Rationality Quotes September 2012
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
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Comments (1088)
Harry Potter, in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
That arguably counts as LW/OB.
If HPMoR isn't allowed, that should be specified in the rules.
Stewart Brand
(from Bret Victor's excellent quotes page)
Guy Steele
Memories can be vile, repulsive little brutes. Like children, I suppose. haha.
But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon, if we can't face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality!
There is no sanity clause!
-The Joker, A Killing Joke
Obsoleted by sticky notes.
"A mind to which the stern character of an armchair is more immediately apparent than its use or its position in the room, is over-sensitive to expressive forms. It grasps analogies that a riper experience would reject as absurd. It fuses sensa that practical thinking must keep apart. Yet it is just this crazy play of associations, this uncritical fusion of impressions, that exercises the powers of symbolic transformation."
Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
Descartes, in Rules for the Direction of the Mind
A related Sherlock Holmes quote:
That's from The Red-Headed League.
-- Motaigne
I'll risk a bit of US politics, just because I like the quote:
Scott Adams on one of the two presidential candidates being skilled at the art of winning (with some liberal use of dark arts).
“The world is just a word for the things you value around you, right? That’s something I’ve had since I was born. If you tell me to rule such a world, I already rule it.” – Tohsaka Rin (Fate: stay night) on not taking over the world.
I think it is having a small core of things and people you value that keeps you grounded and healthy. Our "Something to Protect" if you like. Without that investment and connection to things that matter it's easy to lose your way.
Buckaroo Banzai
...
...
dur....
....
I'll take the new -5 karma hit to point out that this comment shouldn't be downvoted. It is an interesting critique of the post it replies to.
How is it a critique? The quote is an adequate expression of Eliezer's own third virtue of rationality, and I daresay if anyone had responded as uncharitably as that to his "Twelve Virtues", he would have considered 'dur' to be an adequate summary of that person's intellect.
How is it uncharitable? Eliezer is emptying his mind as recommended by Doctor Banzai. Not sure how it's a "critique" though.
Warning: Your milage may vary.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
They Might Be Giants
-William of Ockham
John Mayer
"Do you want 1111 1111 0000 0000 1111 1111 or 1111 1101 0000 0100 1111 1111? "
-- Iain McKay et al., An Anarchist FAQ, Sec. F.2.1
More from Scott Adams:
--Zhuangzi, being a trendy metacontrarian post-rationalist in the 4th century BC
Zhuangzi says knowledge has no limit, one could spend his entire life making a good map of a vast and diverse territory and it would not be enough to make a good map.
If one does not know this and makes maps for travel, he may be travelling to safe lands. This is weak evidence one is in danger.
If one knows this and still makes such maps, this is strong evidence one is in danger, for to travel to safe lands he would not make such foolhardy attempts.
Luther Sloan to Juilian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Inquisition”, written by Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller
Presuming that Starfleet Medical has limited enrollment, and that if he hadn't lied, a superior candidate would have enrolled, then that superior candidate would have saved those hundreds or thousands, and then a few more.
I see no good reason to presume a correlation between a med school's admissions criteria and total lives saved over a doctor's career as tight as this reasoning requires. Or to presume that it is near certain that if he hadn't lied, another liar wouldn't have been accepted in his place.
This reasoning merely requires that the correlation exist and be positive.
Baudrillard, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities
I was curious why the Baudrillard comment was downvoted when it expresses the same idea as the Nietzsche comment, it just uses a different style and approaches the problem from a different direction. Ideas, anyone?
Priming? Beaudrillard is associated with humanities, pomo and academic philosophy; Nietzche is associated with atheism, contrarianism and the idea of the ubermensch. The comment doesn't seem to be very strongly downvoted; possibly you're just dealing with detractors here (I daresay LW has more fans of the latter than of the former).
This was roughly my thought as well. I thought there might also have been more substantive differences though and I was curious what those might be. The only thing I could see is that Baudrillard's quote had a tone that's more critical of the masses and the way they do politics, and that Baudrillard's quote could be misread as an injunction to stop trying to make people rational (which it's not).
Well, I'm not even sure whether Boudrillard's quote is grammatically well-formed, so there's that. Then again, postmodernist texts tend to be imbued with near-poetical and mystical qualities. Much like Zen koans, they're more about exemplifying a particular mind-posture and way of thinking than they are about straightforward argumentation. I think it's unfair to expect LessWrongers to be familiar with such texts.
