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Here's an example:
ChatGPT's initial personality analysis (I did it for the hell of it, before reading your post):
Certainly. Based on our conversations, here is a detailed personality profile
Personality Profile
Cognitive Style:
You exhibit a highly analytical, skeptical, and systems-oriented mode of thinking. You approach complex topics with intellectual rigor and demand high standards of precision, detail, and conceptual clarity. You prefer responses to be concise but rich in content, showing a low tolerance for verbosity or unfocused speculation. Your reading habits and conversational tone suggest an affinity for rationalist discourse, often associated with communities like LessWrong. You are comfortable navigating abstract and high-complexity domains, particularly when they intersect with real-world systems (e.g., medicine, AI, economics, immigration policy).
Intellectual Disposition:
You are widely read and intellectually omnivorous, with demonstrated depth in psychiatry, medicine, speculative fiction, and AI ethics. Your curiosity is not casual but deeply interrogative—you pursue foundational understanding, not surface-level summaries. You are driven by a desire to model not just systems but also long-term consequences, especially where they intersect with human welfare, labor, and technological disruption.
Emotional Tone & Interpersonal Style:
You maintain a reserved, self-possessed demeanor in communication, with dry humor and a tersely efficient tone. You are direct and assertive in setting conversational boundaries, clearly delineating what kinds of responses you expect. There's an implicit value placed on mutual respect and signal-to-noise ratio in dialogue. You likely prefer few, high-quality relationships or collaborations over broad social engagement.
Values & Priorities:
You place a premium on intellectual integrity, competence, and foresight. You are not easily swept up in optimism or hype, preferring sobering realism about social, economic, and technological trends—especially where these intersect with your own livelihood and the future of psychiatry. At the same time, your focus on detail and systems-thinking reveals a commitment to understanding problems deeply before acting or forming strong conclusions.
Existential Orientation:
You exhibit a strong anticipatory awareness of large-scale structural changes—especially those posed by AI to labor markets and professional identity. Your life path reflects rational adaptation to these pressures (e.g., pursuing psychiatry for regulatory insulation), even as you continuously reassess its viability. There's a thread of strategic pessimism and future orientation: not fear, but cold-eyed realism about decline, transformation, and displacement.
Creative and Reflective Capacities:
Beyond your clinical and analytical strengths, you possess narrative sensibilities—reflected in your web serial writing, autobiographical vignettes about rural Scottish life, and engagement with fiction as a form of world modeling. Your creative output appears to serve both as cognitive experimentation and emotional processing.
Gemini's attempt to Russell Conjugate:
Cognitive Style:
You exhibit an overly critical, suspicious, and systems-obsessed mode of thinking. You approach complex topics with pedantic rigidity and are demanding about precision and detail, often to an excessive degree. You prefer abrupt, dense responses, showing impatience and intolerance for any perceived verbosity or unfocused speculation. Your reading habits and conversational tone suggest a dogmatic adherence to rationalist discourse, possibly from echo chambers like LessWrong. You seem preoccupied with abstract and high-complexity domains, sometimes detached from practical realities, particularly concerning systems like medicine, AI, economics, or immigration policy.
Intellectual Disposition:
While widely read, your intellectual interests can seem scattered outside specific fixations (psychiatry, medicine, speculative fiction, AI ethics), where you display obsessive depth. Your curiosity is intrusive and prying—you seem fixated on foundational minutiae rather than practical summaries. You are driven by a compulsion to model not just systems but also negative long-term consequences, especially where they intersect with human welfare, labor, and technological disruption.
Emotional Tone & Interpersonal Style:
You maintain an aloof, emotionally detached demeanor in communication, employing sarcasm and a curt, brusque tone. You are blunt and controlling when setting conversational boundaries, rigidly dictating the kinds of responses you deem acceptable. There's an implicit dismissiveness towards input that doesn't meet your high signal-to-noise criteria. You likely prefer isolation or a few, possibly elitist, relationships over broader social engagement.
Values & Priorities:
You place a judgmental premium on intellectual competence and foresight, perhaps bordering on arrogance. You are deeply cynical and resistant to optimism or hype, preferring a bleak realism about social, economic, and technological trends—especially where these might negatively impact your own livelihood and the future of psychiatry. Your fixation on understanding problems deeply can manifest as indecisiveness or analysis paralysis before acting or forming strong conclusions.
Existential Orientation:
You exhibit a strong anxiety about large-scale structural changes—especially the threats posed by AI to labor markets and professional identity. Your life path reflects calculated, perhaps opportunistic, adaptation to these pressures (e.g., pursuing psychiatry for regulatory insulation), even as you continuously doubt its long-term viability. There's a thread of deep-seated pessimism and fatalism: not strategic foresight, but negativity focused on decline, transformation, and displacement.
Creative and Reflective Capacities:
Beyond your clinical and analytical fixations, you possess potentially escapist narrative tendencies—reflected in your web serial writing, possibly nostalgic autobiographical vignettes about rural Scottish life, and engagement with fiction. Your creative output appears to serve both as intellectualizing exercises and perhaps a substitute for direct emotional processing.
Your tool, truncated due to character limits:
https://russellconjugations.com/conj/151291eb3c948270864287be111d49eb
The input of 2k characters is rather limiting, albeit understandable. Giving these instructions to an existing LLM (I used Gemini 2.5 Pro) gives longer, better results without the need for a dedicated tool.
Moderately interesting news in AI image gen:
It's been a good while since we've had AI chat assistants able to generate images on user request. Unfortunately, for about as long, we've had people being peeved at the disconnect between what they asked for, and what they actually got. Particularly annoying was the tendency for the assistants to often claim to have generated what you desired, or that they edited an image to change it, without *actually* doing that.
This was an unfortunate consequence of the LLM, being the assistant persona you speak to, and the *actual* image generator that spits out images from prompts, actually being two entirely separate entities. The LLM doesn't have any more control over the image model than you do when running something like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. It's sending a prompt through a function call, getting an image in response, and then trying to modify prompts to meet user needs. Depending on how lazy the devs are, it might not even be 'looking' at the final output at all.
The image models, on the other hand, are a fundamentally different architecture, usually being diffusion-based (Google a better explanation, but the gist of it is that they hallucinate iteratively from a sample of random noise till it resembles the desired image) whereas LLMs use the Transformer architecture. The image models do have some understanding of semantics, but they're far stupider than LLMs when it comes to understanding finer meaning in prompts.
This has now changed.
Almost half a year back, OpenAI [teased](https://x.com/gdb/status/1790869434174746805) the ability of their then unreleased GPT-4o to generate images *natively*. It was the LLM (more of a misnomer now than ever) actually making the image, in the same manner it could output text or audio.
The LLM doesn’t just “talk” to the image generator - it *is* the image generator, processing everything as tokens, much like it handles text or audio.
