All of nongiga's Comments + Replies

I have a million arguments against this post and maybe in the past I'd have engaged with each of your points and arguments more thoroughly but I lost my patience for these things. I'll just say this: know that this post (as well as the comments), how they are completely ignorant of the emotional and economic ramifications of unplanned pregnancies, how they completely ignore self-autonomy, are the last straw. I've been in this movement for seven years, modeled my career after it, but especially in light of recent events it made me realize I just can't keep ... (read more)

This hurts but it checks out.

Okay I'll address the rest of the argument. You're also not giving a lot of context. It's hard to understand but based on your whole comment I can also see it being possible that you bumped into situations where people were trying to sort out interpersonal issues privately, and you got wind of it and tried to make it public. 

There is a world of difference between those situations and situations where people are not intellectually honest, which is most of the situations OP describes and discusses.

And it makes the last part of your comment even more uncalled for.

I'm sorry I just disagree. We are an applied ethics movement. Maybe the only one in the world. We should hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards. And yet we benefitted from a scheme that, legal or not, ruined a lot of people's lives. Utilitarianism or not, we need to do everything we can to atone. If we don't, it could ruin our psyches, our ethical standards, our perception and our trajectory.  

Tae so I guess now you can tell your friend that you've Called off the EAs :P

I don't think this post made the strong assumptions about population ethics you assume. 

More unplanned pregnancies does not necessarily equal larger population. In fact, at the very beginning the post highlights that there are twice as many abortions as unplanned births and more unsafe abortions than unplanned births. Including the still births, that is a lot of preventable human suffering. Is it worth those unplanned births?

I also think it's a bit ignorant to deny sub-Saharan Africa a technology we enjoy -  would you also be against birth contro... (read more)

I actually have given artificial wombs a little thought. I do think they'd be great: they could eliminate a very common suffering, give more options to LGBTQ people, aid in civilizational resilience, and definitely increase the number of wanted children people have in practice. They make sense within many different ethical frameworks.

I also think we're very, very far from them. I'm a systems biologist in a lab that also ventures into reproductive health, and we ostensibly know very little about the process of pregnancy. My lab is using the most cutting-edge methods to prove very specific and fundamental things. So at the same time, I am skeptical we will see it in our lifetimes, if ever.

(1) I never purported that communicating that monkeypox is transmitted mostly among MSM is tone-deaf in itself. Like I wrote at the end of my comment, I think this information is important. I think it is the way in which you communicated that made it come across as tone-deaf.

(2) the definition of an STI is:

infections that are passed from one person to another through sexual contact. The contact is usually vaginal, oral, or anal sex. But sometimes they can spread through other intimate physical contact. This is because some STDs, like herpes and HPV, are sp

I think your post comes across as a little tone-deaf in a way that can be counter-productive.  

"Is it worth worrying about?" "Basically no. The disease remains highly confined to the gay community."

Comes across as a disregard to the LGBTQ community. Mostly because of the historical context in which we live.

This sentence echoes many things that were said during the AIDS pandemic, which prior to COVID was the closest we got to GCBR in the past 100 years and in many metrics is closer to a GBCR than COVID.  Historically there was a very intentional d... (read more)

I have an undergraduate degree in Neuroscience and I am very skeptical that such a drug can be found. Can't talk to these specific genes in particular but genes are often turned on in different ways and in different parts of the brain, and lead to different effects based on which genes are turned on or off with them. Now because of the gene interaction in the background, the same receptor can cause a reverse effect when activated in one part of the brain or another. Additionally, each neurotransmitter has upwards of 20 different receptors in the brain. Als... (read more)

Only if you're strictly total utilitarian. But won't all these things drop us into a situation like in the repugnant conclusion, where we would just get more people (especially women) living in worse conditions, with fewer choices?

Women in fact already are having fewer children than they want. Me and a lot of women around me would want to have children earlier than we are planning on, but we couldn't do it without dropping three levels down the socioeconomic ladder and having to give up on goals we've been investing in since elementary school. We won't onl... (read more)

So I took a class on sleep and I read some papers about it. Here are some thoughts:

I do think it's a cause area with a very clear solution: train more imagery rehearsal therapists, and disperse them/make them available through telehealth. I read the papers and it does seem highly effective. I think a lot of people would have enrolled even at high cost if they knew it existed/they had access to it. And then after there were more therapists we could probably talk about raising awareness/providing these servies for free and at places where they are more neede... (read more)

Hi, I'm an EA working in a prominent antibiotics resistance lab. From my point of view, antibiotics resistance is a big issue, resistance is growing, HOWEVER, there are actually a lot of medications in the pipeline that are effective but weren't brought to market because it's not financially viable right now (that I heard in a talk by Floyd Romesberg). There are also other interesting therapies like antimicrobial peptides (explanation here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15761415 ). My lab developed an ML model that will help doctors in... (read more)

This is a very creative idea. A few of my thoughts:

1) Like you pointed out, many diseases that can be very virulent in humans (Ebola, Nipah, Coronavirus) are not so virulent in bats, so there would be many instances where a vaccination program will be very valuable for humans but have very little (and maybe even negative, due to side effects) effect on the wild animal population.

2) Diseases tend to be harmful in dense, homogeneous populations. Like people, or livestock. I don't know how much disease really impacts wild animal suffering - there could b... (read more)

I was terrified of pursuing an EA career

For 3 years after joining EA I was still set on going to medical school. I knew I could do more but I was just terrified of switching. Even when I got an opportunity presented to me I was very torn between pursuing it or staying in my comfort zone. Now I'm having the best summer of my life in a biosecurity internship. I'm more motivated, I'm more productive, I'm going on more adventures, and I have a lot more and better connections than before.

EA was amazing in that having this network made it easier to go into an e... (read more)