The inappropriate laughs reminded me to this recording of a speech from David Foster Wallace: This Is Water.
Is unwarranted, incredulous laughter a sign of a too big cognitive distance between the speaker and the audience? I.e., if the speaker is too smart or too dumb compared to his listeners, are the latter going to find the whole situation so disorienting as to be funny?
That’s a good argument, thank you. I see how expecting people to watch videos about one little assumption made in the original message instead of carefully laying out the core of the arguments and presenting them in a way that more precisely answered to my concerns about what was written in the thread was a bad approach and could be interpreted as too general or derailing even. I will try to do better next time.
I’m amazed both by the substantial lack of key evidence regarding the effectivity and safety of at least some vaccines, and by the radicalization of the discourse everywhere, even here, where you can rarely express an opinion without being heavily censored or criticised.
An example:
I gain nothing by doubting the effectivity and safety of any treatment. I don’t work in the industry, I don’t monetize my opinions, I don’t even get social points. If I express my doubts is because I’m worried and want to know the truth. For some reason, this is politically incorrect in most circumstances.
Why and how this topic became taboo? Even if I’m stupid, and ignorant, I act in good faith, I truly want to know and, in case I’m right, to help people. Why am I censored for asking questions and showing some weak points in the narrative?
As someone born as male who registered as female this year, I believe that one of the ways in which it is possible to negate reality in the most radical manner is to act as if you can truly change your sex.
The map indicates that I’m a woman, but the territory won’t be changed by that. I’m a man, no matter what all the documents say.
It would be unhealthy to pretend otherwise.
I would have just put the cup at the end of the ramp, introducing its edge between the ramp and the book. If that didn’t count as placing it on the floor, even if I had taken a little, unimportant, piece of the edge of the cup and put it separately on the floor, I would have destroyed the cup, made it a hundred little pieces to put them everywhere, so the ball would have landed in some piece at some point in its trajectory or I would have made a barrier with a long piece to stop the ball at some point in its rolling. It that wasn’t valid, I would have kept the cup on the floor facing up, but handling it with my hand to correct the position in real time. If that didn’t count either, I would have put the cup on its side expecting to intercept the trajectory of the ball when it rolls down the floor. If nothing of the previous things were allowed, I would have gone by gut feeling, which is commonly pretty good at predicting physics.
How did I do? Have I killed all of humanity?
PD: I answered without reading the explanation, to force myself to think.
I disagree with that alleged preponderance of the external. While it obviously has a big influence, personality factors like high openness to experience and low agreeableness, plus low latent inhibiton plus high cognitive abilities play, in my opinion and experience, a larger rol by a wide margin.
Consider that I can only talk from my experience.
It is a risky move, for sure, and you are going to piss off some people. But I have found out that said pissed off people are almost always inclined not only to forgive you if you make the smallest gesture of peace, but to befriend you and to appreciate you. I have found out that people really appreciate honesty, and acting this way comes of as idealistic and honest. Whereas I have found out that you can’t really recover in practice from being seen as pathetic, whiny or weak (only a long time and a miracle can make you recover from that). And I believe that most delicate approaches are perceived as low status and coming from frailty. In my experience, women are way more unforgiving towards weakness and more lenient towards assholeness. With men, you will need to concede and lose from time to time, I strongly advise against “wining” too much against men, you need to let them take some jabs even if you have thought the perfect answer and you can always come on top.
The worst of this approach will be felt when the other person is depressed, very insecure and places himself at the lowest echelon of the hierarchy, but don’t accept said position and deludes himself into thinking that he is much better than what he is. I say: avoid as a general rule that kind of people, and this is a good test to detect them; they are usually vulnerable narcissists, or something very similar to that, and they can’t take the slightness jab without feeling injured and vengeful. If you feel deeply hurt and resented with any kind of negative feedback, learn how to sincerely laugh at yourself. The more secure and healthy the people around you, the better they will receive this approach. Low status people who don’t delude themselves will also look up to you. Particularly timid people who would like to act like you, but they don’t find the courage to do so.