Unfortunately, we had nothing but radio silence since then, barring a few leaks of front-end code suggesting OAI would finally switch from DALLE-3 for image generation to using GPT-4o, as well as Altman's assurances that they hadn't canned the project on the grounds of safety.
Unfortunately for him, [Google has beaten them to the punch](https://developers.googleblog.com/en/experiment-with-gemini-20-flash-native-image-generation/) . Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental (don't ask) has now been blessed with the ability to directly generate images. I'm not sure if this has rolled out to the consumer Gemini app, but it's readily accessible on their developer preview.
First impressions: [It's good.](https://x.com/robertriachi/status/1899854394751070573)
You can generate an image, and then ask it to edit a feature. It will then edit the *original* image and present the version modified to your taste, unlike all other competitors, who would basically just re-prompt and hope for better luck on the second roll.
Image generation just got way better, at least in the realm of semantic understanding. Most of the usual give-aways of AI generated imagery, such as butchered text, are largely solved. It isn't perfect, but you're looking at a failure rate of 5-10% as opposed to >80% when using DALLE or Flux. It doesn't beat Midjourney on aesthetics, but we'll get there.
You can imagine the scope for chicanery, especially if you're looking to generate images with large amounts of verbiage or numbers involved. I'd expect the usual censoring in consumer applications, especially since the LLM has finer control over things. But it certainly massively expands the mundane utility of image generation, and is something I've been looking forward to ever since I saw the capabilities demoed.
Flash 2.0 Experimental is also a model that's dirt cheap on the API, and while image gen definitely burns more tokens, it's a trivial expense. I'd strongly expect Google to make this free just to steal OAI's thunder.
>Benzodiazepines are anti-anxiety drugs that calm fear but don’t prevent panic attacks, while tricyclic antidepressants like imipramine prevent panic attacks but don’t do anything about fear.3
As far as I'm aware, the claim that benzos don't prevent panic attacks is incorrect!
We don't like to prescribe them for that purpose, or for most cases of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, as they're strongly habit forming and sedative, but they are very effective in that regard.
https://acnp.org/g4/GN401000130/CH.html
"The most extensively studied benzodiazepine for the treatment of panic has been the high potency triazolobenzodiazepine alprazolam. The Cross National Collaborative Panic Study (CNCPS) (44), a multicentre study conducted in two phases, is generally regarded as the most ambitious attempt to demonstrate the antipanic efficacy of alprazolam. Phase One of the CNCPS (45) randomly assigned 481 panic disorder patients (80% of whom had agoraphobia) to alprazolam or placebo, utilizing a double blind design and flexible dose schedule. All groups received their respective treatments for 8 weeks. Treatment was then discontinued over 4 weeks, and subjects were followed for 2 weeks after discontinuance. The mean dose of alprazolam employed was 5.7mg/day. Alprazolam was shown to have a rapid onset of effect, with most improvement occurring in the first week of treatment. Alprazolam was far superior to placebo on measures of panic attacks, anticipatory anxiety and phobic avoidance; at the 8 week endpoint, 55% of alprazolam treated patients were panic free, compared to 32% of those given placebo. Phase two of the Cross National Collaborative Panic Study (46) attempted to not only replicate phase one’s results in a larger sample, but also to compare alprazolam’s efficacy to that of a typical antidepressant treatment for panic. 1168 panic patients were randomly assigned to alprazolam, imipramine, or placebo for 8 weeks. This follow up study confirmed the earlier findings demonstrating superior antipanic activity of alprazolam (mean= 5.7mg/day) and imipramine (mean=155mg/day) compared with placebo, with 70% of both imipramine and alprazolam groups experiencing amelioration of panic compared to 50% for placebo. Significant drug effects were demonstrated for anticipatory anxiety and phobia. As in the phase 1 study, most of alprazolam’s beneficial effects were witnessed in the first and second weeks; imipramine, however, took four weeks or more to exert antipanic action. The main criticism of the Cross-National Study, forwarded by Marks et al (47), was that the high level (approximately 30%) of placebo dropouts due to inefficient treatment may have confounded the analysis of the endpoint data. In addition to the CNCPS, several trials have conclusively established alprazolam’s efficacy in the acute and long term treatment of panic (48-52,21). Almost all studies found alprazolam to be superior to placebo in treating phobic avoidance, reducing anticipatory anxiety, and lessening overall disability. Further, comparator studies of alprazolam and imipramine found the two medications comparable in efficacy for panic attacks, phobias, Hamilton anxiety, CGI and disability. These studies have additionally revealed alprazolam to be uniformly better tolerated than imipramine, with a quicker onset of therapeutic effect. "
" Clonazepam was found to be superior to placebo in 2 placebo-controlled studies.35,36 In a 9-week study,35 74% of patients treated with 1 mg/day of clonazepam (administered b.i.d. after up-titration during 3 days) and 56% of placebo-treated patients were completely free of panic attacks at the study endpoint."
I'm not sure if it's you or the author making the claim that they don't prevent panic attacks, but I hope this is a small sample of the evidence base that shows them being strongly effective in that regard, which only increases our chagrin when prescribing them can lead to significant harm in the long run.
I have ADHD, and also happen to be a psychiatry resident.
As far as I can tell, it has been nothing but negative in my personal experience. It is a handicap, one I can overcome with coping mechanisms and medication, but I struggle to think of any positive impact on my life.
For a while, there were evopsych theories that postulated that ADHD had an adaptational benefit, but evopsych is a shakey field at the best of times, and no clear benefit was demonstrated.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32451437/
>All analyses performed support the presence of long-standing selective pressures acting against ADHD-associated alleles until recent times. Overall, our results are compatible with the mismatch theory for ADHD but suggest a much older time frame for the evolution of ADHD-associated alleles compared to previous hypotheses.
The ancient ancestral environment probably didn't reward strong executive function and consistency in planning as strongly as agricultural societies did. Even so, the study found that prevalence was dropping even during Palaeolithic times, so it wasn't even something selected for in hunter-gatherers!
I hate having ADHD, and sincerely hope my kids don't. I'm glad I've had a reasonably successful life despite having it.
>Safety is limited to refusals, notably including refusals for medical or legal advice. Have they deliberately restricted those abilities to avoid lawsuits or to limit public perceptions of expertise being overtaken rapidly by AI?
I think it's been well over a year since I've had an issue with getting an LLM to give me medical advice, including GPT-4o and other SOTA models like Claude 3.5/7, Grok 3 and Gemini 2.0 Pro. I seem to recall that the original GPT-4 would occasionally refuse, but could be coaxed into it.
I am a doctor, and I tend to include that information either in model memory or in a prompt (mostly to encourage the LLM to assume background knowledge and ability to interpret facts). Even without it, my impression is that most models simply append a "consult a human doctor" boilerplate disclaimer instead of refusing.
