If NATO, with cca what, 900 million population, GDP (ppp adjusted) maybe 4x of Russia, cannot somehow manage to have conventional forces supremacy in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from attacking, what use is NATO?
Exactly, and Putin may put this into a test, especially to test how will let's say countries like Portugal or Italy or even Hungary or Slovakia or Finland or Romania react to the situation when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare. And we already see the pathetic situation we are in right now - US cannot get a bill of $60 billion passed to support Ukraine, and even that has some Israel support as well as organizational support for European theater inside. And we are still talking about 7% of US military budget and 0.2% of US GDP. And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee". Anyways even besides that, this is still seems crazy to me - you are supposedly willing to pour trillions of dollars to build up defense against hostile power threatening NATO but you are unable to spend comparatively infinitesimal fraction of money to actually fight it? To me it seems like an invitation for Putin to test the resolve.
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
So why am I now hearing this defeatism ? Eastern European countries joined NATO because they were told it'd make them 'safe' against Russia ? Was that just a bluff ?
I actually see it as the opposite. The ultimate defeatism is things I reacted to such as "too many Ukrainians are dying, let's give Putin what he wants" or "don't support Ukrainians by 0.2% of GDP when they are in hot war against an actor that threatens NATO, it is too much money that can be spent on social security". So if we care about non-NATO soldiers dying and spending on level of peanunts, then how is NATO going to absorb tens of thousands of their own citizens dying or spending hundreds of billions or even trillions on potential hot war? Will it not be too tempting to again give Putin what he wants and effectively dissolve NATO as a defensive alliance? These two things are related in my eyes and I bet that those new NATO members are watching it in disbelief, they may have been hoodwinked by mushy allies. Also it is not as if this happened for the first time, Czechoslovakia could talk about that a little bit
georgioz
8mo ago
I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.
Oh, so then let's make it a society wide practice - if you get a job in local Amazon warehouse you are entitled to have your spouse or close family member employed as well. Let's make it a law. Yeah, I don't think so.
This is completely inaccurate take. Anheuser-Busch never really apologized, they refused to admit that they did anything wrong. The best non-apology strategy they have is something like that this was one among many influencers and that it was not a campaign and so forth. So in a sense there is no apology to accept.
It is too late to downplay the situation now and pray it disappears - they voluntarily walked into this political mess, so now deal with it. Obviously they do not want to back down and say they did wrong, because then they would anger woke people - plus I'd guess that PMC people in that company genuinely despise their customer base and they would never admit they did anything wrong. So I think it is absolutely okay to continue despising them back, there is no resemblance with your apocryphal proverb. If they come out that they fired all people responsible for that shit, and that they pledge percentage of sales to go for anti-woke causes - like let's say helping detransitioners with their plight - then I would reconsider.
This is also why I vow never to buy Gillette product unless they denounce woke stuff - which will of course never happen.
As others said, it is basic premise of stoicism and its teachings on locus of control.
I find it especially useful to avoid certain manipulations - including those asking money from you, like EA. As a pragmatic observation, my internal spidey sense now lights up as spoon as I hear “we” as in “we humanity”. We should stop climate change, racism and if we are at it why not also hunger, all murder and pineaple pizza?
I think saying “not my problem” and even “fuck you, I wont do what you tell me” is perfectly fine stance for random ask by some stranger, especially online.
georgioz
11mo ago
I think of banality of evil more in line with the Moloch idea. And I also find it useless. For instance I think that everybody involved in transitioning kids is taking part in great evil, of course they think they are doing good. In the end most people involved ranging from receptionist in gender clinic to actual surgeon who chops off healthy organs of kids will be fine. They are not doing anything illegal presumably. Another example - everybody knows what is happening in Xinjiang, China and it does not mean squat. Disney executives had no qualms filming Mulan next to it, literally thanking Xinjiang government for their tremendous help.
