popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
"The Pajeet, breeds out of control like a plague of rats. Often defecating out in the open with no regard for its native habitat, the Pajeet spreads across the face of the earth like a cancerous tumor consuming all in its path while the world watches on in disgust and horror. With almost 1.4 billion Pajeets and rising our mother earth buckles under the terrible strain, whilst these creatures rapidly multiply in their own filth, with seemingly no end in sight.”
I've been thinking about Christianity lately. Christians (at least the modern ones) struggle with the question of subhumans. They prefer to thrust the question completely out of mind. "That couldn't happen. There could be no such thing!" is their comforting bromide and thought-killer. Understandably, Christians are afraid to put themselves in the position of judging whether a fellow person could be subhuman. But the unwillingness to entertain a hypothetical reflects a kind of cowardice: you are so afraid of being bad, you won't meditate on what makes the good.
Let me elide the question of whether Pajeets, or a subset of them, qualify. I don't know. This movie is selective. Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to imagine the breeding and education of an organism devoid of the divine spark. If you're not a Christian, it's even easier to imagine the creation of an organism without the virtues a materialist uses to define "human". Such a beast is, if C.S. Lewis is to be believed, what God casts into hell after the corruption of pride eats it completely. To materialists, it's some level of sophistication between "ape" and "moth".
If we are to preserve Christian morality, being Christian or no, we must come to terms with God's treatment of the Canaanites, the Hittites, Sodom, and Gomorrah. Subhumans in other words. He killed them. Ostensibly these people had fallen into extreme depravity of human sacrifice, mass rape, etc., and after many generations, these patterns of sin soaked into their very nature. God saved the righteous, but he commanded his people to kill the first two, and he personally rained fire on the others. I've heard protestants claim that this was "old morality" which the New Testament overturned, but this seems exceptionally weak reasoning to me. It endorses morality as something God arbitrarily decides, which Christians deny in every other context.
So there exists a threshold beneath which a "human" does fall below human dignity and should be treated as a beast. At least if you believe in sky daddy™. If you don't, it's an interesting parable to consider for whatever you consider the "source" of morality.
Another possible answer to the question of subhumans is stewardship. My bae Kevin Dolan did a long meditation on this idea, so I won't repeat it. This answer says: the subhumans have value in God's eyes, as we mere humans have value. But that value does not imply the necessity of equality, or the abolition of stewards and bondsmen. Hierarchical relations are perfectly in line with this Christian morality, unlike "modern" post-Christian morality which holds that the divine spark in everyone implies the abolition of rulers and ruled.
I don't have a conclusion, but these are things I've been thinking about.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I even have a toy example I like to use involving an ordinary claw hammer, and how they are four different ways of answering the question "why is this hammer here?"
Its the final cause (teleology) that really gets people upset with Aristotle here. He believed you could meaningfully talk about a dog having sharp front teeth because:
- Material - Enamel
- Formal - "Tooth"
- Efficient - Genetic expression
- Final - To sever meat to eat
Whereas modern scientists are iffy on #2 and hostile to #4.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Good job predicting the motte. I really thought
It's a shame there wasn't a Knowledge option, otherwise we could re-create that scene from HPMOR.
Congratulations on being the only
I bet most of The Motte will (correctly) see that the pleasure machine can provide every feeling the other options might. You could even program the pleasure machine to fool you into thinking you chose something else. And arguably, the existence of the pleasure machine solves any external suffering that Good Works or Power might fix; when others hook up to the grid, the moral dilemma of choosing Pleasure goes away.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
How do I read your plot?
It's a well-known graph from this study on the moral differences between liberals and conservatives. (See page 7.) I don't know why they chose a radial graph rather than a sensible line graph, but the brackets represent:
(1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence
and the color heat represents relative moral weight a person puts on that group compared to the average person.
Trace had massive reservations about the state of The Motte even in 2020, and we're further down the rabbithole now. Besides, Substack and even X have improved as platforms for mottelike effortposts.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Sounds like you independently discovered Mari Kondo minimalism. Read her book since she's a nut for throwing things away to increase mental bandwidth.
