orca-covenant
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User ID: 1931
orca-covenant
10mo ago
Admittedly passwords make for something like an ideal case for torture in that they can be easily communicated in full and be quickly and unambiguously checked for correctness. I don't know if any other kind of information meets those requirements. Overall, given precedents, I think a blanket ban on judiciary torture is worth a lot more than the marginal improvements in investigation effectiveness, even from a coldly utilitarian perspective, much like a blanket ban on killing patients to harvest their organs is well worth the loss of a small number of additional organs, even if those are perfectly good for use.
orca-covenant
10mo ago
I did once find a study comparing the use of torture in Spanish Inquisition vs. modern USA, which concluded that the former was much more effective because of differences in methods and social context. I hope you will pardon me if I copypaste another a post of mine from elsewhere:
There’s this paper claiming (in the case of the Spanish Inquisition) that there are circumstances in which torture can yield reliable and verifiable information, but only in a very specific setting that is very different from, say, yanking a suspect in an alley and beating a confession out of them. You need extensive prior investigation until you have most of the facts available but think that someone is still withholding information; you need to torture multiple people, repeatedly, while comparing and verifying all the statements you extracted between each instance. At that point you might as well scrap the torture and still be left with the vast majority of reliable information.
Even then, you’ll still end up torturing a large number of innocents, and you will learn very little in the process you didn’t already know. And you will inevitably end up a vast, overbearing police state where everyone lives in terror.
Inquisitors tortured for different reasons, with different goals, based on different assumptions, and in a social, political, and religious setting entirely alien to that of modern interrogators…
The Inquisition put in place a vast bureaucratic apparatus designed to collect and assess information about prohibited practices. It tortured comprehensively, inflicting suffering on large swaths of the population. It tortured systematically, willing to torment all whom it deemed to be withholding evidence, regardless of how severe their heresy was or how significant the evidence was that they were withholding. The Inquisition did not torture because it wanted to fill gaps in its records by tormenting a new witness. On the contrary: it tortured because its records were comprehensive enough to indicate that a witness was withholding evidence.
This torture yielded information that was often reliable and falsifiable: names, locations, events, and practices witnesses provided in the torture chamber matched information provided by those not tortured. But despite the tremendous investment in time, money, and labor that the Inquisition invested in institutionalizing torture, its officials treated the results of interrogations in the torture chamber with skepticism. Tribunals tortured witnesses at the very end of a series of investigations, and they did not rely on the resulting testimony as a primary source of evidence.
This systematic, dispassionate, and meticulous torture stands in stark contrast to the “ticking bomb” philosophy that has motivated US torture policy in the aftermath of 9/11… US interrogators expected to uncover groundbreaking information from detainees: novel, crucial, yet somehow trustworthy. That is an unverifiable standard of intelligence that the Inquisition, despite its vast bureaucratic apparatus and centuries of institutional learning, would not have trusted.
The Inquisition functioned in an extraordinary environment. Its target population was confined within the realms of an authoritarian state in which the Inquisition wielded absolute authority and could draw on near-unlimited resources. The most important of these resources was time… It could afford to spend decades and centuries perfecting its methods and dedicate years to gathering evidence against its prisoners… Should US interrogators aspire to match the confession rate of the Inquisition’s torture campaign, they would have to emulate the Inquisition’s brutal scope and vast resources… one cannot improvise quick, amateurish, and half-hearted torture sessions, motivated by anger and fear, and hope to extract reliable intelligence. Torture that yields reliable intelligence requires a massive social, political, and financial enterprise founded on deep ideological and political commitments. That is the cost of torture.
(an interesting point is that, while the “ticking time bomb” is the scenario most commonly given as justification for torture, it also happens to be the scenario in which torture is least likely to work, because you don’t know if you have the right person, the suspect - especially if guilty - knows they have to resist for a brief time, and you can’t verify any statement until it’s too late)
End copypaste.
orca-covenant
10mo ago
The world has no obligation to be just, but it has no obligation to be maximally unjust either: it may be suspiciously convenient that sacrificing children to Moloch for rain doesn't work, but it also happens to be true.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Under what conditions and in what contexts?
That is the key part: in such a case, the status of X as Y applies only to a particular context for a particular purpose. Formulating that question as "Is X a real Y?" obfuscates that by turning Y-ness into an inherent, universal, and permanent quality of X.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
I'm of the opinion that once you start debating what is or isn't a "real" member of a given category, it's time to switch to E-prime or else risk No true Scotsman-ing your way from Orkney to Newcastle.
I agree, and I would say that every question of the form "Is X a real Y?" should be treated in the same way as one of those "Is a hotdog a sandwich?" that you see around on the web.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Pardon the question, and I hope it doesn't come across as too provocatory, but -- if there were evidence that believing every statement made by modern Progressivism made your life easier, and on the balance made you happier -- would you then go through this process in order to become a sincere Progressivist?
