NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics, specializing in probability theory, from the University of Georgia. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
NelsonRushton
10d ago
From reading Nixonland, he documents a bunch of right wing protestors doing the same thing left wing protestors did in the 1960's. We never really hear about it though. We only hear about left wing protestors vs police or the National Guard.
How many is a bunch, and what counts as the same thing? I'm curious to see a list of these and I challenge you to a game: you name a documented act of Republican act of mob violence (where most of the protesters presumably self-identified as republicans and at least one person was injured), and I will name two Democrat acts of mob violence, etc., back and forth for as long as you can come up with them. "A dollar a ball until the loser says quit" [The Hustler].
You name the hardhat riots, in which 100 people were hospitalized and none killed.
I name
- the 1992 LA riots, in which 2383 people were injured and 63 people killed, and
- the 1965 Watts riots, which resulted in 34 deaths.
Your move.
NelsonRushton
8d ago
My claim of fact is that the Democratic party has, since its inception with Andrew Jackson, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, through the civil rights era, and up to this very day, tended to be the party of (1) racial caste systems, (2) illegal mob violence, (3) censorship, and (4) you-work-I-eat, from slavery to welfare.
The 1960's example is a bad example because many of those Democrats switched to being Republicans such as Strom Thurmond after the Democrats started pushing Civil Rights legislation.
"Many" is how many? I am skeptical of this claim of fact. I would like to see a list of pols in the US House and Senate who (a) voted against the civil rights acts of the 1960's, and who (b) ever (before or after) switched parties from Democrat to Republican. Is there more than one (Strom Thurmond)? Robert Byrd, champion of segregation who filibustered the 1964 civil rights act, was a lifelong Democrat who was praised by Hilary Clinton as a "Friend and mentor", and Barak Obama gave the eulogy at his funeral.
And what makes you say it was Democrats who pushed Civil Rights Legislation more than Republicans? For example, looking at the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 39% of House Republicans voted nay, but only 20% of Republicans, while in the Senate 31% of Democrats voted nay but only 18% of Republicans. I think the story was the same for other similar bills. Am I mistaken?
NelsonRushton
10d ago
In some ways, the tweet is not wrong.
I think the tweet is dead wrong. It makes a claim of fact, that is a universal generalization, that is not true, and that is not usefully close to being true.
NelsonRushton
8d ago
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
the net upvotes tell the story of which way TheMotte leans ideologically.
It is a little sad, for The Motte, that it can be assumed people upvote arguments whose conclusions they agree with (as opposed to meritorious arguments on all sides).
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Republicans should not concede illegal results If this is uniquely democracy-destroying, and unacceptable, then: Republicans need to cheat harder. Since in many ways (2) is worse than (1), I'm skeptical of any argument that supposes that conceding a rigged election is the healthy and adult decision.
The nuance here is that (1) we don't know if the election was rigged, and (2) that, by itself, is the problem. Every week I hear people say there is no evidence that the election was rigged. That is the wrong place to put the burden of proof. There is no evidence that the 1946 Russian elections were rigged either, but as Stalin said, "It's not who votes that matters, but who counts." The question is not whether there is evidence the election was rigged, but whether the election was conducted in such a way that there would be evidence if the election were rigged. I think the answer to that question is no -- because if it were yes, Democrats would say that and back it up instead of gaming the burden of proof a la Stalin.
NelsonRushton
6d ago
We can say this with confidence, because this law is a consequence of what mass is, mathematically
This is simply not correct to say about the Law of Gravity. It is almost correct to say about the second law of motion:
F = MA
with one caveat. Newton implicitly assumes that each particle has a property, called its mass, which is constant over time. It turns out this not true: the mass of a particle can vary over time as a function of the object's velocity, according to the special theory of relativity. If you alter Newton's theory to make mass, force, and acceleration functions of time, then I think you are correct and the second law of motion is just the definition of mass. But then, by itself, it does not predict anything (since you could measure the mass of a particle, then perform an experiment, and anything could happen since the mass might have changed between weighing the particle and doing the experiment).
