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Ehh, The Salvation War has some interesting moments about facing down existential threats and not giving up and building a bright future for humanity across the corpses of eldritch horrors, but you have to be willing to slog through a lot of drek. I read the first book of The Salvation War and it can't seem to make up its mind just to what extent it's supposed to be following any particular cosmology, mythology, or theology. I get the impression that it wants to be a chronicle of the moment when humanity cast down the Hordes of Hell, but it's executed more like a chronicle of the moment when humanity engaged in massive amounts of gun porn against acid-blooded fire-spitting lightning-throwing ogres, that happened to be called demons. I say ogres because they're large, brutish, stupid, and generally fill much the same niche as ogres do in Dungeons&Dragons. Whereas many of the classical demonic attributes like temptation, seduction, offering forbidden knowledge, reading the hearts of men to know your dark secrets and embarassing desires, or confronting you with a litany of your sins, have been left more or less by the wayside.
This sounds like to me as though it's essentially a giant recapitulation of the trolley problem - you have one side claiming that the opposition doesn't understand 5 > 1 and isn't trying to maximize utility and should be pushing the fat man onto the tracks, and you have the other side not wanting to violate obvious moral norms such as "Don't push people onto train tracks where they will die" for the sake of hypotheticals that are not merely unlikely but unrealistic. (How is that man so fat that he'll block a trolley going fast enough to crush five other people, anyway?)
Then the first group argues that sometimes you need to be able to engage rational overrides when the situation is different from what you're used to (or adapted to) and in this case we're stipulating that the man is fat enough to stop the trolley if you push him onto the tracks, and the second group argues that you want bright-line ethical rules and guards against corrupted hardware and con artists trying to convince you to do evil deeds "for the greater good".
In this case a bit less freedom would guarantee a lot less distress.
If this statement is to be taken as a hypothetical stipulation similar to that of the trolley problem, I agree with the hypothetical breeding license.
As a real-life policy suggestion, though, it sounds like a terrible idea due to violating a lot of people's moral norms (which will cause distress), having implementation difficulties (who will make/mark the tests for getting a license), being prone to frighteningly nasty abuse, and underspecification. Please do not take my support of the hypothetical stipulation as being in any way supportive of the actual policy suggestion.
Whites and blacks already have enough freedom of movement to segregate themselves all they want.
Not really, since you have no way of keeping members of the other race from settling in your new neighborhood.
Well, you can adopt an ideology that members of the other race find more or less universally detestable and put up posters for it all across the neighborhood, but this has the consequence of filling your neighborhood with an ideology that lots and lots of people find detestable.
The last line doesn't follow at all. Science can discover how priming works, including how it stops working.
Something similar goes for phrenology (the prediction of mental attributes from head shape): Science can discover where phrenology works and which traits it can predict and where it stops working. The sheer number of possible traits and populations one can correlate makes me confident you'd find something scientific if you looked. But if science discovers that elongated heads predict high extraversion among Swedes, and is otherwise largely wrong or unpredictive, would you say that phrenology is science?
Steven Kaas quipped something I find applicable: "Yes, I was wrong, but that only makes me falsifiable which makes me scientific which makes me right."This should be taken as general truth about the path towards becoming right - not a post hoc defense of something specific that didn't replicate.
I'm Starting a New Blog
As suggested by some I'm starting a new blog. I prefer communities to lonely things such as one man blogs, especially if the latter have long periods of inactivity. Originally discussed here.
Some problems have been noted by several users on discussing topics from a perspective rather interesting to me on LessWrong. I don't think this is likely to be a better venue for them in the future and has been degrading in this regard for several months, so we've decided to discuss them elsewhere. It still is a great site for some other topics and I may hang around for this, I don't want to be a splitter though we will probably have blackjack and hookers. LWers having blogs elsewhere is a good thing!
So far ErikM, nyan_sandwich, Athrelon, paper-machine, KarmaKaiser and MichaelAnissimov as well as several other LWers have said they would like to join as co-authors. If anyone else is interested please respond to this post or PM me your email adress? Details on the new blog will be discussed via email.
I don't have a good idea for a name yet, so I'd very much appreciate any suggestions. :)
You're still in the 2012 thread.
Edit: No, wait, this is apparently posted in 2013 but labeled 2012. Bah.
I'm Starting a New Blog
As suggested by some I'm starting a new blog. I prefer communities to lonely things such as one man blogs, especially if the latter have long periods of inactivity. Originally discussed here.
Some problems have been noted by several users on discussing topics from a perspective rather interesting to me on LessWrong. I don't think this is likely to be a better venue for them in the future and has been degrading in this regard for several months, so we've decided to discuss them elsewhere. It still is a great site for some other topics and I may hang around for this, I don't want to be a splitter though we will probably have blackjack and hookers. LWers having blogs elsewhere is a good thing!
So far ErikM, Athrelon, paper-machine and MichaelAnissimov as well as several other LWers have said they would like to join as co-authors. If anyone else is interested please respond to this post or PM me your email adress? Details on the new blog will be discussed via email.
I don't have a good idea for a name yet, so I'd very much appreciate any suggestions. :)
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Deeply amused by the section "Alternative Alternative Politics: Okay fine, knock yourself out identifying with as tiny and finely-grained a subcategory as you want" still missing my desired response. :-) (I put Other:Authoritarian as distinct from Totalitarian. My view of these is that the former concerns the power of the ruling body to hypothetically put its fingers in any given pie, while the latter concerns the propensity of the ruling body to have its fingers in a great many pies.)
Why did this get down voted? The empirical evidence seems to be on his side when looking at most indicator of egalitarian norms. Like say sharing housework equally.
(Did not vote but) I expect it is because the author has a habit of hiding his nuggets of insight in behind the tone and presentation style of an insensitive ass.
And as a less tone-related complaint, sam0345 grossly overgeneralizes. (And if he's the J that I think he is, I suspect he's not much interested in being more nuanced, for much the same reason he's not interested in consensus.)
Monarchist? There's a rational justification for Monarchy? Tom Paine must be doing 1000rpm!
Here's one: less jockeying for power. Monarchs don't need to pander to interest groups to get elected.
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Maybe it's about rationalization. The same feeling could be expressed by one person as: "this is a heresy" (because "heresy" is their party's official boo light) and by another person as: "this could harm people" (because "harming people" is their party's official boo light). But in fact both people just feel the idea is repulsive to them, but can't quickly explain why.
I think this could be generalized into a model with predictions: If we suppose that it's easier to get people to nominally than actually abandon one of Haidt's moral axes (from Wikipedia, to save people some lookups: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation), we should expect that people who disclaim one of the axes will find ways to relabel violations of that axis to make it sound like it's violating a professed axis.
To be specific, if you have a group that officially disclaims the fairness/cheating axis, I expect they'll be quick to explain how cheating is a form of harm. Or drop the care/harm axis, and we'll probably hear about how harm is a form of oppression. And so forth.