any findings", then the outcome is not what Alexandros wants and he's not making any donations.

Otherwise Scott could just say "Well I emailed them, they said no, here's where you can send the $25k".

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That definitely reads as tied to the outcome. "Helps to get the data available in a way that I can access it." Scott shouldn't have to prove cause and effect, but if by the end there's no access, the actions taken didn't help.

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I read the original quote as saying that the money only gets paid out if the outcome of the data being released is achieved.

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Oct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022

I would just like to add that Alexandros made an offer of $10,000 to have a discussion with James Heathers. James agreed and Alexandros backed out.

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To be clear - I made the 10k donation as I had promised. As we discussed the venue, Heathers had some ideas that made it hard to find a way to make the conversation happen. I also lost faith in the neutrality of the moderator I had selected. As such, I lost momentum in making the whole thing happen. It's not the Heathers or anyone else pushed for it and I backed out. And I want to make extremely clear that I stayed true to my word and made the 10k donation to the charity of Heathers' choice, and have the receipt to prove it.

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Oct 14, 2022·edited Oct 14, 2022

Interesting. You were previously asked if the debate happened and your response was:

---"No but that's on me. New baby, new house, and hard to get scheduling authority back."

It wasn't about the $10k, or the additional $5k you agreed to. But I am glad you followed through on part of it after backing out.

"---We have a deal. $15k to a charity of your choice (10k up front and 5k after the fact) for a livestreamed version of "yes/no debate"

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I don't think "backing out" is a good description of the situation, given that nobody pushed for it. If Heathers actually helped organize the thing I would have done it. Hell, I'd still do it.

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Ok. Is this a better description?

"...after not pushing for your own public challenge that you originally blamed on yourself for not happening and now blame others."

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Can you provide some links?

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I do not think Heathers in any way reasonably engaged or did any effort to make this discussion happen, did he? At least I can't see it. It seemed to have withered on the vine but I find the suspicion of fraud you cast so offhandedly on Alexandros a tad unwarranted. I did not follow that discussion but if I was challenged for that money I'd shout it from the rooftops if somebody backed out.

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I simply stated facts. You came up with the suspicion of fraud on your own.

I gave you a link where Alex clearly takes the blame for the debate not happening.

"No but that's on me. New baby, new house, and hard to get scheduling authority back."

https://twitter.com/debate_nate/status/1486827797565693953

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In communities like ours, it is not uncommon to find people who identify purely with their consciousness and refer to their body as a meat cage or similar. Until recently, I was very sympathetic to this view, but on Monday the 3rd of October I started taking oestrogen (2 mg daily) and now feel Embodied, like a person made of a body and mind working together.

I am now entirely in favour of the idea that everyone should try HRT for two weeks once in their adult life. In that time frame, it should only affect your skin texture and state of mind. Permanent changes take around three months, so only taking it for two weeks is harmless.

As well as feeling more embodied, I would also say that until this week I didn't know I was trans. I was pretty sure but this has still managed to be a major update, and I'm fairly certain that if someone had given me a strip of tablets five years ago I could have skipped all the intermediate steps. Even if you don't turn out to be trans you will know for sure and can stop wondering.

So there you have it, a two-week low-effort low-risk experiment with the potential to greatly improve your quality of life and give you possibly the most important data point of your entire life.

As to how to get hormones, https://hrt.cafe/ is a curated list of sellers, but for oestrogen and for our purposes it should be easier to just ask a trans woman. If you are reading this you are probably at least passing me familiar with one and we tend to respond well to requests like this.

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There've been at least two journalists who did the "try HRT for two weeks once in their adult life" thing, and wrote about it for major publications. (I think WaPo and The Atlantic?) Although iirc they were both the other way round, female reporters experimenting with testosterone. Sort of adorable, as a trans reader, but I do agree it's a mechanically unique experience not available via e.g. psychedelics. An interesting experience for sure. Remain somewhat saddened/annoyed that in USA at least, all the good stuff remains officially prescription-locked. I'm sure that protects....someone, somewhere.

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deletedOct 12, 2022·edited Oct 12, 2022
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Thanks for editing your original comment, I was feeling mildly annoyed because you and I specifically have conversed on this topic several times before...and I thought I'd made it clear that we're broadly in agreement. The DIE enemy of my friend is also my enemy, and all that. I take the same position as Scott in "Against Against Autism Cures", and extend that to transgenderism as well. And feel confident doing so, since having both disorders is plenty enough skin in the game to dissent from orthodoxy...it's a strange and sad life, and I guess I'm happier to live it than being dead, but it sure woulda been nice to roll a nat20 and turn out Normal instead. There's no magic in being Neurodiverse(tm), it's not some superpower. That's just cope, and I wish activists could be more honest about the real suffering involved...for the individual, and oftentimes friends, family, etc. too. To the extent certain conditions like transgenderism are voluntary - and yeah, there absolutely are some fraction like me who didn't *have to* end up this way, sunk costs are a bitch - it's a tragedy not to frankly discuss the opportunity costs of choosing differently.

Advocating: a niche aspect of FDA Delenda Est along right-to-try lines, though I can understand how it might be interpreted in a fringe-activist way. To make it explicit, I think it's a damned lie to call HRT "safe and essentially no risk" drugs...the major mood swings I get every couple weeks sure are suspiciously correlated to hormone injections, surely that's not a coincidence! And there's a number of other potentially-major contraindications which I'm only flippant about here cause I've been dosing for a decade or whatever, so seem to have doged those bullets. But there's __a good reason__ new patients are supposed to get a bloodwork panel and regular lab assessments, for the first several months/years. Some things like liver damage, you wouldn't necessarily notice during everyday experience until it's already A Big Problem. Things like that all argue strongly against a DIY approach.