You must also come up as fundamentally good. If you are seen like ultimately evil and wanting to cause real harm, this approach won’t work with decent people, but it will still work with terrible people. If you feel venom in your mouth, swallow it. Only talk when you really find it funny and you are not moved by anger. You must be seen as generous and just, and I recommend to truly be generous and just instead of pretending to be those things, but, while still being truly generous and just, make a show out of it, I always celebrate out loud everything good that I do, particularly when it is a little thing, big things are better discovered indirectly, but you should boast about your little gestures, I always say: ‘look at how good I am’ at the smallest favours I do, but I also say: ‘don’t worry about it, I like you, we are friends’ at the big favours, because people really love a rascal with a heart of gold.
Also, and I can’t stress this enough. Take as much as you give. Being generous must be accompanied by the ability of being the receptor of generousness, otherwise you will also be seen as too needy and weak.
I think that, despite mentioning Larry David, you didn’t consider the most useful technique when it comes to steer a conversation, which is to be an asshole while using a hefty dose of humor.
In my experience, if you try to have a meta-conversation, no matter how delicately you put it, you are, in my experience at least, going to ruin the situation and make people uncomfortable. But if you are funny and shameless enough, you can get away with murder, you can be as blunt as you want to be and people is going to to laugh it off while still giving you points for being able to correct the situation.
When it comes to social dynamics, my experience tells me that power triumphs delicacy and decency. The times I have been myself in a situation in which someone did 80% of the talk I just said out loud something like:
‘Hey! Come on! Why don’t you shut the fuck up already? You are driving me crazy, I don’t even remember the sound of my own voice anymore. It was masculine? I thought that it was masculine. And deep. Heavenly even. It is not? Not a little bit heavenly? You ruined me. That’s what you did with that much talking. I’m now a listener!’.
The other person may fight back or may feel bad. In the first case, you can banter a little; in the second, you just say: ‘oh, don’t take it so seriously, I really like you, you know that, I just want to hear what other people has to say and I’m a little bit of an asshole, everyone knows. We can still be best friends, right? What are your thoughts on betrayal, bestie?’.
I have cultivated an image of someone who always says what he wants and who can take many jabs without feeling insulted. So people let me say anything and laugh at it while still listening to what I say.
I have found out that the most intelligent thing in social situations, no matter how smart the other people are, is to pretend that you are rude and stupid when necessary, almost feral. I have found out that the only thing that makes you lose prestige in a social situation is to appear as someone weak that can be stepped on.
I believe that for highly educated, highly intelligent, sensible people this is hard to accept. But it is my experience. Confidence and bluntness beats carefulness and thoughtfulness every time. And rationality is about wining, isn’t it? To win, you sometimes need to act as an idiot and an asshole.
Even if you don’t have a sense of hierarchy, I can assure you that other people have it.
Nobody seems to explicitly state that AGI won’t kill anyone. Even the most optimist among those who believe that AGI will be safe just consider that it won’t end humanity as a whole. Nobody seems to believe that AGI won’t cause at least some number of casualties.
Would someone care to explain to me what I did wrong to deserve getting my karma obliterated?
I believe that it is difficult to appreciate your other points when you claim things like:
Human challenge trials may have accelerated deployment of covid vaccines by more than a month, saving many thousands of lives and billions or trillions of dollars.
