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Moss_Piglet comments on How to Become a 1000 Year Old Vampire - Less Wrong
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Thanks for the pic, but I'm curious as to why you thought an 'evil' person would be bothered by it.
Edit: Actually, while I've got you here, can you let me know where I've been contradictory? I'd like to fix that sort of thing going forward.
The part that puzzles me most is the way you admit the existence of "chance destruction" before claiming "those who strive will extend their will into the future". In the real world, looks like 5.5 million children die annually between the ages of 4 weeks and 5 years. I picked that range because I'd expect many of them to try forming models of the world and optimizing it as best they can, before the world unceremoniously deletes them.
Like I said, I don't think you're evil. I think you espoused an evil position or preference, which may well contradict other and more real preferences. I think you're looking at a ridiculously small sliver of the real world and using that to conclude that the status quo is fine. (Or you're pattern-matching wildly, which has now grown in probability.)
Now that you've brought this word into the conversation, would you care to define "evil"?
No I would not.
I think you meant to link to this page, but I'm still not sure how either relates to the question.
Maybe we can taboo 'evil' and replace it with something like "immoral within <insert moral system here>' to get a firmer sense of your specific objection.
The difference between "evil" and "immoral within <insert moral system here>" is that evil must be fought with and eradicated, if necessary without taking prisoners and leaving scorched earth behind. Now, "immoral", that we can talk about, is it cool and sexy?
If I haven't already said enough, then it looks like one of the following holds:
You have effectively no empathy and I don't want you to model me accurately.
You share my basic goals, but believe we can't do much better at achieving them. Your earlier strawman really indicated that you see us as foolish dreamers.
Either way, further talk of morality seems counter-productive.
See Yvain on how certain ‘dystopias’ only look like ones from a First World person perspective.
That's one way to look at it; another is to question the unspoken assumption that everyone's needs deserve equal treatment. Human beings are variable on every measurable dimension, most at least partially heritable, so why not the moral dimension as well?
The fact is, as Yvain elegantly puts it, we really don't care about the vast majority people except in the abstract and quite a bit of that professed empathy is just a result of trying to sound like a 'good person' in a society obsessed with the wellbeing of its underclasses. So if our self-actualization (and that of our in-groups) is already more important to us than the hunger of distant people... why not stop following a moral code we don't even really believe in and create new values which better match our natures?
(Also, is it just me or is the hyperbolic use of 'verboten' incredibly annoying when you know the 'vee' is actually a 'fow' and thus the German and English words are virtually indistinguishable when spoken?)
Well said. This is true.
You mean like this?
I totally agree that utilitarianism is overhyped nonsense, and true values are much more selfish and unsympathetic. That said, given massive power, I think a non-significant fraction of my resources would go to public works projects and not just my throne.
Exactly; just because you create your own values and live by them doesn't mean you have to stop helping your neighbor cross the street, or mandate that you start turning cherry blossom trees into biodiesel to power your strip-mining robots. It just means that you have defined your own preferences and aesthetics and act on that knowledge. "Don't make a future too ugly for you to enjoy it" is as good a maxim as any.
I really like the "maximize awesomeness" idea BTW. It's very catchy and cuts away a lot of the fat of the issue.
Unless I'm way out of whack with German pronunciation, the stressed vowel in verboten doesn't sound anything like that in forbidden.
Verboten v Forbidden
Personally I hear fer-boat-in and fer-bid-in as similar enough that if someone on the street said the former I'd assume they meant the latter and never think twice about it. But even if you'd hear the difference more acutely, I don't think either of us would think 'Gestapo!' the way we would seeing it spelled out.
Edit: Oops, I used lmgtfy instead of tinyurl. Sorry, that was a bookmarks issue not condescension.