Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
No, I think you're making a serious and significant argument, which is why I am trying to understand it carefully. I wouldn't spend time on it otherwise.
If being e.g. a femboy or a cad is someone's best bet at romantic success and that's all they want to do, then it's rational for them to do that. And there are no guarantees in love or life, ever. However, it doesn't follow that prosocial masculinity is impossible or irrational for men in general.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Terrible, but not as terrible as what Hitler had planned for Poland.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
"Concessions don't always lead to war" is not equivalent to "Concessions reliably lead to peace."
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
True, it's interesting how some sins (excessive alcohol use, violence as long as it's not too graphic) are more acceptable to many people than sex or drug use.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
what is the meaning of the preference?
I don't know what you mean by that phrase.
If illusion can't be disproven then it differs from reality in name only.
Why not also in fact? There's nothing mysterious about the notion of someone being trapped in an illusory state.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
If reality and illusion are identical from the observer's perspective, what's the difference?
People's preferences are usually asymmetric over the two.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Why put it in terms of perception or the display to children? A penis is a sexual organ. Is there a context where you wouldn't regard a representation of a penis as sexual content?
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
I'm extremely skeptical that the lower classes are subsidizing the middle class
The claim is that the upper and lower classes combined are paying the majority of taxes, not that the lower classes are paying the majority of taxes.
I don't know if that's true, but there are tendencies that make welfare to the middle classes crucial to political success in most places today, even in ostensibly egalitarian societies.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Yes, and in general, if a man really wants to find a woman who is interested in settling down and having kids, that's hard only insofar as it usually involves things that are beneficial anyway: having a good job, being sober, being responsible/reliable, and being kind.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Not the question.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
But Ancient Rome wasn't polygamous in the modern sense. As you suggested, rich men had access to multiple partners, just like in most Christian societies, but they could only marry one. This was also true of Ancient Greece, another key area for early Christianity. The Jews did practice polygamy, but it doesn't seem to have been common (this is debated) by the time of the early Christians.
It certainly helped that Christianity was compatible with the existing Greco-Roman monogamous approach, but Christianity didn't introduce it.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
You could argue that Christianity solved mass inceldom as an issue even if it didn't solve it for everyone... But was it an issue?
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Case in point: this may be true but would anyone argue that the gains we've made in gay acceptance since then are unnecessary? If you agree not, then the general social taboos matter.
I'm fine with "Christian social taboos matter". I'm not fine with the suggestion that Christianity eliminated the dynamic described in the initial bit I quoted.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Maslow's hierarchy of needs which has wide recognition in psychological circles has love & belonging as a need. Maslow is not without criticism though and basic physiological and safety needs rank higher.
I think that even psychologists who think that Maslow's conjectures will some day be vindicated by evidence are embarassed by that particular part of it.
It's plausible that humans need to love things in order to achieve the highest forms of happiness, but loving things and being loved by people and having sex with other people are three different things.
If most incels would be willing to have sex with women that they aren't attracted to, just to get sex, then they are even more deluded than I thought.
My understanding is that the Greco-Roman take was basically that a man could only marry one wife but he could essentially free access to slave and subordinate class women and males (this sort of system would also be prone to the inequity problem of polygamy - unless you have a broad class of exploited women to use as cheap relief for the lower class men*)
In practice, this has been true in a lot of (most?) Christian societies, especially at the top of social hirearchy. "To wives and sweethearts... May they never meet."
Even in the Enthusiastic ferment of the Reformation, James VI still seems to have been able to have plenty of male lovers, and whether Shakespeare was intimate with men or not, his Sonnets certainly show that had a perfect language for seducing other men. Surely this is unsurprising: if Christianity has been an unreliable way of enforcing chastity among popes and bishops, it will naturally be an unreliable way of enforcing monogamy among other powerful men.
What Christianity has generally achieved is the practice of only allowing powerful men to marry one woman, but that was also practice in a lot of places, including Greece and Rome, IIRC.
Yes, the situation is not symmetric. I'm just saying that it's not simple, either. As you suggest, thinking of it as a lottery with a variety of prizes is a good analogy.
For example, a woman's options are hampered by a big nose, flat chest, saggy breasts etc., but the initial option set is probably better than most men's, e.g. she may not be able to make money as a streamer or model, but she can still attract a larger variety of partners than most men, mutatis mutandis.
Incidentally, I have a friend who started visibly balding at 17. He recently married a hot, sweet, smart chick. He also has the personality that a lot of Nice Guys have, or at least think they have - kind, helpful, not very assertive. He has slightly above average intelligence and a moderately good job. On the other hand, she was his first girlfriend, at about age 27. This exemplifies how the situation for men is certainly not ideal, but it's not necessarily awful.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
since for him it’s the difference between eating and not eating right then and there whereas for Elon it’s not even a rounding error
But it doesn't follow that the marginal utility is higher for the beggar than Elon Musk.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
People who insist that a meaning of a word is wrong because it is not etymologically "correct" or because it was not the "original" meaning, even though it's had the one they object to for centuries.
My favourite example of this are communists, and my favourite examples of linguistic prescriptivisms among that group are Stalinists, who would demand that people call them "Marxist-Leninists."
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
By "before", do you mean taking precedence over the utilitarian arguments? Because in that case, as always with deontology, you face this position being taken to absurdity, e.g. claiming you have assassinating the dictator at the cost of a nuclear war that kills everyone but you.
