I take seriously radical animal-suffering-is-bad-ism[1], but we would only save a small portion of animals by trading ourselves off 1-for-1 against animal eaters, and just convincing one of them to go vegan would prevent at least as many torturous animal lives in expectation, while being legal.

That is a justification for not personally being Ziz. But obviously it would have cut no ice with Ziz. And why should it? An individual must choose whether to pursue peaceful or violent action, because if you are Taking the Ideas Seriously then either one will demand your whole life, and you can’t do everything. A movement, on the other hand, can divide its efforts, fighting on all fronts while maintaining a more or less plausible deniability of any connection between them. This is a common strategy. For example, Sinn Fein and the IRA, respectively the legal and illegal wings of one side of the conflict over Northern Ireland.

It doesn’t even have to be explicitly organised. Some will take the right-hand path and some the left anyway. And so here we are.

What seems radical depends on where one stands. We each of us stand on our own beliefs, and the further away one looks, the more the beliefs over there differ from one's own. Look sufficiently far and everything you see in the distance will seem extreme and radical. Hence the fallacy that truth lies between extremes, instead of recognising the tautology that one's own beliefs always lie between those that are extremely different.

Let me put my attitudes in practical terms: I don't kick dogs, but I have destroyed a wasp's nest in my garage, and I don't donate to animal charities. (I don't donate to many other charities either, but there have been a few.) Let those who think saving the shrimps is worthwhile do so, but I do not travel on that path

I have no daydreams about quila, and others of like mind, not existing. Not even about Ziz.

What if I have wonderful plot in my head and I use LLM to pour it into acceptable stylistic form?

What if you have wonderful plot in your head and you ask writer to ghost-write it for you? And you'll be so generous as to split the profits 50-50? No writer will accept such an offer, and I've heard that established writers receive such requests all the time.

"Wonderful plots" are ten a penny. Wonderful writing is what makes the book worth reading, and LLMs are not there yet.

You have an epsilon chance of hitting the terrorist ("NO ONE has ever hit a target from this far"). POI only gives you an epsilon-of-epsilon lower chance of hitting the child. Your superior officer is an idiot.

That's leaving aside the fact that it would take more time to concentrate on the shot that you actually have ("They are hastily heading towards another building nearby"). And it's a moving target. The officer is asking a miracle of this sniper.

I'm actually just interested in whether you find the POI argument valid, not in what you think the right strategic call would be if that was a real-life situation.

The two cannot be separated. Reasoning not directed towards decisions about actions is empty. The purpose of the officer's POI argument is to persuade the sniper that taking the shot is the right call. It is clearly not, and the argument is stupid.

Blindsight strikes me as having the opposite view. Eneasz is talking about getting the underlayer to be more aligned with the overlayer. (“Unconscious” and “conscious” are the usual words, but I find them too loaded.) Watts is talking about removing the overlayer as a worse than useless excrescence. I am sceptical of the picture Watts paints, in both his fiction and non-fiction.

Ok, I'll take your word for it. It was still the most clichéd possible opening.

We find ourselves at the precipice of

tAI;dr.

The link at the top doesn't work. Should it be this?