sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Sorry, I was going off half-remembered information about how "grass-fed" labeling is meaningless in some countries. A more relevant point is that grass-fed labeling includes food sources like hay, which still have to be harvested, which brings us back to the inherent thermodynamic inefficiency of feeding another animal so you can later eat its meat.
And clearing jungle for pasture is a net improvement for animal welfare, because jungles are obscene murder temples of pure agony, while well-tended pastures are grass and flowers and a few voles (if you don't care about insects).
I was responding based on his assumptions that areas like cropland are bad for animals, rather than being good because they involve creating areas where fewer animals are born into lives of suffering. Yes, with the right set of moral assumptions you can view every animal born into the wild as a bad thing, which would be a point in favor of anything that involves using lots of land in a way that leads to a low density of animal life. But once you're considering things at that level of indirect effects, you should also consider that using resources and land to raise cattle trades off against using it in other ways. Strip-mines and suburbs don't have a high density of animals either, even tree farms aren't that high, it's difficult to predict the effects on land use if people redirected money from meat to something like housing.
In the sufficiently long term the biggest effect might be on social attitudes, as humans gain more and more power over the environment a society in which ethical vegetarianism is the norm also seems more likely to care about wild animal suffering and act accordingly. (Like those ideas regarding genetically-engineering wild animals to reduce their suffering.) If nothing else wild animals with brains capable of suffering are already becoming a smaller percentage of Earth's population, so the average welfare of animals (including humans in the average) is increasingly driven by whether humanity continues to scale up the population of animals we raise for slaughter alongside our own population. For instance look at Earth's distribution of mammal and bird biomass - obviously neither mammals or biomass are the metrics we care about, but it gives a sense of the trend.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
But zeke5123 is talking about accidentally killing animals as part of growing and harvesting crops, not optimal land use. That seems like it would be similar per-acre whether you're growing alfalfa or wheat.
It's a completely different subject but I'm reminded of Scott's 2015 post about California's water crisis:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/
34 million acre-feet of water are diverted to agriculture. The most water-expensive crop is alfalfa, which requires 5.3 million acre-feet a year. If you’re asking “Who the heck eats 5.3 million acre-feet of alfalfa?” the answer is “cows”. A bunch of other crops use about 2 million acre-feet each.
All urban water consumption totals 9 million acre-feet. Of those, 2.4 million are for commercial and industrial institutions, 3.8 million are for lawns, and 2.8 million are personal water use by average citizens in their houses.
Which leads to interesting calculations like this:
The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use.
But in any case the question of whether alfalfa is worth the resource usage has little to do with zeke5123's objection.
Industrial farming of animals requires feeding them, and thanks to thermodynamics this is dramatically less efficient than growing food for humans directly. (Theoretically you can raise some grass-fed cattle on grassland that already exists without clearing new land but this does not scale and still kills the cattle themselves. Note that labeling beef as "grass-fed" does not mean they get their food exclusively from pasture, it includes feeding them hay which itself has to be harvested.) You don't need to throw up your hands and act like there's no way to know if there's more animal death/suffering required for beef or bread, various rough estimates like this are enough to show the intuitively obvious answer is correct.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Your link is mangled and goes to a random /r/funny thread, seemingly due to some combination of trying to link an image hosted on Reddit and old.reddit.com.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
Interesting. I thought it might correlate with being a lower-trust society and surveys like these, especially because of the stereotype of Russians being vocally cynical, but maybe not. Though I probably shouldn't conclude anything from non-randomized social media polls.
Even the real surveys are dubious (different countries probably radically differ in how they interpret the question, especially when it's being translated) and looking at the link above Russia isn't as low on them as I thought. For instance 23.3% of surveyed Russians agreed with "most people can be trusted", which is lower than the U.S. (39.7%) or Sweden (63.8%) but slightly higher than France (18.7%) or Spain (19%), let alone Brazil (6.5%) or Zimbabwe (2.1%). It's hard to tell how meaningful any of this is.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
I addressed this in the footnote.
