Is your answer any different for identical twins, who of course only separate after fertilization? How about chimeras?
Yes; if I had a twin, my obvious answer would be when I separated from my brother. Were I a chimera, I suspect I would have researched the issue more extensively than I have now, but at my present level of understanding it still seems like there's a discontinuous event- when the cells fuse together to form one organism.
It seems to me that you can find a discontinuous event for most person precursors, and the discontinuity is important for that question (because the components were continuous beforehand, and the composite is continuous afterwards). The main counterexample I can think of is clones- if I create a thousand copies of my DNA and implant them in embryos scrubbed of DNA, then they seem fungible in a way that a thousand unique fertilized embryos are not. And then, because they are fungible, I would ascribe to the group of them the specialness of a single fertilized embryo, and would only have qualms about destroying the last one (or perhaps last few). Note that as soon as they begin to develop, they begin to lose their fungibility (and we could even quantify that level of fungibility/uniqueness), and could eventually become unique people (that share the same genes).
Likewise, the position "every sperm is sacred" seems mistaken because sperm are by nature fungible (and beyond that, we can complain about the word sacred).
Likewise, the position "every sperm is sacred" seems mistaken because sperm are by nature fungible (and beyond that, we can complain about the word sacred).
In what way are sperm fungible? There is usually a wide variety of difference between two random ones from the same person. After all, half the genetic variability of two siblings is due to the difference in sperm.
It's true that differences are such that we can't easily tell much difference between any two sperm (of the same sex and chromosome number) -- but the same is true of a just fer...
What do you believe that most people on this site don't?
I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if you don't want to tarnish your image.
I think a big problem with a "community" dedicated to being less wrong is that it will make people more concerned about APPEARING less wrong. The biggest part of my intellectual journey so far has been the acquisition of new and startling knowledge, and that knowledge doesn't seem likely to turn up here in the conditions that currently exist.
So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.