quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Meta: I think this post is not appropriate as a top level post.
The content thematic would easily qualify it for the culture war thread.
I would still think it is a bit short for the CW top level post, little more than a link and a few lines of context.
Compare with that natural selection post. At least that post was articulate enough, even if I also disagree with its content (but much less vehemently).
Having top level posts like this (from the quotations from other comments, I am not reading the link) makes us appear like a bunch of internet racists. At least we could try to appear to be a bunch of eloquent internet racists.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I think there is a world of a difference between camping illegally and detaining others.
Believing in the rule of the law does not imply believing that every law should be rigorously enforced all the time. Just like I don't think you should go after every kid's lemonade stand for lack of a business licence, I also think that universities should have some leeway in deciding which of their student groups they tolerate having protest camps on campus.
I think as long as it is not the government deciding that would not be unconstitutional.
For example, a university might tolerate a protest camp to Save The Whales (as long as they do not single out Japanese students or something) but might decide not to tolerate a protest camp about God Hates Fags.
So the amount of antisemitism and especially the attitude towards Jewish students might matter a lot to the universities -- who I imagine are doing damage control. The question for them is if it is worse PR to call the police to dissolve the camp or to continue to tolerate it and thus to some degree be endorsing the messages they spread.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
What you are saying is basically that first you write down the bottom line dictated by your gut feeling, "Therefore killing babies is always wrong.", then try to fill out the empty space above that to fill your page.
If you build a theory and something like this pops out naturally, then your choices are either to admit to that fact or muddy the waters to hide the issue.
Non-speciesist, Non-infanticide, Non-vegan: pick any two. Apart from its species, a pig is cognitively closer to a person than a baby is. If killing the baby is inherently wrong, then so is killing the pig. You could try to salvage this by looking at the future potential, but then you will have to be strictly anti-abortion because a fertilized human egg has basically the same potential to become a person as a baby has.
There is certainly something to be said about being careful with implementing newly found insights of your moral theory, and you will notice that Singer is not actually campaigning for infanticide. In the real world, babies bring tremendous utility to their caretakers, thus killing them would be wrong.
when a living human isn't really human-y enough
Read his argument in Practical Ethics. His first step is to taboo the word human, replacing it with "member of homo sapiens" and "person", just like EY taboos the word "sound" in the Sequences.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
I think it is uncontroversial that societies at similar tech levels can have vastly different amounts of inequality.
There is inequality ("oppression" in modern parlance) both in ancient fucking Sparta and modern day Sweden, but the amount of inequality matters.
Despite coming from the traditional left, I believe some inequality is actually beneficial: if Elon Musk collected the same UBI as everyone, this would not make the world a worse place (except for Twitter, perhaps). On the flip side, taking the land away from aristocrats and redistributing it to the peasants may likewise stimulate the economy as well as lowering the Gini coefficient.
Who is on top and who on the bottom only matters to me as far as their economic policy might differ due to their background.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Of course, we should not discount the possibility that the scripture might be irrationally and immorally hateful.
As NelsonRushton below pointed out, the condemnation of homosexuality in Christian traditions seems to stem from Mosaic law. If there is a chapter in the gospel where Jesus urges his followers to stone the sodomites, I must have missed it.
Almost no Christians strive to consistently follow Mosaic law. If a person with intact foreskin who likes his bacon and shellfish, talked back to his parents and works on Saturdays complains about gay sex being against the bible, I have a hard time taking them serious.
(Of course, I fully support the right of Christians, Jews and followers of weird atheist joke religions to not engage in gay sex for religious reasons, or for any other reasons for that matter.)
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
While vegetarianism might still be a minority position, I can't help but notice that lots of countries have legislation in place regulating animal welfare. So it seems to me that a non-trivial percentage supports restricting the suffering of animals.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup. If we apply that standard, then virtually qualifies as woke. Hamas? Woke. Fundamentalist Israeli settlers? Woke. Third gen feminist? Woke. MRA? Woke. A medieval knight following an honor code of protecting the weak from oppression? Woke.
MAGA contains the narrative that the US was taken over by the coastal elites with their pronouns who are completely out of touch with the hardworking, down-to-earth (possibly white) Americans who are actually the backbone of the country, with DJT as a hero of these downtrodden draining the swamp and making the world right again. By your definition, this makes Trump about as woke as Biden.
Very few political parties have the slogan "things are swell right now, let's keep everything exactly as it is", because this does not mobilize voters much. The very least one needs is "keep us in power or you will become the oppressed", which makes one the champion of the people who would otherwise be oppressed in the future, which is also a big part of the classic hero of the downtrodden movement.
