J_Thomas2

Karma: 71

J_Thomas2 Aug 16, 2008, 2:17 PM
0 points
on: Hot Air Doesn’t Disagree
Konrad Lorenz claimed that dogs and wolves have morality. When a puppy does something wrong then a parent pushes on the back of its neck with their mouth and pins it to the ground, and lets it up when it whines appropriately.

Lorenz gave an example of an animal that mated at the wrong time. The pack leader found the male still helplessly coupled with the female, and pinned his head to the ground just like a puppy.

It doesn’t have to take language. It starts out with moral beliefs that some individuals break. I can’t think of any moral taboos that haven’t been broken, except for the extermination of the human species which hasn’t happened yet. So, moral taboos that get broken and the perps get punished for it. That’s morality.

It happens among dogs and cats and horses and probably lots of animals. It isn’t that all these behaviors are in the genes, selected genetically by natural selection over the last million generations or so. They get taught, which is much faster to develop but which also has a higher cost.

J_Thomas2 Aug 16, 2008, 1:46 AM
−1 points
on: Hot Air Doesn’t Disagree
Chaung-Tzu had a story: Two philosophers were walking home from the bar after a long evening drinking. They stopped to piss off a bridge. One of them said, “Look at the fish playing in the moonlight! How happy they are!”

The other said, “You’re not a fish so you can’t know whether the fish are happy.”

The first said, “You’re not me so you can’t know whether I know whether the fish are happy.”

It seems implausible to me that rabbits or foxes think about morality at all. But I don’t know that with any certainty, I’m not sure how they think.

Eliezer says with certainty that they do not think about morality at all. It seems implausible to me that Eliezer would know that any more than I do, but I don’t know with any certainty that he doesn’t know.

J_Thomas2 Aug 15, 2008, 3:43 PM
−1 points
on: Is Fairness Arbitrary?
Caledonian, thank you. I didn’t notice that there might be people who disagree with that, since it seemed to me so clearly true and unarguable.

I guess in the extreme case somebody could believe that fairness has nothing to do with agreement. He might find a bunch of people who have a deal that each of them believes is fair, and he might argue that each of them is wrong, that their deal is actually unfair to every one of them. That each of them is deforming his own soul by agreeing to this horrible deal.

My thought about that is that there might be some deal that none of them has thought of, that would indeed be better for each of them. Maybe if they heard about the other deal they’d all prefer it. I’d want to listen to his proposals and see if I could understand them, or get new ideas from them.

But when somebody argues that a deal is unfair to somebody else, unfair to somebody who himself thinks it is not unfair to himself, it disrespects that person. It is a way to say that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that he isn’t competent to make his own deals, that he’s a stupid or ignorant person who does not know what’s good for him, that he needs you to take care of him and make his decisions for him. In general it is rude. And yet sometimes it could be true that people are stupid and agree to deals that are unfair to them because they don’t know any better. There are probably 40 million american Republicans I’d suspect of that....

J_Thomas2 Aug 15, 2008, 1:08 PM
0 points
on: The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?
Lakshmi, Eliezer does have a point, though.

While there are many competing moral justifications for different ways to divide the pie, and while a moral relativist can say that no one of them is objectively correct, still many human beings will choose one. Not even a moral relativist is obligated to refrain from choosing moral standards. Indeed, someone who is intensely aware that he has chosen his standards may feel much more intensely that they are his than someone who believes they are a moral absolute that all honest and intelligent people are obligated to accept.

So, once you have made your moral choice, it is not fair to simply put it aside because somebody else disagrees. If he convinces you that he’s right, then it’s OK. But if you believe you know what’s right and you agree to do wrong, you are doing wrong.

If all but two members of the group—you and Aaron—think it’s right to do something that Aaron thinks is unfair to him, then it’s wrong for you to violate your ethics and go along with the group. If everybody but you thinks it’s right then it’s still wrong for you to agree, when you believe it’s wrong.

Unless, of course, you belong to a moral philosophy which says it’s right to do that.

When Dennis says he deserves the whole pie and you disagree, and it violates your ethical code to say it’s right when you think it’s wrong, then you should not agree for Dennis to get the whole pie. It would be wrong.

I believe that what you ought to do in the case when there’s no agreement, should still be somewhat undecided. If you have the power to impose your own choice on someone else or everybody else then that might be the most convenient thing to do. But it takes a special way of thinking to say it’s fair to do that. Is it in general a fair thing to impose your standards on other people when you think you are right? I guess a whole lot of people think so. But I’m convinced they’re wrong. It isn’t fair. And yet it can be damn convenient....

J_Thomas2 Aug 15, 2008, 5:36 AM
0 points
on: The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?
“Why would anybody think that there is a single perfect morality, and if everybody could only see it then we’d all live in peace and harmony?”

