Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
The same would apply to cuckoldry.
New topics:
We know so little about our minds that conscious efforts to improve them are likely to do damage. Actually, I consider that an exaggeration, but I do think that ill effects of following socially supported advice are likely to be kept private and/or ignored for a very long time.
We know almost nothing about the effects of sex for children and teenagers.
Black people are actually genetically superior in important ways—they’ve had such bad luck from geography and racism that their advantages don’t show up as superior results.
Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.
Following up on the “CEV is impossible” part of the discussion: The only thing an FAI can do is protect us from UFAI and possibly other gross existential threats.
Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
The same would apply to cuckoldry.
Upvoted for saying the only thing in this whole thread that makes my inner animal go “aaaaugh I must fight against people who say that”. I didn’t know I had it in me.
The funny thing is, I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising. See also the fairly successful efforts to reduce the stigma of bastardy.
To extend the idea, we could say that just about all the pain people feel about status-lowering events is self-fulfilling prophecy, but this version less likely to sting because it isn’t about something specific.
Just for fun, flip it over. People aren’t nearly sensitive enough about their status. If people cared more about their rankings, they’d do a lot more, and enough of it would be worthwhile (by those entirely rational geek standards which are opposed to the bad mainstream standards) that there’d be a net gain.
One more: You can’t tell anything important about a person by their taste in art, fiction, music, etc.
The funny thing is, I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising. See also the fairly successful efforts to reduce the stigma of bastardy.
Why stop at cuckoldry, where the child is still genetically half one’s spouse’s? Outright cuckcooing! Swap everybody’s kids around in the hospital!
(If I lived in a world where that was regularly done and I knew it, I would not have a bio-kid; I’d adopt a five-year-old and exercise some control over what sort of person I’m inviting into my home that way.)
Why stop at cuckoldry, where the child is still genetically half one’s spouse’s? Outright cuckcooing! Swap everybody’s kids around in the hospital!
Why not take it another step further? Why have random non-licensed people raise children? We usually don’t let just anyone adopt kids, in my country one needs to go through a lot of hoops and be financially capable of supporting a child before getting on the list. In practice one demonstrates conscientiousness, a strong desire to have children and financial independence. If all children are adopted children, why not do this? Surely this should only be done by teams of qualified experts in tandem with carefully chosen adoptive parents?
(If I lived in a world where that was regularly done and I knew it, I would not have a bio-kid; I’d adopt a five-year-old and exercise some control over what sort of person I’m inviting into my home that way.)
Choosing how a child turns out at five as a basis of which kid you want is clearly something that produces a non-trivial eugenic effect. Not in the societal sense (since what kind of kids a society gets are mostly already set), but in the sense of shaping the child you get to have according to one’s own preferences. It is perfectly comparable to choosing the foetus with the right genes for implantation.
Why stop at cuckoldry, where the child is still genetically half one’s spouse’s? Outright cuckcooing! Swap everybody’s kids around in the hospital!
Terrible idea to try actually implement in a multicultural society, since for visible minorities it amounts to cultural genocide. What are the odds the child they get actually assimilate to their culture if he can easily pass in greater society as a member of the privileged one?
Unless one factors in ethnicity in who gets who… which is just a horrible can of worms.
It sounds very much like you’re saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren’t forced into it by non-acceptance. If that is what you meant, wouldn’t that imply that destroying that minority culture is better than forcing people to continue being part of it?
Stolen generation isn’t relevant here since it wasn’t reciprocal—the children were taken, not replaced by white children who were then raised in Aboriginal commmunities.
It sounds very much like you’re saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren’t forced into it by non-acceptance.
Not really, just that for some minorities implementation of such a policy would produce non-acceptance rates would result in genocidal (by the UN definition of the legal terms rather than colloquial use) levels of assimilation. It does a community little good if only 0.5 or 1 or 1.5 child per generation would choose to remain part of it.
If that is what you meant, wouldn’t that imply that destroying that minority culture is better than forcing people to continue being part of it?