I most probably would not do shit about Jews were I living in those times. I don't do squat about kids being tortured in North Korea or literal slavery all over the world. So there is that - am I evil for just watching Netflix while all that is happening around me, possibly even contributing by paying slavers money for their products? If yes, then I don't care, it is not my business to solve these injustices.
A good state of affairs can be that "everyone kinda knows, nobody makes a big fuss about it, it isn't officially condoned or supported or acknowledged, but people slightly judge the people involved in the deal and don't see it exactly aligned with the principles of a university." Plausible deniability is maintained, disbelief is suspended and a "quantum tunneling" has taken place. It's not necessarily good to separate everything into the black-and-white categories of legal (and therefore supported, and documented, and regulated and defined and socially accepted and considered moral) vs illegal (and beyond the pale and morally corrupt and unacceptable and you're an unperson for it).
Yes, this is called good old fashioned nepotism. When this manager in the team fucked his subordinate and then promoted her, everybody knew about it and many thought it was kind of piece of shit move. It also did not endear the newly promoted person in eyes of many of her colleagues. It was tolerated as lesser evil for many reasons by his superiors unfortunately. Little did I know that what he should have done was telling it transparently by saying that he was not promoting somebody for fucking his brains out, it was just normal HR benefit of "sex partner hiring" he was awarded during standard salary increase negotiations, no big deal. You see, he is really working hard and he works harder with hard-on that he needs to be motivated, his situation is special because he has no time to look for partners as he is working so much. Reading apologetics here in this thread I'd guess he would probably have much more defenders, silly him.
They are either lying, or they are perpetuating the unnecessary pain of inmates for political gain.
Of course they are lying. This article in Voices of Bioethics journal describes wonderful evolution in Canada from right to suicide in 2016 to current murdering of ill people (not even terminally ill, just ill) under euphemism of "death with dignity" or MAID (medical assistance in dying). There were over 10,000 people killed in 2021, over 13,500 in 2022 and the number is rising and quickly becoming leading cause of death in Canada. Presumably unlike executions, killing ill people is painless and wonderful.
I will answer the question in kind of roundabout way, the sexual revolution in my eyes is wish fulfilment of certain strains of feminism that basically worship masculinity. I am talking about people who had incorrect analysis of what the social relationships are - that men use male privilege to oppress women and created Patriarchy to reproduce that pattern, that marriage and basically everything is oppression. As with many religions and ideologies - you become what you worship, in this case feminists secretly worship this fantasy of male power and want it for themselves. In their own way they just seized the means of power and put on the other shoe to serve the "just" case of reparations for historical oppression. The thought that they were wrong all along and that they themselves manifested the monster they fantasized about - now in the real world only in pink - and that there is no basis for reparations and revenge, it is too brutal to contemplate now. The new female rolemodel is a caricature of toxic masculine man that feminists supposedly hate: she is powerful and calculating business owner who can also be physically imposing and aggressive as well as sexually promiscuous. She is formidable and feared by all around her, she is highly competitive high status earner and nobody will tell her what to do. She is stoic in her outlook and she is totally impervious to emotions - especially if they take the form of male or other oppressor tears.
Just look what ideal progressive modern woman should look like: she should be given free contraception at early teen or even pre-teen and get fast tracked into sexual experimentation including with her sexual preference and gender identity. Then she should of course spend her most healthy and fertile years of late teens and early twenties studying in college and slaving as HR representative for some nameless corporation while finding meaning not in family and children but by "doing work" on some activist and ideally feminist projects while popping birth control pills and experimenting with sex of course. Then she can go and have a "career" in her late twenties and thirties because every job is a career and groundbreaking work needs to be done on promoting justice of some kind. She may think about relationship, but her "career" and own "wellbeing" should be a priority. You also have right to pursue "career" as Instagram or OF model, it is just a regular work and possibly doable as a sidejob to being preschool teacher.