Sorry it took me so long to respond to this. Thanks for the thoughtful engagement.
@NelsonRushton: It is a mistake to picture a code of conduct that benefits "the community": each person is, after all, a member of multiple overlapping communities of various sizes and levels of cohesion, whose interests are frequently in conflict with each other.
@coffee_enjoyer: This is your brain on 20th century propaganda. More seriously, nobody in the past had any problem understanding what their in-group was. It was ethnicity and religion.
Shared ethnicity and/or religion is a matter of degree, not a Boolean function. What looks like the same ethnicity or religion from afar, or in one conflict, may look like different ethnicities or religions when you zoom in, or look at a different conflict. This is nothing new. For example, the Book of Joshua, written at the latest around 600 BC, records nations being formally subdivided into hierarchies of tribes, clans, and families:
So Joshua got up early in the morning and brought Israel forward by tribes, and the tribe of Judah was selected. So he brought the family of Judah forward, and he selected the family of the Zerahites; then he brought the family of the Zerahites forward man by man, and Zabdi was selected. And he brought his household forward man by man; and Achan, son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, son of Zerah, from the tribe of Judah, was selected.
And these various hierarchies were well known to endure conflicts of interest, if not outright enmity, at every level of the hierarchy, from civil war between tribes (and coalitions of tribes) within a nation, right down to nuclear families:
Then the men of Judah gave a shout: and as the men of Judah [Southern Israel] shouted, it came to pass, that God smote Jeroboam and all [Northern] Israel before Abijah and Judah. [2 Chronicles: 15]
And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. [Genesis 4:8]
So what your "ingroup" looks like depend on the particular conflict we are looking at, and the level of structure at which the conflict takes place. These conflicts can be life and death at all levels, and someone who is in your ingroup during a conflict at one level may be in the outgroup in a conflict at another level on another occasion. This phenomenon is a major theme -- arguably the major theme -- of the oldest written documents that exist on every continent where writing was discovered. In Greece and Isarael, for example, those documents were composed orally in the iron age based on legendary events of the bronze age. If that is my brain on propaganda, it isn't 20'th century propaganda.
@coffee_enjoyer: Utilitarianism as a practical framework comes with huge benefits for an in-group, just not when seen as a top-level explanation of morality... Another way that utilitarianism can help us practically is by creating rules which govern interaction between groups without privileging any one group...
Let's imagine a Medieval man at arms, standing atop a rampart, says to his comrade, "Aristotle wrote that an object falls at a speed proportional to its weight. Wanna see?" Then he takes a boulder and shoves it off the edge of the castle wall, and it falls on an enemy soldier and squishes him. "Good ol' Aristotle," he says, "What would we do without him?".
By analogy, your post describes some interesting examples of groups with competing interests entering into agreements, binding one way or another, that tend to benefit everyone involved. But I do not believe they are really deploying utilitarianism as a moral theory (as opposed to some other theory to morally justify their actions, if indeed they feel the need to morally justify them at all), and I do not believe that the success of their stratagems is evidence for utilitarianism. That is, Aristotle in my story analogous to, say, John Stuart Mill in yours. For your examples to count as anecdotal evidence of the normative force of utilitarianism, you would have to argue that the people in those stories were acting morally -- not just that they benefitted from what they did -- by comparison with what they would have done if they had acted on some other moral theory. For your examples to count as evidence of the efficacy of utilitarianism, you would have to argue that (1) they were thinking in utilitarian terms, as opposed to some other moral theory, and (2) other groups that employ competing theories fare worse by comparison.
NelsonRushton
23d ago
Let's say both sides are equal. In that case, "deterrent to future attacks" is equivalent to "tit for tat forever". This obviously doesn't work.
Doesn't work compared to what? I would rather have intermittent tit for tat forever than constant tit for tit forever, which is the salient alternative. Deterrence is not about being stronger than your attacker; it is about making it persistently, conspicuously not-worthwhile for him to victimize you. That is how it works in prison, for example. Either you fight periodically, win or lose, or your horizons get broadened in a really interesting way.
