All of sunflowers's Comments + Replies

And I can say, also honestly, that everybody I worked with is really, really impressive. It is hard to work in a highly regulated private industry.

So, when I say "ask me anything," I can promise: you are safe in the hands of my friends.

Now that I have said this, I am not allowed to say other things.

"My rights begin where others end."

That is a theory. It has implications. I will go to private messaging. I believe that you are decent.

It is my most important theorem.

Grounding is a good word.

Like "Grundlagen..."

Jesse Parrish. 109 Stanley Ave. Maryville, TN. Mathematics dropout. Blue collar worker. I worked for airlines. I did everything right. I put in my notice months ago.

(Continuation - a concept I did not "appreciate", in a format I never "needed" until "just now.")

That's why I overheard it. The wise man, who never taught me, accidentally said this, before I ever heard of Bayesianism. One of the wise man's friends knew Bayesianism - not as it is practiced here - though he knew the differences... Why am I confident, when he had never heard of less wrong... What did the other wise man do to describe the field to an interested novice, who ended up being a typical dumb young kid, and disappoint... (read more)

"Unfortunately I don't know enough about you to put my finger on something and it's harder over text without real time feedback."

It is impossible, and absurd, to show up listing all of one's implicit motivations. This is why I could never write anything before. It somehow never "felt complete." It never, "felt entire." My problem, was that I could not "trust people" enough to "give adequate credit" to their expertise. I agreed with this, but I did not understand it, sufficiently. I wrote it down, I ma... (read more)

Just muse.

Except that doesn't necessarily reflect anything real besides the details of the culture in question.

Except [supporting lowering the age of consent under some circumstances] doesn't necessarily reflect anything [real] besides [culture], [like witchcraft!] Word salad. What you could have said is, "I was mistaken, as I could not have predicted that," or, "I was correct, because lowering the age of consent is a really popular right now."

And yes, having something happen to you that does not cause physical damage or mental

This particular slogan was selected for usefulness. It retains it's meaning when considered as a question solely in the current context.

When I try to believe that, I become confused. I've found in this and other threads that my being reminded of rationalist truisms correlates with something other than a failure of rationality.

Sure. All I have to do is check what the culture you live in condemns.

Right, which is why you'd be able to guess that I support lowering the age of consent under certain circumstances and relaxing penalties in others. You hav... (read more)

What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?

I wish we could get past slogans.

Ok, we're trying to determine whether or not "meaningful consent is meaningful". A question: could you guess with high reliability what situations I think constitute meaningful consent or not?

A scenario: suppose I slip a girl a roofie, slip her into my car, take her home, and fuck her. Then I sneak her back into the party.

Was my crime "slipping a girl a drug", or was my crime "that and rape"?

the sort of thing people picture when you say "rape"

Which in my experience people picture extremely inaccurately. They picture girls getting grabbed off a park sidewalk by a ravenous stranger. That's a very atypical case. Outside of prison, rape is typically perpetuated by friends and lovers and dates. This is unsurprising given pure opportunity, just as it's unsurprising that children are typically victimized by families and trusted friends of their families, not by strangers with candy.

Requiring rape to be "violent" is to requi... (read more)

Goes the logic that works so long as you do not care about meaningful consent. This is a lot like the "if she's sleeping, it's not rape" argument we heard in the aftermath of the Steubenville case.

I think his fantasies are perverse and contrary to values I have about human autonomy, but I don't think the situation is significantly worse. His actions are not going to put a kid in therapy.

I also completely fail to see the relevance.

Of course the distinction is artificial, but it is worth making, as I explain in the rest of the comment. Is there something wrong with my motivations?

It's not just a "mid-level vs. top-level" split, but a question of when something like the Holocaust was formulated or became likely to happen. "Hitler planned it all along" sets a much earlier date than "mid-level bureaucrats were competing for Nazi brownies during the War."

"Jim Crow" is a pretty small part of the story here. "Criminalization of black life" is a better description.

It wasn't designed to be a erudite summation of what slavery was like, but rather a succinct illustration of how slavery was not at that time an obviously worse outcome than the consequences of abolition. It's obvious to me at least that the abolition of slavery has proved a Good Thing, but it would not have been obvious in 1890.

I agree with the second part of your comment, as I've said.

Good thing + good thing? I don't think that using children for sexual pleasure is a "good thing" at all. It would be if we lived in a universe where the formula is pleasure + pleasure, but it obviously isn't. Do terms such as "meaningful consent" or "exploitation" have any relevance here?

