popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
There are two broad categories of retort to ethical veganism:
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Arguments that the lives of animals are not morally relevant
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Arguments that veganism does not let animals live, but denies their existence, and that animals would prefer suffering in a meat farm to non-existence
Retort #1 is addressed in depth and Retort #2 partially in SSC's 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest, which is more worth your time than what I'll write here. Personally, I have a complicated relationship with both these retorts; I feel that if humans are morally relevant, even very stupid ones, then social mammals with limbic systems must be. But livestock can only possibly live in the context of a farm. This realization makes me sad. Consider re-reading the next paragraph once you reach the end of the comment.
Ethical veganism is rooted in a morality of suffering. But isn't the core imperative of an organism not to just not suffer, but to thrive? Regardless of how we structure society, is there any future for livestock animals to thrive? We can stop Bos Taurus from suffering. Create technological replacements — great. In a few decades, Bos Taurus will be all but extinct, with maybe a few thousand left in the country, in hobby farms and zoos. Is that good? Is it good if we create a social welfare program for Bos Taurus, designate nature preserves of green field pasture for 94 million cows to graze? Then we'll need to prevent predators for entering the Bos Taurus nature preserve, create a meaningless environment free of adversity, because breeding pressures have made Bos Taurus ill equipped to handle predation. (Assume it's fine for the predators to be denied existence.) Likewise, we'll need some mechanism to tamp down Bos Taurus birth rate, lest 94 million cows become 376 million cows become 1.5 billion cows. (If I recall, this book has some interesting data on how quickly cattle can reproduce absent natural predators.) Is that good?
For me, it looks like a cow is a creature that cannot thrive on its own. We cannot artificially let it thrive, lest the whole world be overrun. The two other options for cow are: be useful to the superstructure, suffering; or, be a glorified pet of the superstructure, forever.
Now re-read that with "Bos Taurus" for "Homo sapiens", and you'll see why thinking about Retort #2 makes me sad.
I tend to see feminism as a logical outgrowth of classical liberalism. Most ideologies since 1789 seem to involve people building off the ideas the French Revolution set loose from the salons to their natural conclusions. Once the Declaration of the Rights of Man became the civic religion, abolitionism was inevitable, as was universal male suffrage, as were nationstates, and then eventually female suffrage and the end of the patriarchy, whatever that means. Plus socialism. The whole thing has just taken centuries to play out. We are still adapting to the adaptations to the adaptations to the adaptations, with no one sure when we will settle into a new equilibrium.
I suspect we have knocked down a few very important Chesterson's fences along the way, and the manosphere will write your ear off on all the ways modern gender roles are making people dysfunctional and unhappy. Naively speaking, if you look at the fertility rates, where things end up in 2100 is a race between memetic feminism and genetic traditionalism. Personally? I'd say we will probably reinvent the social contract in a way no one can yet expect, as the dominoes continue to tumble.
I don't think society works that way. Socialism failed [...] Abolitionism wasn't inevitable, and it didn't happen because of some document from decades prior.
It's funny; two examples you highlighted are ones where the line of causality is fairly direct. Abolitionism came to the fore as the French constituent assembly debated the status of Free Colored and slaves in Saint-Domingue, with people pointing out that the Code Noir and slavery in general were illogical in light of the Assembly's liberal ideals. They ultimately eliminated the Code Noir and rubber stamped freeing the slaves (though the slaves did basically free themselves, first, the rebellion sparked by news of revolution at home). Then, a few years into the revolution, proto-socialists like the Enrages and Gracchus Babeu argued for the abolition of private property and social ownership of capital. They would ultimately lose the day, and uh, be killed; this drama of socialists emerging from the reeds after a liberal revolution to get smacked down would repeat in 1830 and 1848. There's a reason why Marx thought a liberal revolution was a necessary precondition of a socialist revolution.
Note: I'm saying classical liberalism, the ideology, naturally lead to feminism. The Declaration of the Rights of Man is just a convenient religious text to point to, embodying a larger movement, much like you point to the Book of Matthew to talk about the social phenomenon of Christianity, many of the participants of whom were illiterate and never read it.