NelsonRushton
24d ago
Notably absent among your conjectures 1-4 is deterrent to future attacks. That is the obvious top of the stack.
Good writeup
I appreciate you saying so.
I suspect that people are drawn to rule utilitarianism because it resolves a certain bind they find themselves in. Let's suppose that I have a landlord who is an all around scumbag, and I don't like him. Suppose I know that, if he needed a live saving medical procedure that cost, say, $10,000, and asked me to help out, I would say no. So his life is worth less to me than $10,000. On the other hand, if I had an opportunity to do him in and take $10,000 in the bargain, and get away clean like Raskolnikov, I would not do it. I think people with certain worldviews feel obliged to articulate an explanation of why that is not irrational, and within those same worldviews, they don't have much to cling to in formulating the explanation. Dostoyevsky's explanation would probably strike them as unscientific. They don't realize that if they keep that up, their grandson might actually do it.
Or maybe, they need a pretext for pointing a finger at the people they feel are doing wrong, and being able to say more authoritative sounding than "boo!", that, again, flies within their worldview.
Original to theMotte
NelsonRushton
24d ago
It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality. If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.
Just have to say that is awesome and I will have to remember it.
NelsonRushton
18d ago
I think there's arguably a "descriptive" version of utilitarianism, and a "prescriptive" one... For an analogy, look at medicine... In the same way, economics as a field of the social sciences is "merely" the descriptive study of how economies work, but the reason we study economies is because we want stable, functioning economies that do a good job of allocating resources and have positive effects on well-being.
This all makes sense, but I do not believe it is right picture. As you suggest, there is a line between, say, the academic discipline of economics on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the role played in moral decisions by the findings of economics. But, also inherent in your description is the fact that the academic discipline of economics falls entirely on one side of that line. So economics as such does not, after all, have a normative component. Moreover, utilitarianism, as a theory of the moral good, lies on the other side of that line -- that is, it says, as a function of the findings of fact and causal law, what is moral and immoral, while remaining silent on those findings of fact and causal law (except as hypothetical illustrative examples). If it were otherwise, we would see whole chapters of the work of Mill, Bentham, and Harris (in The Moral Landscape) devoted to deep investigations of fact and causal law (but of course we do not).
The practice of medicine probably does span both sides of the line, but I think this is a special case, because doctors deal face to face with their patients, who in fact have widely varying degrees of compliance with medical advice. One common tool for increasing compliance is moral suasion (for example, when your doctor wags his finger at you and says you are a bad boy or girl for not taking your medicine, or getting your regular checkup, or whatever). Thus, genuinely moral suasion is part of the practice of medicine, and I conceded that utilitarian reasoning plays a major role, insofar as what physicians morally pressure people to do is a function of scientific findings of cause and effect. I will chalk that up in support of utilitarianism as one tool in our moral toolbox.
On the other hand, I do not believe this argument transfers from medicine to politics, or foreign policy, or individual ethics. The hard part of medicine is knowing what works and getting people to do it in spite of their stubbornness and lack of discipline. The hard part of economics, diplomacy, and life on the street is trading between the interests of various overlapping groups and coalitions engaged in zero-sum conflicts of interest. That is where the study of ethics really ought to help us, and where I claim utilitarianism does not.
NelsonRushton
21d ago
guess I’m confused why you think rule utilitarianism is uniquely required or faulty for the situation you describe.
I don't think rule utilitarianism is uniquely required; it just seems to be the most common candidate for a theory of absolute morality based on Enlightenment epistemology. I don't think the other candidates are any better.
Even if I like my neighbor, why am I the only option for $10k?
It is an element of the hypothetical.
What moral system would demand the $10k payment?
What facially seems to merit the $10K payment is not a particular moral theory, but the situation that (1) I would not pay $10K to save his life, therefore (2) his life is worth less to me than $10K, (3) I have an opportunity to do away with him and collect $10, and (4) I am allegedly a rational agent; so by #2, #3, and #4 I should be expected to pull a Raskolnikov. Yet I don't. What requires a moral theory is to resolve the paradox (or am I just being a sentimental sucker?).
