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ArisKatsaris comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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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.
What benefit, other than satisfaction of sadism, do you see in infanticide of one's own children that wouldn't be satisfied by merely giving them up for adoption?
Look at the youngest children in any adoption photolisting. The kids you usually see there are either part of a sibling group, or very disabled. (Example). There are children born with severe disabilities who are given up by their birth parents and are never adopted. (Example) The government pays foster parents to care for them. That's up to $2,000 per month for care, plus all medical expenses.
Meanwhile, other kids are dying for lack of cheap mosquito nets. This use of money does not seem right to me.
At national level and above, the argument about "use of money" just plain fails. If you're looking for expenses to cut so that the money could be redirected for glaring needs like mosquito nets, foster care can't realistically appear on the cut list next to nuclear submarines and spaceflight.
True. I'd be happy to see those things cut as well. Though foster care is funded at a state level, I believe.
I and others have mentioned some elsewhere in this thread, but more broadly I don't think things should be illegal just because we can't think of a good reason for people to be doing them.
This rule has to be examined very very closely. While it sounds good, it spawns so many strawmen against libertarianism and such, we ought to try and unscrew that applause light of "liberty" from there. Liberty is an applause light to me, too (a reflected one from freedom-in-general), and a fine value it is, but still we'd better clinically examine anything that allows us to sidestep our intuitions so much.
[fucking politics, watch out] *(note that I'm a socialist and rather opposed to libertarianism as well, but I'm very willing to examine and consider its ups and downs)
Well, OK, let's examine it then.
We have some activity.
We see no particular reason to prevent people from doing that activity.
We see no good reason for people to do that activity.
We have a proposed law that makes that activity illegal.
Do I endorse that law?
The only case I can think of where I'd say yes is if the law also performs some other function, the benefit of which outweighs the inefficiencies associated with preventing this activity, and for some reason separating those two functions is more expensive than just preventing the activity. (This sort of thing happens in the real world all the time.)
Can you think of other cases?
I agree with you, by the way, that liberty-as-applause-light is a distraction from thinking clearly about these sorts of questions. Perhaps efficiency is as well, but if so it's one I have much more trouble reasoning past... I neither love that law nor hate it, but it is taking up energy I could use for something else.
Proposed law, or preexisting law?
As pointed out here, tribal traditions tend to have been adopted and maintained for some good reason or other, even if people can't properly explain what that reason is, and that goes double for the traditions that are inconvenient or silly-sounding.
Pace Chesterton, I don't see that much difference, especially when the context changes significantly from decade to decade. If there's a pre-existing law preventing the activity, I will probably devote significantly more effort to looking for a good reason to prevent that activity than for a proposed law, but not an infinite amount of effort; at some point either I find such a reason or I don't endorse the law.