In her late thirties or early forties there is time to have your eggs frozen so that they can be implanted into surrogate Indian or Ukrainian mother and delivered to you on silver platter as if some pet like Khloé Kardashian baby - you do not even have to have any interesting excuse, just valuing your body is enough. You see, access to motherhood is a right and it is all about YOU as a Mother, the child is there just as a reminder for the rest of the society that you are so wonderful and capable of doing the most difficult work of all on your own. Then you can become happy wine whine mom and bitch about how men ignore women over 45 - which signifies that it is a good time getting some plastic surgery done and hit bars and clubs pretending to be teenager again. It is not as if you are some respected matriarch responsible for helping your gaggle of grandchildren navigating life, it is all about you until you end the misery by euthanasia in Canada. In the meantime go and slay it on the dancefloor in your seventies queen.
So is sexual revolution a failure specifically for women? Maybe not, if you are happy with the story above and you think that is an awesome culture worth reproducing by implanting your eggs into poor 3rd world women so that the state can pay for your single motherhood in case something happens - at least until artificial womb is invented and producing children will be a job of child farms on Epstein Islands of some "eccentric" billionaires somewhere. I guess that would also be a way to "reproduce" this "culture" and a huge win for the whole paradigm. Progress cannot be stopped, it is what it is and it is always good as it presents us with opportunity to move one step further even if we made two steps back.
Other people really view it as obvious failure as it produced inverted lifestyle where everything - from sex to childcare - is done in wrong order and often in opposite ways it was done before, often seemingly just in spite and as part of some endless revolt against religions or other traditions. Now half a century later this is how the new Orthodoxy looks like - and it does not look as hot.
Continuing the gymnastics analogy, Aella had recently an interview on trigonometry where she said she vastly prefers escorting and prostitution compared to factory work she used to do when very young, which made her drink too much. Where does the shielding end?
I agree with the OP that this is question of conceptual core beliefs and morality. I think that what we are going through a phase where we will see what are the real consequences of of shredding the old moral principles and replacing them with what we have now. What I find interesting is that between people like Rationalists, Sam Harris and even New Left the common theme seems to be pedestalization of maximizing utils, which means something like "minimizing suffering" as the new ultimate value. The methods may be different - rationalists prefer to think about themselves as professional surgeons who know how to not get emotions in their way. They know what is moral and they will do what is necessary to minimize suffering and maximize flourishing. The new left on the woke side pedestalizes compassion above everything else. They also want to maximize minimize suffering by means of compassionate justice.
I think this morality and aesthetics will bring us ruin, I do not think it is workable as a society-wide system. I agree with the OP that the whole theology is absolutely wrong, the focus on utils and compassion as the highest aim is not only wrong, but I think it is unstable as it was the result of the previous moral system.
georgioz
3mo ago
Slave plantations are less efficient than small farmers.
This was not so for usual cash crops such as tobacco or sugar cane or other similar crops especially if these were grown in on large plantations in hot climates ridden with tropical diseases. After revolution in Haiti the newly freed slaves were not that keen on continuing growing cash crops and the revenue plummeted.
This is the opposite of grain or other type of crops that are more suitable for small family sized groups of yeomen farmers. Heck, even growing rice gives rise to different types of societies given that it is a very labor intensive type of farming that requires irrigation and other communal infrastructure projects. So yes, I'd say that slavery is also largely (but not solely) due to economic reasons.
I am a very weird human being. When I first read this stuff on LessWrong as a teenager I remember being very annoyed by how smug they seemed about "hey, breaking news, you should believe true things and not false things."
I have similar peeve, but because of exactly the opposite reasons: this whole credo is obvious bullshit. Even rationalists like Yudkowsky do not really practice it, take as an example his annoyance with Roko's Basilisk idea leaking or his secrecy around methods how he can get out of the box pretending to be AI. Why doing that, just set the truth free. If it destroys countries or even the whole humanity, then it should be destroyed, right? The cold truth is defined as the highest value so what is the problem.