If you fully absorb what people like John Locke claimed about moral ontology, the idea of keeping women in a subservient disenfranchised status is unsupportable. As is keeping slaves. But much like the Merovingian kings kept concubines for generations after converting to Christianity, it's taken generations for society to shed its traditions and let the logical consequences of classical liberalism seep in.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I don't believe in the Whig view of history, no. There is chaos and contingency that spins history in the short duree. But I do have a theory of history rooted in historical idealism, and the ideologies that people hold do have — and yes, I'll use the dirty word — an inevitable influence on the sort of conflicts a society faces. Throughout the history of Catholic Europe there was a repeated rash of heresies that had to do with clerical poverty like Albigensianism or Hussitism; the reason we see social movements like this in 12th century Europe but not 2nd century Europe or 21st century Europe is that the ideology of the day was Christianity, and Christian dogma very obviously contradicted the political and economic reality. So people fought.
In the same way, it is inevitable that in a civilization where classical liberalism is the dominant ideology, the status of slaves, women, subject peoples, and the poor will be fought over in the form of Abolitionism, Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, and Socialism. How these movements articulate, and whether they succeed, is a historical crapshoot.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I agree that that seems to be the mental model of the most anti-Trump blue family and friends I have. To them, the enabling act was a few months away from 2016 through 2020, and then in January 2021 their fears were seemingly confirmed by Trump refusing to concede. It's a bad situation, because if Trump and/or DeSantis are elected in 2024, it will be with a democratic mandate to go to war with institutions like the FBI, IRS, ATF, CDC, etc and attack woke capital, especially big tech. In the mind of Republicans, this will be seen as restoring democracy from unelected officials and breaking up trusts. To the Trump-fearing, it will look like a dictatorial purge. The institutions being attacked by Trump/DeSantis will obviously play this up in the media for their own self-interest.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Every internet community I've been in with user comment feedback navel gazes about this. It's amounted to nothing. So LessWrong has come up with their own version of Slashdot's "Interesting/Insightful" voting, with even more galaxy-brained schemes in the comments. Other social media experiments suggest you can't hack your way around the human psychology of using feedback UI as an "agree" button. LWers will just now "up-right" vote or "left-down" vote, with two-axis voting forcing them to click a second time.
It's not worth the energy to think or argue about this, let alone design or code it, unless another community invents a voting scheme that brings home the bacon in terms of discourse in a huge, obvious way.
If you have fun talking about ideas that would take hundreds of coding hours with no promise of success for a tiny internet subforum, go ahead. But I strongly suggest anyone who might be tempted to waste otherwise productive manhours on it close this thread and go about their day.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
How are LessWrong comments better than they were two months ago? Is there a good library you can point to of comment threads where the top karma-sorted post is fiercely downvoted? Or where highly upvoted, low effort comments are near the bottom because they have 0 karma? That's a good minimum standard for saying the change "worked".
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Interesting. The ratsphere started with fears of AI risk, so declensionist, stagnationist, or collapse-oriented arguments like this tend to get a frigid reception here. Then again, maybe that's just reality having a rationalist bias.
The fatdemic. One of the greatest threats to the future of mankind. Every year the percentage of the world's population that becomes fat keeps rising. Till date there has been no reversal in the trends and it is likely that the only way to reverse it would be an authoritarian hand over the people's choices in food. With the abundance of food, as a species we have become weaker, stupider, more lethargic, with a higher propensity to heart disease and other comorbidities and an increased economic constraint over the system than is naturally deserved. In our fatness we have put ourselves in a position where we are almost regressing back in humanity's growth and potential. In our fatness is the clear cut sign of our lacking self control as a species.
I think you're confusing the cart and the horse. Rising obesity is not a problem in of itself. It's a visible symptom of technology outrunning the self-control, prudentia, and conscientiousness of the population — or of technology hurting those, directly. People looking like orbs out of WALL-E doesn't prevent an advanced technological society. It only causes retired pensioners with obsolete skillsets to die earlier.
The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war.
I don't know about this. WWII is the most salient event in recent memory, so I think people generalize it to the whole human experience, and in WWII war did drive progress. But, to offer a counter-example, probably the most dramatic period of social and technological progress in human history was the Victorian era from 1815 to 1914. (Looking forward to Vicky 3!) That century is marked by an unusual lack of any bloody general European wars, certainly none that were existentially threatening to England, where the progress was most extreme.
My final point as to the pace of progress primarily focuses on the increasing amount of time, energy, and education required to create new things to progress society. So far at the top of society, our capabilities at the top have kept up with the demands for further returns, the question that comes to mind is, with the failures of our current cultural peak, will we be able to keep progressing as a society?
