domain:abc.net.au
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7m ago
Excluded middle, no?
You can’t point to the most useful examples of suffering and conclude that all suffering must be at least as valuable.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
10m ago
I suppose most people would be uncomfortable with something they pattern match to open proud racism.
That's the catch, people don't pattern match their own proud racism to "racism"
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
11m ago
t's completely reasonable for white solidarity to be seen as more of a threat than other races' ingroup preferences
They're also outnumber 10:1 on the global scale. It's not at all reasonable for it to be seen as more of a threat.
And seeing only one kind of racial solidarity as unacceptable is A) illiberal and B) corrosive to multicultural societies.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
11m ago
My view from the inside of orgs is even if you fall all over yourselves to do AA (like Google did) it barely increases diversity.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
15m ago
Final Fantasy
WhiningCoil
19m ago
If there was a cost-free way to make bees not suffer at all while farmed, wouldn't you press the button?
Because nothing is cost-free, and it's this sort of magical thinking that walks people straight into the nightmare world.
Point taken, but the transhumanists will reasonably interject how contingent so much suffering is. They're entirely correct to note that technological solutions (vaccines, cochlear implants, glasses etc.) have largely obviated forms of suffering which affected vast swathes of the population even a few generations ago, and that it is reasonable to expect this trend to continue. Pain as a stimulus warning you off doing something which will injure or kill you is a relatively elegant evolutionary mechanism, but the modern WEIRD context in which the rate of premature violent death has plummeted to negligible levels really brings home how much of a hack it is in absolute terms (e.g. people who are bedridden for years because of chronic idiopathic back pain). It's not much of a reach to imagine how these particular kinds of suffering could be wholly negated in the near future. Your example about children afflicted with chronic insensitivity to pain and inadvertently gnawing off their own fingers is entirely valid, but it isn't remotely difficult to imagine a future in which small children are given e.g. brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.
naraburns
nihil supernum
24m ago
They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.
This is absolutely my impression also.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
26m ago
This is it right here. If you have to tell people that you're "elite human capital," you ain't elite human capital.
Corvos
27m ago
No, I mean that it’s going to make it much harder to get any democratic buy in if people who have already experienced growth think that you’re dooming them to decline, people in third world understand that they’re going to get at best two generations of growth and then decline, etc.
I.e. it’s poison for the idea of economic growth, which up until now was mostly regarded positively.
Any ruler will face pressure from his subjects. If we call that "democratic norms" I'll be even more confused as to why some countries are said to have them, and others are not.
Like, ages ago I was listening to a libertarian podcast talking about the news, and they had this clip of a western journalist grilling the Saudi king about why he doesn't just give equal rights to women. "You're the king", she said, "can't you just declare whatever you want?". His responses were a stream of evasions, centering around the theme of how much he loves his subjects. The libertarian hosts of the show were utterly clueless and were just making fun of how he's not answering the question, but in my opinion he was giving a clear and obvious response - this is what my subjects want, if I overturn the social order in such a drastic way, they'll hang me from a lamppost by tomorrow morning. Is that a "democratic norm"?
Magusoflight
29m ago
And most descendents of Borderers have intermarried with descendents of non-Borderers.
Do you have evidence for this claim, or is it just a vague assumption? Class assortment is pretty strong in marriage and reproduction, and few move in to the rural areas where the borderers live
Ditto6687
32m ago
Neither psychologist nor RL people I talked with seem to believe that this is literally how the human mind works, because this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring. Yes there is a vaguely RL-like layer of our brain, but RL itself does not conscious experience make. Unless of course you have some very heavy philosophical machinery to convince us otherwise...
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
35m ago
Well yes there is a significant monkey's paw aspect, that's why I said it's a problem. If the answer was obvious, it wouldn't be a problem. I'm not a utilitarian or a consequentialist, I don't adhere to an "anti-suffering ethics". But I also appreciate the gravity of the problem and I understand why people do become utilitarians.
gattsuru
37m ago
To be fair, once you've built a colony industry around Human Skin Leather and Human Skin Leather accessories, there's an upper limit to how much of a surprise this could become.
WhiningCoil
37m ago
No you're right of course. I'm sure you will be able to phrase your wish in just the right way on the monkey's paw.
07mk
46m ago
But it's not actually all that useful a model for the world? Society doesn't change that much if it informs your view: AA doesn't structurally fix anything, maybe try not to force kids to do school programs they can't possibly succeed in, maybe "learn to code!" is cruel. Ok cool. Now that that's out of the way we still have crushing social problems to deal with.
These seem like absolutely huge changes to our understanding of how to manipulate society in order to improve it, though. AA and similar programs are juggernauts in modern Western society, and so our understanding of how/if they work have huge impacts in our understanding of the world.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
47m ago
Well, there's suffering and there's suffering.