Anyways, there are many ways how one can save "belief in untruth". One way is to defer to an authority: I cannot evaluate if Many Worlds or Spontaneous Collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, but I think expert A is trustworthy so I take his word for it. But in a way this is is belief about expert and not belief about the thing, so it is cheating a bit. Another way to do that is to have epistemic humility, Scott Alexander himself once remarked how he was able to argue untrue points very effectively toward people with less knowledge and his takeaway was to be a lot more skeptic when it comes his own views as he could also have been misled. Ironically rationalists themselves accept this premise, their whole shtick is how AI can lie to reach its goals. Similar idea is also expressed by yet another rationalist glib of it all adds up to normality, which basically urges you to be skeptical about too "weird" conclusions and sticking to your intuition a bit, even if evidence seems strong.
Now given the utilitarianism of rationalists I do not trust them at all, there is nothing preventing them to lie to me to reach their goals of maximizing utils or whatever. In fact they are quite upfront about this. The third one is right there in the rationalist Bayesian thinking idea. All it takes for me to defend any belief is to set my prior to very low value so it is incredibly hard for it to be flipped in my lifetime. And I can still signal my sophistication: my credence of idea X being true shifted a bit in light of new circumstances and recalculated posterior, but I still find it unlikely for X to be true. That is unless Scott Alexander or Yudkowsky or other gurus of rationalist faith say otherwise, then my posterior will shift dramatically.
Now maybe this all sounds too harsh, I do not really mind it as much. But one really has to treat rationalism as yet another pretentious internet fad, as an infotainment. There are very useful things I learned and for it I am very thankful. But I think dropping the guru sounding shit or weird stuff like defending value of insect life or polyamory or any of the awfully convenient overlap of supposedly cold rationalists with hippie/techbro Silicon Valley culture and ethos is advised. But sometimes I think I am not harsh enough - listening to Yudkowsky lately I would not be surprised if he founded some Unabomber style cult set out to bomb datacenters to prevent AI apocalypse, which would be logical step if they really believed in the Truth of apocalypse so firmly and unshakenly. So there is that.
A year ago there was a kerfuffle around A Message From the Gay Community AKA "We are coming for your children" song, which was pretty blatant call that they are the ones who will educate kids into whatever their idea of "tolerance" is - and there is nothing you as a parent can do about that. Of course I think that this is all about clash of ideologies or one can say religions. Of course everybody thinks that they are projecting what is good into the world. There are people who think that books like Gender Queer or surgical transition of 15 years old kids is what tolerance means. So I'd say that "we're coming for your children" can be absolutely terrifying even if taken at face value by the criteria of said group - LGBTQIA+ pride protesters in this case. Radical Muslim imam proclaiming that he is going to teach your children how to interpret the Quran and spread goodness into the world, would probably be taken as a threat, despite his best intention of bringing them to heaven in his own mind.
The same for me. In my mind the LGBTQIA+ movement is now indistinguishable from radical religious cult. For me it is not unlike Scientologists infiltrating government institutions. So for these radicals to chant that they are going for my children is akin to Scientologists saying that they are going for my children (meaning they will "help" them by using scientology auditing method on them etc.).
Anyways, what is interesting is that there seems to be some self-awareness among these people that maybe they have shown their cards too soon and that they maybe overestimated their grip on our culture to some extent, given the current backlash. A year back there was a song by gay chorus about how they are going for our children, now it is a single voice in pride parade that is viewed as cringe by fellow marchers.
It is no armchair psychology to understand people on their own terms. A lot of feminists believe that men use sexism to gain power over women. It is literally what they believe, so why it should be "psychologizing" to say that maybe they also believe that women can also use sexism against men to gain power? Why is it psychologizing to just state what some people literally believe? If somebody believes that cabal of twelve Jews and Free Masons rules the world, is it far fetched to say that maybe they also can believe that another group of 12 "good" patriotic people can possibly also rule the world utilizing the same level of control and make it a better place? It has to be in realms of possibility that such a mind can contemplate, desirable even at least as some sort of second worst alternative to Free Mason Jews being on top, right?
georgioz
3mo ago
If you consider only wellbeing of nobility/elites, then yes.
