You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times
I don't. I expect people to follow the rules such as
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Be Kind
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Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
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Be charitable.
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Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is
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Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
The comment I was responding to violates these. The great grand parent violates these:
Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?
The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comments like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.
But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.
Why not? I have better places to discuss topics like this where. I wish this place were better, because then I'd find much more value out of discussing things here, but c'est la vie. [edit: for instance, I found the /r/slatestarcodex threads much more pleasant and insightful]
Many people on this forum definitely consider "the elites" an outgroup.
The comment you chose in particular is as clear an example of outgroup bashing as its possible to be. You can tell because it makes vague negative claims without any evidence for the near exclusive purpose of venting.
Edit:
If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.
This, I agree with. The mods have little tolerance for putting words in others' mouths.
KnotGodel
11mo ago
I report the worst of the worst. I suspect I report far more comments per-minute-read than most people here. But, as I mentioned, it's unfortunately not worth my time to engage very much on this forum, so my overall volume of reporting isn't terribly high.
KnotGodel
11mo ago
As I see it, there are two possible explanations
Option One: He literally believes that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. This is absurd. No one not living in a cave could plausibly think that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. At the very least such a claim requires explanation/justification as per the rules:
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Option Two: He does not literally believe that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. In that case, the comment is much more inflammatory than necessary, again violating the rules.
optimizing for light over not heat [is the goal]
...
It's obviously making use of cheap rhetoric and Orwell memes
Using cheap rhetoric while making no real argument is, in my mind, the almost the quintessential example of optimizing for heat over light (the anti-goal)
Hypothetical elites who consider the rest of us peasants
Re unkind: yes, and anyone who supports existing politicians. If you tell me my preferred candidate wouldn't care if millions of US citizens die, and that is a purely rhetorical move on your part, I'd call that unkind and needlessly inflammatory.
Re weakmanning: he is weakmanning the memes he's referencing, since Bruce Bueno de Mesquita almost certainly would disagree with his claims. Though, it's hard to say he's even weakmanning, when he has not actually made an argument (again lots of heat in that comment; virtually no light).
I acknowledge that "unkind" and "weakmanning" are not the best fits, but it definitely fails on
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Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
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Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
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Avoid low-effort participation
I know "Don't boo outgroup" isn't a rule, but imo it should be, and that comment fails that.
But, like you, I view the real problem as a heat-v-light one. Unlike you (I think?), I believe that comment offers approximately 100% heat and approximately 0% light.
Edit: It occurs to me, that perhaps I'm intuitively thinking of this as
heat / (heat + light) < threshold ==> bad
and you're thinking of it is
heat - light < threshold ==> bad
So, to my mind, a comment that makes no real contribution and has some heat, is bad. In your mind (I conjecture), a comment making no contribution is fine so long as its heat is sufficiently low.
And yet, the literal author of the comment agrees with me.
Yes it is definetly out group bashing to an extent, but bashing both elites and those who I consider naive enough to think compassion and flourishing and deep meaning will provide enough reason for the continued existence of peasants. Outgroups bashing.
KnotGodel
11mo ago
KnotGodel
11mo ago
It's right at the top of the page:
Ahh, it's in each Culture War Post, not the rules page or side bar.
You don't like that I didn't mod a comment you think is bad. Duly noted.
I don' think that's a fair summary, but it's evident I'm annoying you and nothing will change, so I will continue to find little value here, because civil, thoughtful truth-seeking isn't really the goal of this forum. C'est la vie.
KnotGodel
10mo ago
typically outnumber homicides with rifles 2-to-1
Per your same link, "total firearm" homicides outnumber "personal weapons" homicides 14-to-1. You also have to consider denominators. How many times more fistfights happen per year relative to gun fights? That is to say, all things considered, gun fights are probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more lethal than fist fights. Let's not minimize this obvious point.
When you say
Someone commits battery and risks committing murder, but because they haven't (yet?) escalated to a higher probability of death I should be upset that their victim does so first?
If your mode of moral reasoning can justify escalating from ~0.1% fatality risk to a 22% fatality risk under this situation, why not a also accept self-defense escalation to guns if the original fatality risk is 0.01%? 0.001%? If 2-3 orders of magnitude don't convince you, I'm not convinced 4-5 orders of magnitude would convince you, at which point I have to wonder if fatality risk escalation is really the model underlying your beliefs as opposed to, say, honor, fairness, etc.
but for discouraging murder via a more effective means of self-defense I'm fine with at least a couple orders of magnitude of "more effective"
But, this is an important sticking point. The only way allowing people to escalate from fists to guns reduces overall murder is if the 2-3 OOM increase in lethality is paired with a 2-3 OOM decrease in fist fights. This seems implausible. So, the only plausible conclusion is that a norm of escalating fist fights to gun fights causes a large increase in dead bodies. To me that is a steep price to pay for honor and fairness.
