domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
YE_GUILTY
33m ago
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people.
Hm. Just today, I passed a swimming pool and noticed an insect struggling in the water. It was a bee. Did I have a Singerian obligation to hop the fence and rescue the 7-15% of a drowning child?
GBRK
1m ago
tbh that's part of why I don't believe in that current data adequately demonstrates the HBD thesis. If the HBD people are right about selective pressures leading to genetic differences we should expect heterozygote advantage to show up, but it doesn't. A -> means !B -> !A and all that. That's why I gave that whole list of disclaimers before I actually got into discussing the interesting-but-likely-false bit. But it would be fascinating, wouldn't it? My dad recently did a massive study of [telling you the crop might tell you my identity] genetics and it involved hybridizing modern elite genomes with a massive quantity of heirloom varieties from a seed bank to try and find useful alleles that were previously outbred while trying to look for local minima. If anyone wants to actually take HBD seriously they should be thinking of what an equivalent project looks like for humans, not trying to create a single inbred variety on the basis of... ???skin color???
Barring the AI apocalypse Americans will eventually evolve to be darker over large timespans anyways-- people living at our latitude always do. Sunscreen and indoor time will slow the selection effect but not eliminate it entirely.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
5m ago
Being married with kids is seemingly a better predictor than either race or official party affiliation.
I have a huge amount of experience working with animals (both wild and domesticated). Slaughtered quite a few head of livestock by hand in my back yard today, as it happens, which I do about once a week. So I have a lot of thoughts here -- but the main thing I want to suggest to you is that cruelty toward animals is irreverent toward the Creator.
Yes, the chain of being is real and man's place is that of dominion over all other animals and more besides. How then shall we conduct ourselves?
FWIW I completely endorse your perspective on the rat and the kitten, though I don't expect most others to get it. Regardless of intentions, learning to kill animals well requires botching the process rather a lot of times.
Even so, not giving a crap is contraindicated. I doubt you've had much occasion for (or inclination toward) abuse but it never hurts to bear in mind that one will someday stand before the dread judgment seat of Christ.
aqouta
3hr ago
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
We must be reading totally different threads. Every time the topic comes up it's people defending what you're calling the motte from blank slatists. Not to consensus build, as I'm sure we have people who cynically want to live in the bailey, but it really seems like the modal motte opinion on the topic is that HBD is obviously real is a large part of various outcome gaps and what should be done about it is to stop trying to overturn every inch of society for a racism of the gaps. It's an end to affirmative action, not establishing a racial caste system.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
36m ago
(And that story itself is basically just a modernization of Cain's justification for killing Abel.)
To give the traditionalists their due, Cain WAS the bad guy in that story.
Well, you can have that, or you have the traditionalist/progressive projects which are just unironic rewrites of Harrison Bergeron (the only difference between the two is the hair color and name of the antagonist).
(And that story itself is basically just a modernization of Cain's justification for killing Abel.)
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
When I had a kitten I maimed a captured rat to teach it how to catch rodents. I feel no guilt about this whatsoever.
The great chain of being is real. I simply refuse to give a crap about shrimp welfare. You can too. The answer to ethical vegans saying ‘but think of the animals’ is ‘yes, when I do that I remember what they taste like’. I recommend this approach.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
And then you had to go and fuck it up.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5hr ago
Congratulations! You’ve advanced from lazy, uncharitable snarling at your enemies to. Uh. Marginally higher-effort snarling at the same people.
It doesn’t look like you are arguing to understand anything. It looks more like you’re picking fights. This is an immense pain in the ass and against various rules.
One week ban.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Toxic empathy
That's a good one.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
12m ago
How many examples with how many upvotes would i have to provide to convince you that it's not a fluke? How explict do they have to be? Will you accept plain language at its meaning, or should i expect you to play the old "defund the police doesn't literally mean defunding the police" card?
