the provisions of that Texas bill that was notably filibustered sounded reasonable to me

Political and social context is important for the Texas bill and others like it. The relentlessly pursued goal of the "pro-life" movement is to restrict access to abortion. Requiring hospital admitting privileges sounds reasonable on its face, but the stigma faced by abortion providers makes it an onerous burden that is more likely to shut down clinics than to improve the safety of their operations.

I think we should be less squeamish about acknowledging when we're trading off on human lives, particularly those of children.

Alongside bills such as the above, the "pro-life" movement is making every attempt to restrict access to long-lasting low-failure-rate birth control, which is one of the best ways to reduce abortions. They often base their arguments on erroneous claims that such birth control is abortifacient. Even if those claims were supported by evidence, the idea that a single-celled zygote is morally equivalent to (or even anywhere in the neighborhood of) a thinking, self-aware person is absurd.

"Human lives" is an artificial category. What counts as a human life? Why should we care about those things?

I think we should attempt to reduce (and ideally eliminate) these natural miscarriages through funding of medical research, the same way we do e.g. cot death.

There are two important points about these natural miscarriages. The first is the sheer number of them, which certainly would merit medical research and treatment if one considers fetuses morally equivalent or close to persons. The second, however, is not addressed by that proposal. In most cases of early natural miscarriage, the woman did not realize that she was pregnant. Does medical treatment for a fetus warrant, e.g., surveillance of women to ensure that no pregnancies go unnoticed?

I'm a traditional leftist/tax-and-spend liberal but anti-abortion. It could be my catholic upbringing, but it just seems incredibly obvious to me, a "you must be this rational to ride" line, that killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside.

(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide - really pro it, not just the "lol yeah delicious babies" kind we sometimes see on LW. And there's a coherent position of "the line needs to be somewhere and birth is the Schnelling point, so I'm contingently pro-abortion but anti-infanticide, pro tem". But I don't think many pro-abortion folk would endorse that position. )

The political ideology question seems to equate libertarian with libertarian capitalist, and communist with totalitarian There's no option for libertarian communism/socialism.

Also, the moral philosophy question seems to assume one believes moral questions have truth values. "None" isn't given as a choice.

Wow -- quite an emotive piece. I suppose that very fact illustrates the point.

When I was 7th grade (around 1992) a random group of teens came up to me and punched me in the face. I'm not sure this game is all that new.

I was playing a card game with about 6 people in an AP calc class. One component of the game involved guessing: some of the cards were "good' and some were "evil". You had the option to either pick up a card or pass it on to the next player, and the objective was to pick up the "good" cards and pass on the "evil" ones.

Prior to guessing, I would look in my opponents eyes, and ask them: "Is it good or is it evil?". If it was good, I'd get this mischievous, friendly vibe from them. If it was evil, I'd get a sort of adversarial or guilty vibe.

I must have guessed between 60-120 times throughout the game. I got every single guess correct. It was creeping me out.

After the game was over, we tried having the professor draw some cards and pass it to me, and I was supposed to guess whether it was good or evil. My professors face was like a stone, and I was guessing at chance. (Note, however, that this wasn't a real game so there was no winning-losing at stake - that might have made it easier to avoid micro-expressions.)

This sort of thing had never happened to me before and has never happened to me since. I attributed it to luck and temporarily heightened sensitivity to face reading (It certainly felt like reading faces)...but the sheer accuracy of my intuitions and my inability to replicate it still spooked me. And, of course, part of me was screaming you managed to find psychic powers and you lost them you idiot!.

Assuming it wasn't sheer luck, I'd very much like to successfully replicate it one day and master the skill. I scored 33/36 my first time taking the RMET and mean is ~25 so my face-reading skills are probably above average, but it's not like I hit ceiling.

I think a large part of it is learning to listen to gut feeling, not second guessing, not letting your imagination interfere with your perception...but I really don't know. It's hard to introspect on phenomenon that I can't replicate.

One evening, when I was in my mid-teens, my parents had gone out and were due back very late. For story-unrelated reasons there was a lot of tension, nervousness and worry in the household at that time. My younger brothers went to bed, and I stayed up a bit watching the film Cat's Eye, a mild horror film written by Stephen King.

In the final part of the film, a girl is threatened by a vicious troll, a short, ugly, nasty creature with a dagger. It repeatedly creeps in to her bedroom in the night, first slaughtering her pet parrot, and then trying to kill her by sucking her breath out. She's defended by a stray cat, but unfortunately when her parents come in, there's no sign of the troll, only the cat, so the parents don't believe her and blame the luckless animal for the mayhem.