So, no, it shouldn't just be some OTC pillmill giveaway, and it makes me uncomfortable every time I'm assured there's Careful Medical Supervision(tm), cause that absolutely was not my experience. Out of all the trans people I've known, the only ones who had notable gatekeeping difficulty accessing HRT had a bunch of __unrelated__ issues[1] which bounced them from the medical system more generally...doctors are understandably skeptical of people who don't show up to appointments, can't pay, have a ton of comorbidities which ought to be addressed first, etc, etc.

That being said, for the two specific use cases under discussion here, I think rules and regs could be loosened for some potential delta.

Case 1: nootropics fans who want to try a crazy new brain hack. As OP describes, and as those (admittedly sensationalist, but hey, they got clicks) journalists chronicled, this is a mind-bending experience you can't get from ~any other class of drugs. There really are lots of fascinating insights into human nature and the arbitrary lines of sex and gender which are tough to explore any other way. Not going all-in on some woke bullshit "Other Ways Of Knowing", either: as far as I know, this actually is the only route to collecting such empirical data. Since the other source, unfortunates like David Reimer, are so statistically rare that it's just bad science to extrapolate such results more generally. As far as I'm aware on dosing research, OP is also correct that short-term, *low* doses have ~negligible external effects and risks, while still being strong enough to shake up mental models. It should be entirely possible in theory for endocrinologists to devise some sort of HRT-lite regimen. Put it in a two-weeks-course blister pack, slap a new patent on old generic drugs, and profit. (Though I'm unsure what the market would be, psychonauts aren't exactly a huge or legible crowd.)

To the extent there's some danger of "switch flipping": I agree there's probably non-zero risk, yet would would argue one ought to do a clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis vs other psychoactives which sometimes get advocated for looser treatment too. Like, if there's potential in making LSD, ketamine, whatever more widely available/less criminalized, and we know those can also sometimes fuck people up in super-harmful lifelong ways...then it'd sure seem like HRT-lite isn't some weird outlier, and CW is influencing sober assessment. Consider how often[2] normal people take cross-sex HRT or analogous-effect meds (e.g. men taking antiandrogens) for the __usual__ reasons...if this was a huge pipeline for making accidental trans people, I'm sure it woulda been documented by now. But I've not heard of such through media or whisper network from either side, so...that's absence of evidence, at minimum, and I suspect evidence of actual absence as well. It'd be too salacious to pass up reporting on, if it did happen with any regularity. The utility cost of a single accidental trans person isn't so great that I think it merits cutting off an entire branch from the tree of knowledge, is basically my position here.

Case 2, narrower claim: for those who already jumped through all the hoops, Definitely Absolutely Trans, have been on meds long-term with minimal issue, etc, etc...it genuinely is annoying that I gotta keep going through Big Medical for my monthly dosages of banal-for-me meds. Sometimes doctors fuck up, prescriptions get lost, I'm travelling and don't have extras to tide me over, whatever. There have definitely been times where The Process has annoyed me so much that I've been tempted to buy black-market. Compare to injection equipment: for reasons I don't understand (but probably rhyme with Moral Hazard), it's not possible for lay consumers to buy medical-grade OTC needles in the USA. Can get hobbyist stuff or tattoo needles, but anything for like intramuscular...nope, need a "prescription" for needles. This is really annoying, because unlike medication which has a cash cost of dozens/hundreds $ without insurance, needles are just...you know...cheap mass-manufactured goods. So I can, and do, just find "illegal" listings of needles from China or whatever. I like having my own comfortable margin of supplies, to be used at a pace I deem fit, and wish the same could happen with pills. Call that a libertarian free-market impulse, I guess: I just don't like the idea of being yoked to Official 30 Day Cycles, at the whims of paper-pushers who have no particular interest in ensuring timely service, and can freely revoke a prescription for arbitrary reasons. (This isn't a specific-to-HRT sentiment, to be clear, but it was the example under discussion, so that's how I framed it. In general I'm skeptical of Moral Hazard arguments that conveniently restrict medical access[3].)

[1] weasel word, I guess, since transgenderism is comorbid with a laundry list of Bad Life Outcomes just generally...so a little of column A, a little of column B, probably.

[2] yes, still relatively small sample size, but larger than the acutally-trans population

[3] https://www.slowboring.com/p/solving-problems-by-letting-people

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Agreed that it's not something I'd generalize to infinity...the "delenda est" part of FDA Delenda Est is, to me, really more like how the "defund" in Defund the Police doesn't actually mean that (usually). Catchy slogan not meant to be taken exactly literally. There's a time and place for gatekeeping, and I'd feel pretty uncomfortable with a true libertarian's wet dream of no form of drug oversight whatsoever...at the same time, Scott, Zvi, and others have pretty firmly convinced me by now that the current institutions are generally overly conservative. I'd be quite happy if there were a dozen more Aduhelms, in exchange for not dithering on other shit that actually matters (while the window to capture majority of benefits is still open) + actually works...whether that's infant formula, updated covid boosters, or inspecting foreign shipments of monkeypox vaccines. Just to pick a few random recent examples. I'd even be willing to cook my steaks to well-done if that's the sort of Sacrifices to the Gods it'd take.