Good point, but what if the minority culture’s values differ on this? Much like I prefer to exist than my carbon being used for the construction of a perfect orgasmium human. Members of minority cultures might prefer to put costs on each other to prevent them from leaving the community.
Also it would really upset groups like say Haredim Jews.
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine. “Genocide” has really strong negative moral valence in most people’s minds because the last time somebody tried it, it involved killing millions of people. Throwing it around in situations that don’t involve death seems… not inaccurate per se, but still disingenuous.
I use it in the technical legal sense and made that explicit too.
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Article 2 CPPCG)
People are really inconsistent however in colloquial usage and moral reasoning. I partially agree with your objection. Communist crimes are basically whitewashed because “Mao killed Chinese and he was Chinese so it wasn’t genocide so Hitler is still worse”. Isn’t a life a life? Shouldn’t whatever the term one uses, the negative feeling be the same?
for some minorities implementation of such a policy would produce non-acceptance rates would result in genocidal levels of assimilation
I’m with Alicorn on this one: if your members don’t want to be in your community, sucks to be your community.
what if the minority culture’s values differ on this?
Maybe they should make more of an effort to convince their members that their community is worth being a part of rather than using mechanisms like shunning and mainstream stigmatism to enforce membership.
it would really upset groups like say Haredim Jews
Somehow I can’t bring myself to be bothered by this
Good point, but what if the minority culture’s values differ on this?
For some reason my brain decided to recast this question as though the minority culture were a corporation selling a product at a price (non-full-inclusion in majority culture translated into money). If people don’t want to buy it, sucks to be you! I don’t care if your values say they ought to or if it will make you sad. Change product or market product but do not force its purchase on anyone.
You do realize we are talking about retention of children raised in a culture right? Orgasmium cults and brainwashing indoctrinators would tend to out compete most others by such measures. A cult worshipping a baslisk that hacks your brain into absolute loyalty would also win out.
Optimizing for allure will not optimize for welfare. At least not under these mechanisms of “choice”. It also means our value sets can be out competed by really convincing paperclippers.
From the perspective of many traditional cultures Westerners may as well be Supper Happy people.
The problem with ‘orgasmium cults’ is, they have a hard time producing anything valuable enough to outsiders to be able to maintain economic power proportionate to their nominal population. Eventually it’s just a heap of functionally insensate larvae starving themselves into irrelevance.
The above holds for either. Erratio’s formulation was:
It sounds very much like you’re saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren’t forced into it by non-acceptance.
I think it would be trivial by a superinteligence to design a culture that no one would choose any other culture over, yet wouldn’t be a very pleasant place to live. And if superinteligence can do this, why could something like this arise due to memetic evolution? Religious and ideological memeplexes are already examples of weaker but dangerous beasts of this kind.
I don’t ever modify them after reading someone else’s statements. It is just that I often post and then reread my comment and find a point is in need of clarification and immediately hit edit and start fixing it. Most of the time no one notices since responses come 5 or 15 or 200 minutes later.
But if you’d like to keep this more real-timeish, I have no problem from with waiting longer before hitting “comment” and then leaving them unchanged. Sorry for any inconvenience. In any case weren’t the above two comments last modified before you posted yours?
I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising.
I think folk morality only says that if you adopt kids, you should treat them equally to your biological kids. It doesn’t say that people who have biological kids instead of adopting are bad people.
To extend the idea, we could say that just about all the pain people feel about status-lowering events is self-fulfilling prophecy
Why do you single out status-lowering events? You could go further and say that anything that doesn’t cause physical pain is okay, e.g. stealing someone’s car is okay because the victim theoretically could brainwash themselves to not care about material belongings.
My first thought was that people are pushed to take status-raising events more seriously than they naturally would.
Considering that there’s some variation in how people react to physical pain, I don’t know why that (at least below some threshold) should be off-limits.
The funny thing is, I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising. See also the fairly successful efforts to reduce the stigma of bastardy.