I am considering tons of sugar produced, in that sense slave plantations were more efficient compared to other forms of ownership. So no matter the initial organization of labor, slave plantations will be more efficient and thus will be established as dominant structure as that is how incentives are aligned.
By the way it is not dissimilar to some issues here an now: organic and ethical farms are less efficient compared to industrial agriculture and that is why we have the system that we have now. The same goes for textile industry and so forth. And even the do-gooders and Buddhist vegans may not be as squeamish buying illegal drugs with all the costs associated with financing criminal cartels wreaking havoc in many countries. I do not see the situation that different - if English ladies and gentlemen of 18th century wanted to sweeten their tea with sugar, they just accepted slave labor in the same way modern comrades in California accept some people being horribly executed by cartels just as a price of having fun when partying.
georgioz
8mo ago
This is so underrated comment, it really is an unspoken bubble. The demographic change is huge, especially in Southeast Asia where people born in 50s or 60s are often from large families of 5 to 6 while their children have one child or are childless. I have a friend who is single child of single children on both parents side. He has a wife who is also single child although she herself has an aunt. But in general their combined family is incredibly small, if my friend's parents die he will have no living family in this world. This is the family of the future.
I have many uncles and aunts and number of cousins that I being me would probably mix some names. It is such a vast difference in social experience. My experience is just blip in history, it is a rare transition towards inevitable modernity.
You are literally describing the same situation. Manager/Superstar researcher is using his superstar influence in order to secure job for somebody he fucks is the same as saying:
Manager negotiating a spousal hire as part of a compensation package is attempting to secure a business relationship that is in the best interest of the university and utilizing the various tools at their disposal to do so, including potentially that spousal hire.
Yeah, that is the point. Manager is negotiating with the company (hiring manager) to secure new business relationship (for his mistress and for himself to the extent of getting potentially a good fuck as a result) and it is in best interest of the company (or else he leaves in the middle of the most important project to competitor or whatever) and he is utilizing various tools at his disposal (e.g. a lunch with hiring manager and his manager etc.) to secure that relationship.
I understand corporatespeak, no need to remind me that "spousal hiring" and "best interest of the company" means "hire somebody I fuck" and "do as I say or else something bad happens". Nobody with IQ more than 80 falls for this shit.
At face value this is obviously corrupt and nepotistic behaviour, especially if the University gets government money. But even with private institutions, it is yet another crack in form of principal-agent problem when it comes to corporate governance. In practice, this is almost nothingburger - one can point out to many other similar cases as other people already pointed out such as affirmative action or other arbitrary criteria for hiring.
What I find interesting is how this proves a lot about how the PMC class is run and that it really is matter of aesthetics. For some reason spousal hiring of two people for let's say 150k cost each is better than paying 300k to one researcher and leaving it to them to sort things out. Spouse will not be happy even with cash on hand, they need to have credentials and job history and they need to be able to suspend their disbelief in their own abilities, so they can keep their position inside PMC class tooth-and-nail. Being stay-at-home spouse is death sentence in this regard. I recently had similar discussion regarding referrals in hiring, and it really surprised me how much the rules could be bent, when literally the same happened and people even collected money for referring their own relatives. You see, it is not bad nepotism, it is result of exceptional and valuable "networking", you should thank me that I populate your local branch of large faceless corporation with my family and close friends. And if you disagree by "anonymous" complaint to HR, then maybe you mysteriously get bad reviews in next 360 and maybe your twitter will get scrutinized a little bit more. So beware.
So my opinion is that this is immoral practice that will bring problems in the future in all the forms you mentioned - including further dilution of trust and expanding polarization. But at this point this is Moloch-like problem, it is almost inevitable especially if one looks how people make excuses for it. So just go ahead and do it, you will be stupid if you won't participate.
