FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
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User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
Come on, "we treat our children like adult strangers" is hardly a generalising conservative principle, if anything it's usually progressives that are often criticised for that.
Oh I don't think any of this is a generalized conservative principle. I'm not saying this is how it should be, just how it is in conservative American culture. At least, my corner of it. I'm describing, not prescribing.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
I don't think he was trying to say that the problem is being able to produce truth 100% of the time. The problem is understanding what it means for something to be "true" or "false" in the first place.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
The limits of our biology are changing by the year. Will you make your children accept the limits of their biology and watch them be crippled by polio, or something?
You two seem to have an underlying philosophical difference that is causing this confusion. I would hazard a guess that Arjin, whether explicitly or not, has a Natural Law understanding of humanity. Curing children of polio is good, because humans are supposed to be healthy. Giving children tentacles and an extra set of eyes that can see infrared is bad, because humans aren't supposed to have tentacles or infrared eyes. If you give them tentacles and infrared eyes, are they still human?
Those who don't understand things in terms of Natural Law don't see the problem. To them there is no way humans are "supposed to be" so we can do whatever we want and be just as human as ever. Curing polio is the same kind of thing as transforming someone's body shape radically, or whatever. To someone with a Natural Law understanding, it is not at all the same kind of thing. One is fixing something that is wrong with someone, the other is creating things that are wrong with someone, insofar as wrong is deviation from what it means to be a human. Polio is a deviation; transhumanism is a deviation.
Similarly, humans naturally form families where a child has a mother and a father, because both sexes are needed to procreate and humans are the kind of creatures that care about their kids. If you don't care about your kids, then somethings wrong with you. If a kid doesn't have a mother or a father, then something's wrong with that family. Similarly, mothers are supposed to get pregnant, carry their child, and then care for it and raise it and be part of its life. If for some reason she can't (if she died in childbirth, if she's an unfit mother, if she is unwilling to care for the child) then adoption can happen, but adoption is not ideal. It's a deviation from how it should be. So deliberately creating situations where mothers bear children that aren't their own, for the purpose of giving them to someone else, is pretty "un-Natural" in the Natural Law sense.
Your primary disagreement is philosophical, that's where the debate would be most fruitful.
Well, for one, Natural Law is the philosophical setting out of which all modern Western societies came. It has a profound impact on our current institutions and cultural values, even if you reject it as being truthful. In that particular sense it is not arbitrary but conservative: not just anything can be considered Natural, there is a long tradition that is drawn on. You may think the tradition is arbitrary, but understanding what that tradition in is very useful to understanding where a great many people in the West are coming from, whether they know it or not.
Beyond that practical consideration, Natural Law seeks, at least, to be the opposite of arbitrary. The whole point is that things have a real nature, one that they can conform with or deviate from. That nature is rooted in what they are as a thing, and things are not arbitrary. For instance, Natural Law would say that humans have two legs. If someone is born with one leg, they have something wrong with them. Is the standard "humans have two legs" arbitrary? Did someone just decide it one day? Clearly not. Saying that humans have any number of legs would be far more arbitrary than that.
Most people, likely yourself included, have a lot of Natural Law built into your thinking already. If you say a bicycle is broken, it is because you have an understanding of what a bicycle is supposed to be, and comparing the broken bicycle to the Natural bicycle is how you know that the broken bicycle is broken. The same for a broken leg. If someone asked you whether we should vaccinate a child against polio, you likely wouldn't say "Why? Kids with polio are just as valid as kids without polio." Similarly, if your cat gave birth to a fish you would be surprised and dismayed: if someone told you "Why shouldn't a cat give birth to a fish if it wants?" you would think they were crazy.
Where disagreement occurs is outside the realm of the concrete. We can agree that kids aren't supposed to have polio, and that humans have two eyes, but when it comes to how a society should be we likely come into sharp disagreement. Natural Law comes from the perspective that since humans have a specific nature, human societies have a limited number of ways they can be structured for humans to flourish in them. Just as a human can't flourish if you stab it in the guts, because of the nature of the human body and digestive system, so to it can't flourish if society metaphorically stabs them in the guts. You are not free to structure society, or your life, any way you want to because the reality of what it means to be a human means that some choices are unavailable to you and some choices are really bad ideas (just as it's a bad idea to stab yourself in the guts: saying you shouldn't stab yourself in the guts may be trying to limit your freedom, but its good advice nonetheless).
