FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
No bio...
User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
This is not purely self imposed: there's a reason it's the West Coast cities, and that's because they have to comply with the whims of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2018 the 9th Circuit ruled that enforcing anti-camping ordinances (better known as "rounding up all the bums") was cruel and unusual punishment, unless the city provided some kind of shelter that the homeless could go to. Since then lower courts have expanded the ruling considerably in a wide variety of ways that chalk up to making the homeless unpoliceable. In 2022 the 9th Circuit doubled down, ruling that the homeless can participate in class action lawsuits against cities that impose criminal or civil penalties on homeless.
Have the pro-homeless NGOs made hay out of this situation? Yes. Is there more Seattle and the rest of the west coast could do? Sure. But even in conservative Anchorage, Alaska (where it gets down to -20 F on the coldest winter nights) has a serious homeless problem, and that problem is named the 9th Circuit.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
Some thoughts about online political ads:
For the last couple months pretty much all of the ads I get on YouTube have been political. I figure this time of year must be a ripe harvest for Google in terms of ad revenue. Maybe it can buoy them through the recent drop in tech stocks.
Interestingly enough, every single ad I've gotten that mention abortion has been strongly pro-choice. I've strongly pro-life myself, and for most of these ads the effect is that I now know who to vote for (namely, the person they're warning me against). This is a very useful service because all the Republican candidates are keeping their stance on abortion on the down low. It often isn't even listed as an issue on their official campaign website, I have to google around until I can find some interview where they were asked about it in order to learn their stance. The Democrats are definitely making this an abortion centered campaign, and the Republicans are trying to keep their heads down. For someone like myself, who will not vote for a pro-choice candidate, it means I have to do a lot more legwork.
Also interesting is that I saw the same ad more than a dozen times (which is normal) when I suddenly realized that the names in the ad were different every time. Turns out they are cycling through every Republican running for the state legislature, slotting each name in for "If X gets elected, women will have to travel out of state to access reproductive healthcare." It occurred to me that online it can be difficult to tell what district a viewer is in, so I guess you have to have a shotgun approach.
Though for all the abortion focused ads, I did notice none of them actually say the word "abortion": it's always "reproductive rights" or "women's health." The most notable euphemism I heard also happened to be the only time I think I've seen genuine "dog whistle" in the wild: a candidate declared (along a list of other issues) that they would preserve our "constitutional privacy rights". Excellently manufactured so that anyone who cares about the abortion debate will hear "I am pro-choice" while the average voter who doesn't care about abortion doesn't hear it at all. So, ads are big on abortion but mostly wants to talk to the base.
Which is the other odd thing: ads like this are meant for pro-choice voters. It does nothing good for them for a staunch pro-lifer like me to see them. Yet I did see one openly pro-life online ad this election season, and it was on my wife's computer! My wife, who is much more moderate on the issue than I am. Even curiouser, this ad was on a probably-not-quite-legal manga scan-lation site. How and why are pro-life ads ending up on a manga website? Don't manga readers skew female? Doesn't YouTube's audience skew male? I had assumed I was only getting pro-choice ads because most people online lean left, but now I'm not so sure.
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
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.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
11mo 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.
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.
7mo ago
The only thing that could make the current race entertaining is if Biden or Trump randomly drop dead,
Man, at this point I'm hoping Trump will randomly drop dead.
Well hoping is a strong word. I don't wish anyone dead, I don't think Trump deserves to be dead, I would be horrified and outraged if somebody killed him. It's just that I'm a Republican and I want to win. Trump seems to me to be just about the only Republican running who could possibly lose to Biden. A huge chunk of the country hates the man, and while he has a passionate fanbase a significant section of Republicans are tired of the Donald. I've never voted for a Democrat in my life and I'm not sure I'll vote for Trump if he ends up the nominee (not that I'd vote for Biden, I'd just throw it away on a protest vote for DeSantis or leave it blank). I voted for Trump in 2020 but all the talk of the election being stolen without the goods to back it up has soured me significantly. I want Republicans to win, but you don't rock the boat of democratic legitimacy like that. You could break America that way. I think a lot of Republicans feel the same way.
