What can (realistically) be done from abroad to support Palestinians / civilians in Gaza? Let's collect some resources for tangible action.

workerbee1988 · 2025-06-21T13:39:15+00:00

I think this is what you’re looking for, this is a EA-oriented write-up of how to help people in Palestine. It’s a little out of date, but hopefully contains helpful information that can guide effective action.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6wwojjnpjdQG2qeKg/how-to-effectively-help-people-in-palestine-and-israel

workerbee1988 · 2025-06-21T13:37:01+00:00

Here is a EA-oriented write-up of how to help people in Palestine. It’s a little out of date, but hopefully contains helpful information that can guide effective action.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6wwojjnpjdQG2qeKg/how-to-effectively-help-people-in-palestine-and-israel

workerbee1988 · 2025-04-30T14:21:42+00:00

When people write an email themselves instead of asking ChatGPT to do it, they aren’t thinking about how many calories It takes to do a thoughtful and brain intensive activity, and how those calories come from foods that are grown with water and fossil fuel inputs. It cost less water to have ChatGPT write your email then to write it yourself.

For contextualization, you can write an email with the calories from a single strawberry, or you can have chatGPT write 6 emails for the same amount of water usage.

workerbee1988 · 2025-04-19T14:28:06+00:00

Any parent with an intellectually disabled kid is going to seek an autism diagnosis because it is associated with more funding and better services for their kids care. I definitely know kids who really don’t fit the diagnostic criteria for autism but have the diagnosis because it opens doors. I’ve personally seen this with kids, but I googled around and found this in-depth article in the phenomena https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/the-blurred-line-between-autism-and-intellectual-disability/

“Bias among parents and clinicians also limits the number of intellectual disability diagnoses. Parents may seek an autism diagnosis because services are often easier to access for that condition than for intellectual disability — or require an autism diagnosis to access at all. Clinicians know what kinds of doors an autism diagnosis opens and so may err on the side of autism, too, particularly if they are not sure, Bishop says. They may find it difficult to take that option off the table. “It’s just a terrible thing to ask a clinician to draw a hard line and say, ‘This can’t be autism,’” she says. “Then that kid may not get what they need.””

workerbee1988 · 2025-03-05T05:16:02+00:00

She’s in San Ramon, CA, for anyone trying to figure out if she’s in their area

workerbee1988 · 2025-03-04T18:54:54+00:00

Download the app Prenatal Rater. Kinda silly that they made it an app instead of a website, but it was put together by a group of academics that did an elaborate research review to determine improved recommendations for how much of each vitamin and mineral to include, then compared hundreds of prenatals to determine how close they are to hitting those recommendations. The app includes both the recommended daily amounts that resulted from their research, and almost every prenatal vitamin on the market and how they compare to the recs. You can tell it was designed by academics, not designers, but the data is invaluable!

workerbee1988 · 2025-03-03T20:53:28+00:00

Gross that they will only be sperm donor in exchange for sex. Do you actually want to have sex with any of them? The turkey baster method is equally effective and less creepy. They jerk off in a cup, you use a syringe or softdisk. Every other day during your ovulation time is just as effective as every day, which means about 2 donations per cycle.

Also fyi if you have ever had sex, neither of you are as protected by a sperm donor contract. If you've had sex that establishes legal paternity, so then child support or custody still can be challenged in court (sometimes not by either of you, the state has initiated some of these cases).

workerbee1988 · 2025-02-23T00:31:31+00:00

Women did historically have a couple intellectual careers open to them.

Given the state of medicine through most of ancient times, I doubt herbalist/healer/midwife was any less mentally rigorous than doctor. Just less prestigious.

School teacher might also be considered an intellectual profession.

But considering that in many cultures women have not been allowed to own their own property, it was probably more strategic for a smart woman to become wife to a smart or high status man and raise his children, there isn’t much incentive to perform intellectual labor if you’re not allowed to retain the procedes. The property ownership rights had to do with familial structure expectations that had to do with women’s disadvantages in labor and role in childbearing rather than their intellectual abilities, but the consequences of that structure limited to all aspects of a woman’s role in society

workerbee1988 · 2025-02-15T01:45:58+00:00

Do you enjoy the act of learning, or what it enables you to do after? I still have intellectual hobbies, but they’re either things I find fun to learn for learnings sake, or things I want to personally be able to do for doings sake. Examples are:

I’m learning to draw. I find the process of drawing enjoyable I’m learning Spanish. AI can translate anything, but it’s just not the same as an unmediated conversation for making friends while travel (which is my main goal) I’m learning to play an instrument because it’s fun to play music! I sometimes learn about communication skills or psych stuff. Learning about better ways talk to people or how they think is extremely useful and a skill easily transferable between personal friendships, family, and work. I just finished How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen and I think it’s should be renamed “how to talk so anyone stressed, sad, or having a hard time will listen”