The South Park debacle is a great example of media cowardice, but it's not hard to criticize Islam on public television. Hitchens had no trouble, and I don't think anybody in the right wing press has trouble. The left-wing press is semi-censorious about it.

I'd have to do some reading before responding to the second half of your comment, but to the first, that's relatively easy.

During slavery: black people are somebody's valuable property.

After Reconstruction: black people are a hated but cheap source of labor you can do pretty much anything to.

Did you seriously expect the SPLC to say "this guy is an evil racist who hates immigrants, but he brings up sound, quantitative points that we ought to consider"?

No. What I don't expect is for somebody who does decent work to end up on Hatewatch. Which is what you said I should expect. Which I don't. Because I shouldn't. Because the stuff about immigration which ends up on Hatewatch actually tends to be in the indefensible territory.

Thank you for repeating the question; that made it clearer what you were interested in.

Good, so we'll b... (read more)

And German and Austrian Jews had a distinctive culture and identity, to the point that you could find bigotries amongst them against other Jews.

Same applies to Jews in, ehm, Soviet Russia and other places which did not have institutionalized anti-semitism or had a break from it for a few decades at least? Same applies to many other ethnicities, by the way.

What history of Russia have you been reading?

Ah, we were talking about different things, then. But yes, I think it can do that too. I think that Supreme Court rulings helped to make racism taboo. Returning to the labor movement, passing laws that prohibit forming closed-shop contracts are a great indirect means of marginalizing labor, or simply the non-enforcement of laws against firing labor organizers.

Is there any sentence which communicates only something which is objectively true which is also taboo? I think it's the connotations associated with stating the fact that are taboo.

That's the theme of the post, yes. With this and the rest of your comment, I think we're on the same page.

It's a beautiful, beautiful place. I used to drive through it fairly often in a big, ungainly truck, and it always seemed to be storming. Probably my stare-offs with imminent destruction made it even prettier.

I am, near Knoxville.

It wasn't merely marginalized, it was almost entirely outlawed after the Revolution.

Yes, and that outlawing worked. Orthodoxy fell from holding near-universal adherence and being a pillar of state power to a fragmented, hated patchwork, which was re-allowed to exist during World War II as a submissive state organ.

While the state lasted, Russians really did become atheists and Marxists, though as Bertrand Russell footnotes his History of Western Philosophy, this practically meant replacing Tsar-worship with Stalin-worship. Criminalization led to margin... (read more)

I'm hardly a social genius. I haven't kept any childhood friends, and I alternate between making large numbers of friends and months of self-imposed isolation. I read math textbooks at bars for entertainment.

I think most people could do better than me.

At the same time, I'm a socialist atheist living in Tennessee, and I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to sensitive topics. I'll admit the possibility that my disposition could help to make my experiences atypical. But I've seen people have the "typical" experience, and I can usually instantly tell when they've failed and how they could have done better.

Do a before and after of the American labor movement with the central event being the Red Scare. Do a before and after of Christianity in Russia with the central event being the Bolshevik Revolution. Legal crackdowns can ultimately affect thought.

I still disagree, but kudos for a very reasonable response. May I plead time constraints in the hope that we may revisit this topic later?

Of Hatewatch targeting people who oppose immigration? You realize that's one of their tags, right?

Yes, and I searched that tag before responding, and I didn't find people listed for doing careful cost-benefit analyses. Instead, I saw neo-Nazis and "minutemen."

Don't it seem odd that the only dimension on which immigration is politically relevant is personal warmth towards Hispanics?

Don't it seem odd that ain't what I said?

As a policy decision, it has way more impacts than that.

Duh, but your question was whether or not politicians are c... (read more)

Law can criminalize things, but it can't marginalize them.

This is an aside, but yes it can.

It may be that the politicians who make the laws agree with you that a society whose people voluntarily marginalize Holocaust denial would be better than one where the government suppresses Holocaust denial by law. But to them, it's not a directly available option, so they prefer to play it safe.

I'll explain my view. Here are two entirely consistent statements:

1. The falsity and awfulness of a view correlates with a need for marginalization.
2. The falsity and aw

I've read it. Still waiting for your examples.

Right, I disagree with the law, in case you were wondering. I don't think it contributes any significant value. I support marginalizing bigotry, not criminalizing it.