Because they have a specific argument which leads them to believe that?

Sure, but have you ever seen such an argument that wasn’t obviously fallacious? I have not seen one yet. It’s been utterly obvious every time.

Thomas, you are running in to the same problem Eliezer is: you can’t have a convincing argument about what is fair, versus what is not fair, if you don’t explicitly define “fair” in the first place. It’s more than a little surprising that this isn’t very obvious.

I gave a simple obvious definition. You might disagree with it, but how is it unclear?

J_Thomas2 Aug 15, 2008, 5:16 AM
1 point
on: Is Fairness Arbitrary?
Hendrick, it could be argued that each person deserves to own 1/N of the pie because they are there. So if Doreen isn’t hungry, she still owns 1/N of the pie which she can sell to anyone who is hungry.

Similarly it could be argued that the whole forest should be divided up and each person should own 1/N of it, and if the pie is found in the part of the forest that I own then I own that whole pie. But I have no rights to pies found in the rest of the forest.

Now suppose that all but one of the group is busy looking up into the trees at beautiful birds, which gives them great enjoyment. But Dennis instead has been working hard looking at the ground, searching for pies, and he finds one. Should he own the pie? Should he have the right to give or sell pieces to whoever he wants? Or should he have no special rights?

What if Dennis, knowing that the group will confiscate his pie if he shows it to them, eats it before they notice he has it. Is it then fair to pump his stomach so it can be divided equally?

Say it’s 5 people walking through the woods, but they left 5 others back at base camp. Do the other 5 have any right to any of the pie?

If so, what if there are 5 starving children in india. Do they have any rights?

I say, Eliezer is wrong to say there is anything objectively fair about this.

If you and the others present get together and give Dennis 1/Nth of the pie—or even if you happen to have the upper hand, and you unilaterally give Dennis and yourself and all others each 1/Nth—then you are not being unfair on any level; there is no meta-level of fairness where Dennis gets the whole pie.

I agree that giving Dennis the whole pie when others disagree would not be fair. But when you disregard Dennis’s opinion and dictate a solution, that isn’t fair either. Just because Dennis is unable to explain his position so that you see it’s right, and he does not suggest a compromise you can accept, does not make your alternative solution imposed on him fair.

There is no absolute standard of fairness here. It all depends. The concept that we should start with equal shares sounds right if you live in an egalitarian nation, otherwise not. Like, if it’s a medieval english nobleman and four retainers walking through the woods, it would be idiotic to assert the pie must be split into 5 equal shares. The retainers would whip you for saying it, and they’d insist it was no more than you deserved, it was a fair response.

I say, fairness involves people who are making a deal, who are trying to be fair to each other. It is not about people who are not present, who cannot speak their minds. You aren’t making a deal with starving children in india. You can be kind to them or unkind but until you can make a deal with them you can’t be fair or unfair. It is not about the people back in base camp unless you made a deal with them that you will uphold or break.

If the people who are making the deal all agree it is fair, then it is fair. That’s what it means for it to be fair. If some of them do not agree that it’s fair then it isn’t fair. It wouldn’t be fair to give Dennis the whole pie, when somebody doesn’t want to. It wouldn’t be fair to give Dennis nothing, or 1/N of what he believes he deserves, when he doesn’t agree. If you can’t reach an agreement then you don’t have a fair solution. Because that’s what a fair solution isn’t.

You can’t say that just anything is fair. “Fair” isn’t an empty concept that can apply to anything whatsoever. “Fair” is a concept that can apply to anything whatsoever that all participants of the deal freely agree to. If they don’t agree, then it isn’t fair.

J_Thomas2 Aug 15, 2008, 4:17 AM
0 points
on: The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?
But most of all—why on Earth would any human being think that one ought to optimize inclusive genetic fitness, rather than what is good? What is even the appeal of this, morally or otherwise? At all?

I don’t think you ought to try to optimise fitness. Your opinion about fitness might be quite wrong, even if you accept the goal of optimising fitness. Say you sacrifice trying to optimise fitness and then it turns out you failed. Like, you try to optimise for intelligence just before a plague hits that kills ³⁄₄ of the public. You should have optimised for plague resistance. What a loser.

And what would you do to optimise genetic fitness anyway? Carefully choose who to have children with?

Perhaps you would want to change the environment so that it will be good for humans, or for your kind of human being. That makes a kind of sense to me, but again it’s hard to do. Not only do you have the problem of actually changing the world. You also have the problem of ecological succession. Very often, species that take over an ecosystem change it in ways that leave something else better able to grow than that species’ own children. Some places, grasses provide a good environment for pine seedlings that then shade out the grass. But the pines in turn create an environment where hardwood saplings can grow better than pine saplings. Etc. If you like human beings or your own kind of human beings then it makes some sense to create an environment where they will thrive. But do you know how to do that?

