"I'd say they were cowards. Suicide isn't an act of bravery."

R U Kidding, I agree in this particular case.

If they had lived, we would have caught them and slowly tortured them to death. They were taking the easy way out by dying. Similarly with palestinian suicide bombers. By dying they avoid the treatment they'd get as prisoners of the israelis -- they get off easy.

"I still remember a kid who hit me from behind on the street once, because he was too much of a pussy to come up to my face about it."

He was expressing his feelings. Did he tell you he was too scared to face you? You might have misunderstood his intentions. At any rate, modern war often involves a surprise attack. When your intention is that the other guy wind up dead and you wind up alive, why give him any advantages? Neither the USAF nor the israeli air force typically announce their airstrikes ahead of time.

If the kid you remember had intended to kill you, it would make perfect sense for him to attack you from behind and kill you as quickly as he could, rather than give you anything like an even chance to kill him instead. But he bravely left you alive to respond however you chose to. If he had killed you properly you wouldn't have found out who did it before you died. You owe your life to his courage.

"But to those who can't comprehend the possibility that the so-called overreaction might have saved lives, consider that Al Quaeda was escalating attacks until it got the desired response: war. And what, pray tell, do you think the next level of escalation would be, that would one-up the thousands killed on 9/11? Nuclear terrorism, maybe. Biological terrorism."

AQ had a number of guys trained as infantrymen, and about 10% as many trained for espionage. We rolled up their spies and saboteurs real fast. We maybe got a bunch of innocent arab-americans at the same time, but we got most of the ones we were looking for.

When we invaded afghanistan we got a lot of the infantry guys too. They could possibly have been a threat to saudi arabia -- trained dedicated infantry fighting saudis and mercenaries might have done a lot of damage -- so that's maybe a plus. There's no particular reason to think AQ could have "escalated" after our police and counterintelligence guys hit them. The army thing was more for US public relations than anything else -- the public wanted a war so the US government gave them one. We gave AQ what they wanted, against most strategic sense, because they persuaded the US public to want what AQ wanted, and Bush also saw the chance to gain US public approval.

I think. I can't be entirely sure what Bush was thinking. I assume he was rationally looking at his own advantage, but he may not have been thinking at all.

"You're letting your hatred of Bush prejudice your interpretation of events."

Well, no. My disgust at Bush came *from* the events. Not so much the other way round.

"But there is never an Idea so true that it's wrong to criticize any argument that supports it. Never. Never ever never for ever."

Was it wrong for the guy who thought Buzz Aldrin helped fake the moon landing to present his arguments to Buzz?

One of the hungarian Manhattan-project physicists had a slogan that went "It is not enough to be rude, one must also be wrong." When it comes time to decide whether to answer a verbal argument with violence, does it matter whether the argument is wrong, or is it enough to be rude?

GW, to what extent should we treat people as we want them to treat us, and to what extent should we treat them the way they say is right and the way they treat others?

Sometimes it's polite to treat other people by their own standards, and it isn't an admission that their way is right and ours is wrong.

_So don't tell me about situations in which it is appropriate to respond to an argument with violence. Tell me about realistically obtainable states of belief in which it is appropriate to respond to an argument with violence._

I don't exactly agree with this, but I can see it as a social signal. As Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes seem to express it, when somebody makes his argument that you utterly despise, you hit him to show that you refuse to engage in rational argument with him. He is your enemy and beyond the pale and his position is not one that you consider open to rational debate.

So for example a zionist might respond this way to someone who argues that israel/palestine should become one democratic nation under one-person/one-vote. It would mean the destruction of the state of israel, it would mean that israelis would become a minority in their own country. A zionist could respond with words, something like "I don't need logical arguments for why israel should exist. Israel exists because people like me are ready and willing to kill anybody who tries to destroy her.". But a good swift sock in the jaw says the same thing more forcefully, without actually killing anybody. Ideally you knock him out and he falls down and hits his head on the floor, and when he wakes up he will be a chastened antisemite, a subdued antisemite, a far more submissive antisemite. He will not annoy you with logical argument.

Similar treatment might be effective against communists, pro-abortionists, and liberals generally. Logical argument can only carry you so far; at some point you get to principles that you accept because of who you are. You can't expect everyone to accept those same principles because they are not you. Some people accept the principle "You should not sock somebody in the jaw just because he disagrees with you" and some do not.

How we get along in social conversation with people who disagree with us says a lot about us. If you're having a civil conversation with a rapist, or a serial killer, or a republican, how do you handle yourself? Should you always wait for him to strike the first blow, or is it ever appropriate to cold-cock him with no warning?

in the human art of rationality there's a flat law against meeting arguments with violence, anywhere in the human world

"No. You're confusing rationality with your own received ethical value system. Violence is both an appropriate and frequently necessary response to all sorts of arguments."

I want to note that Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, famously encountered a man who denied that humans have ever gone to the moon but that the videos of Buzz on the moon were filmed in arizona. Buzz's response when the man presented his arguments was to sock him in the jaw.

