Thanks for all the work! Can you turn those text lists into tables? It's hard to compare at a glance when the numbers aren't lined up.

I use this framing: If I make 100 copies of myself so that I can accomplish some task in parallel and I'm forced to terminate all but one, then all the terminated copies, just prior to termination, will think something along the lines of, "What a shame, I will have amnesia regarding everything that I experienced since the branching." And the remaining copy will think, "What a shame, I don't remember any of the things I did as those other copies." But nobody will particularly feel that they are going to "die." I think of it more as how memories propagate forward.

If I forked and then the forks persisted for several weeks and accumulated lots of experiences and varying shifts in perspective, I'd be more prone to calling the forks different "people."

Thanks for reaching out! As a LW lurker, I've felt a bit of unease when I first heard about Intentional Insights or read the one HuffPo article, and it's taken me a while to discern where that unease came from.

One natural interpretation is that I'm not as comfortable with emotional appeals, and since that's expressly what you aim to give, it's going to rub someone like me the wrong way. If that's the case, InIn's community will just be a different subset of the population, probably bigger like you hope, and we should accept that.

A more concerning interpretation would assert that the style of LW content is also a big part of its identity, encouraging for instance long and deep reflection and high-quality discussion about difficult topics rather than instant-gratification social media responses. My own mindset while reading LW or SSC (or NYT, for that matter) is often very different from when I'm browsing Facebook or YouTube or ClickHole, and in the former, I feel that I'm more likely to take action based on what I've read.

Still, it's an interesting experiment, to see if the content of LW can be ported over to the BuzzFeed model without too much loss, and I'm glad someone's trying it. BTW, I don't have any contacts there or anything, but in the online Christian world, I would recommend trying RELEVANT Magazine as another place to publish.

The fantasy isn't mainly that Robertson likes torturing atheists or thinks his audience does. The fantasy is that their own atheism is responsible for them being tortured and that the awfulness of that demonstrates that atheism is awful. Whether his audience likes hearing about atheists suffering is a side issue.

.You don't promote the Holocaust by talking about how much pain the Jews would suffer in concentration camps.

That's a bad comparison because Nazis did not believe that Jews could or should give up being Jews.

I'm going to repost something I posted there:

I think that Scott is looking at Phil Robertson’s literal words and ignoring context, implication, and connotation. It is possible to parse what Phil Robertson said as a thought experiment which questions the logical consequences of an atheistic position.

But even though his literal words have the form of such a thought experiment, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s stringing together a set of applause lights meant to tell his audience that he fantasizes about the outgroup getting punished for being the outgroup in a way that is their own fault.

It is a scourge of the Internet that people are too literal. Scott is falling victim to this trend here. The way Phil Robertson phrased that, and the circumstance surrounding it, make it very clear that it is not just a thought experiment even if you can take it apart and say “well, a thought experiment has A, and B, and C, and Phil is also using A, and B, and C and in exactly the right order."

Yes, people can use extreme scenarios when they are legitimately trying to argue a point. No, this is not a case of that. It's not even a case of atheists in the audience getting mindkilled. It's a case of atheists in the audience correctly understanding what he's saying. In the real world outside LW, most hypotheticals of this sort are attacks and not sincere attempts to make a philosophical point.

What does "non-arbitrary" mean, and why is it a virtue? More, why does Robertson's religion have this property, when plainly no moral claims can logically follow from the existence of some deity unless we start by assuming a connection?

As someone who has spent a lot of time with religious conservatives, I've heard the sort of argument given by Robertson many times before. And they use it as an actual argument used against nihilism, which they tend to think follows directly from atheism. So Scott is completely right to address it as such.

I think Robertson conflates the two because he (and others like him) can't really imagine a coherent non-arbitrary atheist moral realist theory. Can anyone here give a good example of one that couldn't include what the murderer he depicts seems to believe?

In an article proclaiming the transcendent use of complicated, modern statistics in baseball, and in particular, one called "WAR" (wins above replacement):

I'm not a mathematician and I'm not a scientist. I'm a guy who tries to understand baseball with common sense. In this era, that means embracing advanced metrics that I don't really understand. That should make me a little uncomfortable, and it does. WAR is a crisscrossed mess of routes leading toward something that, basically, I have to take on faith.

And faith is irrational and anti-intellectual, right? Faith is for rain dances and sun gods, for spirituality but not science. Actually, no. Faith is how we organize a complicated modern world. Faith is what you have when your doctor walks in with a syringe filled with something that could be anything and tells you that it'll keep you from getting the measles. Unless you're a doctor or a medical scientist, you don't really understand vaccines, and you certainly can't brew one up at home. You have outsourced the intellectual side of your health to people who, your faith reassures you, are smarter than you. Maybe in one way of looking at it you're not as smart as your great-great-great-grandparents were, because they had to take responsibility for cooking their own medicine. But you'll live longer. The complicated nature of WAR, your inability to touch the guts of it, isn't an argument against it. That's just what human advancement looks like in the 21st century. And if you can accept that you can walk into a tube built out of 100 tons of aluminum, fly seven miles off the ground and land safely thousands of miles away, you can accept WAR.