But it's not true that "for the energy generated, more radiation is given out by fly ash". You didn't say "so long as nothing goes wrong", so the average amount of radiation released per energy produced includes the risk of disaster. And since nuclear power plants involve significantly radioactive material and coal plants don't, even a tiny risk is enough to push the average way above coal plants. The fact that Fukushima alone released more radioactivity than the fly ash we would get from burning all coal deposits on Earth makes this clear.
It is a quite common myth that living near a nuclear power plant emits radiation during ongoing operations.
Then just say "nuclear power plants release virtually no radiation under normal operation". Don't try to make it sound like nuclear beats coal in terms of radiation, on a technicality sufficiently narrow that both you and the Scientific American article you link (and the people I've seen bring up this talking point before) stumble into outright falsehood. Nuclear beats coal on plenty of metrics, there is no need to compare them in terms of radioactivity besides the appeal of being counterintuitive.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The starting point was you saying that people who aren't white nationalists don't "care about white people", and that the reasons for this are sufficiently obvious that even people with drastically different beliefs about the world wouldn't disagree with white nationalism otherwise. You're now talking about how allowing even highly selective non-white immigration could result in intermarriage that results in...the white population ending up with some fraction of a percent of east-asian ancestry? I'm not seeing how this is harmful, and I certainly don't think it is so self-evidently harmful that even people who disagree with you realize it is harmful.
Meanwhile, on a timeframe like that there are far more important factors to focus on. Obviously there are the non-selective forms of immigration, and the large racial minorities that already live in most majority-white countries. There is dysgenic evolutionary pressure costing around 1 IQ point per generation (along with lower conscientiousness, more ADHD, etc.), because modern society is currently set up so that the more successful you are the fewer children you have. And there is the rapidly-arriving promise of technologies like embryo selection or hypothetical future genetic engineering (or simply getting over the eugenics taboo and doing large-scale sperm donation), potentially allowing whichever group is willing to do it to tremendously improve themselves.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
How many music videos actually have written or scripted reviews? Reaction videos have a lower barrier to entry than a blog post or scripted video, since you just have to watch and say what you're thinking, but a higher barrier and probably more detail than a Youtube comment. So if someone wants to hear what someone else thinks of a particular music video, they might be pretty much the only choice available. Also if a youtuber or streamer already has an audience they might be interested in what he has to say about something, even if they aren't very interested in the actual subject matter and it's low-effort content.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
No, I meant to reply to cake's OP comment.
sodiummuffin
10mo ago
The proponents were saying 'let's get rid of Saddam it'll be easy and stabilize the Middle East, spread democracy, make new allies...'.
Helping Iraqis and the Middle East doesn't significantly materially strengthen the U.S., it's expending U.S. resources and power for the sake of charity. This is inherently self-limiting, the U.S. has resources to waste on things like this but in the end it is left with less capability to wage war than it started with. Having Iraq as an ally or vassal was never going to be valuable enough to be worth a war, even if it was as easy as proponents thought it would be, and proponents of the war instead justified the war in terms of humanitarian (Saddam, democracy) or threat-reduction (WMDs) concerns. And the U.S. didn't even really turn Iraq into a vassal, it's a democracy that has been at times vocally critical of the U.S. and there is no guarantee that U.S./Iraq relations won't worsen further in the future. It would have been far easier to turn it into an ally in some other way, like buddying up to Saddam or replacing him with some other dictator. Proponents of the Iraq war didn't say they would turn Iraq into a vassal, they said they would turn it into a democracy, and that is indeed what they did. It was the opponents of the Iraq war who said the U.S. would materially benefit, the "No blood for oil" people, but that was never remotely realistic and the proponents didn't say it was.
sodiummuffin
1d ago
I would develop unusual meats: lab-grown shark fin, panda bear, lion steaks, elephant.
