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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - LessWrong
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In physics, yes. In history / political science, no.
"Slavery is wrong" isn't obviously correct?
There is obviously no one here who will disagree with it. But it is still a moral judgment, not a matter of fact.
Mencius Moldbug does argue that all moral changes after a certain point in time should be rolled back. That timeframe does include the abolition of slavery.
I don't know whether there at the moment someone on LW willing to make the argument for slavery explicitly but you might find people who do have Moldbug's position.
The last census shows a bunch of neoreactionaries.
A former poster here (known elsewhere on the net as "James A. Donald") does disagree with it. He believes that slavery is the rightful state for many people. And for what it's worth, he also believes that moral judgements are matters of fact, in the strong sense of ethical naturalism.
Where can I find evidence linking the sam0345 account to the identity James A. "Jim" Donald?
Somewhat laboriously, by searching LessWrong for his very first postings and working forwards from there, looking for my replies to him and he to me. I recognised him as James A. Donald as soon as he started posting here, from his distinctive writing style and views, which were very familiar to me from his long history of participating in rec.arts.sf.* on USENET. As evidence, I linked to other places on the net where he had posted views identical to what he had just posted here, expressed in very similar terms. He never took notice of my identification, even when replying directly to comments of mine identifying him, but I think it definite.
BTW, while "sam0345" is obviously not a real-world name, I have never seen reason to think that "James A. Donald" is. Searches on that name turn up nothing but his online activity (and a mugshot of an unprepossessing individual of the same name who served 35 years for forgery, and who I have no reason to think has any connection with him). I have almost never, here or anywhere else, seen him post anything personal about himself. He is American, and an Internet engineer, and that's about it. And 10 inches taller than his wife, for what that's worth. I have never seen anyone mention having met him. His ownership of jim.com is unusual, in that it goes back well before the advent of public Internet access and easy private ownership of domain names. Try getting a domain name that short and simple nowadays! They're all taken.
Interesting! Before the great-grandparent I would have assigned a pretty low prior to sam being Jim; I never even considered the possibility explicitly. Now that I'm looking at it closely, sam does use a similar writing style. I'm updating substantially, and now believe there is a roughly 50-75% chance they're the same person. Thanks for answering!
I find this comment particularly ironic given your chosen username.
"War is wrong" isn't obviously correct?
I think the majority of the population believes that there are valid reasons to start a war. R2P etc.
I was talking about war,not wars. Everybody would wish away war if they could. Many people think THIS war need to be fought.
I wouldn't wish away war unless I also wished away the things we need to go to war for, in which case you could as easily say that I would wish away cancer treatments or firefighters.
People go to war because of war, because they have been attacked. That would get wished away as part of the deal.
Or they go to war less honorable reasons like grabbing resources, or making forcible converts to a religion.
Can't see anything I'd want to keep.
Or because they are being mistreated by others in ways that don't qualify as war.
Inter-state war is by far the least common type of warfare in the modern era, although the proxy wars growing out of the Cold War muddy the waters some. Civil and ethnic warfare is much more common, and I don't think we can say that civil conflicts, at least, can always be described in terms of straightforward aggression and defense against aggression.
(Truthfully I wouldn't say that for inter-state wars either, not all of them, but they're a lot easier to spin that way.)
I was using wish away to mean magically get rid of. Unmagically getting rid of it requires unmagically fixing a lot of other things, which is why it hasn't happened.
Magically getting rig of it strikes me as one of those wishes that will backfire horribly in one of several ways depending on exactly how the wisher defines "war".
Depends. For starters are you counting revolutions and civil wars as "wars"?
The point being that you can't infer that everyone believes in X in a society where X exists. They may dislike it but be unable to do anything about it.
I'm not making that argument. There polling out there that tells you what people like or dislike. I think that responsibility to protect (R2P) is accepted by a lot of people as a valid reason for military intervention.
Considering it was the norm for several thousand years of history and many philosophers either came out in favor of it or were silent ... no, it's not obviously correct.
In which meaning do you use the word "correct"?