Strange7 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

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Comment author: Bakkot 01 January 2012 07:55:21AM *  20 points [-]

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:

  • Infanticide of one's own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren't yet people.
  • Discrimination against youths aged 13 and above out to be viewed, in a reasonable society, in the same light as racism. Reason: broadly, discrimination based on group membership should be frowned upon if the variance within a group dominates the variance between groups. In such cases group membership is a bad predictor and is thus very unfair to individuals. Given this, and on the assumption that variance within the group of 13- to 21-year-olds dominates the variance between the groups of 13- to 21-year-olds and over-21's, we ought not to discriminate against youths.

(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:

I'm curious now, though. What do you think defines an agent as a person, for the moral calculus? How is it that ten-month-old babies meet this definition? Do, say, pigs also meet this definition?

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.

Comment author: Strange7 05 June 2012 05:35:14AM 1 point [-]

Would you approve of a man killing a child which his wife recently gave birth to, without the mother's permission, on the grounds that he does not believe himself to be the child's father? That's certainly not sadism.

Or, if genetic testing has been done and the child's biological father is known, would you say it should be legal for the father to kill the child... say, because he disagrees with the married couple's religious beliefs and wants to deny them an easy recruit?

Comment author: Bakkot 06 June 2012 03:35:00AM 0 points [-]

No and no. Easily solved by requiring both parents to consent and/or by not defining "parent" to mean "progenitor".

Both seem rather tangential, in any case.

Comment author: Strange7 06 June 2012 03:46:35AM 1 point [-]

How would you define "parent," then? It's not a tangent, it's an important edge case. I'm trying to understand exactly where our views on the issue differ.

For what it's worth, I agree with you unreservedly on the age discrimination thing. In fact, I think it's the root of a lot of the current economic problems: a majority of the population is essentially being warehoused during their formative years, and then expected to magically transform into functional, productive adults afterward.

Comment author: Bakkot 06 June 2012 04:27:31AM 0 points [-]

Probably we'd be better served by me explaining why think it's a tangent: The issues related to who has the right to kill the baby have to do with harm done to people other than the baby. The core point I was trying to make was that killing a baby isn't inherently wrong in the way that killing an adult is because the baby isn't a person.

Certainly there are issues to be sorted out, in the same way there are issues to be sorted out related to who has the right to kill a pet dog. But if babies were people these wouldn't be important, relatively speaking: killing babies would be wrong for the same reason killing adults is wrong. As such I think they're tangential: unrelated to the question of "is it wrong to kill babies for the reason that babies are people?".

That said: The legal definition is probably adequate; barring that, perhaps we might say the parents are the people to whom responsibility for raising the baby would fall.

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