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Whatever it is, I think it is the same thing that motivated Dr. Frankenstein.
NelsonRushton
30d ago
I spent about half an hour on this post. The longest draft was a paragraph, but my eventual opinion was that the connection, for those who had read Frankenstein, would be more dramatic if I left it at that. If the post is deficient, it is not from lack of effort but lack of ability.
Are you suggesting that everything bad should be illegal, and that the law should be a perfect mapping of all possible actions to their ethical value and from there to the punishment or reward that is appropriate
No, that would be stupid. On the other hand, if (1) action X is immoral and illegal because it tends to cause a certain harm, and (2) action Y tends to cause more of the same harm, then it seems to follow that action Y is at least as immoral, and ought to be punished at least as severely, as X. Does it not?
me: Do you believe, for example, that stealing a horse is immoral because it causes other people to steal other things if and when they find out about it?
you: Not solely because, but yes, among other things it contributes to the collapse of civil society, especially if it's never punished.
then why else?
Me: Is the immorality of A's theft mitigated by its secrecy, and the fact that it is instrumental in him promulgating anti-theft mores?
You: Not very much, but it's better than not hiding the theft, and better than using the proceeds from the theft to do more evil. Do you disagree?
Yes I disagree. The word "it" I think is a potential point of equivocation here. "It" could refer (a) to the theft, or (b) to the transaction of the theft, concealment, and essay-writing. Let me clarify that "it" is the theft, and ask the question again: is the immorality of the theft mitigated by the other two actions? If so, should A receive a lighter penalty for the theft, if he is caught, than if he had not carefully concealed the theft and written the essays?
Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of an organization that advocates for the violent overthrow of the government of the United States of America?
My guess is that this is supposed to be part of some implicit, clever argument, but it is too clever for me and I can't be sure what it is, so I have to guess. I wish I did not have to guess. My guess is that it is an example showing that speech inciting certain actions can be justifiably illegal in certain circumstances. I agree with that but I do not think it answers the questions I asked. Are you saying that B and C should go to jail? To the extent that theft is illegal because it has a tendency to cause other thefts, perhaps they should.
Since you yourself admit that this argument is restrained to humanist rule utilitarianism, shouldn't you edit the title to include the full phrase?
I don't actually admit that. It starts off with the humanistic version, but the later paragraphs address broader forms of the view. Do you have a particular variation in mind?
I clicked this post expecting a serious attack on the compromise between deontology and consequentialism that rule utilitarian offers,... to hell with clickbait and false advertising.
I don't think the title suggests this topic exclusively. Even if I am mistaken, and it did, "clickbaiting" is a deliberate deception, and I plead innocent to that charge.
If you want society to follow a rule, hold to that rule and propagate that rule.
The issue is that there is no general law of cause and effect that would cause society to follow the rule because I do. On the contrary, it might sometimes be the case that society will follow the rule more if I (1) break the rule, (2) keep it secret that I broke the rule, and (3) use my ill-gotten gains from breaking the rule to promulgate the rule. If you claim that could never happen, then the burden of proof is on you and best of luck. Or do you claim that secretly breaking a rule for the purpose of strengthening the rule is moral if the rule is a good one?
Do you believe, for example, that stealing a horse is immoral because it causes other people to steal other things if and when they find out about it? I don't see how it would at all. Let us suppose the following:
- Person A steals a horse and executes a very good plan to keep it secret, so that the horse will be presumed to have run off, and that he took possession of a formerly wild horse. The thief benefits more from owning the horse than its former owner would have. Moreover, person A rides the horse to work daily, where he writes widely read and highly influential essays about the importance of the rule of law, and the wrongness of theft.
- Person B, an influential intellectual, writes an essay about why it is morally OK to steal, because there is no such thing as private property in the first place. He writes cogently and in good faith. The essay gets ten million views and can be blamed with high confidence to at least three actual thefts (suggesting that there are presumably hundreds or thousands of others inspired by it).
