domain:aporiamagazine.com
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
14hr ago
Skipping the NGO middlemen of bus passes and providing guidance by running direct flights instead, or what?
WandererintheWilderness
14hr ago
exceedingly few people hold any principle that strongly
I think many people intellectually hold principles that strongly. Perhaps, under duress, they would break. But they would recognize themselves to be acting in an immoral manner. They would feel guilty. They would continue to believe that it would have been more ethical of them to stick to their guns, even if they made excuses for why it wasn't that bad of them to have fallen short of that ideal. All of which I find to be very different from openly saying "holding this belief became inconvenient for me, so I gave it up". The former is flawed human nature failing to live up to its genuinely-held moral principles; the latter is giving up on the idea of having moral principles at all.
I can imagine scenarios where I could be coerced into taking actions that clash against my moral principle that e.g. torture is wrong; but I cannot imagine any scenario where the pressure would result in me surrendering my belief that torture is wrong at the abstract level. I would still consider my actions to have been wrong, and someone who had resisted the pressure to be morally superior to me.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
14hr ago
It’s still quietly dominant in Texas, the Midwest, and chunks of New England. But none of those are leading cultural centers like California.
This seems to be claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially.
No, not really. As I saw it, the question was more like whether moral principles like "don't persecute people for their speech" are instrumental or axiomatic. My claim was that for a commitment to free speech/intellectual freedom/etc. to count as a "moral principle", it must be an axiomatic belief, not a context-dependent one. You must believe that all else being equal, it is wrong to suppress speech, in and of itself. You can't just believe that it's inadvisable to do so if you want a certain kind of society; and you certainly can't just believe that being pro-free speech will lead to good life outcomes for you personally. You have to believe, consistently, that censorship is in itself an evil which you should try to minimize.
Indeed, you can approach that premise just as easily from a consequentialist framework (ie you may be willing to trade some censorship against a greater good) as a deontological one (ie you will hold yourself to a rule of never, under any circumstance, suppressing speech). I will recognize it as a moral principle you hold in either case.
It is not impossible to justify short-term right-wing censorship based on a consequentialist pursuit of freedom of speech. For example, we have "culture war acceleriationists" mounting arguments of that kind elsewhere in the thread, talking about the need to demonstrate MAD to return to a stable equilibrium later down the line. I'm perfectly willing to believe that they hold free speech as a moral principle, even as they advocate to suppress it in one particular context. But this is not what @crushedoranges was saying. crushedoranges was saying that he'd abandoned his (so-called) principles because holding them had "amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades" for his political tribe. That's not an argument that suppressing some speech now is the best way to maximize free speech later. That's an admission that guaranteeing intellectual freedom was never a goal he believed in for its own sake, just a means to secure unrelated goods for his "side", who naturally ditched it when it failed in that task.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
It’s entirely plausible that the talent these people actually need isn’t available in the US due to the skilled labor shortage. Particularly the U.S. no longer bothers to produce skilled factory labor.
aeqno
14hr ago
Who would you rather live next to, a randomly chosen elite college faculty member, or a randomly chosen MAGA?
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
With violent crime it really is the same very small number of people doing it(yes, I’ve seen whatever Twitter thread you want to reference trying to prove mathematically that 13/52 means some notable percentage of the black male population will commit murder over the course of their lives- it’s all bupkiss because they don’t account for repeat offenders). With school performance and demands for a bailout because of it it is not.
TheBailey
soapy mop
14hr ago
I want to give the same "quiz" to close friends and see their response/reaction.
Be sure to be clear, not handwavey, about whether you're posing the question in terms of still-mainly-fictional "gene editing", or here-and-now "embryo selection".
- "Improving your bloodline" (in the abstract) is one thing.
- Improving your bloodline by siring a bunch of children and killing the "unfit" ones is another thing.
- Some would say improving your bloodline by producing a bunch of embryos and gestating only the "best" ones is a third thing still.
The "shiri's scissors" around prenatal infanticide could distort your inquiry on eugenics unless you take measures to address those distortions.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
Also shiner bock beer, German influence in barbecue, etc.