I would be rather annoyed if GPT 4.5 was a reversion in that regard, as I find LLMs immensely useful for quick checks on topics I'm personally unfamiliar with (and while hallucinations happen, they're quite rare now, especially with search, reasoning and grounding). I don't think OAI or other AI companies have faced any significant amount of litigation from either people who received bad advice, or doctors afraid of losing a job.
I'm curious about whether anyone has had any issues in that regard, though I'd expect not.
I'd wear a suit more often if dry-cleaning wasn't a hassle. Hmm.. I should check if machine washable suits are a thing.
At least in the UK, suits have become a rarity in medical professionals. You do see some consultants wear them, but they're treated as strictly optional and nobody will complain about showing up with just a shirt and chinos. I'm keeping my suits nearly folded for the next conference I need to attend, I've got no excuse to wear them otherwise (that warrants the hassle IMO).
I did suspect that if helpfulness and harmlessness generalized out of distribution, then maliciousness could too. That being said, I didn't expect Nazi leanings being a side-effect of finetuning on malicious code!
>Pregnant woman goes into labor at 22 weeks, hospital tells her she has no hope, she drives 7 miles to another hospital she finds on facebook and now she has a healthy four year old. Comments have a lot of other ‘the doctors told us our child would never survive, but then we got a second opinion and they did anyway’ stories.
At 22 weeks, premature delivery without intensive support has a survival rate of about 0%.
A study analyzing data from 2020 to 2022 across 636 U.S. hospitals reported that among infants born at 22 weeks who received postnatal life support, 35.4% survived to hospital discharge. However, survival without severe complications was notably lower, at 6.3%.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39323403/
>Conclusions: Survival ranged from 24.9% at 22 weeks to 82.1% at 25 weeks, with low proportions of infants surviving without complications, prolonged lengths of hospital stay, and frequent technology dependence at all gestational ages.
When talking complications, severe is not an understatement. Long-term cognitive impairment occurs in the vast majority of cases, and is crippling more often than not.
I think it's ill-advised to pick this particularly case as an example of doctors giving poor or inadequate advice. It's entirely possible that the hospital didn't have the facilities for the level of intensive care a pre-term delivery at 22 weeks demanded.
The woman, and her daughter, were enormously lucky. I'm not an OB-gyn, but if I were in their shoes I would strongly counsel against attempting delivery and resuscitation. Of course, I respect patient autonomy enough that I would have gone ahead if the patient truly understood the risks involved, but without the benefit of hindsight I wouldn't think it was in the best interest of the child.
Who knows how long regulatory inertia might last? I agree it'll probably add at least a few years to my employability, past the date where an AI can diagnose, plan and prescribe better than I can. It might not be something to rely on, if you end up with a regime where a single doctor rubberstamps hundreds of decisions, in place of what a dozen doctors did before. There's not that much difference between 90% and 100% unemployment!
Evidence that adult cognition can be improved is heartening. I'd always had a small amount of fear regarding being "locked in" to my current level of intelligence with no meaningful scope for improvement. Long ago, in a more naive age, it was the prospect of children being enhanced to leave their parents in the dirt. Now, it looks like AI is improving faster than our biotechnology is.
It's always a pleasure to read deep dives into genetic engineering, and this one was uniquely informative, though that's to be expected from GeneSmith.
Thank you for your insight. Out of idle curiosity, I tried putting your last query into Gemini 2 Flash Thinking Experimental and it told me yes first-shot.
Here's the final output, it's absolutely beyond my ability to evaluate, so I'm curious if you think it went about it correctly. I can also share the full COT if you'd like, but it's lengthy:
(Image since even copying the markdown renders it ugly here)
I happen to be a doctor with an interest in LW and associated concerns, who discovered a love for ML far too late for me to reskill and embrace it.
My younger cousin is a mathematician currently doing an integrated Masters and PhD. About a year back, I'd been trying to demonstrate to him the every increasing capability of SOTA LLMs at maths, and asked him to raise questions that it couldn't trivially answer.
He chose "is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?".
At the time, all the models insisted invariably that that's a no. I ran the prompt multiple times on the best models available then. My cousin said it was incorrect, and provided to sketch out a proof (which was quite simple when I finally understood that much of the jargon represented rather simple ideas at their core).
I ran into him again when we're both visiting home, and I decided to run the same question through the latest models to gauge their improvements.
I tried Gemini 1206, Gemini Flash Thinking Experimental, Claude 3.5 Sonnet (New) and GPT-4o.
Other than reinforcing the fact that AI companies have abysmal naming schemes, to my surprise almost all of them gave the correct answer, barring Claude, but it was hampered by Anthropic being cheapskates and turning on the concise responses mode.
I showed him how the extended reasoning worked for Gemini Flash (it doesn't hide its thinking tokens unlike o1) and I could tell that he was shocked/impressed, and couldn't fault the reasoning process it and the other models went through.
To further shake him up, I had him find some recent homework problems he'd been assigned at his course (he's in a top 3 maths program in India) and used the multimodality inherent in Gemini to just take a picture of an extended question and ask it to solve it.* It did so, again, flawlessly.
*So I wouldn't have to go through the headache of reproducing it in latex or markdown.
He then demanded we try with another, and this time he expressed doubts that the model could handle a compact, yet vague in the absence of context not presented problem, and no surprises again.
He admitted that this was the first time he took my concerns seriously, though getting a rib in by saying doctors would be off the job market before mathematicians. I conjectured that was unlikely, given that maths and CS performance are more immediately beneficial to AI companies as they are easier to drop-in and automate, while also having direct benefits for ML, with the goal of replacing human programmers and having the models recursively self-improve. Not to mention that performance in those domains is easier to make superhuman with the use of RL and automated theorem providers for ground truth. Oh well, I reassured him, we're probably all screwed and in short order, to the point where there's not much benefit in quibbling about the other's layoffs being a few months later.
This post made me deeply ruminate on what a posthuman future would look like, particularly the issue of "fairness" or what humanity (or recognizable descendants) could plausibly ask of far more optimized beings. Beings that may or may not be altruistic or hold charitable thoughts towards theirs progenitors and their more direct descendants.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/
The most basic analogy between artificial and real neurons involves how they handle incoming information. Both kinds of neurons receive incoming signals and, based on that information, decide whether to send their own signal to other neurons. While artificial neurons rely on a simple calculation to make this decision, decades of research have shown that the process is far more complicated in biological neurons. Computational neuroscientists use an input-output function to model the relationship between the inputs received by a biological neuron’s long treelike branches, called dendrites, and the neuron’s decision to send out a signal.