This is generalized conspiracy theory prevalent on the left and that for various reasons endorsed and spread without closer examination. You have two groups: one is oppressor and the other one is oppressed. Oppressors have control over some special property and they use their power to deny oppressed people access to this property. They then create a system that perpetuates and entrenches this dynamic into the future keeping the oppressed people where they are.
So for feminists you obviously have men as oppressors and women as oppressed. Men use their male privilege to oppress women. They also perpetuate the whole system called patriarchy for the future. The same goes for workers/bourgeoisie/capitalism or "normal people"/queer people/cisheteronormativity and so on.
As with all conspiracies, there is grain of truth to it. Even the most stupid ones - like chemtrails - have some useful nugget somewhere down there, like for instance Operation LAC where US governments literally secretly sprayed dangerous chemicals over US soil in order to study if this is viable military technology. That is your Motte, and then Bailey is whatever you want it to be.
As with most tyrannies - where we sometimes literally have to read from the tea leaves - this thing with Prigozhin is also quite an opaque situation. So far I gathered multiple possible explanations related to the crash, each depending on different assumptions and each opening more questions than it answers:
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Shooting down of the airplane was indeed a mistake, which feeds into the narrative that Russians are incompetent and all that.
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The plane was shot down by Prigozhin's enemy without Putin's approval. There are plenty of people in the army who can do this including low ranking soldiers. This escalates power struggle in Putin's orbit.
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The plane was shot down as a gift to Putin, a gift Putin did not want to recieve.
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The plane was shot down on Putin's direct order and with his full knowledge, but even then there are multiple possibilities related to the fact that it happened two months after the "coup"
- 4a) Putin needed two months to try some alternative nonviolent path, it did not pan out so he took Prigozhin down. What did he try to do and why?
- 4b) Putin needed two months to do something to Prigozhin's power base before he dared such an open move as shooting the plane down. Is Putin so weak that he could not do what he wanted sooner?
These are just a few possibilities and assumptions, you will of course see more including theories that the plane was shot down by Ukrainians or CIA or Prigozhin's enemies inside Wagner and who knows what else. The whole situation is a mess and nobody knows the truth. Which is a reason why we will see all sorts of people fitting the story to their already preexisting narrative. Beware.
You describe how people are convinced about anything like ever. It always works frustratingly slowly and then suddenly and quickly. You do not convince people in one discussion, my working model is that you maybe shift their position 1 percentage point at a time. And as their previously 100% opinion reaches that 50% threshold after many discussions and personal experiences, then they suddenly flip their publicly stated and communicated position. It may seem very surprising, but in fact nothing dramatic happened - it was the same slow process as before inside their heads. The upside is that the new beliefs have deeper roots and they will not shift on a whim.
The second rule is that even if talking with true believers, the aim is not to convince them - although it is a plus if that ever happens even in the sense of mildly shifting their posterior. It is lurkers and bystanders watching from the outside, those who are interested in the discussion which are the true "targets". So you are not shifting one person slightly, you are shifting many more people slightly and depending on quality of your arguments you may flip public position of a few people on the margin. I know it happened to me and at least my friends I talk to, when over time we are more likely to get closer in our previously different opinions if the quality of arguments is good.
As for "creative songbirds" who transcend the polarization, they are out there. Prime example that comes to my mind is Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, a youtube talkshow where the former represents the progressive and the later conservative viewpoint on a given controversy of the day. The issue is that the polarization is in the eye of the beholder. Depending on who you ask, the Breaking Points is a cesspit of fascist propaganda or a commie plot sneaking into your bedroom. Again, not a new phenomenon - I remember similar research that asked to rate newspapers and their stance on Israel/Palestianian conflict. The evaluation of any given paper from people asked ranged wildly, depending on what piece from that paper different persons remembered. People often get stuck on things they dislike, it is hard for them to forget. You may know that saying where a man builds 1,000 bridges but sucks just one dick, and he is now forever known not as a bridgebuilder, he is now a cocsksucker.
Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people.
Oh, not this again. The 30% chance was from polls right before the election, the thing people had with 538 was how polls changed completely from day-to-day. On October 17th 2016 the 538 predicted Hillary with 88.1% after it was basically 50:50 on July 30th, then two weeks later on November 4th only it dropped 24 percentage points down to 64.5% for Hillary. The point is that Silver does not have the prediction, he has series of dozens of predictions that swing wildly so it is hard to pinpoint if he was "right" as there is many possible definitions of that.
I stand by my claim that polls in general are more then useless, it is akin to using aggregator to predict weather on a particular day 2 years from now somewhere. You either use absolutely obvious and thus useless take (it will be warm because it will be in the middle of summer - California will remain blue), but you will not know the specifics of events close to the day, such as specific front forming in Arctic or whatnot and thus your predictions are useless until the very day. Silver's polls are useless to watch prior to election because they are for sure to be subject to wild swings so they are not really predictions in that sense, and they are useless to watch on election day because you will have results anyway very soon without needing to then put forth lame defense of how often 1:2 or 1:10 or 1:100 event happens.
Of course it is perfect for Silver's business, we have elections only every few years so it can take decades of data to prove that he is actually full of shit. By that time he will be multimillionaire, in that sense I say well played.
Nicely put post, it also touches one of my findings years back that basically all this fuss about utilitarianism EA style is mostly for its aesthetics and as an intellectual pastime, but potentially dangerous if somebody takes it too seriously. Yud himself even used the concept called Adding Up to Normality, he likes to use eating babies as such an example - if your utilitarian train of thought leads you to eating babies, then stop. Except of course this begs the question of why eating babies is such a sin? Child canibalism was considered as normal in some cultures, it is not as if an angel with fiery sword shows up and stops you if you think about it. But I like this example as you have these enlightened thinkers like Harris or Pinker and others - who already have some implicit moral system - and then just use utilitarianism to rationalize it, because Christianity or Judaism is so cringe. One issue I have here is that I am not sure if three generations down the road - when this background morality of "normality" disappears - we actually won't end up eating babies as the new normal. In the end we already consider flushing unborn babies down the drain as a normal thing in order for people to enjoy nice things in life without burden of parenthood - net positive for utils, right? Eating aborted fetuses for benefits that stem cells provide for human wellbeing is not as far fetched in this context. See, we are nicely getting there eventually.
Another issue I have with rule utilitarianism is that it is often indistinguishable from deontological moral system. In general most people don't have time, inclination or intellect to deeply investigate all their moral intuitions, so they end up just following some "utilitarian rules" like Christians follow ten commandments. Donate 10% of income also called tithe to your local church Effective Altruism where priests experts know best how to use it. Always ask yourself what would Jesus Peter Singer do. There is a lot of weird stuff going on, to me it feels as if we are just reinventing the wheel all the time, because traditional thinking was so backwards and we are now much more refined and sophisticated. Heck, St. Augustin did not even know who Bayes was. And after all this innovative thinking more often than not we just find out, that as in the spirit of the saying tradition is experiment that works we end up reconstructing it, often worse and clunkier.
An act is good if it follows the rule that leads to "good" outcome. Good outcome means maximizing utility, which according to Harris is described as "maximizing human flourishing" or at least "minimizing human suffering". Am I the only one who sees it as very religious style of thinking? Maximum flourishing is literally heaven - or at least heaven on Earth - and maximum suffering is literally hell. So if you want to be a good person then act so that you will bring about heaven as opposed to hell. And this is supposed to be rule utilitarianism as opposed to Christian deontology, mind you.