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Indeed, most unicellular beings reproduce asexually, so they share 100% of genes with their kin, barring new mutations. Most instances of primitive multicellularity derive from cells dividing but remaining physically connected, so all cells in the colony are genetically identical.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Wouldn't that depend on the context the term is used? "Room for rent, looking for people with a prostate" I agree is bizarre and dehumanizing; but "People with a prostate should occasionally get tested for prostate cancer" seems to me pretty reasonable, and if anything more precise than any plausible alternative. Similarly, I wouldn't be caught dead using "people who menstruate" as a term to refer to women in general, but something like "people who menstruate are at a greater risk for anhaemia" is if anything better targeted advice than "women are at a greater etc." (I think, I'm not an expert on anhaemia), given that a fairly large fraction of women do not menstruate and therefore are not the subject of that statement.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Frankly, this is entirely too essentialist about humans for me. If someone had, say, a genetic abnormality that caused them to develop a different number of limbs it seems to me it would be in that individuals nature to have that different number of limbs. There might be commonalities of human experience and existence but whatever our "nature" is, it is in us not some metaphysical model from which we deviate.
A common assumption in this kind of discourse, taking after Plato I presume, is that there is an abstract, immaterial essence of humanness or manness or womanness which actual humans and men and women in the material world may reflect more or less perfectly, but which nevertheless exists independently of any physical instance. I think you reject this assumption, and if so I agree; it's one thing to speak of a typical human that has four limbs as a useful generalization, but humans with three or five limbs exist no less than humans with four, they are just fewer in number. If a rule has exceptions, it's because the rule fails to describe reality in full, not because reality fails to conform to the rule.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
All life on Earth is remarkably compact when it comes to biochemistry, fundamental pathways of metabolism and biosynthesis, and genetics. In particular, the genetic code (the rule translating sequences of nucleotides into sequences of aminoacids) is almost identical in all living species, despite being, as far as we know, arbitrary.
Multiple abiogeneses might very well have occurred, but in that case it seems the product of one has assimilated or destroyed the products of the others -- or perhaps, the products of multiple events have mixed together so tightly, in a period in which organisms were a lot more porous and promiscuous than even modern bacteria, that the different components cannot be told apart.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Even a single universe still contains quintillions of planets, in which potential abiogenesis would take place almost completely independently, so I'm not sure it would be correct to consider a single universe a single chance for the emergence of life.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Agreed -- in my (certainly imperfect and second-hand) understanding, even if the Overall Culture is broadly opposed to LGBT discrimination, most of it occurs in local/familiar settings where the OC has little reach.
If I emulated him, I should not hesitate to feed my own child first, even upon the corpses of my neighbors’ children. I should lie and cheat and steal and murder in game-theoretically optimal ways to bestow upon my children as many resources as possible, that they should not themselves end up in chains or on the dinner plate.
Well, isn't that the point? You defect against your competitors, but it turns out that your neighbor also cares about their children, and if they cannot trust you to leave theirs alone...
Of course in practice everyone defects a bit and cooperates a bit, because the payoff matrix is different in every interaction we have and at every scale of analysis (and it's not like we are automata flawlessly crunching number; the payoff matrix is filtered through layers of instinct, emotions, and memes). I think -- and there's room for disagreement here -- that Hitler became the ultimate evil of the modern world because he was the Defectorest Defector who ever Defected. He openly poured contempt on the very idea of cooperation, mutual trade, or symbiosis, let alone altruism or charity; he celebrated death, violence, and suffering as the only aspects of human existence worth protecting; and his favorite, his only solution to any disagreement or conflict of interest was destruction of the enemy, for in his worldview there was nothing but Us and Enemy.
And what did all this defection brought him? Death, violence, and suffering in unimaginable amounts, not only for his outgroup, but for his ingroup as well. He flouted one international treaty after the other, landing on him in more wars than he could handle. He deliberately broke the most important peace treaty he had secured, opening a massive war front before he was finished with the other. He committed pointless atrocities while the war was still ongoing, to the point of convincing millions of Soviet citizens that Stalin was the lesser evil after all. He diverted resources away from the army toward the mass murder of prisoners, both weakening the army and ensuring that the enemies fought to the death, since they could not expect mercy. He forbid his troops from surrendering even when that resulted in being slaughtered. And what was the result, for the ingroup he was trying to serve? Germany occupied and divided, a generation of its men wiped out, its cities charred wastelands, cursing his own name forever. That's what defecting as hard as possible, rejecting even the slightest opportunity of cooperation, gets you.
Of course Hitler was the Ultimate Defector only at one level, nation (or race) vs. nation. Below that level, he was quite explicit that you should shovel your own children into the fire if that benefitted the Fatherland. "Isn't that what young men are for?", he said. And burn they did, those young men. Perhaps refusing even that level of cooperation would be better for you? Taken literally, "Me and my brother against my cousin" quickly results in destruction of your own genes, but even "Me and my tribe against the world, etc." gets you tribal Afghanistan, or possibly Mafia clans. Granted, Pashtun tribes managed to survive and preserve their culture against incredible odds, and there is something impressive and admirable in that. But they don't have many chances of doing anything but survive, except when they start broadening their circle of cooperation.