- Person C serves on a jury in a case of grand theft, and stubbornly hangs the jury because he has read the essay written by B. In the jury room, Person C argues cogently and in good faith. The accused person is not retried and goes free.
Is the immorality of A's theft mitigated by its secrecy, and the fact that it is instrumental in him promulgating anti-theft mores?
I believe that B and C have done more damage to the moral prohibition against stealing than A has. If so, should the actions of B and C be illegal, and punishable by prison terms longer than what A would serve if he had gotten caught stealing the horse?
As you are likely aware, Jefferson was strongly influenced by John Locke in the writing of the Declaration. Locke wrote that the doctrine of equal natural negative rights was plainly discernable by independent reason:
The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; [Locke, Two Treatises of Government, essay II, section II].
In the opening words of the Declaration, Jefferson follows Locke's wording in this passage fairly closely, writing "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", where Locke had written "life, health, liberty or possessions." In the same paragraph, Locke says, not that these precepts are part of English or Christian traditions, but that they can be ascertained by "all mankind who will but consult it [reason]". So the idea that these notions would be obvious is not a new idea in Jefferson's time, nor a straw man, but the stated opinion of the thinker who was probably most influential on Jefferson's writing. Logical inference from self-evident premises, in the style of Euclid, was in fashion during that period in writing on subjects from physics to politics -- however queer a fashion it now appears to us.
The fact that Jefferson was advised by Madison to keep his opinions to himself does not make them any less his opinions, and the fact that he was writing a public document does keep his opinion from working its way into the text. The text says what the text says.
An axiom is a premise to an argument. You don't set out to prove axioms within the scope of an argument not because they are obviously true, but because they are outside the scope of the argument by definition.
The phrase "self-evident" has meant the same thing from the time of Aquinas, through the time of Jefferson, up until now:
self-ev·i·dent\ /ˌselfˈevəd(ə)nt/
adjective
not needing to be demonstrated or explained; obvious.
[Oxford Dictionary of the English Language]
Can you explain more carefully, from a textual perspective, why you think it means something else in the Declaration? If this is your whole argument,
I said that "we hold these truths to be self-evident" is not the same as "self-evidently".
I don't buy it.
You can't rephrase "we hold these truths to be self evident" as "obviously."
Isn't that exactly what "self-evident" means?
self-ev·i·dent
/ˌselfˈevəd(ə)nt/
adjective
not needing to be demonstrated or explained; obvious.
[Oxford Dictionary of the English Language]
Also,
What Jefferson is doing here is declaring his axioms. He does make several arguments later in the Declaration, but they follow from those axioms; they aren't meant to prove them.
I don't dispute this; there is no need to prove something if it is self-evident, in the dictionary sense of being obvious.
Your conclusion, that handing down traditions takes effort, is sound, but Jefferson would likely agree.
I believe not only that it takes effort, but also that it a moral duty of each generation. I am curious why you think Jefferson would agree. For example, coincidentally, here is another use of the phrase "self-evident" by Jefferson:
The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society has presented this question to my mind; & that no such obligation can be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, & reverts to the society...We seem not to have percieved that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another.. [Letter to James Madison, (6 September 1789), emphasis added]
Jefferson seems to hold that a given generation has no obligation to carry on the traditions of its forebears, even from a single generation ago -- and, in the same letter to Madison of September 1789, he argues that, therefore, the national constitution should be rewritten every twenty years:
The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.
He says in the same paragraph that the constitution should not merely be amended, but rewritten from scratch in each generation (that is, every 20 years). So much for sacred tradition.
Good point. Not to mention the pro slavery mobs who used to riot and destroy the buildings and printing presses of anti-slavery newspapers. There were over 100 documented cases of this in the pre-Civil-War era in the United States [source].
By the way, the pro-slavery rioters were Democrats, and Democrat politicians and police often looked the other way as it happened. That pattern continued on straight from Andrew Jackson in the 1830's to Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960's. Fast forward to today: some things have changed, and some have stayed the same. Black is the new white; BLM is the new KKK, and Democrats are the new... Democrats!
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