The way things are going Trump is probably going to be the nominee. And if he is then I think he's more likely to lose than not. The only way I can think of that would change the outcome is if Trump keeled over. It doesn't seem likely though: he may be old, but he's certainly spry. According to the SSA Actuarial Tables a man Trump's age only has a 4.9152% chance of dying in the next twelve months anyway.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
8mo ago
That reminds me of the book The End of the Spear, which is in large part about the conversion of the Waodoni indians in South America to Christianity. Prior to conversion they were infamous killers: nobody entered their territory because it was well known they would probably kill you. They famously killed the missionaries who came to convert them. What's interesting is that after the missionaries were killed, their wives continued the mission. As women they were not seen as a threat and were not killed, and they managed to fairly rapidly convert the entire tribe.
Here's an excerpt from the book's introduction. Steve Saint, son of the slain missionary Nate Saint, is recounting how he and members of the Waodoni took a group of students from the University of Washington on a trip into Waodani territory. After several days travel the students are resting at a Waodani village, among some of the Waodani people when one student asks where the famously violent tribe that killed the missionaries in 50s was. When told that the Waodani were that tribe the student was incredulous:
It was apparent she wasn’t going to accept my word for it, so I suggested she ask the Waodani themselves. “Just ask any of the adult Waodani here were their fathers are,” I suggested. I told her how to say “Bito maempo ayamonoi?” which means, “Your father--Where is he being?” She seemed to wonder what this had to do with her question, but she picked out one of the Waodani men who was enjoying our English gibberish and asked him. He answered simply “Doobae.” I explained to her that the word means “Already.” His father was already dead. I added “Did he get sick and die, or did he die old?”
The warrior snorted at my ridiculous question and clarified with dramatic gestures that his father had been killed with spears.
“Did he just say what I think he said?” the girl asked. “Was his father speared to death? Who would do such a terrible thing?” I informed her that the only people I knew of in Ecuador who had speared anyone in the twentieth century were Waodani…
One of the other students picked a Waodani woman and asked her the same question. Same answer. After one more try with similar results, two girls in the group asked me to ask Mincaye’s wife, Ompodae, the question. From the whispering I overheard, I gathered that they were sure someone as loving and sweet as Ompodae couldn’t have been traumatized by something as horrible as the vicious murder of her father. But Ompodae answered, “My father, my two brothers”--She counted them on her fingers--”my mother, and my baby sister…” There seemed to be more but she stopped there. “All of them were speared to death and hacked with machetes!” Then she pointed at the oldest warrior in camp, who was quietly sharing a stump with one of the male visitors. “Furious and hating us, Dabo killed us all.”...
My feisty tribal grandmother knew what the question was, so she decided to give an answer. She told how her family had been ambushed by another clan of Waodani. When the spearing was over, only she and another girl...were left alive in their clearing. When she finished her narrative, which I hardly needed to interpret because her pantomime was as clear to the students as her words were to me, she pointed to one of the warriors I was sitting with and stated matter-of-factly, “He killed my family and made me his wife!”
One of the girls in the group stammered, “How could she possibly live with the man who had killed her whole family?” I explained that the other girl who was kidnapped with Dawa was overheard complaining about her family being speared. One of the raiders ran a spear through her, and they left her on the trail to die an agonizing death alone, with no one to even bury her body. I explained, “It wasn’t like Dawa had much of a choice.”
Their society was pretty dang violent, but they took to Christianity in a big way. They were eager for it: a way of life where you weren't constantly in fear of getting killed. The anthropologist James Boster wrote a paper about how Christianity served as a way for the Waodoni to escape the perpetual cycle of revenge killing their society had gotten locked into.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
Gross spending aside, the US has 2.4 cops per 1,000 citizens while the EU averages 3.3. So they have about a third more cops per person than the US does.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1yr ago
I know that evangelical missionaries have been working hard in South America since the the turn of the century: apparently the number of protestant missionaries in South America increased 690% between 1910 and 1969, much more than in other regions. So a lot of this is not a recent phenomenon, but the result of efforts made many decades ago by a lot of mission organizations. As far as I can tell, Africa and Asia were the primary focus of protestant missionaries during the 19th century, primarily because the people there were "unreached" (that is, not any variety of Christian already) while the South Americans were at least Catholic. Why convert Catholics when there are so many pagans who've never even heard of Christ? In the early 20th century, the collapse of China meant it was a much more dangerous mission field, which only got worse during WWII. So apparently a lot of missionaries pivoted from Asia to South America. After WWII the PRC made it extremely difficult to be a foreign missionary in China and Southeast Asia was collapsing into a variety of armed conflicts, so South America continued to receive more focus than it had previously. Notably, while different brands of protestant sometimes butted heads in Africa and Asia, they generally decided that none of them were as bad as the Catholics and tended to work together in South America instead of in competition.
