Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
I'm sorry HighSpace, I love you, I really do, but something about this project has been calling my name.
It all started with an idea for a decentralized recommendation engine in the vein of stumbleupon.com (I posted about it, but I think it got sucked into the vacuum of that database stroke we suffered a while back), but it has since took on a life of it's own. Originally the idea was to collect all the content I'd normally click “like” on, across various platforms, and present it as a curated feed of cool stuff I saw. The decentralization would come later on, as other people would hopefully join in, and we'd aggregate the results, and present them to each user according to their preferences. I wasn't convinced it's that great of an idea, so it languished for a while, until I remembered an old setup I had with Miniflux and Nitter that I'd use for keeping up with some people I followed, without opening a Twitter account. I thought Miniflux would provide a nice scaffolding for what I wanted to make, and Nitter would be a good start for a source of recommended content.
Nitter's dead, long live Nitter!
As we've all heard Nitter is dead, or is it? At one point I saw someone here link to privacydev's instance and after the core Nitter team gave up, I was using it every once in a while. It sure got slow, and it sure got unreliable, but not unreliable enough for me to believe the core functionality is completely crippled. I suspected it's a question of them not having enough accounts to make all the requests to Twitter, to serve all the people using the instance. Lo and behold, turns out I'm right, even though guest accounts are gone, you can still use it with a regular account, and there's even a script for fetching the auth tokens necessary to make nitter run. So I set the whole thing up, at first mostly just to have a Twitter frontend that's not absolute garbage, and it works like a charm! It's probably a good idea to add a few more accounts to avoid rate-limiting, but I've been using it on a single login without really running into issues.
Nitter's fine and well, but one of it's annoying limitations is that you have to look up an account directly. Timeline support is on it's roadmap, but they never got around to it, and it looks like now they never will. But what they do have is an RSS view, so you can add all the accounts you're interested in, and put their tweets together into a single timeline. For this, as already mentioned, I've used Miniflux. This has a lot of advantages that I really like. First, the tweets are in chronological order, and you can use an “unread” feed to only check the stuff you haven't seen yet. I find it much better than Twitter's “slotmachine” feed that shuffles tweets, lies to you about new content being available, and promotes people you haven't even followed. Secondly the tweets are automatically archived. Some people delete their spiciest takes, and even on Elon's Twitter accounts get occasionally yeeted, but since you're storing the content locally, all their bangers are safe with you. Thirdly - searchability. Twitter's search isn't even that bad, but what's missing for me is the ability to search the stuff I followed or liked. My memory is decent, but vague - “I saw that in a tweet I liked around X time”, “someone I followed used a phrase Y”, etc. Limiting the search to only people I follow, or to bookmarked RSS entries helps a lot.
I also had some issues with the setup. Miniflux only renders the titles of tweets, not their content. On the other hand, for some reason, Nitter renders the whole Tweet in the RSS entry title, which you'd think is a solution to the previous problem, but if you add a feed from non-nitter source, you end up with inconsistent rendering - you can read the tweets without clicking on each entry, but you have to check every entry from other feed types manually. So I made some adjustments! Nitter only renders basic info in the title (tweet author, who they're replying to / retweeting) and Miniflux actually renders the entire content on it's feed pages. The commit also includes the script to get the auth tokens. You can now happily scroll through all your content.
But wait, there's more!
So as I was happily using this setup, it occurred to me that images are quite important in the Twitter ecosystem. Sometimes people post memes with very little comment, sometimes they post screenshots of articles, sometimes they post images of text to get around the character limit. That's not an issue, it all renders fine, but since archiving is an important feature for me, I thought I need to do something about the images in case of banger deletion / account yeeting. So I made further adjustments! When the RSS entries are downloaded, their content is scraped for image tags, and they're automatically saved to Miniflux' database.