CommittedToTheG
14hr ago
This is not a good argument, because Jesus is clear that we are all born again from God, that we all become a son of God with the same oneness as Jesus is the son of God (John 17:22-23). Of course we are not turned into sons of God in the sense that we are suddenly turned into a divine being. Neither are we the preeminent Son of God, the firstfruits. But it’s totally anachronistic to make this into an argument for his being God, and it just reads as someone trying to trick those unfamiliar with how words were actually used at the time period.
It is basically the same argument Gregory of Nyssa uses. I am far from an expert in ancient or Koine Greek, though, so it is hard for me to independently evaluate what is or is not anachronistic. I agree that we are all called to be sons of God, and also that there is one (Only Begotten) Son of God; we are to attain by grace what He is by nature. And I think that Christ's (eternal) divinity is necessary for salvation. Irenaeus, who stated that man was created in the image and to attain the likeness of God, says:
Jesus Christ was not a mere man, begotten from Joseph in the ordinary course of nature, but was very God, begotten of the Father most high, and very man, born of the Virgin.
- But again, those who assert that He was simply a mere man, begotten by Joseph, remaining in the bondage of the old disobedience, are in a state of death having been not as yet joined to the Word of God the Father, nor receiving liberty through the Son, as He does Himself declare: If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. (John 8:36) But, being ignorant of Him who from the Virgin is Emmanuel, they are deprived of His gift, which is eternal life; (Romans 6:23) and not receiving the incorruptible Word, they remain in mortal flesh, and are debtors to death, not obtaining the antidote of life. To whom the Word says, mentioning His own gift of grace: I said, You are all the sons of the Highest, and gods; but you shall die like men. He speaks undoubtedly these words to those who have not received the gift of adoption, but who despise the incarnation of the pure generation of the Word of God, defraud human nature of promotion into God, and prove themselves ungrateful to the Word of God, who became flesh for them. For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that we might receive the adoption of sons?
Ultimately, the importance of adoptionism and “low Christology” is not because it’s the oldest and original, but because it’s essential for the religion to actually have an effect.
Makes sense, I can see how an overemphasis on Christ's divinity causes problems. But I also think that part of the magic of the faith is its ability to hold certain opposites in tension.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
I’m not sure that ‘the good ones’ and the ‘black activists working to improve their communities’ are meaningfully different concepts. Sûre, one is a polite euphemism, but the red tribe uses a lot fewer of those in general.
As far as politics getting less racially split- well I think that’s probably downstream of social dysfunction. The deal was always ‘blacks vote Democrat, democrats take care of the black community through their machines’, but when the community gets worse young men are going to be the first defectors(and old women thé last)- almost exactly the pattern we see with black Trump supporters. At the end of the day thé black tribe is its own thing, much more ethnic than thé basically-assimilatory red and blue tribes. It’s urban, poor, southern, and honor driven. ‘Blue’ whites might really like black tribe music, and ‘red’ whites might do so much more quietly, but they’re still separate- and both tribes of whites only offer assimilation over the long term. Now this isn’t particularly realistic for blues because there is no place in the blue tribe for 85 IQ types, so the process is a lot slower and less insistent(the red tribe answer would be that there are many eg truck drivers who make a good living while not being good at school, disproportionately black), hence really identitarian blacks are stuck in a coalition agreement with the blues. But college, reparations, and progressive values are the same package as hard work, family values, and Christianity- just with different components.
07mk
14hr ago
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear. Having been persecuted does not give you a license to persecute in turn, any more than having been raped give you a license to rape your rapist. It's not about what it gets you - it's about right and wrong.
This seems to be claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially. Which may be the case, but not really argued for. I do think there's a strong argument for it, in that consequentialist calculations are irredeemably fraught with bias in such a way as to be meaningless, since people will always, in good faith, calculate the consequences in a way that is biased in their favor.
But the case for taking principles consequentially isn't weak, either. If naively following some principle in a deontological way provably/reliably/logically/etc. reduces [Good Thing], then how do we justify calling the principle "Good?" Well, we don't need to follow it in some naive deontological way, but rather by following consequences.