Hard drugs specifically: yeah, whatever fantasies I once had about the wonders of broad decriminalization/legalization (blah blah Netherlands blah) and the Evils of the War On Drugs have gotten completely crushed by witnessing SF's homelessness crisis. Surely there's any number of cheaper (not to mention more humane) solutions that don't involve people ODing on the street, to the general approval of local government and activists...I don't know, just feels fucked up? Not all drugs are created equal. We can't put the Prohibition-repeal genie back in the bottle, that toothpaste has been squeezed. But I think it'd be a better world overall, some alternate timeline where the net-negative stuff stayed illegal __and__ socially disapproved of. Plenty of ways people can go to hell which don't cause so much collatoral damage to the rest of society. (Even relatively-harmless cannabis I've been less than pleased with the consequences of that tradeoff...the one thing I miss about mask mandates was not having to constantly smell high-as-a-kite people in public.)

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Oct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022

Have you considered taking something else, maybe testosterone, to see how that makes you feel? Maybe then you will feel even more embodied. How can you be sure that the current path is the right path, until you have experimented with every single possible path?

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I concur with the previous comments, "this modified me in a way that will make the rest of my life a lot harder" is not a selling point.

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Oct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022

It didn't modify me it made me fully aware of what the problem had always been

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> So what’s left for the people who believe transgender is a “social contagion” or about “special snowflakeness”? If I had to steelman their position it would be something like: there’s some switch that can be flipped by social pressure and wanting to look cool. Once the switch is flipped, you’re transgender in some pretty real way: you’re not faking it, and you’ll be miserable until you’re allowed to gender transition. Still, being transgender makes people worse off on net, so society should try to avoid flipping that switch.

From Scott's "In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the

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Scott is just flat out wrong there.

Ever you're trans or you're not and and in cases where a switch is flipped it's one of self-awareness rather than anything else

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Or trans is an invented phenomenon that's used as a catch-all diagnoses for people who want to escape their identity for other reasons. The most popular version of wanting to escape your identity is called 'being a teenager', which is why normalizing this route for adolescents is probably a terrible and dangerous idea.

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Source: "Trust me, bro."

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Except fentanyl does that to everyone

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deletedOct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022
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A) I already had a testosterone based endocrine system

B) I started estrogen to deal with top dysphoria (which it has dun) all the stuff about embodiment and knowing I'm definitely trans for sure are unexpected benefits hence me trying to tell people about them

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"As well as feeling more embodied, I would also say that until this week I didn't know I was trans. "

For me, this is the strongest possible argument against taking those hormones. I don't want to get gender dysphoria, thank you very much.

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Either you have gender dysphoria or you don't all hormones can do here is name the darkness and in doing so show you the way to defeat it

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This seems to be an argument for the exact opposite of your claim: people should absolutely not take hormones experimentally.

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Why? thay could majorly improve your quality of life and on the time scale it takes to figure out whether or not they work for you there's no long term risk

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The "careful medical supervision" part isn't so great either. Know of 2 cases where somebody in their late teens/early 20's wondered whether they were trans, had one appointment with a trans-obsessed medical professional, was told "yes, my dear, you absolutely *are* trans," and promptly went on hormones.

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I don't suppose you have either of their numbers a prescription would be quite useful

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Dunno where you're located, but even a decade ago in the benighted 2010s, it was trivially easy to get such a prescription in a friendly locale like SF. Supposedly the gatekeepers are wiser now, supposedly it's not just a standardized checklist of stereotyped hoops that both the client and therapist are fully aware of and jump through...and yet. It honestly has bothered me, how little empirical evidence I had to put forth to get a prescription. Once upon a time, there was at least the safety-hassle of regular bloodwork involved...but ever since covid, clinics here are basically perfectly happy to auto-renew HRT prescriptions sight unseen. Or at least mine is. Haven't so much as contacted the office for 2.5 years or whatever now, yet the pills show up in the mail again and again anyway.

That's not what I'd call "careful medical supervision", even by a really generous definition. And I doubt things have gotten *harder* in the intervening years for fresh starts.

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"I have been repeatedly assured that nobody is going on hormones without careful medical supervision to ensure it is the right thing for them to do"

You didn't actually believe them, did you?!

The guy who got Kiwifarms shut down infamously did so because they revealed that he was involved in sending twelve-year-olds bootleg estrogen made by a Brazilian in his bathtub from impure Chinese precursors (I swear I'm not making this up).

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To be fair anything on the black/gray markets is synthesized by Brazilians in bathtubs using impure Chinese precursors and nobody's complaining*.

* - sometimes because they're dead

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That is absolutely true, but I'm going to be honest with you: in the sentence "Transsexual peddles contaminated third-world bootleg drugs to children in secret", the "transsexual" element is the one I have the *least* problem with. I'm not saying none! But a damn sight less than all the rest.

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It's not just screwing with your hormones it's doing it in a way that significantly improved the quality of life for a notable percentage of the population and is basically risk-free

Also why would you ever want Justin anti-androgen that sounds terrible

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I've got a strange technical question, for the more computer-savvy out there.