Primeval Foods is currently working on exotic cultured meat including lion, zebra, giraffe, and tiger. (On a semi-related note, Because Animals is working on cat food based on cultured mouse meat.) But most companies are focusing on the meats that currently sell in very large quantities, for the obvious reason that they expect those will continue to be the most popular choices even if people have more exotic options for the same price.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
There are immigration policies other than "white ethnostate" and "open borders". Mass immigration sufficient for your concern to happen would presumably come from countries that suck to live in, and countries that suck to live in rarely have many high-quality immigrants. Even under the current U.S. immigration system, demographic replacement has little to do with the small numbers of highly-selected immigrants, it's the reproduction rates of the population groups already in the U.S. and the ways for low-quality immigrants to bypass that selective system.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right.
Yes, I remembered that passage because it seemed prophetic. But of course both denying citizenship based on race and his later discussion of the black-white intelligence gap are now outside the mainstream overton window, something to be cited as proof of generic racism and justification for tearing down statues but not actually engaged with. Including by those who simultaneously find it obvious that Israel can't give palestinians citizenship. The point is that resorting to the "obvious" lets incongruous views pass by completely unexamined. The intent of anti-zionists in comparing Israel to other ethno-nationalist projects is that Israel should be opposed, but other outcomes of taking that idea seriously would include becoming more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism in general or thinking more rigorously about what you think separates Israel from the others. It's not that those views can't be reconciled, it's that people should have to at least realize they're doing so. And perhaps become more understanding of the views that they currently view as cartoon villainy, whether those views are "racism" or the people who think there is a moral mandate for Israel to give up on being a jewish state and give citizenship to the palestinians in the hope that this will result in living together in peace.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
Wouldn’t the rarity of the catastrophic failure matter as well?
Which is why you do enough math to sanity-check the comparison. As I mentioned, Fukushima released more radioactivity than would be released by burning all the coal deposits on Earth. Nuclear power plants involve relevant amounts of radioactivity, coal plants don't. The fact that a release like Fukushima happened even once implies the odds aren't low enough to overcome the massive difference in radioactivity. Nuclear has plenty of advantages, and the risk of catastrophic failure is low enough that those other advantages might easily outweigh it, but being less of a radiation risk than coal is not one of them.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
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Yes, in comparison to established democracies they seem less stable and unlikely to survive as long.
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Like most authoritarian governments, they pay the cost to the functioning of the country I mentioned, because they are less responsive to feedback and have to keep things under control in other ways. What democratic countries would actually prefer to live under a government like Saudi Arabia in exchange for some supposed economic benefit from open borders?
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Remember we are talking not just about formal democracy but a "share in governance", in particular in the context of open borders. Non-democracies can still do things to keep the support of the majority of residents, both by controlling who enters (and how long they stay) and by being responsive to the desires of residents. But he was talking about a country that both let in anyone and then disregarded their opinions in favor of democratic rule by the minority of natives.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
initially lie to her in at least one way about it
I don't see how that is shown by the email in question.
having at least one other affair at approximately the same time
The email talks about feelings rather than actions, so this may depend on whether we're including "emotional cheating". I'm not saying that multiple extramarital sexual relationships are an implausible interpretation, but it's not completely definitive. More to the point:
having an affair
Note that, while in the email he says "affair", whether he was actually having an affair may depend on the definition you are using. She claims that he falsely claimed his wife was fine with it. If that arrangement was instead actually real, having extramarital sex with his wife's permission would not fit the definition of affair typically used by "polyamorous" people, even if Singer himself used the word. I am not very inclined to think polyamory is a good idea, not least because it leads to more relationship drama like this, but I do think it makes a difference ethically if he had permission. And it doesn't seem terribly implausible for a philosopher and his wife to be the sort of people to think open relationships are a good idea in 2002.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
No? That depends on birth rates, intermarriage rates, and the actual rate of immigration from different nations and races. Non-hispanic whites and asians currently have the same birth rate, which presumably means east-asians specifically are even lower. Furthermore, assuming you count people with 98% white and 2% east-asian ancestry as white, intermarriage is going to reduce the proportion of the minority demographic, and unlike with black people I don't know of any research indicating there's a disadvantage to having east-asian ancestry. (There was that one survey of online hapa communities where they seemed to do worse than average whites or asians, but that was obviously because of the selection bias of participating in those communities.) So even if your immigration policy ended up letting in more east-asians than white people, that doesn't mean the country would end up more east-asian over time. And of course there are plenty of hypothetical selective immigration policies where the end result would be the majority of immigrants being white without being an outright ethnostate, in which case the end result will be a higher proportion of white people than if there was no immigration at all.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
White nationalism doesn't just mean "pro-white", it is generally defined by its advocates as including a desire for the existence of white ethnostates. It's like conflating "cares about jewish people" and "zionist": many jews believe zionism harms jewish people instead of helping them (and doing it with white nationalism is even less accurate because zionism is currently more mainstream).