Well, one of the main emotional objections to cuckoldry is feeling betrayed and lied to, which isn’t the case in adoption. I don’t think being lied to is only an issue due to unclear thought, even without the status issue.
Huh… I felt it (with considerable force) about some other items ITT, but not even a twitch here. I hate to ask, but you probably saw it coming anyway… any personal things in your background that might have triggered that?
Men probably have systematic preferences for how to treat their children according to traits the children do or do not posses and a variety of cues that have evolved to ensure they invest in genetically related children.
But this may have little to do with conscious awareness of such information or emotional distress caused by it.
We know almost nothing about the effects of sex for children and teenagers.
“Teenagers” doesn’t really describe anything in the real world except perhaps a subculture.
Black people are actually genetically superior in important ways—they’ve had such bad luck from geography and racism that their advantages don’t show up as superior results.
Well we already have data about the social status of people who propose such theories.
It’s easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct. First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries. In those societies, infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most Europeans who escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes of death and proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.
Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.
… in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners …
Clearly Jared Diamond is a shunned outcast and publicly apologized for his inappropriate speculation.
“Underdog is actually better but has just had bad luck” or “overdog is only winning because he is evil” is a narrative humans love and are significantly biased towards. Unless overdogs actually consider it plausible that they will be threatened even they derive status from claiming they where just lucky. Or that most (but clearly not them personally) overdogs are unethical.
Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.
Which the New Guinea quote is a sarcastic parody of. It’s a “one could just as easily say” gambit. I don’t have much time for GG&S, but you have to be willfully misreading that passage- or deaf to tone and context- to interpret it as a paen to the New Guinean master race.
I am a fan of Diamond’s work in general and GG&S in particular. It sure doesn’t feel like like I am “willfully misreading” him. I would lean more towards being “deaf to tone and context” (although it seems unlikely that I don’t understand the context, since I have read the entire book and watched the documentary based on it). On the other hand, I have been accused of being too literal in the past, so I can’t merely dismiss your criticism.
On a related note, I must admit that I was rather disappointed with Diamond for dismissing previous attempts to answer the “cargo question” for being racist rather than being false (which is question-begging).
“Teenagers” dosen’t really describe anything in the real world except perhaps a subculture.
Maybe not everywhere in the real world; but in most industrialized countries, a looooong time does elapse from puberty until independence from parents.
I agree. Why would there be a switch in the brain “in case genetic tests prove/shaman says child isn’t yours go into depression!”? Other cues like smell or facial similarity are already factored into the fathers feelings before he consciously knows about the child’s genetics.
We know almost nothing about the effects of sex for children and teenagers.
I don’t think that’s true for teenagers, their sexuality is heavily studied. I don’t have very high confidence in academia but they must have produced something useful on the subject. Right? In any case I agree that children’s sexuality is a pretty strong mind-killer and that our knowledge about it is woefully inadequate or just plain wrong.
Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.
Possible. But I don’t see why this would be controversial.
Black people are actually genetically superior in important ways—they’ve had such bad luck from geography and racism that their advantages don’t show up as superior results.
Come now. White people would be all ecstatic that they now have proof they are to blame for all the problems they’ve been blaming themselves this entire time (and even more since the opportunity cost of squandered superiority is greater than squandered equality). Who dosen’t like being proven right? This also fulfils their deeply ingrained pseudo-Christian guilt complex and desire for original sin. White people love feeling guilty and signalling moral superiority to other white people. I think that’s partially genetic btw. Most other people on the planet are not such annoying moral poseurs. I don’t have any real data to back me on this last claim but anecdotal evidence is pretty consistent on it.
East Asians and Arabs may react unfavourably though. Also the future would be very bright for mankind since Africa is likley to stay in population explosion mode for most of this century, while say Latin America and the Middle East are showing signs of incredibly rapid drops in birthrates (and the developed world is showing no real signs of recuperation).