What do you mean by "relationship model"? I just googled polyamory and this is how it was defined:
Polyamory is a form of ethical, or consensual, non-monogamy that involves having romantic or sexual relationships with multiple partners at the same time. Ethical, or consensual, non-monogamy describes relationships in which all parties are aware of and consent to practice non-monogamy.
Yeah, to me that is about right in terms of how I thought about polyamory. It describes "relationship model" as that of open relationship, it also explicitly says that it is non-monogamous and also that it is practiced. I do not get the "identarian" argument here - to me polyamory can also mean that both partners openly and consensually bang other people. Also to me what Aella pushes can also be viewed as an identity - I someone can identify as nonrestrictive person although his partner never expressed any desire to fuck other people other than him. But he still may hate even a thought of him putting some restrictions on his partner hence he identifies as polyamorous despite him and his partner both living in exclusive and committed monogamous marriage for over 80 years now.
Plus this "identity" vs "relationship model" distinction is not as smart as it seems. A different example I saw somewhere recently are attempts at redefinition of gay/lesbian identity as something akin "sexual model" mostly in order not to offend trans people since "same sex attraction" as identity can be a thin ice to skate on nowadays. Supposedly saying "I enjoy fucking vulvas" is viewed as more hip in some spaces. It is not as if it is your fault that vulvas are attached to females, that is just a coincidence and it definitely does not tell anything about your "identity" and especially its relation to archaic concepts such as biological sex (as opposed to non-biological sex I guess?).
georgioz
7mo ago
The way I understand 2rafa's argument is that a woman that craves "normal" and traditional monogamous relationship is in a trap. In the modern environment she has to go out and risk getting burned by some sexual predator who will take advantage of her. A logical thing to do in such an environment may be to lash out utilizing available tools such as #MeeToo.
Some time ago there was an article here on The Mote by someone who pointed out to exactly this phenomenon using some Indian word. The phenomenon being demonstrated by an image of car cut in half used as a horse carriage complete with rubber wheels. It was too heavy and not suitable as a horse cart, but the new technology of car was successful enough to completely wipe out institutional knowledge of how to build a good horse carriage. So when a crisis came and fuel became too expensive so cars were not viable anymore, people used the tools available to them to put something together which was subpar to what was there before.
The example here is sexual behaviour where 2023, one such example is infamous sex consent app where people will be required to agree to a contract prior to having sex. If only there was an institutions where two people swore before witnesses that they are now in a relationship - including sexual one - voluntary and in full knowledge of consequences. So we will solve the situation surrounding sex and relationships with an app, because this is year 2023 and old things like marriage is no longer viable social technology anymore.
As others said, this is absurd version of the events at hand. If Ukraine loses this war, they are fucked in the same way Donetsk and Luhansk are fucked now, only worse. It may very well happen that they will end up according to the map that Medvedev shown with Ukraine being what Donetsk/Luhansk was in since 2014 - just a puppet state and source of expendable shock troops for the new Russian Empire. The next move? Putin attacks Moldova with forced conscripts from newly annexed Ukraine thus potentially solving two problems at once by expanding the territory and sending potential rebels into the meatgrinder. He already uses this tactics to some extent by conscripting mostly ethnic minorities and rural population. The same tactics Mao utilized when he sent surrendered Kuomintang soldiers to Korea: win-win scenario for him.
And we are not even talking about a scenario where Putin with his newfound strength may test the article 5 and actually conduct Baltic offensive on Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania. It is not as if NATO will fire nukes in face of conventional assault - so what will they do? Will Spaniards and French and Italians send enough troops to the meatgrinder to save some faraway countries? At worst Putin can always say "my bad, I just want part of Estonia and make peace" and play peacemaker or he can withdraw after testing the waters. It is not as if NATO countries will ever muster courage to actually wage full fledged war with the aim to physically oust Putin from Kremlin when he hides behind nuclear ICBMs and torpedoes. And in the meantime Putin will have enough Ukrainians to send ahead of his barrier troops.
Don't forget, things are never so bad that they cannot get worse.
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