orca-covenant
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User ID: 1931
orca-covenant
1mo ago
I'm not convinced of that; pessimistic estimates quite easily result in fewer than 1 advanced civilization per galaxy.
orca-covenant
1mo ago
There was plenty of lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating in times and places when theistic faith was most ascendant. Do you think Renaissance Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Ottoman Empire had none of that? Members of the Sicilian Mafia all consider themselves scrupulous Catholics. You may say they are not, in fact, good Catholics (and I would agree, and AFAIK so does the chief of the Catholic Church), but convincing them that God is watching them would not stop their crimes, because they already believe that. People usually think their behavior is either righteous or at least justified by the circumstances; the thought does not become "I better not not burn down that store, God would punish me"; it becomes "Let's burn down that store, it's what anybody would do in my place, actually it's a pretty good idea, God will be happy I'm not a pushover".
orca-covenant
1mo ago
You just need to coordinate society such that
"Just"? Pardon me, but you might as well say that to lift mount Everest you just need to push up very hard.
orca-covenant
1mo ago
I don't suppose anyone in this thread is going to consider the idea that attractiveness is largely subjective? This discussion feels like reading "Bananas are delicious, if you disagree get your head checked!" "What are you saying? Bananas taste vile, you idiot".
orca-covenant
1mo ago
IMO that's an interesting but rather strange objection. Doesn't the presence of angels and demons require more flaws in the scientific understanding of physics than fast interstellar travel, not fewer?
orca-covenant
1mo ago
The Fermi calculation is a multiplication of numbers most of which have an uncertainty that spans several orders of magnitude. One can derive any outcome from "there's a civilization in 99% of star systems" to "one civilization every 10,000 galaxies" just by using more optimistic or pessimistic numbers.
orca-covenant
1mo ago
I don't believe in God either and my answer would be:
I would very much rather not get murdered, nor any of my loved ones or people I respect get murdered. I generally would like to live in a society with as little murder as possible, trading off with other considerations (e.g. the cost of law enforcement). This would also favor various things I vaue in addition to not-dying. I can also expect most people in my society to have similar preferences, but inolving different sets of individuals; it is fairly easy to collectively agree on a policy of "no murder", but not on one of "no murder of people orca-covenant likes". Every exception I carve out for myself, other people can carve for themselves. (Since people may have different preferences, the general principle is actually a policy of respecting people's preferences as much as possible, with not-being-murdered as an especially strong and stable example.)
In accordance with utilitarianism-but-not-the-dumbest-type, I also oppose murder in edge cases where it lead to short-term benefits, except in ultra-edge cases where 1) it has disproportionately large benefits (e.g. kill Hitler to end the Holocaust), 2) it's not possible to achieve the same benefits without murder, and 3) both 1) and 2) can be known with a very high degree of confidence, taking into account how often people are wrong about them (so, in practice, basically never).
orca-covenant
1mo ago
Infanticide was plenty common even long after Christ, possibly as late as the 19th century. But zoophilia? I'll admit I don't know of any society in which sex with non-human animals was widespread and accepted. The two instances I can think of are some cases of damnatio ad bestias in the Roman Empire (but that was intended to be a gruesome punishment, and probably worked as spectacle because it broke taboos) and a certain Vedic ritual in which a queen had to couple with a sacrificed horse (but that was a very specific and probably very rare ritual, and certainly not something widespread in society).
orca-covenant
2mo ago
Why should nice people who happened to catch jury duty need a splash of Smith's blood on them?
Because they're the ones who voted to spill it, presumably.
orca-covenant
3mo ago
Killing a billion people would presumably make you several additional enemies among the people you didn't kill.
orca-covenant
3mo ago
I happened to be in China for work last summer during the national holiday -- anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic -- and to my surprise there was not a single mention of Mao, or any other specific figure, neither by name nor by image. The only words plastered everywhere were a thoroughly innocuous "I love China". His face is still on the money, of course, but physical cash is being phased out fairly quickly.
orca-covenant
3mo ago
Ah, nevermind, then. Thanks for the context.
orca-covenant
3mo ago
Might be a definition issue. Obviously I don't know the specifics of that discussion, but the person might have meant "useful" as in the "all models are wrong, but some are useful" (i.e., "useful" in the sense that they can be used to build theorems on or make falsifiable hypotheses), rather than in the sense of "having practical applications". If so, I'd be tempted to agree.
orca-covenant
3mo ago
That seems extremely dependent on fads of the time and initial axioms, honestly (which divine authority are you going to take? On what subjects?) -- are experiences of divine revelations less tied to what is currently popular than experimental results?
orca-covenant
3mo ago
It seems to me that you arrive at whatever is convenient to the politics of the time, since Reason can be used to justify practically anything well depending on your starting priors.