Let's say a doctor has a personal principle that he will endeavor to make his patients no worse than the counterfactual of if they never saw him. Counterfactuals are intrinsically hard to predict and fraught with bias. So he might decide to avoid his personal bias and just take the deontological position that any action that harms the patient's health is out of bounds for him. Puncturing someone's skin certainly harms the patient's health, even if it's nearly trivial, and so he never draws blood for tests or gives his patients IV (or allows his staff to). This doctor would be less effective than a doctor who follows the exact same principle, but thinks in longer time horizons and figures that the harm of a syringe prick on a patient is outweighed by the benefits of what it enables, in terms of leaving his patient no worse off than otherwise. And in society at large, people who believe in the same principle would commonly prefer the latter consequentialist doctor as fulfilling their principles better than the former deontologist one.
So we could follow the principle of free speech by just never punishing anyone for saying anything (with rare exceptions, etc.) and let the chips fall where they may. I would prefer this, personally. We could also follow it by checking how certain behaviors affect people's ability to exercise free speech in society and then take the action that seems most likely to increase it (or not reduce it or maximize some metric or etc.). I would prefer not this, personally, because, again, this sort of prediction is so fraught with bias that I don't know that there's a way to do it credibly. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with me on that.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
15hr ago
You could just go to a tanning booth.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
Also, I checked the banana stats. A single banana might output 15 Bq…but this is not directly comparable to the dose from eating one. That has more to do with how the body eliminates the potassium. It’s different for every isotope, and the FDA doesn’t even bother to set a standard for potassium.
Why is so-called "Open Banking" a good thing for payments?
Almost all discussions of [Open Banking] center on “data”, but it’s actually a fight about payments, and whether banks have a right to monopolize and charge for all economic activity their users engage in, irrespective of whether the bank operates the payment method.
If the merchant and I trust each other, I pay with check and we cut out the middleman; otherwise, the merchant gives me a 3% discount and I pay my bank between a third and negative two-thirds of that amount as an escrow fee. This seems like a perfectly cromulent setup, and it's not at all clear how "Open Banking" provides any compelling advantages on either side of that fork.
Plaid was asked [by Chase] for $300 million [in exchange for API-based direct debit access to Chase's customers]...
For customer-to-merchant transactions, "Open Banking" just seems to combine
- All the downsides of plastic (potentially unlimited interchange fees, as Chase has reminded us)
- All the downsides of Check/eCheck (no consumer protections for fraudulent transactions; permanent direct debit account numbers are revealed to a party that is not the customer, the customer's bank, or the customer's bank's contractors)
- Further additional downsides (no precedent for competitive "rewards programs" to renegotiate the effective interchange fee back down; normalization of the use of sketchy as hell 3rd-party intermediaries like Plaid and Stripe, which all actually just screen-scrape most banks anyway.)
For customer-to-customer transactions, if the banks license out access to a mostly-standardized set of APIs to select partners like Venmo, Zelle, and Plaid, that doesn't seem compellingly different from the banks licensing out access to a proprietary set of APIs to select partners like Venmo, Zelle, and Plaid.
For customer-to-self-at-a-different-bank transactions, supposedly Gen Z is so mentally fried that a 3-day ACH transfer time will meaningfully impact conversion rates for new brokerage account sign-ups as they get bored/distracted and wander off; getting around that is the only remotely compelling payment use-case I can see in McKenzie's article.
What am I missing here?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
Consumers who have symptoms should contact their health care provider to report their symptoms and receive care.
“Please, stop calling us.”
I think you’re correct about smelling smoke. Especially if the sampling was random. There’s no guarantee this was the only contaminated shipment, so further investigation is justified.
Also, this might be the most exciting thing that’s happened to them since RFK took office.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
15hr ago
Immigration is one of the issues where I tend to be more in agreement than not with the "anti" side.
Which is why I think your fist-pumping for "fuck yeah faster harder" accelerationism is ill-considered.
