mountainriver @ mountainriver @awful.systems

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Joined

2 yr. ago

They are trying to solve the problem of gigantic markups - because of legal monopolies through patents - on advanced chemical products where dosage and quality control is literally life or death. Their solution is to do it yourself in a garage.

Couldn't they at least tried parallel imports from quality controlled production in countries with less gigantic markups?

Or, if they could have stopped playing Robin Hood for a second and looked at the systemic problems instead, there was a proposal at WHO some ten years ago to reform pharmaceutical research and development with direct funding and then releasing the results, basically creating a direct to generica pipeline. The US shot it down, of course, which means public relations campaigns in the US would be great. But no, DIY in the garage.

(If anyone is interested in details the proposal was called "delinkage".)

God creates three legged giant to make more laps for children to sit on? Or is that Jennifer Lopez job?

Saving that link if I come across someone who has bought the "it may be a small risk, but what if?"

What if the moon got mad at us?

And steer their careers into positions of influence.

Among the comments is an obvious rationaliser who claims that because [list of people in positions of influence] thinks AI Doom is real, this can't be a cult. Guess one has to be a rationaliser not to figure out how a cult that tries to place its followers into positions of influence can have many people in positions of influence.

Penis enlargement and breast implants can be understood as gender affirming surgery for cis people, it is just an affirmation of the gender assigned at birth. Rather than go to primates I would point to ancient Greece and it's statues to make the point that ideals of gender and bodies shift over time. Greek statues shows as I understand it often an ideal body, which by the norms of its time included a rather small penis. So maybe some male ancient Greeks wished there were treatments to shrink their package?

With gorillas, my understanding is that primates that have very unequal sizes between the sexes has small penises, while its among the primates with roughly equal body size you find larger penises. So akin to plummage, the males showing off of that their bodies can afford to waste resources, and thus presumably is very fit. I am no biologist, but I think this means that if you try to win a domination fight with a gorilla, it may show who is the boss by showing off its physical strength. So not recommended.

Reading this extract I was surprised, figuring the desperate search for investment money must mean that Kickstarter wasn't turning a profit despite a seemingly sound business model.

Reading the article I found out it was even stupider. Kickstarter wasn't lacking a path to profit, it was lacking a path to growth. And being a profitable company with a clear market nisch isn't cool enough. Everything has to grow, grow, grow. So Kickstarter created a bunch of problems for itself, destroying much of its brand. It's that stupid.

We can not allow a spam bot gap to develop!

700 million Effective Altruists? That's one big cult!

Oh it's the other EA! You had me there for a minute.

And to add, admitting that Tumblr had an admin who charged for banning trans women: Important.

Explaining wtf that was all about: Not important.

He probably should be in rehab.

Banning trans women on Tumblr who are mad at him for them being harassed through the platform: Important.

Feuding with said trans women on Twitter: Important.

Explaining their decision to sell the users data: Not important.

You don't even need to be a utility monster.

Applying standard EA logic with utilions (approximately 1 utilion = 1 dollar) shows that when SBF was free he caused billions negative utilions. He says he did nothing wrong, and presumably he would continue to do nothing wrong. After updating our priors on the consequences of SBF doing nothing wrong, we can conclude that the risk is above 99% that SBF doing nothing wrong will cause billions in negative utilions. So the only utilitarian thing to do is hand out a life sentence.

Fortunately for SBF the judge is probably not in the business of creating philosophical justice.

What benefits did the Longtermist stuff on pandemics do in the actual pandemic?

If, as I suspect, it was of no benefit, it belongs in the same pile as hindering the acasualrobotgod.

Every server is great.

If a server is wasted,

Acasualrobotgod gets quite irate!

I did jiu-jitsu In middle school. We had two guys who were perhaps about 20 years old as assistant coaches. Pretty impressive belt colours and to us kids really cool and good at jiu-jitsu. I don't remember their names, lets call them Jim and Peter.

So nearing the end of a class Jim and Peter gathers us for a bit of pep talk. Jim: Good work everybody! Peter: We will soon end class, but first one thing... Jim: No? No, that was the last thing? Peter: Everyone, get Jim! Jim: What? No!

And I can tell you Jim was no match for two dozen ten year olds with white belts.

Soviets were in theory democratic councils but were in practice ruled top-down (except in the very beginning, according to Emma Goldman in her book "My two years in Russia"). So I don't think there is much similarity there.

On the other hand, charter cities are according to Wikipedia essentially areas where a more advanced economy "helps" a third world country by "temporarily" taking over governance to develope the area. In other words: a colony.

And in the historical part of their video I missed the other parts of the industrial revolution. You know the taking over other countries to get cheap raw materials, cheap labour and captive markets. Surely just an oversight that they forgot to mention how colonialism has worked before and its role in why poor countries are poor.

Isn't "pandemic preparation" one of their longtermist causes that they grift money to? Shouldn't they have been able to show some results?

I think funding and repetition are the fundamental building blocs here, rather than the human psyche itself. I have talked with otherwise bright people who have read an article by some journalist (not necessarily a rationalist) who has interviewed AI researchers (probably cultists, was it 500 million USD that was pumped into the network?) who takes AI doom seriously.

So you have two steps of people who in theory are paid to evaluate and formulate the truth, to inform readers who don't know the subject matter. And then add repetition from various directions and people get convinced that there is definitely something there (propaganda and commercials work the same way). Claiming that it's all nonsense and cultists appears not to have much effect.

I have been meaning to ask is there an overlap between rationalists and incels? Or do they both overlap with neoreactionaries?

At times their idea world appears close to each other.

Poetic description of normal weather in Finland.

Also, if you think either of these are true:

Lab Leaks Common: There is a 33% chance of a lab-leak-caused pandemic per decade. Lab Leaks Rare: There is a 10% chance of a lab-leak-caused pandemic per decade.

You should probably be campaigning to increase safety or shut down the labs you think would be responsible. 10% risk of pandemic per decade due to lab leaks (so in addition to viruses mutating on their own) isn't rare or an acceptable risk.