Read Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. You might find it interesting.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Yes, but @dont_log_me_out was talking about Necessity-Is-The-Mother-Of-All-Invention total wars which supposedly drive progress. You'll agree that mobilizing the nation to fight the Wehrmacht is different from sending expeditionary forces to mow down Zulu tribesmen. NATO does tons of stuff like that second thing these days, so the Victorian era would qualify as "peaceful stupidity" by OP's metrics.
Legacy media is and always was propaganda.
I feel the multiple senses of "propaganda" are doing a lot of work in this argument. American culture has always been heavy on groupthink. (Full passage under "Power exercised by the majority in America upon opinion.") As soon as mass media was invented, Americans demanded it cater to their tastes regardless of the facts. For example, in the 1890s they were hyper-nationalist jingoists, so they only bought newspapers that told them terrible things about the Spanish. And individual actors like William Randolph Hearst might steer these passions in a certain direction.
This is "propaganda" after a fashion. But it's not the same propaganda as a clique of oligarchs or a small political faction pulling the strings of the whole media landscape to distract or confuse the country.
Legacy media sucks now because it used to be very profitable but isn't anymore. Today, the only reason to own a newspaper is to control the narrative. So today, that is the only master newspapers serve. I do believe they once served other ones.
Of the four boxes, it seems "jury box" is the most likely to deliver victory to people who think like you and me. I'm hoping someone can get a "Are social media platforms like company towns when it comes to civil rights?" case in front of the supreme court one of these days.
Quokka: A kind of Australian macropod. They have no natural predators and are therefore not particularly fearful. Some people, beginning with a 2020 Twitter thread by “Zero HP Lovecraft”, who believe rationalists are too trusting or naive compare rationalists to Quokkas.
Weren't there people calling us quokkas before then? It's hard to remember the pre-covid times.
And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and mutter, "I notice I am confused".
Man, it's sad how accurate this is. Our rightful caliph got taken in like the biggest sucker ever. "Hey everyone, NY Times is interviewing me for a human interest story about rationalists next week. The timing is a little weird, what with the race riots and all. Anyway she was really sweet and engaged, we talked about my petition to save Steven Hsu from cancellation!"
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Yep, looks like I'm just misremembering. Thanks for the investigation.
Who are you referring to?
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Scott Alexander, as I'm sure you'll know unless you're someone else wearing /u/DrManhattan16's nick as a skinsuit. The NYT doxxed him, forcing him to resign from his job, and eventually published an article highlighting his connections to HBD and gender gap in math ability writing, and suggesting obliquely that things like his blog are too dangerous to be tolerated on tech platforms. There were also people ready to publish damaging private emails from Scott after he predictably wrote a self-defense which I'm sure is purely a coincidence and was not coordinated in advance at all.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
It's very far from perfect but the best way to find new comments to old subthreads ATM seems to be browsing https://www.themotte.org/comments
Putting aside your take on the morality of the parties, which I think is ass backwards, the benefit of cracking down on employers is that it's a politically viable potential solution. If there are no employers for economic migrants, there will be no economic migrants.
The average American voter is not going to support shooting illegal border crossers. Nor are they going to support imprisoning families with their little kids at the border. And if you bus them back home, they'll be back within the fortnight. On the other hand, if prospective migrants know there's no opportunities in the USA, they won't come.
It's like how the HOA will tell you to secure your trash. They could just hire hunters to go after bears, skunks, and raccoons without imposing on you. But that solution is more expensive and makes people squeamish. By demanding an expensive and/or unpopular solution you're only guaranteeing a solution won't be implemented.
What I don't get why a ordinary joe (or a mottizen) who is concerned about illegal immigration would treat this as anything other than a stunt designed to distract them from Desantis prioritizing business interests over actually dealing with the problem.
I'm a moderate DeSantis fan who has since 2016 believed something along the line of "Trumpism deserves a better Trump". Trump, to me, seems like an incompetent narcissist who unintentionally ruptured America's bipartisan foreign policy consensus. He put ideas on the ballot that have a good deal of popular support, but because of campaign finance and the pecularities of the Democrat/Republican voting coalitions, never got any representation. Anti-interventionism, protectionism, immigration control, and nativism, to name a few.
Trump was able to do this with the power of the meme. CNN put him on TV over and over again because he was entertaining and ostensibly too much of a moron to be dangerous. But once Americans were exposed to this meme, it caused a preference cascade that took the establishment completely by surprise.