Now people can disagree on how society should be structured, given the nature of what it is to be a human. That doesn't make those disagreements arbitrary. If someone is working from a Natural Law background then their arguments should be grounded in what it means to be a human. If you disagree with them you can use that grounding in human nature as support. You may be able to defend a great many positions on Natural Law grounds, but you cannot defend any position you like. You can't say that blindness is as good as seeing, or that humans by nature love to be tortured, or that if we pass this specific law people will suddenly start working together without incentive.
Without Natural Law at your back things get more arbitrary, not less. You might argue that transhumanism will prevent disease; without Natural Law I can retort "What's wrong with disease? Why should we value being healthy over sick? Sickness is just an arbitrary category that society puts on those who do not conform to it's expectations." If you argue that transhumanism will increase human ability I might respond "Why should humans have more power? If we have more power we will destroy the Earth, and every living thing on it. We should de-industrialize instead, and fade away until none of us are left." If you argue that transhumanism is a great step forward in human progress, I could respond "Progress is a meta-narrative designed to hide the crimes of industrialists and tyrants, and has no meaning beyond that."
Yet, as a follower of the Natural Law, if you argue to me that transhumanism will prevent disease I may be swayed, for humans are supposed to be healthy. If you argue that transhumanism will increase human ability I might support you, for it is the nature of humans to improve themselves and seek excellency. If you argue that transhumanism is human progress I may or may not disagree, but I would at least agree that there is something to progress towards. You might convince me that transhumanism will allow us to be more fully human than before.
TL,DR: You should take Natural Law seriously because deep down almost everyone in the West, including you, believes in Natural Law, and if you don't then there's nothing left but arbitrary narratives and you become the kind of ghoul who is mad the people are curing the blind because blindness is just as valid as seeing.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
That's an excellent question, and one I'm not fit to answer. All I can tell you is a potted history of Natural Law. Aristotle and Plato are considered some of the first writers to expound on Natural Law, and the Romans (particularly Cicero) expanded on their ideas, particularly as they apply to society. Natural Law got refined further through the Middle Ages and beyond, particularly by Aquinas. A lot of Enlightenment thought was explicitly based in in Natural Law. I'd skim the Wikipedia article on it for more details. Beyond that, you'd have to ask a philosopher.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
You don't really understand what Natural Law is, if you think that just because something happens in nature it is Natural, in the Natural Law sense.
It's an understandable mistake to make. English is a terrible language for these things. Natural used to mean according to something's nature, but now it also means "not artificial" or a vague "animals and plants and stuff".
I explained this once already over on ACX, so if you don't mind I'll just copy over my comments from there:
It is "natural" for people to get sick in the sense that getting sick is a thing that happens.
It is "not natural" to be sick because a living things "natural" state is to be well: the only way we recognize a difference between sickness and health is that sickness is an abnormality that is different from the "natural" functioning of an organism.
Natural in this sense means "According to somethings nature" and not "the oppisite of artificial." So, for instance, a dog "naturally" has four legs because part of the nature of a dog is that it is a four legged animal. The fact that some dogs are born with two or three legs doesn't change the fact dogs are "naturally" four legged.
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You will better understand "natural law" if you interpret "natural" to be "best possible state", although that goes a smidge too far in the other direction.
A dog is "naturally" a creature with four legs, eyes, nose, digestive system, waggy tail, etc. If the dog gets cancer and his digestive system is blocked and no longer functions he has moved away from his "natural" state into an "unnatural" one. One way we know this is that the purpose of the digestive system is to turn food into nutrients that the body needs, and if cancer is blocking his intestines so that the food cannot pass and the nutrients cannot be absorbed then the digestive system is being frustrated in accomplishing it's "natural function".
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...if you think of "natural" as meaning "intended" you are getting close to understanding what "nature" means in terms of "natural law" philosophy.
Natural law comes from ancient philosophy, later refined by medieval philosophers. It fits with the "four causes" understanding of how change can occur and what things actually are that was first laid down by Aristotle. Everything that exists has "four causes" or four "things that make the thing what it is and not something else". Formal cause is the form the thing takes, material cause is what the thing is made out of of, efficient cause is what caused the thing to exist, and final cause is what the purpose of the thing is. So a digestive system has the formal cause of consisting of a stomach and intestines and all the other "blueprint" type data, a material cause of being made of flesh (a variety of animal cells, if you want to be more specific), an efficient cause of having grown from the zygote over time through a variety of biochemical processes, and a final cause of digesting food to provide nutrition for the body. A violation of any of these causes could be seen as "unnatural": a digestive system with the wrong form (if the small intestine was missing, for instance) would be "unnatural" even if that defect might occur sometimes in nature, for example.
