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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 10th, 2024

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  • There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.

    That seems obviously false, unless you’re proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don’t actually do anything. I guess you could argue that as you throw money into saving lives, the low-hanging fruits get picked and the cost rises, so you can never saturate all the charities - but this is a very weak argument, since saving 99.99% of all the people in the world from hunger or poverty would be about as good as 100%. Just because there’s diminishing returns doesn’t mean it’s a doomed cause.










  • Hmm, interesting. Somewhat compelling, but:

    • it’s a rather small (n=38) Chinese pilot study
    • the effect on the sleep latency is sizable (a latency decrease from 31±14 to 18±12 minutes, effect size of 0.85), but there’s no effect on actual sleep duration.
    • the sleep measurements were subjective (sleep diaries, not actigraphy)

    I’m also a bit concerned why it’s the only study with this methodology in this later meta-analysis - all of the other “behavioral intervention” studies in it experiment with stuff like “extended time-in-bed”. In other words, there seems to not have been any followup or replication of this study.




  • For jobs behind the camera, there are something like, only 13% of women employed in the film industry.

    That doesn’t necessarily imply sexism at all, note. If it turns out women are just 6 times less likely than men to want to have these jobs, then this percentage would be 13% in a perfect non-sexist world. (Though 13% is concerningly low; the percentage of women that go into computer science is around 20-25% and that’s one of the strongest effects. Plausibly the remaining 1.5-2x difference here is due to sexism; I can buy filmmaking being one of the most sexist industries).




  • Yet, people suffering from it can lead happy and fulfilling lives.

    Sure, it’s possible for a person with a severe disability to grow up happy. But when one is making a decision in real life (like having a child), one should consider an average case, not a exceptional one. And the average case for an example like Down’s Syndrome is pretty bad. It is a bit unclear how to quantify the suffering in this particular disease’s case because the main harm to the child is lifelong mental impairment and assorted physical disabilities - but it is at least going to inflict suffering on the child’s family, since caring for a child with a severe disability for their entire life isn’t exactly fun.

    It is a slippery slope that, if not navigated carefully, has historically leaded to atrocities.

    I don’t see the relation. You’ll notice that I’m not proposing killing off disabled people for the “improvement of society” or whatever it was that nazis called it. I am not doing this because nonconsensually killing a person is a harm to them. But deciding not to have a child isn’t the same thing as murdering a person - it’s not harming anyone who exists, and hence may well be morally better than having a child.

    (Oh, I suppose you might mean that I’m arguing that there are circumstances in which it’s morally bad for a person to have a child, which is similar to nazi eugenics in that I’m deciding whether or not people should have children? In that case, my answer is that the difference is that I’m a person, not an authoritarian government, and I don’t have power (nor, indeed, the desire) to force people to obey my personal moral judgements.)