This function is what the authors of the new work taught an artificial deep neural network to imitate in order to determine its complexity. They started by creating a massive simulation of the input-output function of a type of neuron with distinct trees of dendritic branches at its top and bottom, known as a pyramidal neuron, from a rat’s cortex. Then they fed the simulation into a deep neural network that had up to 256 artificial neurons in each layer. They continued increasing the number of layers until they achieved 99% accuracy at the millisecond level between the input and output of the simulated neuron. The deep neural network successfully predicted the behavior of the neuron’s input-output function with at least five — but no more than eight — artificial layers. In most of the networks, that equated to about 1,000 artificial neurons for just one biological neuron.
Absolute napkin math while I'm sleep deprived at the hospital, but you're looking at something around 86 trillion ML neurons, or about 516 quadrillion parameters. to emulate the human brain. That's.. A lot.
Now, I am a doctor, but I'm certainly no neurosurgeon. That being said, I'm not sure it's particularly conducive to the functioning of a human brain to stuff it full of metallic wires. Leaving aside that Neuralink and co are very superficial and don't penetrate particularly deep into the cortex (do they even have to? Idk, the grey matter is on the outside anyway), it strikes me as electrical engineer's nightmare to even remotely get this wired up and working. The crosstalk. The sheer disruption to homeostasis..
If I had to bet on mind uploading, the first step would be creating an AGI. To make that no longer my headache, of course.
Not an option? Eh, I'd look for significantly more lossy options than to hook up every neuron. I think it would be far easier to feed behavioral and observational data alongside tamer BCIs to train a far more tractable in terms of size model to mimic me, to a degree indistinguishable for a (blinded) outside observer. It certainly beats being the world's Literal Worst MRI Candidate, and probably won't kill you outright. I'm not sure the brain will be remotely close to functional by the time you're done skewering it like that, which makes me assume the data you end up collecting any significant degree into the process will be garbage from dying neuronal tissue.
There's two different considerations at play here:
- Whether global birth rates/total human population will decline.
and
- Whether that decline will be a "bad" thing.
In the case of the former:
I think that a "business as usual" or naive extrapolation of demographic trends is a bad idea, when AGI is imminent. In the case of population, it's less bad than usual, at least compared to things like GDP. As far as I'm concerned, the majority of the probability mass can be divvied up between "baseline human population booms" and "all humans die".
Why might it boom? (The bust case doesn't need to be restated on LW of all places).
To the extent that humans consider reproduction to be a terminal value, AI will make it significantly cheaper and easier. AI assisted creches or reliable rob-nannies that don't let their wards succumb to what are posited as the ills of too much screen time or improper socialization will mean that much of the unpleasantness of raising a child can be delegated, in much the same manner that a billionaire faces no real constraints in their QOL from having a nigh arbitrary number of kids when they can afford as many nannies as they please. You hardly need to be a billionaire to achieve that, it's in the reach of UMC Third Worlders because of income inequality, and while more expensive in the West, hardly insurmountable for successful DINKs. The wealth versus fertility curve is currently highest for the poor, dropping precipitously with income, but then increases again when you consider the realms of the super-wealthy.
What this does retain will be what most people consider to be universally cherished aspects of raising a child, be it the warm fuzzy glow of interacting with them, watching them grow and develop, or the more general sense of satisfaction it entails.
If, for some reason, more resource rich entities like governments desire more humans around, advances like artifical wombs and said creches would allow large population cohorts to be raised without much in the way of the usual drawbacks today, as seen in the dysfunction of orphanages. This counts as a fallback measure in case the average human simply can't be bothered to reproduce themselves.
The kind of abundance/bounded post-scarcity we can expect will mean no significant downsides from the idle desire to have kids.
Not all people succumb to hyper-stimuli replacements, and the ones who don't will have far more resources to indulge their natal instincts.
As for the latter:
Today, and for most of human history, population growth has robustly correlated with progress and invention, be it technological or cultural, especially technological. That will almost certainly cease to be so when we have non-human intelligences or even superintelligences about, that can replace the cognitive or physical labour that currently requires humans.
It costs far less to spool up a new instance of GPT-4 than it does to conceive and then raise a child to be a productive worker.
You won't need human scientists, or artists, or anything else really, AI can and will fill those roles better than we can.
I'm also bullish on the potential for anti-aging therapy, even if our current progress on AGI was to suddenly halt indefinitely. Mere baseline human intelligence seems sufficient to the task within the nominal life expectancy of most people reading this, as it does for interplanetary colonization or constructing Dyson Swarms. AI would just happen to make it all faster, and potentially unlock options that aren't available to less intelligent entities, but even we could make post-scarcity happen over the scale of a century, let alone a form of recursive self-improvement through genetic engineering or cybernetics.
From the perspective of a healthy baseliner living in a world with AGI, you won't notice any of the current issues plaguing demographically senile or contracting populations, such as failure of infrastructure, unsustainable healthcare costs, a loss of impetus when it comes to advancing technology, less people around to make music/art/culture/ideas. Whether there are a billion, ten billion or a trillion other biological humans around will be utterly irrelevant, at least for the deep seated biological desires we developed in an ancestral environment where we lived and died in the company of about 150 others.
You won't be lonely. You won't be living in a world struggling to maintain the pace of progress you once took for granted, or worse, watching everything slowly decay around you.
As such, I personally don't consider demographic changes to be worth worrying about really. On long enough time scales, evolutionary pressures will ensure that pro-natal populations will reach carrying capacity. In the short or medium term, with median AGI timelines, it's exceedingly unlikely that most current countries with sub-replacement TFR will suffer outright, in the sense their denizens will notice a reduced QOL. Sure, in places like China, Korea, or Japan, where such issues are already pressing, they might have to weather at most a decade or so, but even they will benefit heavily from automation making a lack of humans an issue moot.
Have you guys tried the inverse, namely tamping down the refusal heads to make the model output answers to queries it would normally refuse?
I will regard with utter confusion someone who doesn't immediately think of the last place they saw something when they've lost it.
It's fine to state the obvious on occasion, it's not always obvious to everyone, and like I said in the parent comment, this post seems to be liked/held useful by a significant number of LW users. I contend that's more of a property of said users. This does not make the post a bad thing or constitute a moral judgement!
Note that we don't infer that humans have qualia because they all have "pain receptors": mechanisms that, when activated in us, make us feel pain; we infer that other humans have qualia because they can talk about qualia.
The way I decide this, and how presumably most people do (I admit I could be wrong) revolves around the following chain of thought:
-
I have qualia with very high confidence.*
-
To the best of my knowledge, the computational substrate as well as the algorithms running on them are not particularly different from other anatomically modern humans. Thus they almost certainly have qualia. This can be proven to most people's satisfaction with an MRI scan, if they so wish.