I felt what I consider an appropriate level of bad one particular time I found a rat in a traditional trap. It was gravely maimed, and as I went to put it out of its misery I saw, as it had lain incapacitated, its friends or children had taken the opportunity to feast on its guts. If I had chosen to not put it out of its misery, then I would have thought less of myself. The experience did not make me think more highly of rats, but it's not as if I am above considering the suffering of other animals.
Targeting an animal one already hopes to exterminate for pest control is not outlandishly cruel. To argue against that one needs to argue against effective rodent control more generally.
If I told you I trapped rats to torture them because it felt good and made me laugh you'd probably remember my face and tell people to avoid me. Except, in this case, instead of one weird kid you make sure your child stays away from, it's all of society that is going out of their way to torture rats. That what I imagine and have been told the emotional prism is like for dedicated vegans. As a personal choice it is common and well enough. The personal choice I don't have much objection to. The more foreign value impositions are what I find objectionable.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
23m ago
Wash it? Pretty much never. It's a light color that doesn't show dirt much, the paint job is roasted, and there's a bit of body damage so washing it doesn't really make it look much better. I keep the interior reasonably clean, though, and my tools are organized in the trunk.
I find anything to do with cleaning cars to be a chore, but worth it when I have a car where the effort actually pays off.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
I'm unlikely to be fined, jailed, or fired even if I write some seriously fucked up code. The CEO may be fired, and the company may be sued, but neither of those entities knows what my day to day looks like.
GeneralElephant
4hr ago
Almost all of these employees laid off employees will be replaced by H1-Bs (Microsoft put in for over 6000 the first two quarters this year) as well as previously announced hiring in India.
I’m not sure where AI comes in but they certainly aren’t replacing their laid-off workers with AI unless AI stands for “another Indian”.
aqouta
2hr ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
I mean we won huge battles in the fight against affirmative action and knocked the woke racial identarians off their game in a lot of areas. It being discussed less fits squarely in the hypothesis that most of us HBD people weren't actually white nationalists but simply what we've been telling you we are, people who prefer race blindness if they're allowed to have it. Yes, white nationalists continue to exist and they will continue to make white nationalist noises, not really sure why that should matter when discussing HBD.
ulyssessword
53m ago
I've also seen arguments that a particular distribution of values for IQ, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, etc (including many factors that psychologists don't measure) is the best for a nation, and the only way to get spread is to select based on race.
Even though the "good" numbers might be higher on other people, naive number-maxxing would lead to a failure mode of some kind. It's often unspecified, but the ones I can remember involve out-of-touch highly [good trait] people making norms that are legible and achievable to them, but disastrous to everyone else. Liberalization of sex and drugs are the main culprits.
thejdizzler
3hr ago
As perhaps one of the few resident vegans (although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey) on this forum, I think this stuff is insane and is why we've had little to no progress in growing the movement or in meaningfully reducing animal suffering that we cause. Things like animal welfare restrictions that make factory farms impractical are broadly popular (although would require people to eat less meat). Nope, instead we have to focus on utilitarian suffering min-maxing which leads to crazy conclusions like those mentioned above (banning pets, GMOing predators to herbivores, being concerned about exploiting earthworm labor).
I still have an intuitive belief in a lot of what veganism stands for. I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure. Yet as a movement, or at least how it's practiced right now, veganism can never work. Nutritionally it's become clear to me that eating shellfish/fish is straight better than being on a strict vegan diet. Ethically, the emphasis on not eating/exploiting kingdom Animalia, when things like oysters have just as little sense perception as plants makes no sense, not to mention the failure to admit that there are gradations of intelligence/sense perception that should cause us to feel differently about cephalopod or mammalian suffering say, compared to that of arthropods. Practically, people don't like being scolded, and that's what a lot of vegans end up doing when it comes time to do activism. You can prevent a lot more animal suffering by teaching all your friends to cook more plant-rich meals than by converting one person to veganism and alienating everyone else.
