Sure you could have, in the sense that IF you had desired beef more strongly, you WOULD have made that decision. The fact that it's deterministic does not make it any less your choice. I honestly don't think answering this requires more than one line, since it's in principle a really simple issue. Convincing someone of this is a lot harder and would take much longer of course, but that's not really the aim of a terse post. The fact that you don't feel convinced doesn't mean the question hasn't been answered.
Could I have desired beef more strongly?
It's not a simple issue. It seems intuitive to me that I have ownership of actions that I originate in a way that I don't over events that were originated by the Big Bang
Answering questions catechistically is easy. Justifying an answer as being the one true answer, and meeting objections is difficult.
The world does not abound with simple answers to complex problems, because they are hard to achieve -- genuinely.
The typical failure modes are:
1 answering a different, easier question.
2 taking sides on an issue withou...
I like posts that are concise and to the point. Posts like that maximize my information/effort ratio. I would really like to see experienced rationalists simply post a list of things they believe on any given subject with a short explanation for why they believe each of those things. Then I could go ahead and adjust my beliefs based on those lists as necessary.
Sadly I don’t see any posts like this. Presumably this is because of the social convention where you’re expected to back up any public belief with arguments, so that other people can attempt to poke holes in them. I find this strange because the arguments people present rarely have anything to do with why they believe those things, which makes the whole exercise a giant distraction from the main point that the author is trying to bring across. In order to prevent this kind of derailment, posters tend to cover their arguments with endless qualifications so that their sentences read like this: “I personally believe that, in cases X Y Z and under circumstances B and C, ceteris paribus and barring obvious exceptions, it seems safe to say that murder is wrong, though of course I could be mistaken.” The problems with such excessive argumentation and qualification are threefold:
By contrast, terseness makes posts more readable and makes it less likely that the main point is misunderstood. So if we as a community could just relax the demand for argumentation and qualification somewhat, and we all focussed on debating the main points of posts instead of getting sidetracked, then perhaps experienced rationalists here could write nice and concise posts that give clear and direct answers to complicated questions. Instead, some of the sequences are so long and involve so many arguments, counter-arguments and disclaimers that I feel the point is lost entirely.