Because if you think future Democratic administrations cannot open the borders more than previous ones did, I think you're in for a world of disappointment. And that is frankly what I expect to happen.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
15hr ago
Indeed, that's certainly a component and it is most charitable to attribute failure to that.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
15hr ago
no martyrdom necessary
I overstated, then. I think your definition of moral principle requires a willingness to be martyred, literally or metaphorically (say, career, social life, tolerating being the acceptable target of hatred, etc), and exceedingly few people hold any principle that strongly.
It's just that if the benefits dry up
There's a significant gap between benefits drying up and 'costing you dear,' though.
Let's take two moral principles that I think we might agree the average "normie liberal" of 2008 could have been said to hold: free speech is good, and racism is bad. As it turns out, both of these were quite ideologically constrained for most people- only some free speech is good, and only some racism is bad.
On one hand, I still think both are good principles to have. On the other, holding them in the social climate of the last 15 years makes one into something of a punching bag. If saying "free speech is good" plays a role in making it so academics and journalists have no repercussions for calling people that look like me cancerous goblins that made deals with the devil, my willingness to think free speech is good dwindles rapidly.
Does this mean that my thought of "free speech is good" is not a true moral principle? So be it, it's not a moral principle. I think it is good in theory but the tradeoff cost can and has been reached.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
I remember reading years ago about a survey someone gave to Christians and atheists, asking them what they find to be the most compelling argument for either side. It turned out that the most compelling argument for atheism, as rated by atheists didn't rank all that high for Christians, and the one rated by Christians wasn't all that compelling to atheists, and you saw the same patterns for arguments for Christianity. So what is the steelman argument for atheism? The one rated highest by atheists, since that is presumably what made them lose their faith (as that was in the times when people were Christian-by-default, rather than atheist-by-default), or the one rated highest by Christians, as that is what they consider the most challenging for their faith?
You asked for me to defend these arguments to the best of my ability, and that would indicate that answering in the mode of a Christian giving the best argument for atheism would be ok, but my best argument for the ideas you outlined might contain assumptions that you disagree with so deeply, that you want recognize my defense as defending your ideas anymore. On the other hand, without these assumptions, I won't find these defenses particularly compelling, so how much of a steelman are they then? Still, the best of my ability sounds like I would have to be the one to find them compelling, so this is the perspective I'll be taking, while trying to preserve your core premises as best as I can.
The kinds of arguments that I find the most compelling on these issues are ones that acknowledge that certain things happened that got us to where we are now. Regarding your first point, this would mean reformulating the part about unapologetic racism being suddenly more visible. There was plenty of unapologetic racism before Elon bought Twitter and changed the rules there, what changed is that the list of acceptable targets was expanded. The other part of the argument, about corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country is pretty straight forward. It's not sustainable for pretty much the same reasons why unapologetic anti-white racism turned out to be unsustainable. "We don't have to live like this, we can respect each other and work together for the common good" sounds like pretty good deal to me. It's most compelling version is liberals like TracingWoodgrains LARPing as Lee Kuan Yew, even if I don't find them credible. If concessions are made about the things that went wrong in the past, and I get assurances that skulls will be cracked and kneecaps will be broken to set it right, or better yet I get to see some gesture-of-good-faith kneecappings firsthand, I might indeed be compelled to drop the hammer on internet racists from - roughly speaking - my side.
Regarding your second point:
How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?
That sounds like it's mostly an empirical argument, correct? If so, that's probably the easiest case to argue. If you look at Vivek / Elon / H1B-Gate, such strong pushback would have been hard to imagine even as recently as Trump's first term. The ideas might not be completely dominant on the right, but they're definitely not fringe anymore either.
Your third point is the most difficult to argue, because it requires the acceptance of several premises. First, did the strategic advantage of the US stem from the smartest and most ambitious people coming there, or did they come there because of American strategic advantages? As an americanized by media Europoor, that saw a bit of your country, I can tell you this isn't just a chicken vs. egg thing. My experience of America is that it has (or used to have) an entire culture conducive to making things happen, that you won't find anywhere in Europe (with the possible exception of the UK, where you might get but a glimpse, but not more). I better not get into that too much, because the more I talk about it, the more it will undermine the core premise of your argument, and you asked me to argue for it.