YE_GUILTY
7hr ago
Hm, thank you for bringing this up.
One thing I remember of the HBD debate is the meta-debate over why it's being discussed at all. The anti-HBD side is not quiet about their belief that pro-HBDers are just racists seeking to deploy this information as an offensive weapon, so that they may construct a system of white supremacy. The pro-HBD side sometimes says that it's mainly brought up defensively, as a counterargument to assertions that the only cause for outcome disparities between racial groups has to be white racism, (and therefore the only solution to outcome disparities is to squeeze white people more until they give up whatever kind of oppression they're doing.)
So, if we're hearing about HBD less in a period of right-wing ascendancy, as compared with a period of left-wing ascendancy (e.g. when Black Lives Matter defined the discourse,) that strongly suggests the defensive explanation is true.
And I'm relieved, because I don't want to live in a society of enforced racial hierarchies, whether they're built on IQ or on blood guilt or on anything else.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
Your report was obnoxiously unfunny and we have to deal with enough spurious and bad-faith reports on posts.
Normally I'd leave it at that, but you have a history of this kind of obnoxious trolling, so banned for a day. Knock it off.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Thank you for the contribution. I probably do need to set the saddle higher.
I'm pretty sure it was a cheap bike, and I came into it second hand, but how bad can it really be? I figure it will, you know, roll and stuff, and I don't plan to enter any races any time soon.
What do you mean by putting in more hours compared to other modalities?
Your metaphor is subtly broken, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
Using a gun for a reason other than to shoot ballistic missiles is suspect, because that's not what it's there for.
No, by that logic, it's "using/having a gun for a reason other than shooting to kill [its primary purpose] is suspect" (so 'I'm just here to shoot targets because it's fun' is immoral and weird).
Thus, by that same logic,
Sexual intercourse can be done for making babies and for pair bonding and pleasure (for example, post menopause or when the woman is already pregnant.)
"having sex for pair bonding and pleasure" is suspect.
Which is the Catholic position on sex.
It appeals to people who are given to being addicted to seeking sex, and Catholic Christianity treats everyone (both men and women, but the emphasis is traditionally more on men) as being in this condition by default. It makes sense that Catholicism draws in people that are aware they have problems with sex in this way, hence the assertion everyone does and that it's Godly for you to behave as if you were addicted to sex at all times[2].
Other denominations of Christianity, in particular the more Charismatic strains, treat dancing and alcohol/other drugs this way as well. Catholicism has a more measured response to the latter, but not for sex.
[1] Which forms one of the two prongs of the stereotypical Blue viewpoint on guns. They can't just be telling the truth, it has to be for some nefarious purpose. You'll recognize that rejecting that's true is also the [classical] liberal refutation of the Christian party line on the gays (and on those readings of 'fornication' and 'sexual morality' more generally).
It's more like a kind of mutual masturbation
[2] And if you're one of those men who tends to treat their partners like a human fleshlight during sex, then the smuggled assumption of "and that's bad" becomes trivially correct. Some (many?) men legitimately do have problems with this [source: I read the posts here], and when they do, following that rule is probably better for both them and their wives (and it forces them to have buy-in to the relationship through childbirth).
Of course, there's another answer in "well, just don't do sex that way lol" (and this approach is hinted at in a few other Pauline letters), but having "don't be fucking stupid lol" as the rule is about as effective as abstinence-based sex ed is at avoiding pregnancy for most people who [spiritually] require the structure of Catholicism in the first place, so...
Shocking. So shocking I'm calling BS. We should be arguing if one ten thousandth or one one hundred thousandth is a better order of magnitude estimate. Not 15%. Wrong order of magnitude is putting it lightly.
I'm aware of people very concerned about the very hypothetical suffering of tiny bugs including dust mites. Imagining that they have conscious awareness and suffer. Ex: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3hqXxzFRSZqRFPCTv/killing-the-ants
We need a term for this. Toxic empathy or something.
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