FeepingCreature
No bio...
User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
Ero, surely.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
I think it's worth looking at the answers to that question when it's posed for other sexual orientations or desires. "Can't you just not be a public masturbator?" "Can't you just not be a pedophile?" "Can't you just not be a sadistic murderer, Ted?" If he says, "No! I was born this way, and I can't change!"
I mean, first of all yes, I think that applies to all of those as well. I think people back then were conflating "can't you just not do the thing you like" and "can't you just like the normal thing instead." One of those is possible, the other isn't. But also, I genuinely think there's a difference in that most kinks, I believe including pedophilia, tend to be optional, not obligatory: you can get off without them. This does not apply to gayhood. I think there's maybe genuinely two separate categories here.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Sure, but then the argument is on who is right, and I am not aware of a strong reason for why who you love should be wrong to be.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
I thought Born This Way was supposed to be about "can't you just not be gay?"
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
That seems unrelated: there's a difference between a partner and a victim.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Childhood as gay conversion therapy does work: some people only realize they are gay in college. They gather the usual evidence, "women don't interest me" plus "wow that man makes me feel things", but without gayness as a model it just gets lost in the evidential noise of daily life.
The problem is that once you have the model of gayness, you can't exactly erase your memory and redo childhood. So it is a viable conversion therapy, possibly the only viable one, but it is not one that can be applied to a person it has already failed for.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Long before you put paedophiles in jail, you should argue for the much cheaper approach of a special arm of the police whose job it is to surveil every house for child abuse. You could probably even farm most of it out to AI. So since we don't even do this, it's not just that society accepts the current level of child abuse in trade for not having to put an unknown fraction of the populace in jail, it accepts the current level of child abuse in trade for not providing every household with a Child Abuse Safety Siri, which is much lower. We don't even do this with schools or churches! In other words, just the cost of implicitly accusing every member of society of being a potential child molester is already too high to be worth stopping the vast majority of abuse that happens. In conclusion, society seriously does not care very much about the background noise of child suffering.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
I mean, but conversely, who should have the right to determine what feelings are or aren't part of an identity? I mean conversely, if I start saying "divine-attracted" or "people who experience a religious impulse" and note that they don't have to raise their children to believe in Hell, they can't help that they perceive the divine but pushing it on others is a choice- I suspect some of the same people would become very angry at me.
Hell, being grossed out by gayness also doesn't need to be part of people's identity. As they say, "you are not immune from propaganda identifying with your impulses."
The investment and divestment of impulses from your identity is to some extent voluntary. However, it also serves as a signal as to which impulses you value the highest. To say that "SSA do not have to make that a part of their identity" is close to saying "SSA should not make that part of their identity" which is itself approximately equivalent to "society should not try to fulfill or support SSA". At which point I start disagreeing: so what if men have impulses to have sex with men? Society is a system to arbitrate the fulfillment of impulses with minimal friction. The religious impulse or the purity impulse should not get primacy over the gay impulse.
If you disagree with my criticism of oppression-status granting infinite moral immunity, be specific about what limiting principle you'd propose (if any).
I kind of disagree with this, yes. The limiting factor is having a chance to flourish.
Hypothetical: A guy comes into your house to murder you. He has a gun and spec-ops training; you are a keyboard warrior; he will definitely find you and murder you. The best you can hope for is maybe take him by surprise and give him some bruises. Do you hang out in broad daylight, sheepishly say "guess you caught me" and let yourself be shot? Or do you do the fucker as much damage as you can?
The game theory is this: every decision to exploit somebody exists on a margin spectrum. You are trying to extract as much benefit as possible for a given effort cost; if the other can raise the effort or lower the benefit, it incentivizes you to maybe leave them alone. But we never know where somebody's cut-off point is, so there's always an incentive, if you notice you're being fucked over, to do as much damage as you can back.
So there's a very tentative hypothetical we can construct here to advocate for Palestinean terrorism. Israel is clearly fucking them while exploiting "their" land (whether your game theory implementation advocates forgiveness or revenge here probably depends on preexisting sentiment, but revenge is at least plausible), Israel is clearly trying to minimize effort costs with Gaza, maybe if you can impose some costs on Israel, it'll push them closer to the threshold or at any rate strengthen your negotiating position. In game theory, a person who never plays 'defect' isn't an agent but a resource. Hamas chose the most damaging strategy available to them. Did it break existing compacts? Sure, but I'd presume they assumed that they could not get fucked any worse than they were. Will it work? Probably no.