The real story is the rise of Pentecostalism. Pentecostals are a variety of evangelical that is very much "charismatic": that means speaking in tongues, faith healing, prophecy, miracles, etc. It's taken off like wildfire in South America, particularly among the poor. Pentecostalism can be particularly appealing to the poor because generally in order to become a leader of a Pentecostal church you don't need to go to seminary, you just need to be chosen by the Holy Spirit. What that comes down to is having enough people believe that you were chosen to lead the group. It means they have a lot more trouble with problematic theology, but it also means you can start a new churches very quickly.
The Pentecostals are also the fruit of all those decades of protestant mission efforts: one the the first things protestant mission organizations did was set up schools to teach people to read and distribute millions of Bibles. Once enough poor people can read the Bible themselves, they're going to end up attracted to denominations like the Pentecostals that are very egalitarian with little hierarchy. The kind of church where anybody can stand up in the middle of worship and start preaching.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
8mo ago
If it's normal homeostasis, it means matching your appetite to your activity.
I can understand controlling what you eat, but how does one control appetite? It seems that taking medications like this is a real way to match appetite to activity, so I'm not sure what the objection is.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
8mo ago
Exercise doesn't seem to reduce weight by much, though of course it will make you healthier overall.
Long time Mottizens might barely recall that about a year ago on the subreddit I experimented with the croissant diet. That's the diet where you cut out all polyunsaturated fats, and eat a lot of saturated fat instead. Specifically the point was to reduce consumption of linoleic acid as much as possible, and increase consumption of stearic acid. Why? Because of metabolism stuff related to the Krebs Cycle. See Brad Marshall's website for more details, since he's the main driver behind the diet. Scott wrote about it a couple years ago as well.
My experiment was technically a failure, but a weirdly promising one. When I stuck to the diet strictly I ate like a king, as much food as I wanted (that fit the diet) and I didn't gain any weight. I also didn't lose any weight. After a month or two I started to lose interest and didn't keep to the diet as strictly as I had been, at which point I started gaining weight faster than normal. In the end, I abandoned the diet and went back to trying to watch my calories and eat lots of healthy food, etc. But the fact that I didn't gain weight while eating sourdough bread fried in butter with heaps of cream cheese on top every morning for breakfast intrigued me. I marked Brad Marshall down as "Might not be a nutrition crank."
I kept up with his blog, and in the time since then he's moved more towards specific metabolic supplementation on top of cutting out polyunsaturated fats. A few months ago he recommended supplementing with high amounts of calcium pyruvate combined with L-carnitine.
These supplements aren't expensive, so I was willing to give them a try. He recommended 2 grams of L-carnitine and 12 grams of calcium pyruvate per day, taken in two or more doses. Thats more than it's particularly feasible to take with pills, so I bought it in power form. I don't have a kitchen scale so I just eyeball a half teaspoon of L-carnitine and a teaspoon of calcium pyruvate, taken dissolved in hot water at 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM each day. I've been taking them for about 7 weeks now.
This has been the most remarkable experience I've ever had with a supplement.
My experience with supplements has always been as follows: I take the supplement, and hope it will improve my life. I take it for a while and the whole time I'm unsure if it's doing anything. Nothing significant happens, though it's possible there is a gradual improvement that's hard to notice. Eventually I stop taking the supplement because things don't seem any different if I take it or not. The only exception is Vitamin D, and only because I live in at a high latitude and my doctor brings it up every time I have a checkup. I don't feel any different if I take it or not, but I know I should and annually checkup bloodwork confirms that I need to keep taking it. Overall, supplements are always a leap of faith with uncertain results.
