All of Orual's Comments + Replies

Can concur, wetsuits are great even if you aren't scuba diving. I got one back when I taught swimming lessons at beaches in Maritime Canada. Even at the height of summer and at some of the warmest beaches, the water is never that warm, and as an instructor teaching more than one class per day I'd usually be in the water for long enough that keeping adequate sunscreen on my body was a Sisyphean task, as was keeping warm. After one busy week where I got a pretty nasty burn all across every exposed part of my torso, which hurt for days, I went and bought the wetsuit. Did not regret it.

This is a definitely an assumption that should be challenged more. However, I don't think that FOOM is remotely required for a lot of AI X-risk (or at least unprecedented catastrophic human death toll risk) scenarios. Something doesn't need to recursively self-improve to be a threat if it's given powerful enough ways to act on the world (and all signs point to us being exactly dumb enough to do that). All that's required is that we aren't able to coordinate well enough as a species to actually stop it. Either we don't detect the threat before it's too late... (read more)

This is definitely a spot where the comparison breaks down a bit. However, it does still hold in the human context, somewhat, and maybe that generalizes. 

I worked as a lifeguard for a number of years (even lower on the totem pole than EMTs, more limited scope of practice). I am, to put it bluntly, pretty damn smart, and could easily find optimizations, areas where I could exceed scope of practice with positive outcomes if I had access to the tools even just by reading the manuals for EMTs or paramedics or nurses. I, for example, learned how to intubat... (read more)

Distinguishing between a properly cited paraphrase and taking someone's work as your own without sufficient attribution is not trivial even for people. There's a lot of grey area in terms of how closely you can mimic the original before it becomes problematic (this is largely what I've seen Rufo trying to hang the Harvard admin woman with, paraphrases that maintained a lot of the original wording which were nonetheless clearly cited, which at least to me seem like bad practice but not actually plagiarism in the sense it is generally meant) and it comes dow... (read more)

Yeah, the joke for professors is you can work any 60-70 hours of the week you want, so long as you show up for lectures, office hours, and meetings. It's got different sorts of pressures to a corporate or industry position, but it's not low-pressure. And if you're not at the kind of university that has a big stable of TAs handling a lot of the grunt work, you're gonna have a number of late nights marking exams and papers or projects every semester, unless you exclusively give students multiple-choice questions.

Also, getting to the point of being a tenured ... (read more)

Those who are good teachers will continue to be good teachers. Example of this from a prof I know who won teaching awards and continues to teach basically the same way now that she's gotten tenure. She likes teaching, that's a big part of why she's good at it, she's not about to phone it in. I think what's slipped a bit post-tenure is the amount of resources she devotes to publishing her research. I don't think her actual research has slowed down any, because she also likes that part, she's just not focused on getting papers out the door ASAP because her c... (read more)

One of the most frustrating things about the Blanchardian system for me is how it flattens a ton of variation into the "auto____philia" category, asserting the same "erotic target location error" cause for all of it, and the people pushing the theory tend to brush that off by asserting that trans people are lying (or grossly mistaken) about their own experiences and sexualities. That category in the original study was extremely heterogenous (and subsequent studies have been almost exclusively run on members of crossdressing fetish forums and similar, as yo... (read more)

Yeah, that's my main issue, too. I know the original incredibly well, I worked out the chords on piano from scratch years ago. So while I get the motivation here I would really have trouble with the adapted version. 

I natively have higher expectations in terms of congregational musical and rhythmic ability, due to where I grew up (Congo), so I always feel the need to push back when people dumb down songs for group singing. My brain expects random untrained people to be able to do melody and descant, syncopation and pick-up notes, and so on, because th... (read more)

My experience is that there's a huge amount of conservatism among classical instrument players. 

One part is the sound change. If something changes the sound of their instrument in a way that isn't clearly positive it's very hard to convince people to switch to it. Sometimes this is pretty rational, (I don't think anyone thinks plastic brass instruments sound better) but other times it's a kind of superstitious audiophile sort of logic. For a flute, I think bending a formerly straight tube will always have some effect on the sound. If the tube is alrea... (read more)

Apologies in advance for any tonal issues in this.

I have serious issues with the autogynephilia analysis, both yours and more generally. You've likely heard the critiques that many cis women qualify as AGP if they take the same surveys, but I also think the questions and scenarios are simply not useful in terms of distinguishing a sexual motivation from any other sort of gender euphoria/dysphoria/identity. Someone with entirely non-sexual motivations for transition would still likely find a sexual fantasy where they are their transitioned gender in one way... (read more)

And for the flip side, my (cis male) partner was having acne issues and decided on a whim to take my anti-androgen to see if it helped (because it's been used to treat hormonal acne, primarily in women for reasons that will become immediately obvious). He was absolutely miserable within a couple days. I was kind of amazed because I had a very similar reaction to you when I started feminizing HRT, I wasn't expecting such a dramatically different reaction on his part, even though he's a cis guy.

That being said, I don't necessarily suggest this kind of experi... (read more)

Minor correction. The UK is not the only country employing the delayed second dose strategy. Canada has done so as well, as a way of maximizing and front-loading the benefit of its relatively limited supplies of vaccine, and I believe we started doing so fairly quickly after the UK, before the effectiveness was clear. So whatever answer explains the UK's willingness to take that risk has to also explain Canada's similar decision.

I think you might be better served by using a slightly higher gear and adjusting your seat upward so that your leg is at full extension when the relevant pedal is at the bottom of its rotation. I expect that's the main reason you're seeing an advantage, you're using more of your leg in the pedaling motion, which is more efficient. And would be even more efficient if you weren't having to balance your weight on your pedals. Look at how professional cyclists have their bikes set up. Obviously you won't exactly replicate that without toe clips that you won't want to use, but that's where I'd look for improvements as opposed to reinventing the wheel.

Colour me intrigued. Might you happen to have the code for this anywhere? I didn't see it linked in any of your posts, though I may have missed something.

I've got time. I'm happy to validate predictions. Give me as many as you want.