Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 November 2012 07:05:36PM 6 points [-]

I would call “moral progress” the process whereby a society's behaviours and their CEV get closer to each other than they used to be.

What? So would you call an incorruptibly evil society highly "morally progressed"? What about the baby eaters since they both believe they should and do in fact eat babies?

Comment author: Strange7 11 November 2012 07:32:36PM 0 points [-]

Babyeater babies don't want to be eaten, or particularly want to eat their peers, and those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time, so "eat babies" isn't the 'coherent' part of the babyeater CEV.

Comment author: wedrifid 12 November 2012 02:56:39AM 4 points [-]

Babyeater babies don't want to be eaten, or particularly want to eat their peers, and those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time,

Using the observation that being dead precludes wanting to (and endorsing) eating babies as an adult as a technical reason that "those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time" is highly misleading. I'd go as far as to call it bullshit.

We could equally as accurately say "those who will never develop into non-paperclipping adults constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time" (therefore CEV<Babyeaters> means paperclipping!)

so "eat babies" isn't the 'coherent' part of the babyeater CEV.

Any attempted implementation of CEV<Babyeaters> that does not result in the eating of babies sounds like a catastrophic failure. It would seem to result in the sneaking in of non-babyeater values at every excuse.

Comment author: sam0345 11 November 2012 08:27:09PM * 0 points [-]

Insert abortion debate: Right to choose is morally coherent, and right to life is morally coherent. It is debatable which of these would constitute moral progress.

However, what is not morally coherent, is that women have sole power over reproductive decisions, but men have an obligation to support those choices whatever they may be, that husbands don't have a say, that unmarried men can be forced to support babies, but women cannot.

This is not moral progress, but anti white male democratic coalition.

One could coherently argue that right to choose, but no right to child support is moral progress

One could coherently argue that right to life, plus right to child support is moral progress.

One cannot argue that right to choose plus right to child support is moral progress. It is morally right that he who pays the piper, calls the tune, and that she who calls the tune, gets stuck with the piper's bill.

Comment author: chaosmosis 12 November 2012 11:42:26PM * 3 points [-]

I agree that the current system is inconsistent. If women are allowed to abort babies because babies are an expensive burden, men should either have an equal say in that decision or men shouldn't be obligated to support those children. Either one would make sense.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 November 2012 01:34:52AM 2 points [-]

Insert abortion debate

On second thoughts, let's not!

Comment author: MugaSofer comment score below threshold [+] (19 children)

Comment author: [deleted] 13 November 2012 12:59:17PM 2 points [-]

EDIT: Is this seriously being downvoted?

Maybe people (e.g. MileyCyrus, I guess) are just objecting to this conversation and downvoting everything.

Comment author: MugaSofer 13 November 2012 02:43:50PM * -1 points [-]

Well, if so, their cynical exploitation of the karma mechanics is working; it's at -3, soon all discussion will be silenced by the Toll.

EDIT: Well, there it goes. To defend my point, deliberately invoking mechanics designed to discourage feeding trolls to prevent discussion on topics you disagree with is cynical exploitation. Karma is intended to rate the quality of a comment, not to censor certain topics of discussion. I personally would consider this just as reprehensible as creating new thread to reply to comments in a Karma Tolled old one, which has been met with severe sanctions.

Comment author: Kindly 13 November 2012 02:55:55PM 0 points [-]

Cynical exploitation? The point of the karma mechanics is to downvote comments you don't want to see more of.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 November 2012 03:03:43PM 1 point [-]

“I don't want see more of this” != “I don't want people to reply to this” (though the two are correlated); the Toll is about the latter.

Comment author: DaFranker 12 November 2012 06:48:38PM * 4 points [-]

I agree with your statements as written. However:

However, what is not morally coherent, is that women have sole power over reproductive decisions, but men have an obligation to support those choices whatever they may be, that husbands don't have a say, that unmarried men can be forced to support babies, but women cannot.

This is not nonsense, as far as I can tell.

Given "Accidental Pregnancy", the woman's decision tree (A) goes:

A1 - Keep the baby, support it, including whatever costs and benefits.
A2 - Get an abortion, costs and benefits are avoided.

The man's decision tree (B), according to the quoted statement, goes:

A1 - The woman kept the baby; (Bx|A1) - Support the woman and baby. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant.
A2 - The woman got an abortion; (Bx|A2) - No baby, no costs, no benefits. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant.

Once you've boiled down the calculations, given unforeseen pregnancy, the men have zero decision power according to such a system in theory, and must pay a cost independently of whatever they could possibly do in exactly half of the possible outcomes.

In other words, whether you pay a cost or not is entirely not up to you, for no specific reason whatsoever other than "aren't the ones using their bodies as life support". Does this sound like a fair setting, and more importantly, does it sound like an optimal system to play in?