What are your unconventional mental bandwidth saving hacks?
This is more common than unconventional, since it's the GTD method, but be sure to transfer the noisiness of your brain into a coppermind. For every thought that you anticipate will touch your mind more than once: put tasks in a todo app, high-priority facts like face-name pairs in a flashcard app, notes and writings in a searchable reference app. (I'm use Todoist, Anki, and Obsidian atm.)
For those with anxiety, there's a fourth category I use called recurring worries. Thoughts like 'am I on the right path?' 'why am I wasting time on this?' 'what will people think about this?' etc. I put these in an evergreen note called 'The Worry Bucket' and allocate one hour on Sundays for them. This makes them easier to dismiss and focus for the rest of the week.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I do not have it, sorry. Pretty sure it was the old site.
So let's concede that your faith is not Catholic, Orthodox, or Lutheran-adjacent but a personal interpretation of faith that allows unbaptized Hindu children into heaven. You probably have a lot of theology to do, but put that aside.
The common Christian response to the problem of pain is a wonderful meme attached below. Suffering is God's chisel to sculpt us. (It is a great meme.)
Can you think of a type or manner of suffering that would falsify this hypothesis? That is to say, a Job-like situation of suffering so meaningless that it could not be didactic? And that if you found it to exist, your current paradigm would have to update? If you can't think of one, what does that rationally mean?
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all".
Isn't there an entire strain of christian analysis of history that chalks the rising of the roman state and later the expansion of the european powers as this?
Yes, but there were definitely people left behind in the last chopper out of 'Nam, so to speak. Christians posit an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity; thus, even small edge case exceptions are highly damaging to this claim. Why did God not do 100 AD Malaysians the favor he did for Saul on the road to Damascus? Or even just send a missionary or two?
popocatepetl
1yr ago
+1 on the 12 Miles Below rec.
I enjoyed 12MB, but mostly because of the unique setting. The protagonist lucks into all the things that give him power progression, as opposed to planning, training, or using his own unique cleverness to problem solve. IIRC, despite being characterized as a brainy engineer, his major contribution to his own success is using a few Bash commands.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
the reaction to dissent against lockdowns in China was to lift lockdowns, while the reaction in the West was to beat the shit out of protesters or even shoot them.
Western repression is a sieve, Chinese repression is a dam. A dam fully contains dissent until it reaches emergency levels. Canada could treat its protestors roughly because they didn't reflect a level of discontent that could threaten the regime.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
What’s your issue with brain modifications? We’ve already massively modified our brain from homo erectus and I’m pretty happy about it.
Yes, "you're" happy about it. The non-human entity that succeeds us will be happy, too.
Assuming happiness or sadness is even a factor for it.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Interesting. I'll give it a shot.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
It was a great surprise to me the first time I realized that certain societies could be literate for centuries with relatively little to show for it in terms of great works. The literary output of classical Athens in a single century was easily better than the previous three thousand years of Egyptian writing combined.
When I first read the Bible, I noticed the Old Testament got way more interesting at Job, Ecclesiastes, and Songs. You can read and love these even as an Atheist. They're great. Later, I discovered these books were probably written during the Hellenistic period. There was something uniquely awesome and fertile about Greek culture at that particular moment.
Should this be surprising? Calculus might have been invented by many algebraically literate cultures for hundreds of years. Then, two separate Western Europeans invented it within a twelve year period. Along with a million other discoveries, dug up in a frenzy during the Enlightenment. It takes a special combo of cultural forces to produce amazing intellectual advancements.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
This is a very simple (and wrong) concept. When you feel pain, you are feeling pain. Not qualia! The feeling of pain is just pain. You can't have pain without a feeling of pain, they're one and the same.