I think it's fine that DeSantis isn't solving the root of the problem. He is releasing a meme into the news cycle, which exposes (or manufactures?) the image of coastal elites who hang "No human is illegal" signs in their million dollar summer homes, but then call the national guard to deport fifty illegals who show up. Memes like this are incredibly powerful, and in my opinion, are the only way my side could possibly win.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We have a good index to measure g but very poor indices to measure whatever single letter variables you want to assign to personal virtue. So eugenicists focus on g.
I'm a human environmentalist. I want homo sapiens sapiens to persist in their present form, forever. History is not on my side, as humans have already applied selection to ourselves several times. People who could not live pro-socially in a Dunbar's number tribe were weeded out somewhere between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago. People who balk at living in states are in the process of being weeded out and have been for the last ten thousand years; the last big tribes were forcefully sedentarized in the nineteenth century. I don't really know what direction humanity is currently self-selecting towards, but birth control is probably accelerating it.
The character of the human who thrives in this environment is sure to be quite different from what you see around you.
Unfortunately we can expect uncontrolled evolution to this effect even if you fight off the naive eugenics.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
The word 'liberal' may need to be taken out back behind the woodshed with 'socialism' as term that's suffered too much linguistic erosion to be useful. People's aesthetic associations dominate their usage of the word. Not a shared definition.
Traditionally the "liberal" perspective of land use is that you gain ownership over land by working and improving it. If natives are not improving the land, but merely hunting on it, they don't own it. This was the justification of indian removal that early Americans used. For example, IIRC there was usually a provision to pay for any improvements on repossessed lands such as tilled fields or buildings.
Nowadays I try to use the term "classical liberalism" when talking about this kind of thinking, unless I know I'm in an audience that already has this background.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I think it's mostly lockdowns knocking people off their healthy extroverted life habits and hooking them on a NEET-ish lifestyle. This is akin to governments mandating that everyone try crack one year. For crack addicts, nothing will change. For most people, they'll go through one degenerate year and then resume their regular lifestyle on the other end. But for a portion of the population that were healthy but predisposed to become crack addicts, they will emerge in 2022 as crack addicts. That happened but for junk food, Netflix binging, and vidya.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
"Forever games" can reach an unbelievable level of complexity, and they didn't exist (EDIT: as much) in the 90s. MOBAs, MMORPGs, arena shooters, strategy games, heck even Minecraft.
I think today's forever games are less engaging, though, because people engage with their complexity mostly by learning "the meta" that someone else discovered by rote. The standard advice given to HOI4 newbies is to watch five hours of tutorial videos that teach you how division templates and combat calculations work. In the 90s you would dive into a game and parse it for yourself.
My point is that modern forever games are so complex that it's implausible or at least unpleasant to learn to play them on your own. A late 90s game like, oh, Fallout or Morrowind for example, you can have a pleasant time muddling through the middling level of complexity and mastering it on your own. This learning process was what I really loved.
Modern games are like making a choice between doing a worksheet of fifth grade math problems with fancy graphics OR going through the Khan Academy course for multivariable calculus with a tutor giving you formulas to memorize.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
You usually need a little more analysis than a link and a summary for a toplevel post 'round these parts... This is one of many studies seeming to show the covid vaxxes are less effective than hoped / advertised in 2021. Why does this move the needle more than what we already know?
The anti-meritocratic part isn't that older kids are allowed to outperform younger kids. It's that someone born in August is automatically slotted in to be the "older kid", whereas the person born in September is forced to be the younger kid for every social, physical, or intellectual competition from ages 6-22.
I'm lukewarm on the motte of the social justice movement when they apply this kind of logic to race and sex/gender. I just disagree that they have identified the most important sources of unfair disparate outcomes, or that a society is illegitimate if it doesn't hunt those specific categories of unfair advantage out, whatever the human or societal cost. I basically think "born rich in a rich country" makes a rounding error of any other kind of privilege in the modern world.
I have a completely opposite view of the Reddit /r/jailbait saga. Places like /r/jailbait and /r/coontown did not exist because the Reddit admins at the time secretly liked it, but because they had a legitimate ideological commitment to only ban things that were explicitly illegal. Reddit used to have all sorts of maximally offensive subreddits at the time, like communities dedicated to images of rotting kid corpses. Are you going to say the admins liked those too?
In my opinion you are projecting today's culture war lines onto 2012 culture wars lines, which were not "LGBT+ vs social conservatives" but "Tech libertarians vs anyone who wanted to impose minimal standards online". In a sense, the tech libertarians really were right. Banning legal but universally reviled places like /r/jailbait and /r/coontown did start the slippery slope which continues to this day.
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