Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
No bio...
User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think in practice this vagueness functions the opposite way. If you said you wanted to cut program XYZ then the people in that program know you're coming for them, but people in other programs feels safe. That which is not explicitly included is implicitly excluded and all that. On the other hand if you leave the details vague you leave people uncertain about whether their program is safe. I think in the presence of that uncertainty people are more likely to infer the negative outcome (you want to cut their program) than the positive outcome (their program is safe). By leaving the details vague you can piss off everyone instead of just the people in a particular program.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I am pretty sure the quoted section explicitly acknowledges that good outcomes can justify evil acts, so I'm not sure what your first three paragraphs are doing. As to the last paragraph, if you want to make the case that America's bombing of Cambodia, or supporting a coup of Allende, or supporting Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh were actually necessary to topple the Soviet Union I am open to hearing the argument but I do not believe it just because you assert it.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
In addition to what @Skibboleth mentioned below Kissinger was also instrumental in US support for Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile.
Even if you’re a bleeding-heart internationalist who thinks he’s bad for killing foreigners in Indochina, his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed.
I do not think people's unrelated good and bad acts somehow function to cancel each other out. Maybe if the evil things were in some way necessary to do the good things we can say the things were on net good but I don't think a case could be made that Kissinger's evils were actually necessary to accomplish his good deeds. You don't get, like, one free murder for every life you save. Or every thousand. Or every million. You get no free murders!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think it's a good reason not to use only fiction. I think an important part of being able to reason about complex situations is to be able to reason about simple ones. There's a reason logic classes start off with simple syllogisms. One should, of course, always keep in mind that the author has their own views on the topic and the work itself should be examined through that lens. I actually think this last part is an important part of media criticism that I see less often than I would like. Instead of asking whether a work is "good" in the sense that I enjoyed reading it or that I endorse the message it conveys one should think about what message the author is trying to send and whether the work does so in an enjoyable or engaging way. Reading fiction critically is an opportunity to consider how others or yourself might act (or ought to act) in ways that are analogous or dis-analogous to various actual situations one may find oneself in.
While that often happens with non-fiction too, at least the events in question happened and the author's take can in principle be refuted.
I find this a little confusing. What do you take it to mean to refute an author's take? If you mean an author's description of events that have actually occurred, then no one should be reading fiction for that anyway. If you mean refuting an author's take on what ways it would or would not be appropriate to act in some circumstance then it seems to me fiction author's takes are as open to refutation as non-fiction author's takes.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I wonder what fraction of high school age people have played video games. The way you describe what you want people to do and how you want them to reason are things anyone who has spent any amount of time playing video games has had to do. They are very literally state machines with limited inputs that the player must be able to reason about. The player must be able to reason about what the game will do with further inputs and the context of previously given inputs. Most people playing games don't think about it at this level of abstraction but it seems clear to me that's what's happening.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I'm of the opinion that exploring issues and themes in fiction was basically entirely useless to me.
I find this fascinating since my experience was quite opposite. Fiction could make issues clear cut in a way non-fiction almost never could.
I think learning to think logically and understand a bit about how computers work would be valuable, at least as much as most highschool classes. I might just be over valuing because it was one of my favorite classes though.
What do you mean by how they work? I think a lot of the practical operation of computers (opening programs, navigating file systems) are easily integrated into other classes. If you mean more literally how they work (binary, memory, CPU clocks, adders, etc) then that seems more esoteric to me than a lot of other stuff you describe as wanting to be optional.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now.
Maybe this is just my American education but I was required to take both History and English classes though High School. Not clear to me that events having actually happened necessarily gives it more value. The freedom of fiction seems like it gives more opportunity to explore particular issues and themes with more precision than can commonly be encountered in real world events.
Science will only be mandatory in grade 9
I'm wondering here if there's some specific class named "Science" that students are required to take? My recollection of high school is that we had to take one "Science" class per year but the classes were all themselves themed around specific sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc) so you had freedom in choosing what you were interested in.
and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.
What would be the content of a grade 10 computer science course that would be useful? Maybe it's because I have a CS degree but I struggle to think of what I could teach someone about computer science in a single year that would be useful for them in general life, unless it was some kind of tech-support-esque class.
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
I think this could be a good idea but only if Gym class is significantly reconstituted. Maybe it was just my experience but my own Gym class did not do a good job impressing on us the importance of aerobic exercise as a habit. It was just this annoying class we had to take. I think a gym class reconstituted around the idea of healthy habit formation, the importance of exercise as a habit, nutrition, and so on would be much more effective.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I'll second this one. Learning about epistemology in college was extremely helpful for me. It seems pretty core to the idea of what we think of as critical thinking. Who is telling me this information? Why are they telling it to me? Why do I believe X? What makes X true? Are all important questions to be asking and to be able to answer to understand the world around you. Especially appreciating the distinction between why you believe a thing and what would need to be the case for a thing to be true.