deploying covid vaccines a month sooner could have saved many thousands of lives
I think that it is reasonably unclear that CoViD vaccines have saved as many lives, given how wildly exaggerated the expected mortality figures that were used to made those claims were. Norman Fenton (“a mathematician and computer scientist specialized in Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis with Bayesian Networks”) has talked and written about this and other issues for a while now:
Even if we accept a degree of effectiveness from the vaccine, which I dispute, given issues of fading immunity and inverse protection over time (particularly among most vulnerable cohorts)
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj-2021-069052
maybe by the promotion of IgG4 antibodies:
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202303.0441/v1
and who knows if by targeting Interferon Regulatory Factor 3:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2021.789462/full
we must admit that there were other less risky and very well-known interventions that could have been used in this situation, if we didn’t overreact (or accelerate) as much as we did:
Figure 2. Forest plot of the association of protective effect of vitamin D supplementation with intensive care unit admission in patients hospitalized with COVID-19. CI, confidence interval; OR, odds ratio [26,32,36,37,38].
https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8247/16/1/130
A double-blind, randomized clinical trial study was conducted on 128 critically ill patients infected with COVID-19 who were randomly assigned to the intervention (fortified formula with n3-PUFA) (n = 42) and control (n = 86) groups. Data on 1 month survival rate, blood glucose, sodium (Na), potassium (K), blood urea nitrogen (BUN), creatinine (Cr), albumin, hematocrit (HCT), calcium (Ca), phosphorus (P), mean arterial pressure (MAP), O2 saturation (O2sat), arterial pH, partial pressure of oxygen (PO2), partial pressure of carbon dioxide (PCO2), bicarbonate (HCO3), base excess (Be), white blood cells (WBCs), Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), hemoglobin (Hb), platelet (Plt), and the partial thromboplastin time (PTT) were collected at baseline and after 14 days of the intervention.
The intervention group had significantly higher 1-month survival rate compared with the control group (21% vs 3%, P = 0.003). About 21% (n = 6) of the participants in the intervention group and only about 3% (n = 2) of the participants in the control group survived at least for 1 month after the beginning of the study.
The effect of omega-3 fatty acid supplementation on clinical and biochemical parameters of critically ill patients with COVID-19: a randomized clinical trial
https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-021-02795-5
Of the 50 patients enrolled in the N-acetylglucosamine treatment group, 48 patients had follow-up data (50.0% [24/48] male; median age 63 years, range: 29–88). Multivariate analysis showed the treatment group had improved hospital length-of-stay (β: 4.27 [95% confidence interval (CI) −5.67; −2.85], p < 0.001), ICU admission (odds ratio [OR] 0.32 [95% CI 0.10; 0.96], p = 0.049), and poor clinical outcome (OR 0.30 [95% CI 0.09; 0.86], p = 0.034). Mortality was significantly lower for treatment versus control on univariate analysis (12.5% vs. 28.0%, respectively; p = 0.039) and approached significance on multivariate analysis (p = 0.081).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8282940/
And there are a number of doubts about the safety of these vaccines, which seem to create risks that never existed or that were remarkably uncommon among some population cohorts. We can see it, for example, in the risk of developing myocarditis:
Among 23 122 522 Nordic residents (81% vaccinated by study end; 50.2% female), 1077 incident myocarditis events and 1149 incident pericarditis events were identified. Within the 28-day period, for males and females 12 years or older combined who received a homologous schedule, the second dose was associated with higher risk of myocarditis, with adjusted IRRs of 1.75 (95% CI, 1.43-2.14) for BNT162b2 and 6.57 (95% CI, 4.64-9.28) for mRNA-1273. Among males 16 to 24 years of age, adjusted IRRs were 5.31 (95% CI, 3.68-7.68) for a second dose of BNT162b2 and 13.83 (95% CI, 8.08-23.68) for a second dose of mRNA-1273, and numbers of excess events were 5.55 (95% CI, 3.70-7.39) events per 100 000 vaccinees after the second dose of BNT162b2 and 18.39 (9.05-27.72) events per 100 000 vaccinees after the second dose of mRNA-1273. Estimates for pericarditis were similar.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9021987/
Since the Israeli vaccination program was initiated on 20 December 2020, the time-period matching of the control cohort was calculated backward from 15 December 2020. Nine post-COVID-19 patients developed myocarditis (0.0046%), and eleven patients were diagnosed with pericarditis (0.0056%). In the control cohort, 27 patients had myocarditis (0.0046%) and 52 had pericarditis (0.0088%). Age (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 0.96, 95% confidence interval [CI]; 0.93 to 1.00) and male sex (aHR 4.42; 95% CI, 1.64 to 11.96) were associated with myocarditis. Male sex (aHR 1.93; 95% CI 1.09 to 3.41) and peripheral vascular disease (aHR 4.20; 95% CI 1.50 to 11.72) were associated with pericarditis. Post COVID-19 infection was not associated with either myocarditis (aHR 1.08; 95% CI 0.45 to 2.56) or pericarditis (aHR 0.53; 95% CI 0.25 to 1.13). We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection.