The fact you are forced to make this claim, which is probably irrelevant to the discussion at hand (e.g. what exactly happened in the Holocaust), is evidence that you are discussing a taboo subject.

A sensitive subject not in itself taboo so long as one includes provisos to prevent reasonable inferences leading to their concluding that I have views that actually are taboo.

I doubt you have real evidence that anti-Semitism is a mental illness, rather than a normal mental state which is common in certain societies and is not harmful to those who possess i

I agree that it's sound inference, given the hypotheses "racist" and "not racist."

Yes, given mutually exclusive and exhaustive - if fuzzy - categories that necessarily exist. Ok. Are you saying that it's an unsound inference?

What is more important is the importance given to those hypotheses. I think you're mistaken about what taboos are: they're signals of "not my tribe."

My tribe here being correct and not completely morally reprehensible, which includes lots of people who aren't in what I consider my in-group.

Someo

Your suggested experiment wouldn't be very good. I do think that appearing to have become suddenly obsessed with holocaust revision would cost me. Talking about these things as one would actually talk about these things makes for a better experiment. Here's an interesting outcome: I've never been called an anti-Semite for discussing Holocaust revision - partly because it's made clear that I think anti-Semitism a form of mental illness and it's obvious I blame the Nazis for a genocide-that-yes-duh-happened. Now, I have been called an anti-Semite for su... (read more)

There were abuses by bankers and capitalists, many of whom were Jewish. There were "Jewish Bolsheviks." And there was resistance and terrorism. As for the war being a prerequisite for the Holocaust, see the intentionalist vs. functionalist debate.

The avoidability of the war is a more subtle question. Along with Orwell, I think war was inevitable and obvious by 1936, at least if we consider the conquest by Germany of continental Europe possibly excepting France, Switzerland, Belgium, and other fascist powers unacceptable. Even then, the war m... (read more)

If memory serves, it was something about not hitting 6-month-olds for touching themselves in Marriage and Morals that prevented Russell from teaching at City College years later...

Perhaps it should be? I'm not sure how we can rely on ourselves to give sexual pleasure without any sort of self-gratification, and using children for sexual gratification is a big no no in my book. Lots of moral hazard in this form of pleasure that is quite avoidable by finding one of the billion other things kids like doing.

That's.... a really good one, actually. Perhaps disguise the idea in a critical discussion of Brave New World?

I thought it was amusing that someone could wreck their credibility so quickly by saying something so obviously true.

Tone matters here. Whoever says it as if any scientist were under the opposite impression has some serious problems.

Sometimes, saying something true is excellent evidence for believing falsehoods. Sometimes, giving knowledge is excellent evidence of ignorance. See Rand Paul's recent performance at Howard.

It doesn't have to be that statement, either. Tell me something that comes close to that, something so grave that it even approaches such a statement, something even near a thing so awful that I have trouble repeating it and feel awful for even making such a proposition exist.

This is actually one of my favorite conversational topics. People find it uncomfortable, but not in a "you're sinister" sort of way.

But yeah, not a great way to make friends.

I'm not proposing a new and better definition of "taboo." I'm proposing a new and useful notion of taboo under particular circumstances: what true things can we really not say? If we can talk about them but must do so carefully, let's do it carefully.

Here's the other side of this usefulness: there's a moral to the story here. Statements that are marginalized are often marginalized for good reason. People who claim to be speaking taboo truths are giving us and themselves a very self-serving story in which they feature as heroes. I think it'... (read more)

I still don't understand what you mean. I would ask you to give an example of something you think is genuinely taboo, but I suppose the reason you posted this is because you can't think of any.

Correct, in the specific sense I meant, i.e. factual, well-established truths, in pretty much any venue, etc. I'll continue in a moment.

Might I suggest the possibility that whatever definition you have in mind, it's too strict and isn't what other people mean by taboo?

Tell me a true statement that is taboo like this: "niggers, unlike most races, are subhuman and untrainable, and are intellectually similar to the chimpanzee."

Here I have no idea whether or not my experience should generalize, but I have good luck finding a nice regular place simply by being a regular there. This holds for coffee shops, bars, and just about any other sort of establishment. It's worth risking a second bad meal to guarantee a practically unlimited number of good ones.

You're treating "context-dependent" in a trivial way. I am not. Otherwise, I wouldn't be floating the question, since presumably we can whisper about any statement to a close confidant.

Was that me? We may be reading "I obviously wouldn't have trouble thinking of tabooed truths..." in different ways.