It's not just a matter of prioritization but of beliefs about the world. There are plenty of normal people who genuinely think that racial diversity benefits everyone, including white people. Furthermore, even within the realm of people who both know about HBD and think it potentially justifies government discrimination on the basis of race, most are not white nationalists. For instance white nationalists have termed Emil Kirkegaard an "IQ nationalist", though in the linked post he ends up concluding that explicit IQ nationalism would just amount to much the same thing as skilled worker laws, and the important thing is keeping out the far-below-average immigrants without IQ tests or racial discrimination being nessesary. Even if you go to a more populist community like /pol/, there are both white nationalists who think each race should get its own ethnostates, but also plenty of people who only have an issue with specific races like black people and don't care about racial separation otherwise. If your definition of "white nationalist" includes people who want to ban black immigration but allow mass-migration from Hong Kong, on the basis that they believe that such immigration would benefit everyone in the destination country including white people, it's not going to be very recognizable to conventional white nationalists.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
It can justify a lot of things, but there does need to be some justification that those involved find convincing. Operation Northwoods, for example, was a proposal from the DoD to start a war and thus attain a specific geopolitical goal, rather than justify one that has already occurred. It also drew justification from the greater importance of the Cold War. To justify faking WMDs after Saddam was already overthrown you have to think about it in terms of long-term PR concerns, there isn't any immediate goal. That's enough of a difference to explain why one would be proposed but not the other. (Of course, even if it had been proposed, we wouldn't necessarily know if Bush rejected the idea. I'm inclined to think that it wasn't even a proposal though.)
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
Well, it happened because you couldn't keep it in your pants and took a risk, and now the risk has happened.
There is a large difference between something being a bad idea that carries risk, and those risks being a good thing that the rest of society should make worse. There may be cases where it's better to leave people to their fates, but only when the actual costs of doing so are high enough, like if putting up more safety fences or warning labels is too costly compared to the benefit. The obvious topical comparison would be that, if a woman gets raped because of choosing to keep questionable company or choosing to date an abusive man or walking down a dark alley, we still put the rapist in jail if feasible. We certainly don't help domestic abusers on the basis of "you took that risk when you chose to date a crazy person, so society will punish you on the abuser's behalf". Not even feminists creating policies that help female abusers who use accusations of abuse/rape/etc. as weapons generally do so on purpose, they are just biased enough to genuinely think that such accusations from women must be true.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
This rings rather hollow when both opponents and supporters of the transgender movement see the link to transhumanism.
People say a lot of things. There are people who will assure you that transgender ideology is either the culmination or feminism or incompatible with it. Spend any time reading SJW or transgender communities talk about fiction and you'll find them headcanoning tons of random stuff as actually about transgenderism. But if you read either prominent historical transhumanists or modern prominent transhumanists like Nick Bostrom (co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, now named Humanity+) there is little or no interest in transgenderism, except incidentally insofar as transhumanist technology might make body modification in general much easier.
By the logic of utilitarianism any change you make will be "improving your condition" because you wouldn't have done it otherwise.
