I gravely doubt that anyone has that expression permanently stuck on their face. The image you linked to was obviously created in order to show "SJWs" in a bad light, and I can't imagine that anyone wanting to do that would use typical photos rather than particularly bad-looking photos for that purpose.

(The SJWiest people I know do not generally wear that sort of expression.)

I'm sure you're right that treating impurity and disgustingness as moral is not confined to the political right.

I suspect that the things treated as disgustingly wrong in "social justice" circles tend not to be ones that arouse feelings of disgust, as such, in most people, whereas things treated as disgustingly wrong among traditionalist social conservatives are often more widely felt to be disgusting. To put it differently: I suspect that "moral disgust" takes different forms on the left and on the right: on the left it's usually moral disapproval that has engendered disgust, and on the right it's usually disgust that has engendered moral disapproval.

My 11-year-old son had homework on how to be more compassionate. Rather than doing the homework he decided to donate (and tell the teacher that he was donating) $25 to the against Malaria foundation.

One conceptual difference between netnews (Usenet, NNTP, etc.) and current bloggyweb systems (LW, Reddit, Wordpress, Livejournal, etc.) is that bloggyweb systems have two kinds of messages, whereas netnews has only one.

The two kinds of messages in the bloggyweb are often called "posts" and "comments". A post is a top-level item. A comment is always attached to a single post. Some bloggyweb systems allow a tree structure of comments descending from a post. But comments and posts are fundamentally different, not only visually but also in the database schema behind them. They are also socially different: the ability to create a post is often restricted, whereas any damnfool can spam the comments. Comments are inferior to posts in every way: they are less searchable, they often can't be independently linked-to, they are presented as subordinate to posts in the user interface, etc.

In the netnews system, there is only one kind of message. Messages can contain metadata that refers to other messages — particularly by saying "this message is a reply to that one." If you want to start a new thread, you just create a message that is not a reply to any other message. If you want to continue a thread, you reply to a message in that thread. But a "thread" is not a thing — it's just a chain of messages linked to each other by metadata.

There are also other major differences. In the bloggyweb system, topical tagging is an afterthought; you find messages by following sites such as lesswrong.com, or forums such as reddit.com/r/rationality. In the netnews system, topical tagging is how anyone ever finds any messages. Topical tags in netnews are called "newsgroups". The user interface makes it seem like messages are inside newsgroups, but really a newsgroup is just a bit of indexing for tags, along with some glued-on rules for things like moderation.

I've heard that as a behavior is being extinguished, it becomes less common, but it's just as intense when it happens. That's something else to check.

Which would stop us from deriving new moral claims from existing ones. I understand now. Thanks!

So, if I understand correctly now, non-cognitivists say that human morals aren't constrained by the rules of logic. People don't care much about contradictions between their moral beliefs, they don't try to reduce them to consistent and independent axioms, they don't try to find new rules implied by old ones. They just cheer and boo certain things.

I don't understand how this difference leads to different (and disjoint / disagreeing) philosophical positions on what it means for people to say that "murder is wrong".

If someone says they disapprove of murder, they could be wrong or lying, or they could actually disapprove a little but say they disapprove lots, or vice versa. And if they actually boo murder, that's a signal they really disapprove of it, enough to invest energy in booing. But aside from signalling and credibility and how much they care about it, isn't their claimed position the same?

Are you saying non-cognitivists claim people who say "murder is wrong" never actually engage in false signalling, and we should take all statements of "murder is wrong" to be equivalent to actual booing? That sounds trivially false; surely that's not the intent of non-cognitivism.

As before, I found the question on metaethics (31) to be a tossup because I agree with several of the options given. I'd be interested in hearing from people who agree with some but not all of these answers:

• Non-cognitivism: Moral statements don't express propositions and can neither be true nor false. "Murder is wrong" means something like "Boo murder!".
• Error theory: Moral statements have a truth-value, but attempt to describe features of the world that don't exist. "Murder is wrong" and "Murder is right" are both false statements because moral rightness and wrongness aren't features that exist.
• Subjectivism: Some moral statements are true, but not universally, and the truth of a moral statement is determined by non-universal opinions or prescriptions, and there is no non-attitudinal determinant of rightness and wrongness. "Murder is wrong" means something like "My culture has judged murder to be wrong" or "I've judged murder to be wrong".

I'm a subjectivist: I understand that when someone says "murder is wrong", she's expressing a personal judgement - others can judge differently. But I also know that most people are moral realists, so they wrongly think they are describing features of the world that don't in fact exist; thus, I believe in error theory. And what does it mean to proclaim that something "is wrong", other than to boo it, i.e. to call for people not to do it and to shun those who do? Thus, I also agree with non-cognitivism.

If you paint a Chinese flag on a wolverine, and poke it with a stick, it will bite you.

This does not mean that the primary danger of aggravating the Chinese army is that they will bite you.

It certainly does not mean that nations who fear Chinese aggression should prepare by banning sticks or investing in muzzles for wolverines.

Andrew Gelman mentioned "the Kahneman-Gigerenzer catfight, or more generally the endless debate between those who emphasize irrationality in human decision making and those who emphasize the adaptive and functional qualities of our shortcuts." This looked worth checking, so I followed the link to the following statement by Gigerenzer:

The “half-empty” versus “half-full” explanation of the differences between Kahneman and us misses the essential point: the difference is about the nature of the glass of rationality, not the level of the water. For Kahneman, rationality is logical rationality, defined as some content-free law of logic or probability; for us, it is ecological rationality, loosely speaking, the match between a heuristic and its environment. For ecological rationality, taking into account contextual cues (the environment) is the very essence of rationality, for Kahneman it is a deviation from a logical norm and thus, a deviation from rationality. In Kahneman’s philosophy, simple heuristics could never predict better than rational models; in our research we have shown systematic less-is-more effects.

LW's dog in this catfight is probably on the Kahneman's side, but the debate is interesting.

If we define intelligence as the ability to solve complex problems in complex environments then there is no objective way to measure competence or intelligence outside of society. If a gene makes you more attractive and because of this attractiveness others respond better to you and this makes you better able, with the help of others, to solve problems then this gene really has made you more intelligent. (This is different from this beauty gene causing others to falsely perceive you as being better able to solve problems than you really are.)