Also its pretty obvious that black people are superior in certain aspects to most other races. Besides the obvious stuff like say West Africans being good sprinters and East Africans excelling at marathons, greater resistance to tropical diseases, greater diversity helping the evolve more rapidly to deal with new pathogens, lower rates of skin cancer, ect. humans in Sub-Saharan africa share some nearly continent wide adaptations to their environment that are very desirable. I’m pretty sure African males have an edge when it comes to attractiveness and no I’m not talking about the penis myth (which may not be a myth, it is hard to tell since measurements are ambiguous and conflicting). First off there is the purely physical advantage of darker skin since it is associated with masculinity, then there is the well documented “winning personality” when one controls for other factors. That last one is related to the fact that people of African descent generally have far fewer mental health problems (Europeans be they gentiles or Askenazi Jews and East Asians are really the neurotic freaks of the human race), better self-image, greater self-confidence and are much less prone to suicide than most.
Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.
Possible. But I don’t see why this would be controversial.
It’s pre-controversial. I say it now and then, but people just ignore it.
There’s a contingent of atheists who are seriously pissed off at people having religions, but I haven’t seen anything comparable against nationalism, even though these days, wars are apt to be more about nationalism than religion.
It’s pre-controversial. I say it now and then, but people just ignore it.
Mostly because highly educated people on LessWrong don’t know many nationalists personally. They do know many religious people.
In any case classical pacifist movements where basically about this. Getting upset about nationalism seems a 19th or 20th century thing to do. Its not that the arguments against it are new and haven’t sunk in because of future shock level, its just that elite respectable opinion in the Western world has long ago shifted closer towards that position and most people living in the West suffer very little if any harm from the residual traces of nationalism. And the residual traces aren’t that notable, most people in say Western Europe are because of the well known traumas of wars in that time period not very nationalistic.
wars are apt to be more about nationalism than religion.
It is hard to say something like the Iraq war was caused by nationalism, though obviously “spreading democracy” is pretty much not only part of an ideology but is also a key part of America’s civic nationalism.
With most wars in the rest of the world that don’t directly involve Western states (obviously many of these are proxy wars). Ie. The ones that actually should matter to utilitarian since they consume far more lives, do indeed often seem to revolve around ethnic clashes. But this is where it gets tricky.
How do you classify the conflict in Sudan a few years back? One can claim that civil war was a religious one since Muslims where attacking animists and Christian villages and the latter where retaliating. How do you measure how much of it was because of nationalism. Is destructive Muslim or Irish Catholic nationalism a bigger blemish on religion or nationalism? What is the better approach to attacking it if you feel that the phenomena is not conductive to how you want to order the world?
Also nationalism evokes images of people being proud of the state or considering themselves a part of a people that numbers in the tens of millions and has supposedly some common past and a common destiny before it. Most of humanity has no idea of anything like that (outside of religion). It is basically a Western thing with very similar phenomena in East Asia and to a lesser extent the Indian subcontinent and Latin America. Most of humanity is much more tribal than it is nationalistic in the classic sense. And the types of bloody civil wars and revolutions one sees in Africa and the Middle East are I think evidence in favour of this.
White people love feeling guilty and signalling moral superiority to other white people. I think that’s partially genetic btw. Most other people on the planet are not such annoying moral poseurs. I don’t have any real data to back me on this claim but anecdotal evidence is pretty consistent on this
This almost reads like you are trying to hint at something but for the life of me I can’t figure out what. Nope. No idea.
The Science of Yoga (which generally supports yoga as valuable) has a chapter about the risks of yoga—which are much higher than a lot of people in yoga knew. These days, at least some yoga teachers are working on making it safer.
I agree the majority of the damage caused by cuckolding/cheating is self created (though the pain is still real). However I do think there is a rational albeit selfish reason to be opposed to partner’s cheating. If your partner cheats on you she/he may find out she/he prefers the other person to you. Or at the very least your inadaquaces may become clearer if your partner gets involved with somoene else.
