Bistrofan

A simple steelman is something like "if we're very wrong about A[G/S]I, then birth rates are a big issue, so we better invest some resources into it, in case we're wrong".

This would be understandable if it weren't for the timelines here. Let's say AGI takes ~10x the amount of time (40 years instead of 4 years from the 2026 date) and the few billion people (which to note is just the population of the 1900s) happens in 100 years instead of 200, that would be 2066 vs 2126.

Despite being absurdly friendly on the timelines, it's still not even close! That suggests to me a very rocky confidence level being held about AGI... (read more)

A lot of the rationalist discourse around birthrates don't seem to square away with AGI predictions.

Like the most negative predictions of AGI destroying humanity in the next century or two leaves birthrates completely negligent as an issue. The positive predictions with AGI leave a high possibility of robotic child rearing and artificial wombs (when considering the amount of progress even us puny humans have already made) in the next century or two which also makes natural birthrates irrelevant because we could just make and raise more humans without the need of human parents to birth them.

And stuff like say, the concerns about old people consumption outnumbering youth worker production don't work well... (read more)

How many incidents will an LLM find of a president ignoring a court order?

To my knowledge at least, there hasn't really been an actual time this has "truly" happened even now. It's often said that Andrew Jackson did but the situation is complex enough that it's arguable it shouldn't count and the famous quote of "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!" seems to be apocryphal.

Now there are lots of ways to essentially get around the court order for a long while without actually violating it like a favorite of modern presidents to go "ok X justification doing thing was ruled unconstitutional, but that doesn't mean Y is,... (read more)

I assume 3 and 4 are the main reasons. If you want to know what's happening locally, join a Facebook group and you'll know things way faster than your local paper most of the time. Also parts like the classifieds/job information/etc are all replaced by the Internet so a huge function of local newspapers has become obsolete.

National news is also slowly dying too, just not to the same degree. I think the loss is mitigated now by distribution. National news appeals to basically everybody, so something like NYT and WAPO can pick up subscribers from the other side of the country or even across the world (like how I read the BBC... (read more)

Yeah what caused it is definitely still up in the air, although I doubt it's going to end up as an either/or situation. Even if we can point to social factors as a major cause, how environmental stimulus impacts people differently still depends on their preexisting biology so it's going to be a mix there regardless. Just how much? I don't know.

Because the answer to this question has massive implications for what healthcare should look like for trans people.

Now I'm very libertarian so I don't think it should impact much at all for adults. Trans people already have the freedom of choice and they're using it. In terms of bad healthcare decisions,... (read more)

I'm trans so I have a motive to search for evidence that suggests I am ~biologically valid~ and not subject to some kind of psychosocial delusion.

I'm personally not a fan of viewing things this way to begin with because I believe all differences in human behavior is "biologically valid".

If two people are exactly the same in every way except one prefers purple and the other prefers green, I expect we would find a difference somewhere in the human body and brain that matches this and explains it. Whether favorite color comes from a single part of the body or a complex emergence of various parts, I still expect a difference. I expect... (read 351 more words →)

The CDC started lying about the effectiveness of masks to convince people to stop using them so service workers would have access to them as political pressure on them mounted.

That's the common explanation given, but from my understanding at least it's (at least partially) incorrect and the original recommendations were due in part to not understanding Covid was airborne. And that was because of a major communication error ~60 years ago from "Alexander Langmuir, the influential chief epidemiologist of the newly established CDC" who had pressed back on airborne viruses being common as he thought they were too similar to miasma theory.

Like his peers, Langmuir had been brought up in the Gospel

A high school coach who has to choose whether to allow a trans student to compete in female sports is faced with a difficult social dilemma. If they deny the request, then the student- who wants badly to be seen as female- will be disappointed and might face additional bullying; if they allow it, that will be unfair to the other female players. In some cases, other players may be willing to accept a bit of unfairness as an act of probably supererogatory kindness, but in cases where they are aren't, explaining to the student that they shouldn't compete without hurting their feelings will take a lot of tact on the part

One issue with underdog narratives nowadays is that they tend to be applied to large groups of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people. Even if there are general statistical truths, by their very nature those large groups still tend to be very diverse and dynamic at the individual level. And the most standout of those tend to be the rich and powerful elites, which the average Joe is comparing themselves to.

"My group" = all the normal hard working people in my personal life

"Their group" = the rich and powerful elites I see on Television or in the news

But of course the perspective is the exact same for the average Joe of... (read more)