While I was watching this, one of my brothers came in from his bedroom, clearly upset. He'd heard something creeping in to his bedroom, first opening the door, then walking across the floor. He was scared. I instantly thought of the vicious troll from the film, but with my rational brain knew it couldn't possibly be that. I also knew he hadn't seen the film. So I tried to reassure him, and talked about how the house makes noises in the floorboards when the central heating turns off - which had just happened. He wasn't remotely convinced: he knew fine what the usual house-settling noises were, and this was something different. It was something with feet, and small, no more than a foot tall.

I was a bit creeped out, but as the older brother put on a brave, reassuring face and came with him in to his bedroom and searched it thoroughly. We found nothing. With a bit of persuasion he went back to bed. I went back to the film.

About fifteen minutes later he came back, absolutely terrified. The thing, whatever it was, had come back, opened his door, and walked around on its little feet. It totally wasn't the house settling, it was footsteps. I wondered whether he'd overheard or seen the film, and was imagining the troll, but I was pretty sure he hadn't. He was convincing: he wasn't the sort to get that upset at something wholly imaginary, and was able to give clear detail about what he had heard when questioned. So by now I was really quite creeped out. With my rational brain I knew that the vicious troll couldn't be real and in our house, but there was clearly something going on. My emotions were running pretty high, and I really didn't want to take on the role of the wrongly-unbelieving parents from the film. Which of course made me pretty unconvincing at reassuring my poor brother. I went with him to check his bedroom, and again we found nothing.

He was too scared to sleep on his own, so I stayed with him. If anything does come in, it'll have to come past me first, and I'm pretty tough and I'll be ready, I told him with the best teenage bravado I could muster. Of course, nothing happened with me on watch, and eventually, he fell asleep.

It was my own bedtime by then, so I got myself ready for bed and locked the doors and turned off all the lights except the porch and hall lights for my parents' return. That in itself was slightly spooky, which didn't help.

I lay down in bed and turned off the bedside light. My mind was still racing, but eventually I found myself starting to get a little sleepy.

Suddenly, I was wide awake and awash in serious adrenaline reaction. My bedroom door had just opened an inch or two, and my body was in full-on fight-or-flight-or-freeze mode. I froze. Had I imagined it, in a going-to-sleep sort of way? No: as I watched in horror, the door opened another couple of inches. I'd been in the dark long enough that my eyes were fully dark-adapted, and from where I was lying in bed, I could see the doorway from about a foot high upwards, dimly but distinctly backlit from the hall light, and there was nothing there. Whatever had opened the door was less than a foot tall. So definitely not my parents coming home and checking on me, then. Now I was really scared. My hyper-alert state led to massive subjective time dilation: all this took only a few seconds, but it felt like minutes.

It got worse. I heard footsteps. Small but quite distinct footsteps. Nothing remotely like the house settling. The sort of footsteps something less than a foot high would make. Exactly like my brother had described. Exactly like the vicious troll. Whatever it was stopped for a moment. I could hardly breathe.

Then it started again, clearly walking towards me in my bed. I'm not sure I've ever been as scared as I was at that moment.

Rationally, I knew it couldn't be a vicious troll come to kill me, but emotionally I was certain of it. I thought furiously, taking advantage of the extra subjective time. Whatever it was, I wasn't going to just lie there and let it do whatever it wanted. I sized up my situation. I had no obvious weapons or things-that-could-be-weapons to hand or in easy reach, but on the plus side, I was clearly much bigger than it was, and reasonably fit and strong. Whatever it was clearly intended to surprise me in my bed, but I reckoned I could seize the tactical advantage by surprising it. So far I'd just lain there silently, as if asleep. I decided to seize the initiative and confront it in a rush. This was classic battlefield thinking: under desperate pressure, I didn't seek and evaluate alternatives, I just quickly checked over the first plan that came in to my mind, and although it didn't seem great, it seemed better than doing nothing, so I went for it. I visualised what I would do, got my muscles ready, then moved. I leapt out of bed, hurling off the blankets in the direction of the thing, and roared as loudly as I could as I charged towards it.

Bhe bja ubhfrubyq png unq pbzr va gb gur orqebbz ybbxvat sbe fbzrjurer jnez gb frggyr qbja sbe n anc. Ur jnf nofbyhgryl greevsvrq ol guvf qvfcynl, ghearq gnvy, naq syrq.

One movie that certainly portrays a rationalist favorably is Contact. An almost-perfect humanist movie is UFOria, which weaves the two leads' developing connection with each other and with reality together in a very organic way. Unfortunately, in the last few seconds it seems to wimp out in favor of ontological ambiguity.

I experienced this striking coincidence between what I was reading and what I was doing: http://understandinguncertainty.org/user-submitted-coincidences/fictionalreal-location