The polyamory community suggests that these issues can be manged. But there is a plausible rational argument that outside relationships reduce stability, at least for some people.
Also I agree that black people are obviously superior in several ways. Black men seem clearly the most athletic overall. Subjectively they are also the hottest imo :)
The same would apply to cuckoldry.
New topics:
We know so little about our minds that conscious efforts to improve them are likely to do damage. Actually, I consider that an exaggeration, but I do think that ill effects of following socially supported advice are likely to be kept private and/or ignored for a very long time.
We know almost nothing about the effects of sex for children and teenagers.
Black people are actually genetically superior in important ways—they’ve had such bad luck from geography and racism that their advantages don’t show up as superior results.
Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.
Following up on the “CEV is impossible” part of the discussion: The only thing an FAI can do is protect us from UFAI and possibly other gross existential threats.
Upvoted for saying the only thing in this whole thread that makes my inner animal go “aaaaugh I must fight against people who say that”. I didn’t know I had it in me.
Hot damn!
Thanks for letting me know.
The funny thing is, I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising. See also the fairly successful efforts to reduce the stigma of bastardy.
To extend the idea, we could say that just about all the pain people feel about status-lowering events is self-fulfilling prophecy, but this version less likely to sting because it isn’t about something specific.
Just for fun, flip it over. People aren’t nearly sensitive enough about their status. If people cared more about their rankings, they’d do a lot more, and enough of it would be worthwhile (by those entirely rational geek standards which are opposed to the bad mainstream standards) that there’d be a net gain.
One more: You can’t tell anything important about a person by their taste in art, fiction, music, etc.
Why stop at cuckoldry, where the child is still genetically half one’s spouse’s? Outright cuckcooing! Swap everybody’s kids around in the hospital!
(If I lived in a world where that was regularly done and I knew it, I would not have a bio-kid; I’d adopt a five-year-old and exercise some control over what sort of person I’m inviting into my home that way.)
Why not take it another step further? Why have random non-licensed people raise children? We usually don’t let just anyone adopt kids, in my country one needs to go through a lot of hoops and be financially capable of supporting a child before getting on the list. In practice one demonstrates conscientiousness, a strong desire to have children and financial independence. If all children are adopted children, why not do this? Surely this should only be done by teams of qualified experts in tandem with carefully chosen adoptive parents?
Eugenics FTW.
Relevance?
Edit: Parent used to be much shorter.
Choosing how a child turns out at five as a basis of which kid you want is clearly something that produces a non-trivial eugenic effect. Not in the societal sense (since what kind of kids a society gets are mostly already set), but in the sense of shaping the child you get to have according to one’s own preferences. It is perfectly comparable to choosing the foetus with the right genes for implantation.
Terrible idea to try actually implement in a multicultural society, since for visible minorities it amounts to cultural genocide. What are the odds the child they get actually assimilate to their culture if he can easily pass in greater society as a member of the privileged one?
Unless one factors in ethnicity in who gets who… which is just a horrible can of worms.
It sounds very much like you’re saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren’t forced into it by non-acceptance. If that is what you meant, wouldn’t that imply that destroying that minority culture is better than forcing people to continue being part of it?
Stolen generation isn’t relevant here since it wasn’t reciprocal—the children were taken, not replaced by white children who were then raised in Aboriginal commmunities.
Not really, just that for some minorities implementation of such a policy would produce non-acceptance rates would result in genocidal (by the UN definition of the legal terms rather than colloquial use) levels of assimilation. It does a community little good if only 0.5 or 1 or 1.5 child per generation would choose to remain part of it.
Good point, but what if the minority culture’s values differ on this? Much like I prefer to exist than my carbon being used for the construction of a perfect orgasmium human. Members of minority cultures might prefer to put costs on each other to prevent them from leaving the community.
Also it would really upset groups like say Haredim Jews.
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine. “Genocide” has really strong negative moral valence in most people’s minds because the last time somebody tried it, it involved killing millions of people. Throwing it around in situations that don’t involve death seems… not inaccurate per se, but still disingenuous.