(Probably!) not true. Fish act as if they feel pain, but study of their neurology indicates they probably don't. Call them "p-fish-zombies".
popocatepetl
2yr ago
It's still the weekend. If nothing pops up by the end of the workweek, I'll have been wrong and will be suitably embarrassed and nonplussed.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Lizzardspawn is saying that 40%~ of women polled with low body counts aren't divorcing because they can't abandon the one guy who was willing to take them. So, the common cause of low divorce rate and low body counts is desperation, rather than chastity or high relationship ethics.
I do not find this interpretation of the data convincing as, in my experience, 40% of women in their teens and twenties do not struggle to find partners willing to bed them.
Ah, fair enough. GEAJ mentioned him killing someone, and I thought you were seconding that fear.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I disagree with Lewis. In an alternate universe where Pontius Pilate let Jesus off with a whipping and he later died in a cholera outbreak, you could still have a religion based on his ministry of the Kingdom of God — the infinite grace of the Father, the equality of sinners be Him, the need to forgive debtors as one's debt has been forgiven... it's a spicy take on judaism. Without the resurrection, "Christians" might teach the same doctrines, but grace wouldn't be mediated personally through Christ.
If tomorrow, incontrovertible evidence came out that the apostles lied, you could still salvage a religion from the wreckage. Christians would have to perform some interprative surgery on the parts of the Bible where Jesus claims to be God — maybe make it like Buddhism where any enlightened person can be God? — but there are already stretches in biblical interpretation, as is.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
There's no functional difference between the two. People use "I feel" and "I think" as a preemptive defense against hostile readers attacking propositions stated without that label. Unfortunately, this makes writing less forceful and less enjoyable for everyone.
Let me include an earlier version of this comment:
I don't see any functional difference between the two. I think both are a form of preemptive defense against a hostile reader refusing to address your points by instead attacking your certainty in something you're only proposing for discussion.
While I didn't use "I feel" there, it's still weak writing.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I simply don't feel that "interesting ways to solve energy output problems from solar cells" can be described as "in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing".
We've dropped something midstream through our conversation. At the very beginning you said: Smart ≠ highly analytical and inclined to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing. Would you then retract the first part? That smart does indeed = highly analytical?
But if people are inclined to "live life and vibe" outside their professional fields + areas of special interest, that doesn't intrinsically reflect on their intelligence.
I mean that unsmart people "just live life and vibe" outside and inside their professional fields; they are uninterested in the truth value, implications, or consistency of the symbol systems they manipulate for a paycheck, or any other system for a hobby. Take the third grade teacher in another thread who teaches elementary math for a living but does not understand why two column multiplication works when a student does the tens column first, tries to browbeat them for doing it wrong, and then complains in the teacher's room that the student keeps getting problems right. That person is most people. They do not have an "area of interest". They want to ascend status hierarchies and have pleasant experiences, and good for them.
Could you be in a smart-people bubble where you don't interact with them enough to scratch the surface and realize average people are like that?
(I think this whole comment thread kicked off with someone dropping in to say prioritizing a smart mate is important, which I interpreted as a response to my claim that constant in-depth quality discussion turned out to not be nearly as meaningful to me as I'd imagined when I started dating. Hence my initial response resisting conflating the two. I really believe it has much more to do with personality than intelligence)
I guess it's possible to have a smart partner who is inclined to in depth discussions... but not with you, because you're not versed in their area of interest. You know they're smart, but you don't meet the standard to speak with them about the thing they care about. God knows, in-laws through my sister's husband I meet every Thanksgiving would never guess I like in depth discussions. Their opinions are not worth dissecting for me. (Again, good for them, they spent their time and mental energy on something better.)
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Would probably need to be limited to married couples to do that
This seems to suggest the political correlation with fertility rate holds even if you include unmarried fertility. But putting that aside, by the pure math of the thing, the more children you have the older you must be, and older folks skew conservative.
It's strange. When I visit old /r/themotte threads, the discussions seem hotter and the tone more aggressive, while downvoting unpopular opinions was rarer. You'd figure those two behaviors would move together.
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