All of TiffanyAching's Comments + Replies

It means things like not giving preferential treatment to one sex or gender over another when there isn't an actual reason for doing so, and finding ways to reduce disadvantages faced by one sex or gender even if they are (incidental) consequences of real differences.

gjm already stated what he meant by gender equality quite clearly. I see no justification for putting words in his mouth.

To stick my oar in for a minute, as I am wont to do, I didn't find your comment offensive. That which is true should never be offensive, and those are some real metrics by which gender inequality can be measured.

However I didn't get "humorous". I thought it was intended to be serious, though I could interpret the intended message in several different ways - interpretations to which my responses could range anywhere from "total agreement" to "not even worth engaging", so I decided to see where the discussion went before joining... (read more)

The problem with your moral theory, as I see it, is that it also fails to meet (c), because there could be many plausible, but horrific in my view, arguments you could make [...]

I was expecting this response either from you or someone else, but didn't want to make my previous comment too long (a habit of mine) by preempting it. It's a totally valid next question, and I've considered it before.

Criterion (c) is that the principles of my moral system must not lead when taken to their logical extent to a society that I, the proponent of the system, would co... (read more)

I have nothing to add, it just delights me to see that someone out there is still using the diaeresis.

Hey, I appreciate your ability to engage constructively with a critique of your views! Rare gift, that.

if your theory rests on arbitrary principles, then you admit that it's nothing more than a subjective guide

As other people have pointed out, maybe we should consider here what we mean by "arbitrary". In your initial statement you said that non-arbitrary was that which was derived logically from facts on which everyone agrees. So to avoid ambiguity maybe we should just say that criterion (b) is "the principle(s) of the moral system must... (read more)

Hi ArisC! Gratz on your first post. A few thoughts:

I can't agree with your b) criterion - non-arbitrary. The fundamental principle has to be arbitrary or you end up in a turtles-all-the-way-down situation where each principle rest upon another. "The fundamental principle is to not infringe on the liberty of others". Why not? "Because everyone agrees there's no way to prove moral authority". No they don't. Billions don't. "Well they should, because it's true." Well so what if it is? "That means you have no right to impose ... (read more)

Of all the different explanations and interpretations people have been giving in this thread this is the most satisfying to my mathematically illiterate brain. It's troublesome for me to grasp how 0.999... isn't always just a bit smaller than 1 because my brain wants to think that even an infinitely tiny difference is still a difference. But when you put it like that - there's nowhere between the two where you can draw a line between them - it seems to click in. 0.999... hugs 1 so tight that you can't meaningfully separate them.

I would think that for the purposes of the poll that doesn't count, because it's more a "guided thinking" thing - you're helping yourself to organize your thoughts by framing your problem as an imaginary dialogue. I do it too, with mixed results (I sometimes just end up scolding myself which I don't think is particularly constructive). But I would think it's qualitatively different to an actual dialogue with another mind which has at least the potential to introduce solutions or perspectives that you would not have come up with on your own. Maybe you should create a similar poll to see how many people talk to themselves and whether it helps!

Cool, another one! I'm supposed to be sleeping now rather than working, so I can engage with this.

(b), "there are mysterious forces at work here"

we would have to multiply by infinity and that wouldn't prove anything because we already know such operations are suspect.

Infinity is weird, and it makes math weird. I think a fuzzy version of this belief is pretty widespread - look what you get when you do an image search for "divide by zero", for example. For me, and I suspect for a lot of people with a very little general math knowledge... (read more)

It's awesome that you guys are really considering ways to incorporate changes people want.

I wonder, since you're going to have to put a lot of work into the refurbishing project and resources are finite, would it be worth generating some kind of survey for members to take about what kind of features/alterations/options they'd most like to see? I ask because it occurs to me that soliciting ideas in open threads, while absolutely useful as far as encouraging discussion and exchange of ideas goes, might present a patchy or unduly-slanted picture of what the ... (read more)

So the cop can create a self-consistent time loop, where he predicts that you will resist arrest, arrest you for this specific crime, and if you resist that arrest, that retroactively makes the arrest legal. (Sorry, I don't have a link, but at least in one situation the court said that such reasoning was okay.)

Here's an example via one of my favorite blogs, if you'd like to have a look. Summary - a lawyer who was verbally objecting (calmly) to a cop's interaction with her client was told that she would be "arrested for resisting arrest" if she... (read more)

This would be a problem with an obvious solution if Discussion was structured anything like a normal forum.

Main is one thing. The "community blog" structure works there. But Discussion in reality functions like a forum and it suffers from the lack of basic, common forum-features like sticky threads, posts bumping based on activity, and the ability to create sub-fora.