This has not been the case with l-carnitine and calcium pyruvate.
Within an hour of taking my morning dose, I feel a strong upswell of energy. I want to move, and moving in general feels easier. I hate exercise normally, but when I feel this feeling it's easy to start walking or running. More enjoyable. It's not a small sensation, and it's not always pleasant (mostly if I can't get up and move, which feels good. If I have to stay seated I get a bit twitchy).
More importantly, in his post Brad claimed one easily measurable effect form taking the supplement: an increase in body temperature, caused by increased metabolism. "The thermogenesis from pyruvate is real. Within minutes after drinking 10-15 grams of pyruvate I can feel my body temperature rise. If I’m fasted, my body temperature usually stays in the 98.6-99.0 range. If I then eat a bowl of white rice, my body temp will often shoot to over 100." So after taking my first dose, I decided to use one of those forehead scan thermometers to see if I was heating up. To my shock, it came bad reading 100.4 degrees. I've been keeping track of my temperature ever since. Before I take the my morning supplement my temperature reads normal (around 98 F), and after taking the supplement it reads 99-101 F. Forehead thermometers are not the most accurate, but given that I'm using the same thermometer for before and after temperatures I'm confident that there is an increase in temperature, even if the exact number is off. This is consistent: it isn't always as significant an increase, but it always goes up.
I have been losing weight, but it's difficult to attribute that to the supplements. I started taking the supplements in large part because I was already trying really hard to lose weight. Since I started taking the supplements I've lost 10 pounds, but during that same time I've tried to cut calories significantly and started at least light exercise daily. Still, I do feel that the supplements are definitely making it easier to cut calories and exercise: I'm not as hungry as I used to be during the day, and I'm actually looking forward to my daily jog which is novel for me. I'm going to keep taking these supplements indefinitely because I feel like my life has been significantly improved.
However, the comments at r/Saturated Fats tells me that my experience is far from universal. Many people reported no effect at all: some said it made them feel lethargic and lowered their body temperature. Interestingly enough, I recently found a mouse study where they found that giving obese mice pyruvate actually induced torpor, sending them into hibernation and lowering their body temperature significantly. They also found that lean mice given pyruvate did not go into torpor, and the pyruvate instead activated their brown fat and increased their temperature. So it seems to me there are possibly multiple factors that would cause people to have very different reactions to pyruvate, which might explain why so many people report bad effects.
I posted this because I feel obligated to do so: after a lifetime of trying things with no apparent effect, the fact that this has had a strong and significant effect is worth sharing. There is something here.
On the other hand, I'm taking a very large amount of calcium pyruvate here. Every resource I've checked says I should be okay, and that the side effects are just digestive troubles (which I haven't experienced, but I have a pretty resilient digestive tract). On the other hand, maybe someone here knows something I don't.
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.
...
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".
...
...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.
...
...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.
22d ago
I think the government/academic jobs vs private sector jobs is doing most of the divide there. As Ghostbusters said, "You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
I've worked government jobs (low level ones) and I've worked private sector, and in the government job I just had to do the minimum required and follow the rules and I could be sure not to be fired. Private sector there have been times I've worked my butt off and still went home scared that I'd be unemployed next month because the company went belly up.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
22d ago
I'll first note that your comment seems to reinforce my point; the idea that staying fit and attractive helps people stay married goes hand in hand with the idea that your partner becoming less attractive is reasonable grounds for divorce. That's much more of a left wing than right wing perspective on marriage. But you're right! We should find some actual data and check.
Pew found that when it comes to the statement "Couples who are unhappy tend to stay in bad marriages too long" 69% of Democrats agreed compared to 41% of Republicans. That divide gets wider the further to the right or left you go: for Republicans that described themselves as "conservative" (as opposed to "moderate" or "liberal") only 35% agreed, compared to 76% Democrats who described themselves as "liberal".
Of course that's just stated attitudes, what about actual divorce rates? A study from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia found that for people who had ever been married at all 41% of Republicans had been divorced compared to 47% of Democrats. They also found that 57% of Republicans are currently married, compared to 40% of Democrats.
