To be completely honest, I agree with you but find it hard to come up for a good argument for why that should be. One way I’ve thought about it in the past is that the parents or caretakers of a child are sort of like stewards of a property that will be inherited one day. If I’m going to inherit a mansion from my grandfather on my 18th birthday, my parents can’t arbitrarily decide to burn it down when I’m 17 & 364 days old. Harming children (physically or emotionally) is damaging the person they will be when they are an adult in a similar way.
aelephant
To me morality is an agreement that people can come to with one another. Since animals can’t come to agreements with one another, what happens between animals is amoral. It isn’t immoral when a bird kills a worm or a cat kills a rat and it doesn’t make me feel bad either. Humans could make agreements between themselves about how they want to treat other animals, but humans can’t make agreements with other animals. For this reason, I consider all interactions with animals to be outside the realm of morality, although there are certain behaviors that disgust me & that are probably indicative of mental illness & a sign that someone is probably a danger to others (eg torturing kittens).
Nested bags work well too. I have one of those huge waterproof messenger bags & it is like a bottomless pit if you don’t organize it somehow.
This can also be looked at as a willpower issue too. I want to do X, but I didn’t do it in the morning or the afternoon, now it is the evening & I’ve still got to cook myself dinner & then clean the dishes & I’m already exhausted & I was working hard all day & I really just want to relax...
Pharmacy stuff Brand & generic name pairs for prescription drugs. Classes & mechanisms of action for prescription drugs. 1st line therapies for various diseases. Etc.
Mandarin Chinese *Mostly just doing vocab at the moment, but have used it for listening (MP3 clips), writing, & grammar.
Misc work stuff Names of new employees (they’re Chinese names, so difficult to remember) Who is the contact person for what (eg if you want a new email account, you need to contact Mrs. Wu YiJun for approval)
I was thinking “rapid sequence intubation”.
I’ve noticed that in published works, the 1st instance of a term is usually spelled out / clarified. So in the title, you could use “repetitive strain injury (RSI)” & then use RSI for every instance after that.
I wonder if getting everyone to agree to use Beeminder could help with the cleanliness. When I lived in a group house I found that my mate whom I shared a bathroom with had a significantly lower dirtiness threshold than I did. I don’t consider myself particularly disgusting & never even noticed the bathroom was getting dirty, but it drove him crazy. I didn’t want to be a dick & never clean the bathroom, but I never cleaned the bathroom because he ended up flipping out & doing it himself. I probably would’ve agreed to using Beeminder or some other similar system to help motivate me, had I known about these kinds of things at the time.
I’d assume that 3^^^3 people would prefer to have a barely noticeable dust speck in their eye momentarily over seeing me get tortured for 50 years & thus I’d choose the dust specks. If I’m wrong, that is fine, any of those 3^^^3 people can take me to court & sue me for “damages”, of which there were none. Maybe appropriate reimbursement would be something like 1/3^^^3 of a cent per person?
I would rather observe you & see what you do to avoid becoming a wirehead. I’d put saying you want to avoid becoming a wirehead & saying you want to want to pay to save the squirrels in the same camp—totally unprovable at this point in time. In the future maybe we can scan your brain & see which of your stated preferences you are likely to act on; that’d be extremely cool, especially if we could scan politicians during their campaigns.
I’ve actually built & abandoned several decks. When I was studying in university I was focusing more on the specific usage of certain words in context, so my cards were ridiculously complex. It was good for studying for the exams, but exhausting to keep up with. Now my cards are pure vocabulary. I don’t go through lists & add all the words. I wait for the word to come up in daily life, then add it. In the past I studied a lot of words I never used, now I mostly study words I’m encountering regularly. I do think this depends on where you are though. I can usually follow a conversation but just one or two words will be new to me. If you’re still in the early beginning phase, you need to collect all of those super common words first.
When you’re talking about the utility of squirrels, what exactly are you calculating? How much you personally value squirrels? How do you measure that? If it is just a thought experiment (“I would pay $1 per squirrel to prevent their deaths”) how do you know that you aren’t just lying to yourself & if it really came down to it, you wouldn’t pay? Maybe we can only really calculate utility after the fact by looking at what people do rather than what they say.
Congrats man. I also highly suggest you use Anki if you aren’t already. It reminds me of the words & phrases I learned months ago & keeps them fresh in my memory. Not that it is my sole motivation, but you can really impress native speakers when you pull out some obscure saying someone mentioned in passing a long while back.
How about intentionally surrounding yourself with people who are excited about the thing you want to be excited about?
It sucks to experience it personally, but maybe it serves an evolutionary purpose that we don’t yet fully understand & eliminating it completely would be a mistake?
There’s a difference between an infant, which is already a living, breathing human being & the sperm that are expunged in masturbation. Even if those sperm could have been used to produce more humans, there’s no way to prove whether or not they would actually. The woman could fail to conceive, for example. If you wanted to make a law against masturbation, you’d also run into the problem that there is no victim, just the probability of someone that might have existed at some point maybe. I also see a conflict here with autonomy. Can we require people to turn all of their sperm into humans? They didn’t choose to produce sperm; it is an accident of biology. On the other hand, people do choose to have children (usually); it requires conscious choice & effort (excluding certain exceptions like the female rape victim).
In the US certain employers are required to provide health insurance for employees who work 40 hours per week or more, but not for employees who work 20 hours per week, so that is at least one incentive that would encourage hiring part-time employees vs full-time employees.
None. You get thrown in jail or put to death for that kind of thing.
If a moral theory accepted and acted upon by all moral people led to an average decrease in suffering, I’d take that as a sign that it was doing something right. For example, if no one initiated violence against anyone else (except in self defense), I have a hard time imagining how that could create more net suffering though it certainly would create more suffering for the subset of the population who previously used violence to get what they wanted.
To me it is not the suffering per se that bothers me about factory farming. I’m having trouble finding the right words, but I want to say it is the “un-naturalness” of it. Animals are not meant to live their whole lives in cages pumped full of antibiotics. I also believe it is harmful to humans, both to the humans who operate these factories (psychologically) & to the humans that consume the product (physically).
On the other hand, it is natural for animals to eat other animals, and properly raised animal products are arguably one of the best sources of nutrition for humans. I also don’t think raising chickens on an open farm & slaughtering them is psychologically harmful; I imagine those farmers feel deeply in tune with nature & at peace with their way of life.
Don’t know. I imagine any answer I could produce would be a rationalization.