But that's not all! Since search is also an important feature for me, I thought “what if someone posts one of those wall-of-text images containing something interesting, and I'll only remember a phrase in the image, but nothing about the text of the tweet or it's author?”. Don't fret, another adjustment I made was to use gosseract, a Golang (which Miniflux is written in) OCR package, to automatically scan and transcribe the images, and to extend the search feature to look up the transcriptions as well! No spicy screenshotted headline will be able to hide from you now!
We're quite far from the original “p2p recommendation engine” idea, but I'm quite happy with the result. Back during one of the dotcom booms there was a saying to the effect of “just make an app you'd want to use”, and by that criterion I feel like I struck gold, so I thought I'd share it. There's potential to develop it further, both Substack and Youtube (still) offer RSS views of their content, and both have relatively-easy-to-access transcriptions. Automatically downloading audio or video content might be a tall order storage-wise, but it definitely will help with my chronic “I know I heard this on one of the several 5-hour long podcasts I listen to daily, but don't know which one" problem.
Now, if you're thinking, "that all sounds nice in theory, but I fell asleep reading the README of the repositories you linked to, and there's now way I'll bother setting any of this up" - you're in luck! For my next performance, if anyone's interested, I might set up a demo server.
If you want to take a stab at setting it up for yourself, and need help, I'll be happy to assist.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
By rule utilitarianism, here I will mean, roughly speaking, the moral stance summarized as follows:
- People experience varying degrees of wellbeing as a function of their circumstances; for example, peace and prosperity engender greater wellbeing than for their participants than war and famine.
- As a matter of fact, some value systems yield higher levels human wellbeing than others.
- Moral behavior consists in advocating and conforming to value systems that engender relatively high levels of human wellbeing.
Varieties of this position are advocated in academic philosophy, for example, by Richard Brandt, Brad Hooker, and R.M. Hare -- and in popular literature, for example, by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape and (more cogently, in my opinion) by Stephen Pinker in the final chapter of his book Enlightenment Now. I do not believe that rule utilitarianism cuts much ice as a moral stance, and this essay will explain why I hold that opinion.
1. Take care. By this rule...
In his book Enlightenment Now, psychologist Steven Pinker hedges right off the bat on proposition #3 of the utilitarian platform, which I will call the axiom of humanism -. Pinker writes, "Despite the word's root, humanism doesn't exclude the flourishing of animals" [p. 410]. Well, professor, it sho' 'nuff does exclude the flourishing of animals! If the ultimate moral purpose is to promote human flourishing, then the welfare non-human animals is excluded from consideration in the ultimate moral purpose. To be charitable, I suppose Pinker means that it is consistent with (3) that there is a legitimate secondary moral purpose in maximizing the wellbeing of animals. However, (a) I cannot be sure that he means that, and (b) it is unfortunate that he did not say what he meant, especially since this point is central to a weakness in the humanist position.
In The Moral Landscape, and in his TED talk on the same thesis, Sam Harris spends most of his time defending propositions (1) and (2) of the utilitarian position --- which is unfortuante, because I believe they are self-evident. To his credit, Harris does briefly address issue of "speciesism" (that is, assigning greater moral weight to the wellbeing of animals than humans), saying, "If we are more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering." What Harris does not do is to carefully place the range of animal experience on the scale with that of human experience to compare them, or give us any reason to think bottom of the scale for humans is meaningfully (if at all) above the top of the scale for other animals. Moreover, he gives no reason why we ought to draw a big red line at some arbitrary place on that scale, and write "Not OK to trap, shoot, eat, encage, or wear the skins of anything above this line." Perhaps that line reaches well down into the animal kingdom, and perhaps the line is above certain of our fellow men. As a matter of ultimate concern, I cannot imagine an objective reason why it should not.
