But then you've already lapsed into consequentialism, and thus stuck yourself with a mandate to consider the trade-offs between desirable and undesirable consequences.
Yes, and deontologists and virtue ethicists consider trade offs between different principles or virtues.
This is not what deontological and virtue-theoretic politicians actually do.
This is not what consequentialists actually do either. In particular, I've never seen an actual utility function, much less using one to compute trade-offs.
..."Look how morally brave I am for being willi
I would guess that they don't exist in some communist countries.
Yes, and those countries' economies aren't doing to well.
If I understand all of someone's logical arguments for believing what they believe, and I have the knowledge and processing power needed to evaluate those arguments,
Outside of math you also need the relevant evidence, i.e., observations, which requires you to trust that they have been accurately reported.
So by that standard almost no politicians believe in global warming.
Notice how all the rich actors who show up at charity events to "fight global warming" are also lining up to buy beach front property. (They also tend to fly around in private jets, but that's a separate issue.)
Edit: The reason I didn't use politicians in the above example is that not all politicians can afford beachfront property and the ability to do so correlates with other things that may be relevant to whether you want him in power.
Sarah Hoyt isn't quite NRx, but her recent (re)post here seems relevant.
In particular, the old distinction between deserving and undeserving poor.
I'm a virtue ethicist.
Classics is the traditional solution to the latter and I think it's still a pretty good one, but now that we can't assume knowledge or Greek or Latin, any other culture at a comparable remove would probably work as well.
Um, the reason for studying Greek and Latin is not just because they're a far-removed culture. It's also because they're the cultures which are the memetic ancestors of the memes that we consider the highest achievements of our culture, e.g., science, modern political forms.
Also this suffers from the problem of attempting to go from theoretical to practical, which is the opposite of how humans actually learn. Humans learn from examples, not from abstract theories.
To put it shortly, it seems to me we have lost the ability to build new things, and became an online debate club.
Did LW as a group ever have this ability? Going by the archives it seems that there were a small number (less than 10) of posters on LW who could do this. Now that they're no longer posting regularly, new things are no longer produced here.
try creating a new one from scratch, or whatever?
A reasonable case could be made that this is how NRx came to be.
Maybe we should have a meta-rule that anyone who starts a political debate must specify rules how the topic should be debated.
Um, this is a horrible idea. The problem is people will make rules that amount to "you're only allowed to debate this topic if you agree with me".
One aspect of neoreactionary thought is that it relies on historical narratives instead of focusing on specific claims that could be true or false in a way that can be determined by evidence.
I don't see how it does this any more than any other political philosophy.
When you say "X does Y", you must specify gender of X in Y's form.
Nitpick: I believe you meant "X did Y".
Berkeley's explanation that there is no physical world, but God exists and is directly causing all of our sensations is an alternate theory, although a rather unlikely one.
What evidence lead you to this conclusion?
The impression I get from Gardner is that "the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good".
So what does that make the LW sequences?
Obviously it doesn't make them anything. But I have heard similar criticisms levelled at them.
My own impression of the Sequences is that most of what they say is fairly standard-issue analytic philosophy / cognitive science / physics / whatever; that where they're novel they're right more often than (according to what I've read, which I repeat is rather little and I have no reason to think it very reliable) Korzybyski is when he is novel; and that there's very little in them that's just straightforwardly wrong as (again, according to what I've read) some k...
When the most powerful weapon is the pointed stick…
Skill is an a large premium. Thus those who have the free time to practice can end up dominating.
We just really don't know very much about the roman economy, and are unlikely to find out much more than we currently do.
On the other hand we do know a lot about what happened in 1921, Krugman just wishes we didn't because it appears to contradict his theories.
Generalizing from one example isn't good .. science, logic or argument. But it's better than generalizing from the fog of history.
Um, no. History contains evidence, it's not particularly clean evidence, but evidence nonetheless and we shouldn't be throwing it away.
NRx's are generally not utilitarians.
Hey hallucinations are totally a thing.
Otherkin (or transgenderism, as discussed in previous posts) is an identity. It refers to who you are. Homosexuality is an orientation. It refers to whom you desire.
And this distinction is relevant because?
What's the alternative. Site what's currently going on in other countries (people generally aren't to familiar with that either)? Generalize from one example (where people don't necessarily now all the details either)?
Yes. Because both of those have actual data, and are thus useful - your reasoning can be tested against reality.
We just really don't know very much about the roman economy, and are unlikely to find out much more than we currently do. Generalizing from one example isn't good .. science, logic or argument. But it's better than generalizing from the fog of history. Not a lot better - Economics only very barely qualifies as a science on a good day, but Krugman is completely correct to call people out for going in this direction because doing so just outright reduces it to storytelling.
which makes progressivism the stream itself, rather than a dead thing floating down some other stream.
Well progressivism self-identifies as "being on the right side of history".
Well progressivism self-identifies as "being on the right side of history".
Indeed it does. It sees itself as the stream and the tide, not dead flotsam. At least, when it is not casting its enemies as the stream and itself as the living thing valiantly fighting against oppression. Chesterton, progressivism, and neoreaction all have that equivocation in common, casting their favoured ideology as either the tide or as fighting against the tide, as it suits their rhetoric.
