Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Upvoted.
It is true that a woman in such a situation would be well advised to arm herself. However, a complaint about being raped - personal emotional traumas aside - would be a complaint about the necessity of doing so as much as anything else. The response that she should'a armed herself then doesn't address the real meat of the issue; what sort of society we live in, how we want to relate to one another; whether we're to respond with compassion or dismissive brutalism (or at what point on that scale.)
There are things that are the result of natural laws - you jump off a building with no precautions, then you're probably gonna go splat. It makes limited sense to interpret those as complaints about the laws of physics. So, the balance in those cases swings more towards preventative advice in a way that's rarely the case with issues that are the result of human action.
There's certainly a concern, very pressing in the case of the rape example, that if the risk is too high then there's a responsibility upon society to mitigate it. In the case of the jumping off the roof example, building codes could mandate that the building be made impossible to jump off of or the surroundings be cushioned, but in this case most people would probably agree that the costs on society are too high to be justified in light of the minimal and easily avoidable risk. The case of the minimum wage worker falls somewhere in the middle ground betwe... (read more)