Do you not think that you can ever be morally obliged to suffer indignity or coercion?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Since completeness is defined, at least per wikipedia, with a ≤ instead of a <, it would seem relatively hard to deny? The others are less obviously necessary.
Suppose you have a revealed preference analysis of preference. Note that I do NOT NOT NOT mean a revealed preference theory of evidence about preferences, but the idea that observed choice behaviour is what preference is. In that case, Completeness holds trivially, provided the choices in question are in fact made.
However, if you understand preferences as mental attitudes, then it is perfectly possible that someone does not have an attitude such that (1) they prefer A to B, (2) they prefer B to A, or (3) they are indifferent (in the technical sense) between A and B. For example, Duncan Luce did experiments that found that, under some conditions, people's choices in apparently repeatable choice-situations fluctuated probabilistically. IIRC, they preferred A or B to a random choice between the two, indicating that this was not indifference. Now, it's possible that they were interpreting those choice-situations as non-repeatable, but it could also be that their preferences with respect to A and B don't form a strict ordering.
What followed: there are inconsistent, deductively false beliefs, that nevertheless need subjective credences.
There's no basis in decision theory or mathematics for that claim, AFAIK.
Fair enough—well, not necessarily in the sense that you're not performing updates, but in the sense that you have no universal probability function.
There is a cool literature on imprecise probabilities you might like to look at:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imprecise-probabilities/
I haven't read any applications of this approach to Pascal's Wager, but since IP is arguably a more realistic model of human psychology than maximising expected utility (which assumes unique additive probabilities) someone should definitely do that.
I guess I just don't have any better, clearer way to handle things.
Me too! I don't want to dox myself, but I think that Bayesian decision theory is similar to things like General Equilibrium Theory, neoclassical capital, and other concepts in economics, in that they can be useful tools to make decisions given idealised assumptions, but they shouldn't be taken too literally. Like any scientific model, their value comes not from their approximation of truth, but because of empirical and formal properties they possess, e.g. track-records and approximations of relevant features in the world (empirical) and tractability/computability properties (formal).
For more about the topics raised in the last paragraph in my comment above, the Stanford Encyclopedia page is pretty good - written by a very good young philosopher, Seamus Bradley, who has done other work on the topic worth reading. Much of the great work in this literature, e.g. by John Maynard Keynes, Teddy Seidenfeld, Peter Walley, Clark Glymour, Henry E. Kyburg, and Isaac Levi, is extremely technical, even for decision theorists. The SEP page covers most of their ideas at a more accessible level, sometimes in its appendix. The best young guy in the field is probably Richard Pettigrew, who has done some magnificent work that has still not been incorporated into the broader Bayesian consciousness, e.g. https://philarchive.org/rec/PETWIC-2 (see this video for a relatively easy introduction to that paper - https://youtube.com/watch?v=1W_wgQpZF2A ).
I find this topic very interesting, because (like you, I think?) I see Pascal's Wager (or something like it) as the best current case for religious belief. I actually like Arthur Balfour's variation of this type of reasoning, which avoids some of the features of Pascal's arguments that are awkward, e.g. regarding infinite expected payoffs:
https://archive.org/details/adefencephiloso01balfgoog/page/n12/mode/2up?view=theater
Here's John Passmore's summary of Balfour's position, from One Hundred Years of Philosophy (1968):
In his A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief (1879), Balfour set out to show that the naturalism of nineteenth-century science rests on principles-the principle of the Uniformity of Nature, for example-which cannot possibly be derived demonstratively. This negative conclusion is the starting-point of The Foundations of Belief (1895). Naturalism, Balfour argues, conflicts with our moral and aesthetic sentiments, whereas theism satisfies them. If naturalism were demonstrable, he admits, it ought for all its distastefulness to be preferred to theism; but since it is not, our feelings should carry the day. He denies that there is any impropriety in thus bowing to our feelings: our beliefs, he says, are always determined to a large extent by nonrational factors.
Basically, the idea would be that, at least assuming a common human nature, it is prudentially rational to believe in God, because one is permitted to do so in the absence of a refutation; there is no refutation of God's existence; and one can expect better consequences from such belief.
Whether that reasoning is sound is one of the most important questions of philosophy, in my view, and it's brought me very deep into epistemology/decision theory. Balfour's starting place is Hume, but Subjective Bayesianism (either with precise or imprecise probabilities) seems very apt for such reasoning. Indeed, on a Subjective Bayesian view, I don't think there is any reason to think that theism is less rational than belief in even our most supported scientific theories.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
As you note, there are two separate things here:
(1) Focus on literary technique.
(2) The subject matter.
It's easier to use (2) as a way to lure otherwise uninterested students into talking about (1), IF you are more interested in (1), as English teachers tend to be. But there we agree.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Makes sense, thanks for the update.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
whereas in Russia the defining feature of Nazis is their hatred of and desire to displace and kill Slavs (and Russians in particular as the leading Slavic people),
As it happens, the Slavs were categorised by the Nazis as an Aryan race until 1939, after the conquest of Poland.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
That's not really 'Irish,' though.
They were in the eyes of Americans at the time, specifically Scotch-Irish. Also, Scots are Celts, though views about that at the time were sometimes complex.
Aside from their Catholicism, there was little to distinguish a typical Irishman from a typical Protestant Highlander. (Their languages would have been slightly different, but equally alien to an English American in 1850.)
Indeed: you can shame a redneck for being fat, because they chose to do it.
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