I use it in the technical legal sense and made that explicit too.
People are really inconsistent however in colloquial usage and moral reasoning. I partially agree with your objection. Communist crimes are basically whitewashed because “Mao killed Chinese and he was Chinese so it wasn’t genocide so Hitler is still worse”. Isn’t a life a life? Shouldn’t whatever the term one uses, the negative feeling be the same?
I’m with Alicorn on this one: if your members don’t want to be in your community, sucks to be your community.
Maybe they should make more of an effort to convince their members that their community is worth being a part of rather than using mechanisms like shunning and mainstream stigmatism to enforce membership.
Somehow I can’t bring myself to be bothered by this
Haredim can be a real pain in the ass when they decide they want to be.
For some reason my brain decided to recast this question as though the minority culture were a corporation selling a product at a price (non-full-inclusion in majority culture translated into money). If people don’t want to buy it, sucks to be you! I don’t care if your values say they ought to or if it will make you sad. Change product or market product but do not force its purchase on anyone.
You do realize we are talking about retention of children raised in a culture right? Orgasmium cults and brainwashing indoctrinators would tend to out compete most others by such measures. A cult worshipping a baslisk that hacks your brain into absolute loyalty would also win out.
Optimizing for allure will not optimize for welfare. At least not under these mechanisms of “choice”. It also means our value sets can be out competed by really convincing paperclippers.
From the perspective of many traditional cultures Westerners may as well be Supper Happy people.
The problem with ‘orgasmium cults’ is, they have a hard time producing anything valuable enough to outsiders to be able to maintain economic power proportionate to their nominal population. Eventually it’s just a heap of functionally insensate larvae starving themselves into irrelevance.
I thought we’d drifted away from that particular spin on the scenario as of erratio’s comment.
The above holds for either. Erratio’s formulation was:
I think it would be trivial by a superinteligence to design a culture that no one would choose any other culture over, yet wouldn’t be a very pleasant place to live. And if superinteligence can do this, why could something like this arise due to memetic evolution? Religious and ideological memeplexes are already examples of weaker but dangerous beasts of this kind.
You keep editing your comments after you post them and then my replies look really poorly targeted.
I don’t ever modify them after reading someone else’s statements. It is just that I often post and then reread my comment and find a point is in need of clarification and immediately hit edit and start fixing it. Most of the time no one notices since responses come 5 or 15 or 200 minutes later.
But if you’d like to keep this more real-timeish, I have no problem from with waiting longer before hitting “comment” and then leaving them unchanged. Sorry for any inconvenience. In any case weren’t the above two comments last modified before you posted yours?
Before I posted mine, maybe—I didn’t check—but I was on a static page referring to an unedited parent when I wrote my replies.
Ok from now on I won’t modify comments after posting for this debate.
Edit: Starting after this one!
Or you can just include edits as “Edited to add: X” Then it’s perfectly clear, and you can edit freely. You just can’t prove that’s all you did.
From what kind of a position are people choosing to buy? The veil of ignorance? Lol.
You can’t choose to buy or not buy a spot somewhere in mind-space without already being somewhere in mind-space.
A sufficiently dedicated group could just keep childbirthing in-house rather than trusting hospitals.
It seems very likley that that would be illegal in such a society.
I think folk morality only says that if you adopt kids, you should treat them equally to your biological kids. It doesn’t say that people who have biological kids instead of adopting are bad people.
Why do you single out status-lowering events? You could go further and say that anything that doesn’t cause physical pain is okay, e.g. stealing someone’s car is okay because the victim theoretically could brainwash themselves to not care about material belongings.
My first thought was that people are pushed to take status-raising events more seriously than they naturally would.
Considering that there’s some variation in how people react to physical pain, I don’t know why that (at least below some threshold) should be off-limits.
Taboo “naturally”.
