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What ever happened to the transhumanists?

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Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#431

Post by fastball »

DanBC wrote: post #424
JetSetWilly wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing puberty blockers, allows children to make uninformed decisions with lasting and harmful consequences to their own body and future. That's why this issue has went to various courts, ascending the hierarchy, in England where it has been found illegal, legal etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_v_Tavistock and think how Keira Bell is likely to feel about your simplistic "it is safe" comments. It is a com…

Just checking you know that Kiera Bell lost.

Given as they linked the wikipedia article, it seems likely they are aware. Just because she lost on appeal does not detract from the parent's point, which is that clearly these things are not harmless otherwise there probably wouldn't be such a court case.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#432

Post by fastball »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #352
JetSetWilly wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing puberty blockers, allows children to make uninformed decisions with lasting and harmful consequences to their own body and future. That's why this issue has went to various courts, ascending the hierarchy, in England where it has been found illegal, legal etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_v_Tavistock and think how Keira Bell is likely to feel about your simplistic "it is safe" comments. It is a com…

It’s a bit silly that you’ve essentially written here “abandoning all nuance is bad, that’s what the other side does!” This is ironic of course, since you’ve ignored the nuance that the Keira Bell case was specifically regarding the ability of children under the age of 16 to consent to this treatment themselves. It does not question the lawfulness of the treatment or guidance itself, and it has been clearly establish…

How have they ignored the nuance of the Keira Bell case?

> It does not question the lawfulness of the treatment or guidance itself

Nobody is saying it does. The nuance is in fact what people are talking about. Many advocates for the trans community argue that under-16s should be able to choose such treatments for themselves without parental consent/oversight. The other side argues that trans issues should not be treated any differently than anything else, where generally children have limited say in medical interventions applied to them and that the responsibility is ultimately the parents'.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#433

Post by NateEag »

trasz wrote: post #420
NateEag wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, okay. I personally wouldn't have called those things "intelligences" - more like clashes of unintended perverse incentives and ignored negative externalities. That said, I didn't think you were talking about a hypothetical deity - it's just what your metaphor made me think of.

>I personally wouldn't have called those things "intelligences" Why, though? By which criteria they are not intelligent beings?

Because in my experience these systems act dumber than most individual humans manage to.

They function much more like a drunk, demented DNN optimizing for some unknown set of variables than like a human using its intelligence to solve problems.

IMO. YMMV.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#434

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #166
revolvingocelot wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The argument is circular: if animals make it, it's part of Gaia else it's 'unnatural'. Animals didn't make plastics, so they're 'unnatural'. Er, this is your argument, not mine. Mine is: "if animals make it, and it is unmade (or remade, or recycled, or broken down [0]) by something else, then this is 'natural'." Plastics nor PFAS meet that standard. Those matter types stay static. The animals called 'humans' make pl…

PFAS, like nearly everything, has a half-life. As a category so large the half-lives can range from days to thousands of years in a vacuum, but even those with thousand year half-lives can be broken down with catalysis in seconds. It is new tech on the scale of humanity and we will figure it out.

And fortunately, its NOT in a vacuum. It's being ground down by ordinary weather etc.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#435

Post by DanBC »

jl6 wrote: post #429
DanBC wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-trans campaigners misunderstand what's meant by "low quality evidence". It just means we don't yet have double blind randomised control trials of certain treatments. But that's to be expected: trans children are rare, we don't put anyone on puberty blockers without very good reason, and withholding PBs is not a neutral act. So running RCTs on this population group is very difficult. See also masks: we're pretty…

> Anti-trans campaigners misunderstand what's meant by "low quality evidence". It just means we don't yet have double blind randomised control trials of certain treatments. No it doesn’t. The problems run far deeper. Read the interim report, pages 18-19[1]: > 1.24. A lack of a conceptual agreement about the meaning of gender dysphoria hampers research, as well as NHS clinical service provision. > 1.25. There has not…

> No it doesn’t

Yes it does. You not knowing what GRADE is or how it works but insisting that you are well informed is a great example of the problem with these discussions. You dump a load of ill-informed mangled sources into a thread, and now I have to spend a few hours explaining how you're misrepresenting the sources.

> Additionally, the new UK regional centers are not an expansion of gender-affirming care, they are an expansion of care, period. The presumption of gender affirmation was explicitly criticized, and in the forthcoming service model there is a requirement to deal with the whole clinical presentation.

I've read the service specification for the new centres. (Have you?) It's an expansion of gender affirming care, and there's no way to spin it otherwise. There will be more clinics treating more children in a more timely way. More children will have access to puberty blockers. What's that if it's not an expansion of service?

> None of this has any bearing on being “pro-trans” or “anti-trans”.

All the information you've posted to this thread so far is sourced to anti-trans organisations. At least be honest about it. You are anti-trans, you post anti-trans disinformation from anti-trans links.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#436

Post by kuschku »

fastball wrote: post #430
kuschku wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are not saying "this is a boy" and then giving them testosterone when they hit 12 so that they match their "assigned" gender. That's literally what happens, especially to inter people, though. And sometimes even done for cis people if their natural hormone levels are too low, or rather their parents and doctors deem them too low (the child is never asked).

We literally do not give 99% of the population any sort of hormonal treatment in order to ensure they match their "assigned gender". For the overwhelming majority of people we say "wow this looks like a boy" and that person ends up a boy with no intervention and no gender identity issues. Yes, there are intersex people and they are a special case that need to be handled differently than the rest of the population. An…

What do you mean "of course"?