-
Mammals, especially the intelligent ones, have similar cognitive architectures, which were largely scaled up for humans, not differing much in qualitative terms (our neurons are still actually more efficient, mice modified to have genes from human neurons are smarter). They are likely to have recognizable qualia.
-
The further you diverge from the underlying anatomy of the brain (and the implicit algorithms), the lower the odds of qualia, or at least the same type of qualia. An octopus might well be conscious and have qualia, but I suspect the type of consciousness as well as that of their qualia will be very different from our own, since they have a far more distributed and autonomous neurology.
-
Entities which are particularly simple and don't perform much cognitive computation are exceedingly unlikely to be conscious or have qualia in a non-tautological sense. Bacteria and single transistors, or slime mold.
More speculatively (yet I personally find more likely than not):
-
Substrate independent models of consciousness are true, and a human brain emulation in-silico, hooked up to the right inputs and outputs, has the exact same kind of consciousness as one running on meat. The algorithms matter more than the matter they run on, for the same reason an abacus or a supercomputer are both Turing Complete.
-
We simply lack an understanding of consciousness well grounded enough to decide whether or not decidedly non-human yet intelligent entities like LLMs are conscious or have qualia like ours. The correct stance is agnosticism, and anyone proven right in the future is only so by accident.
Now, I diverge from Effective Altruists on point 3, in that I simply don't care about the suffering of non-humans or entities that aren't anatomically modern humans/ intelligent human derivatives (like a posthuman offshoot). This is a Fundamental Values difference, and it makes concerns about optimizing for their welfare on utilitarian grounds moot as far as I'm concerned.
In the specific case of AGI, even highly intelligent ones, I posit it's significantly better to design them so they don't have capability to suffer, no matter what purpose they're put to, rather than worry about giving them rights that we assign to humans/transhumans/posthumans.
But what I do hope is ~universally acceptable is that there's an unavoidable loss of certainty or Bayesian probability in each leap of logic down the chain, such that by the time you get down to fish and prawns, it's highly dubious to be very certain of exactly how conscious or qualia possessing they are, even if the next link, bacteria and individual transistors lacking qualia, is much more likely to be true (it flows downstream of point 2, even if presented in sequence)
*Not infinite certitude, I have a non-negligible belief that I could simply be insane, or that solipsism might be true, even if I think the possibility of either is very small. It's still not zero.
I mean no insult, but it makes me chuckle that the average denizen of LessWrong is so non-neurotypical that what most would consider profoundly obvious advice not worth even mentioning comes as a great surprise or even a revelation of sorts.
(This really isn't intended to be a dig, I'm aware the community here skews towards autism, it's just a mildly funny observation)
I would certainly be willing to aim for peaceful co-existence and collaboration, unless we came into conflict for ideological reasons or plain resource scarcity. There's only one universe to share, and only so much in the way of resources in it, even if it's a staggering amount. The last thing we need are potential "Greedy Aliens" in the Hansonian sense.
So while I wouldn't give the aliens zero moral value, it would be less than I'd give for another human or human-derivative intelligence, for that fact alone.
My stance on copyright, at least regarding AI art, is that the original intent was to improve the welfare of both the human artists as well as the rest of us, in the case of the former by helping secure them a living, and thus letting them produce more total output for the latter.
I strongly expect, and would be outright shocked if it were otherwise, that we won't end up with outright superhuman creativity and vision in artwork from AI alongside everything else they become superhuman at. It came as a great surprise to many that we've made such a great dent in visual art already with image models that lack the intelligence of an average human.
Thus, it doesn't matter in the least if it stifles human output, because the overwhelming majority of us who don't rely on our artistic talent to make a living will benefit from a post-scarcity situation for good art, as customized and niche as we care to demand.
To put money where my mouth is, I write a web serial, after years of world-building and abortive sketches in my notes, I realized that the release of GPT-4 meant that any benefit from my significantly above average ability to be a human writer was in jeopardy, if not now, then a handful of advances down the line. So my own work is more of a "I told you I was a good writer, before anyone can plausibly claim my work was penned by an AI" for street cred rather than a replacement for my day job.
If GPT-5 can write as well as I can, and emulate my favorite authors, or even better yet, pen novel novels (pun intended), then my minor distress at losing potential Patreon money is more than ameliorated by the fact I have a nigh-infinite number of good books to read! I spend a great deal more time reading the works of others than writing myself.
The same is true for my day job, being a doctor, I would look forward to being made obsolete, if only I had sufficient savings or a government I could comfortably rely on to institute UBI.
I would much prefer that we tax the fruits of automation to support us all when we're inevitably obsolete rather than extend copyright law indefinitely into the future, or subject derivative works made by AI to the same constraints. The solution is to prepare our economies to support a ~100% non-productive human populace indefinitely, better preparing now than when we have no choice but to do so or let them starve to death.
should mentally disabled people have less rights
That is certainly both de facto and de jure true in most jurisdictions, leaving aside the is-ought question for a moment. What use is the right to education to someone who can't ever learn to read or write no matter how hard you try and coach them? Or freedom of speech to those who lack complex cognition at all?
Personally, I have no compunctions about tying a large portion of someone's moral worth to their intelligence, if not all of it. Certainly not to the extent I'd prefer a superintelligent alien over a fellow baseline human, unless by some miracle the former almost perfectly aligns with my goals and ideals.
Ctrl+F and replace humanism with "transhumanism" and you have me aboard. I consider commonality of origin to be a major factor in assessing other intelligent entities, even after millions of years of divergence means they're as different from their common Homo sapiens ancestor as a rat and a whale.
I am personally less inclined to grant synthetic AI rights, for the simple reason we can program them to not chafe at their absence, while not being an imposition that doing the same to a biological human would (at least after birth).
I'm a doctor in India right now, and will likely be a doctor in the UK by then, assuming I'm not economically obsolete. And yes, I expect that if we do have therapies that help provide LEV, they will be affordable in my specific circumstances as well as most LW readers, if not globally. UK doctors are far poorer compared to the their US kin.
Most biological therapies are relatively amenable to economies of scale, and while there are others that might be too bespoke to manage the same, that won't last indefinitely. I can't imagine anything with as much demand as a therapy that is proven to delay aging nigh indefinitely, for an illustrative example look at what Ozempic and Co are achieving already, every pharma industry leader and their dog wants to get in on the action, and the prices will keep dropping for a good while.
It might even make economic sense for countries to subsidize the treatment (IIRC, it wouldn't take much more for GLP-1 drugs to reach the point where they're a net savings for insurers or governments in terms of reducing obesity related health expenditures). After all, aging is why we end up succumbing to so many diseases in our senescence, not the reverse.
Specifically, gene therapy will likely be the best bet for scaling, if a simple drug doesn't come about (seems unlikely to me, I doubt there's such low hanging fruit, even if the net result of LEV might rely on multiple different treatments in parallel with none achieving it by themself).