Well, one of the main emotional objections to cuckoldry is feeling betrayed and lied to, which isn’t the case in adoption. I don’t think being lied to is only an issue due to unclear thought, even without the status issue.
Have heard it claimed that that is partly true of statutory rape.
Did that for me too.
Huh… I felt it (with considerable force) about some other items ITT, but not even a twitch here. I hate to ask, but you probably saw it coming anyway… any personal things in your background that might have triggered that?
No, I think I always felt that way.
Men probably have systematic preferences for how to treat their children according to traits the children do or do not posses and a variety of cues that have evolved to ensure they invest in genetically related children.
But this may have little to do with conscious awareness of such information or emotional distress caused by it.
“Teenagers” doesn’t really describe anything in the real world except perhaps a subculture.
Well we already have data about the social status of people who propose such theories.
Clearly Jared Diamond is a shunned outcast and publicly apologized for his inappropriate speculation.
“Underdog is actually better but has just had bad luck” or “overdog is only winning because he is evil” is a narrative humans love and are significantly biased towards. Unless overdogs actually consider it plausible that they will be threatened even they derive status from claiming they where just lucky. Or that most (but clearly not them personally) overdogs are unethical.
Metternich would approve!
Interestingly, that Diamond quote comes shortly after his dismissal of previous attempts at “big history” for being “racist”.
Which the New Guinea quote is a sarcastic parody of. It’s a “one could just as easily say” gambit. I don’t have much time for GG&S, but you have to be willfully misreading that passage- or deaf to tone and context- to interpret it as a paen to the New Guinean master race.
I am a fan of Diamond’s work in general and GG&S in particular. It sure doesn’t feel like like I am “willfully misreading” him. I would lean more towards being “deaf to tone and context” (although it seems unlikely that I don’t understand the context, since I have read the entire book and watched the documentary based on it). On the other hand, I have been accused of being too literal in the past, so I can’t merely dismiss your criticism.
On a related note, I must admit that I was rather disappointed with Diamond for dismissing previous attempts to answer the “cargo question” for being racist rather than being false (which is question-begging).
Maybe not everywhere in the real world; but in most industrialized countries, a looooong time does elapse from puberty until independence from parents.
But this period doesn’t usually end in teen years.
I agree. Why would there be a switch in the brain “in case genetic tests prove/shaman says child isn’t yours go into depression!”? Other cues like smell or facial similarity are already factored into the fathers feelings before he consciously knows about the child’s genetics.
I don’t think that’s true for teenagers, their sexuality is heavily studied. I don’t have very high confidence in academia but they must have produced something useful on the subject. Right? In any case I agree that children’s sexuality is a pretty strong mind-killer and that our knowledge about it is woefully inadequate or just plain wrong.
Possible. But I don’t see why this would be controversial.
Come now. White people would be all ecstatic that they now have proof they are to blame for all the problems they’ve been blaming themselves this entire time (and even more since the opportunity cost of squandered superiority is greater than squandered equality). Who dosen’t like being proven right? This also fulfils their deeply ingrained pseudo-Christian guilt complex and desire for original sin. White people love feeling guilty and signalling moral superiority to other white people. I think that’s partially genetic btw. Most other people on the planet are not such annoying moral poseurs. I don’t have any real data to back me on this last claim but anecdotal evidence is pretty consistent on it.
East Asians and Arabs may react unfavourably though. Also the future would be very bright for mankind since Africa is likley to stay in population explosion mode for most of this century, while say Latin America and the Middle East are showing signs of incredibly rapid drops in birthrates (and the developed world is showing no real signs of recuperation).
