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[silverspawn]

Apropos to no one particular thing, I'd say I was substantially wrong about Musk. I don't think I'm substantially wrong about the idea that billionaires can be wonderful people, but it's certainly evidence against that.

I certainly think that Vitalik is an extremely good person, to give the most obvious example.

[silverspawn]

Now going through 15 old reddit posts on Chanca Piedra and cataloging everything anyone reported about whether or not it helped with Kidney Stones. Around 75% so far say it helped.

According go Andres, kidney stone are about as painful as getting surgery without anesthesia and, across the entire population, are probably felt more and hence cause more overall pain (Wikipedia says around 10% of all people get it during their lives). So getting people to drink this totally benign tea may be one of the most pressing moral causes in the world right now.

[silverspawn]

17 euros on Amazon. Get it now in case you or anyone you know gets Kidney stones in the future. It works best if the surface area is large compared to the mass, so should be almost infallible as a pre-emptive, good chances while they're very small, may fail if they're already large (though still worth trying). https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Tausendkraut-Premium-Chanca-Piedra-Phyllanthus/dp/B010FRNXBA/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=chanca+piedra&qid=1660149932&sr=8-5

[silverspawn]

By far the best argument against it is that the prior probability of a random tea working against a common disease is incredibly low, but the data is not what it looks like when something doesn't do anything. You will always have some people that report effects because diseases can go away by themselves, but not that many.

[Awaclus]

Chanca Piedra

tea

[Awaclus]

For what it's worth, I don't have anything against herbal infusions made out of plants other than camellia sinensis, but they're not tea. "Herbal tea" (as opposed to actual tea) is at least an established and therefore technically correct, although potentially misleading, term.

[silverspawn]

Fair enough.

Still going to die on this hill though: https://old.reddit.com/r/KidneyStones/comments/wl5y3t/please_try_chanca_piedra/

[Awaclus]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I could try it if it was sold in a trustworthy looking online store in Finland I guess, but I kind of don't want to pay for international shipping and I definitely don't want to support Amazon. And it doesn't seem like any Finnish online stores are selling it.

[silverspawn]

I estimate damage done by supporting amazon to be negligible

[Awaclus]

I estimate damage done by supporting amazon to be negligible

But Amazon is like one of the scummiest corporations in existence, and if not even people on my level of caring about things can be ASSed to boycott something as objectively harmful as Amazon, then the market is clearly not working and everything is pointless.

[silverspawn]

If QRI's model is correct, a kidney stone hurts about 120 times as much as something you would consider moderately painful, like a regular headache. You're only about 10% likely to get it, but nonetheless, I would put the amazon thing aside.

[Awaclus]

Like, I seriously think that Amazon and people choosing to do business with it will go down in history as a noteworthy example of the innate weaknesses of humanity, similar to any of the countless examples from history that we have nowadays where people just kind of collectively decided that it would be easier to be complicit with human rights violations than to mildly inconvenience oneself. Many large companies are scummy, but Amazon is really a special case, for just about any objectionable thing that you could possibly imagine a company doing, plus a bunch you couldn't even imagine, whether it's related to how they're treating their workers, how they're treating their customers, how they're treating the environment, how they're treating the market, or anything else, you can bet Amazon has recently done it or most likely is currently doing it.

I would easily much rather have 12 regular headaches than support Amazon.

[silverspawn]

Interesting take. Do you think the same about factory farming?

[silverspawn]

But I'm also sort of curious why you would expect this to get better with time.  Isn't the trend more toward normalization of large cruel corporations?

[silverspawn]

all the agonizingly stupid people of the world are also me, alas. That's one of the more depressing aspects of open individualism.

[Awaclus]

Interesting take. Do you think the same about factory farming?

Nope. Factory farming is bad, but it doesn't necessarily have to have any problems beyond the environmental impact and the animal rights questions. I can buy meat from a store without having to worry about how the farm is going to use my personal data or whose viewpoints they're censoring or how complicit in the Uyghur genocide they are or whether they're partners with Palantir or how much I can really trust the product info is real and not just a result of purposefully insufficient moderation etc. I might still have to worry about workers' rights and anticompetitive practices, but the chances are excellent that the farm is at least a lot better than Amazon on both areas.

But I'm also sort of curious why you would expect this to get better with time.  Isn't the trend more toward normalization of large cruel corporations?

Large? Yes, unfortunately, but on the other hand, that's something that I think people have already largely realized is a problem, we just haven't figured out a solution yet.

Cruel? I don't think so, I think the typical corporation nowadays is far less cruel than ever before. There are some corporations whose entire business models are based on improving human rights, sustainability, etc, and there are tons of corporations who put in at least some effort to run their business operations in the least harmful ways, as a PR campaign if nothing else. Amazon being Amazon wouldn't stick out like such a sore thumb in the 1800s or early 1900s (other than for its massive size and the fact that some of their bullShiT specifically has to do with technologies that didn't exist at the time), but it does now.

