One of the reasons this post is interesting is because I don't expect it to raise any sort of debate at all - I expect pretty much everyone who posts on LW to be pro-choice. Is this because LW people are part of the "Correct Contrarian Cluster" (although it isn't so contrarian in this context). Or does this mean that LW is massively biased towards a certain political point of view? If the latter, should we be actively aiming to encourage more pro-Lifers to give us useful counterpoints in our debates?
One of the reasons this post is interesting is because I don't expect it to raise any sort of debate at all - I expect pretty much everyone who posts on LW to be pro-choice. Is this because LW people are part of the "Correct Contrarian Cluster (although it isn't so contrarian in this context)"
This is nearly the opposite of 'contrarianism' (as you partially acknowledge). The 'pro-choice' stance in most cases will be more to do with conforming than coming to a Correct choice. In fact Correct barely fits either, except to the extent that it is p...
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.
If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.
This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.