So there's an old arcade game I have installed, one of those classics that helpfully displays the framerate for troubleshooting purposes...it's a fighter, and thus very difficult to play effectively at anything less than ~60fps. (You know, back when that was top-of-the-line...lol...) There's only so much "adjusting my timing" to compensate for 20-50fps, since obviously opponents don't have the same handicap. This game used to run just fine on older versions of Wandows, but like so many yesteryear programs, at some point it got lost in the compatability shuffle...I'd thought it was a lost cause for years, something I'd need to intentionally set up an outdated machine to enjoy again.

But I stumbled on an illogical solution by accident: for whatever reason, having a media player open at the same time (say, VLC) fixes the framerate back up to good-as-new 60fps. Doesn't even require playing any media, the other program just has to be open at all.

Why would this do anything? My tentative guess is that the media player loads a bunch of additional AV codecs or something, but then I'm not sure how <whatever key game component> went missing from default-Wandows in the first place, such that it could be backdoor-substituted this way.

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I don't have a solution for you, but wouldn't a fighting game slow down the frame rate for both players? So if your frame rate drops, your opponent's does as well. They might be annoyed, tell you to get off the wifi, etc., but I do not think that it puts you at a disadvantage. Obviously you want to get it fixed though.

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The p2p is legendarily shitty, so (as far as I understand it) lag on one end doesn't actually cause lag on the other. Part of why it's only ever played competitively via LAN, no one even tries to do it over actual external connections. Supposedly the re-released version that came out on Steam years later fixed this, but that version lacks many of the fan-coded patches that helped make the game more playable in the first place.

The AI also doesn't care if I'm slow in meatspace, heh...

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What game are we talking about here, out of curiosity? Is it not available on Fightcade?

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Melty Blood Actress Again Code Cadenza.

(am I still a weeaboo if I'm Asian to begin with?)

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Ah Melty. I have only played Type Lumina and only briefly. Too many games and too little time.

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Oct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022

https://sorry.about.computer

I did driver dev for a living and I don't even want to start thinking about it. Somewhere in the unholy abomination of the Windows/compositing WM/GPU driver stack things happen and your game is fast again.

Someone could be actually paid to investigate it for a better part of a month, unearth a really weird reason then patch it into the newest OS/driver update. Nobody will bother, so make an offering to the Machine God and be happy you got blessed with a solution.

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Not worth my money, at least to pay a competent person's Cheerful Price, but it'd definitely be a fascinating deep-dive subject if I ever had the opportunity to let someone dig under the hood. I'm just happy it works, mysterious kludge or not. The more years go by, the more games-I-grew-up-with that become functionally impossible to ever replay...and that's pretty sad. Games that only live on in memories: $ERROR_404

...oh, I was gonna link to the article about Killswitch on invisiblegames.net, but that site doesn't seem to exist anymore. Nevermind, sometimes even the memories get lost too :( Corruption is a terrible thing.

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Perhaps this has something to do with https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/windows-timer-resolution-the-great-rule-change/. It seems somewhat odd, though, since the change should have made this "spooky action at a distance" in timing less possible than before.

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Interesting - I wonder why other programs which ought to do the same prompting don't work? Like MPHC doesn't do diddly to up the framerate, despite being a mostly-superiour media player, at least for video.

I have tried clocking the CPU higher...running the game on all threads, maxing priority, uncapping RAM allotment, whatever. This would sometimes offer small improvements, but nothing consistent, and of course it meant computer was sweating bullets just to try and halfheartedly run an old game. Perhaps there's some other deeper-level route to try; I'm out of my technical depth though, been ages since I did the "build your own gaming PC" rite-of-passage.

Emulator-wise, sadly most of the relevant documentation is in Japanese, and it's largely fan-patched anyway :(

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I read Dr David Hanscom's book on Chronic Pain. It seems that we don't really understand chronic pain at all but it is an inappropriate and useless response. His method is to write down your thoughts about the pain, rip up the paper and throw it away. It works fast and it's free. Do you know someone you could try this on? If so, please comment, so this can get taken seriously. It worked for me- my back pain was completely cured. https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/pain-and-what-to-do-about-it

Dr Hanscom did a talk at google so has external validation but there's a lot of fake stuff around so it's hard to get heard. https://youtu.be/B5cwZ2iu8jU?t=130

The idea builds on Dr John Sarno and James Pennebaker but is quite amazing (maybe too amazing). If I can get some anecdotal responses here, maybe we can get a formal trial approved.

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Hi, my first impression when I heard about this method was : I think this is a bullshit. My wife insisted and I did it thinking what a crap. A week ago I couldn’t walk because of the pain in my left knee. Today I can walk for hours with my two beautiful Husky. I tried also this method for my back and the result was awesome. I can't explain but I just can say it works. Just give it a try and thank you Stuart. I am a PhD in Biology and I don't believe in mystical care but this method works.

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I'm delighted to hear it worked for you! I don't believe in mystical care or mystical cures either- I'm sure there will be a suitable neuroscience explanation one day- I favour a miswiring of the competing sub-routine version of the brain described by David Eagleman but I think more important than why it works at this stage is how many people will it work on, and to do that we need a trial.

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Oct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022

How about if you two and Dr. Hanscom be the first subjects: cause yourselves some chronic pain. You'll need to figure out a safe way to cause a bit of painful tissue damage that will later heal up with no permanent injury -- maybe the sterile equivalent of a thumbtack in the heel, well covered with sterile bandages? Walk around on it for long enough for the pain to count as chronic. For pain to count as chronic it has to go on for weeks or months, so I'm not sure how long you'd need to carry on with the thumbtack phase, but I'd say at least a week. Then do the paper trick & let us know how well it worked.