The science fiction writer John Barnes, who collaborated with Aldrin on a couple of science fiction novels, has since written several novels in which the appealing protagonist argues that the only appropriate response to some arguments is a good swift sock in the jaw. His protagonists do so, with good results.

Millions of impressionable young science fiction readers are influenced by these novels.

If you met John Barnes and he argued that he's doing the right thing, would it be appropriate to sock him in the jaw?

Barnes is 53 years old but has been doing martial arts for something like 30 years. Would that influence your choice?

Should you let the moral value of initiating violence depend on whether or not you win?

If it's right to physically attack somebody who disagrees with you provided you win but wrong when you lose, what about when it's a ten year old girl who makes an argument you can't answer except with violence?

This generalises. Since you don't know everything, anything you do might wind up being counterproductive.

Like, I once knew a group of young merchants who wanted their shopping district revitalised. They worked at it and got their share of federal money that was assigned to their city, and they got the lighting improved, and the landscaping, and a beautiful fountain, and so on. It took several years and most of the improvements came in the third year. Then their landlords all raised the rents and they had to move out.

That one was predictable in hindsight, but I didn't predict it. There could always be things like that.

When anything you do could backfire, are you better off to stay in bed? No, the advantages of that are obvious but it's also obvious you can't make a living that way.

You have to make your choices and take your chances. If I had an outcome pump and my mother was trapped in a burning building and I had no other way to get her out, I hope I'd use it. The result might be worse than letting her burn to death but at least there would be a chance for a good outcome. If I can just get it to remove some of the bad outcomes the result may be an improvement.

Skilling *was* selecting badly. The 10% he discarded each year might have included some he should have kept, and vice versa.

Similarly, God at one point said he was going to get rid of evil people and keep good people and so people would get better. I don't see much evidence that's worked well.

Evolution happens, but if you want to harness it for your own goals you have to be very careful. Try to arrange it so you can throw away your mistakes.

There are lots of examples of unexpected selective outcomes.

A story -- a long time agon a swedish researcher tried to increase wheat yields by picking the biggest wheat kernels to plant. In only 5 generations he had a strain of wheat that produced 6 giant wheat kernels per stalk.

When scale insects were damaging citrus fruits, farmers tried to poison them with cyanide. They'd put a giant tent over the whole tree and pump in the cyanide and kill the scale insects. Plants can be immune to cyanide but no animal that depends on respiration can be. And yet in only 5 years or so they got resistant scale insects. The resistant insects would -- when anything startling happen -- sit very still and hold their breath for half an hour or so.

If you want to do directed evolution, you do better to do it in controlled conditions. Take your results and test them carefully and make sure they're what you want before you release them. Microbiologists who want mutants for research commonly take 20 or 100 mutants who survive the conditions they're selected to survive, and test until they get a few that appear to be just what they want. Eliminate the rest.

So, for example, to find a mutant that has a high mutation rate -- start with a strain of bacteria that has at least 4 selectable traits. Say, they don't survive without threonine, don't survive without isoleucine/valine, don't survive penicillin, and don't survive rifampicin. So you grow up a hundred billion or so of them and then you centrifuge them down and resuspend them in medium that doesn't have threonine. Most of them die. Wait for the survivors to grow, and then centrifuge them down and resuspend them in medium that doesn't have isoleucine/valine. Most of them die. Wait for the survivors to grow, and centrifuge them down and resuspend them in medium that has penicillin. Do it a fourth time with rifampicin. Plate them out on media that has lactose (when the originals couldn't use lactose). Some of the colonies will be large and some small, pick a colony that has lots of little warts of bigger growth, because it gets lactose-using mutants even while the colony is growing. A strain that has a hundred times the mutation rate can be easily selected this way. It started out at frequency around 10^-8. After the first selection cycle it was frequency around 10^-6. By the fourth round it was common. Sometimes you can get a mutation rate around 1000 times the normal rate. Much above that and it doesn't survive well.

Take one colony per try because you don't want to test multiple colonies and then find out they're the same mutation over again.

Me: "in *principle* you ought to consider the entire state of the future universe when you set a terminal value."

Douglas: 'Yes, and in practice we don't. But as I look further into the future to see the consequences of my terminal value(s), that's when the trouble begins.'

Me: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

Doctor: Then don't do that.

'Our modern transportation systems have effectively eliminated most of the barriers between human populations. All of our eggs are in one basket. If a highly lethal virus that will spread throughout an entire population and kill it arises, that basket will be dropped.'

This is a strong argument to change that situation. We have a communications system that lets us transmit data widely without needing personal contact. We could do some sorts of trade without a whole lot of risk, and minimise both the risk and the amount of trade for the rest.

It would be hard to do that effectively without a consensus among most of the world population, since people are so good at sneaking. So ideally over the next generation or so we'll develop a convincing case for dividing the world up into small breeding groups with strictly limited contact among groups, assuming the case actually is convincing.

At the moment the idea seems almost fantastical, as if we'd never put up with something like that. So we have a long way to go.