Tyrrell_McAllister2
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Tyrrell_McAllister2 has not written any posts yet.
Tyrrell_McAllister2 has not written any posts yet.
George Weinberg:
Does it occur to anyone else that the fable is not a warning against doing favors in general but of siding with "outsiders" against "insiders"?Wow; now that you mention it, that is a blatant recurring theme in the story. I now can't help but think that that is a major part, if not the whole, of the message. Each victim betrays an in-group to perform a kindness for a stranger. It's pretty easy to see why storytellers would want to remind listeners that their first duty is to the tribe. Whatever pity they might feel for a stranger, they must never let that pity lead them to betray the interests of their tribe.
Can't believe I missed that :).
Some here seem to think it significant that the good-doers in the story are not naive fools over whom the audience can feel superior. It is argued that that sense of superiority explains stories like the Frog and the Scorpion in the West. The inference seems to be that since this sense of superiority is lacking in this African tale, the intent could only have been to inform the audience that this is how the world works.
However, I don't think that the "superiority" explanation can be so quickly dismissed. To me, this story works because the audience keeps having their expectations of gratitude violated. Hence, the storyteller gets... (read more)
Paul Crowley:
One trivial example of signalling here is the way everyone still uses the Computer Modern font. This is a terrible font, and it's trivial to improve the readability of your paper by using, say, Times New Roman instead, but Computer Modern says that you're a serious academic in a formal field.I don't think that these people are signaling. Computer Modern is the default font for LaTeX. Learning how to change a default setting in LaTeX is always non-trivial.
You might argue that people are signaling by using LaTeX instead of Word or whatever, but switching from LaTeX to some other writing system is also not a trivial matter.
Eliezer, the link in your reply to nazgulnarsil links to this very post. I'm assuming that you intended to link to that recent post of yours on SJG, but I'll leave it to you to find it :).
I think that you make good points about how fiction can be part of a valid moral argument, perhaps even an indispensable part for those who haven't had some morally-relevant experience first-hand.
But I'm having a hard time seeing how your last story helped you in this way. Although I enjoyed the story very much, I don't think that your didactic purposes are well-served by it.
My first concern is that your story will actually serve as a counter-argument for rationality to many readers. Since I'm one of those who disagreed with the characters' choice to destroy Huygens, I'm pre-disposed to worry that your methods could be discredited by that conclusion.... (read more)
Psy-Kosh: Yeah, I meant to have a "as Psy-Kosh has pointed out" line in there somewhere, but it got deleted accidentally while editing.
ad:
How many humans are there not on Huygens?
I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't matter to me. I generally find on reflection that, with respect to my values, doing bad act A to two people is less than twice as bad as doing A to one person. Moreover, I suspect that, in many cases, the badness of doing A to n people converges to a finite value as n goes to infinity. Thus, it is possible that doing some other act B is worse than doing A to arbitrarily many people. At this time, I believe that this is the case when A = "allow the Super-Happies to re-shape a human" and B = "kill fifteen billion people".
If the Super-Happies were going to turn us into orgasmium, I could see blowing up Huygens. Nor would it necessarily take such an extreme case to convince me to take that extreme measure. But this . . . ?
"Our own two species," the Lady 3rd said, "which desire this change of the Babyeaters, will compensate them by adopting Babyeater values, making our own civilization of greater utility in their sight: we will both change to spawn additional infants, and eat most of them at almost the last stage before they become sentient." ... "It is nonetheless probable," continued the Lady 3rd, "that the Babyeaters will not accept this change as it stands;... (read 354 more words →)
Wei Dai: Consider a program which when given the choices (A,B) outputs A. If you reset it and give it choices (B,C) it outputs B. If you reset it again and give it choices (C,A) it outputs C. The behavior of this program cannot be reproduced by a utility function.
I don't know the proper rational-choice-theory terminology, but wouldn't modeling this program just be a matter of describing the "space" of choices correctly? That is, rather than making the space of choices {A, B, C}, make it the set containing
(1) = taking A when offered A and B, (2) = taking B when offered A and B,
(3) = taking B when offered B... (read more)
It's good. Not baby-eatin' good, but good enough ;).
michael vassar:
Would you elaborate on this? What is the generally-feminine behavior of which the first sentence describes an instance?My first inclination would be to think that your first sentence describes something stereotypically masculine. It's an example of wanting things to come in pre-structured formats, which is part of wanting to operate in a domain that is governed by explicit pre-established rules. That is often seen as a stereotypically-masculine desire that manifests in such non-nerdy pursuits as professional sports and military hierarchies.