Oh. So this quote is difficult to read, then? More difficult than the Nietzsche one? I guess inferential gaps must be coming into play here. I'm having a difficult time trying to not-understand it, trying to emphasize with your viewpoint. I'm having a difficult time believing that you couldn't understand the quote, honestly.
I feel like you're generalizing too much about post modernism. I like lots of it, and don't think that it's mystical oriented. I would say rather that it packs a lot of information into a small amount of words through the clever use of words and through recurring concepts and subtle variations on those concepts.
Post modernism can be difficult to understand, but I don't think it is in this case, and I think that it's complexity is justified. Scientists use obscure terminology, but for a good purpose, generally. Some scientists use obscure terminology to hide the flaws in their ideas. I view post modern criticisms in almost exactly the same way - their complexity can be for both good and bad.
Also, Baudrillard is French. It might not be his fault if there's problems with the translated text.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Marcus Aurelius
Meh, there are worse things to be than a mean man.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
From "An Elementary Approach to Thinking Under Uncertainty," by Ruth Beyth-Marom, Shlomith Dekel, Ruth Gombo, & Moshe Shaked.
Or not.
--Oliver Sacks regarding patients suffering from "developmental agnosia" who first learned to use their hands as adults.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment
Tenzin Gyatso, 14. Dalai Lama
From "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character
The view, I think, is that anything you can prove immediately off the top of your head is trivial. No matter how much you have to know. So, sometimes you get conditional trivialities, like "this is trivial if you know this and that, but I don't know how to get this and that from somesuch...".
Chesterton doesn't understand the emotion because he doesn't know enough about psychology, not because emotions are deep sacred mysteries we must worship.
-- Jianzhi Sengcan
Edit: Since I'm not Will Newsome (yet!) I will clarify. There are several useful points in this but I think the key one is the virtue of keeping one's identity small. Speaking it out loud is a sort of primer, meditation or prayer before approaching difficult or emotional subjects has for me proven a useful ritual for avoiding motivated cognition.
-- 21st c. AI Clippy
Do I understand you to be saying that you avoid "the struggle between 'for' and 'against'" to an unusual degree compared to the average person? Compared to the average LWer?
No. I'm claiming this helps me avoid it more than I otherwise could. Much for the same reason I try as hard as I can to maintain an apolitical identity. From my personal experience (mere anecdotal evidence) both improve my thinking.
Respectfully, your success at being apolitical is poor.
Further, I disagree with the quote to extent that it implies that taking strong positions is never appropriate. So I'm not sure that your goal of being "apolitical" is a good goal.
I don't get it. Is this saying "Don't be prejudiced or push for any overarching principle; take each situation as new and unknown, and then you'll find easily the appropriate response to this situation", or is this the same old stoicist "Don't struggle trying to find food, choose to be indifferent to starvation" platitude?
Edited in a clarification. Though it will not help you since I have shown you the path you can not find it yourself. Sorry couldn't resist teasing or am I? :P
Salman Rushdie, explaining identity politics
I think "identity politics" is a term of art which covers things other than that which aren't bad, like minority struggles.
Jon Skeet
-Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids
I'd pick gripping lies over most nonfictional shows, which are mainly irrelevant or misleading truths.
"Is this a victory or a defeat? Is this justice or injustice? Is it gallantry or a rout? Is it valor to kill innocent children and women? Do I do it to widen the empire and for prosperity or to destroy the other's kingdom and splendor? One has lost her husband, someone else a father, someone a child, someone an unborn infant... What's this debris of the corpses?" -- Ashoka
-- Bryan Caplan
That sums it up.
Hitler was at least a hypocrite - he got his Jewish friends to safety, and accepted same-sex relationships in himself and people he didn't want to kill yet. The kind of corruption Caplan is pointing at is a willingness to compromise with anyone who makes offers, not any kind of ignoring your principles. And Nazis were definitely against that - see the Duke in Jud Süß.
— Robert A. Heinlein
Do it today, and fix/retry tomorrow on failure?
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Michael Lewis, Moneyball, Chapter Ten, "Anatomy of an Undervalued Pitcher".
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us." - Sagan
EDIT: Quote above is from the movie.
Verbatim from the comic:
I personally think that Watchmen is a fantastic study* on all the different ways people react to that realisation.
("Study" in the artistic sense rather than the scientific.)
