To just wipe away the last tear, and be done?
For the last time, yes! Wake up from the Dragon-Tyrant’s spell!
You could cut out just the intolerable parts of pain?
It is all tolerable. Or intolerable. You’d better define your terms.
Keep the sort of pain that tells you not to stick your finger in the fire
Just regenerate the finger.
grinds down and destroys a mind
Does pain actually do that? Have we done experiments showing that’s the case?
Or configure minds to be harder to damage
One of Judith Harris’ points is that minds are designed to be resilient, which is why child abuse doesn’t have the effect many assume it does.
No child sexual abuse that turns out more abusers.
Are you sure you’ve got the causation right there? Couldn’t it be that abusive people are likely to be related to other abusive people?
or AIDS
This is a less serious criticism of Eliezer than the others, but it’s funny how often people go on about this rather easily preventable disease that kills a lot fewer people than diseases that get much less attention (various tropical diseases in Africa, a huge list of cancers in the U.S). Other diseases need better marketing and market segmentation research.
Is there a point where Romeo and Juliet just seems less and less relevant, more and more a relic of some distant forgotten world
Eliminating out-group hatred alone would do that.
Is that… what we want?
To just wipe away the last tear, and be done? For the last time, yes! Wake up from the Dragon-Tyrant’s spell!
You could cut out just the intolerable parts of pain? It is all tolerable. Or intolerable. You’d better define your terms.
Keep the sort of pain that tells you not to stick your finger in the fire Just regenerate the finger.
grinds down and destroys a mind Does pain actually do that? Have we done experiments showing that’s the case?
Or configure minds to be harder to damage One of Judith Harris’ points is that minds are designed to be resilient, which is why child abuse doesn’t have the effect many assume it does.
No child sexual abuse that turns out more abusers. Are you sure you’ve got the causation right there? Couldn’t it be that abusive people are likely to be related to other abusive people?
or AIDS This is a less serious criticism of Eliezer than the others, but it’s funny how often people go on about this rather easily preventable disease that kills a lot fewer people than diseases that get much less attention (various tropical diseases in Africa, a huge list of cancers in the U.S). Other diseases need better marketing and market segmentation research.
Is there a point where Romeo and Juliet just seems less and less relevant, more and more a relic of some distant forgotten world Eliminating out-group hatred alone would do that.