A pain signal that tells you to pull your hand away from a hot stove is "suffering".
This, on the other hand, is suffering:
The New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, which took place on February 2 and 3, 1980, at the Penitentiary of New Mexico (PNM) south of Santa Fe, was the most violent prison riot in U.S. history. Inmates took complete control of the prison and twelve officers were taken hostage. [...]
Events spiraled out of control within the cell blocks in large part due to the actions of two gangs. The first were the Chicanos, who protected each other and dished out targeted retribution for specific grudges. The other gang was loosely labeled the Aryan Brotherhood and was led by some of the most dangerous inmates (who by this time had been released from segregation in Cell Block 3). They decided to break into Cell Block 4, which held prisoners labeled as informers. Cell Block 4 also housed inmates who were mentally ill, convicted of sex crimes, or otherwise vulnerable, and held a total of 96 prisoners. [...]
During an edition of BBC's Timewatch program, an eyewitness described the carnage in Cell Block 4. He saw an inmate held up in front of a window; he was being tortured by using a blowtorch on his face and eyes until his head exploded. Another story was about Mario Urioste, who was jailed for shoplifting. He was originally placed by officers in a violent unit where he was gang-raped by seven inmates. Mario had filed a lawsuit against his rapists, so prison officials had housed him in Cell Block 4 for his own protection. Urioste was one of the targets for revenge. His body was found hanged, with his throat cut and his dismembered genitals stuffed into his mouth.
The former is a useful biological mechanism; the latter raises suffering to the level of a genuine philosophical problem (as in, should we sacrifice everything else to make the elimination of suffering our primary goal? If the choice is between a universe with suffering and no universe at all, would it be better to just not exist at all? etc).
netstack
Texas is freedom land
51m ago
Pretty much, except it’s neither silencing nor unjust.
You and Turok are welcome to state your true facts in a suitably polite, cooperative fashion.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
55m ago
I seem to recall putting "neutral" and then changing it to "deserves a warning" on noticing the last paragraph (because seriously, that was vicious). I also seem to recall taking so long to do it that @Amadan had already actually warned you by the time I completed the form.
(I've given out "deserves a ban" before, but all the times I can remember were death threats. There are other things that'd get it, like doxxing or advocacy of specific terrorist acts, but those are pretty rare here.)
ChickenOverlord
58m ago
Your comment here actually really got me thinking. My wife loves most bugs, and over the years we've found several struggling bugs that managed to find their way inside, usually cute ones like moths and box elder bugs (she has no qualms with killing pests like mosquitoes, flies, and wasps though). My wife will catch them, give them water and something to eat (like leaves or sugar water or whatever, depends on the bug), then release them in a nice place. Sometimes I think she goes a little overboard in making things nice for them, but her actions are driven by real love and compassion for the little critters. In fact just a week ago we found a vole trapped in one of our window wells so we caught him and brought him to a beautiful field a few miles away right next to a river.
In any case, my ooint is that for all of this abstract talk of bee consciousness and suffering, the idea of the weirdos writing this stuff having actual compassion and concern for these creatures doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe it's the virtue ethicist in me (and my utter contempt for utilitarianism as a guiding ethical framework) but all of these attempts to abstract moral and ethical behavior into quantifiable abstractions makes them seem like something an alien might come uo with. The human aspects of ethics are completely missing.
Almost makes me wonder if secret lizardmen aliens infiltrating human society conspiracy theories aren't true.
Ah yes, I can totally see how that will go. The screening for the disease will be more expensive than just getting the device and/or lobbyist will get the CDC to "recommend" that every child get the device, even ones that don't have the disease. Better safe than sorry. They can throw it in with the Hep B vaccine as soon as the baby is born. But then it turns out that when you offload vital cognitive function to this device, the brain never develops them itself, so now every child grows into an adult dependent on this device for life. Oh, and also you need a new one every 5-10 years. And when they break, now it's like pain insensitivity has been induced in you, and you get mightily banged up.
I guess mentioning the Twilight Zone is a bit dated of a reference. But if you've never seen one, a constant theme of the show was to heighten one aspect of the human condition to a point of terrifying absurdity. And while an autist or a particularly dim child might watch an episode and think "Ah yes, it would suck to literally wish for more time to read, and then be the only survivor of an apocalypse and have your glasses break", you are supposed to realize how foolish it is to have such a myopic focus in life in the first place.
So when I compared that medical condition to a Twilight Zone episode, I was implying there are lessons to be drawn from it beyond the literal "This condition sucks." I fully reject the notion that pain, physical or mental, is outdated in any modern context.
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