I am not sure about teaching Bayes Theorem or specific fallacies, but I think teaching students the ability to reflect on their beliefs and how they formed them would be very valuable. School itself is rife with opportunities for this since most of the time you learn things by trusting the testimony of a teacher or some other expert source rather than by direct firsthand experience of the facts that establish something as true.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
They are suprisingly good, but that's mainly because we got alot of really high IQ elites (the Shah's Persians for example),
I mean, what fraction of US Muslims can this represent? There are over 3 million of them. The idea that they're substantially high IQ elites doesn't really square with their lower educational attainment and income.
and because our own great remplacement was already carried out by blacks in the inner cities and someone needs to provide the food trucks and groceries, and bear the risk of getting shot. But this hardly scales forever!..
Not sure I'm following the reasoning here. US Muslims are well integrated because Whites were replaced in the inner cities? A plurality (38%) of US Muslims are white.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Surely this is an empirical question. What has Muslim immigration been like for America? What are Muslims in America actually like? PEW did a giant study back in 2007 that surveyed over 60000 Muslims in American and found they're... pretty similar to the general American public. Less likely to go to college and a little bit more likely to be poor. They did have more socially conservative views than the general American public but, like, "median American of 1994" not, like, "median American of the 1800's". I think it's pretty easy to believe that a substantial shift in the social beliefs of Muslims can occur over the course of some decades, given we have already seen such a shift occur in the general public's perception over a similar time frame. Maybe Islam is going to turn out to be inoculating against modernity in a way that Christianity or Judaism weren't but color me skeptical.
I think Matt Levine had the correct take in his latest Money Stuff. The basic idea is there's some natural tension between the board of OpenAI and its employees/investors. The board is committed to the non-profit mission of building safe AI while the employees and investors want to build a commercially viable product that turns their equity into big piles of money. There can naturally be some tension between these things!
While the board has a certain formal legal power over the employees and investors it cannot actually accomplish much without them. So the employees and investors have a great deal of informal power. Currently it seems like the balance of power is on the "make big piles of money" side and this will probably be more true after the restructuring.
I think one outcome here is the IRS should probably revoke OpenAI's charitable status. It is hard for me to take the idea they are a charitable organization seriously when the CEO of the for-profit subsidiary can overrule the board to which he ostensibly reports in order to make more money.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Okay. None of my beliefs about Gamergate and who was right or wrong turn on the question of whether Sarah Nyburg was a pedophile and whether particular people defended her.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
You'll notice that you yourself have pointed out O'Mally's positions are "anti-trans" according to the website, even though in itself there's nothing anti-trans about "disease models", "gatekeeping", or ROGD (or even "LGB without the T" though I can grant that it's more debatable).
That's why the descriptions of those positions link to other articles explaining why they're anti-trans. Maybe you don't think they're anti-trans but the site authors do and link to specific arguments for why they think that.
It's funny you should say that. Every single link on that page links to another page on the website itself, not to primary sources where O'Malley explains her positions in her own words. The only direct link to her material is a link to the homepage of her personal website, but by that point the well is poisoned.
This is just false? In addition to the link to O'Malley's own site it contains a link to Beyond WPATH. An anti-WPATH declaration of which O'Malley is a signatory. As well as O'Malley's Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Substack, YouTube and more. As I write this there are five articles about trans issues, four of them about ROGD, on the first page of the substack as I write this. If people want to read O'Malley's beliefs about trans people in her own words, transgendermap has told them where to go!
BTW, do you think that portrait on top is neutral and accurate, or might be at all caricatured?
Relevance?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
At this point I have to ask you, how do you think cults do control of information?
They encourage people to use cult-approved sources of information, generally other sources inside the cult, and disapprove or punish the acquisition of information from non-approved sources. The fact that transgendermap links directly to O'Mally, in her own words, seems quite the opposite of that.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
This still sounds like an objection of the way people use the tools. The demonization or dismissal are the issue. There is nothing that forces someone to dismiss (or take seriously) a person or website on the basis of Shinigami Eye's evaluation. Similarly there's nothing that forces people to demonize those profiled on transgender map.
Their entire purpose is to demonize the critics of gender medicine.
This do not seem to be true, to me. The profile you linked identifies specific beliefs O'Malley has that the website considers anti-trans. Specific groups she's affiliated with that the website believes oppose trans writes. It links to outside resources as citations for these claims and even links directly to a number of social media and other websites operated by O'Malley herself so people can do their own evaluation.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Well the way you phrased your comment made it sound like transgendermap or Shinigami Eyes were themselves the problem, rather than the way people use them.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
What do you imagine my objection to this app would be?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Websites like transgendermap.com, and apps like Shinigami Eyes tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up.