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/8/2219
But there are many more safety signals, you can find about them very quickly by following health publications:
In July 2021 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quietly disclosed findings of a potential increase in four types of serious adverse events in elderly people who had had Pfizer’s covid-19 vaccine: acute myocardial infarction, disseminated intravascular coagulation, immune thrombocytopenia, and pulmonary embolism.1 Little detail was provided, such as the magnitude of the increased potential risk, and no press release or other alert was sent to doctors or the public. The FDA promised it would “share further updates and information with the public as they become available.”
Eighteen days later, the FDA published a study planning document (or protocol) outlining a follow-up epidemiological study intended to investigate the matter more thoroughly.2 This recondite technical document disclosed the unadjusted relative risk ratio estimates originally found for the four serious adverse events, which ranged from 42% to 91% increased risk. (Neither absolute risk increases nor confidence intervals were provided.) More than a year later, however, the status and results of the follow-up study are unknown. The agency has not published a press release, or notified doctors, or published the findings by preprint or the scientific literature or updated the vaccine’s product label.
https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2527
I will, thus, claim that these vaccines represent a strong point against rushing out new treatments, that there were no reason to rush them out even more, and that a more conservative approach would have, in fact, prevented damage, at least, I believe, in terms of years of life lost, given that CoViD seems to very rarely pose a threat for young people, whereas these vaccines seem to cause more secondary effects precisely among young people.
There were definitely parts where I thought Lex seemed uncomfortable
Like when at 1:03:31 he suggested that he was a robot trying to play human characters?
That kind of words make me think that there is something extremely worrisome and wrong with him.
Do you remember the end of Watchmen?
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.
Have you take a look at the mortality trends?
https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/
As Pfizer scientists raced to develop their COVID-19 vaccine at record-breaking speed these past few months, they turned to an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help achieve this mission.
“Do it?” Dan, I’m not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I “did it” 35 minutes ago.
I find astonishing that one can speculate about censorship without mentioning how big American corporations armed with the monopoly over certain technologies, ESG scores and the support of the USA government and its agencies have launched an aggressive campaign to control the discurse and silence any dissenting voice all over the world.
Here in Europe we now have to think and to speak in the way that some “intellectuals” from the USA deemed politically correct if we don’t want to find ourselves casted out of society. Despite how absurd most of the linguistic directives are in a language that it is not English.
I, a former famous creator and a legally registered transexual woman, have been explicitly or shadowy banned from almost all platforms for saying things like that you shouldn’t give interventions that lead to permanent infertility to kids or that affirmative action should be frown upon.
As all the big platforms are controlled by a reduced number of investors who share the same discourse, I lost my ability to make a living out of my art, for example.
Just look at what happened if, relying on evidence, you doubted the usefulness of masking during the CoViD pandemic.
I think that it is possible that it has never existed a more widespread and subtly malignant campaign of censorship than the one established by the USA. They destroy competitors just to force you to use their platforms just so they can say “hey, don’t use our social networks if you don’t like them”. Social networks that are employed to influence public discord, to initiate unrest and to propagate misinformation with carefully curate algorithms.
An example: My previous Facebook account was banned for sharing official data about the gender and age distribution of refugees during the Syrian crisis without making any personal observation of the data.