Okay, cynic hat on: no, but the cost of it not working will not fall on Hamas. IMO, Israel can't really do anything (not hugely expensive) here that will hurt Hamas more than it drives recruitment. From the cynical view, Hamas and the authoritarian movement in Israel are obviously just playing Toxoplasma Tennis. B attacks A'. This enrages A! A cannot fight B, so it attacks B'. This enrages B! B also cannot (cheaply) fight A, so it attacks A', and so on. Part of the reason I don't really have a strong moral view against Hamas is that if this is an accurate model, it's obviously "cooperative" to some extent. Hamas benefits Netanyahu, and conversely. And whenever a cycle like that exists, blaming the most recent hit on whoever committed it is looking at the wrong component. It's a systemic effect. Remove Hamas, another terror group will be found. There is a gap here that allows the existence of a feedback cycle, so a feedback cycle arises. Anyway, in this particular case, the cycle might be running out of control because somebody, A or B, underestimated the damage the current serve would do, so it's unclear what happens next. But my moral view to "let's put the angry people in a cage and then send the guard away" is: a stupid game was played, and a stupid prize was won, I feel bad for the victims but not angry at the perpetrators; it's not like they were the load-bearing causal component.
To loop back: why did I say "the limiting factor is having a chance to flourish?" Well, how do you get out of a cycle like this? You find better things to do with your life. Not sure how good a life you could have in Gaza City. If you could have a good life, a dignified life, a life with authorship and respect, and then you go on a revenge bender - well, I am a humanist, I want to maximize flourishing. When people live an unworthy life, I welcome attempts to, even counterfactually, push for a better life; when people could already live a worthy life, I don't. Do I think Gazans lack the capability to live a worthwhile life? I don't know, honestly, but if I wanted to construct a moral case for terrorism, that's where I'd start.
Addendum: When this conflict started, I said to a family member: "I don't think what Hamas did was right, but I am willing to bet on two things: at the end of this, a lot more Palestineans will have died than Israelis; and at the end of this, Hamas will still be there." If Israel wants to convince me that I'm wrong about the Toxoplasma Tennis thing, those are the two factors they should try to improve.
I don’t get what you’re saying here. They weren’t so bad, compared to some hypothetical regime that would commit a genocide of equal proportion, but would purposefully, systematically torture people before killing them… is that your point?
Yep. I mean, say the Catholic church thought I was a heretic or something. Or some bush war where half the point of the army is that it's where you stuff your psychopaths so they do something useful. And I think that's mostly attributable to the professionalism of the German army. Sure, they served an evil regime - granted! But I think you're just underestimating how much farther an army can fall, and how much more personal suffering it can cause if it has lower standards.
My point is - there is still a point to praising honor and professionalism in the army of Sauron. I would absolutely honor the righteous Orc who ran a tight ship and whose men only ate alive a small fraction of his POWs. - In war, you may die either way, but you can still have a preference whether to die with your limbs attached and your rectum intact. Everybody wants to act like their enemies are the absolute worst, the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth - and they are almost universally wrong, and simply have never seen real scum in their lives. The lowest of humanity is very, very low.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Oh, but the german army was full of such honorable, patriotic men. They had made an oath, and they had a duty to their state and people. And by God they carried it out.
Personal opinion, no particular historical knowledge: the German army could have been so much worse. Consider the ordinary execution of genocides in history. The Holocaust was unique in organization and sheer scale of suffering, but at least the suffering it caused was, mostly, incidental and not the goal. If I'm de facto going to be the victim of a genocidal campaign, to be quite honest, there are worse options than the Nazis. There are even worse options in German history than the Nazis! Make my captor and executioner an honorable patriotic career soldier any day.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
As I understand it from comments here (might be wrong! I have no idea!), part of the Civil War was that it ended in a sort of "okay, let's both now calm down and work together, you lost but that isn't the end" agreement. And whereas the same thing happened, sort of, with World vs Germany, it certainly did not happen with World vs the Nazi movement - that lost, and was destroyed, and eradicated, and all its flags destroyed, and the Earth salted and so on, already after the second World War ended. There was never anything like a truce with the Nazis; the most that occurred was "alright, if you completely repudiate the Nazi project and also are useful, we're going to keep using you and not look too closely." And that was more a matter of civil necessity.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Please don't abuse the phrasing "listen to what people say" when you actually mean "speculate what people mean". The entire point of "take them at their word" is to take them at their literal word. If you want to use this phrase, please link a video of Greta Thunberg literally advocating Jewish genocide in those exact terms.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
But in this case, the moral harm entirely comes from the reaction of her social circle, no? She has to lie that he raped her to protect her reputation. It sounds to me like her peergroup is the problem here, not the sex. It sounds like the problem isn't "open sex-positive norms", but "trying to live sex-positive norms while actually in a very sex-negative environment."
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Imagine reading this on CNN: "Many fled their vehicles and jumped from the bridge. Those who stayed behind..." Is something good about to happen to those people?
