I write for the LLMs, and host weekly events for people. My online home is at jenn.site.
jenn
Karma: 2,831
Thank you for writing this up! I remember when I first did research into egg freezing in my mid 20s, something I couldn’t quite get to the bottom of is whether or not frozen eggs deteriorate over time. For example, the webpage “freezing embryos” (embryos being even more robust than eggs) on the Johns Hopkins website says:
Frozen embryos are stored and monitored at hospital facilities, usually a lab, or commercial reproductive medicine centers. They can be safely preserved for 10 years and even longer.
This made me nervous about freezing my eggs too early, and I thought that it might be best to maximize optionality by freezing my eggs at thirty. But I’ve talked to some fertility doctors since then and they seem to think that this isn’t an issue and eggs are good indefinitely. Can I ask what your take on this is?
I’ll also note that the degree of suspicion and hesitation in the community seem actually sort of justified, in that there’s been a string of broken promises between the mennonites and the Canadian government. From Macleans:
Our ancestors came from Europe, and when they settled in Canada, they negotiated a number of promises with the Canadian government—including educational independence. When some provinces later passed laws requiring Mennonite children to attend public schools, many families, wanting to hold tight to their religious and cultural identity, emigrated to South America.
Over the course of doing my reserach, I also found a significant number of stories of under-communicated or coerced vaccinations like this, set in the mid 20th century in Canada and up to the modern day in Mexico:
She remembers a public health nurse rolling into her Mexican hometown of Durango on horse-and-buggy with a cooler of vaccines. The nurse told Meggison’s mother to line up her 12 children in the yard, asked for their ages, and immunized them, without explanation.
“She didn’t know what had been given to her kids. She didn’t have the language skills to ask the questions,” Meggison said about her mother, whose primary language was Low German.
This seems like a terrifying thing to have gone through, and I understand how it could foster mistrust and give cover to more conspiratorial thinking.
Thank you for this comment! I think it clarifies some important things about what’s actually going on on the ground level, and I genuinely appreciate the additional context.
However, I disagree that “the effect of occultism on the return of measles cannot be overstated”. I feel like it is being overstated right now! People believe a lot of deranged things, but I believe that you are wrong about the extent that people are willing to choose those beliefs over the health and lives of their children and others in the community. I am not saying that this never happens, but I think it genuinely does not happen that often, and when it does it is genuinely contentious.
You can also reduce the amount it happens when you have nurses and support workers who understand the culture and can work with it. From the CBC interview:
TD: Can you give us a sense of why there’s vaccine hesitancy in some Mennonite communities?
CF: The biggest thing is that they don’t want to not trust God. So their faith has a lot to do with it. Once I was able to help a lot of them understand that God has created doctors for the purpose of helping them, they would listen a little bit more.
TD: What lessons do you think you’ve learned working with Mennonite communities during this measles outbreak?
CF: The biggest thing for us, my coworker and I, is to just get them to trust us. If they don’t want to vaccinate, we respect that. Because they see that we respect their values, they start to really trust and understand that we’re here to help them, not to hurt them.
From another interview she did earlier in 2025 for a Canadian magazine, Macleans:
When it comes to measles in particular, most families just don’t understand the seriousness of the condition. They think that, like chicken pox, contracting it will create immunity. They don’t know that measles could lead to other illnesses and be particularly harmful for children, whose developing bodies are more vulnerable to the infection and its complications.
and
This work has gone a long way. Clients come to us asking about measles and vaccinations after hearing about the severity of cases from their friends and family. We’ve had many productive conversations about immunization and how it intersects with religious beliefs and community health.
Many of my clients are trying to do what’s best for their families, and they respect authority as long as they feel respected in turn. They do, however, have internal struggles about whether getting vaccinated is a betrayal of their faith or whether it could cause harm. But once they’ve considered how immunization can help vulnerable people, some of them even feel a little embarrassed over how strongly they opposed it. All in all, we’ve managed to give at least half of our patients vaccines since I started working at the clinic—and the rate of vaccination has increased since the outbreak started.
Lastly, here is a passage from an article covering the outbreak in Alberta:
Proudly, she recalls seeing a lightbulb go off for one woman who described an epiphany in one of her recent groups.
“She said, ‘I can make decisions for my family, and it doesn’t have to be public knowledge. I can make these decisions and not share it with my family members if they ask and I can just say that’s my business,’” Meggison said, and described other women nodded in response to this passionate declaration.