If politics had its own sub-forum, people could choose to enter it or not, simple as that. Nothing fancy about it - political discussion available, but cordoned off behind one more cl... (read more)

I'll try to come back and engage more substantively with the material later when I'm not actually supposed to be working, but for now just wanted to say bravo - this is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to see when you mentioned making math posts. I'd take posts like this every day if I could get 'em.

That's not helpful. One definition is "being willing to oppose someone even at personal cost", but that doesn't include cases like "I hate chocolate ice cream."

Okay - what would you say is the best way to articulate what you mean by "hating" liars, for example, as opposed to "hating" chocolate ice cream?

(You don't really hate chocolate ice cream, do you?)

Well, your original point was that Black Lives Matter is justified in insisting upon Black Lives and that countering with All Lives Matter was a bad thing to do. I would guess that BLM would strongly object to e.g. Poor Lives Matter as well.

Maybe they would, but I don't think I would be quite so quick to dismissive Poor Lives Matter, as they would have legit beef, so to speak.

Actually if a real movement sprung up with the intention of uniting poor blacks and poor whites in a shared resistance to police brutality and systemic injustice generally, that co... (read more)

Absolutely. There are link posts to decent content sitting with no discussion. There was an article about octopuses a couple of days ago that I really enjoyed and would have liked to discuss - plenty of LW-relevant material in it about how brains work - but I couldn't think of anything to start the ball rolling other than "aren't octopuses cool?" which I think would have been Frowned Upon.

(To be fair to morganism, who posted that link, they do at least create a comment on each one with a relevant quote from the article, which is more than some people do.)

Could you maybe consider creating "split-level" math/physics/computer science posts? A few interesting bits of beginner-level information or introductions to basic concepts for the noobs like me, and then proper meaty technical stuff for the well-informed. There'd be something for everyone that way - no need to choose between turning off the beginners or boring the advanced.

Well, I've been here two weeks now and it's been good. Interesting. Learned some things, had some decent discussions.

I don't mind the links, I just don't think they should be posted one by one, and I don't think the post title should be the link. Put the link in the body of the post. And users who like to contribute lots of links to random articles rather than their own blogs - that's fine, good even, but maybe consider collating a week's worth into one post. So you might have a few different conversations going on in the comments, so what? Better than hal... (read more)

Well, Science having pointed out above that membership in a political party is a choice made by an adult, rather than a group people are born into like nationalities or - I'd argue - many religions, I conceded the point you're making. It was in among a bunch of other stuff so here's the quote:

With big demographic groups, your hate cannot be directed at a specific action that they all, by definition, must have taken - except, as you pointed out, in the case of freely-chosen political party membership, but then only in the case that you consider membership of that party in and of itself, regardless of other actions or beliefs, such an awful thing as to deserve hatred.

FWIW, I was linked to a SSC post today about "race and criminal justice in America" - so, five-alarm hot button topic - and I quickly read through about half of a super-long comments section, and it was great. Plenty of debate, minimal spittle, collaborative and civil, fact-based and in good faith.

The urge to protect and prioritize children is partly biological/evolutionary - they have to be "cute" otherwise who'd put up with all the screaming and poop long enough to raise them to adulthood? The urge to protect and nurture them is a survival-of-the-species thing. Baby animals are cute because they resemble human babies - disproportionately big heads, big eyes, mewling noises, helplessness.

But from a moral perspective I'd argue that there is a greater moral duty to protect and care for children because they can neither fend nor advocate for... (read more)

...that's a very plain-vanilla story with little drama -- compared to the baseline of 'net forums and online communities in general.

Well yeah, I suppose that's true. But the screenwriter can zhuzh it up a bit, throw in a murder somewhere.

It would be... regrettable if LW turned into an ideologically homogeneous place where everyone sees the world in a basically similar way.

Absolutely. I didn't come here for everyone to agree with me. But disagreement, even passionate ideological disagreement, isn't the same as obsessively following people around to d... (read more)

Good point well made. I have nothing to add but agreement. Also I may steal this analogy and use it in future, just so you know.

Especially because you've noted that getting rid of the third guard does help. The argument that I see often but don't understand is that trying to ditch the third guard is not worth doing because it doesn't solve the wider peasant-injustice issue.

I don't mean just with the police brutality/American race-relations thing either - it seems almost any time people want to put work into fixing Specific Issue X, there are other people standing back and saying it's a waste of effort because it won't solve Larger Issue Y. Winds me right up.

As far as "rational" in some situations in may not be worth spending the effort to determine if this person is one of those extremely rare "good X's".

Granted - but it's not necessary to determine that. It's only necessary to recognize that there are "good Xs" and direct your hate to what you hate about the "bad Xs". If some but not all Blues are thieves and you hate theft, it's only necessary to recognize that and say "I hate thieves" instead of "I hate Blues" in order to make your real meaning... (read more)

Thanks gjm! Once again you have used your presumably-valuable time to give me a really thorough explanation. Jeez, what a story.