This assumes the different black swans are uncorrelated.
I'm inclined to think that non-ideological autocracy (we're in charge because we're us and you're you) is the human default.
I'm not sure about that. In fact, I can't think of any actually non-ideologically autocratic society in history. Are you sure you're not confusing "non-ideological" with "having an ideology I don't find at all convincing"?
I was just amused by the distinction between what we think of when thinking "grammar nerd".
I was thinking of the people involved in things like lojban. Who were you thinking of?
I couldn't care less whether sexual orientation is innate or a choice. If it's innate, the debate is over. If it's a choice, you're free. In both cases, nothing wrong has happened.
s/homosexuality/other-kinness in that paragraph. Do you still agree with it? If not, what's the difference?
Even in 200 years we went from homosexuality being legal
Citation please.
... the lateral thinker who finds a new route forward, the hedonist who bungee jumps off the edge, and the engineer who builds a bridge.
(Of course, there might not be another route to find, the bungee jumping could get you killed, and a bridge might not be cost-effective, but I'd like to at least consider a third way out of a dilemma)
I think all the work here is done by determining what actually constitutes a precipice.
Is, or was, anyone actually saying anything that amounted to "we are safe, therefore precautions are unnecessary"? What I've heard people saying is more like "we are safe enough with our current level of precautions, therefore such-and-such an extra precaution is unnecessary".
This has the Chesterton's post problem. What do you mean by "our current level of precautions"? Do they include the existing provisions for quarantine in case of emergencies?
...We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do n
I am reminded of:
"Arf arf arf! Not because arf arf! But exactly because arf NOT arf!" GK Chesterton's dog
In trying to find the above quote by wildcard searching on Google, I stumbled upon another quote of this nature by the dog's owner himself: "I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I." There appears to be another one about science being bad not because it encourages doubt, but because it encourages credulity, but I'm unable to find the exact quote.
OTOH there is a single point of failure
There is something worse than having a single point of failure, that's having multiple points of failure in "series", for lack of a better term.
Um, NRx's aren't arguing for totalitarian countries.
Hint: Monarchy =/= Totalitarianism.
In fact one of the main neoreactionary arguments for monarchy is that historical absolute monarchies have been less totalitarian, in terms of government intrusion into citizens day-to-day life or control of the economy, then modern "liberal democracies".
People who sleep with their same sex do not necessarily identify as homosexuals
Just noticed this clause. Then which of the two is the thing that is supposedly 100% innate?
How about the Black-Scholes model with a more realistic distribution?
Or does BS make annoying assumptions about its distribution, like that it has a well-defined variance and mean?
Thanks, fixed.
Interestingly, most of the arguments against language influencing thought that I've seen wind up showing the grammar doesn't influence thought. Basically the biggest effect language has on thought is via vocabulary, which must be really disappointing news to all the grammar nerds obsessing over the perfect grammar to give their conlang.
Technically true, although Mao managed to get remarkably close.
I'm not as familiar with WHO's ICD; however, I'd expect the process that produces its contents to be similar to the one for the DSM.
On the other hand, gender dysphoria is classified as a mental disorder in the DSM, and the treatment is helping your body match your brain, not the other way around.
Um, you do realize the DSM's contents is massively influenced by politics?
There are ontogenetic factors (insufficient uptake of testosterone, for instance) that might lead to a child with male-typical sexual organs but more female-typical neurological features.
Why would this effect the neurological and only the neurological features? On the other hand the example of other-kin shows that it's possible for a human brain to identify as something it isn't.
Depends on where I went to school in a liberal state and what I describe was definitely going on.
People who sleep with their same sex do not necessarily identify as homosexuals, and definitely not all homosexuals identify as transgender.
Sorry if my wording wasn't clear.
No valid argument exists to equal homosexuality per se with, (..) or having a psychiatric disorder.
I don't see what argument you can possible make for why say transsexuality shouldn't be considered a psychiatric disorder but being an "other kin" should. Today people who call transsexuality a psychiatric disorder are labeled "evil trasphobes", the way progress...
You're leaving out that he left Latin America to get away from those problems
But do they understand what caused them.
also that a lot of immigrants want to become real Americans (or whichever country they're moving to).
I'd be more comfortable with an immigration policy that explicitly screened for something like this.
Many Western societies have seen pretty dramatic productivity-enhancing institutional changes in the last few hundred years that aren't explicable in terms of changes in genetic makeup.
Who said anything about genetics?
Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea seem to make a pretty strong case for a huge independent effect of institutions.
Korea is. China (I assume this is what you mean by Hong Kong and Singapore) is evidence against.
It could be any number of things. Including the one I take it you're looking for, namely some genetic inferiority on the part of the people in country A.
Not necessarily, my argument goes through even if it's memetic.
...The people who move from country A to country B may be atypical of the people of country A, in ways that make them more likely overall to be productive in country B.
Your only response to this has been a handwavy dismissal, to the effect that that might have been true once but now immigration is too easy so it isn't any more. How about some
It seems like half your complaints are that Russian doesn't make some distinction that English does and the other half are that Russian forces you to make distinctions that English doesn't. It strikes me that you're simply more comfortable thinking in English.