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Budget cell phones ($150 range) have basically not improved since at least 2016. There's maybe a bit more RAM. Displays are the same, CPUs are largely the same, connectivity is the same, functionality is the same, batteries are largely the same. Numeric improvements seem to average out to maybe 20%. (Which may seem respectable, until you consider that in other computing products we were used to doublings over that range.)
FeepingCreature
7mo ago
This is a point that can be argued, and agreed with or disagreed with. However, to say "X people were killed by capitalism", when they were killed by imperialism, particularly if you know or should know that your conversational partner may not agree with the necessity of the association of capitalism and imperialism, is a way of making a strong point while skipping the work required to actually support it - in other words, the sentence makes sense to you, and it will make sense to your listener, but your listener will take a significantly different meaning from it than the one that you understand it to mean. That's why it's mottebuilding when charitable, and lying otherwise.
FeepingCreature
7mo ago
Every open-minded educated person knows the 14 words, "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Do they remember these words because some recluse killed a few people with mail bombs in the 80s?
Yes, I broadly think this is why they remember them. I mean - how much else of the manifesto do they remember? Maybe I'm arguing too much from my own state of mind here, but I'd wager - nothing. That one sentence is punchy without saying too much that one may disagree with in the specifics, it's universally recognizeable, and most importantly, it's spicy, in no small part because of its association with terror. This all combines to make it a memetic winner.
FeepingCreature
7mo ago
Once you've invested sufficiently in military build-up, you need to somehow translate that buildup into some sort of gain for yourself, or you've wasted a lot of money for nothing. Armies have inertia.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
I mean, I think this is overly simplistic. Did some people aim intentionally for genocide back then? Sure, probably. Did some people aim, agitate, and advocate for uplift? It seems like this was also the case, hence schools and churches. And of course, the natives as labor force is and has always been among the resources being exploited, where it could be, and this can also explain the schools. Iunno, I don't think you're wrong, per se, I just don't think any single strategy can explain colonialism, being as it was an emergent venture prosecuted by many interest groups. I'd expect most things that were done to fulfill multiple interests.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
Though of course, hopefully the Scientologists had gone to prison as well. If they hadn't, I'd be getting increasingly sympathetic to the building-burners.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
This is also my position. It is incredibly unfortunate that this situation gives ammunition to holocaust deniers, and so if people could stop drawing from the credibility account of the Holocaust with scams, and if other people could please stop enabling them doing that with incredibly uncritical reporting, I think we'd be in a much better situation here.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
I mean, I do think that ... like, if you can go futa, you can go anywhere; it's hard to see why such a world wouldn't collapse into a Slaaneshi fuckpile pretty much overnight. To have a sustainable futa population requires the populace to go: "Alright! Chicks with dicks... but no farther!" Which is indeed quite implausible.
I guess my question would be - is there any purpose to the futa outside of kink and fetishism?
I mean, I guess what I'm saying is just, don't underestimate the lengths people will go to for kink and fetishism. Having kink and fetishism drive a major component of your life like permanent or prevalent body type is not at all implausible to me.
If it's just being done for kink and sexual exhibitionism, does this pattern-match to trans people IRL?
As an AGP, I am the wrong person to ask about this. I guess I'd say, I don't know because the current cost of entry is so enormously high, and also because perversion is still stigmatized. I think "doing it because you find it hot" is a very underestimated motivation, even in trans circles, but it's not one you're allowed to admit to right now, in part because SRS and trans in general draws on limited societal resources. Idk, I'd say give it a year past the singularity and we'll have a lot better idea where people "naturally" land once scarcity of body is removed.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
But being a big-breasted female-presenting tiefling with a futa cock and dude voice? Feels like a strange midpoint. If you live in a world of magic and this can be done easily with a finger snap or a procured service, why wouldn't you go all in one way or the other? I'll admit to a possible failure of imagination on my end, but it just comes off as kink and fetishism.
If you live in a world of magic and this can be done easily with a finger snap, why wouldn't you go for kink and fetishism?
That's a misunderstanding. You're implicitly applying a virtue/signaling framing to a consequentialist policy. You should be supporting the least altruistic people iff you want to signal the depth of your commitment to altruism to your peergroup. EA isn't trying to "maximize the depth of the virtue of altruism", it's trying to "maximize the rating produced by the altruism principle." Adherence is "capped" at one - when you already do the maximum good for the greatest number, you cannot adhere even harder by diverging from this concept to avoid also benefitting non-altruist principles. That is, EA does not at all penalize you for your actions also having auxiliary benefits to yourself or your peergroup, if that happens to be the optimal path. Also, utilitarianism is in fact allowed to recognize second-order consequences. That's why "earning to give" and 80,000 Hours exist - help some already pretty privileged people today, and they can probably help a lot of others tomorrow.
What makes EA EA as opposed to traditional A is exactly that it's supposed to care more about outcome rating than virtuous appearance!
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