--George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
-- G.K. Chesterton
I cannot tell if this is rationality or anti-rationality:
Steve Ballmer
Ambrose Bierce
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
-Lloyd Stone
obviously he never visited the British Isles :D
Baruch Spinoza Ethics
-- William Thurston
--Kate Evans on Twitter
-Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the snark
"In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the prestige car market in cars from the market in cars for people who just want a reliable means to getting from A to B, all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the society in which we live." -- Peter Singer
I'm not at all convinced of this. It seems to me that a genuinely ethical life requires extraordinary, desperate asceticism. Anything less is to place your own wellbeing above those of your fellow man. Not just above, but many orders of magnitude above, for even trivial luxuries.
Julia Wise would disagree, on the grounds that this is impossible to maintain and you do more good if you stay happy.
That sounds to me like exactly the sort of excuse a bad person would use to justify valuing their selfish whims over the lives of other people. If we're holding our ideas to scrutiny, I think the idea that the 'Sunday Catholic' school of ethics is consistent could take a long, hard look.
The coalition of modules in your mind that believes in ascetism being the only acceptable solution is most likely vastly outnumbered by the hedonistic modules. (Most people for which this wasn't the case were most likely filtered out of the gene pool.) As with politics, if you refuse to make compromises and insist on pushing your agenda while outnumbered, you will lose, or at best (worst?) create a deadlock in which nobody is happy. If you're not so absolute, you're more likely to achieve at least some of your aims.
Or, as Carl Shulman put it:
I believe Peter Singer actually originally advocated the asceticism you mention, but eventually moved towards "try to give 10% of your income", because people were actually willing to do that, and his goal was to actually help people, not uphold a particular abstract ideal.
An interesting implication, if this generalizes: "Don't advocate the moral beliefs you think people should follow. Advocate the moral beliefs which hearing you advocate them would actually cause other people to behave better."
And the great philosopher Diogenes would disagree with her.
So, how many lives did he save again?
Clever guy, but I'm not sure if you want to follow his example.
I'm not at all convinced that this is the case. After all, the shampoos are being designed to be less painful, and you don't need to test on ten thousand rabbits. Considering the distribution of the shampoos, this may save suffering even if you regard human and rabbit suffering as equal in disutility.
— Michael Kirkbride / Vivec, "The Thirty Six Lessons of Vivec", Morrowind.
Am I the only one who thinks we should stop using the word "simple" for Occam's Razor / Solomonoff's Whatever? In 99% of use-cases by actual humans, it doesn't mean Solomonoff induction, so it's confusing.
Yeah, various smart people have made that point repeatedly, but Eliezer and Luke aren't listening and most people learn their words from Eliezer and Luke, so the community is still being sorta silly in that regard.
-- Tim Kreider
The interesting part is the phrase "which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays." If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?
The way to divorce work from income is the ownership. Be an owner!
One way to divorce work from income is to own stuff.
A more popular way is to find someone else who owns stuff, then take their stuff.
That counts as work.
Not if it's in the form of "Be poor in a country that taxes the rich to give to the poor".
No, you just need to own enough stuff to pay workers to take even more stuff from others.
Are you sure you can. It's remarkably easy to make retroactive "predictions", much harder to make actual predictions.
One of these things is not like the others.
Yes, no state has ever implemented truly universal suffrage (among minors).
Or non-humans.
In Jasay's terminology, the first is a liberty (a relation between a person and an act) and the rest are rights {relations between two or more persons (at least one rightholder and one obligor) and an act}. I find this distnction useful for thinking more clearly about these kinds of topics. Your mileage may vary.
I was actually referring to the the third being what I might call an anti-liberty, i.e., you aren't allowed to work more than eight-hours a day, and the fact that is most definitely not enforced nor widely considered a human right.
I thought eight-hours workdays were about employers not being allowed to demand that employees work more than eight hours a day; I didn't know you weren't technically allowed to do that at all even if you're OK with it.
It would be very hard to distinguish when people were doing it because they wanted to, and when employers were demanding it. Maybe some employees are working that extra time, but one isn't. The one that isn't happens to be fired later on, for unrelated reasons. How do you determine that worker's unwillingness to work extra hours is not one of the reasons they were fired? Whether it is or not, that happening will likely encourage workers to go beyond the eight hours, because the last one that didn't got fired, and a relationship will be drawn whether there is one or not.
It's not like you can fire employees on a whim: the “unrelated reasons” have to be substantial ones, and it's not clear you can find ones for any employee you want to fire. (Otherwise, you could use such a mechanism to de facto compel your employees to do pretty much anything you want.)
