orca-covenant
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User ID: 1931
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
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
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.
orca-covenant
2mo 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
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
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
9mo ago
For most of human history, most visions of war were written down by the warrior aristocracy that got the best training, the best weapons, and the best treatment when made prisoners. I'm sure the young baron who grew up with tales of chivalry was having a blast when he rode into battle on a 800 kg warhorse, clad head to toe in glimmering steel; the dozen peasant conscripts armed with a rusty sickle that he trampled on his way there might have had a different perspective (or for that matter their families, who could look forward to starvation when their crops and tools had been burned, their livestock slaughtered, and half their workforce murdered).
Outside of that warrior aristocracy, it's not that difficult to find moral opposition to war, even in antiquity:
It is considered wrong to murder one man, and there is capital punishment for this crime. Then the crime of killing ten men is ten times as bad as that of killing one, and the punishment should be also ten times as much. The crime of murdering one hundred persons is one hundred times as bad, and the punishment should be also one hundred times as much. At this time, in this case, every gentleman under the heaven knows how to condemn it, and calls it wrong or crime.
But the greatest crime is to invade another country, killing many men. Nobody condemns it, but praises it. Because no one knows it is wrong to go to attack an other nation, they write about their glorious victory in order to let the future generations read it. If they could discover the wickedness of war, what is the pleasure of writing such a record of it?
It is just like a man who calls a little black black, and calls much black white. He cannot tell black from white. It is bitter when little is tasted. He calls it sweet when much bitterness is tasted. So he cannot tell bitter from sweet. Little wrong is wrong; everybody condemns it. But the greatest wrong, that of attacking another country, is not only left uncondemned, but is honored and praised. It shows that the world cannot tell right from wrong.
– Mozi (墨子), ca. 400 BCE (source)
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
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
3mo 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
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?
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
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
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
7mo ago
Exactly. We do environmental genetic testing all the time in our lab, and even in the best case the results are full of "unknown" -- partly because most DNA gathered is too damaged to be identified, and partly because we don't have genetic data available for all random protists and bacteria that are swarming in every cubic millimeter of dirt.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I'd be opposed to this for a number of reasons, but most importantly: if you have any use for democracy at all, "one person, one vote" is an extremely important Schelling point. It's easy to come up with reasons your favorite demographic group should get more representation than others, and while as pointed out above there is already some wrangling on who gets to vote, giving de jure multiple votes to some people would start an immediate arms race for politicians to give ever more voting power to their supporters.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
just that there must have been a fair amount of children sired by someone else than the actual Pharaoh.
Epistemic status: half-remembered stuff I read long ago
I recall reading that the paternity of royal children in Egypt was relatively unimportant compared to similar civilizations, because the "true" father of the Pharaoh was always the god Ra, with his physical sire at best acting as a vessel, and therefore the mother being a lot more relevant to establish lineage. Indeed, I believe that the main reason for a pharaoh to marry his sisters as a habit was to acquire legitimacy from them, if not for himself at least for his heirs.
orca-covenant
9mo ago
It seems to me this somewhat stacks the deck by making two assumptions:
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That this belief has no consequences outside of how the person feels in their final moments, but a lessened fear of death might very well lead to pointlessly shortening your life.
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That the consequence in question is positive, but for each man who dies foretasting Heaven, there's probably another who dies in terror of Hell. Similarly, believing your dead loved ones to be damned is probably as distressing as believing them blessed is uplifting.
In general, though, my real objection is that making yourself believe propositions because you benefit from such belief regardless of its truth is extremely dangerous. As the saying goes, once you've told a lie (even to yourself), truth is ever after your enemy. As I wrote in another post somewhen before, deluding yourself for expediency (and I contend that, even if the afterlife actually exists, believing that for any reason other than its factual truth is delusion) is the epistemic equivalent of the naive consequentialist doctor who would kill a patient to save five people with their organs. In the short term, it might work, but on the longer term it will poison your epistemology and make you unable to distinguish truth from falsehood.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
After reading the whole thread (The Motte: "The choice is so obvious, how could anyone disagree" Also the Motte: 40,000 words of debate in a day) it seems to me that the choice depends from what you're planning to achieve:
- If you want to save yourself, red is the clear choice;
- If you want to save a group of people with whom you can reliably coordinate, either by explicit communication or by sharing similar thought patterns (a group sharing your values, if you will), red is again the best;
- if you want to save everyone, blue is the most likely to succeed.
orca-covenant
10mo 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
5mo 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
1yr ago
Barbara Mertz' Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs (2009 edition), a fantastically written history of Ancient Egypt. Last year I had also read Jan Assmann's The Mind of Egypt, a more scholarly text focusing on its self-image and its conceptions of the world, history, and power. My combined impressions were as follows:
- For being a Bronze Age kingdom ruled by literal god-kings, Ancient Egypt looks surprisingly nice. Sure, they had their share of dispotism, chauvinism, and imperial warfare, but I haven’t found anything like Assyrian brutality on prisoners, Roman blood sports, Greek slave economy and rampant misogyny, or Aztec mass human sacrifices. For the standards of antiquity (which are very low to us), it seems an actually pretty decent place to have lived as a commoner.
- The development of culture and worldview looks so strangely like a coherent arc. First there’s Ancient Kingdom pharaohs, who look so aloof and self-sufficient in their divinity. Then the kingdom collapses in rebellion and civil war, teaching the rulers of Egypt that they have responsibilities towards their people; Middle Kingdom pharaohs care a lot more about justifying their position with philosophy and theology. That era collapses too, with an invasion and occupation that teaches them that the rest of the world exists, too; and the New Kingdom is defined by imperial engagement with the great powers of Asia. Eventually the state model of the Bronze Age becomes unsustainable and Egypt fades into a province of distant empires, ruled by fatalism and detachment. This honestly sounds like the kind of satisfying storytelling that one should be most skeptical about in history; I wonder how much this understanding is due to scarcity of records, pareidolia, and my own ignorance, and in what proportion.
"Just"? Pardon me, but you might as well say that to lift mount Everest you just need to push up very hard.
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