471–480 of 570 posts
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> This is the party of so-called "rationalists". Eh?
Republicans pride themselves in this "facts over feeling" aesthetic, when they let vibes alone dictate the entirety of their decision making process. See: Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro...
> "facts over feeling" aesthetic
Do you think someday soon we will have the equivalent of an LLM coding assistant, but for gene editing?
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The EA community is generally incapable of self-awareness. The academic-but-totally-misinformed tone is comparable to reading LLM output. I've stopped trying to correct them, it's too much work on my part and not enough on theirs.
I once went into a LessWrong IRC server. I posted a question where I referred to something by the wrong name. Someone said I was confused / wrong, so I corrected myself and restated my question. For some 10 minutes they just kept dogpiling on the use of the wrong term. Never a bunch a stupider people have I met than LessWrong people.
50 replies arguing about how you can simplify your for() loop syntax and not one reply with an actual answer.
Does this mean when they grow up, their own offspring will also have this defect and require a correction? And, if so, does this mean it is now introducing this defective gene into our gene pool? I know this is an issue with caesarean section. It is becoming more prevalent because those who require it are surviving, making it more likely to happen in their offspring.
We know that infants are generally larger than 50 years ago and one of the factors which trigger birth is the inability of the mother's metabolism to support further growth of the fetus.
That, combined with the fact that all over the world availability of nutrition is much better than half a century ago points to this being the culprit.
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Made it sound like it's a computer, is it Turing complete?
It's fundamentally different than a computer and arguably more complete. The talk of "crawling along the genome" is kinda fundamentally wrong though and is a bit irking - CRISPR kinda just bumps around until it hits a PAM site, in which case it starts checking against sgRNA. Much more random than they make it seem
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This seems like more of an issue with accessibility of the treatment than the treatment itself If we could make most children smart, productive, ambitious, courteous, civil, conscientious, honorable, strong... the value to society is probably high enough to justify covering it for almost anyone.
The society already can invest a lot (through public education) to “make most children smart, productive, ambitious …”. Somehow society (or indeed parts of it) decided to use it as a tool of further segregation rather than overall prosperity. I’m afraid same might apply to this.
I don't really see how this affects e.g. what I do for my children. I will absolutely be turning them into the closest to superhuman the current state of treatments lets me, traveling internationally if I need to. If someone else decides to segregate access to treatment, that is a separate, wrong act that will not hold me back from giving my children every advantage possible.
(Yes, I understand this is a positional arms race, but 1. that doesn't change the individually-optimal outcome, and 2. that doesn't change that society net benefits from it.)
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How does it know how to gps around? From what I know everything down there is a chemical reaction with some minimal physical motion, but how do you program it to know where to change and what and how.
It doesn’t know anything about where it “needs” to go. One of the weirder and more unintuitive things about molecular biology is just how fast everything moves inside a cell. The CRISPR molecule diffuses from one side of the nucleus to the other in a couple seconds and probably bumps into the entirety of the genome in a matter of minutes or hours. It’s very, very crowded inside cells, proteins and DNA and metabolites…
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I'm of accord with the Utopians of Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning : When a Utopian dies, of anything, the cause is marked and not forgotten until solved. A fall? They rebuild the site to make it safe. A criminal? They do not rest until he is rendered harmless. An illness? It is researched until cured, regardless of the time, the cost, over generations if need be. A car crash? They create their separate system, s…
So we should not even try to help the sick because 'death' has too many other ways to kill them?
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As the father of a 5 year old boy with a genetic degenerative muscular disease whose lifespan will depend directly on how fast these technologies progress, I have difficulty responding in a civilized manner to the pointless, cruel, and stupid actions of the Administration in this regard. Rage is the word. It is breathtaking to consider how the members of the Administration and their children, parents, and grandparent…
I have the same rage. But it extends equally to those who voted them in and donated to their campaigns, including my own family members. They have created a huge rift in this country and I am still trying to figure out if I will forgive my family members and what they'd have to do to set us on a path towards reconciliation. When there's a contract in place to conduct pediatric cancer research, and the government deci…