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...even moderns treat things as if they had a final cause: just think of the term "digestive system": it's based completely on what the "purpose" of the organ system is, namely digestion. Strictly speaking you don't need a designer for things to have a purpose, a function, etc. Even if evolution did not "intend" anything it remains a fact that the digestive system is aimed at a particular end, the end of turning food into nutrition. Jettisoning final causes makes it harder to say what things are, exactly: if final causes aren't real then you could never meaningfully say that someone's "heart failed" (failed at what?), or that there is "something wrong" with their eyesight or hearing. Wrong compared to what? Without final causes, even unintentional ones, such judgements are nonsense.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
Yeah, you're still not grokking Natural Law.
Set aside whether God intended humans to get polio. Lets focus down to ground level here. What does it mean for a human to be sick? How do we know if someone is sick?
Well, we know someone is sick because we have an idea of how healthy humans are supposed to be, and sick humans differ from that. Healthy humans breath easily, humans sick with a chest cold hack and cough and wheeze. Healthy humans are about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit: if you're much hotter or colder than that, you're sick. If you found someone whose leg is black and putrid with necrosis you say to yourself "That doesn't look right. This person is sick."
Yet all of these judgements require us to have an idea of how a human is supposed to be. What a "natural" human is like. When we compare sick humans to the "natural" human, we can see something is wrong. What's more, we believe that it a bad thing to differ from the "natural" human. We don't consider having a leg that is black with necrosis to be just as good as having two legs that are operating normally. Without our conception of a "natural" human, distinguishing sick from healthy is impossible. They're just different kinds of humans that have different ways of being.
Yet it doesn't seem that our idea of healthy and sick is arbitrary. Our concept of the "natural" healthy human seems to correspond to something real. It does seem that humans are "supposed" to have two legs, and that our digestive system is "supposed" to provide us with nutrients, and that our heart is "supposed" to pump blood through our body. It doesn't seem that a heart that stops pumping is just as good a heart as one that keeps pumping. Regardless of whether the heart was created by a mind or by blind evolution, it isn't arbitrary to say that the heart's "purpose" is to pump blood. Or that human's have two legs. Or that eyes that see are better than eyes that are blind.
So in that sense, regardless of whether God intended humans to get polio or not, we can say that a human sick with polio has something wrong with them: to be sick with polio is not "natural" to humans.
I hope that helped.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
My grandmother declined quickly after my grandfather died. Her father lived to be 101 and was sharp as a tack until the last couple years. She's 90 now and unambiguously senile. Given the timing of her decline, I have to think that if my grandfather has lived she would have kept her mind.
I'm not so sure this is true. Stephen Shaw put out a documentary about falling birth rates called Birthgap, and he was interviewed by Jordan Peterson recently (it was a good interview, you can get it by podcast as well, but I know most people don't have the time for that).
The most interesting thing he's talking about, that I hadn't heard before, is that according to him something like 5% of women report that they never want to have kids, yet right now something like 30% of women never have any kids. Which comes out to something like 80% of women who never have kids having wanted them. This is a real source of suffering that has mostly gone unnoticed by the mainstream. Shaw, interestingly enough, never gives an explanation of what's causing this. He has ideas, but every time he looked at the data the ideas just didn't make sense. He described his documentary as him asking all these experts why fertility rates are falling, even while most women still want to have kids, and finding that every explanation he was given kinda made sense but didn't match the data. Really, the interview is great and I'd recommend listening to it.
So while it makes sense intellectually that "most people will choose not to have kids" for the vast majority of women, at least, who never have kids it wasn't a choice. They meant to have kids, but it did not work out for them. No doubt for most of them it was due to other choices they made, but they never meant to be childless. So when we see falling fertility we can't round it off as "More people are choosing not to have kids." That doesn't seem to match the data (again, among women).
Another interesting bit of data I learned from the interview: Shaw claims that only children are not a major driver of lower fertility, and says that having only one kid is still very rare. The people who are having any kids at all are choosing to have more than one kid, and only child rates have remained about the same over the last 70 years or so.
EDIT:
Just wanted to add a quote from Shaw, from a different podcast he did:
"Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe women don't want their children. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe we have to accept that. And that's the society where now, you know, we set ourselves up for and we just accept consequences. Well, it turns out from studies and from my documentary talking to people in 24 countries, it's pretty clear that the vast majority of people who don't have children, and I'm estimating 80% and it might be higher, had planned to have children. They had assumed there would be a moment in time after education, after careers when it would be the right time. But the right time never came. And, you know, if you were to watch a part two of the documentary, I almost suggest you don't watch it alone because there's some very emotional scenes with people in their 40s, men and women who get deeply emotional about what went wrong in life that they had planned to have children."