Also, even if you somehow did manage to de facto demand workers to work ten hours a day, if you have to pay hours beyond the eighth as overtime (with a hourly wage substantially higher than the regular one), then it's cheaper for you to hire ten people eight hours a day each than eight people ten hours a day.
Only if they can't get another job.
That assumption isn't that far-fetched. Also, the same applies to doing that to compel them to work extra time (or am I missing something?).
To see why, assume that without any restrictions on workday length, workers supply more than 8 hours. Let's say, without loss of generality, that they supply 10. (In other words, the equilibrium quantity supplied is ten.)
If employers can't demand the equilibrium quantity, but they're still willing to pay to get it, then employees will have the incentive to supply it. In their competition for jobs (finding them and keeping them), employees will be supply labor up until the equilibrium quantity, regardless of whether the bosses demand it.
Working more looks good. Everyone knows that; you don't need your boss to tell you. So if there's competition for your spot or for a spot that you want, it would serve you well to work more.
So if your goal is to prevent ten-hour days, you'd better stop people from supplying them.
At least, this makes sense to me. But I'm no microeconomist. Perhaps we have one on LW who can state this more clearly (or who can correct any mistakes I've made).
How is that different from pointing out that you're not allowed to sell yourself into slavery (not even partially, as in signing a contract to work for ten years and not being able to legally break it), or that you're not allowed to sell your vote?
I'd say each of the three can be said to be unlike the others:
If we had eight-hour workdays a century ago, we wouldn't have been able to support the standard of living expected a century ago. I'm not sure we could have even supported living. The same applies to full unemployment. We may someday reach a point where we are productive enough that we can accomplish all we need when we just do it for fun, but if we try that now, we'll all starve.
So, accepting the premise that the ability to support "full unemployment" (aka, people working for reasons other than money) is something that increases over time, and it can't be supported until the point is reached where it can be supported... how would we recognize when that point has been reached?
Is that true? (Technically, a century ago was 1912.)
Wikipedia on the eight-hour day:
The quote seemed to imply we didn't have them a century ago. Just use two centuries or however long.
My point is that we didn't stop working as long because we realized it was a good idea. We did because it became a good idea. What we consider normal now is something we could not have instituted a century ago, and attempting to institute now what what will be normal a century from now would be a bad idea.
If you are a consequentialist, you should think about the consequences of such decision.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person has to work nine hours to produce enough food to survive. Now the pharaoh makes a new law saying that (a) all produced food has to be distribute equally among all citizens, and (b) no one can be compelled to work more than eight hours; you can work as a volunteer, but all your produced food is redistributed equally.
What would happen is such situation? In my opinion, this would be a mass Prisoners' Dilemma where people would gradually stop cooperating (because the additional hour of work gives them epsilon benefits) and start being hungry. There would be no legal solution; people would try to make some food in their free time illegally, but the unlucky ones would simply starve and die.
The law would seem great in far mode, but its near mode consequences would be horrible. Of course, if the pharaoh is not completely insane, he would revoke the law; but there would be a lot of suffering meanwhile.
If people had "a basic human right to have enough money without having to work", situation could progress similarly. It depends on many things -- for example how much of the working people's money would you have to redistribute to non-working ones, and how much could they keep. Assuming that one's basic human right is to have $500 a month, but if you work, you can keep $3000 a month, some people could still prefer to work. But there is no guarantee it would work long-term. For example there would be a positive feedback loop -- the more people are non-working, the more votes politicians can gain by promising to increase their "basic human right income", the higher are taxes, and the smaller incentives to work. Also, it could work for the starting generation, but corrupt the next generation... imagine yourself as a high school student knowing that you will never ever have to work; how much effort would an average student give to studying, instead of e.g. internet browsing, Playstation gaming, or disco and sex? Years later, the same student will be unable to keep a job that requires education.
Also, if less people have to work, the more work is not done. For example, it will take more time to find a cure for cancer. How would you like a society where no one has to work, but if you become sick, you can't find a doctor? Yes, there would be some doctors, but not enough for the whole population, and most of them would have less education and less experience than today. You would have to pay them a lot of money, because they would be rare, and because most of the money you pay them would be paid back to state as tax, so even everything you have could be not enough motivating for them.
Well, if your society isn't rich enough, you just do what you can. (And a lot of work really isn't all that important; would it be that big of a disaster if your local store carried fewer kinds of cosmetics, or if your local restaurant had trouble hiring waiters?)
See also.
