Ok, the quoted position is not nonsense. But it is totally rejected by society's decisions about involuntary medical procedures and economic support of children. Once those decisions are made, there is no space for anything like what the quote advocates for.

First point: Abortion is a medical procedure. Society is generally unwilling to force anyone to undergo a medical procedure. Given the special moral issues arising out of abortion, why do you expect a different result here?

Second point: society has decided that a child's economic support should come from all biological parents, rather than the people raising the child. There are (and have been) other decisions made by other societies. So what? That doesn't make the current position incoherent (as sam seems to argue). Men know (or should know) the risks when deciding whether to have sex.

Ok, the quoted position is not nonsense. But it is totally rejected by society's decisions about involuntary medical procedures and economic support of children. Once those decisions are made, there is no space for anything like what the quote advocates for.

First point: Abortion is a medical procedure. Society is generally unwilling to force anyone to undergo a medical procedure. Given the special moral issues arising out of abortion, why do you expect a different result here?

Second point: society has decided that a child's economic support should come from all biological parents, rather than the people raising the child. There are (and have been) other decisions made by other societies. So what? That doesn't make the current position incoherent (as sam seems to argue). Men know (or should know) the risks when deciding whether to have sex.

Speaking as a pro-lifer, that's nonsense. Men aren't the ones using their bodies as life support. Also, "anti white male"? Really? I'm pretty sure you don't have to be white to get an abortion.

EDIT: Is this seriously being downvoted?

But as Saint Paul rather delicately said, and people in the eighteenth century rather more plainly said, enforced abstinence is not going to fly.

Yeah, in certain circumstances people are going to have incentives to break promises (and/or contracts). I don't think that this is specific to marriage, and I don't think it makes the concept of marriage invalid.

Making up numbers (99.9999...%) as hyperbole is considered rude here. It is much less misleading to readers if you say that you are nearly certain. For example I am nearly certain job interviews on top jobs are often gained from social networks and connections someone without parents in those circles wouldn't have. I'm pretty sure the gains from such connections are nearly zero sum.

I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer's behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense. (Are you thinking of anything in particular about Homer or was it an arbitrary example?)

In any case mind sharing how you implemente CEV checking on a mere human brain?

I wouldn't, but I can roughly guess what the result would be. (Likewise, I couldn't implement Solomonoff induction on any brain, but I still guess general relativity has less complexity than MOND.) If I had no way of guessing whether a given action is more likely to be good or to be bad, how should I ever decide what to do?

One form of moral progress that doesn't look the same as "random walk plus retrospective teleology", is the case where some inconsistency of moral views is resolved.

For example, some dudes say that it's self-evident that all men are created equal. Then somebody notices that this doesn't really jive with the whole slavery thing. So at least some of what gets called moral progress is just people learning to live up to their own stated principles.

Another way of looking at it is that there is little difference between the terminal values of me vs a mediaeval lord, but the lord is very confused about what instrumental values best achieve his terminal values (he wants the best for the peasants, but thinks that that is achieved by the application of strong discipline to prevent idleness, so values severe discipline).

I would call “moral progress” the process whereby a society's behaviours and their CEV get closer to each other than they used to be. And this looks pretty much like it, to me.

The canonical example is, I think, the aborigines of Tasmania after they were cut off from the mainland. Over the 8000 years of isolation, the ~10,000 Tasmanians lost most of their technology - fishing, the ability to make fire or bone tools, etc.

The story, as I read when visiting relevant sites in Tasmania (and confirmed on wikipedia) is one of "necessity is the mother of invention" in reverse - Tasmania being a veritable paradise compared to most of the mainland. Fishing traps for scaled fish were not especially important given the effort they required compared to eating shellfish and seals while environmental changes and increasing tribal territory sizes made hunting land animals even easier. They also never lost fire.

This example isn't especially strong evidence that technology loss is caused by a 10k population size.

I just knew the Socialist Russian commenter was you. :)

The post came off as bitter, as someone in desperate denial of how much he started rooting for Romney ever more the more the election date approached. But I liked it because of the bolded sentences in my other comment. I liked it because of how well it shows the sheer terror of the huge check reality is going to hand back to us one day if my and his model of the government and politics is correct.

Perhaps I was biased towards it because while on the day of the election I was apathetic, since I could barely see the difference between Romney and Obama both pro-wall street moderate theist stateist democracy advocates who like to bomb other countries. My apolitical stance crumbled when I saw everyone celebrating the win. The Facebook comments. The smiles on my friend's faces. The utterly creepy unity of thought. That I couldn't share. That I could never share. And I couldn't explain to them why, there is too little time, the singaling is so wrong, it would only cost me friends. I also knew I was far away from anyone else that even empathy towards me was not possible. So alienating. So alienating to see this in what I was as a child told was supposed to be my society too. Having to be quiet about it... I hated it, I hated all of modern Western civilization and wished it to disappear ground to dust by Chinese boots or drowned in an Islamic tide or surgically cut off from mankind to ensure the latter's survival, the wound sterilized by cleansing atomic fire. It activated my tribal brain.

The next night I couldn't sleep for hours. I couldn't help but see Obama's election as a sort of symbolic thing a signal "so right wing traditionalist reform is utterly impossible via elections, we aren't going to fix this are we? We can't fix this! It won't fix itself! GOD! Democracy won't fix itself! We are fucked. Probably since 1914."

To be perfectly clear I still think there is no real difference in an Obama or Romney win. Certainly nothing to worth voting for. But I've had compartmentalized beliefs about the world for some time. And the post election glow of so many people made me feel the implications of those beliefs in my belly and heart much like I had only felt the implication of natural selection being allowed to do horrible things to creatures after reading Back to the Trees. I found myself once again staring in the face of a world beyond the reach of God and I wanted it to go away.