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Um, yes. that's what I'm trying to do here. I had back pain for 5 months- here's the list of exercises I did to try to heal it

https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/fascia-and-lower-back . Then I read an article by Isobel Whitcomb in Slate https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/chronic-pain-identity-spoonies-support-recovery.html and read Dr Hascom's book. 10 minutes later I was dancing. Now, it could be placebo, it could be coincidence but isn't it worth finding out? Dr Hanscom was the first person he cured, he cured his own back problems. There's another patient here https://youtu.be/B5cwZ2iu8jU?t=426. By posting here, I'm hoping I can get enough anecdotal evidence to get a trial arranged. As Isobel Whitcomb says in her article, one of the problems is that people can resent it, thinking it's saying their pain isn't real, especially if the pain has lasted a long time. That's not the idea, it's just accepting that neuron paths don't always work in your best interests. see here by Lorimer Moseley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwd-wLdIHjs

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Yeah, OK, but what I’m suggesting is that given how simple and effective the procedure, and how rapid, and how inexpensive the required materials, it would be feasible for the you early adopters to accumulate a body of evidence by performing some experiments on yourselves. And making videos of the climactic tearing of the paper and the astonished relief of the sufferer would really make those anecdotal results pop. With that material in hand you’ll soon have legions of chronic pain sufferers sprinting — well, OK, hobbling —to your clinical trial.

In addition to the sterile-thumbtack-in-the-heel experiment, I think you should try some variations on the original procedure. For instance, if you scotch tape the ripped up pieces of paper back together, does the pain return? If you write your feelings about the pain in vanishing ink but then do not tear up the paper, will the pain fade slowly as the ink does? Next you might explore whether the procedure works on things other than pain. For instance, what about unsightly abdominal fat? If I were to write “blubbergut, I freakin hate you so so much,” is it possible that I would slim down at the moment I tore up the paper? And if so, what about this variant? A chubby guy writes, “195 pounds, you’re bringing me down, I wish every one of you was gone” — when he tears up the paper might he become weightless? And if so, then what if instead he had written “205 pounds, I wish every one of you was gone” might he end up actually buoyant, like a helium balloon? But then — MY GOD, COULD WE USE THIS TECHNIQUE TO LAUNCH ROCKETS & SHIT?

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Hmmm, I have my doubts whether those would work... but the first idea is a great one- getting people to film themselves doing it- the only problem is scepticism. I have got a video of myself struggling to do one of the many back exercises I tried but who's to say I'm not just acting the pain? I did this 3 months ago and since then I've found 6 people to try it on and it's worked every time. I emailed the sceptic's sceptic, Michael Shermer, to see if he's ever come across anything like this, but he hasn't replied. I'm trying the rationalist community because the mantra is they'll look at the facts- surely everyone knows one person with pain- is it worth 5 minutes of their time to try it? You can say to them, « I’ve got this crazy guy emailing me- he says like Jesus he can heal your pain- it’s probably rubbish but could you just write your thoughts/emotions/feelings out for 5 minutes on a piece of paper, rip it up and throw it away. He (this Jesus guy) says that will work and your pain will go- please just do it so I can tell the Jesus character he’s full of shit and is wasting my valuable time ».

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OK, I just did it. I have had chronic lower back pain for at least 20 years. My back always hurts a little bit, even when I'm lying in bed. If I walk it starts cramping on the lower left, & I'd call that moderate pain. If I lift something the wrong way, I get a zinger of somewhat more severe pain, and then for a few days my whole back is worse. Today it is about average. This morning, sitting down, I have an ache in my lower hip that I can tell is coming from my back.

So I spent 6 minutes writing a description of my pain and my thoughts and feelings about it. Then I tore it up and threw it away. My back feels exactly the same. Same ache in left lower hip. If I stand it, whole back hurts a bit more. Trying to arch it even a little bit hurts a lot, like it always does. Bending forward hurts moderately, like it always does.

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Hi again- can you just confirm for me that there has been no change in your pain levels. If so, you're my first failure of 8 people- while it's a small sample size, I'm having a lot of trouble convincing people to try it so I would like to be certain that it failed for you.

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Absolutlely no change?

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I haven't read the book but have heard some positive stuff about it. To me it always sounded like CBT for pain. Since starting lexapro again i have found that my anxieties don't produce anxious thoughts anymore but do cause me to clench my jaw which produces pain in my face and jaw. (Its not a medication side effect as it happens only at times of high stress and not all the time). So, to me, the idea that stress and mental anguish can manifest as physical pain isn't too crazy and therefor physical pain can be treated with mental work.

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Yes, i think CBT is a good analogy- and I think we're edging towards a world where we accept that physical pain has a mental component- but I don't think we're there yet. My question really is how to move the process along a bit faster?

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Sounds too good to be true.

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It's a time-tested psychological trick; give your concerns a physical form, then punch them in their stupid physical face. As stated, it's free, fast, and surprisingly effective; a lot of problems are more psychological than people assume, and a lot of burdens get less burdensome when you give yourself a physical outlet for your frustrations.

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But can we quantify "surprisingly effective"?

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Yes, that's exactly the problem- it sounds too good to be true and "you get what you pay for"- give it 2 minutes and see what happens. In my substack I link to 2 articles in slate where Isabel Whitcomb describes her experiences.

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Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022

The idea of romantic love has been one of the major values of Western Civilization since the Rennaissance when legends such as Tristan and Isolde, Guinevere and Lancelot, Romeo and Juliet, and the Provencial poetry of Courtly Love were popularized. Though occurring within Christendom, this particular notion of love existed outside of and often in tension with religious belief.

Still today popular culture is suffused with this notion of love in which two people choose, often against practical considerations, to get together because they hold romantic love as a higher value.

Yet we seem to be at the end of the romantic era. Try explaining to the HR department that the reason you had sexual relations with another employee was due to "love". That your souls had recognized each other as their immortal other-halfs. The concept has no place in our official lives. The corporate world of the 21st century has less patience for romantic love than did the 12th century Church.

Might this be due to too much rationality?

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If it was love, who cares what HR thinks?

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>Try explaining to the HR department that the reason you had sexual relations with another employee was due to "love".

I am married to someone I met at work. HR didn't care at all because: 1) we followed the established policies in the employee handbook, 2) told them about the relationship, and 3) neither of us managed the other person or worked with them directly.

Based on the HR training I had in b-school and my work experience, HR policies at large companies won't treat inter office relationships as anathema, they will have established procedure to deal with such a thing.

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The HR department could not give two figs about your soulmates, you could have a string of them as far as they're concerned - UNTIL you doodle your co-worker, then you break up with them and it turns sour and co-worker decides they were harassed or you are a pest and anyway Somebody Should Do Something and it's all the company's fault for letting it happen, so they'll sue the company.

Since the company is in the business of selling apps for something or other, but not in the business of helping you get your ashes hauled, this is a pain in the backside for them, which is why HR makes rules about "no doodling on company time". If your co-worker couldn't sue them and had to restrict themselves to giving you dirty looks during the tea break, you could doodle every person on the same floor of the building and they wouldn't care.

It has nothing to do with rationality, it has all to do with $$$$$$$$$$.

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I don't blame HR departments or corporate culture for caring most about the dollar bill. I blame this culture that now allows so many frivolous lawsuits for sexual harassment to win those dollars. (They aren't all frivolous, of course, but many are.)

It is progressive* culture that has devalued romantic love, I think.

*I'm distinguishing progressive culture: feminism, DEI stuff, "words are violence" believers, from the longer tradition of liberal Western values: basically the 18th through 20th centuries, which mostly angled for more freedom of individual behavior than the popular Left of today.

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Oct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022

The DEI people are perhaps the most passionless and sexless individuals one can find in the wild.

It's weird when it's the faux-Christian alt right RETVRN types that actually talk about passionate love they feel for their tradwife, while the vanguard of the sexual revolution is afraid to touch another human being.

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>Try explaining to the HR department that the reason you had sexual relations with another employee was due to "love"

Culture condones treating love as a HIGHER value, not an equal or lesser one. That means you accept losing your job over it, as an upgrade.

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Wait, was there a time when this sort of love was *accepted*?! As far as I can tell, Tristan and Isolde, Guinevere and Lancelot, and Romeo and Juliet were all written as *tragedies*, where the people in romantic love faced only opposition from their communities and ended up dying for it. We seem to have progressed if HR just fires you instead of literally having you killed.

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Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022

These aren't morality plays in which the message is "Don't be like them!" Rather, the audience tends to view them as heroes. The trickle-down message over centuries has been to believe that one should find their "true love". Such notion is in diametric opposition to cultures which believe in arranged marriage or that marriage should only take place within the clan and approved of by authorities.

Put another way, liberal Western culture's reaction to Romeo and Juliet is that the community is the problem and must be reformed so as to be less oppressive of a sentiment as noble as love.

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"Put another way, liberal Western culture's reaction to Romeo and Juliet is that the community is the problem and must be reformed so as to be less oppressive of a sentiment as noble as love."

I... don't think so? I was with you right up until here, but my experience is that liberal Western culture's reaction to Romeo and Juliet is the Italian community must be reformed to be less violent and crazy so teenagers stop killing each other and themselves. Practically everybody I know, especially on the liberal side of the divider, views the love affair per se as discomfiting at best.

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Seriously. If the Montagues and Capulets don’t keep stabbing each other and bystanders for slights, it really doesn’t matter if the teens are forced apart by their mean parents or married to one another to end the feud.

Which last is pretty likely, though probably not conducive to R&J’s adult happiness, if Tybalt could just keep it in his scabbard.

(But the Nurse and Friar Laurence are still irresponsible idiots who are old enough to know better.)

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Speaking of someone who has a strong romantic love for their wife and also as someone who's old enough to scoff at younger people claiming to be in love -

Lots of people don't know the difference between love and lust, especially when they're younger. Two people at a job having sex is a nightmare for potential sexual harassment claims, and a big deal for the other employees who are likely aware that something is happening (especially if it's happening at work!). To be on the same side, companies are highly incentivized to just assume that it's not really love.

I met my wife at work, and I still say that most people who date at work are going to cause more problems than they solve. That said, I'm not a fan of broad corporate policy against it, and prefer the more neutral "here are some guidelines to follow and a way to report harassment" that gives most employers a solid out. A pox on courts who wouldn't accept that as a fair compromise.

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Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022

Eh, I know I always trot this one out, but my go-to example of why doodling on company time is a no-no is the former married manager in a former workplace of mine who doodled one of his subordinates, got her pregnant with twins, then got a better job elsewhere and left, in succession, the job, his wife, the town, and his mistress and babies. He's probably hooked up now with a third soulmate/love of my life now, wherever he is.

