RichardKennaway comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Thomas 03 June 2013 03:08AM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 17 June 2013 04:37:30PM 11 points [-]

There is already a word for "don't think about, don't care about, don't act based on, don't know how many there were". That word is "disregarding", which is used in the original quote. It then adds, a fortiori, "and in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes". In that context, it cannot mean anything but "explicitly say that there are no victims", and in addition, that this has actually happened in "many" cases.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 June 2013 05:02:08PM 4 points [-]

Hm, good point. I still suspect it's metaphorical. Then again, in a world where Fox News is currently saying how Edward Snowden may be a Chinese double agent, it may also be literal and truthful.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 18 June 2013 06:06:48PM *  6 points [-]

By "in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes", I think that the author meant "in many cases (i.e., many strikes), outright denying that some of the victims are in fact victims."

The author is probably referring to the reported policy of considering all military-age males in a strike-zone to be militants (and hence not innocent victims). I take the author to be claiming that (1) non-militant military-age male victims of drone strikes exist in many cases, and (2) the reported policy amounts to "outright denying the existence" of those victims.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 June 2013 01:28:31PM 0 points [-]

That's how I read it. The claim isn't that no one was killed by drone strikes, it's that no one innocent was killed, so there are no victims.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 19 June 2013 07:57:16PM 1 point [-]

Yes. Furthermore, the "many cases" doesn't refer to many people who think that there has never been an innocent victim of a drone strike. Rather, the "many cases" refers to the (allegedly) many innocent victims killed whose existence (as innocents) was denied by reclassifying them as militants.