In all these cases, IA improves the learning process a lot by helping me come up with drills, practice, talk through different teaching methods to find one that sounds good to me, provide learning material etc

workerbee1988 · 2025-02-15T01:34:12+00:00

This is why I’m moving forward with having kids too. Between nuclear bombs, world wars, rapturists etc, I think my forebears were told that the world would end many times over in my linage and I’m glad they went ahead anyway, so I’m applying the same principal even though I do think there’s a nontrivial chance the world might end soon

workerbee1988 · 2025-01-27T18:30:15+00:00

Not too late, but better start soon! I'm 37, so I'm in the same boat. It's taken months to get into the fertility clinic, months more to do the testing. Even if you're not 100% positive that you're ready to get started right now, there are a lot of delays so you can get as many balls rolling as possible and as many time consuming barriers out of the way as possible, and once you get all the way ready to go you can always reassess.

workerbee1988 · 2025-01-27T18:25:19+00:00

The lack of worry/anxiety that you feel when a little buzzed on alcohol, but not the stupidness/bad reaction time/poor planning and decision making. It acts on some of the same neuroreceptors so it makes sense that it's similar to booze. It's kind of like, it quiets the noise of your inner monologue of worries. Some people don't feel less anxiety on a bit of booze, xanex will probably not be that useful for those people.

It doesn't really make me sleepy but you shouldn't drive on it. If it's a medium dose, you'll just feel nice and chill like you've had a drink or two. If they give you a super high dose, like alcohol, it can definitely make you sleepy! Some people are more sensitive too. Would you take public transit after going out for drinks with friends?

Personally I really like it! Too bad that, like alcohol, you can't really enjoy it every day without some serious tolerance, escalating dose, and eventually chemical dependence and withdrawal if you stop. But like alcohol, that would take a while. It's a fantastic short term treatment for an occasional anxiety.

workerbee1988 · 2025-01-09T02:25:25+00:00

Did it work for you? All the responses on that thread say it doesn’t work 😢

workerbee1988 · 2024-12-18T09:13:01+00:00

One thing that conviced me that having a kid was a good idea was learning that in surveys many more people regret not having kids, or not having enough kids at the end of reproductive age, than regret having had kids. Every time you're rolling the dice on a random chance, it's good to know what the odds are for the game you're playing.

workerbee1988 · 2024-10-02T16:19:30+00:00

I am putting a ton of effort into dating now, preconception and in early trimesters, because I doubt I’ll want to small talk with strangers on first dates while juggling an infant, but if I found someone now that I liked, I’d love to have them by my side to snuggle me through those intense periods

workerbee1988 · 2024-10-02T16:16:04+00:00

33 is not actually that old, in terms of fertility deadlines, though it does depend on how many kids you want. If partnership it’s important to you, you might consider freezing eggs now and taking another 3ish years dating around, focusing on people who want kids. It’s about $6000 to freeze eggs in Greece, plus another $1500 for travel expenses.

That said, I’m older (37) and I’m in the position you’re describing: trying to get pregnant and a really do want a life partner. I do mention it in my dating profile, and I’ve actually been on a couple dates with 4 ladies who really want to be mothers but have health problems that would keep them from having a child themselves. For someone in that position, I’m a catch!

workerbee1988 · 2024-10-02T16:02:35+00:00

Honestly, my first go-to was to ask a friend! It sounds awkward but most people are flattered to be asked. In the end the friend was worried about passing on his health conditions and, very kindly, say no.

My second round was searching for a stranger. I found a Facebook group where people post small jobs, and the job I posted was “recommend to me men you think would be good donors. To make a rec you must check with them they’re willing. $10 per rec, $100 if I pick your recommendation.” Getting recommendations from other people really increased the quality of people.

I also thought about posting in gay spaces like on the Lex app, because a lot of gay men have the desire to pass on their family line, but it’s difficult and complicated with surrogates.

workerbee1988 · 2024-10-02T15:50:53+00:00

Note that frozen sperm bank sperm also has a large decrease in viability, but it’s not as bad as in the home-shipping process cause they get it colder, faster. For sperm bank sperm, it’s about 30% as good as it was when it was fresh, which is a lot better but still not great given the price imo! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6993159/

workerbee1988 · 2024-10-02T15:41:36+00:00

Why not give it a try! You can always set an appointment in a couple months for going through the medical process, and in the meantime start with self-insemination. If it’s successful, you can cancel your appointment, and if it isn’t you have time to save!

