But either handling your personal mindkillers, or at least just quietly sitting out and not making a fuss while other people talk about them is the price you pay for sitting at the grown-ups table, and in return you don’t have to be super-careful about stepping on everyone else’s toes.
Generally speaking, it’s not my personal mindkillers that I’m trying to avoid; I do have some, but they aren’t the ones I mentioned and I know well enough to leave them alone. Nor do I much care about the occasional isolated outburst from someone else that I can downvote and ignore. It’s the thousand-post threads that could have been summarized without loss of generality in ten good ones. It’s the extended bouts of ideological angst that recur every few months without bringing up any new information. It’s a community phenomenon, not a personal one.
Meat used as part of a throwaway metaphor doesn’t trigger that sort of thing, as evidenced by the fact that I am not now defending myself against a howling mob. (Incidentally, neither does death as such; it’s too abstract.) Torture used as part of an extended thought experiment, without hemming it in plenty of obligatory hand-wringing, does. So do a number of other things that I’m sure you can remember from experience. I’m not trying to suggest a precautionary principle here; I hate those things and I’m sure you do too. But we do have that experience to draw on, and it now seems to me that persisting in the use of language and concepts we know that we as a community can’t handle in an adult manner is symptomatic of either gluttony for punishment, of bloody-mindedness to the point of pathology, or of some truly outstanding cluelessness.
I’d like it too if LW could reliably be treated as the grown-ups’ table. But that isn’t the world we live in.
Meat used as part of a throwaway metaphor doesn’t trigger that sort of thing.
When I hear the word, 1-3 images of tortured animals usually briefly cross my mind, and I know there are much more emotional vegans than me. Speak for yourself. And even if torture mindkills some people, like I said, you can’t properly discuss some important topics without it, so if it spawns 1000-post threads that aren’t worth reading, too bad. (When I’ve used torture thought experiments so far, it hasn’t.)
Edit: Actually, I probably would stop talking about torture if every time I did it spawned a1000-post thread that wasn’t worth reading. But if that was what LessWrong was like, I would probably leave. Or if it was in every other respect the same (an implausible counterfactual), stay, but not enjoy it nearly as much.
Generally speaking, it’s not my personal mindkillers that I’m trying to avoid; I do have some, but they aren’t the ones I mentioned and I know well enough to leave them alone. Nor do I much care about the occasional isolated outburst from someone else that I can downvote and ignore. It’s the thousand-post threads that could have been summarized without loss of generality in ten good ones. It’s the extended bouts of ideological angst that recur every few months without bringing up any new information. It’s a community phenomenon, not a personal one.
Meat used as part of a throwaway metaphor doesn’t trigger that sort of thing, as evidenced by the fact that I am not now defending myself against a howling mob. (Incidentally, neither does death as such; it’s too abstract.) Torture used as part of an extended thought experiment, without hemming it in plenty of obligatory hand-wringing, does. So do a number of other things that I’m sure you can remember from experience. I’m not trying to suggest a precautionary principle here; I hate those things and I’m sure you do too. But we do have that experience to draw on, and it now seems to me that persisting in the use of language and concepts we know that we as a community can’t handle in an adult manner is symptomatic of either gluttony for punishment, of bloody-mindedness to the point of pathology, or of some truly outstanding cluelessness.
I’d like it too if LW could reliably be treated as the grown-ups’ table. But that isn’t the world we live in.
When I hear the word, 1-3 images of tortured animals usually briefly cross my mind, and I know there are much more emotional vegans than me. Speak for yourself. And even if torture mindkills some people, like I said, you can’t properly discuss some important topics without it, so if it spawns 1000-post threads that aren’t worth reading, too bad. (When I’ve used torture thought experiments so far, it hasn’t.)
Edit: Actually, I probably would stop talking about torture if every time I did it spawned a1000-post thread that wasn’t worth reading. But if that was what LessWrong was like, I would probably leave. Or if it was in every other respect the same (an implausible counterfactual), stay, but not enjoy it nearly as much.