[silverspawn]

Interesting take. Do you think the same about factory farming?

Nope. Factory farming is bad, but it doesn't necessarily have to have any problems beyond the environmental impact and the animal rights questions. I can buy meat from a store without having to worry about how the farm is going to use my personal data or whose viewpoints they're censoring or how complicit in the Uyghur genocide they are or whether they're partners with Palantir or how much I can really trust the product info is real and not just a result of purposefully insufficient moderation etc. I might still have to worry about workers' rights and anticompetitive practices, but the chances are excellent that the farm is at least a lot better than Amazon on both areas.

The animal parts are why I asked. Like if the mistreatment of workers from amazon is that high of a priority, what about the mistreatment of animals in factory farms?

[silverspawn]

By the way, if you order Chanca Piedra from a non-amazon store, I'll paypal you the shipping cost

[silverspawn]

Cruel? I don't think so, I think the typical corporation nowadays is far less cruel than ever before. There are some corporations whose entire business models are based on improving human rights, sustainability, etc, and there are tons of corporations who put in at least some effort to run their business operations in the least harmful ways, as a PR campaign if nothing else. Amazon being Amazon wouldn't stick out like such a sore thumb in the 1800s or early 1900s (other than for its massive size and the fact that some of their bullShiT specifically has to do with technologies that didn't exist at the time), but it does now.

interesting...

[silverspawn]

Let's psychoanalzye some people. I think the reason why this thread hit so much resistance (although it's now at least at positive karma!) is that many people who have suffered from kidney stones really don't want this herb to help. If it did, they would have to admit that all of their enormous suffering was cheaply preventable. And you'd think that above a certain level, they'd just forget about those petty motivations and try to help others avoid the same, but, well, there's not actually any particular reason to believe it works that way.

This seems especially likely to be what's going on because all of the pushback was so weak. You could much a much stronger case against he herb if you tried a little.

[silverspawn]

And Andrew Yang talks about mindset of abundance all the time. You have far more room to be compassionate if you're in a good place yourself.

[silverspawn]

Took me 28 years to realize that my actual comparative advantages are philosophy and maybe distillation, rather than math or programming or  BECOMING A STARCRAFT II PROGAMER

[silverspawn]

Regular LessWrong quote to keep me motivated

Panpsychism is an obvious non-starter too. It is clear that consciousness is an attribute of things that can think, because consciousness is a certain kind of self-reflective thinking. Thus, it should not be attributed to anything unlikely to be thinking in a sophisticated manner. I doubt consciousness for animals in general, but at the very least, it is certain that only animals and up even have the chance. (Perhaps you might be able to make a conscious AI sometime in the future [I don't have a strong position on it], but that wouldn't make the computers it was running on conscious.)

[silverspawn]

Or becoming a soccer referee, which was one of 3 career options I've considered when I was in preschool. I think the other two were being a playtester for games and being a lawyer because that's what my father was.

[Awaclus]

The animal parts are why I asked. Like if the mistreatment of workers from amazon is that high of a priority, what about the mistreatment of animals in factory farms?

Well, there is a pretty big difference there, namely that I don't want animals to unnecessarily suffer because it's an uncomfortable idea, and I think Daoism at least advises against participating in causing unnecessary suffering to animals (I have forgotten where it says that or what the approximate wording was, though, so I guess it's possible it was just someone's interpretation rather than something official), but those are the only reasons why I would care about animals suffering. Meanwhile, Amazon's workers are people, and I am also a person, so supporting their mistreatment would indirectly support my own potential future mistreatment as well and that would be actually bad in addition to being at least as uncomfortable and likely considered at least as inadvisable in Daoism.

By the way, if you order Chanca Piedra from a non-amazon store, I'll paypal you the shipping cost

I guess I'll look into it some time. I tend to be a bit skeptical of the types of stores that sell this kind of stuff, I want to properly make sure it's not a scam and that the business owner is not an actual neo-Nazi supporter or Putinist or something (pseudoscientific treatments kind of go hand in hand with being an anti-vaxxer, which goes hand in hand with being a conspiracy nut in general, which goes hand in hand with supporting neo-Nazis and Putin. I swear this is a legitimate concern here, there's even a precedent, Kärkkäinen sells a lot of normal stuff too but most of their competitors don't even sell hippie dietary supplements at all and Kärkkäinen certainly does).

There is a hippie dietary supplement store that I trust where I get my Carmolis from, but they didn't have Chanca Piedra unfortunately. Carmolis (at least the liquid version) is great by the way, I doubt its effectiveness is supported by very rigorous scientific research either but it's definitely effective, I can clearly hear the improvement it makes in a singer's voice.