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
Good work! A long while ago I came up with my own version that was a more meaningful translation to me personally. Here's my version, with notes:
Our Father, who is in Heaven,
I think "Our Father" actually gets across what you were trying to get across just fine: that "Father to us" understanding. To say "Our Father" is to say "my own Father who is also father to others".
Holy is your name.
I really appreciate the new information you've given me on this being a command rather than a description.
May your Kingdom come and your will be done on Earth, just as it is in Heaven.
I put the emphasis on the contrast between Earth and Heaven, and the desire for Earth to emulate Heaven. I often add to it "...on Earth, and in me, as it is in Heaven"
Give us this day our daily bread,
I never found a better version of this that wasn't also much more wordy. Like "give us this day all the things we really need" or something like that.
and forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
Sometimes I would swap out sins with debts, but sins just works better for me. Sometimes I'll add in a new bit right here: "Father, if there is anyone who I have not forgiven, please show me now so I may forgive them." I honestly want to live up to the prayer and forgive everyone who sins against me, but I'm not always great at recognizing that I am holding something against someone.
And lead us not into the time of testing, but deliver us from evil.
I had heard before that temptation was more like a trial in the original, calling it a trial is probably more elegant than my wording.
Its a pretty darn good prayer. I think you can get a good English translation out of it.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
I've been baffled by the sudden media deluge of people proclaiming that DeSantis can't beat Trump. DeSantis hasn't even declared he's running yet. It would be one thing if he had a sudden gaffe or something that got everyone talking, but I'm seeing articles, videos, tweets from "personalities" left and right beating DeSantis with any stick they have handy and declaring that he's already lost when the contest hasn't even begun. This strikes me more as an attempt by those who want Trump to be the Republican candidate (both on the right and on the left) to either pre-emtively take the wind out of DeSantis's sails or convince him not to run.
Chill out people. The primaries are a long way away, this is way to early to declare winners and losers.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
Which is part of a growing drumbeat of stories that DeSantis is really quite the unlikeable asshole. A very loud drumbeat. A very, very loud drum beat with lots and lots of anecdotes that DeSantis has terrible people skills, and with very few stories of how he’s a swell guy.
More stories than there have been over the last seven years about Trump being unlikable and hard to work with?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
Problems with having kids in 40s are well known.
You know, I don't think they are. At least, not among the population of women who want to have kids but never have them.
I think our society used to be built around an cultural expectation that you marry young and have kids, and the 1970s blew up that cultural expectation because it restricted people's freedom. And a lot of women since never got told that they better have kids young or it probably won't happen. Pop culture didn't tell them, their parents didn't tell them, school didn't tell them, and their peers didn't tell them. This isn't true of all women, but of a lot. They were told they could have it all.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
I have a brother who is currently in South Sudan doing bible translation work. Is South Sudan getting involved in this, or likely to get involved?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
I think a big part of it was that internet piracy (as opposed to, say, buying bootleg VHS tapes) was pretty new. Just look at the debate above on whether piracy is stealing on not: everybody was in that boat, and for teenagers with limited funds piracy looked pretty great so most of them didn't try to settle the question too much.
Now we've had several decades to culturally digest the idea of digital piracy, and we're starting to develop mores and ethical norms. In 2002 if you asked me whether the cracked copy of Giants: Citizen Kabuto I copied off of some guy at a LAN party was stolen goods or not, I would have not known what to say. It didn't feel like stealing, it felt like a friend sharing something with me. But it is illegal. But are all illegal actions immoral? At this point, your average teenager would shrug their shoulders and forget about it. I know I did.
Now it seems that the culture as a whole is coming down on the side of piracy being stealing, or at least morally wrong. So younguns today get taught by their elders that they shouldn't pirate, just as they get taught that they shouldn't steal. So for them it's less of a moral conundrum.
So I would say that the lack of novelty is certainly driving some of the change.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
I agree. Copying a cracked video game from a friend during a LAN party sure felt a lot different than going down to GameSpot and buying it. It seemed unrelated: you wouldn't shoplift the game from a brick and mortar, after all. Now that you download games when you buy them, pirating games seems like an apples to apples comparison.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
I've known someone who thought they had degenerative disc disease, but when she finally actually got scanned all her discs were fine. People talk themselves into medical conditions all on their own more than you think.