"Broad corporate policy" probably will do nothing for the romantic featherheads who are convinced "but we're in love and any day now he's gonna leave his wife for me!", but it will at least be a big warning sign in the middle of the road about these kinds of messes.

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My experience is that such policies actually don't work, and those interested in pursuing such a relationship will find a way to do so anyway. What it gives an employer is some legal protection, but at the cost of sometimes having to fire employees (or worse/weirder, tell people to stop dating) regardless of the merits of the relationship. If my former employer had told my (then future) wife and I to stop dating, there would have been no good outcome - either one or both of us quit, or it breaks up a good relationship.

If companies felt they had decent legal protection without having to meddle in the affairs of their employees, that would solve most of these issues.

I will say, I'm strongly against a supervisor dating a lower level employee, *especially* if the lower level employee is a direct subordinate. That's just asking for all kinds of problems, often directly related to work benefits, promotions, etc.

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https://aeon.co/essays/russia-against-the-western-way-of-love

Think you'd enjoy this article on the topic, not the same entirely

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The last sentence lost me: modern HR is not something I'd consider remotely rational, in either the small- or big-R sense.

Otherwise I'd agree in general that legibility and safetyism are having an outsize chilling effect on all kinds of mushy human relations, romantic and otherwise. Was just thinking about it on the commute home: my workplace recently foisted an HR-nightmare sexual harassment case boss to another <s>diocese</s> store branch. Everyone's glad that he's gone, but the lingering bad vibes and heightened sense of threat make every potentially-misinterpreted reaction between sexes a helluva lot more fraught. Who knows how long until that'll settle down... (Maybe it'd be different if the asshole actually got fired, or disciplined in any meaningful way, but blah blah Official Investigation mumble fair trial cough lack of HR-admissible evidence. It's like some weird alt-reality where #MeToo never happened.)

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Not only has that *never* been an acceptable excuse (whereas for example "I like pussy and mind your own business" often has), it's the mainspring of the romantic conception of love that it isn't. Acceptance would smother the whole thing to death. You need zealous opposition to get the sturm und drang, the heightened emotional states which make romanticism appealing to histrionics; if you pat the lovers on the head and say "well isn't that nice" you ruin it for them and they'll probably break up, no longer united by the world's opposition.

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Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022

As per "The Screwtape Letters":

"If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that “Love” is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, “noble”, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides."

From "The Allegory of Love":

"Every one has heard of courtly love, and every one knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc. The characteristics of the Troubadour poetry have been repeatedly described.1 With the form, which is lyrical, and the style, which is sophisticated and often ‘aureate’ or deliberately enigmatic, we need not concern ourselves. The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel of the courtly life. It is possible only to those who are, in the old sense of the word, polite. It thus becomes, from one point of view the flower, from another the seed, of all those noble usages which distinguish the gentle from the vilein: only the courteous can love, but it is love that makes them courteous. Yet this love, though neither playful nor licentious in its expression, is always what the nineteenth century called ‘dishonourable’ love. The poet normally addresses another man’s wife, and the situation is so carelessly accepted that he seldom concerns himself much with her husband: his real enemy is the rival. But if he is ethically careless, he is no light-hearted gallant: his love is represented as a despairing and tragical emotion—or almost despairing, for he is saved from complete wanhope by his faith in the God of Love who never betrays his faithful worshippers and who can subjugate the cruellest beauties.

...There can be no mistake about the novelty of romantic love: our only difficulty is to imagine in all its bareness the mental world that existed before its coming — to wipe out of our minds, for a moment, nearly all that makes the food both of modern sentimentality and modern cynicism. We must conceive a world emptied of that ideal of ‘happiness ’— a happiness grounded on successful romantic love — which still supplies the motive of our popular fiction. In ancient literature love seldom rises above the levels of merry sensuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated as a tragic madness, an ἄτη [disaster, ruin, folly] which plunges otherwise sane people (usually women) into crime and disgrace. Such is the love of Medea, of Phaedra, of Dido; and such the love from which maidens pray that the gods may protect them. At the other end of the scale we find the comfort and utility of a good wife acknowledged: Odysseus loves Penelope as he loves the rest of his home and possessions, and Aristotle rather grudgingly admits that the conjugal relation may now and then rise to the same level as the virtuous friendship between good men. But this has plainly very little to do with ‘love’ in the modern or medieval sense; and if we turn to ancient love-poetry proper, we shall be even more disappointed."

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Related to the Lewis passage, I read this interesting bit recently in Octavio Paz's The Double Flame (which is about the history of love in literature):

"The majority of specialists in this field agree that the Provencal poets adopted two popular Arabic-Andalusian poetic forms: the zajal and the jarcha. Another borrowing that had a great influence not only on the poetry but also on the customs and beliefs: the reversal of the positions of the lover and his lady. The main axis of power in feudal society was the vertical link, both juridical and sacred, between lord and vassal. In Muslim Spain the emirs and the great lords had declared themselves to be the servants, the slaves of their beloveds. The Provencal poet adopted this Arab custom, reversed the traditional relationship of the sexes, called his lady his mistress and himself her servant. In a society much more open than the Hispano-Muslim one--a society in which women enjoyed liberties unthinkable under Islamic rule--this change was a real revolution. It upset the images of man and woman hallowed by tradition, affected mores, left its mark on vocabulary, and through language influenced the vision of the world."