If you are a bayesian, you should think about how much evidence your imagination constitutes.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person gains little or no total productivity by working over 8 hour per day. Imagine, moreover, that in this civilization, working 10 hours a day doubles your risk of coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in this civilization. Finally, imagine that, in this civilization, a common way for workers to signal their dedication to their jobs is by staying at work long hours, regardless of the harm it does both to their company and themselves.
In this civilization, a law preventing individuals from working over 8 hours per day is a tremendous social good.
Work hour skepticism leaves out the question of the cost of mistakes. It's one thing to have a higher proportion of defective widgets on an assembly line (though even that can matter, especially if you want a reputation for high quality products), another if the serious injury rate goes up, and a third if you end up with the Exxon Valdez.
You mean “incentives to fully report your income”, right? ;-) (There are countries where a sizeable fraction of the economy is underground. I come from one.)
The same they give today. Students not interested in studying mostly just cheat.
It is true that in the long run, things could work out worse with a guarantee of sufficient food/supplies for everyone. I think, though, that this post answers the wrong question; the question to answer in order to compare consequences is how probable it is to be better or worse, and by what amounts. Showing that it "could" be worse merely answers the question "can I justify holding this belief" rather than the question "what belief should I hold". The potential benefits of a world where people are guaranteed food seem quite high on the face of it, so it is a question well worth asking seriously... or would be if one were in a position to actually do anything about it, anyway.
Prisoners' dilemmas amongst humans with reputation and social pressure effects do not reliably work out with consistent defection, and models of societies (and students*) can easily predict almost any result by varying the factors they model and how they do so, and so contribute very little evidence in the absence of other evidence that they generate accurate predictions.
The only reliable information that I am aware of is that we know that states making such guarantees can exist for multiple generations with no obvious signs of failure, at least with the right starting conditions, because we have such states existing in the world today. The welfare systems of some European countries have worked this way for quite a long time, and while some are doing poorly economically, others are doing comparably well.
I think that it is worth assessing the consequences of deciding to live by the idea of universal availability of supplies, but they are not so straightforwardly likely to be dire as this post suggests, requiring a longer analysis.
As I wrote, it depends on many things. I can imagine a situation where this would work; I can also imagine a situation where it would not. As I also wrote, I can imagine such system functioning well if people who don't work get enough money to survive, but people who do work get significantly more.
Data point: In Slovakia many uneducated people don't work, because it wouldn't make economical sense for them. Their wage, minus traveling expenses, would be only a little more, in some cases even less than their welfare. What's the point of spending 8 hours in work if in result you have less money? They cannot get higher wages, because they are uneducated and unskilled; and in Slovakia even educated people get relatively little money. The welfare cannot be lowered, because the voters on the left would not allow it. The social pressure stops working if too many people in the same town are doing this; they provide moral support for each other. We have villages where unemployment is over 80% and people have already accommodated to this; after a decade of such life, even if you offer them a work with a decent wage, they will not take it, because it would mean walking away from their social circle.
This would not happen in a sane society, but it does happen in the real life. Other European countries seem to fare better in this aspect, but I can imagine the same thing happening there in a generation or two. A generation ago most people would probably not predict this situation in Slovakia.
I also can't imagine the social pressure to work on the "generation Facebook". If someone spends most of their day on Facebook or playing online multiplayer games, who exactly is going to socially press them? Their friends? Most of them live the same way. Their parents? The conflict between generations is not the same thing as peer pressure. And the "money without work is a basic human right" meme also does not help.
It could work in a country where the difference between average wage (even for a less educated and less skilled people) is much more than one needs to survive. But it can work long-term only if the amount of "basic human right money" does not grow faster than the average wage. -- OK, finally here is something that can be measured: what is the relative increase in wages vs welfares in western European countries in recent decades; optionally, extrapolate these numbers to estimate how long the system can survive.
Systems that don't require people to work are only beneficial if non-human work (or human work not motivated by need) is still producing enough goods that the humans are better off not working and being able to spend their time in other ways. I don't think we're even close to that point. I can imagine societies in a hundred years that are at that point (I have no idea whether they'll happen or not), but it would be foolish for them to condemn our lack of such a system now since we don't have the ability to support it, just as it would be foolish for us to condemn people in earlier and less well-off times for not having welfare systems as encompassing as ours.
I'd also note that issues like abolition and universal suffrage are qualitatively distinct from the issue of a minimum guaranteed income (what the quote addresses). Even the poorest of societies can avoid holding slaves or placing women or men in legally inferior roles. The poorest societies cannot afford the "full unemployment" discussed in the quote, and neither can even the richest of modern societies right now (they could certainly come closer than the present, but I don't think any modern economy could survive the implementation of such a system in the present).