Perhaps Pinker and Harris don't spend much effort on the issue of speciesism because it is uncontroversial: of course human wellbeing has greater moral gravity than animal wellbeing, and the exact details of why and how much are not a pressing moral concern of our day. I submit, on the contrary, that accounting for speciesism is the one of the first jobs of any moral theory. I am not saying that perhaps we ought to start eating our dim-witted neighbors, or that we should all become vegans; I am saying that if you purport to found a moral theory on objective reason then you should actually do it, and that how it accounts for speciesism is a salient litmus test for any moral theory -- especially a moral theory that claims to be founded on objective reason. To wit, either animals count as much as humans our moral calculus, or they do not. If animals count as much as humans, then most of us (non-vegetarians) are in a lot of trouble, or at least ought to be. On the other hand, if animals don't count as much as humans, then the reason they don't, carried to its logical conclusion, is liable to be the reason that some humans don't count as much as others. Abraham Lincoln famously made a similar argument over the morality of slavery:
You say A is white, and B is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be a slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? — You mean whites are intellectually the superiors to blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you. [From Lincoln's collected notes; date uncertain]
In the spirit of Lincoln's argument, for example, do (non-human) animals count less because they are less intelligent? In that case, the utilitarian is obliged to explain why the line is drawn just where it is, and, indeed, why, in the best of all possible worlds deep fried dumbass shouldn't be an item on the menu at Arby's. Do animals count less, as Harris says, because they allegedly have less varied and vivid sensory experience? It is not clear to me that they do in the first place, or, if they do, that they do by a degree sufficient to make cannibalism universally forbidden and vegetarianism optional. The fact that Pinker and Harris do not resolve this issue is important -- not because their conclusions on the matter are or ought to be controversial, but because it is the first sign that they are not deriving a theory from first principles, but instead rationalizing the shared common sense of their culture. If their culture were that of the Classical Romans, the Goths, or the Mongols, they might well have a quite different view -- and, if they put their minds to it, expound an allegedly objective moral theory to rationalize that instead.
2. And who is my neighbour?
"All you need is love" -- John Lennon
Perhaps, but the real question is,
"Who do you love?" -- Bo Diddley
Suppose we were to grant (which I do not) that it is objectively self-evident that the wellbeing of humans is categorically more valuable than that of other animals. The fact remains that some humans might count more than others, from my perspective, as an ultimate moral concern. Many cultures have taken this view unashamedly. For example, the opening stanza of the Anglo Saxon poem Beowulf extolls the virtues of the Danish king Sheild Sheafson for the laudable accomplishment of subjugating not just some but all of the neighboring tribes, and for driving them in terror -- not from their fortresses, not from their castles, but from their bar stools:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
A wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
As his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
Beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
And begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.
[translation by Seamus Heaney, emphasis added]
The literature, monuments, and oral traditions of the world are replete with examples of this sentiment, but for the sake of space I will give just one more example. The inscription on a monument to honor the Roman general Pompey in honor of his 45'th birthday reads,
Pompey, the people’s general, has in three years captured fifteen hundred cities, and slain, taken, or reduced to submission twelve million human beings.
In our culture, a growing number of people tear down monuments claiming that the men they honor were enslavers or imperialists -- but evidently other cultures put up monuments to glorify their leaders for those very characteristics. So it is not a no-brainer -- that is to say, not at all self-evident -- that the welfare of members of foreign tribes ought to play any role in our moral calculations at all -- or indeed that the subjugation and exploitation of foreign tribes is not a positive moral good from our own perspective. That is how the Romans and the Saxons saw it, and if you or I had been born into those cultures we would probably would have felt the same way -- and so, I dare say, would Sam Harris and Steven Pinker.
I imagine the utilitarian response is that we are all better off if we take the modern Western view (of course) that exploiting foreigners is inherently immoral. I imagine the response of a Roman to that would be that he cares little for what makes barbarians (that is, non-Romans) better off, any more than he cares what makes apes or pigs better off. I imagine the utilitarian response to that is, "You fiend!", and that the Roman response to that is, "Get out of my sight, you womanish punk". So, from a logical perspective, who won the debate? Nobody did. Pinker almost concedes this, writing "If there were a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath who could exploit everyone else with impunity, no argument could convince him he had omitted a logical fallacy" [Enlightenment Now, p. 412] -- but it is not clear whether he means the sociopath could not be convinced because of his thick skull, or whether he is actually not committing a logical fallacy. I emailed Dr. Pinker for a clarification, and he was kind enough to reply, acknowledging that the sociopath is actually not committing a logical error. Note that (1) this is a second example of Pinker's writing being vague exactly where the argument is weakest (the first being the issue of speciesism), and (2) a Roman general is not a megalomaniacal sociopath or anything of the sort, and whatever we claim to be objectively self-evident ought to be evident to him as well as us.