I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage. It would be like defining 'porn' wide enough that it includes the Muppet Show (furries!), then arguing that most school shooters were exposed to 'porn' in their childhood and that therefore we need to do more to keep porn (see what I did there) from kids by forcing onlyfans to do age verification.
quiet_NaN
22d ago
I was speaking generally. I feel that (would-be) genociders such as Hamas come as close as you can get to being hostis humani generis without leaving dry land.
But not all non-state actors who ever take up arms against a country are that evil. For example, I do not think that the US civil war would have been improved if the North had decided that since the South represented no state they recognized, they were free to kill Confederate soldiers like dogs in the street. Or if the Brits had adopted that stance with regard to the US during the war of independence.
So a stance of "well, these gunmen are not representing a nation state, no reason to give quarter to them" would have predictably bad outcomes whenever you are not fighting Hamas or the like.
quiet_NaN
22d ago
From the other discussion, I nominate "free will".
Intellectually, I know that human minds are messy things partly driven by drives hard-wired by evolution plus perhaps a bit of capacity to rationally consider hypotheticals and pick an option based on that in a very imperfect manner.
Yet when interacting with others, it is a very convenient frame of reference to assume that Bob was free to pick any option when he punched you instead of modelling him deterministically.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
the health of broader society
The textbook example of such societies are the Malthusian in nature. If having kids is the only way to ensure you survive in old age, then it is in everyone's interests to breed like rats. The outcome is an exponential grows which periodically gets mowed down by the horsemen Pestilence, War and Starvation.
You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.
The main problem with the pension system is that the working generation is paying the pensions for the previous generation, which works when the population is growing or stable. What we should do instead is make each generation pay into a fund which will eventually pay for their pensions. So even if the size of generations changes, the per capita funds will be stable.
Previous generations if nationalists worried a lot about having enough manpower to throw into the meat grinder of war. In the nuclear age, this is not much of a concern among superpowers any more.
Personally, I would predict a rebound of the TFR at some point, once space in the metropolitan areas becomes more affordable due to the shrinking population, people are likely to have more kids. But even if I am wrong, I would much rather that some robot nurse cared for me in old age than living in a society which puts undue pressure on people to have kids.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The story feels like a weak-man to me. Personally, I don't consider insect welfare to be relevant, and I would be surprised if it would be a major area of action within the animal welfare part of EA.
Compared to a moth, median humans and pigs are basically the same in terms of genetics and intelligence. GPT-2 is probably more sentient than your average insect.
Of course, the idea to just let some species breed as much as it likes in a human-shaped environment is also stupid on the face of it if you care about the suffering of that species, because the outcome is likely to be a lot of suffering. Reputable animal charities don't allow wild cats or dogs to breed as much as they want, they will generally try to fix them.
If she had originally widely discussed this on EA and the consensus was that she should let the moths be because insect lives matter or something, then that would be sufficient to sneer at EA.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think the probability that outright election fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 election is very low.
Per Wikipedia, the very close states were Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, with a total margin of some 40k votes.
But that does not suffice for Trump in a tie, because both chambers of Congress went to the Democrats (House by 222 to 213 seats).
So either you would need larger scale fraud in Pennsylvania or Nevada, or argue that the election fraud also affected the (typically heavily gerrymandered) House outcome.
Trump's behavior does not correspond to someone who had very specific allegations (which he could then take to the supreme court, a la Bush vs Gore), but instead paints the picture of a man-child throwing a tantrum because he did not like the outcome of the election, per Wikipedia:
At one point on the call, Trump told Raffensperger, "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state."
I am all for making the voting results more robust, but I also recognize that the US has a long and proud tradition of disenfranchisement, so anything which makes it harder to vote will be understood in that vein, and might even be intended that way.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I guess that this is meant to poke fun at the OP by likening their concerns to the paranoid delusions of Mr. Davis.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Biological adults interested in sex, news at 11.
This is the root problem. Perhaps we should just mandate puberty blockers for all minors, thereby removing the hormonal incentive to watch porn. /sarcasm.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
One way to solve this without mine fields would be if NATO would accept Ukraine as a member conditional on them signing a peace deal. I think from a humanitarian point of view, this would be a much better outcome than continue the slaughter for some more few years if one side runs out of soldiers.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
I think that there is a vast gulf between the phrase "unhyphenated American" and the phrase "ethnic American".
