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Would the latter remain true in America if Americans were to lose their beliefs that organ meat is repulsive?
Probably the price of organ meat would go up, while the price of "normal" meat would go down. That's basically a winner for everyone.
They have to do some bending to get people to notice its existence in the first place, let alone deem it worthy of trying a first time. The fact that people insist on calling it by its French name, rather than "fat liver", is a testament to the marketing that has to be done to support interest in it.
I don't pretend this is a cure-all, or that we can always end livestock torture by not promoting its tasty products -- that would be endorsing a "just world fallacy". But sometimes we really do make our hard choices a lot harder than they need to be.
The fact that people insist on calling it by its French name, rather than "fat liver", is a testament to the marketing that has to be done to support interest in it.
The study of variable quantities is called "al-jabr" not because mathematicians want to make it sound exotic, but because of historical accident. Unless you have particularly good reason to think otherwise, I would guess foie gras is the same way.
In response to
Mapping Fun Theory onto the challenges of ethical foie gras
How about this solution:
- Stop expending resources to bend people's preferences in the direction of liking foie gras.
And the solution generalizes to lots of stuff beyond foie gras: critic-approved art, for example.
So far as I know it's not an acquired taste (e.g., generally unpleasant), so people would probably want it even if nobody were "bending their preferences".
I think it helps establish the overall parent-child metaphor, which is important to the work.
After reading it over again, I think I agree with you.
In response to
[Link] How doctors die
At least we know croynics promoters tend to take their own medicine.
Would you describe doctors as "medicine promoters"?
In response to
Beyond the Reach of God, Abridged for Spoken Word
In the second paragraph, I would strike this line:
Parents don't do everything their children ask.
as it seems to interrupt the flow.
That was an unfortunate, arbitrary call. The whole piece is filled with good lines, and somehow they need to be trimmed out to the minimum necessary to convey the idea. There are some other borderline sections that I might swap out for it, but honestly they probably need to be removed to begin with. (Specifically, the line about the cows and wolves - that can be skipped over to the line about humans. But evolution is a recurring theme for the night as well [An Alien God is also getting abridged. Very seriously abridged] and I'd like to keep that tied in.)
I may be underestimating how long people's attention span is, but I'd prefer to risk overshooting the trimming process. But I'll try reading it with and without and see if it feels too long. If I were to include it, it'd be trimmed something like this:
And if the Khan tortures people to death, for his own amusement? They might call out for help, imagining a God. And if you really wrote the program, God would intervene, of course. But in the what-if question, there isn't any God in the system. The victims will be saved only if the right cells happen to be 0 or 1. And it's not likely that anyone will defy the Khan; if they did, someone would strike them with a sword, and the sword would disrupt their organs and they would die, and that would be the end of that.
So the victims die, screaming, and no one helps them. That is the answer to the what-if question.
I think removing it was a fine call. It is a nice paragraph, of course, but as you said, the entire thing is nicely written. And the next paragraph:
God would prevent it from ever actually happening, of course. At the very least, he’d visit some shade of gloom in Khan's heart. But in the mathematical answer to the question “What if?”, there is no God in the axioms.
conveys the same idea well enough.
In response to
More "Personal" Introductions
This is a bad idea. Attempting to create personal relationships will just accelerate LW's degeneration into a typical internet hugbox. People will start supporting or opposing ideas based on whether they are "e-friends".
Maybe we should embrace an opportunity to put our rationality skills into practice.
Yeah; "Aumann agreement" is (to my knowledge) my own invented term by which I mean "Agreement reached by, among other things, taking into account the Bayesian evidence the other's testimony."
Wei_Dai used the term back in 2009.
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Except those of us who already like organ meat...
Well, you people are disgusting anyway :)