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I think one of the arguments declaring that voting is rational is a bit suspect.
But here's the good news. If your vote is decisive, it will make a difference for 300 million people!
In the rather unlikely event that your vote decisive, this is true enough (for US voters anyway). The error he makes though is the assumption that your decisive vote will always create a positive change. If you're going to take the credit for the right decisive vote, you have to take the blame for the wrong decisive vote.
Some people might go on to argue that it's the voters job to make an informed choice, but good luck with that. Even the most informed voter is going to be working with sketchy information, politicians don't always (ever?) deliver everything they promise.
Worse still, you can't even tell what positive/negative real life events were actually dependent on who is in office even in theory, let alone in practice.
I'm not going to say whether voting behaviour is rational or not because I'm not sure everyone is using the same definition as me, but I will say that I think people seriously overestimate the power of their vote.
In that case, the requirement to show up at the polling station seems like a pointless infringement on personal liberty.
It's annoying sure, but what other strategies are available to them? Voting is anonymous process after all. They've succeeded in getting you all the way to the polling booth which is a start. If the voters can't even be bothered to fill out a simple form, that suggests to me deeper problems.
Not that I'm one to talk, I vote for Optimus Prime.
for instance, not voting is illegal in Australia, and incurs a fine.
I'm being pedantic but it's more accurate to say that "Not marking your attendance off on the electoral roll incurs a fine". There is no penalty for then taking your ballot and submitting it blank.
Under what conditions do you support (or are confused about whether you should support) suicide and assisted suicide? Under these conditions, would cryonics be a better alternative, barring legal and financial barriers?
Situations where continuing medical interventions are effectively only prolonging the suffering of the individual and family members. Cryonics as an alternative is very interesting, but I haven't given the topic much thought.
Assisted suicide is not about looking for death, it's about minimising pain and humiliation.
Death is just a mean to that end - specifically, the only remaining mean. You don't have to like death to decide that it's the only way you're going to leave that hospital bed.
Ah, so it's a non-optimal solution that just so happens to be the best of the crappy options available. Thanks.
A common thread in the transhumanist community's ethics is "non-consensual effects are wrong"
Smallpox is a non-consensual cessation of existence. Suicide is consensual.
Is that, perhaps, the ethical principle that causes you to accept one and not the other?
Possibly, but consent in this context is a bit tricky.
A depressed person may actively want to die but we generally don't consider a person in this state as capable of consenting to anything.
If that same person had depression AND a fatal illness that will cause them suffer for another joyless 20 years, do we consider them capable?
Your suggestion is a really good rule of thumb but I'm just wondering if there is more to the story
<sarcasm>Great!</sarcasm>
So I should have taken the advice to come back as a new account after being gang-tackled (to use a polite term).
That does seem like the best way to reset your karma. It does feel like a total negative karma should reset to zero after enough time passes.
Upvoted in the interest of saving you the trouble of making a new account. You're now at 0 total karma.
Ah, I'm glad to see that I'm not so horribly stuck in the mud. I don't have many relationships to gauge these things by. Thank you :) I've always wanted to learn how to "think better". To have greater use of my facilities with greater frequency in everyday life. Problem solving, math, social interactions, all of which seem to elude me except in "Spurts" of clear thinking. (I.e. this comment will take quite a while to write, If I was speaking, I would not be able to be as clear in my thoughts.) I think that's why this site excited me so much. Much of what is here seems to get to the root of "thinking".
It should excite you even more then, to know that part of what is on here is a model explaining why this site excites you so much!
I don't know why I'm so excited for you, but I am. It can be easy to feel intimidated by people and comments are sometimes on the blunt side, but if your goal is self improvement people will really respect that (I will at least!)
For what it's worth,I started with the sequences and went from there.
How do they know it's not the persons idiosyncratic "availability of willpower" after a demanding task that shapes idiosyncratic beliefs about willpower?
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I read Goertzel's recent paper on "Morphic Pilot Theory", which sketches a possible framework for PSI phenomena of the inexplicable synchronicity type.
As far as I could understand, the idea is that the seemingly causally unconnected phenomena are mutually affected by nonlocality from the Bohmian interpretation of quantum physics. The anomalous cognition part comes in as some kind of conservation of algorithmic information, where the Bohmian configuration state tends towards having a low Kolmogorov complexity, this shows up as the same pattern acausally showing up in several places at once. I guess human and animal brains are then assumed to have been evolved to make what use they can of this phenomenon.
I can't really evaluate the paper. I've never looked into Bohmian QM in any detail and would have to work up my physics to get there. I do get that the paper is very speculative, but it is interesting in positing zero ontologically basic woo to work. On the other hand, PSI with quantum physics is a well-deserved crackpot indicator, and I'd really need to know more about the generally physicist-approved version to tell if this stuff is off the deep end or not.
I'm in no position to analyse it either, but if psi exists and can be selected for by evolution, doesn't this imply that an AI (or even just a brute force algorithm on the right track) can optimise for it too?
So that's something to consider if there turns out to be anything substantial behind all this.