Because in the end your choice is not just between sacrificing other people's children to save yours, and sacrificing yours to save them; there is such a thing as positive-sum interactions. Even when fights to the death come, it's usually the side that harnesses best the power of cooperation that prevails. Neandertals could craft tools as well as Homo sapiens, and were much larger and stronger, to boot. The hallmarks of our species, as far as I know, were more complex figurative language, longer-distance trade, and larger social groups, in short instruments of cooperation. Similarly, hunter-gatherers were much healthier and better fed than early farmers, but farmers could organize in larger numbers and act on a larger scale. At any level of selection, cooperation, if you can get it, usually beats any amount of individual badassery. Cooperating between individuals makes stronger families, cooperating between families makes stronger communities, cooperating between communities makes stronger countries, and why wouldn't cooperating between countries make a stronger, richer world?
Pardon me if this is a bit rambling, it's been a long day.
EDIT: small fixes.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Would you rather live in a world where people make some effort to avoid unnecessary suffering, or one in which they don't? Not going to complain if you disagree, but I find this is more than enough justification.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
Thanks for clarifying.
orca-covenant
11mo ago
The Orthodox Church (Roman or Eastern?) also took active part in quite a lot of that killing and torturing that RandomRanger mentioned above, though. If His Holiness the Bishop of Rome is the one who decides who does and does not count as a Christian, for example, I don't think you then get to claim that Innocent III o Julius II does not qualify as one.
Not exactly the same career, but -- won't someone who spent most of their youth learning no skills that are not crime-related, socializing with nobody except other criminals, and is actively discouraged from finding non-criminal jobs and forming non-criminal social connections even after leaving prison, be rather unlikely to become a highly productive member of society, even if they strongly wish to?
I realize this is an extremely minor and tangential point, but...
Take another example - "evolution is just a theory." A Bible basher may take this expression to mean that "evolution is just a guess," whereas a scientist may understand this phrase to mean, "evolution is a falsifiable hypothesis that has been verified through empirical study and evidence." The Bible basher simply does not understand the academic definition of the term "theory;"
... every "Bible basher" I've met to date knew quite well what "theory" means in a scientific context; "evolution is just a theory" are not, in my experience, the words of scientists expressing a properly humble understanding of the physical world, but of precisely the people who need the scientific definition of "theory" explained to them.
EDIT: I'm open to seeing counterexamples, of course.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
There's an interesting hypothesis (postdating Diamond? I think I loaned out my GGS copy a decade ago and never ended up getting it back...) that potatoes (even better nutritionally than corn) might not have been an advantage for civilization in particular because "leave it in the ground until you need it" doesn't reward the sorts of planning and storage and trading and so forth that lead to large scale social organization ... but maize is the same sort of "harvest it in season and dry it and store it" crop as the Old World grains.
Sounds like a hypothesis mentioned in James Scott's Against the Grain. (Although, weren't potatoes a staple on the famously centralized Inca empire? I might be wrong)
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Sure, you can describe a nuclear bomb like that, but could you explain them why it would be likely to work, and why it is something they should find likely and concerning, and not just a lurid fantasy?
If this description is accurate, than this would imply that Marines are a much greater threat to their own society than subway hobos, at least per capita. Being gratified by killing and mutilation, and being likely to uncontrolledly resort to it upon provocation, sounds far, far worse than being unable to hold a job and a home or being numbed by drugs.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Not to the same degree. There's probably no way to avoid discussions on whether convicts/undocumented immigrants/17-years-olds/etc. should or shouldn't be allowed to vote, but granting multiple votes per person can increase without bounds -- if your opponents give two votes per person to their constituency, then you can give yours five, and then they can give theirs ten, and so on.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
that, for example, chickens are meat automatons; that no chicken possess an even-for-a-chicken subjective experience of being... i'm mostly sure of the same of cows... same for the pork.
On what grounds? As far as I know, the physiology of pain responses is not significantly different between humans and non-human vertebrates, and a subjective experience of pain explains their behavior in response to harm at least as well as the alternative. We can't of course know for a fact what goes on in the head of other species, but that goes for humans as well.
i'm sure enough right now animals can't suffer we shouldn't change anything, but when lab-grown meat is commonly available the possibility animals have been suffering is enough to demand action? that would mean my argument in truth is "animals are probably suffering, but what are you gonna do, go vegan?" that doesn't hold ethically.
It doesn't seem all that contradictory to me. You can very well say that eating animal meat is justified if (Utility of eating animals - utility of not eating animals) > (harm of eating animals - harm of not eating animals) * probability of that harm occurring (to cover the possibility that you're right about animal suffering). Widespread availability of lab-grown meat will increase the utility of not eating animals by providing a hopefully satisfactory alternative, thus decreasing the relative value of eating them, while the harm would be unchanged.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Religious people, I can at least understand are kneecapping their worldly pleasures on the promise of some mythical afterlife of eternal bliss. It's a silly reason, but it is a reason. But you? You're just making your life harder and yourself more miserable for essentially no reason at all.
Is one's personal gain the only admissible reason to ever do something?
Then I guess we agree after all, especially about the nitpicking. Cheers!
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