= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MileyCyrus comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1430)
Greets, all!
I'm a walking stereotype of a LessWrong reader:
I'm a second-year undergraduate student at a decent public university, double majoring in math and computer science and compensating for the relatively unchallenging material even at the graduate level by taking 2-3x the typical workload; this is allowed by my specific college, which is a fantastic program I'd strongly recommend to high school students who happen to be reading this. (I'll happily go in to more depth if for anyone even slightly interested.)
I'm white, male, atheist, libertarian. I intend to sign up for cryonics once I have a job, because I am having tons of fun and want to continue to do so.
I've been reading LessWrong for three or so years, and have by now read all of the sequences and nearly all of the miscellaneous posts, as well as the most highly-rated discussion threads. I've also read and loved MoR. I could not, at this point, tell you how I found either of them.
I read this site, and study rationality, because I want to win.
I hold almost no views which would be notably controversial with the mainstream here, except perhaps these, presented with the hope of inspiring discussion:
(edit: formatting)
ETA: This is the first LW discussion I've participated in, so I hope you'll forgive my using this space to ask about the conventions of the community broadly. If you look below, a lot of my comments are getting voted down. For statements of opinion, this I understand, at least if the convention is "vote down things you disagree with" as opposed to "vote down things which don't contribute to the discussion". But why are my questions voted down? This one, in particular:
which as I type this is at -1.
Please interpret this as an honest question about community standards, not an implicit rebuke or anything like that.
Why is sadism worse than indifference? Are we punishing people for their mental states?
We're punishing people for their motives, which seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Why does that seem like a reasonable thing to do? Isn't that just an incentive to lie about motives?
Of course it's an incentive to lie about motives, but some inferences can be made.
I'm sure this discussion has been had on LW before, but there's a few reasons motives are important in considering what should be punished. In particular:
We accept as given that infanticide is something broadly to be discouraged. So we should only be accepting sufficiently good excuses.
Allowing sadists to kill their babies creates incentive to produce babies for the sole purpose of killing them, which is a behavior which is long-run going to be very damaging to society.
Its illegal to torture an animal. Why wouldn't it be illegal to torture a baby while killing him? If a sadist can get jollies out of killing with painless poison his children and keeps making them for that purpose, I can't really see how this harms wider society if he pays for the pills and children himself.
Please rethink this. E.g. are you at all confident that this sadist wouldn't slip and go on to adults after their 10th child? Wouldn't you, personally, force people who practice this to wear some mandatory identification in public, so you don't have to wonder about every creepy-looking stranger? Don't you just have an intuition about the myriad ways that giving sadists such rights could undermine society?
Fine make it illegal for this to be done except by experts.
No, why?
We already give sadists lots of rights to psychologically and physical abuse people when this is done with consent or when we don't feel like being morally consistent or when there is some societal benefit to be had.
For your own safety, in every regard that such people could threaten it.
Well, I've always thought that it's enormously and horribly wrong of us.
I don't think society considers that a valid reason for discrimination.
Also please remember surgeons can do nasty things to me without flinching if they wanted to, people do also occasionally have such fears since we even invoke this trope in horror movies.
I generally agree.
But on the other hand I think we should give our revealed preference some weight as well, remember we are godshatter, maybe we should just accept that perhaps we don't care as much about other people's suffering as we'd like to believe or say we do.
I don't understand your reasoning for either of those dot points.
Let me try again, then.
We want to discourage infanticide. Say you kill your baby because, say, you unexpectedly found yourself unable to support it but were familiar with the foster care system and didn't want any more people to go through that than necessary. That's unfortunate, but that's an excuse we can accept. By accepting this excuse we've basically committed to accepting all excuses which are equally good. But there's no way for you to exploit this commitment for your own benefit, and so we're OK making this commitment. The same could not be said to a commitment to accepting sadism as a reason to kill your children.
This point is less important. The idea is that a woman repeatedly getting pregnant and then killing the child is putting a lot of strain on society, both in terms of resources and in terms of comfort. We allow a lot of privileges for pregnant women and new mothers, with the expectation that they're trying to bring new people into society, something we encourage. If you're killing your kid out of sadism, you're not doing this, and society will have to adjust how all pregnant women are treated.
I'd think that that the bulk of the resource cost of a newborn is the physiological cost (and medical risks) the mother endured during pregnancy. The general societal cost seems small in comparison.
Sure, that seems true. Note that Bakkot didn't say that the costs to everyone else outweighed the costs to the mother, merely that the costs to everyone else were also substantial.
We already treat accidental pregnant women basically the same as those who planned their pregnancy. Clearly we should distinguish and discriminate between them rather than lump them into the "pregnant woman" category (I take a lighter tone in some of my other posts here to provoke thought, but I'm dead serious about this).
Also many people are way to stuck in their 21st century Eurocentric frame of mind to comprehend the personhood argument for infanticide properly. Let me help: