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glutamate comments on Cached Thoughts - Less Wrong
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Please, explain how the human race could fail to survive without each of its members dying.
I never said that, nor implied it. You're completely misinterpreting what I said.
Consider the difference between these two scenarios:
a) There's a family of 10 people, who I normatively have decided do not deserve to live. I, over the course of the next 40 years, kill them person by person, using an instant and physically painless method, one by one, one ever 4 years.
b) There's a family of 10 people who I normatively have decided do not deserve to live. I wait 40 years, and kill them all at once, using an instant and physically painless method.
Answer me this: are they the same thing?
The same end result, yes, but not the same process, and the amount of suffering in process a) is far greater, would you agree?
Actually, assuming that the people in the family are relatively normal and want to live and want each other to live, and assuming that they don't know about your plans before you start enacting them, I'd expect the suffering to be significantly higher in situation A, since the family members experience more time mourning and probably considerable time worrying about being murdered.
I'm not actually sure how these scenarios are relevant, though.
Exactly my point. [mixed up a) and b) in the last question].
A bad thing about a person's death is the negative externality imposed on those who mourn them dying.
So to equate someone not wanting to kill their child [the equivalent of scenario a), killing a person with people around to mourn them] with someone deciding that the human race, as a whole, deserves to die [which is the equivalent of scenario b)], or to say that this person is a hypocrite, is totally idiotic.
If in the original essay it said it would be hypocritical of someone to say that the human race deserves to die while being unwilling to push the button which instantly ended all human life, then it would make sense.
Why the downvotes on the original reply? Are people so thin-skinned that they can't take their arguments being called stupid, or are they so ignorant that they bury an argument they don't agree with?
No, glutamate. Your original comment was rude and uninteresting. "Stupid" isn't an informative criticism (not even if you specify that the stupidity is "incredible"), and it signals contempt and disrespect besides. Uninformative criticisms that signal that attitude are not readily welcomed here.
You could have said - if I interpret your view correctly, which I may or may not - something like:
That, and it's pretty standard around here to assume that the human species dying off is bad even if it happens in such a way that nobody knows it's happening or happened - it's not actually about suffering, in other words.
The vocabulary someone uses in an attack on an argument shouldn't be limited by the degree to which the language might offend someone. Or should it?
To be explicit: I am not calling him stupid! Only someone intelligent could write an article like this, that's obvious, and I agree with the rest of it.
And yes, that's a superior phrasing of my argument. I should have been more descriptive in the original post, that's my fault. Do you agree with it?
This is an ongoing controversy, but if you can be inoffensive without sacrificing too many other virtues, it seems best to go for it.
That's good to know. It wasn't at all clear - any of it! - from your original comment.
I would agree with a weak, purely descriptive form of my restatement.
If I'm a member of the family, I prefer (a), because it gives us nine opportunities to identify you, track you down, and kill you before you kill us all.