Honestly, I'm not sure I will. The response on LW continues to be aversively critical, so I crosspost here relatively rarely. I really appreciate your comment though, in light of that.
If you want to stay on top of my posts, I recommend my newsletter or rss.
Although perhaps your saying "continue to crosspost" is less about you wanting to read my writing in particular and more you just generally wanting LW to have long-form content on it... in which case, well, we'll see.
The response on LW continues to be aversively critical
Yeeeeup.
It's not the upvotes/downvotes, either. It's the comments.
People in other countries (note: I'm anti-nationalist, and prefer to just say "people", or if I need to distinguish, "people distant from me") starving is not under my control, but I can have a slight influence that makes it a small amount better for a lot of them. To me, this absolutely puts it in bounds for ethical consideration
Put in decision-making terms as opposed to ethical framing, "my utility function includes terms for the lives of distant strangers". For me, ethics is about analyzing and debating (with myself, mostly) the coefficients of those terms.
Okay. Imagine two versions of you: In one, you were born into a society in which, owing to nuclear war, the country you live in is the only one remaining. It is just as wealthy as our own current society owing to the point this hypothesis is leading to.
The other version of you exists in a society much more like the one we live in, where poor people are starving to death.
I'll observe that, strictly in terms of ethical obligations, the person in the scenario in which the poor people didn't exist is ethically superior, because fewer ethical obligations are being unmet. In spite of their actions being exactly the same.
Outside the hypothetical: I agree wholeheartedly the world in which poor people don't starve is better than the one in which they do. That's the world I'd prefer exist. I simply fail to see it as an ethical issue, as I regard ethics as being the governance of one's own behavior rather than the governance of the world.
I answered a slightly different question. I don't think all ethics or moral systems do either or both of these things. My preferred ruleset (consequentialist personal regret-minimization) both prohibits and requires action, and in fact doesn't distinguish between the two.
I'd classify it loosely as Both; nothing requires an ethical system to distinguish between the two cases, but I think it's a substantial divide in the way people tend to think about ethics.
I'm starting to think "ethics" is an incoherent concept. I'm a strict-negative ethicist - yet I do have an internal concept of a preference hierarchy, in terms of what I want the world to look like, which probably looks a lot like what most people would think of as part of their ethics system. It's just... not part of my ethics. Yes, I'd prefer it if poor people in other countries didn't starve to death, but this isn't an ethical problem, and trying to include it in your ethics looks... confused, to me. How can your ethical status be determined by things outside your control? How can we say a selfish person living in utopia is a better person, ethically, than a selfish person living in a dystopia?
Which isn't to say I'm right. More than half the users apparently include positive ethics in their ethical systems.
Incidentally, do we have anybody about who can answer a very specific question about meditation practice? (And if you don't know exactly why I'm asking this question, instead of asking the question I want to ask, you shouldn't volunteer to try to answer.)
Got -1 on each post in this chain - downvoter, mind providing feedback? If I'm making some mistake here, I'd like to know.
If somebody downvotes an entire chain of content you've posted, you're probably expressing an idea they disagree with, rather than making a mistake. (Not always true, but usually.)
Highly recommend kazerad, for Scott-level insights about human behavior. Here's his analysis of 4chan's anonymous culture. Here's another insightful essay of his. And a post on memetics. And these aren't necessarily the best posts I've read by him, just the three I happened to find first.
By the way, I'm really averse to the label "hidden rationalists". It's like complimenting people by saying "secretly a member of our ingroup, but just doesn't know it yet". Which simultaneously presupposes the person would want to be a member of our ingroup, and also that all worthwhile people are secretly members of our ingroup and just don't know it yet.
Highly recommend kazerad, for Scott-level insights about human behavior. Here's his analysis of 4chan's anonymous culture. Here's another insightful essay of his. And a post on memetics. And these aren't necessarily the best posts I've read by him, just the three I happened to find first.
I gave him/her a shot.
After five or six pages of angry ranting about Gamergate, which was four or five pages too many, I quit. I have no dog in that fight, and I find the notion of arguing about specific people's specific lives as if they were culturally or socially significant to be a really misguided enterprise. It's tribal superstimulus, and it is both addictive and socially self-destructive.
You've encrypted a brain, and maybe salted it a bit to boot. You're still running the brain's "consciousness" program, it's just encrypted, and the brain is still experiencing exactly the same things, on account of it is running exactly the same program it would otherwise. The fact that the brain is cryptographically entangled with other data doesn't make the brain not exist.
Something I and my local group of conversational partners noticed (I don't have a better word for it) over the weekend: Greek philosophy was a matter of law; Theseus' Ship had tax consequences, and shifting conventions in philosophy had legal ramifications. Greek philosophy was argued in court; Sophists were lawyers who were paid to argue your case, and would argue any side whatsoever, as that was what they were paid to do. Socrates had to die, not because he was annoying important people (which he was), but because he insisted on a "pure" philosophy, and was causing all kinds of legal havoc.
It's an observation which probably isn't particularly unique, as all the clues are in just about every philosophy book I've ever read, but it's an interesting part of the history of the divergence between instrumental and epistemic rationality.
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Hmm. You're getting close to Repugnant Conclusion territory here, which I tend to resolve by rejecting the redistribution argument rather than the addition argument.
In my view, In terms of world-preference, the smaller world with no poverty is inferior, as there are fewer net-positive lives. If you're claiming that near-starving impoverished people are leading lives that are negative value, I understand but do not agree with your position.
There are two problems.
In the first scenario, in which ethics is an obligation (i/e, your ethical standing decreases for not fulfilling ethical obligations), you're ethically a worse person in a world with poverty, because there are ethical obligations you cannot meet. The idea of ethical standing being independent of your personal activities is, to me, contrary to the nature of ethics.
In the second scenario, in which ethics are additive (you're not a worse person for not doing good, but instead, the good you do adds to some sort of ethical "score"), your ethical standing is limited by how horrible the world you are in is - that is, the most ethical people can only exist in worlds in which suffering is sufficiently frequent that they can constantly act to avert it. The idea of ethical standing being dependent upon other people's suffering is also, to me, contrary to the nature of ethics.
It's not a matter of which world you'd prefer to live in, it's a matter of how the world you live in changes your ethical standing.
ETA: Although the "additive" model of ethics, come to think of it, solves the theodicy problem. Why is there evil? Because otherwise people couldn't be good.