If you knew all about how to design ecosystems to get the results you want, that might provide some of the tools you’d need to design human societies. I don’t think those tools exist yet.

On a different level, I feel like it’s important to avoid minimising mimetic fitness. If you have ideas that you believe are true or good or beautiful, and those ideas seem to kill off the people who hold them faster than they can spread the ideas, that’s a sign that something is wrong. It should not be that the good, true, or beautiful ideas die out. Either there’s something wrong with the ideas, or else there should be some way to modify the environment so they spread easier, or at least some way to modify the environment so the bearers of the ideas don’t die off so fast. I can’t say what it is that’s wrong, but there’s something wrong when the things that look good tend to disappear.

If they’re good then there ought to be a way for them to persist until they can mutate or recombine into something better. They don’t need to take over the world but they shouldn’t just disappear.

I don’t like it when the things I like go extinct.

So I don’t want to maximise the fitness of things I like, but I sure do want that fitness to be adequate. When it isn’t adequate then something is wrong and I want to look carefully at what’s wrong. Maybe it’s the ideas. Maybe something else.

Similarly, if you run a business you don’t need to maximise profits. But if you run at a loss on average then you have a problem that needs to be fixed.

J_Thomas2 Aug 15, 2008, 1:38 AM
3 points
on: The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?
Eliezer, you claim that there is no necessity we should accept Dennis’s claim he should get the whole pie as fair. I agree.

There is also no necessity he should accept our alternative claim as fair.

There is no abstract notion that is inherently fair. What there is, is that when people do reach agreement that something is fair, then they have a little bit more of a society. And when they can’t agree about what’s fair they have a little less of a society. There is nothing that says ahead of time that they must have that society. There is nothing that says ahead of time what it is that they must agree is fair. (Except that some kinds of fairness may aid the survival of the participants, or the society.)

Concepts of fairness aren’t inherent in the universe, they’re an emergent property that comes from people finding ways to coexist and to find mutual aid. If they agree that it’s fair for them to hunt down and kill and eat each other because each victim has just as much right and almost as much opportunity to turn the tables, this does not lead to a society that’s real useful to its participants and it does not lead them to be particularly useful to each other. It’s a morality that in many circumstances will not be fully competitive. But this is a matter of natural selection among ideas, there isn’t anything less fair about this concept than other concepts of fairness. It’s only less competitive, which is an entirely different thing.

It’s an achievement to reach agreement about proper behavior. The default is no agreement. We make an effort to reach agreement because that’s the kind of people we are. The kind of people who’ve survived best so far. When Dennis feels he deserves something different from what we think, we often feel we should try to understand his point of view and see if we can come to a common understanding.

And we have to accept that sometimes we cannot come to any common understanding, that’s just how it works. We have to accept that sometimes somebody will feel that it isn’t fair, that he’s been mistreated, and we have to live with whatever consequences come from that. Society isn’t an all-or-none thing. We walk together, we stumble, we fall down, we get back up and try some more.

Why would anybody think that there is a single perfect morality, and if everybody could only see it then we’d all live in peace and harmony?

You might as well imagine there’s a single perfect language and if we all spoke it we’d understand each other completely and everything we said would be true.

J_Thomas2 Aug 14, 2008, 11:08 PM
0 points
on: Is Fairness Arbitrary?
One very funny consecuence of defining “fair” as “that which everyone agrees to be “fair”“ is that if you indeed could convince everyone of the correctness of that definition, nobody could ever know what IS “fair”, since they would look at their definition of “fair”, which is “that which everyone agrees to be “fair””, then they would look at what everyone does agree to be fair, and conclude that “that which everyone agrees to be “fair” is “that which everyone agrees to be “fair”″”, and so on!

An, I have no idea what you are saying here.

If a deal is fair when all participants freely agree to the deal, then there you are.

Are you saying that everybody has to agree to this definition of fairness before anybody can use it? I don’t see why. People use the word “fair” when they are talking about deals. We don’t all have to agree on the meaning of a word before any of us can use the word in conversation. If that was necessary, what would we say?

If some people freely agree to a deal but they still say it isn’t fair—perhaps it isn’t fair to God, or to the pixies, or to somebody in Mali who isn’t a party to the deal anyway—then they can say that. Whether or not we all agree that the deal is fair, still we have a deal we all agree to.

What point is there to build an infinite regress of definitions? What is it good for?

J_Thomas2 Aug 14, 2008, 10:52 PM
0 points
on: Is Fairness Arbitrary?
If fairness is about something other than human agreement, what is it?

Suppose you have a rule that you say is always the fair one. And suppose that you apply it to a situation involving N people, and all N of them object, none of them think it’s fair. Are you going to claim that the fair thing for them to do is something that none of them agrees to? What’s fair about that?

