From Wikipedia:
In 331 BC, a deadly epidemic hit Rome and at least 170 women were executed for causing it by veneficium.[18] In 184–180 BC, another epidemic hit Italy, and about 5,000 people were brought to trial and executed for veneficium.[17] If the reports are accurate, writes Hutton, "then the Republican Romans hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world".[17]
... and anyway it's not very convincing to single out witch hunting among all the other things people have always done, because people have always been shitty. Including, but by no means limited to, massive amounts of "scapegoating and blame".
The ancient past was terrifically violent.
Some hypothetical past person's not being able to recognize their despicable cruelty doesn't preclude their being able to recognize your despicable cruelty. Even given relatively compatible values, everybody gets their own special set of blind spots.
I do agree that romanticizing the past to vilify the present is wrong, though. And not good scholarship if you don't bring a lot of evidence along with you. The idea that modernity is "the problem" is badly suspect. So is the idea that "the central values of this era are largely those of biological competition and survival" and that's somehow different from the past. The past has a whole lot of this group slaughtering that group and justifying it with "survival" arguments... assuming that they bothered to justify it at all. Sometimes it seems to have been just viewed as the natural order of things. Nothing new there.
It reminds me of random affluent white college students trying to address some ancestral guilt about colonial abuses by making the people who got colonized into Morally Superior Beings... which is not only wrong, but itself dehumanizes them and reduces them to props in a rhetorical play.
in the case of software engineers crossing into the humanities, it's far too applicable.
They do it in science and technology too. You're constantly seeing "My first-order, 101-level understanding of some-gigantic-field allows me to confidently say that something-actual-experts-know-is-really-hard is trivial".
Less Wrong is pretty prone to it, because you get people thinking that Pure Logic can take them further than it actually can, and reasoning from incomplete models.
Of course people will use the knowledge they gain in collaboration with you for the purposes that they think are best.
It is entirely normal for there to be widely accepted, clearly formalized, and meaningfully enforced restrictions on how people use knowledge they've gotten in this or that setting... regardless of what they think is best. It's a commonplace of professional ethics.
I guess it depends on how it's described in context. And I have to admit it's been a long time. I'd go reread it to see, but I don't think I can handle any more bleakness right now...
Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts. —James Nicoll
I don't see where you get that. I saw no suggestion that the aliens (or vampires) in Blindsight were unaware of their own existence, or that they couldn't think about their own interactions with the world. They didn't lack any cognitive capacities at all. They just had no qualia, and therefore didn't see the point of doing anything just for the experience.
There's a gigantic difference between cognitive self-awareness and conscious experience.
Do you think these sorts of scenarios are worth describing as "everyone is effectively dead"?
Not when you're obviously addressing people who don't necessarily know the details of the scenarios you're talking about, no... because the predictions could be anything, and "effectively dead" could mean anything. There are lots of people on Less Wrong who'd say that IQ 150 humans living in ease and comfort were "effectively dead" if they didn't also have the option to destroy that ease and comfort.
What does "effectively dead" mean? Either you're dead, or you're not.
Not everybody is going to share your values about whether any given situation is better than, equivalent to, or worse than being dead.
I used to exchange MS office documents with people all the time without running Windows. Admittedly it wasn't "my job to use Excel", but I did it regularly, and I could have used Excel all day if I'd needed to. And that was years ago; it's actually gotten easier to sandbox the software now.
Anyway, all that office stuff is now in the "in the cloud" category, and to the degree it's not, Microsoft wants it to be.
The only things I can think of that might actually be hard to do without putting Windows on the bare metal would be CAD, 3D rendering, simulation, that kind of thing. I'm not sure how well GPU computing works.
Also, a "work" computer is a less likely battleground, since it's likely to be locked down in an "enterprise" configuration that won't let that happen.
It's a pretty big assumption to claim that "moral progress" is a thing at all.
A couple of those might have been less taboo 300 years ago than they are now. How does that square with the idea of progress?
Did you leave any answers out because they were too taboo to mention? Either because you wouldn't feel comfortable putting them in the post, or because you simply thought they were insanely odious and therefore obvious mistakes?