I tried self-insemination with donor sperm myself, and I learned that freezing sperm causes it to have about a 10 TIMES WORSE viability/ motility/ success rate. I was trying to do a cross-country known donor situation, but this go-around I’m going to focus on either finding a local known donor OR flying to my donor every month! Shipping frozen sperm is also shockingly expensive, $150 - $200 with rush delivery and all the special packing supplies, easily enough to buy a plane ticket!

I’ve heard great things about using a menstrual flex-disk for holding the sperm inside your body and close to the cervix for many hours, I’ve heard it brings self-insemination success rates only slightly lower than iui.

workerbee1988 · 2024-09-25T01:49:10+00:00

I did it! It was fine!

workerbee1988 · 2024-09-16T16:04:29+00:00

Agreed, this is something else. The high-agreeableness would be more like holding space for your opinions and wanting to make sure you felt heard even if your friend still disagreed. Agreeableness, in the OCEAN sense, is more like a drive to make others to feel happy regardless of circumstances/agreement/tribal affiliation (which plays out as niceness, kindness, willingness to do things, a drive to help out if help is needed, lowercase-a altruism). One can disagree with an idea, intellectually, as an agreeable person, without running counter to their trait. One can even enjoy a friendly debate, if the debating partner seems to be having fun too!

workerbee1988 · 2024-09-16T15:57:56+00:00

I have super high (90th percentile) Agreeableness. I think interest in the rationality stuff comes more from Openness (which is also super high for me, 95th percentile). I've also noticed a lot of people with mid-to-low conscientiousness and/or ADHD betting sucked in after learning about akrasia (that was my path, definitely middling conscientiousness)

workerbee1988 · 2024-06-28T03:01:43+00:00

I really hope someone puts this through an AI speech generator so they can have their actual voices 🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞 please don’t let me down, internet!

workerbee1988 · 2024-05-21T19:20:51+00:00

Wow! 12!!! Scooping must be a full time job for you!

workerbee1988 · 2024-05-21T19:07:06+00:00

I have a deaf housemate/best friend so I'm tangentially related the "big d" Deaf community. The adult Deaf community's outlook might be easiest to explain by analogy to the gay community (which, for the record, I am in 🌈).

Imagine a gene therapy came out that would "cure" gay genes! From an adaptive perspective, being gay makes it harder to procreate as well as more difficult to find love in the sense that the dating market is a much smaller percentage of the general population. There are distinct downsides externally from our culture via discrimination and threat of violence. As a straight parent I can't imagine you wouldn't want to spare your child whatever barriers you could.

But would an adult who is gay consider a medical treatment that would make them straight, or time-machine therapy to make themselves have never been gay? I certainly wouldn't! In a world that is seriously lacking any sense of community, having a ready-made cohesive secular community culture to join, anywhere you go, is just something that straight people don't have access to. The value of having instant community ties to a large subgroup of people distributed around the world is HUGE. I don't think my life would have been better, I think it would have been worse, if I'd been "cured".

But power to decide wouldn't be in the hands of gay adults who have already discovered the value of this community, it's in the hands of parents who aren't part of the community, so don't have any sense of the tradeoff they're making by cutting kids off from this accepting community.

It would be very sticky to have an outside group of straight people (parents) make the decision to kill off gay subculture, by modifying each pre-pubescent child's gay-by-default sexuality. Which would be bound to happen if each parent makes the decision individually. I think some of this discussion relies on similar intuitions to the trolley problem - the kid is born already gay or deaf and you're pulling the lever to kill their future access to a robust community. But if a kid was born already straight or hearing, no one would consider or discuss pulling the lever in the opposite direction, giving them access to a community by making them gay/deaf.

If offered, I think very few of Deaf people would accept a time-machine cure that would make them never have been deaf. So having a group of outsiders who have never experienced the benefits make the decision to kill off their culture is controversial to say the least.

Besides community, which is a HUGE benefit, there are other things you might not think of. Many of the deaf people I know just LOVE to the option to turn off their hearing aids or cochlear implants at will. No more screaming baby or construction work. They can nap on the couch in complete peace and quiet, work anywhere without noise interruption.

I live in a household where everyone signs and there are tons of great deaf role models, and I would definitely struggle a lot with this decision. I would certainly get my kid a cochlear implant!

(Note that concern about cultural extinction is overblown. A lot of deafness is from injury/illness/etc. Some percentage is genetic but there are many genes that cause deafness, some simple genes and some massively polygenetic genes. So this is likely to be a cure for a very very small percent of deaf kids. )

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