We are both just quibbling about numbers at this point, right?
I don't think when numbers are OOM that you can fairly describe it a "quibbling".
At what point does "if you don't want to face potentially-lethal force, don't start potentially-lethal force" become a more sensible rule than "just shake off the concussion and calculate probabilities", to you?
Definitely not when the expected loss of life is a decade (e.g. 50 years * 22% = 11) versus ~a week (2-3 OOM less). I don't think one man's honor and sense of fairness at a bar one night are worth an expected value loss of a decade of human life. Do you? Do you honestly think the deterrence effect is anything other than a rounding error next to a decade of human life lost in expectation?
I just pointed out how important the distinction is between fist fights and unprovoked assaults.
Consider my previous comment as applying entirely to unprovoked assaults as well.
I just pointed out how important the distinction is between fist fights and unprovoked assaults. A world with fewer fist fights sounds nice to me, but to each their own.
Please don't imply I prefer a world with more fist fights, when I obviously don't.
A world with fewer unprovoked assaults, though, is one I'd really like to live in, even if that means I never get to blindside someone myself. Wouldn't you agree?
Sure? Though obviously the cost of achieving that world is important to consider.
Wouldn't "I can never safely give someone a black eye out of the blue" be a price so small that it's worth paying for even a slightly reduced risk of being punched and possibly even killed out of the blue?
Sure? Alas, that's not what we're considering.
Everything I'm reading about this case makes it sound like...
Good on you for being open minded. I personally don't really care about the specifics of a random particular case.
You're also ignoring the distinction between different dead bodies. Why?
Because when we're weighing pros and cons and you discussion partner ignores a 2-3 OOM factor, perseverating on a dramatically less important factor is not helpful.
If someone invents the "murder a little child" button, a magic device which can only be used once and has a fifty-fifty chance of working, would you kill them if that was the only way to stop them from pressing it?
To answer your question, I'm unsure if I would kill the button-pushing sociopath, but note that advocating killing him merely means accept a 2x decreased value of his life. Still far and away from the 2-3 OOM factor I've been harping on.
Moreover, in the minds of most people, there's an enormous difference between someone pushing a button with a specific probability of killing someone purely for the thrill of killing someone with a magic button and a drunkard throwing a punch at someone he views as disrespecting him. So even if you believe our button-pushing sociopath's life has 0 value, I don't know why you would infer the punch-throwing drunkard's life has no value. That's an enormous jump so, no, we have not "solved the problem" with your thought experiment - you've simply replaced the hard problem (is it acceptable to shoot drunks who punch people) with an easy problem (is it acceptable to shoot sociopaths who push magic buttons that kill people), all while refusing to actually grapple with the fact that you advocate cutting 10 years of life from someone in expectation because of one dumb drunk decision at a bar.
So, must we still treat attackers equally to victims?
No? You seem to think I am a blind utilitarian calculator. I'm not. But when utilitarianism says the costs outweigh the benefits by 10ish QALYs to ~0 QALYs and the benefit is a sense of fairness/justice in a brawl in a bar some random night... well, that seems like a pretty easy question for me to answer.
It seems silly to discount someone's life by 100x merely because the threw an unprovoked fist some night. It seems silly to think such a policy change would reduce fist fights by 2-3 OOM. It seems silly that fairness in a bar fight weighs more than 10 years of human life.
KnotGodel
10mo ago
Whether the death happens to a victim or a perpetrator is not "less important". It's more important than just about everything else relevant to the situation.
You've made an assertion. Not an argument.
If I had two sons, and one son got drunk and punched someone at a bar while another got drunk and was punched by someone at a bar. I would not want to live in a world where the former was killed and the latter killed their assaulter. I'd much rather live in the alternative world where no one died. Which would you rather live in?
Also, using QALYs here at all produces bizarre results because it becomes much less bad to kill an older perpetrator than a younger one.
Again, I am not a blind utilitarian calculator. It is a model.