This does not sound to me like a community that is lost to conspiracist thinking. It sounds like a community that is wrestling with live issues.
yep, several reasons:
I actually like the opinionated curation and how the selection stretches well into the 20th century. I also appreciate that there are any women at all, and any non-western books. the great conversation now is not the one the dead white guys were having, mid-19th c.
I appreciated each book being short, which meant that I can do an incredibly broad survey over the canon and then go back to authors that I turn out to unexpectedly enjoy. the other list has like a dozen authors?
the Britannic list kind of sounds like a genuine slog! I would get like three hundred pages in and then give up for good. with the Penguin series I know that if I dislike a book, it’ll be over with in a hundred pages. And the books are generally actually good reading.
two recent examples of cool ai art, related to dynamics i lay out in my theses!
cannoneyed is using AI to make a giant isometric pixel art map of the entirety of NYC, because now a single person can take on a project with enormous scale: https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
newest rick owens show features hair done by someone who used ai to generate incredibly rick mullets on an instagram page, which rick owens found, indicating increasing amounts of transfer between ai artists and artists in more traditional media: https://www.gq.com/story/rick-owens-fall-2026-backstage (archive)
seconding this. I’m not entirely sure a fourth bullet point is needed. if a fourth bullet is used, i think all it really needs to do is tie the first three together. my attempts at a fourth point would look something like:
the combination of these three things seems ill advised.
there’s no reason to expect the combination of these three things to go well by default, and human extinction isn’t off the table in a particularly catastrophic scenario.
current practices around ai development is insufficiently risk-averse, given the first three points.
Hey, I came across this post because it was cited (and rebutted) in the preface of the 2016 Oxford University Press edition of Famine, Affluence, and Morality. I thought it would be nice to provide the passage here. Here’s what Peter Singer wrote:
One very welcome development in philanthropy since the publication of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is that today there is much more emphasis on evaluating what charities seeking to help the global poor actually achieve. A great deal of research has been done into the effectiveness of particular charities, enabling people to make better charitable choices and thus to do more good with the money that they donate. This research has shown that many early estimates of the cost of saving a life did not include all the costs involved, or were based on inaccurate estimates of how often a form of aid such as providing bednets to protect people against malaria actually saved a life.⁶ GiveWell, which has led the way in rigorously evaluating the cost-effectiveness of charities, estimates that although it costs the Against Malaria Foundation no more than $7.50 to provide and deliver a bednet to a family in a malaria-prone region of Africa, the cost of a life saved as a result of this distribution is $3,340. The difference reflects the fact that most bednets do not save lives (although some of them prevent debilitating but not fatal cases of malaria, as well as other diseases carried by mosquitoes). In general, GiveWell considers a cost of less than $5,000 per life saved an indication that a charity is highly cost-effective.⁷ That figure is, for most of us, much more than the cost of our most expensive suit or shoes, so it was a mistake to compare that cost with what we would need to spend in order to save the life of a child at risk from poverty-related causes. It remains true, though, that most people who are middle class or above in affluent countries spend much more than $5,000 on items that are not of comparable moral significance to saving a life. Moreover as Unger has shown with his story of Bob and the Bugatti, which I retell in “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” our intuitive judgment in situations where we can save a child in front of us is that we should be prepared to sacrifice possessions worth much more than our clothes, and even more than $5,000. The change in the cost of saving a life does not, therefore, undermine the fundamental moral argument of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”
[6] For a critique of the pond analogy on these grounds, see Jonah Sinick, “Some Reservations About Singer’s Child-in-the-Pond Argument,” at http://lesswrong.com/lw/hr5/some_reservations_about_singers_childinthepond/, accessed August 9, 2015
[7] http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/amf. GiveWel considers anything under $5,000 per life saved to be good value, though the organization also cautions against taking such estimates too literally. For further discussion see http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/criteria/cost-effectiveness
here’s the resource I like best, which is written by Dan Eth for bluedot impact: https://blog.bluedot.org/p/alignment-introduction?from_site=aisf
despite the fact that it’s been
twothree(!) years, it still holds up well imo.I also like Duncan’s intro, but it’s 8000 words long which makes me more disinclined to send it to people :T
I liked Crawford’s defense of slop and think both rebuttals missed the point of his argument.
