No, it's actually fun. Brief examples:

• "It depends". I have never been able to get away with just saying "it depends" - Russian version prompts you to either specify what it depends on, or explicitly refuse to, begging the question of why I am being so sneaky.

• There is no word that means "complexity", but can not be alternatively understood as "difficulty". When I tell someone I want a complex challenge, they ask why I am not carrying heavy things around, as that is quite difficult.

• In same vein, no word for "challenge" that doesn't also mean "ordeal". The distinction seems to be also missing from Russian brains, a very peculiar phenomenon that Russian culturologists are always upset about.

• No different words for 'accuracy' and 'precision'.

• No word for 'awesome' that is both strong enough and can be shown on TV. But, on the other hand, the obscene word for 'awesome' is much more awesome that 'awesome'.

• English tenses are more flexible and consistent. Russian only has three, plus the standalone "have been"-like form. They don't distinguish between "I do things" and "I am doing things", for instance.

• In English, you can put an emphasis on 'am' or 'is'. In Russian, to do that, you need to throw in a few extra words.

• Context-independency. Russian has a small basic vocabulary, and compensates it with insanely complex syntactic structures that makes it harder to pull a couple of words from a sentence and understand what it is about.

To even things a bit, here are some advantages of Russian over Englsh:

• Phonetics. If you know how to write a word, you automatically and unambiguously (with a single notable exception) know how to pronounce it. It works a little less perfect the other way around, but good enough that Russian spelling bees do not exist and don't even make sense.

• English has a ridiculously huge amount of words that sound the same or similar, like 'to', 'two' and 'too', or 'bot' and 'bought'. The last one is just horrible - you insert three new letters, doubling word's length, and it still sounds the same. No such thing is possible in Russian.

• Words "себя" and "авось".

• Word formation. It is much more flexible than in English. You can easily say things like "недоперепрыгнул", which means "tried, but not succeeded, to jump over something".

• Distinction between singular and plural "you".

• Mat. English swearing pales in comparison to this.

Um, "hard work and loyalty to employers" can also be interpreted as desirable things that raise total utility in the long run.

Sure. But then you've already lapsed into consequentialism, and thus stuck yourself with a mandate to consider the trade-offs between desirable and undesirable consequences. This is not what deontological and virtue-theoretic politicians actually do. What they actually do is see an undesirable consequence, and start loudly pointing it out, signaling "Look how morally brave I am for being willing to let this sort of thing happen out of pure principle!"

I think limited liability corporations are a very political thing. I would guess that they don't exist in some communist countries.

It does not matter if those "reasons" are signaling, privilege, hegemony, or having an invisible devil on your shoulder whispering into your bloody ear: to impugn someone else's epistemology entirely at the meta-level without saying a thing against their object-level claims is anti-epistemology.

Ignoring reasons why someone believes what they believe is not good epistemology.

It depends.

If I understand all of someone's logical arguments for believing what they believe, and I have the knowledge and processing power needed to evaluate those arguments, and I want to know whether the belief is correct, I should ignore all of the non-logical reasons why they believe what they believe. Argument screens off authority, which means it also screens off non-authority and indeed anti-authority.

If someone tells me the sun's shining, and I look outside and see the sun's shining, it doesn't matter if the person told me the sun's shining because they're trying to signal something else; it doesn't matter if they're privileged; it doesn't matter if they're a hegemon; it doesn't matter if they have an invisible devil on their ear. I can see for myself that they're correct. The process that generated the claim has been rendered utterly irrelevant.

But of course I've made some assumptions there which are routinely false: I often don't have the knowledge or processing power needed to evaluate all of someone's arguments, and sometimes don't even know the arguments for a belief. If so, it's legitimate to use what I know about the belief-generating process as a cognitive shortcut to judge the belief. And this is true frequently enough that you have a good point, too: in real life we don't have time to do a full-blown evaluation of the belief network supporting a claim, in which case the "reasons why someone believes what they believe" can be useful (even important) evidence. Whether you are correct or eli_sennesh is correct is situation-dependent.

As mentioned above, be very, very sure about what ethical framework you're working within before having a political discussion. A consequentialist and a virtue-ethicist will often take completely different policy positions on, say, healthcare, and have absolutely nothing to talk about with each-other. The consequentialist can point out the utilitarian gains of universal single-payer care, and the virtue-ethicist can point out the incentive structure of corporate-sponsored group plans for promoting hard work and loyalty to employers, but they are fundamentally talking past each-other.

Um, "hard work and loyalty to employers" can also be interpreted as desirable things that raise total utility in the long run. (Also note: the above is not at all an accurate description of any political position that I know off, I was just going with eli's example.)

This is a broad point in favor of consequentialism: a rational consequentialist always considers consequences, intended and unintended, or he fails at consequentialism. A deontologist or virtue-ethicist, on the other hand, has license from his own ethics algorithm to not care about unintended consequences at all, provided the rules get followed or the rules or rulers are virtuous.

Except, as I mentioned above in practice the conventionalist dismisses any consequences he can't or doesn't want to measure as "irrelevant virtue-ethical considerations". And that's not getting into his license to define the utility function however he sees fit.

Do not ask whether a politician Believes in Global Warming. Ask whether that politician would want their kids to inherit a nice house in South Miami.

(But beware: if this trick gets around, politicians will buy or sell their Florida real estate in order to signal tribal allegiance.)

The problem isn't objectification of women, it's a lack of non-objectified female characters.

The types of objectification are different, as you touch on. Men are not sexually objectified as often. When they are, they are shown in a position of power or self-direction, with women in contrasting positions of passiveness and submissiveness. This is most visible in advertising because it's the place where men are portrayed as specifically male rather than as people (with the assumption that all people worth knowing about or portraying must be men).

Your example of random mooks? They're there to shoot and die and follow orders. You can replace them with robots or ambulatory plants or aliens with no discernable gender. Calvin Klein ads? The men are there to be masculine.

Men are allowed to be short or tall, fat or thin, strong or weak. They can have long noses and bulbous noses and button noses and earlobes that hang down. Women have several molds they can fit -- they can be crones or grandmothers, or they can be minor variants of generic white sexy woman at different ages, between fifteen and thirty.

Even when women are portrayed as skilled, intelligent people with their own backstories and interests, you'd be hard pressed to find one that isn't portrayed in a way to make sexual objectification easy, even if it makes no sense with their story. Amita from Far Cry 4, for instance, is one of two leaders of a terrorist group fighting against an oppressive dictatorship. You'd expect that she'd have scars. You'd expect she'd be too busy to maintain long hair. You'd expect muscles. You'd expect powerful body language. You wouldn't exactly expect her to have turquoise earrings, wear eyeliner, have immaculately plucked eyebrows, have skin as smooth as marble, and wear a pouty / concerned expression half the time.

The huge problem is that women's perceived value can never exceed the ease with which they can be objectified.

What cause would an NRx EA donate to?

What ethical system do you follow?

I may write a full discussion thread on this at some point, but I've been thinking a lot about undergraduate core curriculum lately. What should it include? I have no idea why history has persisted in virtually every curriculum I know of for so long. Do many college professors still believe history has transfer of learning value in terms of critical thinking skills? Why? The transfer of learning thread touches on this issue somewhat, but I feel like most people on there are overvaluing their own field hence computational science is overrepresented and social science, humanties, and business are underrepresented. Any thoughts?