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What I find interesting is that romantic love isn't a given but a cultural convention which had to be invented at some point. According to Paz, romantic love is a subset of eroticism which is a subset of sex. Sex is animal, eroticism involves symbolism such as the kiss, romantic love the paradox of the captured soul mixed with the freewill to choose its ongoing enslavement.

I wonder if modern society isn't now uninventing romantic love.

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"In ancient literature love seldom rises above the levels of merry sensuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated as a tragic madness, an ἄτη [disaster, ruin, folly] which plunges otherwise sane people (usually women) into crime and disgrace. Such is the love of Medea, of Phaedra, of Dido; and such the love from which maidens pray that the gods may protect them."

This remark of Lewis' reminds me of the following footnote to the Thousand Nights and a Night, by Burton (a man who was himself inclined to the ancients' attitudes toward the matter): http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Vol_1/v1notes.htm#124

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Sounds like Lewis disapproves of courtly love while acknowledging that the notion of love prior to it was no better. My point is that courtly love has been distilled over the centuries by a liberal culture which now views romantic love as one of the important ingredients to a marriage. When the Troubadours exalted adultery, it was the only form of romantic love at the time and place, since the nobles of the court married for social and political reasons.

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No joke, getting married is one of the biggest issues in life, one of the biggest determinants of happiness. It seems to have become much harder, judging by percentage of adults married. I'll reverse your formula and say that if they don't bring back arranged marriages, the least they can do is let people date at work. Maybe there is love there.

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But Trebuchet, that fence seems completely pointless to them!

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Oct 12, 2022·edited Oct 12, 2022

Unfortunately, I think the only thing left to do for now is enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing them also suffer from their destructive behavior while simultaneously refusing insistently to fix it. Maybe when we're like 80, the rising generation will have had enough of this shit and want to go back to one of the manifold forms of sanity.

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You were mentioned in The Forward (a national Jewish online paper published both in Yiddish and English) this week, because of discussion about lox:

https://links.forwardcdn.com/e/evib?_t=4616583590614aeb8da9a4f87d20e5fd&_m=b39a4d34f36b4129a45e3d510d50c8c3&_e=2_XN2ywz2oJFS2R_maDMYrf6m6_VvgsogavUSN-JMIpkBt7GXSTASZEqehvzJSra

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Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022

Physics question. You often hear baseball announcers say how a fastball can never really rise because that would violate the laws of physics, it only appears to rise to the hitter because the brain expects it to drop sooner than it does.

Can a baseball really not rise given enough speed and backspin? My intuition is that it could, but maybe I've played too much wiffleball.

Bonus: If it can rise, what would the velocity and backspin rate (and air-pressure?) need to be? Assume a spherical cowhide.

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I think so. If we use this simple equation for the Magnus force on a spinning baseball:

https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/node43.html

...then we need the baseball to be spinning at about 5700 rpm for a 90 MPH fastball to generate 1g of vertical acceleration to compensate for the force of gravity. That gives us a surface velocity of about 23 m/s which isn't fast enough to make any of our assumptions questionable.

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A little digging tells me that in the real world, fastball spin rates average about 2000 rpm and max out around 2600 rpm.

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Yes, I wouldn't think this would be possible for a human pitcher, or someone would have done it already for lulz and to freak out a batter. But we could readily build a machine to do it, it would've been a great proposal for "Mythbusters" when that show was on.

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Thanks for the responses!

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If the announcers do indeed say that, they are wrong. It might be a bit beyond a human's ability to pitch a baseball fast enough for it to rise, but there are no laws of physics standing in its way.

As I mentioned to Yug below, you can do it yourself with a table tennis bat and ball. Strike the ball in a horizontal direction with even a moderate amount of backspin, and it will swerve in a more vertical trajectory i.e. upwards. No laws of physics being violated, just the Magnus effect in action.

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That got me curious enough to try to look it up. https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/forces-on-a-baseball/

Ignoring-link top-of-head answer; gaining altitude after leaving the pitcher's hand would require it to start spinning faster in midair, while gravity is instead working to make it stop spinning. Short of freak weather conditions like a tornado, it will never go higher than its original trajectory.

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I don't think either of your contentions are true. If it is spinning fast enough to gain altitude when it leaves the pitcher's hand, it doesn't need to spin faster. And gravity is not working to make it stop spinning.

Consider a table tennis ball. It can be made to spin fast enough to change it"s trajectory from horizontal to vertical after it leaves a player's bat. The same is theoretically true for a baseball,, though I don't know what combination of speed and spin would achieve this, and whether or not it is practically possible.

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I assume we're talking about the baseball rising when it gets to the batter at home plate, a distance of 60 feet. You can't make a table tennis ball fly a straight line for ten feet and then start climbing, you'd have to get it climbing out the gate.

A baseball is 5 ounces on the light end; I didn't find the equation for how fast you have to spin it to get it rising, but it's a lot heavier than ping pong balls or paper airplanes.

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You assume incorrectly - I was responding to your 'gaining altitude after leaving the pitcher's hand', and 'it will never go higher than its original trajectory'. You didn't mention anything about a delayed reaction.

A table tennis ball can gain altitude after leaving a player's bat, and with sufficient spin and speed, a baseball will do the same after leaving a pitcher's hand.

I guess we're in agreement in that neither of us knows the speed and degree of spin for this to happen, nor how far from it are real baseball pitchers.

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Is Somaliland an independent nation?

For the next really slow response, here is my current "gotcha"