I am obliged to relate that Pinker imagines something like the argument with the Roman general in his book. His imagined response (in his version to Nietzsche, a Romanophile, rather than an actual Roman) is as follows:
I [Steven Pinker] am a superman, hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience. As you recommend, I will achieve glory by exterminating some chattering dwarves. Starting with you, shortly. And I might do a few things to that Nazi sister of yours, too. Unless you can think of a reason why I should not [Enlightenment Now, p. 446].
Now that Professor Pinker has switched arenas from the logical to the martial, I submit that someone would win that debate -- and that the Roman argument would have something to do with a crucifix.
In any case, an allegedly universal and self-evident regard for "human wellbeing" leaves unanswered the central question of morality: in the words of the great moral philosopher Bo Diddley, Who do you love? Speciesism is only the thin end of the wedge: not only do I generally value the wellbeing of people more than that that of cows and rabbits, I also value the wellbeing of my people more than I value that of other people -- and, in my view, rightly so. Thus, premises (1) and (2) of the humanist/utilitarian position do not imply conclusion (3) for the following reasons:
- As an ultimate concern, I value the wellbeing of people in my identity group over that of people outside my identity group, and it is only right that I should do this.
- As a matter of fact, the wellbeing of different groups, of which I am a member, often trade against each other in moral decisions.
- The purpose of moral precepts, largely if not mainly, is to manage tradeoffs between our concerns for the welfare of different groups, with different degrees of shared identity, of which we are a common member (e.g. self, family, clan, tribe, nation, humanity, the brotherhood of conscious creatures, etc.).
Now in response to (1), you might say that I am a scoundrel and a villain. In response to that, I say that's just, like, your opinion, man. Philosophers such as Peter Singer, and popular writers like Stephen Pinker, insist that I must be impartial between the wellbeing of my people on the one hand, and that of homo sapiens at large on the other. For example, Pinker writes, "There is nothing magic about the pronouns I and me that would justify privileging my interests over yours or anyone else's" [Enlightenment Now, p. 412]. To that I reply, why on Earth would I need magic, or even justification, to privilege my own interests over yours? Of course I privilege my interests over yours, and almost certainly vice versa. In fact, unless you are a friend of mine, not only do I privilege my own interests over yours, I privilege my dog's interests over yours. For example, if my dog needed a life-saving medical procedure that costs $5000, I would pay for it, but if you need a life-saving medical procedure that cost $5000, I probably would not pay for it -- and if an orphan from East Bengal needed a life-saving medical procedure that costs $5000 (which one probably does at this very moment), I would almost certainly not pay for it, and neither would you (unless you are actually paying for it).
Not only do I actually value my dog's wellbeing above that or a random human stranger, I submit it is only right that I should. Indeed, if a man let his family dog pass away, when he could have saved the dog's life for a few thousand dollars, and he spent that money instead to save the life of a foreigner whom he had never met, then, all else being equal, I would prefer not to have him as a countryman, let alone a friend. I submit that, as a matter of fact, a nation made up of such quixotic pipsqueaks would perish from the Earth in a matter of three generations.
