guesswho
2yr ago
Sure, no one does math, but that's just a theoretical explanation of the ideal way to do decision theory in a world without limits on calculation.
Being a consequentialist just requires that you judge the morality of an act based on the empirical outcomes it has for the world, rather than judging it based on some abstract rule or by what virtues it exhibits or etc.
guesswho
2yr ago
Having read that, gosh isn't it great that there are utilitarians out there to save the world from us crazy deontologists?
Unironically yes.
Maybe the people who make a big deal about calling themselves utiliatarian and talk about it all the time (eg me) aren't the best examples, but if we didn't have someone guiding humanity who cared about good outcomes for people as a goal in-and-of-itself, we'd never have advanced very much as a civilization.
I guess we can quibble about what makes someone a utilitarian, I count people who intuitively have 'the overall well being of everyone' as the basis of their moral reasoning and goal structure, even if they've never heard of utilitarianism and don't do calculations on anything. Maybe you'd want to call those people something else.
guesswho
2yr ago
I honestly don't understand why the strategy has been to build Trump up as this massive threat with power, influence, and a horde of fanatically devoted followers who will vote for him no matter what. Wouldn't it have been better to insist that he was a has-been, washed-up, useless and incapable? Couldn't do anything while in power, so why vote for him again?
Partisanship is at very high levels historically, convincing people not to vote for their party's candidate is a losing battle (and correctly so, the most consequential thing Trump did was appoint Supreme Court justices and that was an astronomically huge win for his base even though literally anyone in his chair with a R by their name would have done the same thing).
The way you win is by driving up turnout for your own base. Which is what the scare tactics are for.
guesswho
2yr ago
Is there a mechanism for him to suspend elections and stay President forever? No.
I mean, get enough loyalty from the army, declare it, kill anyone who objects?
That's how it typically goes, right?
Sure, the US has historically been pretty resistant to this, and probably will continue to be, but it's not like there's no mechanism by which this could imaginably happen. History has plenty of examples.
guesswho
2yr ago
except four years of utterly futile attempts at action that are completely #Resisted by the permanent bureaucracy?
The problem is, Trumpism and MAGA have now had 8 years to take over the Republican party, and have efficiently marginalized all other factions of the party.
Much more of the permanent bureaucracy is now on Trump's side and comfortable with his tactics and ambitions, than were 3 years ago. The same is true for his Republican colleagues in Congress, the Judiciary, and various state and local governments.
There's every reason to think he will get much more cooperation from the rest of the government than he did during his last term. Bureaucratic turnover is slow for sure, but it does happen, especially when an insurgent movement in one of the parties is chasing out non-believers. This has absolutely been happening to Republican offices for the last 8 years.
Whether the process has proceeded far enough for him to accomplish any of the horror scenarios Dems are predicting is probably impossible to tell. But the odds are definitely much higher than they were 3 years ago, people are not wrong to notice that and point it out.
Status quo bias is ussually correct, and probably will be again; but it's still just a heuristic, you can actually notice things about your environment and reason about whether they undermine it this time.
guesswho
2yr ago
I don't think the GG side was claiming to be evil and stupid?
Almost everyone is claiming moral and intellectual superiority almost always, those are the two main reasons people claim to be on any side of any argument. I would think?
I mean, yeah, I think the heart of the GG movement was trolls trying to harass and victimize women in retaliation for entering their cultural spaces, but my impression is that everyone on the other side vehemently denies that and claims that GG was a lofty movement rooting out corruption and tearing down the lies and abuses of the SJWs.
And the same for the anti-gg side, they claim themselves to be lofty defenders of etc etc blah blah and the other side calls them sjw snowflakes cancel culture etc etc blah blah.
There was a popular media narrative that proclaimed one side the good guys, sure; but both sides were claiming to be the good guys in their own rhetoric.
Also, on another note: We applaud the old-school ACLU for protecting the rights of Nazis to hold parades because we recognize that they were fully committed to defending one specific ideal, an ideal that was incredibly important to have someone protecting, and they didn't cares who's 'side' this put them on along any other axis. We decried them more recently abandoning this purity of ideology and considering other factors in their allegiances.