Why is it bad to give people more information to make a decision? That seems like the opposite of controlling information!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I haven't thought of this sort of distinction between "cause" versus "reason," but if you break it up that way, I think what you wrote here makes sense. It's just, I think the "reason" in the sense of something subjectively experienced is one of the least interesting and least impactful factors when it comes to exploring the way people think about things, because the flexibility that people have for using anything they want as a reason to support anything they want is effectively infinite.
I wonder if this is at the heart of our disagreement. When I read a sentence like "how X thinks about Y" I interpret it less like "what all kinds of causal forces act on X's beliefs about Y" and more like "what kind of subjective state does X have when considering Y." So when I read the claim that people come to conclusions based on what "feels good" in a social status sense I interpret is a claim about their subjective reasons to believe Y.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think you overestimate how much people are motivated to seek out the truth about something that's not interesting or important to them, especially if it means getting in long online debates and understanding technical arguments and possibly reading academic papers. It's not that people are aware of their ignorance and consciously choosing to be ignorant, it's that they were told incorrect things by some source they trust and have rarely been presented with counter evidence or reasoning. Or worse, have ended up in some epistemic closure that prevents them from considering alternative reasons and evidence. They are ignorant of their ignorance! I think certain kinds of arguments having certain social status attached might make sense as a cause for why people come to form particular beliefs but I think it is rarely a reason, in the sense of something subjectively experienced.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
This seems perfectly compatible, indeed supportive, of my thesis that people have false factual beliefs about the housing market.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think the issue is most people in favor of rent control policies don't understand the economic arguments against them. They have mistaken factual beliefs. They correctly perceive the first order effects of reducing rent for people covered by such policies and think it is desirable. I think it takes a pretty specific kind of economics education to see the prices as outputs of a system, rather than inputs, and reason from the implications of that.
I think there is a confusion in this discussion between people being irrational and people lacking specific technical knowledge or perspective.It's like the xkcd Average Familiarity comic but for moral philosophy or economics.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Where does the article cite to any evidence, or provide any numbers, to demonstrate the "recruiting issues among specific demographics?" As far as I can tell its only external links are to an army ad and Twitter reaction.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Exactly! And I guess your point is that the push for legal marijuana is slowly winning, but my counter-point is that legal marijuana is winning much more slowly than it ought to be, given that there is such a strong argument in its favor. Indeed, these are the kinds of important questions of public policy that I am worried about and that inspired this post, Singer's A' being illegal is nowhere near the top 10 on my list of biggest injustices.
I think this misunderstands my point. My point is rather, there are some arguments of the A/A' form that do not descend into "Ew, yuck" or similar, but also that what makes an argument convincing is not universal, it can be relative. It's relative to what ethical premises you accept. It's relative to facts you know about the world. Changes in policy get even more complicated, being related to facts about how governments are structured and a million other factors. There are many explanations for why the given A/A' argument is not considered strong by a lot of people, ranging from differences of premises to different knowledge of facts. It is not correct to extrapolate the state of the world by assuming most people share your moral opinions and state of knowledge.
But we have lots of things that would make a lot of people better off but are illegal because they sound bad, which, as Bryan Caplan puts it, "The way I like to think about it is that markets are great at doing good things that sound bad, and governments are great at doing bad things, that sound good."
Frankly, I think this is a terrible theory of mind. People generally have motivations and reasons for believing the things they do beyond "it sounds bad." Maybe you think their reasons round off to that because they are not utilitarians or consequentialists but I think it is much better to understand people's beliefs and motivations on their own terms.
I agree with you that Singer's A' is not strictly comparable to A such that we can say supporting A but not A' is irrational, but my point is that the responses I have seen do not even get there, they stop at "A'? Ew, yuck"
Do you often see discussions of issues on Twitter that go the way you wish this discussion had gone?
I think there are a few under-appreciated explanations for this one.
One reason is that kids are, frankly, surveilled by their parents to a degree that was literally impossible in the 90's. Tons of kids today have phones and tons of parents use location tracking apps so they know where their kids are at basically all times. And these kids often know they are being surveilled, which surely changes their behavior. In the 90's you could plausibly lie to your parents about your location to go hang out with your friends or SO. That is much harder today.
It is much harder today to engage in the kind of deception required to have sex when one's parents wouldn't approve than it has been historically.
Another reason might be changing social mores about sex. There's been a big push to normalize ideas like enthusiastic consent and similar. If a lot of the sex in the 90's was dubiously consensual on the part of one party or the other it may be that kind of sex is happening less frequently, leading to less sex over all. I don't have hard data on this unfortunately but my impression from being on the internet is also that zoomer-age people tend to be more skeptical about significant age gaps. Sometimes to the point of silliness (I've seen Discourse about 25 year old being with a 21 year old) but if that translates to younger gaps as well that may be another factor.
More options
Context Copy link