If the right thing to do is the consequentialist thing to do, and an outcome turns out bad, but it was still the best choice with the information one knew at the time, would that be consequentialism or virtue ethics?

edit: Ok, I completed the survey and just guessed. Would still like to know the answer though.

Yes! Exactly what I'm talking about. Such concerns have been raised here before, y'know. But it's also that, well, a newcomer unfamilliar with LW thought patterns might take offense.

I'm feeling fairly negative on lesswrong this week. Time spent here feels unproductive, and I'm vaguely uncomfortable with the attitudes I'm developing. On the other hand there are interesting people to chat with.

Undecided what to do about this. Haven't managed to come up with anything to firm up my vague emotions into something specific.

Perhaps I'll take a break and see how it feels.

Straight white males are the least discriminated against and therefore probably most likely to be dismissive of the idea that racism, sexism ect still exist and such.

I am well aware that these prejudices exist. I even spot prejudice implicit in this very sentence.

Straight white males are the least discriminated against and therefore probably most likely to be dismissive of the idea that racism, sexism ect still exist and such.

I don't doubt they exist at all.

Oh, and your first comment, about scapegoating and seeing malignant agency where there is none- is that a jab at me supposedly doing that?

No. Thought I must admit I'm not quite sure which comment you have in mind. I do think I mentioned something like that in the original form of this comment, but it was aimed at categorizing the kinds of conspiracies I linked to and didn't have anything to do with this fork of the conversation.

Edit: Ugh I'm so stupid, of course you where refering to the first comment in this exchange. I forgot about that line. No it wasn't targeted at you I was setting up my explanation of why I thought it made a good joke/example. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

The Heterosexual White Males example rubs me the wrong way.

The article deals tightly scapegoating and seeing malignant agency where there is none.

Our Dunbarian minds probably just plain can't get how a society can be that complex and unpredictable without it being "planned" by a cabal of Satan or Heterosexual White Males or the Illuminati (but I repeat myself twice) scheming to make weird things happen in our oblivious small stone age tribe.

The line was a joke alluding to acceptable targets. However since you responded seriously and with concern I think I should reply in kind.

I haven't heard of what I'd call conspiracy theories about that, and it doesn't match the ridiculousness of Satan or the Illuminati.

I find this hard to believe. They aren't really used in such theories exactly the way a devil would be (oh wait), but I dare say they are invoked in the same way Jews sometimes are. And surely a list of Satan, the Iluminati and the Jews makes intuitive sense? ;) Even the most ardent anti-semite in conversation assures you that while most Jews are annoying they probably aren't all involved in plots to enslave mankind. The MacDonald inspired anti-semite will further argue that because of their culture they can't help but subconsciously sabotage wider society for the benefit of their ethnic group. He will also even point out one or two good Jews, usually the kind that exposes the fiendish plots of other Jews.

Are anti-semites conspiracy theorists? Not all of them. One can have hatred or dislike for the Jewish or any other people and avoid spinning any such tales at all. But often conspiracy theories used to support such positions are quite common among them. A different example of this would be the conspiracy theories regarding Armenians. The pattern even holds for Anti-American sentiments.

Keeping this in mind I ask you to search for some conspiracy theories about the origins of AIDS. Mind you these are quite popular in some circles. Are you really claiming you never head of such tales? Don't White Heterosexual males play the role of Satan or the Jews in them? It seems strange to deny that they indeed to. It also seems hard to dispute that the image evoked by The Man is such a male.

Even if you discount all these example, what about the theories such as that of Babylonian oppression?

Some Rastafarians maintain that a white racist patriarchy ("Babylon") controls the world in order to oppress the African race.[32] They believe that Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia did not die when it was reported in 1975, and that the racist, white media ("Babylon") propagated that rumour in order to squash the Rastafari Movement and its message of overthrowing Babylon.[33]

These indeed this one exactly fit the bill of my joke and is far from the only one of its kind.

The Heterosexual White Males example rubs me the wrong way. I haven't heard of what I'd call conspiracy theories about that, and it doesn't match the ridiculousness of Satan or the Illuminati. It reads like someone who wants to get back at feminists or whomever, you know. A politically motivated and sort of mean-spirited low blow. I mean, maybe there are a bunch of people that believe that on a level that matches the rest of the examples, but this is the vibe I got.

The Sequence Re-Runs seem to have had little participation, which is disappointing - I had great hope for those.

As someone who is rereading the sequences I think I have a data point as to why. First of all, the "one post a day" is very difficult for me to do. I don't have time to digest a LW post every day, especially if I've got an exam coming up or something. Secondly, I joined the site after the effort started, so I would have had to catch up anyway. Thirdly, ideally I'd like to read at a faster average rate than one per day. But this hasn't happened at all, my rate has actually been rather slower, which is kind of depressing.

Hmm, Creative Arts seems useless for its intended purpose. The only thing I can think of that might have a benefit is Performance Arts though I don't really know, and it seems to me there'd be more effective ways to teach communication skills in the personal development class.

The loved one is working on a novel. It turns out that "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp" (W. Somerset Maugham) is a good way to get a lot of first draft turned out. Inspired by this, I've been attempting to write something vaguely song-shaped every day for a month. Doesn't have to even be any good at all, it just has to be an actual thing. I've missed two days in the past couple of weeks, but am attempting to keep at it. When I have thirty days down I'll probably put all thirty days up as an mp3.

I've also submitted two pieces for the Homestuck album competition: "Salmon" (Feferi Peixes) and "Kingdom" (Eridan Ampora). I doubt they'll get anywhere, but it provoked me to get them into some sort of finished form.

At work, we have until the end of this month to move all our live sites from the old Solaris SPARC servers to a new bunch of hosted Ubuntu VMs. (Our stuff is Java webapps running in Tomcat, so this is not at all difficult conceptually.) So I've spent the last couple of months making as absolutely as much as possible deployable in a completely automated fashion - automating everything I've done by hand for ages, and actually defining all the accumulated cruft (magical symlinks, etc.) the apps rely on. Since we use ant for builds, I've been using that. Even with ant-contrib mixed in, it's like playing with an esoteric programming language whose particular conceit is requiring all code to be correctly-formed XML. As such, I've evolved a new law of the universe:

If your hammer is Turing-complete, you will one day have to use it as a screwdriver, spanner, soda siphon and nail.

or:

Every Turing-complete domain-specific language evolves into brainfuck.

It's the largest useful piece of coding I've ever done. Even as a non-coder I think the code is horrible, but the spaghetti is mostly concealed behind not-very-horrible targets and macrodefs, and working to the rule "get the data format right and the code will follow obviously" is giving good results. And - and this is the important thing - it actually works. Everything I've been doing is directly useful. The eventual goal is to have the ant-based deploy automation controlled by Puppet, and be able to say "Puppet, go install an instance of that app over on that node, taking care of all the little details." "Righty-ho!" (done)