I expect that high-level tastes… will not be satisfied by AI-assisted art unless either the AI or the human creator has high-level tastes as well
I agree with this; this is the case in all the other mediums (you can’t create a good song, or ballet, or watercolour painting unless you have good taste) so I don’t see why it wouldn’t also be the case for AI assisted art as well.
One direction I think artists can take AI is to just increase the complexity of their pieces. No one is going to spend 5000 weeks creating a single work of art (the average human lifespan is 4000 weeks), but if a good artist can, with AI, create something in 50 weeks that would take them 5000 weeks without it, I would be interested in seeing the result.
I’m not sure, but I think it can be useful to think of it as one at least sometimes.
Thank you for creating and/or digging up all those gifs! I didn’t mean to imply that it took the industry until the 50s to become functional and agree that many sorts of innovations happened from fairly early on.
To noodle on this a little more, doing the math, there were around seven years between the first Lumière shorts and A Trip to the Moon. But there’s also other landmarks we can use for the basis of comparison. For example, if we use The Horse in Motion (1878) as our starting point, we might not expect anything super exciting to happen for a few decades more.
Please do not call me a bitch, I do not think this is an appropriate thing to do.
I do not agree with the general sentiments expressed in the post and it makes me sad that some people seem to think that I do.
Even if I did, though, I would still be quite upset over your use of the term in your response. I understand that I used it first and that you put it in quotes, but even still, it was hurtful to read, much more so than if the charge you levied was just that I scored poorly at not being elitist. With the harshness of the surrounding context, it really increases the amount of hostility that I sense from you in a way that makes it more difficult for me to engage with the contents of your comment.
That’s correct, it’s my intellectual knowing that’s more inclusive. While it’s often important to pay attention to what your emotions are telling you, sometimes the emotions are saying something stupid or antisocial, and in this case I don’t think there is much to be gained by conceding any ground to it.
Sorry, I kind of think this comment misses the point. I already know when I would like for personhood to be granted, the problem is that my emotions do not agree.
If it’s helpful, I think this analogizes to a person who knows intellectually that dogs are not frightening, but gets scared in the presence of dogs anyways.
I suppose that analogy brings up some interesting interventions to try...
do i get some sort of prize for getting no less than a half dozen members of the less wrong dot corn commentariat to earnestly recommend that i yeet myself into a sports bar
I admit I am somewhat daunted by the basket of worms that this definition entails. daunted further by the question of if the worms in question are suffering
...I hope my unpleasant baby tree frog ways are becoming clearer. People keep saying that actually the other patches of rainforest are polluted garbage. No! I just need a problematically extensive selection of epistemic microbiota in my biome.
I’m sure Sofia can give a better answer but I can give a rough summary of the events I went to.
One was a close reading of a passage from Descartes’s First Meditation, done as an exercise to practice identifying arguments and supporting claims being made in a text, and assessing validity. That was facilitated by a philosophy professor who provided a five page handout with step by step instructions on what you should do, and walked us through a suggested process that involved five different colours of highlighter marker. This was a great skill to teach, and I was blackpilled by how people seemed to struggle to parse Descartes even though the translation we worked with was a very accessible one (Moriarty for Oxford World’s Classics).
The second was a more social event, where we began with a short lecture by someone with experience on the subject matter, was provided a one-page handout with three sets of three curated discussion questions, and then alternated between small and large group discussions until we worked though all the discussion questions. One set was asking about our own personal experiences, one set was about a hypothetical scenario we were invited to think through, I forget if there was a theme to the third set. This was a really well facilitated event, and I was blackpilled by the cornucopia of bad takes on offer.
Hi Sofia,
Thanks so much for weighing in, and with much more grace and understanding than I realistically deserve.
First, I want to say that I am actually very sad that the good name of public philosophy groups is being dragged through the mud in the comment section here, because I genuinely mean all the good things I say about your organization. I found the events I attended to be excellently organized, warm and lively, and really good at doing exactly what you are aiming to do, which is to make philosophy less scary for the people out there who’ve always been a little interested in it but also find it a little intimidating and maybe struggle with impostor syndrome. I completely agree that people who have not done years of philosophy courses deserve to have interesting and thoughtful conversations, and your org does a really good job of facilitating them. I consider your work a stupendous act of public service, one I know I would personally flame out of doing in 2 weeks flat, and I’m genuinely happy whenever I see another substack update from you guys talking about the latest event! I truly have nothing but admiration for all of B&B’s organizers. Please don’t let any of the midwits here convince you that your mission or approach needs any changing at all!