Not wrong, but what alternative is there to Reason that is independent from fads of its time and from initial axioms?
orca-covenant
4mo ago
This is a very interesting argument, but I don't think "if it's acceptable for people to voluntarily perform an action for money, then it must be acceptable to force them at gunpoint to perform that action in the most dangerous possible conditions with no compensation" would be considered compelling for any line of work.
orca-covenant
4mo ago
If we're discussing progressives, then we need to explain why they feel justified in saying certain type of gross behavior should be illegal when they've spent the last few decades telling us that people behaving in a gross manner should not be jailed or discriminated against.
Because in this case they see a reason other than grossness to make it illegal. It is certainly a progressive tenet, although one that many people who call themselves progressives often forgo, that one should not be punished only for behaving in a way that others find gross or distasteful. It does not follow that no behavior that others find gross or distasteful should ever be punished. AIUI (might be mistaken), the Bible forbids murder on the grounds that it offends God to destroy something that is created in His image. This rationale makes no sense if one does not believe in the divine creation of humans. Nevertheless, people who don't believe that still have reasons for wanting murder to be forbidden and prosecuted. It does little good to say "But you're fine with sinning against God's creation in this case [eating blood pudding], so why are you not fine with sinning against God's creation in this other one [mass shooting]?"
orca-covenant
4mo ago
Genetic problems from incestuous relations is a problem. There is no comparable problem for people of one culture interacting with people from that same culture.
I don't know. The physical problem with sustained inbreeding is the pathologies that occur when recessive genes with the same harmful mutation are paired together, and low genetic diversity in a group makes it more vulnerable to pathogens and less flexible when conditions changes. It's not absurd to make an analogy with cultural and social diversity. If people get all their memes from the same metaphorically-inbred pool than deleterious memes are harder to identify and lose, and it becomes harder to generate new ones. A society with low cultural and intellectual diversity would allow viral memes to spread more easily, would be very vulerable to social pathologies that different societies could avoid, and would have fewer resources to deal with changes in circumstances.
orca-covenant
5mo ago
Problem is you have no way of telling which action results in less suffering.
It's certainly easier to check, with a confidence high but lesser than 1, whether an action results in suffering than whether it's inherently Virtuous or whether God approves of it.
orca-covenant
5mo ago
then your definition of honor is so selective as to be meaningless, and I suspect it really just boils to people you agree with
If the goodness of a cause is too subjective to judge people from, what makes honor any better a standard? The concept of honor also varies quite a lot from time to time and from place to place -- it's not like one can't construct a coherent definition of honor that does not include Lee's conduct.
orca-covenant
6mo ago
I feel it would be a strange choice to represent Americans as a whole by a man who fought in a war specifically to not be American. (Assuming by "America" you refer to the United States of America and not to the American continent as a whole, but in the latter case I don't see how you can't consider Hispanics to be not American too). I'll admit I'm not American in either sense, so there might well be a third interpretation I haven't thought of yet.
orca-covenant
6mo ago
The founding Fathers were white nationalists.
Worth noting that at least Benjamin Franklin's definition of "White" would have excluded French people, Russians, Swedes, and Bavarians -- quite different from how it would be used today.
orca-covenant
6mo ago
Seconded on every point. (I can't think of a way to make me hate a book and its protagonist any faster than the text spelling out that you're supposed to like the protagonist and that only bad people dislike them.) Red Mars + Green Mars (Blue Mars was not terrible, but felt a bit like an overgrown appendix of the former) and The Years of Rice and Salt are wonderful, though.
orca-covenant
6mo ago
I suspect:
Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. (Matthew 16:28, and Mark 9:1, NIV)
“Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” ... Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. (Matthew 24:34, NIV)
Group selection, AIUI, only works when selective advantage for groups traits is stronger than selective advantage of individual traits. This is generally not the case because 1) individuals reproduce faster than groups and 2) individual heredity is much more reliable than group heredity. Strong pressure on groups is not necessarily sufficient to counter these two factors. That said, the situation is different if the group selection is in fact kin selection, in which the component individuals of a group have a high probability of sharing the genes being selected for.
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