I do agree, however, about it being a solid goal, at least for basic amenities.
Not if it's actually the same morality, but depends on technology. For example, strong prohibitions on promiscuity are very sensible in a world without cheap and effective contraceptives. Anyone who tried to live by 2012 sexual standards in 1912 would soon find they couldn't feed their large horde of kids. Likewise, if robots are doing all the work, fine; but right now if you just redistribute all money, no work gets done.
Not if they were gay.
Then they'd just be dead, or imprisoned.
We're talking about morality that is based around technology. There is no technological advance that allows us to not criminalize homosexuality now where we couldn't have in the past.
Naming three:
Homosexuality was common/accepted/expected in many societies without leading to any negative consequences, so technology is not an enabler of morality here.
Homosexuality has certainly been present in many societies.
However, your link does not state, nor even suggest, that it did not lead to any negative consequences.
I didn't specify promiscuous homosexuality. Monogamously inclined gay people are as protected from STDs as anyone else at a comparable tech level - maybe more so among lesbians.
Neither did I, but would rather refrain from explaining in detail why I didn't assume promiscuity.
It's really annoying that you jumped to that conclusion, though. Further, I'm confused why the existence of some minority of a minority of the population that doesn't satisfy the ancestor's hypothetical matters.
Condoms may be older than you think.
What?
Didn't the Jews have that back in the years BC? It's sort of cultural, but it's been around for a while in some cultures...
Imām al-Ḥaddād (trans. Moṣṭafā al-Badawī), "The Sublime Treasures: Answers to Sufi Questions"
-- xkcd 667
"If at first you don't succeed, switch to power tools." -- The Red Green Show
I can confirm that this works.
Alexander Grothendieck
-- Dienekes Pontikos, Citizen Genetics
-Robin Hanson, Human Enhancement
--Kate Evans on Twitter
Don't we all choose for ourselves on which side to drive? There's usually nobody else ready to grab the wheel away from you...
Have successfully quoted this to counter a relativist-truth argument that was aimed towards supporting "freedom of faith" even in hypothetical scenarios where the majority of actors would end up promoting and following harmful faiths.
While counterintuitive to me, it was apparently a necessary step before the other party could even comprehend the fallacy of gray that was being committed.
"Junior", FIRE JOE MORGAN
-- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
Not all that rational. Note that he requires scientific proof before he is willing to change his beliefs. The standards should be much lower than that.
No, the claim is that a scientific proof is sufficient from him to feel the need to change his beliefs. It isn't that it's necessary.
Technically true, but nice though that is, saying that scientific proof would force you to change your beliefs still isn't a very impressive show of rationality. It would be better if he had said "Whenever science and Buddhism conflict, Buddhism should change".
I know, it is good to hear it from a religious figure, but if it were any other subject the same claim would leave you indifferent. "If it were scientifically proven that aliens don't exist I will have to change my belief in them." Sound impressive? No? Then the Dalai Lama shouldn't get any more praise just because it's about religion.
G. K. Chesterton, "The Absence of Mr Glass"
Note: this was put in the mouth of the straw? atheist. It's still correct.
He's just showing that those people don't give infinite value, not that it's nonsense. It's nonsense because, even if you consider life infinitely more intrinsically valuable than a green piece of paper, you'd still trade a life for green pieces of paper, so long as you could trade them back for more lives.
If life were of infinite value, trading a life for two new lives would be a meaningless operation - infinity times two is equal to infinity. Not unless by "life has infinite value" you actually mean "everything else is worthless".
Related:
"Nontrivial measure or it didn't happen." -- Aristosophy
(Who's Kate Evans? Do we know her? Aristosophy seems to have rather a lot of good quotes.)
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his candle at mine, receives light without darkening me. No one possesses the less of an idea, because every other possesses the whole of it." - Jefferson
-- GoodDamon (this may skirt the edge of the rules, since it's a person reacting to a sequence post, but a person who's not a member of LW.)
Ken Wilber
Unless you're a fictional character. Or possibly Mike "Bad Player" Flores:
An interesting corollary of the efficient market hypothesis is that, neglecting overhead due to things like brokerage fees and assuming trades are not large enough to move the market, it should be just as difficult to lose money trading securities as it is to make money.
No, not really. In an efficient marked risks uncorrelated with those of other securities shouldn't be compensated, so you should easily be able to screw yourself over by not diversifying.