Thanks! I'm trying to return to a more active commenting lifestyle.
Yours is a reasonable definition of "is it political?" but I think it's a very different sense from that which was forbidden on LW 1.0, as I understood it. The idea there was to avoid discussing any subject that was a live political debate (implicitly: in the US), because those are the debates that seemed most likely to become mindkilling.
So it was fine to say slavery and Nazism are bad, because (in the US) these are politically settled subjects, even though they're...
I'd like a clearer definition of what counts as politics. Some examples are easy to classify, but this post doesn't feel that way to me.
There was a recent post about the ethics of eating meat, and earlier posts on EA. Presumably these didn't count as "politics". But those two subjects are some of the examples given in the current post, and some of the others are uncontroversial (e.g. boo slavery).
ETA: ChristianKI's comment does seem clearly more politicised than the OP. But I wouldn't have predicted the discussion would go there just from reading the OP. And the thread I'm commenting on is older than that comment.
I came up with many reasons why this approach might fail. The fact there are so many suggests that I don't have very a good model and/or may be engaging in motivated reasoning.
In the general case, the recipients of the signals may not understand what is being signalled, or that signalling is involved at all, so they won't accept a substitute signal. E.g., most people are unaware or disbelieve that education serves for signalling more than teaching. They would not hire people who were merely accepted to MIT and would have received good grades, be...
seeds and placentas won’t exist for a long age yet, and there’s no other way to reproduce outside of standing water bodies.
Did you mean to write 'eggs' rather than placentas? Land-dwelling animals evolved long before placentas did. And long before tetrapods did - arthropodes came on land first, as well as many other ("worm") phyla such as nematodes and annelids - land ecology wouldn't be the same without insects and earthworms!
Plants, too, can reproduce on land without seeds, and for a long time they did: witness the bryophytes (li
Aleksei, do you mean they would have sex with the children once and then ask them if they'd like to leave their parents and have sex every day for the rest of their lives? :-)
Anyway, it takes too long for unmodified human children to develop proper minds in order to consent to anything like this. What do you do about pain incurred at the age of a few months? A year?
I'm also bothered that nobody has mentioned non-human animals. Why should cats and chimps and dolphins have to suffer pain and romantic disappointment? The Super Happy People should modify all the higher life forms and completely reshape the ecology.
How the fluff would they be able to feel all possible types of feelings
They seem to be limited to mapping others' experiences to their own feelings for analogous experiences. For instance, they first mapped giving birth to pleasure. Hardly epic angelic universal empathy powers.
What else is there, though? How do you define the feelings "pleasure" and "pain", distinctly from "goals sought" and "things avoided"? How do you empathize with a really alien intelligence without mapping its behavior and experiences to your own?
Do babies realize what will happen to them?
I asked about this in yesterday's comments thread, but I guess everyone's moved here since then :-)
My intuition is that selection pressure on young aliens (to do anything it takes not get eaten) would be stronger than most selection pressure adults experience (most adults produce hundreds of offspring <=> only one offspring out of several hundred survives; and in a technological society most if not all adults live to reproduce).
We should see children evolving to escape being eaten. If running faster doesn...
I don't think the Pilot is really taking the time to think through all the logical consequences of what he's saying
Indeed, even if he wants to make war, the logical next step would still be to keep talking to the aliens and learning as much as possible about them. Then maybe trying to capture or infiltrate their ship. Or asking for escort to their system and returning with strategic knowledge about that. Preparing a surprise attack. Things like that.
Destroying the first contact alien ship would be stupid.
Also, if some people care so much about this crusade they're willing to go against the rest of human society and risk a huge war, then logically they ought to have mounted a huge operation long ago to sweep the galaxy looking for morally unsuitable aliens. Killing or forcefully transforming any alien species that 1) they judge to be sufficiently intelligent and 2) whose behavior doesn't conform to human morals.
Or they might realize there's no real upper bound on the amount of suffering that might potentially be taking place somewhere out of sight. Especial...
Sentience DOES make a difference. You dont frown on your cat for hunting mice, but on your dog for doing it with children.
That's at least partly due to speciesm. How many people have gone on crusades to stop leopards from eating chimpanzees? For that matter, how many people devote their lives to stopping other humans from eating chimpanzees?
As for cannibalism, it seems to me that its role in Eliezer's story is to trigger a purely illogical revulsion in the humans who antropomorphise the aliens.
Imagine two completely different alien species living in one...
Will there be a policy on banned topics, such as e.g. politics, or will that be left to author discretion as part of moderation? Perhaps topics that are banned from promotion / front page (regardless of upvotes and comments) but are fine otherwise?
If certain things are banned, can they please be listed and defined more explicitly? This came up recently in another thread and I wasn't answered there.