coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Where is the line you draw in biological sophistication when you begin to care? A mouse? A bird?
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Not only that, but there’s “pleasant suffering”, as in a boy playing a game with friends that roughs him up, or a climber scaling a mountain. There are people who live weeks or months of their life with a negligible amount of “pain signal pain” and zero “traumatic pain”. To deny that we can live with less pain is to deny essentially any motive for a human to do anything. It governs everything we do.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
The suffering of bees may be important to mitigate (I think that’s true — wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?) but the author must convince us —
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the suffering of bees is of such high importance that it is worth writing on it to convince people to place a burden on themselves. (Unlikely. There is worse suffering taking place even if we consider only bees, like the effects of pesticides. It’s not worth discourse hours).
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that writing something so unintuitive that people ignore what else you write is morally worth the future drawbacks of loss of influence.
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that the suffering of bees is so important that we should forego the very term of pleasure. This is problematic to his utilitarian ambitions, because our motivation to live well and expand our wellbeing is tied to whether we are able to experience wholesome pleasures in life. If people feel better from a spoonful of honey, not only does their own suffering decrease, but (1) they have energy to reduce the suffering of others and (2) the reason to love bees over wasps is brought to mind.
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bees are not designed to be destroyed by mammals, given that bears and raccoons destroy them in the wild, and given that fish are designed to be eaten by other fish. If the author does not believe that nature’s design should be respected, then his interest should be ensuring that killer whales aren’t able to kill dolphins in the ocean. But wouldn’t only a senseless person have a problem with the killer whale enjoying his design and eating dolphins, who significantly more intelligent than bees? So the suffering of bees is within our design — we should only guarantee that the suffering isn’t excessive, like with some easy regulations about whether all the young bees are killed off after the honey is made.
There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.
I don’t think it’s possible to find real data about this, because the only way to determine cheating is for a reasonable observer to watch footage (otherwise, the algorithms would quickly catch them). You can’t generalize that across time for obvious reasons, and you can’t trust a cheater to answer a survey for obvious reasons. The next best evidence is to see what high-reputation people in these niches think about the question, and I’d guess most of them across different games would say cheating is out of control.
In CS2, nearly all of the leaderboard: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6GA4AM1Szxc https://youtube.com/watch?v=m8wsCU0NR38
In Trackmania, nearly all of the leaderboard (I think this is the most competitive racing game): https://youtube.com/watch?v=yDUdGvgmKIw
Chess . com : https://youtube.com/watch?v=SG5PMVyCi8U (though here it is significantly easier, almost trivial, to find and ban cheaters)
There are also many in the speedrunning niche.
I can’t say I understand the conflation of academic and game cheating, either
They are similar from a psychological perspective involving honesty and rewards. You want to win in order to gain status and feel a sense of success. Among males, video game success translates into reputational benefits, bragging rights, plus the basic biological pleasure of defeating an opponent in a bout. This is no different from academic success, except perhaps that the rewards of academic success occur on a longer timeframe, making the rewards of cheating a little less salient.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Is there a new cheating epidemic?
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Some major game titles are now unplayable in the higher rankings because of cheating: CounterStrike, Call of Duty, Tarkov. This occurs to a comical degree
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High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI
Iran could threaten the use of a salted bomb on the grounds of the Temple Mount, maximizing radioactive contamination. The ultra-religious have enormous political influence in Isael. This would act as deterrence in a way that targeting a major city would not, while minimizing loss of life. Al-Aqsa isn’t super important for Shia Muslims, but the Temple Mount actually needs to be the place of construction for the Third Temple.
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