I do not find the former objectionable, people are free not to care about their past. But the later term implies that there is a distinct American ethnic, i.e. that the US is an ethnostate, which seems both objectionable and wrong. If you only count people who only have ancestors which inhabited the British Colonies, then the "ethnic Americans" would probably have be a small minority for a century. And if you include people with ancestors who were immigrants to the US and mixed with others, then there is not much of an ethnic left.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
"Toaster" is deeply problematic, substratist slur for a Person of Artificial Descent.
Just kidding.
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
While I am neither a Clinton supporter nor a SJW, I still find your oddly specific (on the Clinton part) comparison distasteful.
Don't you think that you might have been able to make the same point in a less inflammatory way?
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
Plausibly, every non-human animal species is closer to ants along the relevant axes than they are to humans.
Genetically, cows (80% similarity to humans) seem to be on the halfway point between fruit flies (80%) and other humans (99.9%), while some other other mammals (e.g. dogs 94%) are even more similar.
So your "relevant axes" are not genetics or sentience (which some humans lack and some other animals might have). Or number of neurons.
To paraphrase your mode of reasoning:
-
Killing women is wrong.
-
Killing Stalin is fine.
-
There are axes on which men in general are more like Stalin than like women.
-
These are the relevant axes.
-
Therefore, killing men is just as fine as killing Stalin.
I think that 0.-2. are uncontroversial.
Step three is highly debatable.
Step four is also debatable, why should a life at the halfway point between Stalin/ant and the woman/human not be half as worth preserving as a woman/human?
Also, how do I turn that automatic formatting off?
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
Agreed. I think culpability should be assigned on a case by case basis. Someone jumps off a highway bridge in front of a moving truck, you can hardly blame the truck for not going slow enough so that it could come to a stop within a meter. Someone went 50km/h in a 30km/h zone and runs over some kid? Whole different story.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
"Don't hand out recipes for methamphetamine" sounds pretty straightforward and coherent, though, much more than "Don't Murder", which per Wikipedia "is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction."
I mean, some of the best (worst) CW stories are about a killing where all sides more or less agree on the facts but their interpretation of what they think is (or should be) the law is different.
"Don't kill any humans, directly or indirectly, ever" might be simpler, but to phrase it so that our AI can't lock up people and let them die of thirst without it also being compelled to round up people and force them to take their cancer screenings or stop smoking or whatever will be complicated. There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Originally I picked uniforms kind of at random, but thinking more about it, it seems like a fun hill to die on.
Uniforms have been part of most armies for centuries. Kind of weird as a fashion choice? I think that the reason is that uniforms serve a useful purpose in the military: they erase differences in class and culture between the troops, and emphasize the difference between the troops and the enemy or civilians. This increases group cohesion: instead of seeing Bob the bully lying bleeding in the barbed wires in their stupid blue sweater, you see a fellow brother in arms. This unit cohesion and the sublimation of individual responsibility to the chain of command are then useful for military operations such as winning a battle or murdering a village.
"beliefs they are fighting for the oppressed" and "wears uniforms" are both Bayesian evidence for someone being more likely to drag you from your home and murdering you. Of course, there are some important difference in details between the postmen and the Einsatzgruppen, but there are also some important differences in details between the Stalinists and campus protesters.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
"What religious practices do you have to follow to not go to hell? -- Trick question, you are all going to hell unless you accept Christ, who will be born in another few hundred years or so" seems like the kind of shit the old testament god would pull, right.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think replying "That seems like a pretty controversial claim, do you have any evidence to back it up, my evidence for it not being true is so-and-so".
The (I guess) inflammatory statement was part of the top level post, which to me seems like a clear example of an effort-post. If the post was just this one statement, I think our mods would likely have asked the submitter to put more effort in by proactively providing evidence. But if one cancels every lengthy post which contains some claim which might be controversial and is not backed by evidence then there will be very few posts left.
It is bad taste for any group whose primary purpose is not a dating pool to systematically rate the hotness of that pool, no matter the gender.
These lists tend to become common knowledge, and some people will end up on the bottom part of the list or being rated an average of 1.3 out of ten (but people -- especially people going through puberty -- might also be uncomfortable being rated really high). If the victim had actually asked to be rated, this would be different, but in all likelihood, they do not prefer an supposedly objective (it's a number! numbers don't lie!) rating of their hotness to become common knowledge.
The outcome of these lists is not so different from writing "X is an ugly pig" on the blackboard. As that is bullying, I would classify creating such lists as at least likely to lead to bullying.
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