Also its pretty obvious that black people are superior in certain aspects to most other races. Besides the obvious stuff like say West Africans being good sprinters and East Africans excelling at marathons, greater resistance to tropical diseases, greater diversity helping the evolve more rapidly to deal with new pathogens, lower rates of skin cancer, ect. humans in Sub-Saharan africa share some nearly continent wide adaptations to their environment that are very desirable. I’m pretty sure African males have an edge when it comes to attractiveness and no I’m not talking about the penis myth (which may not be a myth, it is hard to tell since measurements are ambiguous and conflicting). First off there is the purely physical advantage of darker skin since it is associated with masculinity, then there is the well documented “winning personality” when one controls for other factors. That last one is related to the fact that people of African descent generally have far fewer mental health problems (Europeans be they gentiles or Askenazi Jews and East Asians are really the neurotic freaks of the human race), better self-image, greater self-confidence and are much less prone to suicide than most.
It’s pre-controversial. I say it now and then, but people just ignore it.
There’s a contingent of atheists who are seriously pissed off at people having religions, but I haven’t seen anything comparable against nationalism, even though these days, wars are apt to be more about nationalism than religion.
Mostly because highly educated people on LessWrong don’t know many nationalists personally. They do know many religious people.
In any case classical pacifist movements where basically about this. Getting upset about nationalism seems a 19th or 20th century thing to do. Its not that the arguments against it are new and haven’t sunk in because of future shock level, its just that elite respectable opinion in the Western world has long ago shifted closer towards that position and most people living in the West suffer very little if any harm from the residual traces of nationalism. And the residual traces aren’t that notable, most people in say Western Europe are because of the well known traumas of wars in that time period not very nationalistic.
It is hard to say something like the Iraq war was caused by nationalism, though obviously “spreading democracy” is pretty much not only part of an ideology but is also a key part of America’s civic nationalism.
With most wars in the rest of the world that don’t directly involve Western states (obviously many of these are proxy wars). Ie. The ones that actually should matter to utilitarian since they consume far more lives, do indeed often seem to revolve around ethnic clashes. But this is where it gets tricky.
How do you classify the conflict in Sudan a few years back? One can claim that civil war was a religious one since Muslims where attacking animists and Christian villages and the latter where retaliating. How do you measure how much of it was because of nationalism. Is destructive Muslim or Irish Catholic nationalism a bigger blemish on religion or nationalism? What is the better approach to attacking it if you feel that the phenomena is not conductive to how you want to order the world?
Also nationalism evokes images of people being proud of the state or considering themselves a part of a people that numbers in the tens of millions and has supposedly some common past and a common destiny before it. Most of humanity has no idea of anything like that (outside of religion). It is basically a Western thing with very similar phenomena in East Asia and to a lesser extent the Indian subcontinent and Latin America. Most of humanity is much more tribal than it is nationalistic in the classic sense. And the types of bloody civil wars and revolutions one sees in Africa and the Middle East are I think evidence in favour of this.
This almost reads like you are trying to hint at something but for the life of me I can’t figure out what. Nope. No idea.
Could someone make explicit what is being hinted at? I fear that I am missing the signal.
Didn’t catch that implication before.
Edit: Just wanted to make clear that I’m not endorsing it.
Sharp. I’ve seen this especially in dieting/weightlifting communities.
I picked it up from fat acceptance.
The Science of Yoga (which generally supports yoga as valuable) has a chapter about the risks of yoga—which are much higher than a lot of people in yoga knew. These days, at least some yoga teachers are working on making it safer.
I agree the majority of the damage caused by cuckolding/cheating is self created (though the pain is still real). However I do think there is a rational albeit selfish reason to be opposed to partner’s cheating. If your partner cheats on you she/he may find out she/he prefers the other person to you. Or at the very least your inadaquaces may become clearer if your partner gets involved with somoene else.
The polyamory community suggests that these issues can be manged. But there is a plausible rational argument that outside relationships reduce stability, at least for some people.
Also I agree that black people are obviously superior in several ways. Black men seem clearly the most athletic overall. Subjectively they are also the hottest imo :)
Another risk of polyamory is increasing the odds of getting involved with someone who is very bad news.
On the other hand, if you choose to be monogamous, then the consequences of a bad partner are more serious.
Also, having other good partners while dealing with a bad partner can make it a lot easier, and help you recognize and get out of it faster.