Another study found that the divorce rate was higher in red states than blue states, but they also noted that the marriage rate was much higher in red states than blue states which may account for it. A smaller percentage of divorces among a larger number a marriages may mean that Republicans divorce more per capita, but divorce less as a proportion of all married individuals.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
I'm opposed to student loan forgiveness, but I'm one of the people who would have benefited from it. So maybe I can provide some light on who would benefit.
I have a bit over $10,000 in student debt that I acquired getting an MBA (I went through undergrad debt free, got the MBA because my work wanted me to and was willing to pay for a third of the cost). My wife has over $20,000 in student loan debt, and started out with almost $80,000 in debt. She got that pursuing a career as a licensed professional (I won't say what profession because I don't really need to, but you need a masters degree, you need to get licensed, and the average one of these makes around $65,000 a year and the really successful ones make about twice that).
Between the two of us we bring in around ~$125,000 per year. So we're not poor by any means. We have a house, two cars, can afford to go on vacation, etc. We will definitely be able to pay off the debt over time without falling into penury. If forgiveness had gone through, the main result would be getting it all paid off faster so we could free up that money for other expenses: savings, home improvements, luxuries, that sort of thing.
I think our case isn't that unusual. There are a lot of people who, like my wife, paid way too much for a degree that gets them an income well above the median.
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
Christianity is a religion about AI alignment. Not as an analogy or metaphor, it just literally is. We're the AIs, Jesus died to redeem us (ie allow us to return to alignment with God) and someday there will be a Judgement where all the non-aligned AIs are cast into the fire while the aligned AIs will serve God forever.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
7mo ago
The difference between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom is that DeSantis has shown himself to be competent at governing. Things have been going pretty great for Florida in material terms during his tenure, while California is more of a basket case than ever (that 2021-2022 Florida was the fastest growing state in the union for the first time since the 50s, while California lost population over the last two years says a lot).
On the other hand, being a competent governor doesn't mean that you can run a competent presidential campaign. We'll see what happens when the primaries start, but as a DeSantis supporter I've got a bad feeling about his chances.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
In my experience (reading guides to writing by successful authors, or listening to interviews on the subject) there are two types of professional writer out there: those who hate writing, and those for whom writing is as easy as breathing.
The first type (the Haters) are people like Freddie DeBoer, Larry Correia, or Roald Dahl. They are more likely to look at writing as a job like any other: it's hard, and it takes commitment and work and discipline if you're going to have any chance of being successful. Dahl would write about how writing was exhausting:
The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
I am in this camp myself: writing is hard to do. I'd rather be doing other things. When it comes time to write, (proper writing, not shooting off a comment on The Motte) I find just about anything else more attractive, like doing the dishes or weeding or finally cleaning out those gutters. For these writers the difficulty of writing is something that must be overcome.
Then there is the second camp (the Breathers) who have no idea why the first type are writers to begin with. This camp includes C. S. Lewis, Andrew Klavan, Scott Alexander, and Isaac Asimov. These are the type of people who, when asked how a young writer can start writing, would reply in either frustration or confusion that if they're not writing already then they're not really writers. Writers write, it's what they do, and it's easy. They couldn't not write if they wanted to. Lewis would hardly ever edit his books, getting them just the way he liked them on the first try. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers on earth, writing over 500 books and scads of short stories, essays, articles, etc. As for Scott:
On the other hand, I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years.
But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I can’t stop even if I want to. Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to keep writing, and it’s exactly the same virtuous cycle as my brother got from his piano practice.
That's just how it is. I would say the Haters become professional writers because they have ideas they want to share and stories they want to tell and writing, while difficult, is the best way they can express those things. The Breathers become writers because that's just what they are. If they weren't publishing books, they'd be one of those guys who constantly edits Wikipedia.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
11mo 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.
3mo ago
The devil.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
7d ago
If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it.
You would be wrong to doubt it. Over 1.5 million died in the gulags, and over a twenty year period citizens were regularly snatched out of their beds, taken to the basement of the Lubyanka, and shot in the back of the head. At least 700,000 Russians were executed between 1936-1938 during Stalin's Great Purge.
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.
More options
Context Copy link