Eugine's new account was banned. Another one appeared. That was banned. Another appeared. After a while, new Eugine accounts were appearing faster than the old ones were closed down.

There's movie material here. A dark psychological indie-thing about obsession and rage. "Troll", starring... Steve Carrell? He was dead creepy in Foxcatcher.

I mean, to mess with a community once or twice is one thing. To keep coming back ... (read more)

Let me offer you alternative hypotheses. One is that victimization is determined by the socioeconomic status -- basically your wealth and/or ability to demonstrate high-class markers. For example, I doubt that white trailer trash is treated particularly gently by the cops.

Actually I think that's true too. There's nothing mutually exclusive about them, as you point out yourself. When I said "disproportionately determined by race" I didn't mean determined only by race. I'd guess - just a guess, no data - that there's a gender disproportion too -... (read more)

Thanks for the link, that's an interesting and useful article. Updated my probabilities in a few areas. Also an amazingly civil, rational comments section given the nature of the material.

It didn't help me very much on police shootings though - lot of way-out-of-date data that points both ways depending on area. No racial bias in shooting recorded in New York, seriously significant effect in Tennessee. Given what I know about American racism-by-state that's almost disappointingly obvious. (Again though, out of date - relevant laws in Memphis have changed ... (read more)

Why? Because I'm showing that your position is BS?

Believe it or not, there are other reasons for considering the usefulness of continuing a discussion. But if you've decided I'm "afraid of losing" there's not much I could say to convince you otherwise, is there?

In that case the OP doesn't belong on LW.

You're right - it doesn't at all, and that's the first and last thing I should have said on the topic here. I don't think political posts never have a place on LW, but they have to clear a certain bar of relevance to be worth the potential do... (read more)

I'd say the most important property is whether being Catholic is part of one's identity. Specifically "I admire those who are better Catholics than myself and consider them to be holier and more virtuous people than myself. I feel somewhat guilty about not being more like them."

I take your point, but that gives the notional I-hate-Catholics guy a pretty difficult task of differentiation, since plenty of people who identify as Catholics - if you asked them if they were Catholics, they'd say yes - don't mean that. They mean "I was baptized&... (read more)

But why is it fair to focus on "Whichever Lives Are Most Affected By Police Brutality At The Moment" when that's a tiny subset of the lives being affected by brutality. The number of lives affected by the "brutality" of blacks is much much larger, yet focusing on that would be racist.

In the specific context of police brutality in America, victimization - of the innocent, by the way, as well as the guilty - is disproportionately determined by race. This disparity is the specific problem BLM was set up to address. By the logic that say... (read more)

What about practicing membership? What about identifying as?

Well, what about it? There are people who practice Catholicism and people who don't. There are people who say "I am Catholic" meaning "I actively follow the rules of Catholicism", and and people who say "I am Catholic" meaning "I was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church when I was a kid". They all go down as Catholics on the census. Practicing Catholics are a subset of the number of people recorded as Catholics in the world.

How so? What's the r

Okay. I assume you mean religions and political parties. Nominal membership in a religion requires no specific action. 90% of Irish people would be considered "Catholic" by virtue of having been baptized and confirmed as children. They need not have taken any specific action as adults to be afforded that designation, nor do they need to be "practising" in any active sense - going to Mass, for example. Many don't. They still go down as Catholics.

In the case of political parties, you're right that an individual needs to register, or vote... (read more)

Perhaps I should have been more specific - I did not mean groups in the sense of "people who have all performed a certain action", like murder. I meant "groups" in the sense of things likes nationalities, ethnicities, major religions, large political parties. The kind of groups that are not morally uniform, if only by virtue of their size - even if membership in that group correlates to some degree with a negative action or attribute. Russia has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world, but saying "I hate Russians because they'r... (read more)

I think there's some miscommunication here regarding the quoted sentence. You used the phrase "Whichever Lives Are Most Affected By Police Brutality At The Moment". I stated that this group, right now at the moment, is "black Americans". I wouldn't have thought you would disagree with that statement given that you said it was acceptable for "Black Lives" to be used as a "convenient shorthand" for WLAMABPBATM, and you've just reiterated that being black is highly correlated with being unfairly victimized. Where's the... (read more)

I don't know if this is the right place to have this conversation but I can't help myself. Mods - feel free to kill this.

Disclaimer, I'm not American. I don't have a dog in this fight one way or another, but I can pattern-match.

People object to "All Lives Matter" because it derails the discussion and implies that it's somehow unfair to focus, as you said, on "Whichever Lives Are Most Affected By Police Brutality At The Moment" - which in America means black people specifically. It's the same reason people object when a discussion of se... (read more)

I'm dying to know, who the heck is this Eugine character? I keep seeing the name but I don't know the backstory.