Comment author: TimS comment score below threshold [+] (9 children)

Comment author: sam0345 12 November 2012 11:42:24PM * 1 point [-]

But it is totally rejected by society's decisions about involuntary medical procedures and economic support of children. Once those decisions are made, there is no space for anything like what the quote advocates for.

Exactly so: Moral and social decay. People behaving badly, bad behavior being encouraged, and frequently enforced. Hurtful consequences, decadence, and all that. "Society" is making wrongful decisions to advance the interests of one group at the expense of another, a characteristic flaw and failing of democracy.

A previous society decided that women and their children were not entitled to support except by a contract voluntarily entered into by both parties, whose terms differed strikingly from current terms. The question then is, which society was right?

The question at issue is moral progress. That society has decided X is not, in the context of this debate, evidence that X is right, since a previous society decided Y.

Comment author: sam0345 13 November 2012 12:50:04AM 0 points [-]

There are (and have been) other decisions made by other societies. So what?

The question is, which society was right? I argue that this society's decisions constitute evil, decadence, moral decay, and are an indictment of democracy.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 November 2012 10:04:37AM * 0 points [-]

We're assuming false dichotomies here. We could have a society where women get to decide whether or not to abort, but if they don't they are encouraged to give the child up for adoption if they can't afford to raise it, and if they choose not to, rhat's their business and they aren't entitled to demand that anyone else help them out financially. EDIT: that way, a woman is not forced to undergo a medical procedure if she doesn't want the child.

Comment author: MugaSofer 13 November 2012 10:16:32AM -1 points [-]

I haven't seen anyone assuming that you can't have abortion and no childcare, or childcare and no abortion. The main point of contention is that the grandparent is arguing that those are the only coherent options - that abortion and childcare is self-contradictory/discriminatory.

Comment author: DaFranker 12 November 2012 09:13:57PM 0 points [-]

I mostly agree on all of this, at the very least denotationally agree on everything.

I'm quite on a different end of the spectrum when it comes to whether this is morally optimized, but of course this is because I work from different assumptions and when I picture it, I also imagine a completely different social framework than most people who think this is the "right" way to do it would imagine around it.

Errh. Not sure how I could rephrase the above to make it less confusing, but hopefully your model already knows the gist of what I'm saying.

Comment author: TimS 13 November 2012 03:03:24AM -1 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand your position - more specifically, I'm not sure what connotations you disagree with. I was trying in this instance to make statements without relevant connotation at all, but it seems that my attempts fell short.

Comment author: DaFranker 13 November 2012 02:53:55PM 1 point [-]

Well, for one example:

Abortion is a medical procedure.

This pattern-matches to the noncentral fallacy described by Yvain, and can be very easily read as an attempt to categorically identify abortion as nothing other than what people generally identify as "medical procedures", while abortion clearly has some elements (even in flat-out physical materialistic terms, let alone social, moral, legal, etc.) that are not quite like most medical procedures.

If I want to push the meta-analysis a bit further...

So what?

This seems dismissive of the issues. At this point in the paragraph, it holds some connotation of "Your arguments are worthless, society is right because that's what society decided", which is clearly not intended (or so I would presume) but still sneaks into the reader's stream-of-consciousness.

In general the tone of the comment feels a bit like you're saying that society has decided something, nothing can be done about it by one individual, the Enemy's arguments are invalid, and thus society is right. This (probably unintended) connotation is very much one I strongly disagree with.

Comment author: TimS 13 November 2012 08:06:50PM * -2 points [-]

Abortion is a medical procedure.

This pattern-matches to the noncentral fallacy described by Yvain, and can be very easily read as an attempt to categorically identify abortion as nothing other than what people generally identify as "medical procedures", while abortion clearly has some elements (even in flat-out physical materialistic terms, let alone social, moral, legal, etc.) that are not quite like most medical procedures.

Doesn't this support my position? Even if an abortion was only a medical procedure, it wouldn't be available to vindicate the man's choice over the woman's choice. And you correctly note that it isn't only a medical procedure

This seems dismissive of the issues.

Sam says there's only one correct moral choice. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was dismissive of that position.

continue this thread »

Comment author: sam0345 12 November 2012 10:51:50PM * 2 points [-]

The problem is not nine months servitude, but twenty years servitude.

Comment author: MileyCyrus 13 November 2012 12:26:32AM * 3 points [-]

Who the blazes upvoted this comment? I was hoping the troll toll would cut back on troll feeding, but it won't work if people keep upvoting trollish behavior.

(And yes, sam0345 behavior is trollish, even if they earnest hold these views. There is no reason hijack a conversation about CEV into a MRA talking point regarding an explosive political issue)

Would one of the mods please kill this thread before we get a pile-up?

Edit: Looks like I've been karmassinated, as several of my old comments in unrelated threads are getting downvoted.

Comment author: MugaSofer 13 November 2012 02:42:31PM -1 points [-]

Downvoted; if discussing things is trolling, what exactly is the point of the site? This is not an assassination attempt.

Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong

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