Something I just realized:

If literal infant trauma is a real phenomenon, then their should be some psychological impact of circumcision.

There aren't many things that are more traumatic than someone cutting off a piece of your penis.
Circumcision rates vary widely.

For most of western history, it was just the Jews. Then in the late 19th century medicalized circumcision became common in the US.

link.springer.com/chapter/10.100…
Circumcision rates rose for decades, but there started to be push-back in the 40s and 50s. And they've falling again in the second half of the 20th century.
It was never in popular in Europe as it was in America. Current European circumcision rates are around 20%.
Is there any trend (psychological or otherwise) that we saw mostly in Jews, and then, in the 19th and 20th centuries in the American, but not the European, population as a whole, but which is starting to receded now?

Bonus points if the trend seem to only impact men, not women.
Can we detect the "footprints" of an infant trauma effect?
*THERE!

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More from @EpistemicHope

22 Jan
After we exit the acute risk period (ie put our global house in order and "solve" x-risk) the thing to do is a "Long Reflection":
All of humanity (with our new aligned AGI assistants / augmentations) think hard together: considering our collective values, and working out moral philosophy, game theory, and other more esoteric considerations, to decide, carefully and wisely, what to do with the cosmos.
This is usually framed as "we should think really hard about what is good to do before we take any actions to transform the stars."
Read 10 tweets
21 Jan
One thing that I currently (weakly) believe:

Giving money to charities is broadly useless or close-to-useless.

If you have $100,000, and want to improve the world, you're better off investing it in the stock market then donating it.

(Though, of course, there are specific organizations, both for-profit and non-profit, that are much more promising than either "random good sounding charity" or "broad-based index funds".)
That is, I claim that the default assumption should be that giving away money approximately doesn't do anything (and might even cause harm), and that a high burden of proof is required to overcome that prior.
Read 7 tweets
21 Jan
My current understanding is that while there was some impeachment of US sailors by the English, the admiralty had ordered the British navy to cut it out, and the practice mostly ceased by the start of the war of 1812.
"Impeachment!" was the official causis belli for the war, that was just an excuse to try to seize British-controlled land in Canada.

Does anyone dispute that story?
(Who should I tag, and what should I hashtag, to bring this to the attention of the history buffs that like talking about this sort of thing?)
Read 6 tweets
20 Jan
This is a great question. Anyone have examples?
This is useful for calibrating our expectations about tools for thought.
"Allows us to solve problems we couldn't solve before" isn't the only thing that tools for thought might allow us to do. They might also help us discover new problems, or streamline an otherwise-viable but costly creative process.
Read 7 tweets
19 Jan
There's a particular kind of romantic partnership, with a certain sort of person, that I've wanted since I became a self-aware, directed agent at around age 15.
Empirically, this kind of relationship has been hard to achieve. It hasn't worked out yet, at least.

And this sometimes leaves me wondering if my standards are unreasonable.
In years past that desire was often very alive.

These days, I'm rarely directly or viscerally in contact with it.
Read 28 tweets
17 Jan
I was reading something that suggested that trauma "tries" to spread itself. ie that the reason why intergenerational trauma is a thing is that the traumatized part in a parent will take action to recreate that trauma in the child.
This model puts the emphasis on the the parent's side: the trauma is actively "trying" to spread.
This is in contrast to my previous (hypothetical) model for IGT, which puts the emphasis on the child's side: kids are sponges that are absorbing huge amounts of info, including via very subtle channels. So they learn the unconscious reactions of the people around them.
Read 13 tweets

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