There's an angle from which defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption is not different from defending a saint against false charges of corruption. If the charges are false and you are restricting your defense to those charges, someone should be there to stand up for the truth and the integrity of the system that produces and considers those charges.
Of course, anonymous internet flame wars with millions of participants are never that clean. Obviously even if 99% of anti-gg people carefully restrict their defense to the charges of 'corruption in games journalism' alone, that's still 100,000 of the stupidest 1% producing memeable screenshots defending them against the pedo charges or saying they're a great person or whatever else.
Just like there are 100,000 screenshots of the vilest 1% of the gg side making rape threats and posting pictures of women's houses and etc. etc.
Whether a side can be fairly judged by screenshots of its worst members is an eternal question in these types of debates, and a surprisingly complex one once you get into the weeds on it.
guesswho
2yr ago
I once made it to mythic on MTG Arena for Historic Constructed, although only for a short time and now I only draft.
guesswho
2yr ago
Frankly, reflexively defending someone with the rest of your in-group simply because your out-group attacked them does not have good foundations of any sort.
Well, I would agree that believing something is correct because people like you/on your side believe it is double-counting evidence and improper.
However, I'm not sure that generalizes to discounting attacks, which are different from neutral beliefs. People who make the most vocal and virulent attacks against a side are not ussually the ones most motivated by a dispassionate commitment to the truth alone, and their vitriolic attacks are often motivated by more-extreme-than-median beliefs about the thing they are attacking.
These are reasons to expect that an attack will be less likely to be accurate than the median belief of the defender in general. I certainly admit that the most virulent attackers on my own side are often wrong or being misleading about my opponents, in ways that often make me cringe or make me angry at them. This belief about my own side's bulldogs being unreliable transfers to my beliefs about the other side's bulldogs.
There's also something to be said about when it is sensible to believe that your own side is more likely to be correct about something from the outside view, and I think this judgement often falls with defenders rather than attackers.
For example, I think people who personally know a lot of trans people well or follow a lot of trans creators or etc. are more likely to be in favor of trans rights than people who don't, and also that this personal knowledge makes them on average better informed about the topic.
On the other hand, I think strict gun control is probably a pretty good idea that would save a lot of lives, but I also know that the people who disagree with me know way more than I do about guns and gun culture, and so I actively discount my confidence in my position there and rarely advocate about this topic (or try to give this caveat when I do so).
I think it's often true that familiarity and actual knowledge breeds defense and allegiance more often than the opposite, and this gives defenders on average an epistemic advantage form the outside view.
Of course, there's an extent to which everything I have said are just-so stories that can be pulled out to justify one's own beliefs, but conveniently forgotten when those beliefs are challenged. I could tell a different story appealing to the metaphor of an investigative journalist, claiming that most people are happy to lazily believe whatever propaganda is convenient to them at the moment, and that the most virulent attackers are ussually the ones who have bothered to do their own research and actually found the proof of the problems that need to be addressed.
On the whole, I think my initial bent towards defenders is more often true, though both definitely happen; I would be less skeptical of the investigative journalist metaphor if attacking the other side wasn't so much fun that lots and lots of people seem to spend all their time doing it without any personal expertise justifying it, swamping the signal there.
I tend to believe, however, that this lack of knowledge was because they actively decided not to look at or consider any of the evidence although, again, it was readily available to them at the time, then formed their own opinions based almost solely on preconception. It was wilful ignorance borne out of tribal partisanship that caused them to defend this, and that definitely deserves scorn.
I certainly believe that, BUT, I believe it about both sides of the issue equally.
If 99% of the people on both sides are participating in the flame war without really bothering to do the level of research needed to form truly independent opinions, then I'm not sure that the ones who coincidentally happened to be on the right side are any more virtuous than the ones on the wrong side. Perhaps if one side was consistently correct in these types of battles, and allegiance was based on observing that; but I definitely don't think that's true with regards to GG, it was a complete fiasco where both sides believed tons of wrong things at various points.
