As executions?

Oh, sorry, I didn't realize that you were referring to executions specifically; I thought you were referring to the entire process of erecting a sort of "Great Firewall of USA". I agree with you regarding executions, they are extremely unlikely.

Well, that's a danger, certainly. But it's not our fated doom. As somebody once said, politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality. So, we ought to be aware of the danger of making public policy into a team sport. However, rationalists don't have to ignore and avoid politics, but rather must try to look at it objectively. There are tools for this. Explicit models checked against historical data is a good start, as a way of making assumptions transparent.

In any case, to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. Politicians are the people who tell police and armies what to do. Governments can be benign or maybe not so benign. To ignore politics altogether would not be rational.

Yes, and then what ? Freenet servers can (and, AFAIK, routinely are) be blocked by IP. Protocol analysis tools can (and again, AFAIK, already are) used to block undesirable packets regardless of IP. Perhaps more importantly, any person who is using a tool like Tor or Freenet is exposing himself to a serious risk of prosecution, incarceration, or, in extreme cases, execution. This is a risk that most people simply wouldn't be willing to take.

What makes you believe that the US won't go as far ?

The guy who runs OpenDNS says he won't fight SOPA.

“There are a number of people who have knowledge in this field that estimate humanity’s chance at making it through this century at about 50 percent,” Schwall says. “Even if that number is way off and it’s one in a billion, that’s too high for me.”

Presumably he meant something different.

I am working on finishing up a philosophy paper about whether "fine-tuning" (the claim that the physical constants and initial conditions that permit the evolution of life and conscious observers are rare in the space of physically possible parameters) supports "multiverse" hypotheses according to which the cosmos is huge and is heterogeneous in its local conditions. One major argument for the view that fine-tuning does not support multiverse hypotheses is due to Ian Hacking, who claimed that this inference is analogous to an "inverse gambler's fallacy" where a gambler enters a casino, witnesses a roll of dice resulting in double-sixes, and concludes that the people must have been throwing dice for a while.

While going through Nick Bostrom's book Anthropic Bias, I've found his discussion of Hacking's argument (and of an significantly improved recent version by Roger White, available here ) somewhat unilluminating, although I thought there must be something wrong with the argument. Going through the existing replies to this argument in the literature I've found counterarguments that either fail straightforwardly or (more commonly) render fine-tuning irrelevant to whether multiverse hypotheses are confirmed, degenerating into an almost a priori argument that I find very implausible. I've found a fairly simple way of seeing how exactly the Hacking/White argument goes wrong, by combining Bostrom's self-sampling assumption with a technical fix independently arrived at by a few other philosophers. This solution does not generate the implausible a priori argument for the multiverse that previous approaches in the literature do, as long as the reference class (for applying the self-sampling assumption) satisfies some weak requirements.

The result is a critical review paper going through the literature while building up the concepts needed to understand the proposed solution. I've produced all the content by now, and am now mostly working on finishing a draft, integrating notation across sections, making it readable to philosophers with at least rudimentary knowledge of Bayesianism, and in general improving the paper to meet top-tier journal standards.

Here's a summary and discussion of the affair, with historical comparison to the Gödel results and their reception (as well as comments from several luminaries, and David Chalmers) on a philosophy of mathematics blog whose authors seem to take the position that the reasons for consensus in the mathematical community are mysterious. (It is admitted that "arguably, it cannot be fully explained as a merely socially imposed kind of consensus, due to homogeneous ‘indoctrination’ by means of mathematical education.") This is a subject that needs to be discussed more on LW, in my opinion.

Yes, but just to iterate: it's a failure to empathize not a failure of empathy.

What does it mean to "cultivate an X based morality" and why should we do it? Why should we have an any-one-thing based morality? Obviously picking one moral emotion and only teaching and encouraging that is likely to leave important moral judgments out. I don't think even Peter Singer is recommending that. Nonetheless, empathy seems to have a central if not exclusive role in the motivation and development of lots of really important moral judgments. That empathy is not necessary for all moral judgments does not mean that it can be systematically replaced by other moral emotions in cases where it is central. Helping people is good! We should teach children to help people and laud those who do.

I'm not sure section 5 says... anything at all. All of the things said about empathy in this section are true of people. Try substituting one for the other. Which is to say, they're true for lots of other behaviors and emotions as well. Pointing out that biases affect empathy isn't helpful unless one has found a different moral emotion which inspires a extensionally similar moral judgment (one that leads to the same behaviors) that combines the motivational force of empathy without the vulnerability to bias. Anyone have candidates for that?

Edit: Prinz's suggestion is "outrage". He says we should get angry and indignant at the causes of suffering- claiming that this has more motivational power than empathy. This may be the case-- but outrage tends to come with empathy (unless the outrage is directed at something causing oneself harm) so it isn't clear how to evaluate this claim. More importantly, I see no reason at all to think outrage is less subject to bias. It can certainly be subject to in-group bias, proximity effects, salience effects. It can be easily manipulated. It also leads to people looking for an enemy where there isn't necessarily one. This leads to people ignoring causes of suffering like economic inefficiencies and institutional ineffectiveness in favor of targeting people perceived as greedy. A bit richly, he condemns the 'empathy-inspired' moral system of collectivism by referencing collectivist atrocities... as if they had nothing to do with outrage.