I think that's more an economic/libertarian principle (rational choice theory?) rather than the logic of utilitarianism, utilitarianism doesn't say anything about whether people make good choices. Whichever principle says that because people are close to the consequences of their own choices and are self-interested they make better decisions for themselves than distant decision-makers like the government. But yes, providing more choices is generally an upgrade in the sense that it allows people to choose the better option, at least if the choice is easily reversible and provides rapid and clear feedback. ("Becoming a meth addict" is a choice enabled by modern technology, but having that option available is generally not an upgrade. Similarly grocery stores are much better than government meals when it comes to things like choosing food you like, but still struggle at tasks like increasing long-term health.) But the upgrade provided by having sidegrade choices available is much smaller than the upgrade provided by having the choice to continue living, or by granting objective capabilities such as higher intelligence, so it is those that transhumanists focus on.
sodiummuffin
19d ago
These weren't no-names or non-scientists but they were seriously and embarrassingly wrong. Imagine if we actually listened to these people, speedily cut fossil fuels out of the world economy accepting the energy rationing, economic mobilization and famines that would likely happen... only for it to be a nothingburger.
No they weren't, The Guardian just made that up. It's not a prediction, it's a brief outline of a hypothetical written by two non-scientists (both self-professed futurists working for the consulting firm Global Business Network) who specifically state that it is extreme and unlikely. The point is not that they think it is likely to happen, but that they think such unlikely but extreme scenarios should be considered and prepared for by the Pentagon.
An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately.
These are the steps they propose be taken:
- Improve predictive climate models to allow investigation of a wider range of scenarios and to anticipate how and where changes could occur
- Assemble comprehensive predictive models of the potential impacts of abrupt climate change to improve projections of how climate could influence food, water, and energy
- Create vulnerability metrics to anticipate which countries are most vulnerable to climate change and therefore, could contribute materially to an increasingly disorderly and potentially violent world.
- Identify no-regrets strategies such as enhancing capabilities for water management
- Rehearse adaptive responses
- Explore local implications
- Explore geo-engineering options that control the climate.
Notice that reducing CO2 emisssions isn't even mentioned because their scenario is so abrupt that it would be too late, rather they are talking about preparing ways to mitigate the damage and/or do emergency geo-engineering, in case an unlikely scenario like that happens.
This report suggests that, because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
You can argue that consistently using "anti-X" to refer to any restriction on X, even if the restriction is the lack of a special privilege and is something the speaker thinks is justified, would be a more objective way to use language. But it is not the standard way to use language, guesswho isn't out there talking about people arrested for dangerous driving as being "arrested under an anti-white law", so it seems understandable for Folamh3 to interpret guesswho as making a bolder and less semantic claim.
I don't think it would really be a better way to use language either, because it's so impractical to do consistently that nobody would do it. Nobody is going to use it for every hypothetical special privilege that could exist, at best it would be influenced by status-quo bias based on what laws already exist, and realistically personal bias would creep in immediately. It would just create a natural motte and bailey where people would use "anti-X" in some cases based on their biases, and then retreat to "it's a restriction on X so it's anti-X" when challenged.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
I can't conceive of a space between determinism and randomness where free will could exist. It's possible that I'm just missing something here, or there is such a thing as free will and it's just absolutely indescribable in any terms that we could possibly understand, but right now it makes more sense to me to just say that free will is an illusion.
I think a better way to phrase it is that it's just a poorly-defined concept that ends up functioning as a motte and bailey. "Illusion" makes it sound like something constantly apparent but untrue, rather than just a confused way of thinking about a concept. In the motte, he can declare that things that happen for a reason are "deterministic" and thus not free will, while things that don't happen for a reason (like the outcomes of quantum randomness) are "random" and thus not free will, and then imply that magic can produce results that are neither caused nor uncaused and thus free will is proof of magic. But then when the time comes to argue the existence of "free will" he doesn't have to do anything to argue that something can be neither caused or uncaused, just that people make decisions. Well yes, I believe that people make decisions, I am a "compatibilist" who thinks that people can make decisions with their brains even when those decisions are caused by prior events. I just think that those decisions are some mixture of caused and uncaused rather than some incoherent third thing that has been arbitrarily associated with magic.
The U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. So setting aside all other forms of animal feed, more land goes to producing hay alone than to wheat.
Which is why I'm pointing out that raising cattle at scale involves harvesting even more land. Estimating the effects on animals from cropland is difficult, but it's not a comparison that favors beef to begin with.
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