S. Verona Lišková's Shortform
Jun 4, 20231
S. Verona Lišková
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Let's steelman the position a bit, because I believe you're putting "defund" and "abolish" into the same bucket.
I don't like the cops. But I think --- pessimistically --- as long as civilization exists, they will have their niche. Humans alive today are neither Homo economicus nor hunter-gatherers (with very few exceptions.) There is a subset of things humans are capable of doing that perhaps cannot be solved any other way without abandoning society as we know it. The hardline abolitionists I know either are okay with abandoning society or believe that that subset is empty. I cannot abandon society without forgoing modern medicine which I need to live, and I doubt the... (read more)
Another commenter said this doesn't depict 2084, but 2034. I think it depicts 2021.
Perhaps I'm incapable of laughter, but I think enough of the younger folks have recognized the tendencies of the pathologically online and are getting away from social media that incentivizes this kind of thing that this piece reads as an outdated caricature. Ironically, this is caused at least a little bit by the enshittification of those same platforms at the hands of Zuck, Musk, et al.
My personal opinion: Almost all Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Mastodon activism is performative, intended primarily to discharge feelings of guilt. The phrases "circular firing squad" and "leftist infighting" appear a lot. This is because the social problems of... (read more)
I strongly suspect I have something in the same general cluster you speak of, but I don't have a diagnosis. There's a sustained and entirely artificial shortage of ADHD meds. I take 450mg bupropion XL, which seems to work pretty well for me.
His political views aside, it's well-known that the alpha/beta dynamic doesn't even apply to wolves, let alone humans, except for the ones that care a great deal about performing it.
The problem is that supporting scientific investigation is likely to do the same. Any sort of genetic marker of transness will be immediately turned against our community and used to fracture us. They want to fight against us no matter what the science says. There is no way for us to win by rational argument, or by anything else, really. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into.
I certainly have the sense it could. But those comparisons are in sedentary people, not athletes, and it's also possible that out in those tails training causes the differences to mostly disappear.
This has been a nice exercise but I think it's tangential.
I don't really follow this. In the data I've seen, HRT brings trans women halfway between cis men and cis women. Janssen et al 2000 does not contain any trans women, and the place you are quoting from in the linked report is kind of convoluted and since the report has already been misleading one time I don't really feel like wasting time following the report's argument. Please lay out the argument for this if you want me to believe it.
Here is my interpretation. The relevant data are contained in Table 6 of the 2022 report on page 25, and show that the relative muscle loss caused by 12 months of feminizing... (read more)
The Everest regression here is "when you control for height and lean body mass, cis men aren't actually stronger than cis women", yes? That would be a deal-breaker if they were comparing cis men and cis women, I agree, but they're not. I don't think I've seen anybody make that claim. The claim that's being made is, as I follow it:
I was going to post this in my original comment, but decided not to: the quantum of belief is the story, not the study. "They're going after the children" and "they're pretending to be women so they can win sporting events" have shown to be two of the most easily-believed stories, so conservative media has been leaning on those angles. Even some people who are nominally cool with my existence believe the latter if pushed a bit, despite the preponderance of the evidence [0] showing that there's no significant advantage after enough feminizing HRT.
Incidentally, there's a dominoes meme I've been meaning to make for some time now, with "Someone posts a mathematical monograph on a new kind of decision theory to the Internet" at the small end and "Pop star leaves world's richest man for transfemme hacker" at the big end.
We appreciate power.
[0] https://www.cces.ca/transgender-women-athletes-and-elite-sport-scientific-review
Can somebody convince me that the problem this site is trying to solve is even soluble?
I don't understand how an aligned machine intelligence is definitionally possible without some sort of mathematization of ethics/decision theory, which I know has been worked on. But any such correct mathematization, that is to say one that doesn't assert a falsehood or anything else from which seemingly anything is derivable, should amount to solving ethics entirely. It's the ethical equivalent of..."the meteor is coming and it will eradicate us all unless we come up with a polynomial algorithm for 3SAT, despite the fact that we don't even know that P=NP nonconstructionally."
My admittedly meager mathematical and philosophical knowledge gives me the intuition that alignment is somehow by its nature unsolvable, or that an aligned AI is Solomonoff-like nonconstructable. Any conceivable solution would prove far, far too much. Clearly there must be an assumption that I'm making but you're not, since you're still working on it, but I don't know where it is.
Nope, not really. The only significant change I made to my life was cutting out alcohol, but that really needed to happen anyway. Maybe I've been a little more nervous, but I'm always a little nervous, and I have plenty of outlets for nervous energy.