I am not alone in being more concerned with the welfare of my dog than with that of a random homo sapien. Consider, for example, that the average lifetime cost of responsibly owning a dog in the United States is around $29,000 -- while, according to the Givewell organization, the cost of saving the life of one unfortunate fellow man at large by donating to a well chosen charity is around $4500 [source]. If those figures are correct, it means that if you own a dog, then you could have allocated the cost of owning that dog to save the lives of about six people on average (and if the figures are wrong, something like that is true anyway). Now, Steven Pinker himself once tweeted that dog ownership comes with empirically verifiable psychological benefits for the dog owner. In his excitement over those psychological benefits, I suppose, he neglected to mention that it also comes with the opportunity cost of six (or so) third world children dying in squalid privation. If Pinker really believes, as he claims to believe, that "reducing the suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings is the ultimate moral purpose," he sure isn't selling it very hard. But then again, no one in their right mind is.
In one talk, Pinker has said, "You cannot expect me to take you seriously if you are espousing moral rules that privilege your interests above mine." But, professor, if I have more and better men on my side, then it does not matter whether you take me seriously; it only matters whether they do. Again, I am not saying that it would be right to take advantage of that situation of having more and better men on my side; I am saying that the Pinker and Harris's egg headed argument yields no reason why I shouldn't.
A perceptive utilitarian might say that impartiality between the wellbeing of a one's ingroup and outgroup is harmful to the communities that adopt it, and that is why real utilitarianism does not require impartiality (contra. Pinker and Singer). In fact, that is getting somewhere -- but that somewhere is not one step closer to resolving the Bo Diddley question (who do you love?). One might suppose that utilitarianism could be salvaged by tailoring it to favor the wellbeing of "the ingroup", but the fly in that ointment is that there is no such thing as "the ingroup". On the contrary, human nature being what it is, groups at all levels split into factions which then try to have their way with each other -- from nuclear families, to PTA boards, to political parties, to nations, to the whole of humanity. A code of conduct that is good for my community at one level might subtract from the good of a smaller, tighter community of which I am also a member. That is a basic fact of the human condition.
Such self-interested factionalism is the elephant in the room in every negotiation, at every level of community, from international diplomacy down to an argument over who is doing the dishes after supper. Thus, 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. Now hear this: when we are looking for a win-win solution that benefits everyone at all levels without hurting anyone at any level of "our community", this is an engineering problem, or a social engineering problem, but not an ethical problem. It is the win-lose scenarios, which trade the wellbeing of one level of my community against that of another, that fall into the domain of ethics. Of course we are more concerned for the welfare of those whose identities have more in common with our own -- but how steep should the drop-off be as a function of shared identity? Should it converge to zero for humanity at large? Less than zero for our enemies? How about rabbits and cows? As an ultimate concernb, who do you love, and exactly how much, when it comes to decisions that trade between the wellbeing of one level of your community and another (self, family, clan, tribe, nation, humanity, vertebrates at large)? That is a central problem, if not the central problem, of strict-sense ethical discourse -- and it is a question about which utilitarianism has nothing to say, and about which humanism begs the question from the outset.
3. No Moral Verve
At the end of the day, the conversation on ethics should come to something more than chalk on a board. When the chalk dust settles, if we have done a decent job of it, we should bring away something that can inspire us to rise to the call of duty when duty gets tough. The fatal defect of utilitarianism in this regard is that practically no one -- neither you, nor I, nor Steven Pinker, nor Sam Harris, nor John Stuart Mill himself -- actually gives a leaping rat's ass about the suffering or the flourishing of homo sapiens at large. Such was eloquently voiced by Adam Smith, and his statement is worth quoting at length:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened. [Smith (1759): The Theory of Moral Sentiments]
Here is the point. As C.S. Lewis wrote, In battle it is not syllogisms [logic] that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment ["The Abolition of Man"]. Lewis was right about this -- and, while we are making a list of things that do not inspire people to rise to call of duty when duty gets tough, we can include on that list any concern they might claim to have for the welfare of human beings at large.
