This is wonderful – thank you so much for writing it.
Mutual dedication to one another’s ends seems like a thing commonly present in religious and ethnic communities. But it seems quite uncommon to the demographic of secular idealists, like me. Such idealists tend to form and join single-focus communities like effective altruism, which serve only a subset of our eudaemonic needs.
Agree about secular, single-purpose communities – but I'm not sure EA is quite the same.
I've found my relationships with other EAs tend to blossom to be about more than just EA; those principles provide a good set of shared values from which to build other things, like a sense of community, shared houses, group meals, playing music together and just supporting each other generally. Then again, I don't consider EA to be the core of my identity, so YMMV.
I guess I don't even really understand her relevance. Fully a third of the TIME article is about her mediation in an EA house, and makes her bad behaviour out to be emblematic of problems at the core of EA, but she's... just some random person, right?
From some online digging: she's listed as an attendee at EA Global 2016. She appeared on the Clearer Thinking podcast in 2021. She's never posted on the EA Forum or LessWrong, at least not under her own name that I can find. Her relationship with EA seems at the most to be very, very slight. Am I missing something about her relevance in this whole thing?
"What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood." - This is just not a useful thing to mention in an apology about racism, or at least, not in this way
I actually think this was quite reasonable. He's a bioethicist, after all – 'eugenics' has a bunch of different meanings in that field and it's important to distinguish between them
The figure of 85% of Americans having their wisdom teeth removed isn’t very informative as (IIRC) most Americans have them removed by default, even if there’s no impaction.
In the UK, the NHS only removes them if they’re causing problems (although in practice I found they were quite reluctant even in this case). That would provide a more useful base rate.
You generally consider yourself to be happy, highly composed and emotionally stable. You have no history of depression or other mood-related dissorders
I’m not convinced you can really replace sleep with caffeine in any meaningful way; tolerance to caffeine builds so quickly as to make it unuseful after a couple of weeks.
This seems like generally a bad precedent to set - lots of people put a bunch of time into writing thoughtful comments; those comments are now gone. Even leaving the post up with the body blanked out would be preferable. I’m not sure the author of a post should have the power to erase all the discussion of it unless they have a very good reason.
This is wonderful – thank you so much for writing it.
Agree about secular, single-purpose communities – but I'm not sure EA is quite the same.
I've found my relationships with other EAs tend to blossom to be about more than just EA; those principles provide a good set of shared values from which to build other things, like a sense of community, shared houses, group meals, playing music together and just supporting each other generally. Then again, I don't consider EA to be the core of my identity, so YMMV.
I guess I don't even really understand her relevance. Fully a third of the TIME article is about her mediation in an EA house, and makes her bad behaviour out to be emblematic of problems at the core of EA, but she's... just some random person, right?
From some online digging: she's listed as an attendee at EA Global 2016. She appeared on the Clearer Thinking podcast in 2021. She's never posted on the EA Forum or LessWrong, at least not under her own name that I can find. Her relationship with EA seems at the most to be very, very slight. Am I missing something about her relevance in this whole thing?
This is awesome, thank you so much for writing it. Incidentally I wrote a piece on treating restless legs syndrome (RLS), step 1 of which is “fix iron deficiency”: https://henryaj.substack.com/p/how-to-treat-restless-legs-syndrome
I actually think this was quite reasonable. He's a bioethicist, after all – 'eugenics' has a bunch of different meanings in that field and it's important to distinguish between them
The figure of 85% of Americans having their wisdom teeth removed isn’t very informative as (IIRC) most Americans have them removed by default, even if there’s no impaction.
In the UK, the NHS only removes them if they’re causing problems (although in practice I found they were quite reluctant even in this case). That would provide a more useful base rate.
Good point about stimulants mostly being useful as adjuncts and not as monotherapy.
Some stimulants seem to work well for depression, however: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6375494/
I’m not convinced you can really replace sleep with caffeine in any meaningful way; tolerance to caffeine builds so quickly as to make it unuseful after a couple of weeks.
Would be interested in your experience with tranylcypromine; it sounds to me to be way more dangerous than amphetamines.
This seems like generally a bad precedent to set - lots of people put a bunch of time into writing thoughtful comments; those comments are now gone. Even leaving the post up with the body blanked out would be preferable. I’m not sure the author of a post should have the power to erase all the discussion of it unless they have a very good reason.