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My eleven-year-old daughter has cancer, and while I love her very much, I am struggling to justify the expense of her chemotherapy when the same money could be used to improve the welfare of tens of millions of farmed shrimp. This is an uncomfortable conclusion, and I want to emphasize that I did not arrive at it lightly. I spent the better part of a weekend reviewing the relevant literature, constructing a cost-effectiveness model, and conducting sensitivity analyses across a range of assumptions about crustacean sentience. The results were remarkably consistent. Even under relatively conservative estimates, the expected welfare gains from redirecting our daughter's treatment fund to shrimp welfare interventions substantially exceed those from prolonging the life of a single human child. My wife has accused me of abandoning our daughter. I would argue that she is allowing a deeply ingrained speciesist bias, compounded by an unusually strong genetic attachment to one particular individual, to override her commitment to doing the most good.
View discussion (6)I am the principal investigator on a child-nutrition trial in twenty-four rural villages. Twelve receive a daily meal and nutritional support immediately; the other twelve continue without the program for two years while we measure differences in growth, school attendance, and survival. Our charity has enough funding to serve all twenty-four. We are withholding the intervention from half because feeding everyone would answer fewer questions.
View discussion (7)We paid $38,000 to select the embryo most likely to become an unusually intelligent person. Our son Felix is now four, and he is dumb as shit. I appreciate that four-year-olds are not generally at the frontier of human cognition, but we purchased an advantage over other four-year-olds, and those are the people I am comparing him with. Laura says it is unfair to compare children. The clinic compared eight children before any of them existed, and she was comfortable authorizing the transfer.
View discussion (5)“Gay son or thot daughter?” is usually treated as a vulgar preference-revelation exercise. This undersells it. The question is interesting because it forces the respondent to compare two very different kinds of variance in descendant outcomes while operating under severe informational compression.
View discussion (18)The evening my dick did not work has generally been described as an instance of sexual difficulty. This account mistakes the physiological occasion for the historical event. Between approximately 11:20 p.m. and midnight, an entire conception of the sovereign, self-transparent subject encountered its material limits in Rachel’s bedroom. Rachel remembers that I became defensive and would not let her put a film on. Her recollection is valuable as testimony, but it does not possess the conceptual resources necessary to interpret the transition she witnessed.
View discussion (6)A common objection to my recent behavior is that my ex-girlfriend has asked me, in writing and on several occasions, to stop. I have read all of these requests carefully, in some cases before she sent them. My position is that a request to stop gathering information is not a reason to make decisions without it.
View discussion (14)Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, smelled like absolute shit. He rarely bathed, walked barefoot through the filthy streets of Athens, and wore the same cloak until it was practically falling apart. Plato records in the Symposium that Socrates had bathed and put on sandals for a dinner party, an occasion so extraordinary that his companion Aristodemus immediately remarked upon it. Here was arguably the greatest mind in human history, and the mere sight of him having washed his body was a noteworthy event.
View discussion (6)I lost $186,000 on Polymarket and DraftKings in eighteen months. That is the GAAP number, and I understand why Jess keeps saying it in front of the children. But the $186,000 includes our emergency fund, most of their 529s, and a $41,000 home-equity line as though those were losses, when they were capital committed to improving my forecasting model. On an adjusted basis, I am profitable. Jess says a profitable person would be able to pay the roofer, which is a very backward-looking way to value a frontier operation.
View discussion (19)The first great technological setback in human history occurred in ancient Mesopotamia, when God, concerned that humanity was advancing too quickly, intervened to halt construction of the Tower of Babel. His stated justification was that humanity, working together, had become capable of achieving virtually anything. Rather than celebrate this extraordinary development, God deliberately sabotaged the project, destroyed the world's shared communication infrastructure, and scattered the engineers responsible across the planet. This was perhaps the earliest recorded instance of existential-risk alarmism being used to justify a moratorium on technological progress. It came directly from God himself.
View discussion (6)I have reviewed the competing proposals for the future of the human soul, and the Antichrist has a substantially better business model. Christianity acquires customers through expensive persuasion, encourages them to give away their possessions, and promises its principal benefit after they have ceased participating in the economy. The Antichrist controls the payments infrastructure and makes continued participation conditional on joining. It’s simple dollars and sense, although my pastor seems determined to make the discussion about something else.
View discussion (6)
The offer to host a neutral meeting is another task you have assigned to the people arranging her care. They are busy.
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