Jiro
27d ago
A pencil is a good pencil when it is able to draw, is sharp, long enough to be held easily in a hand, etc.
By that reasoning, if God punished people for being kind and generous, he'd still be good.
God is not good in the sense of being accountable to others for duties and obligations that he performs admirably.
The word "accountable" here is tricky. Clearly nobody can punish God if he doesn't act appropriately. So in that sense, God isn't accountable. But surely people can come up with conclusions about whether God's acts live up to his principles, and if they don't, conclude that God is acting badly.
Jiro
27d ago
I don't think most conservatives, let alone tradcaths, would suddenly be fine with transition if MTFs gave up on any "woman" talk and, say, went back to calling themselves queens, or indeed (if that's still smuggling too much spurious femininity in there) started calling themselves fnarglebargles.
If MtFs transitioned but didn't call themselves female or otherwise associate themselves with femininity, then why did they transition? This scenario would mean that they're physically altering their bodies to crudely resemble women while vehemently denying that they're doing so for any reason having to do with women--their chosen method of surgical self-expression just happens to be sorta based on physical attributes of women. Nobody would believe them if they claim it has nothing to do with women because that would be a really weird coincidence. And most conservatives (and most people) would look askance at someone surgically reducing the function of their body for no articulable reason whatsoever, which this would be.
Jiro
30d ago
If you steal something from someone and he doesn't notice and he doesn't need it, is it still stealing?
This only sounds plausible because we don't have a good intuition about how it works. Taking the scarf is going to affect things on the margin. There's some probability that someone will come looking for the scarf and not find it. If you steal it they won't be able to. But since this is only a probability, it's easy to say "they probably won't return for the scarf" and mentally round the probablity to zero.
Likewise, if you stole a hotel towel, that's going to marginally use up the hotel towels and slightly push forward when the hotel needs to buy towels--even if nobody points at the particular towel and notices its absence, and even if the advance in when the hotel runs out of towels is within the normal variation in towel wear.
So yes, if nobody notices it, it's still stealing. It can affect people on a statistical level, in a way which averages out to the harm in being one item poorer, even if nobody actually notices the effect.
Jiro
1mo ago
You can't separate "is the search justified" from "is it worth saving a child's life" because the search is justified exactly when a child's life is likely to be saved.
Jiro
1mo ago
The power line project costs $5.5 million every year for 400 years. Sagrada is so slow because they are using privately raised funds.
Jiro
1mo ago
I've never heard of people claiming that the Bible is good literature make similar claims about the Koran or other scriptures. So I'm inclined to think that claims that the Bible is good literature are mostly halo effect (with some addition of 'everyone uses it so you need to read it to know the references').
Jiro
1mo ago
But I think it’s necessary for such a system to exist because there are some decisions that it’s extremely hard to undo
There are also some injunctions that are hard to undo, like an injunction against not spending money.
Jiro
1mo ago
Or are you perhaps confusing the Dean quoted by Pasha here to be referring to me, the user who goes by Dean
You did say this in response to Pasha saying that ethics courses are in his experience useless:
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review a compare / contrast of ethic courses and frameworks for different professional groups with different stakes in human harm. Even if it's just regulators who enforce safety standards, medical policymakers that shape the standards, and state prosecutors who's job it is to give the people who violated the standards a bad day in court, the overlaps and distinctions in what they base their professional-ethic frameworks upon can be enlightening.
This sounds like you were saying "no, ethics courses aren't useless, go research them yourself to find out".
One, a short argument is not a filibuster.... recommendations with short supporting arguments and no time commitment are about as far from a filibuster argument as one can get.
Your argument is "to find out why it's useful, go do it yourself". That is neither short, nor has no time commitment. The sentence may be short, but reading the sentence is not enough to see the whole argument; the rest of your argument is hidden behind the time commitment.
Two, 'I want you to do it on your own' is an honest argument if it I honestly think he would enjoy and benefit more from doing it on his own and I want him to have that benefit.
Again, that's the difference between "do it to gain a benefit" and "do it to see the explanation". You are proposing that he go through an entire field of study in order to see the justification for your claim. This is unreasonable. If you make a claim, justify it. It doesn't matter how much he'd benefit from it, you should be willing to back up what you are saying.
It's also bizarre to suddenly give life advice in the middle of an argument with someone over the Internet. Clearly you told him to do that as part of the argument, not because you have a habit of giving random advice to strangers.
Jiro
1mo ago
The only way a suggestion for Pasha teaching himself about ethics violates the value judgement of dimwit professors teaching ethics is if Pasha is a dimwit professor
Come on. There's a difference between "I am suggesting that people do this to learn life skills" and "I am suggesting that people do this to justify my claims". Ethics classes are recommended in the former context. Your "recommendation" that Pasha study things himself was in the latter context. You should just explain it, since you are the one making the claim, not demand he study it himself.
People are supposed to back up what they say here. "I want you to do it on your own" is a filibuster, not an honest argument.