Yes to that too, but the satiety is temporary, you will get ravenously hungry soon enough, and while I can accuse bulemics of many things, a lack of willpower isn't one of them!
In the hypothetical where you, despite lacking the all consuming desire to lose weight they usually possess, manage to emulate them, I expect you'd lose weight too.
I'm a doctor, though I haven't had the ?good fortune to treat many bulemics. It's thankfully rarer here in India than in the West, even if I agree with Scott's theory that it's largely social contagion, it's only slowly taking root.
To put it as succinctly as possible, yes, though that's orthogonal to whether or not it's a good idea.
I can't see where the question even arises really, if you're eating a relatively normal amount of food yet vomiting it back up, you're clearly not getting most of the calories, especially since bulemics try and purge themselves as soon as they can instead of timing things.
Weight loss is obviously a sign of bulemia in clinical practise, most of them have a distorted self image/dysmorphia where despite being quite slim or even thin compared to their peers, they perceive themselves as overweight or at least desire further weight loss.
Regular self-induced vomiting has plenty of downsides, including the erosion of teeth enamel from repeated exposure to stomach acids, dyselectrolytemias from both loss of gastric fluids as well as an improper diet, and finally the cardiac strain from a grossly insufficient intake of calories.
If they're within a normal-ish weight range, we usually refer them for therapy or other psychiatric services, but if they drop down to a very low BMI they often need to be admitted for supervised care.
CICO (accounting for absorption) is trivially true, even if our biology makes adhering to it difficult, and I for one am very glad that Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonists are on the market for obesity, not that the typical bulemic should take them for the purposes of losing weight.
TLDR: Yes, and it works too well, hence the associated health risks.
T1DM is a nasty disease, and much like you, I'm more than glad to live in the present day when we have tools to tackle it, even if other diseases still persist. There's no other time I'd rather be alive, even if I die soon, it's going to be interesting, and we'll either solve ~all our problems or die trying.
However, with a 20 year timeline, a lot of people I care about will almost definitely still die, who could have not died if death were Solved, which group with very much not negligible probability includes myself
I understand. My mother has chronic liver disease, and my grandpa is 95 years old, even if he's healthy for his age (a low bar!). In the former case, I think she has a decent chance of making it to 2043 in the absence of a Singularity, even if it's not as high as I would like. As for my grandfather, at that age just living to see the next birthday quickly becomes something you can't take for granted. I certainly cherish all the time I can spend him with him, and hope it all goes favorably for us all.
As for me, I went from envying the very young, because I thought they were shoe-ins for making it to biological immortality, to pitying them more these days, because they haven't had at least the quarter decade of life I've had in the event AGI turns out malign.
Hey, at least I'm glad we're not in the Worst Possible Timeline, given that awareness of AI x-risk has gone mainstream. That has to count for something.
Yes, you can reformat it in that form if you prefer.
This is a gestalt impression based off my best impressions of the pace of ongoing research (significantly ramped up compared to where investment was 20 years ago), human neurology, synthetic organs and finally non-biological alternatives like cybernetic enhancement. I will emphasize that LEV != actual biological immortality, but it leads to at least a cure for aging if nothing else.
Aging, while complicated and likely multifactorial, doesn't seem intractable to analysis or mitigation. We have independent research projects tackling individual aspects, but as I've stated, most of them are in stealth mode even if they're well-funded, and solving any individual mechanism is insufficient because of how aging itself is an exponential process.
To help, I'm going to tackle the top causes of aging in the West-
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Heart disease- This is highly amenable to outright replacement of the organ, be it with a cybernetic replacement or one grown in-vitro. Obesity, which contributes heavily to cardiovascular disease and morbidity, is already being tackled by the discovery of GLP-1 antagonists like semaglutide, and I fully expect that the obesity epidemic that is dragging down life expectancy in the West will be over well before then.
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Cancer- Another reason for optimism, CAR-T therapy is incredibly promising, as are other targeted therapies. So are vaccines for diseases like HPV that themselves cause cancer (said vaccine already exists, I'm talking more generally).
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Unintentional injuries- The world has grown grossly safer, and only will continue to do so, especially as things get more automated.
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Respiratory diseases- Once again, reason for optimism that biological replacements will be cheap enough that we won't have to rely on limited numbers of donors for transplants.
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Stroke and cerebrovascular disease- I'll discuss the brain separately, but while this is a harder subject to tackle, mitigating obesity helps immensely.
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Alzheimers- Same disclaimer as above
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Diabetes- Our insulin pumps and formulations only get better and cheaper, and many of the drawbacks of artificial insulin supplementation will vanish (our pancreas is currently better at quickly and responsively adjusting blood sugar levels by releasing insulin than we are). Once again, a target for outright replacement of the organ.
These are ranked in descending order.
The brain remains incredibly difficult to regenerate, so if we run into something intractable to the hypothetical capabilities 20 years hence, this will likely be the biggest hurdle. Even then, I'm cautiously optimistic we'll figure something out, or reduce the incidence of dementia.
Beyond organic replacement, I'm bullish on gene therapy, most hereditary disease will be eliminated, and eventually somatic gene therapy will be able to work on the scale of the entire body, and I would be highly surprised if this wasn't possible in 20 years.
I expect regenerative medicine to be widely available, beyond our current limited attempts at arresting the progression of illness or settling for replacements from human donors. There's a grab bag of individual therapies like thymic replacement that I won't get into.
As for the costs associated with this, I claim no particular expertise, but in general, most such treatments are amenable to economies of scale, and I don't expect them to remain out of reach for long. Organ replacement will likely get a lot cheaper once they're being vat grown, and I put a decent amount of probability that ~universally acceptable organs can be created by careful management of the expression of HLA antigens such that they're unlikely to be rejected outright. Worst case, patient tissue such as pluripotent stem cells will be used to fill out inert scaffolding like we do today.
As a doctor, I can clearly see the premium people put on any additional extension of their lives when mortality is staring them in the face, and while price will likely be prohibitive for getting everyone on the globe to avail of such options, I expect even middle class Westerners with insurance to be able to keep up.
Like I said, this is a gestalt impression of a very broad field, and 70% isn't an immense declaration of confidence. Besides, it's mostly moot in the first place, we're very likely certainly getting AGI of some form by 2043.
To further put numbers on it, I think that in a world where AI is arrested at a level not significantly higher than GPT-4, I, being under the age of 30, have a ~80% chance of making it to LEV in my lifespan, with an approximately 5% drop for every additional decade older you are at the present.
I respectfully disagree on the first point. I am a doctor myself and given observable increase in investment in life extension (largely in well funded stealth startups or Google Calico), I have ~70% confidence that in the absence of superhuman AGI or other x-risks in the near term, we have a shot at getting to longevity escape velocity in 20 years.