I hope the above paragraph also makes it clear that I fully understand what B&B’s mission is, and I walked into your events with my eyes wide open (or something close to that. Maybe they were open but there were some scales on them or something like that? Anyways.) I just happened to have socialized exclusively in a very strong intellectual bubble in a university town for several years before this, and it was only because I was incredibly out of touch that I found myself dismayed at the lack of epistemic rigor on offer. There was literally no reason for me to have expected any amount of epistemic rigor!
And while I disavowed my sandcastle metaphor because I do think of intelligence as an important meta-skill that is much more important than the ability to build sandcastles, I was still acting like a muppet! If a black belt BJJ practitioner came to an introduction to grappling class and had a bad time, this literally says nothing about the quality of the class. That practitioner is just in the wrong place and to try to accomodate him would make the meetup worse for their actual goals (it is always worse when organizations have goals that are somewhat incompatible), and the black belt needs to go away attend meetups that are appropriate for them. I’ve read enough philosophy that it’s genuinely not enjoyable to me to hang out with the amateurs in the hopes that one of them surprises me with an insight every few sessions, but that’s on me, not on you, and certainly not on the attendees.
But to be frank, none of this gives me any hope back. To be more precise, I don’t want hope. I want to believe true things about the world, even when they are inconvenient and even when they hurt. And I want to obey Kant’s categorical imperative more than I am doing currently. And those things are currently at loggerheads, and this is just going to take me some amount of time and reading and thinking to work through.
To be honest, it’s not just the B&B events that led me to the conclusions that I did. I’m in my second decade of being an adult and having full control over my social interactions, I’ve done and continue to do a lot of the social things that people have recommended in the comments (talking to uber drivers and random people and attending classes about various things I am not good at and whatnot), and they don’t really help as much as the people advising them seem to think they would, and the bad experiences compound and drag me towards a conclusion that I don’t want to accept. I wrote up a B&B event because it was sort of hilariously bad for me in a way that brought all the little thoughts I was suppressing to light (which, again, you shouldn’t feel bad about at all!), partly to try to process the ugly amount of vitriol my body decides is acceptable when I’m in intellectual waters I consider inadequate, and partly because I thought it made for an amusing tale at my expense. I am boo boo the clown. I fully, completely admit that me turning evil is entirely a skill issue on my part and has nothing to do with the organizational capabilities of the B&B crew at all, nor the quality of the people who show up to them.
And while I don’t want to tell you how to run your organization, insofar as I keep turning evil when being dropped in your particular rainforest patch, I don’t think you should welcome me back to your events. I will not be able to faithfully adhere to your core values, and like you point out beginners can often become timid and self-conscious in the presence of people with a lot more skill than them, and that is the last thing I want. Everyone deserves a safe space to discuss meaningful topics, at whatever level is most comfortable to them.
Microwaves deserve more love! A few more notes on the subject:
David Chang and Priya Krishna’s 2021 cookbook, Cooking at Home, has an entire section on microwave cooking, and it is very good.
Everyone should know how to fiddle with the power settings on their microwave. It is actually very easy to microwave soup (and other goopy things, like lentils) without it exploding. To do so, microwave it at 40-50% power for 5-6 minutes.
I like steaming vegetables in the microwave if I’m then mixing them into other foods like pasta or butter chicken. To steam vegetables, put them in a covered bowl with 2-3 tablespoons of water at the bottom, and microwave on high heat for 5-8 minutes depending on the size of the vegetable. Let it rest a few minutes to cool down. Be careful when removing the cover, as the steam that escapes will be very hot.
I have never managed to poach an egg outside of the microwave but I have poached hundreds using one. When you do so with a new-to-you microwave, you explode two to three eggs as sacrifice to figure out what to dial in, and then you can enjoy perfectly poached eggs going forward. Best of all the only mess you make is a mug that you put in the dishwasher.
With my current microwave the setup is:
1. fill a mug (ideally one with a narrower, curved bottom) halfway with water and microwave it on high for 2 minutes.
2. take egg from fridge and crack it into the hot water. swirl it around a bit to avoid it sticking to the bottom.
3. microwave at 5 power for 55 seconds.
4. let it cool/continue cooking in the mug for 2 minutes.