The second part you have to argue is that the US is indeed losing it's economic advantage. That's the part I'm quite open to. A fellow motte-poster made the argument a few times that China's culture is adapting to enable the kind of cutting-edge innovation that was typically associated with America. Again, quite compelling, and all the denials feel pretty cope-y to me.
With the third part we start running into problems again, as you have to show that it's the lack of openness to immigration that would be responsible for the loss of the strategic advantage. I haven't really heard an argument for that, not even an unconvincing one, and I drawing a blank trying to argue for this. I can say what would convince me if you could demonstrate it: if you could see countries like Canada, that imported millions of immigrants, suddenly zoom past it's previous economic performance, that would make a very strong case for your argument.
gattsuru
15hr ago
Incidental contamination isn't impossible -- they're usually Cobalt, but Cesium has gotten into the scrap metal supply before -- but yeah, accidental food irradiation release seems more plausible. In turn, it's weirder, though: while there are some types of food irradiation involve just slapping raw and open product through the processing line (eg, fruit), for seafood specifically the norm is to pack the food first and then nuke the hell out of it. It's not great to have it on the wrapper, or maybe the original packaging is getting opened and the product repacked in ways that would get the material onto the food, but it's a weird bit compared to everything else being discussed.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
15hr ago
We've had the same issue with Hlynka
Funny in hindsight, given that OP was revealed to be a Hlynka sockpuppet recently. Not sure if you saw.
07mk
15hr ago
It's a few hundred millions, max. After that, the sun will slowly increase its irradiance by a relatively small percentage, resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect from atmospheric water vapor, which will end the carbon cycle on Earth.
Ah, I had thought we had at least a billion, but I hadn't done that much research. I'll take your correction at face value. You also answer here the question you asked earlier in this comment about what catastrophes I'm worried about. I'm worried about the big one.
So, those timelines are so extremely long, we can worry about them when we get really, really bored. The problems we have to solve before that need to be solved here, because solving them here is cheaper than living in space or on Mars.
I disagree. We won't ever get really, really bored, at least that's my prediction based on our evident ability to find extremely banal and inconsequential problems extremely interesting when there's a dearth of consequential problems that are nipping at our heels. And escaping boredom is a really bad motivator for accomplishing something as difficult as sustainable life off Earth. If we take the attitude that the timeline is just so long that we can worry about it in the future, that's a formula for just never doing it at all and letting humanity get snuffed out. One might hope that the human spirit would overcome and survive when push comes to shove, and I'd guess that it would, but I think things would be more pleasant if push didn't come to shove. Plenty of people survived the Titanic and made it to America, but I think it would have been more pleasant for everyone involved if that had been accomplished by the ship just reaching its destination safely instead of having to rely on lifeboats and another ship coming around to pick those up. If we can clearly see an iceberg in our path, it's best to plan for it now instead of relying on future us to solve it when there's less time to work out the kinks.
And there's no need to solve cheaper problems before expensive problems. Our problem-solving abilities aren't fungible like money, and we can devote resources both to expensive and cheap problems at the same time in a way that's more beneficial overall for humanity. Obviously no one can actually work out a credible measure of "benefit to humanity" or whatever, there are arguments to be made about the details, including the notion that, in 2025, all resources devoted to researching and accomplishing space travel would be better spent on something else on Earth, which I disagree with but which I think isn't unreasonable. But that's a different notion than the one that there's no point to humans living in space. Even before a planet/solar system-destroying catastrophe, there's a point, because living in space will force individuals living there to innovate and learn the things we don't even know that we don't know about how to live in space, so that we can actually get it right when shit hits the fan for all of Earth (some of them may will die along the way as they encounter these unknown unknowns, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make).
Bartender_Venator
15hr ago
There's a good Nick Land essay about this where he argues that space exploration is really about planetary disassembly by posthuman intelligences rather than domestead frontier LARPing.
Iirc he starts from the premise that spheres are an extremely inefficient shape to extract mineral resources from, compared to disassembling a planet into asteroids and having space drones mine them.
At risk of reductio ad fascism, there are quite a number of things which are useful but not good. We should not do those things.
More options
Context Copy link