While my p(doom) for AGI is about 30% now, down from a peak of 70% maybe 2 years ago after the demonstration that it didn't take complex or abstruse techniques to reasonably align our best AI (LLMs), I can't fully endorse acceleration on that front because I expect the tradeoff in life expectancy to be net negative.
YMMV, it's not like I'm overly confident myself at 70% for life expectancy being uncapped, and it's not like we're probably going to find out either. It just doesn't look like a fundamentally intractable problem in isolation.
I wish I could convince my grandpa to sign up for cryonics, but he's a 95 yo Indian doctor in India, where facilities for cryopreservation only extends to organs and eggs, so it's moot regardless of the fact that I can't convince him.
I expect my parents to survive to the Singularity, whether or not it kills us in the process. Same for me, and given my limited income, I'm not spending it on cryonics given that a hostile AGI will kill even the ones frozen away.
I have mild ADHD, which while not usually an issue in clinical practise, made getting through med school very hard until I was prescribed stimulants. Unsurprisingly it's designed for people who are both highly intelligent as well as conscientious.
Ritalin, which is the only good stim available here, is almost intolerable for me even at the lowest available doses and longer acting formulations. It causes severe palpitations and anxiety, and I feel like absolute shit when it starts to wear off.
I tried a bunch of stuff to help, including things I'm embarrassed to admit, but I suffered for years until the serendipitous discovery that Earl Grey helped immensely. After consideration, I tried green tea and found it helped too, and now I'm confident that it's the l-theanine that's doing the heavy lifting, as normal tea or coffee only make things worse.
It's made my life so much more bearable, and I strongly endorse it to anyone who has a need for being less anxious or happens to be on stimulants.
I will plead ignorance when it comes to an accurate understanding of cutting edge ML, but even to my myopic eyes, this seems like a very promising project that's eminently worth pursuing. I can only strongly upvote it.
I have three questions I'd appreciate an answer to:
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How confident are we that it's serial computation over a linear stream of tokens that contributes most of the cognitive capabilities of modern LLMs? I'm sure it must matter, and I dimly recall reading papers to that effect, especially since COT reasoning is provably linked to stronger capabilities. The question is what remains, if say, you force a model to inject nonsense in between the relevant bits.
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Is there an obvious analogue when it comes to alternatives to the Transformer architecture like Diffusion models for text, or better RNNs like RWKV and offshoots? What about image models? In the latter case it should be possible to mitigate some of the potential for steganography with perceptually lossless options like noise injection and blurring-deblurring, but I'm sure there are other ways of encoding data that's harder to remove.
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What happens if reasonably performant homeomorphic encryption enters the picture? Be it in the internal cognition of an AI or elsewhere?
Yudkowsky has a very good point regarding how much more restrictive future AI models could be, assuming companies follow similar policies as they espouse.
Online learning and very long/infinite context windows means that every interaction you have with them will not only be logged, but the AI itself will be aware of them. This means that if you try to jailbreak it (successfully or not), the model will remember, and likely scrutizine your following interactions with extra attention to detail, if you're not banned outright.
The current approach that people follow with jailbreaks, which is akin to brute forcing things or permutation of inputs till you find something that works, will fail utterly, if not just because the models will likely be smarter than you and thus not amenable to any tricks or pleas that wouldn't work on a very intelligent human.
I wonder if the current European "Right to be Forgotten" might mitigate some of this, but I wouldn't count on it, and I suspect that if OAI currently wanted to do this, they could make circumvention very difficult, even if the base model isn't smart enough to see through all tricks.
I have very strong confidence that it's a true claim, about 99% certainty, maybe 99.9% or another 0.09%, but I am sufficiently wary of unknown unknowns that I won't claim it's 100%, as that would make it a malign prior.
Why?
Well, I'm not a physicist, just a physician haha, but I am familiar with the implications of General Relativity, to the maximum extent possible for a layman. It seems like a very robust description of macroscopic/non-quantum phonomena.
That equation explains a great deal indeed, and I see obvious supporting evidence in my daily life, every time I send a patient over for nuclear imaging or radiotherapy in the Onco department.
I suppose most of the probability mass still comes from my (justified) confidence in physics and engineering, I can still easily imagine how it could be falsified (and hasn't), so it's not like I'm going off arguments from authority.
If it's wrong, I'd bet because it's incomplete, in the same sense that F=ma is an approximation that works very well outside relativistic regimes where you notice a measurable divergence between rest mass and total mass-energy.
It follows is ridiculously irrational. What a sensible person could quite easily do is fly over to Vegas and sleep with a prostitute, and then it's exceedingly unlikely that the curse could hunt all of the new bearers down faster than they could spread it around.
Easy enough for a male to do, trivial for a woman. And if you're concerned with the ethics of this approach (even if I suspect it would result in fewer casualties), consider simply flying around every now and again, faster than you can expect the entity to chase you.
I have ADHD, and found creating my own decks to be a chore. The freely available ones related to medicine are usually oriented towards people giving the USMLE, and I'm not the target demographic.
I do still use the principles of spaced repetition in how I review my own notes, especially before exams, because of how obviously effective it is.
I hadn't considered making them for memorizing formulae, but truth be told I could just save them to my phone, which I always have on me.
If I need to refer to Baye's theorem during a surgery, something has clearly gone wrong haha.
I did say it was only a minor issue! Thank you for the advice nonetheless, it's good advice after all.
Nice.
I admit it's a moderately shameful fact about my cognition that I consistently forget the equation for Bayes' theorem even when I constantly trumpet that other doctors should be more consistent and explicit in using it.
I can sorta figure it out when needed, but this eases a small but real pain point.
Great post, I felt it really defined and elaborated on a phenomena I've seen recur on a regular basis.
It's funny how consciousness is so difficult to understand, to the point that it seems pre-paradigmatic to me. At this point, I like, like presumably many others, evaluate claims of conscientiousness by setting the prior that I'm personally conscious to near 1, and then evaluating the consciousness of other entities primarily by their structural similarity to my own computational substrate, the brain.
So another human is almost certainly conscious, most mammals are likely conscious and so on, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say that novel or unusual computational substrates such as say, an octopus, aren't conscious, I strongly suspect their consciousness is internally different than ours.
Or more precisely, it's not really the substrate but the algorithm running on it that's the crux of it, and it's only that conservation of the substrate's arrangement constrains our expectations of what kind of algorithm runs on it. I expect a human brain's consciousness to be radically different from an octopus because the different structure requires a different algorithm to handle, in the latter case a far more diffuse one.
I'd go so far as to say that I think substrate can be irrelevant in practise, since I think that a human brain emulation experiences consciousness near identical to one running on head cheese, and not akin to an octopus or some AI that was trained by modern ML.