Tossing a punch at someone is an attempt to kill, or a reckless act that may kill, and should be treated as such
This is black-and-white thinking. There are gradations here that you are ignoring, because they are inconvenient to you. Those gradations are central to my argument, so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond here.
KnotGodel
10mo ago
That was the response I expected, which is why I continued with:
What if it only had a 0.1% chance of working? We're now talking about multiple orders of magnitude, right?
Which I addressed with
there's an enormous difference between someone pushing a button with a specific probability of killing someone purely for the thrill of killing someone with a magic button and a drunkard throwing a punch at someone he views as disrespecting him. So even if you believe our button-pushing sociopath's life has 0 value, I don't know why you would infer the punch-throwing drunkard's life has no value...
You ignoring me grappling with an issue ≠ me not grappling with the issue. Motes and beams, indeed.
My position is that there's a level of unjustified lethal force, perhaps on the order of p=1-in-1000 risk, such that a victim reducing even similarly minimal subsequent risk is worth perhaps a q=1-in-10 risk of lethality against the aggressor....
Yes, I understand that, and you based this on your thought experiment of a sociopath with a magic button, which I addressed and rejected (see above).
I think "some ratio exists, it might even be as high as 100, and the more avoidable the aggression is the higher the ratio should be" is a more philosophically defensible position than deleting attempts to clarify a position. Fists kill people; the idea that a gun is qualitatively rather than quantitatively different is just philosophy-via-rounding-error.
to
0 QALYs
Would you have preferred 0.1 QALYs? I admit I feel like that is quibbling. Just replace my "0" with "0.1" and literally everything I say continues to follow through. The point is that the consequences of "don't escalate to guns" are far better than "do escalate to guns". Since the consequences are enormously better (e.g. 10 years of human life), I expect an argument for why escalation is commendable (or should be legal) to offer something of similar value. This "rounding" is not central to my argument in the least.
So, how high a percentage of the time would such attacks have to kill people before you'd stop rounding to zero? Or conversely, how low a percentage of the time would the response have to be lethal before you started?
I don't have a specific numerical answer, but I don't need one, because the answer is definitely not 2-3 OOM.
but "don't suddenly attack people" seems so much easier to turn into a bright line rule than "you can attack them, a little lethally, and they can attack you, but nobody start doing it too too lethally, if you get me".
How about just "try running away before shooting"? But, I don't concede that a brighter line outweighs the expected loss of life.
"if you're going to be violently dumb when drunk, teetotal" is the dead-body-minimizing solution
Agreed, but alas the framing of this conversation isn't what to do if you are omnipotent, but what actions / laws we should advocate for.
Doesn't nearly everybody? Suppose the killer in this case had been pissed off enough to brandish and aim his gun before even being provoked by an attack? It would be self-defense to kill him first, no? Would we want to forbid that because it would be cutting off his life from one dumb drunk decision?
Again, there is a gradient here. Most things in life are on a gradient. We can't just ignore the gradient, because it makes decision-making simpler.
Ignoring all the bits here and there, let me give you my own thought experiment that I think illuminates my intuition:
Suppose you have two sons: Bob and Dan. A genie comes before you and say
Bob got drunk and punched someone; Dan got drunk and got punched. You can choose one of two futures for your sons:
(1) Bob got shot by the guy he punched. Dan shot the guy he punched.
(2) Bob did not get shot by the guy he punched. Dan did not shoot the guy he punched.
Which would you wish for? Is Dan's honor/fairness/safety-from-fists more important to you than Bob getting shot? [Edit: Which society would you want children to grow up in? ]
KnotGodel
10mo ago
I've been arguing this entire time that I don't think the trade-off of marginally fewer fist fights is worth the trade-off of more "self-defence" killings. This does NOT imply that I prefer a world with more fist fights ceteris paribus.
As an example: wearing seatbelts probably cause people to have more car accidents via risk compensation. Me supporting people wearing seatbelts does not imply I want more car accidents.
KnotGodel
10mo ago
I agree with all of that. Personally, I think the impact of right-to-shoot on number-of-fist-fights would be very small, because I don't think most fist-fights are based on a rational weighing of pros and cons, which is why I didn't center it in the thought experiment. If you'd prefer, try this one:
You have three sons: Bob, Dan, Frank, and Ivan. They go out to bars and get drunk.
A genie comes up to you and tells you
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Bob punched someone.
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Dan got punched.
You can choose one of two futures for your wish
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Bob got shot. Dan shot his assaulter. Nothing happens to Frank or Ivan.