4. The Voodoo Factor
On top of ignoring the multilayered, competitive nature of the human condition, and on top of having no practical motivational force even for its professed adherents, another problem with rule utilitarianism is the voodoo it invokes to connect (a) performing a particular action with (b) what would happen, counterfactually, if everyone followed the salient rule that permits the action. In the simplest possible example, if I steal a tootsie roll from a convenience store, then, in the immediate material, this is good for me and bad for the store owner. In the world of mystical utilitarian counterfactuals, if everyone stole everything all the time, then everyone (including me) would clearly be worse off -- but in the actual world, me stealing a bite of candy is not going to cause everyone to steal everything all the time, or, probably, cause anyone else to steal anything else ever. Even if an individual tootsie roll pilferage did have some miniscule ripple effect on society, I would still expect the material impact on me personally to be less than the cost of the candy I stole. To put it more generally, when someone steals something and gets away with it, they do not reasonably expect to lose net income as a result. So, why on Earth should I care about what would happen in the counterfactual situation where everyone stole everything all the time? I cannot imagine an objective reason why I should.
Perhaps there is some deep metaphysical argument that establishes, on an objective basis, that one ought to behave the way they wish others in "their community" to behave (if, again counterfactually, there were such a thing as "their community") -- or perhaps there is some kind of cosmic karma stipulating that what goes around invariably comes around on this Earth, but (1) I cannot imagine what that metaphysical argument would be, (2) the world doesn't look to me like it works that way, and (3) neither Pinker, nor Harriss, nor Singer, nor Benthem, nor Mill actually give such metaphysical arguments, nor attempt to show that the world does work that way.
Conclusion
When I say that utilitarianism has nothing useful to say about real world ethical problems, I mean it. Of course one might give evidence about the impacts of some rule or policy, which might then inform whether we want to adopt that rule or policy -- but I doubt the following words have ever been uttered in a real debate over policy or ethics: I conceded that your policy/rule/value-premise, if adopted, would benefit every level of our community more than mine does, but to Hell with that. The fact is that everyone prefers policies that benefit their communities when they are a win/win at every level -- whether or not they have read one fancy word of John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Peter Singer, Sam Harris, or Steven Pinker. Thus, to the degree that utilitarianism has any force in the real world, it adds nothing to the conversation that wasn't already inherent in common sense. On the other hand, to the degree that utilitarianism is not redundant with common sense, it has no motivational force, even for its professed adherents -- especially if they own a dog.
I submit that the position of utilitarianism is not only weak, but so evidently preposterous that its firm embrace requires an act of intellectual dishonesty. I can say this without contempt, because less than ten years ago I myself espoused utilitarianism. I knew then and I know now that I was not being intellectually honest in espousing this view. To my credit, I could not bring myself to write a defense of utilitarianism, even though I tried -- because I could not come up with an argument for it that I found convincing. Yet, I presumed that I would eventually be able to produce such an argument, and I did state utilitarianism as my position, without confessing that I could not defend the position to my own satisfaction.
I further submit that programs like utilitarianism are not only mistaken but harmful. Moreover, they are not just a little bit harmful, but disastrously harmful, and the engendered disaster is unfolding before our eyes. The problem is not that utilitarians are necessarily bad people; it is that, if they are good people, they are good people in some sense by accident: reflexively mimicking the virtues and values of their inherited traditions, while at the same time denigrating tradition, and mistaking their moral heritage for something they have discovered independently. As John Selden wrote,
Custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in [by this] to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind. [Natural and National Law, Book 1, Chapter 6]
The problem with subverting the actual source of our moral conventions and replacing it with a feeble rationalization is this: each generation naturally (and rightly) pushes back against their inherited traditions, and pokes to see what is underneath them. If the actual source of those traditions has been forgotten, and they are presented instead as being founded on hollow arguments, the pushback will blow the house down. Sons will live out the virtues of their fathers less with each passing generation, progressively supplanting those virtues with the unrestrained will of their own flesh. That is what we are seeing in our culture today -- and I hold that shallow and impotent theories of morality espoused by academics are part of the problem.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.
In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.
I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
4Chan's First Feature film is also the first Feature length AI Film.