Jiro
1mo ago
The big risk for the student: what if they don't get hired by Palantir?
Or what if they do and end up having to quit (or Palantir goes bankrupt)? Not having other options is bad even if you get the job.
Jiro
1mo ago
I wonder if you could have a new university that initially paid students to come.
They would have to pay the first students an amount equivalent to the increase in lifetime earnings from going to a regular university (minus the cost of a regular university). This would be cost prohibitive.
Jiro
1mo ago
We still have deminimis unavailable for China, which is a problem for individual consumers. It's basically impossible to buy anything from China now.
Jiro
1mo ago
What?
The scenario is vague in one important aspect. Do the police have good reason to think there's a baby in there?
If they had good reason to think there's a baby in there, then they do have exigent circumstances.
If they don't have good reason to think there's a baby in there, then they shouldn't be doing the search. If there's a baby in there anyway, it's an accident that they have no way to predict.
For all that the OP says that we shouldn't be allowed to make post hoc rationalizations, that's exactly what the scenario is set up to do--it's trying to imply that finding the baby means that the hunch was justified. But if the hunch was actually justified, the search is legal, and if the hunch wasn't justified, they shouldn't be doing the search based on the chance that the unjustified hunch turns out to be true by pure luck. By being vague about which of these two scenarios it is, it invokes justified hunches to say that you're supposed to follow unjustified hunches.
If the scenario was "the police read some tea leaves, decide to search someone based on the result, and find a baby" you could ask the exact same questions: isn't this a moral quandry where freedom from unjustified searches is important, but if you ignore the tea leaves, you may end up killing a baby? But we know the answer to this: No, we don't search people based on reading tea leaves, because tea leaves find babies only by luck. Even though that means that reading tea leaves does, in fact, sometimes find babies.
Jiro
1mo ago
He's asking you because multiple parentheses are a dogwhistle for antisemitism (although that's actually three, not two).
Jiro
1mo ago
There is a historical person who actually existed named Jesus, and he did not write a testament called "The Book of Mormon". This isn't a debate about theological interpretations, it is a historical fact.
I find Jesus writing a book that nobody's heard of not inherently goofier or ahistorical than rising from the dead. Or having communion wafers turn into his flesh. Of all the weird things people say about Jesus, writing a book that isn't in the historical record is nowhere near the top of the list of "things secular historians don't think are true about Jesus".
Jiro
1mo ago
hay with performative outrage.
Yes, but it would be performative outrage.
Pretty much nobody would actually say and mean "well, I used to be a supporter of that top Democrat, but now that he made a bad joke, I can no longer support him!"
Jiro
1mo ago
To which his response is, basically, "why can't you take a joke?"
My response is basically "why can't you take a joke?".
As an anti-Catholic act, posting a picture of yourself as the pope is pretty weaksauce. It isn't even saying anything bad about the pope, except maybe "the Pope is only human", which a lot of people do sincerely believe, and Trump doesn't seem to be a Catholic.
This... led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)
I'm inherently suspicious of "this minor act is why I can't possibly support this politician any more!" Yes, there's such a thing as a last straw, but something like this shouldn't be a last straw unless there are substantial unrelated reasons why you no longer support him. If that picture is the major reason why you don't support him, you're way, way, overreacting.
Jiro
1mo ago
The Amish are grandfathered in and you could not create a similarly isolated group from scratch. They don't even pay Social Security taxes--just try doing that with a new group.
Jiro
1mo ago
You did not speak plainly. You didn't state what your plan was. If you don't state what it is, we have to try to figure it out. And nobody could figure out anything except killing.
If it isn't killing, say what it is.
I'm partial to the argument that undertaking this project in the year 10^9 AD or even 10^6 AD might be a better use of resources than in the year 2025 AD. But I'm also partial to the argument that technology doesn't just progress through time alone, that we can always come up with excuses for why this would be easier or more efficient to tackle later, and as such, we might as well start working on it now.
By that reasoning we should have worked on rockets to the moon in 2000 BC.
Very few of either "realistic" hard scifi scenarios, or "realistic" speculative scenarios have us escaping the Earth only in 10^9 AD. The decades of scifi we've had about exploring the solar system have been about much more recent time periods. Sure, maybe we'd do it in 10^9 AD, but 10^9 AD is a long way off. and it isn't what everyone talking about this stuff wants.
And "excuses" is just a spin you put on "reasons".
Jiro
1mo ago
The typical retort is that what there is, is a chance of survival for the human race in the event of total catastrophe befalling the Earth
This idea seems to come from scifi geeks thinking space is really cool, and trying to come up with some sort of justification for exploring it.
It's not hard to think of a catastrophe that would make the Earth unlivable, but space is already unlivable, unless you can terraform something, and that's a generations long project. Going into space won't be any better than going to Antarctica or the sea floor, or underground.
Then rephrase it. People can come up with conclusions about whether God's acts are consistent with his supposed nature. In that sense, yes, they can hold God accountable, even if they aren't able to punish God.
More options
Context Copy link