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Bob was not shot. Dan did not shoot his assaulter. Frank also punched someone (not shot) and Ivan was also punched (didn't shoot).
There, now the thought experiment bakes in an assumption that letting-people-shoot reduces fist-fights by 50%. As their parent, which would you wish for? I know what I would.
I think this crucially depends on the death rates from punching vs shoot-to-fist ratio... I don't think that guns are limited to having a 50% reduction on fistfights
Agreed, and based on the evidence this seems like a 2-3 order-of-magnitude difference, which is why I've been arguing its crazy to advocate for shooting. To argue otherwise on utilitarian grounds requires claiming that for every 1% decrease in shooting-people-who-throw-punches, the number of punches throw grows by 100-1000%, which seems patently absurd.
And we can modify the thought experiment: your extended family of ~50 people go to a bar and drink. Would you prefer they all come armed with a willingness to escalate a punch to a shot? I wouldn't. I have a hard time believing many people would.
Once someone actually cares about the people involved, it seem clear that they are much less gung-ho (pun intended).
you should consider it from behind the veil of ignorance
I agree.
If Man A punched Man B and I knew one of them was my son but not which, I would pray to every god under the sun that B didn't shoot at A.
KnotGodel
10mo ago
If B shoots A and A is your son, your son is a murderer who was shot in self-defense.
No? He was a drunkard who punched someone and was killed. Not a murderer.
If B doesn't shoot A and B is your son, then your son is a murder victim, with some probability.
"with some probability" is don't a lot of work there.
Unless you're saying that you don't want B to shoot A because your only concern is reducing the chance of death, and it doesn't matter who started it
It matters, but not as much as my son stay alive.
Then this proves too much and implies that you oppose lethal self-defense, period. Do you?
It does matter, but not nearly as much imo as it does to you.
If a unhinged man is holding a dozen people hostage with a gun, take him out if you can. I'd support this even if there were a 1-in-13 chance the hostage-taker was my son. If a psychotic man has a knife and is charging you, and you can't get away, shoot him.
If one man sucker punches another in public, don't shoot. I'd support this even if there were a 1-in-2 chance the punched man was my son.
There are scenarios where there are degrees of uncertainty regarding the correct action - parameters that influence this include
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who started it
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how much effort was made to escape
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how much each party escalated prior
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discrepancies in overall strength of the parties
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presence of peers
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distance from security/police
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etc
I think a big tripping point is what you're counting as energy expenditure. For instance, the piece you linked cites this meta-analysis and claims it "found no penalty". However, if you look at the actual meta-analysis, one of the inclusion criteria is
To have values of resting EE or resting metabolic rate or basal metabolic rate or sleeping metabolic rate and body weight before and after the intervention
So, it is looking at various measures of resting metabolic expenditure. In other words, it is explicitly excluding studies of non exercise activity thermogenesis (NEET) - that is, it is excluding "the energy expended for everything we do that is not sleeping, eating or sports-like exercise" - this is summarized as "fidgeting"
When I skim the other links the article uses to prove that there is no effect, I see the same issues. The one study they cite without this issue found significant declines in energy expenditure.
Other studies also find large changes in energy expenditure and suggest (1) the degree of change varies significantly from person to person and (2) is largely genetic. For instance, in this study, researchers established a neutral level of calories needed by each member of a collection of identical twins, added 1000 kcal to that, and then fed that to the twins over 100 days while they lived mostly sedentary lives under 24-hour supervision. Before and after, they measured energy expenditure on the neutral diet. Based on a naive CICO model, each of these twins should have gained ~12 pounds. Instead (see Figure 1), they gained between 4 and 13 pounds.
KnotGodel
6mo ago
To address the concrete point, real median pay is basically flat from its pre-pandemic value. The number you cited in your post was nominal.
Unemployment is also basically flat from pre-Covid (ditto for employment).
So, if people are subconsciously replacing the survey questions with "am I economically better off compared to pre-Covid?", then we should see about as many people answer "yes" as "no".
Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.
It depends on the purpose of the discussion.
Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.
Is it to vent? They don't.
The question to ask: why are we on this forum?
I don’t know what HylinkaGC or the rest are living like
Well, the one time he provided concrete examples of runaway inflation, his "lived experience" almost perfectly matched the official data. So, there's that...
It's throw-away lines like this that make me avoid commenting here.
Then it's followed up by
Ahh, such steel-manning, such charity - definitely no booing outgroup here!
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