(or at least, that is my belief having lived through it, and I don't have any real desire to try to hindsight-argue about it now)
guesswho
2yr ago
A fact which often has good Bayesian foundations!
Given epistemic learned helplessness and the ability of the internet to invent narratives and fabricate 'evidence', considering the motives of the source when you hear a surprising piece of information meant to motivate you towards some action is often a good idea.
If the KKK attacks someone for being black, and that person also happens to be a pedophile but very few people know that and the evidence of it is currently hotly debated, a lot of people will take issue with the KKK attacking them for being black.
10 years later, anyone who feels like it can go back and curate a narrative about that and say 'hey look, they were defending a pedophile'.
/shrug. Not all victims are good people, that doesn't mean you do a full background check and wait for consensus to form before trying to protect them. Even if, yes, that will sometimes get used against you in hindsight.
If someone defends Andrew Tate while saying they don't believe him to be a sex trafficker, I give them the benefit of the doubt and say they defend a right-wing asshole and are probably suffering from motivated reasoning in evaluating him. I don't say that they defend sex traffickers.
guesswho
2yr ago
Basically, socialist/communist and social progressive are separate axes, even if the right tends to hate them both and thus views them as largely confounded.
My question is, is there a locally-famous court case about someone being killed in a traffic accident and the driver blaming their poor driving on sleep apnea, which is the foundational myth behind this law?
Was some past governor or State Senate official the brother of a guy that sold CPAP machines?
Where did this come from?
EDIT: Actually, the Maryland DMV page on this topic makes me think it's less that this is the law in Maryland, and more that the DMV's Medical Advisory Board has some latitude to work with individual drivers to come up with individualized solutions, and this is just one case of one individual bureaucrat coming up with a really stupid and invasive solution for one individual victim.
guesswho
2yr ago
'There is an ongoing criminal investigation' is also a good post-hoc theory for 'why does the NFL not want anyone talking about this incident', which if I recall was the question we were discussing at the time.
guesswho
2yr ago
Where on the chain of charity does 'These posts were partially/fully produced by AI summarization tools' fall?
That's my pet theory (people try to sell my company tools that do stuff like this all the time), though I don't place huge likelihood on it.
guesswho
2yr ago
So, I applaud you for finding the original source and figuring out what was going on, but...
This is basically a single bulletpoint at the very bottom of a corporate blog post written by the CEO of a tutoring agency.
I don't strongly expect anything written by a CEO on their corporate blog to be factually accurate, that's really not the point of the medium.
In this case it's plausibly just that the CEO is not a scientist and can't read data and made a mistake, or maybe was sinisterly trying to make white reading comprehension look low so white parents buy their product or investors think they have a larger market or something.
But, basically: yeah, the internet is full of crap and misinformation everywhere you look, most often through incompetence rather than malice. It would be a big deal if a politician or major news outlet repeated the wrong stat, but the actual sources you're linking are performing at about the level of competence I expect from them (little to none).
Also, on the 'how did this happen' question: I'm the guy who sits in on meetings with vendors trying to sell my company 'AI workflow solutions' that do things like write automated summaries (yes, even with graphs and charts!) of papers/legislation/articles/pdfs/powerpoints/etc that you feed into them, so that you can send executive summaries to your managers or post them online as marketing.
I'm not saying I can tell that either of these sources were created by/with the help of AI, but AI products are being sold to companies that do similar-looking things.
guesswho
2yr ago
I don't think wokes are the only people who choose their political rhetoric based on consequentialist aims.
Just for example, I think the average use of the word 'woke' by a politician or pundit on the right is aimed at a consequentialist goal (rallying the base, pushing a narrative) rather than it being a meaningful term used carefully and precisely to optimal describe a situation.
People get involved with industries that are trying to change the world because they care about the state of the world. This is true on all sides of every issue.
Asking people who care about the state of the world and want to change it, to not be consequentialist when considering their rhetoric and actions, is sort of definitionally a losing fight.
guesswho
2yr ago
I don't know what you mean by 'original promise', whether that's a single specific document or a general sense that most of the public got from reading hundreds of politicians and pundits talk about the matter, or what.