I must state that I don't think this meets the general "relevance" standard for political posts on LW, and I don't personally want to see that standard lowered.

That said, I do agree with the central point - in fact it's because it seems so ethically obvious that I don't think it clears the relevance bar. Is there anyone here on LW who is likely to disagree with the statement "hating every member of a group X on principle is irrational and counter-productive"? I'm not trying to be sarky, it's a good post, I just don't see how it's likely to provoke a discussion or a debate here.

They're allowing users to build their own scenarios and add them as well, so it looks like the intention is to let the complexity grow over time from a basic starting point.

Actually, I wonder whether they might find that people really don't want a great deal of complexity in the decision-making process. People might prefer to go with a simple "minimize loss off life, prioritize kids" rule and leave it at that, because we're used to cars as a physical hazard that kill blindly when they kill at all. People might be more morally comfortable with smart cars that aren't too smart.

Yes, that's the sort of idea I was getting at - though not anything so extreme.

Of course I don't really think Elo was saying that at all anyway, I'm not trying to strawman. I'd just like to see the idea clarified a bit.

(We use substitution ciphers as spoiler tags? Fancy!)

Could you explain this a little more? I don't quite see your reasoning. Leaving aside the fact that "morally valuable" seems too vague to me to be meaningfully measured anyway, adults aren't immutably fixed at a "moral level" at any given age. Andrei "Rostov Ripper" Chikatilo didn't take up murdering people until he was in his forties. At twenty, he hadn't proven anything.

Bob at twenty years old hasn't murdered anybody, though Bob at forty might. Now you can say that we have more data about Bob at twenty than we do about Bob ... (read more)

Fair enough. Kindest thing to do really. I think people have a hard time walking away even when the argument is almost certainly going to be fruitless.

I don't know if this has been discussed before, but what's the argument against the standard response-bumps-thread model? You've got active threads falling off the first page while threads that haven't successfully started a discussion are just sitting there.

Thread-bumping also allows for the creation of long-term threads - threads that might not be worth turning into stickies but are worthy of being resurrected many times when somebody has something new to contribute to them. "Your Favorite Rationality-Related Books", just as an example. Somebod... (read more)

I agree totally about sticky threads. I'd never even seen a forum without them until I came here. Having to repost the Welcome thread and the open threads over and over seems like such a PITA.

This is pretty fun in a sick way. Suck it, pedestrians! I wonder how much their results will be skewed by people answering flippantly?

For the record I didn't mess with the test, I honestly tried to judge the scenarios, even though trolleycar problems drive me nuts. I swear if I'm ever in that freakin' trolley I'll run over the five kids on one track then go back and beat the other one to death with a shovel.

If a consensus emerges I predict that it would go "kids over adults, humans over animals, law-abiders over law breakers" and maybe "old ... (read more)

Then write a clear and cogent post about Ideal Money - in one single thread, not three - that meets the posting standards.

That's your only option right now. You can stamp your foot about it all you like but that is the case. Show people that you can behave sensibly and they will listen to you. If you keep allowing your frustration to override your common sense you'll just keep having discussions like this.

I've tried to be helpful because you're new, but I don't think there's any more I can say. I'm tapping out.

I think the problem here is that this a place for people who accept the possibility that they could be wrong and look to others to check and maybe improve their ideas - so that we can all help each other be "Less Wrong".

You have an idea that you're certain is right, and you don't think anybody here can possibly improve it or contribute anything to it. That's why people are questioning whether this is the right place for your material.

You also haven't had time to build up credibility - not John Nash's credibility, your credibility. That's why I suggested participating in the community a bit before insisting that people listen to you.

Okay, I hear you, but the site has its own rules about presentation and dialogue. Given that you've said it's something that only you can explain correctly to people, maybe you'd actually be better off starting a blog and putting it in there? Then you could do it your own way and present your information as you see fit. Because if you explain it here people might not listen the way you want them to, and that might be very frustrating for you.

Hi Flinter, welcome to Less Wrong.

Don't be too upset about a mod moving your post. You just need to get a bit more familiar with the site rules before you dive in. I'm sure it's nothing to do with their views on John Nash. If I made a post about how much I love Terry Pratchett, a mod would take it down for being irrelevant, but that wouldn't mean they necessarily disapproved of Terry Pratchett, would it?

Maybe take a day or two to read some threads, make a few comments and settle in here. You've got plenty of time to make your arguments once you've found your feet a bit.

And then every job applicant needs a WOC (Widget Operations Certificate) before they'll even be considered for the role, and then there's a whole quasi-academic professional body set up to provide training courses and administer the WOC test, and so that provides employment to a bunch of Widget Operations Instructors... Economics is weird.