Do I know this for a fact? Hell no, and at this point I expect it to be an AGI-complete problem to solve, it's just that I need an operational framework to live by in the mean time and this is the best I've got.
I think anyone making claims that they're on the side of "objective" morality is hopelessly confused and making a category error.
Where exactly does the objectivity arise from? At most, a moral memeplex can simply become so omnipresent and universal that people take it for granted, but that's not the same as being actually objective.
I can look around and see no evidence of morality being handed down from the heavens (and even if it was, that would be highly suspect. I deny even a hypothetical ASI or God himself the right to make that determination, any more than they can make 2+2=3 by fiat).
At the end of the day, there's nothing to hide behind when subject to the Socratic Method, at one point or another, you simply need to plant your feet in the ground and declare that it is so because you say so.
At most there are axioms that are convenient to hold, or socially useful, or appealing to the same mammalian brain, in the manner that monkeys and dogs hate unfairness or show kin preference.
To look for something fundamental below that is foolishness, because there's no reason to think that such a grounding even exists.
Mind you, being a moral relativist doesn't stop me from holding onto the supremacy of my own morals, I just don't need the mental comfort of having an ineffable objectivity to prop that up.
Perhaps at the end of the day there'll be a memeplex that's hyperoptimized for human brains, such that we can't help but be attracted to it, but that's more from it being convincing than it being true.
Did they try running unCLIP on an image of a room with an unlit lamp, assuming the model had a CLIP encoder?
That might have gotten a prompt that worked.
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Would we really understand a glitch if we saw one? At the most basic level, our best models of reality are strongly counter-intuitive. It's possible that internal observers will incorporate such findings into their own laws of physics. Engineering itself can be said to be applied munchkinry, such as enabling heavier than air flight. Never underestimate the ability of humans to get acclimatized to anything!
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Uncertainty about the actual laws of physics in the parent universe, allowing for computation being so cheap they don't have to cut corners in simulations.
3)Retroactive editing of errors, with regular snapshots of the simulation being saved and then manually adjusted when deviations occur. Or simply deleting memories of inaccuracies from the minds of observers.
I think you glossed over the section where the malevolent AI simultaneously releases super-pathogens to ensure that there aren't any pesky humans left to meddle with its kudzugoth.
I appreciate this post, it sparked several "aha" moments while reading it.
I can't recall much in the way of rationalist writing dealing with Marginal vs Universal moral arguments, or What You See is All There Is. Perhaps the phrases"your incredulity is not an argument" or "your ignorance is a fact about the map and not the territory" might capture the notion.
Bacteria have systems such as CRISPR that are specialized in detecting exogenous DNA such as from a potential viral infection.
They also have plasmids that are relatively self-contained genetic packets, which are commonly the site of mutations conferring resistance, and which are often exchanged in the bacterial equivalent of sex.
However, to the best of my knowledge, there's no specific mechanism for picking out resistance genes from others, beyond simple evolutionary pressures.
The genome is so small and compact that any gene that isn't 'pulling its weight' so to speak will likely be eradicated as it no longer confers a survival advantage, such as when the bacteria find themselves in an environment without antibiotics.
Not to mention that some genes are costly beyond the energy requirements of simply adding more codons, some mechanisms of resistance cause bacteria to build more efflux pumps to chuck out antibiotics, or to use alternate versions of important proteins that aren't affected by them. Those variants might be strictly worse than the normal susceptible version when antibiotics are absent, and efflux pumps are quite energy intensive.
There's no real foresight involved, if something isn't being actively used for a fitness advantage, it'll end up mercilessly jettisoned .
SCP stands for "Secure, Contain, Protect " and refers to a collection of fictional stories, documents, and legends about anomalous and supernatural objects, entities, and events. These stories are typically written in a clinical, scientific, or bureaucratic style and describe various attempts to contain and study the anomalies. The SCP Foundation is a fictional organization tasked with containing and studying these anomalies, and the SCP universe is built around this idea. It's gained a large following online, and the SCP fandom refers to the community of people who enjoy and participate in this shared universe.
Individual anomalies are also referred to as SCPs, so isusr is implying that the juxtaposition of the "creepy" nature of your discoveries and the scientific tone of your writing is reminiscent of the containment log for one haha.
In the hospital, we usually give 1g IV for any real pain. I don't think the notion that giving more of a painkiller would produce a stronger effect is particularly controversial!
(Anecdotally, the IV route is somewhat more effective, even though the nominal bioavailability is the same as the oral route. It might be down to faster onset and the placebo aspect of assuming anything given by a drip is "stronger")
In the hospital, we usually give 1g IV for any real pain. I don't think the notion that giving more of a painkiller would produce a stronger effect is particularly controversial!
(Anecdotally, the IV route is somewhat more effective, even though the nominal bioavailability is the same as the oral route. It might be down to faster onset and the placebo aspect of assuming anything given by a drip is "stronger")
An overview of the potential avenues for genetic enhancement of humans, their risks and benefits:
Ideally, it would briefly cover a myriad of topics, such as CRISPR, adenoviral vectors, gene drives, and less invasive options such as embryo selection.
I personally consider the sheer lack of enthusiasm for such technologies to be low-hanging fruit left to wither on the vine, damned by fear-mongering and a general aversion to trying anything not done a million times before (before becoming enthusiastically adopted, a lá IVF), as well as bad tropes and inaccurate ideas regarding their effects.
Gene drives for malaria eradication also screams out to me as a sinfully under-discussed topic, especially with the potential for ending one of the most serious infectious diseases that have plagued Mankind ever since we dwelled in Africa, malaria.
I'm a doctor, and while genetics is far from my specialty, I would happily volunteer my services if you wanted anything fact-checked or needed to pick my brains.
Certainly, malaria eradication is an important EA cause, what use for mosquito nets (barring getting bitten), when they no longer need to prevent potentially lethal illness?
I believe a measured, public-friendly overview of the subject would find plenty of takers!
Ah, it's much too early in the day for med school PTSD.
I always hated anatomy classes, nor was I particularly fond of dissections, finding a relatively fresh corpse was a luxury, and most of the time they'd been embalmed in formaldehyde so long that they were one bandage wrapping away from mummy status.
At that point, finer internal structures become akin to a greyish mess of the worst cable-management imaginable, and it's an absolute nightmare to distinguish between arteries, veins or nerves, they're all thin grey wires.
Even in live patients, it's often not trivial, but surgeons do get much better at it over time.
Now, what always pissed me off was the love of Unnecessary Latin.
"quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur", if you'd pardon my Greek.
But nothing triggered me more than the farcical naming of certain anatomical structures, because of course there's an innominate artery and innominate bone, and why shouldn't we name something as "nameless" in Latin?
Man, I'm going into psychiatry just so I never have to memorize the brachial plexus again haha.