Not that I'm totally disagreeing, I'm sure there are some specific groups involved who were either lying or mistaken about what course things would take and didn't project it looking exactly like it does today. Which isn't teh same thing as the whole enterprise being deceptive from the start, I don't know enough of how it was proposed to judge that either way, would be interested to learn more if you are thinking about a specific document or speech.
I think there should be a principled difference between 'this is a slippery slope' and 'this was sold using deceptive rhetoric'.
If so far nothing crazy has happened, and nothing that the original proposers wouldn't have been happy with has happened, and it's only been a short time since it was implemented, then I'm not sure that's evidence that it will slide into crazy things that the original proposers would not want.
It just sounds like original proposers were downplaying how big the change would be, which is bad because it's dishonest, but not strong evidence of an ongoing trajectory.
Anyway, if the proposition is 'Canada has proven that the government can't be trusted with medical decisions involving life or death', then I think I'd have to see the Canadian government do something objectionable before it was strong evidence of that. Not just 'it's being used in sensible ways that weren't originally specified'.
(of course, maybe you believe the current way Canada is using it is objectionable in and of itself. That's something I'd be interested to hear more about, but it's a different argument than the slippery slope argument)
guesswho
2yr ago
“We can’t accept one true claim before you withdraw another claim that sounds low-status right-wing”?
"I won't choose to use my cultural and political influence on pursuits that will lead to outcomes I disagree with".
It's not just about those beliefs being low-status because of who currently expresses them. The political alignment between anti-Islam sentiment and anti-Muslim politics is strong enough that effectively attacking Islam will actually, consequentially, assist anti-Muslim policy proposals and cultural pundits.
You can caveat every statement you ever make on the topic with 'This is not anti-Muslim, just anti-Islam." But caveats rarely work. The average reader will not be able to completely disassociate those in your head, and will end up with stronger anti-Muslim priors after reading it. And anti-Muslim groups will quote sections of your anti-Islam arguments out of context and with no caveats in sight to support their anti-Muslim arguments.
Political narratives and alliances are real, consequential things. You decide to unilaterally ignore them for yourself, but you can't unilaterally force the rest of the world not to be influenced by them when they are interpreting and reacting to your content.
guesswho
2yr ago
I largely agree that mockery and blasphemy are good routes to undermining any religion.
But I also think that it's easier for that project to start in places like the US that already have relatively a lot of free speech, and which export a lot of culture globally.
And the primary thing stopping that from happening here is folks on the right linking hatred and mockery of Islam with hatred and legal restrictions on Muslims. Elite thought-leaders, Hollywood content creators, and rabid social media teens are never going to get on board with the project as long as it's synonymous with right-wing shibboleths like that.
If the rhetoric switched from 'Islam sucks so all Muslims are dangerous and we shouldn't let them immigrate' to 'Islam sucks so we should let Muslims escape its grasp by coming here to learn our ways instead,' you'd still get some number of lefties complaining about that stance on social media, sure, but you'd get a lot more leeway to attack the religion on its own merits.
And you'd also recruit a lot more westernized Muslims to the cause, which would help it spread back to the homelands.
guesswho
2yr ago
I expect there will be enough people reading headlines that just say 'attackers trying to break into Biden's daughter's car' without getting to the third paragraph where it says 'unoccupied' that you'll see a lot of lefty social media users saying it was justified and was probably MAGA extremists and generally being confused.
guesswho
2yr ago
Taboos (an old fashioned word, you can also describe this category as "infohazard" or maladaptive training data which derails your brain software) are best preserved not by studying them in ever increasing detail, but by making them unthinkable.
Right, and creating a new taboo can often be done by appealing to an existing taboo and trying to draw an emotional connection between them, so that this unthinking revulsion gets spread to the new thing you're trying to eradicate.
That's the whole point of this line of argument, to try to do that to factory farming.
I dunno, if it's a battle for civilization you should probably use guns, instead of anonymous comments on an obscure message board.
I do think that what happens in online discussion/debate spaces like this is consequential in that it is a part of the process that produces our culture's priorities and values and beliefs, but it's a very small part of a very big process. The stakes are correspondingly much smaller.
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