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credit cards
Trivial inconvenience, the oxymoron.
The point isn't "a credit card", the point is "any means of making digital purchases", which pretty much translates to "a credit card". A non-trivial problem in the situation I describe.
In response to
Knowledge is Worth Paying For
One key cause of piracy left out of this analysis is the significant demographic of people who have internet but can't buy things over it. This usually describes teenagers in developed countries who have internet access, but don't have capital that they can freely spend on digitally purchased objects. The amount of young adults who actually have jobs is really falling in developed countries because of the promotion of internships and volunteering opportunities, which are easier to obtain than jobs and have equal or greater prestige. Even if they do have income, they may not possess credit cards. There's a good portion of this group that can't even drive to purchase things with cash. So every new possession they obtain by spending money, or rather getting an adult to spend/provide/transfer money, is a significant expenditure.
In this situation, knowledge becomes something it seems irrational to pay for, because it seems like it "should" be liberated. They might acknowledge that being able to understand physics better or win arguments has a value of $20 or $50, but they won't spend that when they could get a comparable result with an expenditure of time, even if said time is worth more than the money would be.
CI don't behead people, Alcor offer it as an option. If I've just met someone at a party, I'll tend to say "I'm having my head frozen" because people have heard of that, but I'll explain I'm actually signed up for whole-body if the conversation gets that far.
Really? My image of cyronics is always of people lying in tanks, a pre-LW conceptualization. Cutting off heads always seems to me like a wasteful way of going about things and has much more of a "creepy sci-fi movie" vibe to it.
Only on this site would you see perfectly ordinary charity fundraising techniques described as "dark arts", while in the next article over, the community laments the poor image of the concept of beheading corpses and then making them rise again.
I thought that we'd pretty much ditched the beheading part precisely for that reason?
You didn't want to do that already?
The exact idea of "tell aliens that I am their god" would have, if it occurred to me before, been immediately recognized as juvenile and worse than pointless. But this phrasing, especially alien teenagers, plural, spins it again to me as something that would be "totally epic" and "all my friends would totally think it was awesome" and invokes vivid images of negotiating with them about who gets to be this theology's Jesus.
(Interestingly, I originally thought this was a reply to this comment when it appeared in my inbox, and was slightly disappointed to learn it was not.)
In response to
Teenage Rationalists and Changing Your Mind
Gosh, all us teenagers just coming out of the woodwork over here! We should all get together and play, I don't know, online Monopoly or something. ~Rationally.~ Since I figure it would take less long and be a more teen-appropriate game than Diplomacy was.
In response to
Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable
One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." From a Bayesian perspective that's some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity. (Albeit it doesn't prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent - it could be alien teenagers.)
I think this phrasing, particularly of the parenthetical portion, is a low-level but still present existential risk, because the temptation it creates for teenagers such as myself to actually say in the future "This is your god speaking" to an alien world is enormous. The potential negative consequences this could have on said alien world is astronomically enormous.
OTOH, the surge of bipolar diagnoses, esp. self-diagnoses, suggests it's overdiagnosed. How would you test? (This is a matter of some interest to me as well.)
Possibly you'd take a good selection of people whom health professionals have proposed may be suffering from bipolar disorder, and randomly select for patients to either be treated for bipolar disorder, or for doctors to pursue an alternate explanation for the victim's symptoms (such as regular depression or attention deficit disorder - the latter of which has been proposed to be responsible for the vast majority of "bipolar disorder cases" in children). Although this is a pretty sketchy concept. The alternative is for the other group to not be treated at all, but the ethics thereof are even more questionable.
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But what REALLY puts a bad taste into my mouth is the casual mention that you basically slept with several different women for research purposes. This is due to a combination of the aforementioned cached thoughts, and... seriously, dude? I mean, are you down with animal testing? Because if you are that's cool, but... gosh. Seriously. It just bothers me and... I can't really be coherent here, it's a cached reaction but damn.
The only part I agree with is that you are not being coherent. Having sexual experiences for the sake of growth and experience is approximately what most people do throughout their teens as a part of natural human development. It is certainly not harmful to others, all else being equal.
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For me "research purposes" implies something completely different from the "experiences for the sake of growth and experience" you describe. A lot of his terminology implied to me that he was using these fancy new techniques of his to get women to sleep with him on pretenses, some of which seemed to be false to me (e.x. claiming he has to go so he can get the woman interested in coffee later, etc).
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Welcome! Sweet, another girl my age!
Kind of similar to how I discovered it. I think I googled EY and found his website after seeing his name in the sl4 mailing list.
My story is similar, finding this stuff from that good old "The Meaning of Life" FAQ from back in 2003, which I think he's officially renounced, kind of like the doornail dead SL4 wiki. A search brought me back into the website fold years later.
Anyway, seconding Swimmer's happiness at the young female demographic being bolstered a little more with your arrival, Sarokrae! May you gain the maximum amount of utilons from this site.