On the other hand, this same person eventually got over their back pain by having surgery to stop getting in-grown toenails. Turns out the chronic in-grown toenail problem was making her walk funny, which was straining her back. So, not exactly an example of psychosomatic disease. But people do come up with explanations for the pain they have, sometimes without any medical evidence, so if someone did have back pain due to psychosomatic reasons I could see them thinking they had a herniated disc without ever being checked for it.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
Almost a decade ago I decided to try to get the recommended daily amount of fiber, which resulted in a significant change to my diet. It's a lot of fiber! Like two heads of broccoli a day. I ended up adding a lot of beans to the meals I eat.
I cleared up a ton of issues. No more constipation, no more hemmeroids. Lot gassier though, I don't have the genetics to process beans quite right.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
I think that it is inevitable that AI will get used for TV and film screenwriting in the future. Not to completely replace writers, but to make it so you can get by with half or a quarter of the writers you used to have, with each of those writers using AI as tools to produce a lot more than they could before.
I'm basing that off of GPT-4, the tool we currently have: even if text generation AI doesn't get significantly better than GPT-4 its still going to increase writer productivity.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
westerners' objections to a plant-based diet seem to stem partially from their inexplicable inability to prepare vegetables in any way that isn't disgusting and unpalatable
Any advice on that? Every time I decide to "eat more vegetables" I end up flummoxed on how to do that exactly, other than steaming them and having them as a side. Or making a salad. Or dumping a can of green beans into a bowl and calling it good.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
So if producers capture 99% of surplus by near-perfect price discrimination and leave just a tiny scrap of surplus to customers to push them over the edge of indifference, then customers are being deprived of surplus that is rightfully theirs.
I know you're probably speaking casually, but customers do not have a "right" to anything here (other than a right to the product or service they paid for). We can say that we prefer it when gains from trade are divided as evenly as possible, but there is nothing morally wrong about selling something for a price that a customer is willing to freely pay.
And as we see in your own example, total surplus can be greater when price discriminating. In fact, we often see price discrimination as laudable in medical context: if a doctor charges clients based on what they can afford to pay, we see that as a good thing. Perfect price discrimination is just charging people exactly what they can afford to pay: that is, the most they'd be willing to pay for the good or service you're providing.
This means poor people benefit greatly from price discrimination: they get goods or services they want at a price they are willing to pay when otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford it.
EDIT: One further thought. If we had to choose between producer and consumer getting the majority of the surplus, favoring the producer has the benefit of incentivizing more people to become producers. Which benefits everyone.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
In a medical context, price discrimination means the difference between getting medical treatment and not getting medical treatment. If I can only afford to pay $1,000 at most for medical treatment, and I'm in serious pain or dying, and treatment costs $50,000 for everybody then I'm going to go without treatment, or go for treatment and be saddled with medical debt. If the doctor price discriminates, then I can get treatment for $1,000 which is better than going without and better than being saddled with $49,000 worth of debt.
Most doctors do this de-facto anyway, if someone owes a clinic $10,000 and they say they can't pay they'll usually cut a deal where they pay $500 and the doc writes off the rest. Very common. Because money in hand is worth more than money owed that you'll never collect on. Those who can afford to pay their bills pay them, those who can't pay what they can.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
Right now I mostly eat tomatoes in the form of homemade tomato sauce, onions in the form of cooking them up in sauces or burrito fillings, and that's about it. I mean, I'll eat other vegetables at restaurants and functions, but cooking at home that's pretty much it. Maybe once every couple of weeks I'll make fried rice, I throw some canned peas and carrots in that. If we're getting fancy I might put some canned green beans in a bowl as a side.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
Trade is pretty clearly give-and-take negotiation, and it's not obvious to me why the economics which emerge from such interactions should set their roots all the way down to the level of fundamental moral axioms.
That was kind of my point. Saying that someone has a right to an even share of the gains from trade is making a moral statement. It's saying that anything other than an even share is morally wrong, a violation of someone's rights. It's not.
All this is to say that trades can be imbalanced, and there are levels of imbalance that undermine confidence in the win-win nature of trading.
If its not win-win, then don't make the trade. Like your bottle of water example: given I have a gun, I wouldn't make that trade. Would you make that trade? Certainly not. My point is, if you willingly take a trade (and no fraud is involved, you know what you're trading for and you get what you expect) then the person trading with you has not done anything wrong.
Ah, that makes sense. I only have girls myself so I forgot peeing with my dad to learn how to do it without making a mess.
Really, now that I consider that, I think the main taboo is against girls seeing male genitals, and vice versa.
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