Children have a right to take part in their own medical decisions as early as 7 years old, and teens make the majority of the decisions themselves after 14yo.

If teens can get tattoos (16+), can drink alcohol (16+), can work part time jobs (14+), under conditions (12+) and can get jail time (14+), then they can just as well make at least part of their own medical decisions.

Delaying permanent changes to a point in time where they can decide for themselves is the perfect solution if teens want to make such a decision, as long as it's safe (which even the cass review admits has been proven safe for AMAB people)

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#437

Post by trasz »

NateEag wrote: post #433
trasz wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I personally wouldn't have called those things "intelligences" Why, though? By which criteria they are not intelligent beings?

Because in my experience these systems act dumber than most individual humans manage to. They function much more like a drunk, demented DNN optimizing for some unknown set of variables than like a human using its intelligence to solve problems. IMO. YMMV.

They wield power not available to individual humans. They achieve things individual humans can’t. They get people to sacrifice themselves (up to a literal karoshi) for company’s interests.

Are you sure you don’t do things that appear stupid to your cat?

>They function much more like a drunk, demented DNN optimizing for some unknown set of variables than like a human using its intelligence to solve problems.

That’s a weird sentence. It’s written as if there was some fundamental difference between the two.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#438

Post by nemo44x »

tsimionescu wrote: post #258
nemo44x wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say leftists of more federally liberals but settled on post modernism since it’s taken up by those groups. Post modernists say there is no truth and that everything comes down to power structures and control. That everything is made up anyways so feel free to throw away all grand narratives and indulge in whatever decadence you want. Because truth doesn’t exist and is a function of power structures. I…

I don't think post-modernism is actually popular in any significant population - it's only popular among some small segment of academia, one that has some influence on literature. But the vast majority of people, either on the left or right, and even of academics in general, find it pretentious and fallacious. The vast majority of people are decidedly not relativists and instead believe in certain absolutes - truth,…

Identity politics, which is about as mainstream as you can get is based entirely from post modern principals.

Anything “normal” is only thought of that way due to the discourses of established power (white, heterosexual men and their paternal nuclear family structures) and not only can be replaced (everything is equally arbitrary) but *should* be dismantled and replaced because it’s oppressive.

That’s literally our society today and it’s 100% postmodern.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#439

Post by NateEag »

trasz wrote: post #437
NateEag wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because in my experience these systems act dumber than most individual humans manage to. They function much more like a drunk, demented DNN optimizing for some unknown set of variables than like a human using its intelligence to solve problems. IMO. YMMV.

They wield power not available to individual humans. They achieve things individual humans can’t. They get people to sacrifice themselves (up to a literal karoshi) for company’s interests. Are you sure you don’t do things that appear stupid to your cat? >They function much more like a drunk, demented DNN optimizing for some unknown set of variables than like a human using its intelligence to solve problems. That’s a…

> They wield power not available to individual humans. They achieve things individual humans can’t. They get people to sacrifice themselves (up to a literal karoshi) for company’s interests.

Do these have something to do with intelligence? I see power and intelligence as largely orthogonal. Ditto control and intelligence.

See Donald Trump during his presidency, for instance. Mountains of power, control of the nuclear arsenal, massive private wealth. People threw their careers away to tell lies for him.

Still an idiot.

> Are you sure you don’t do things that appear stupid to your cat?

Not at all. I see your point here and it's a valid one (though I still can't do anything but reason from the reference frame I've got).

Though I'm not sure my cats even have a category for "stupid".

> > They function much more like a drunk, demented DNN optimizing for some unknown set of variables than like a human using its intelligence to solve problems.

> That’s a weird sentence. It’s written as if there was some fundamental difference between the two.

I'm not sure there's a fundamental difference, but I'm also not convinced there isn't.

Certainly the output I've seen from image recognizers, GPT-N, image generators and similar have seemed recognizably different to me from skilled human makers.

They're occasionally quite good at aping a particular style or topic, but I don't remember seeing anything so far that reminds me of the flashes of inspiration, insight, and understanding I'm used to seeing from other humans while they're problem-solving.

I've also seen people much more informed than I make cogent-seeming arguments that DNNs are necessary but not sufficient for something like human intelligence, and that we'll need other paradigms to combine with them before we really see progress.

I've seen the opposite claimed too, in a reasonable and coherent way - that DNNs are all we need and they just need more scale than we've been able to throw at them so far.

I'm not sure which stance I think is right (if either - not too sure human intelligence is actually a tractable problem, given that we don't even have a coherent definition of it, nor a clear idea of whether the not-understood nature of consciousness may have anything to do with it).

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#440

Post by DanBC »

fastball wrote: post #431
DanBC wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just checking you know that Kiera Bell lost.

Given as they linked the wikipedia article, it seems likely they are aware. Just because she lost on appeal does not detract from the parent's point, which is that clearly these things are not harmless otherwise there probably wouldn't be such a court case.

Why link to wikipedia and not the court judgments?

Almost no healthcare is harmless. Anyone can sue for almost anything, there's a low threshold to bring a case. Notably she didn't sue for a personal injury case because she knows she would have lost that - she was strongly advised by her doctor not to proceed, but she ignored that advice and went ahead anyway. She was over 16 at the time, and capacitous, and so she got the treatment that she asked for.

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