Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Or that the conduct is different if different people are doing it?
I challenge any gay man to have sex with his husband by inserting his penis into his husband's vagina.
More seriously, I've never read Lawrence, and don't particularly feel like subjecting my eyes or brain to tortured legal reasoning at the moment. Is it written in a way that would allow a state to criminalize anal sex in general without regard to the sex of the persons?
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
They're trying to model it off of the Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes, which are obnoxious, but balanced out by the fact that smoking literally causes 5-20% of all deaths in the United States.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Massive L for our system of government. Who the hell wants to ban porn? And yet, it happened.
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function."
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses."
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography."
Are these things even true?
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
In theory, they could get Columbia to completely cave and put out a sufficiently groveling statement that it triggers a respectability cascade, causing all the other universities to cave and put out groveling statements. This would be followed by major media outlets, and finally the White House.
It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
This seems like a textbook case of the law of undignified failure. The classical AI doom scenerios assumed that people would be smart enough not to build AI-powered killbots. If AI-powered killbots were floated as a load-bearing assumption of the classical AI doom case, then people would simply retort that we could just not build AI-powered killbots. The point of the classical AI doom case is that the problem is robust to minor implementation variance, not that AI-powered killbots are safe.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Middle-class Americans have enough disposable income that it isn't worth the inconvenience to scoop up minor discounts like these. People with higher marginal utility for money and less marginal utility for time will differ of course.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
You got me. My use of the word "justice" there was a poor choice. The word is used in a legal context as a colloquialism for "desirable outcomes". There's a fair bit of play in the joints of course, but you don't need a definition of justice that would satisfy Socrates to see that removing the idea of moral culpability from the legal system would result in a world much lower in ≈everybody's preference ordering than the one we have now.
“You will say to me then, 'Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?'”
Indeed. Paul's answer falls short. As does everyone else's. Perhaps one day I will try my own hand on the question, though I suspect I lack the writing skill and attention span to make it coherent (not to mention the philosophical heft). I do have some ideas though.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
especially Gorsuch reducing a professional to a stammering mess.
Kneedler is the government's third-string solicitor general. If they thought this case was important, they would have put Fletcher or Prelogar on it.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
People seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a set of deterministic “statuses”, and then there is a different set of non-deterministic free-will “choices”, but actually it’s all deterministic (modulo some weird quantum mechanical stuff).
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true. Yudkowsky’s decision theory paper uses the phrase “surgery on a world model” when describing how one considers counterfactuals. I think that is a good way to put it. In some sense it is impossible for someone who is homeless at any given time to have not been homeless, because in the physical universe that exists they are in fact homeless, but this isn’t very useful when designing a legal system that creates actual justice.
American sports was completely canceled for 48 hours because a domestic abuser in the process of kidnapping a child and holding a knife was shot by police.
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