The Conceit? Aside from a few Joke stills, none of the visual film is AI. It is a "Nature Documentary" Narrated by David Attenborough... It is also maybe the most disturbing film ever made, and possibly the most important/impactful film of the decades so far.
Reality is more terrifying than fiction.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
Alternative Title: Where would you live if you had only minimal constraints?
While I am very much soliciting genuine requests and hope to follow through on the post title, I hope this prompt will also be a fun one.
Many of us fantasize about living abroad or starting over. But there is always an excuse. Some factor tying us down or preventing us from making the lunge: a job, a partner, a sick relative. I have found myself with these excuses recently plucked away.
Since any (good) recommendation should be tailored to the recipient, here are the aforementioned minimal constraints:
- American citizen. Native English speaker.
- Not restricted to English speaking locations, but the difficulties of learning a language and assimilating should be considered
- For simplicity and op-sec, assume fluency in other languages can be rounded down to 0
- Long Term, Stable Couple
- All preferences are shared between both of us
- Do not need to consider relationship prospects of destination
- Monogamous
- Straight
- Young (~30) years old
- No children yet. Will have first (of several) children within next 3 years.
- No adult dependents (such as sick family members that need to be cared for)
- $250k household income
- Assume standard income growth for competitive tech field: +5-10% real growth per year.
- Fully Remote Work
- This is the big one that opens up the world
- Assume remote work will remain viable (fair assumption given our fields)
I'm a believer in the idea that constraints can paradoxically increase creativity, but if you have a dream destination that is incompatible with these constraints don't let me stop you from sharing.
The Motte has an eclectic mix of users and I specifically want to know YOUR ideal destination, NOT what you think someone like us would want. The standard lists and rankings of "best places to live" are either bizarre (they overweight metrics that don't matter to most) or end up just being too blank - effectively just a list of major cities.
I'm hoping to discover some unusual preferences. Maybe your dream is a few hundred acres of farmland in a rural spot. Maybe it's something incredibly niche like needing to be walking distance from the Louvre or being able to view the Khumbu at sunrise from your porch. Now is the time to sell me the rest of us on your dream :).
We will be visiting a number of options this summer and would love to add some additional locations to either this trip or the next. The goal is to move to this location early 2025.
Will include some of the options I've been toying with as a comment.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Inspired by some of the conversations we had here about the experiences of previous generations (especially with /u/the_nybbler, and yes, I know you're not a boomer), I wrote up a post that challenges a common narrative of how good the boomers had, and how screwed the millennials are. Main point is that the houses were not that much cheaper relative to now, and the interests rates were murderous. Enjoy!
(I'm a regular poster here, but I wanted to separate the identities for opsec purposes).
Millions of people connect with his media persona, he was/is a cultural phenomenon. There is a picture of him that is treated like a shrine at my cousin's very good restaurant. Why did a man who seemingly had everything to live for take his own life? Not through an OD or other excess, but by hanging himself from a doorknob? The guy could score drugs in a second, why not ride it out in a heroin haze?
This whole thing is a puzzle to me and it seems wrapped up in his romantic life somehow? I remember seeing a picture of his girlfriend who was obviously cheating on him while "training" MMA etc...
I lose a lot of respect for people that "trade up" after they get famous and ditch their long time spouse that supported them when they were just a normal person, turnabout is fair play? Was it really that he could dish it out but couldn't take it?
Is this someone that people should look up to because he could be a charming bad boy for the cameras? I almost feel like it was too many 3rd world trips, I could actually see the pain he experienced while getting an "authentic" experience over and over again from people that wouldn't make in a lifetime what he made in a day. One or 2 fixers/guides even angled for some wealth or a chance to move to the US and pointed out the extreems, and that is just what they showed us on camera.
Anyhow, I'm a few glasses of wine in. Nowhere in my rambling, incoherent response did I come close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. We are all dumber for having read it. I award myself no points and may God have mercy on my soul.