When everybody involved in a deal agrees it’s fair, who are you—an outside kibitzer—to tell them they’re wrong?

Suppose a group all agrees, they think a deal is fair. And then you come in and persuade some of them that it isn’t fair after all, that they should get more, and the agreement breaks down. Maybe they fight each other over it. Maybe some of them get hurt. And after some time contending, it’s clear that none of them are better off than they were when they had their old agreement. Were you being fair to that group by destroying their agreement?

J_Thomas2 Aug 14, 2008, 7:05 AM
1 point
on: Is Fairness Arbitrary?
It’s fair when the participants all sincerely agree that it’s fair.

If you think you’re being unfair to somebody and he disagrees, who’s right?

There isn’t any guarantee that a fair solution is possible. If people can’t agree, then we can’t be fair. I say, fairness is a goal that we can sometimes achieve. There’s no guarantee that we could always achieve all of our goals if only we did the right things. There’s no guarantee that fairness is possible. Just, it’s a good goal to try for sometimes, and sometimes we can actually be fair or mostly fair.

People often agree that equal shares is fair. Not always. It seems like a sort of default, and we might choose to start with the default and then argue why we should deviate from it. Like, the one who found the pie in the forest might deserve a finder’s fee. The one who negotiated an agreement when it seemed unlikely might deserve a reward for that. If there’s a danger that a bear might come take the pie, then one who guards the others while they eat might deserve a reward. If one person is carrying extra weight for things he shares with the others, he might deserve extra calories etc. There can be lots of reasons to deviate from equal shares once you accept equal shares as the default.

Approaching a fair solution is an art. It’s an adventure that might not have any good ending possible, but when you don’t know it can’t be done then it’s better to try than just accept failure from the beginning. Starting out with the assumption that there is a fair approach that everybody ought to accept, and that if it doesn’t work you’ll figure out who to blame, is both backward and counterproductive.

J_Thomas2 Aug 13, 2008, 10:38 PM
1 point
on: Planning Fallacy
Glyn, I did something similar, but with mine after the granular tasks are estimated, a random delay is added to each according to a pareto distribution. The more subtasks, the more certain that a few of them will be very much behind schedule.

I chose a pareto distribution because it had the minimal number of parameters to estimate and it had a fat tail. Also I had a maximum entropy justification. Say you use an exponential distribution, you’re assuming a constant chance for completion at any time that it’s incomplete. But other things equal, the more you get behind schedule the less likely that the chance for cmpletion at any time will stay constant. It should go down. If you estimated 3 hours to completion to start with, and it’s already been 6 hours, is it more likely that the correct estimate now is 3 hours, or something larger? And when it’s been 9 hours and still incomplete, should you predict 3 hours then? The more you’re already behind deadline, the more reasonable it is to suppose that you’ll get even farther behind.

J_Thomas2 Aug 11, 2008, 5:13 PM
0 points
on: Hiroshima Day
Steve, I think you posted your comment in the wrong thread, not this one.

J_Thomas2 Aug 10, 2008, 3:25 AM
1 point
on: Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps
This seems to imply that the relativists are right. Of course there’s no right way to sort pebbles, but if there really is an absolute morality that AIs are smart enough to find, then they’ll find it and rule us with it.

Of course, there could be an absolute morality that AIs aren’t smart enough to find either. Then we’d take pot luck. That might not be so good. Many humans believe that there is an absolute morality that governs their treatment of other human beings, but that no morality is required when dealing with lower animals, who lack souls and full intelligence and language etc. I would not find it implausible if AIs decided their morality demanded careful consideration of other AIs but had nothing to do with their treatment of humans, who after all are slow and stupid and might lack things AIs would have that we can’t even imagine.

And yet, attempts to limit AIs would surely give bad results. If you tell somebody “I want you to be smart, but you can only think about these topics and in these particular ways, and your smart thinking must only get these results and not those results” what’s the chance he’ll wind up stupid? When you tell people there are thoughts they must not think, how can they be sure not to think them except by trying to avoid thinking at all? When you think a new thought you can’t be sure where it will lead.

It’s a problem.

J_Thomas2 Aug 9, 2008, 12:33 AM
0 points
on: Morality as Fixed Computation
Given that the morality we want to impose on a FAI is kind of incoherent, maybe we should get an AI to make sense of it first?

J_Thomas2 Aug 8, 2008, 11:59 PM
0 points
on: Hiroshima Day
Funky, you might be right.

Consider Tacitus:
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

How better to make a desert than with nukes?

As a general rule, real WMDs do not help nations achieve the goals they think of as victory. Imagine for example that we had created plentiful nukes two years earlier, and we had then bombed 20 german cities while the germans surrendered to us. We would then have to deal with russia, and our german ally would have 20 fewer cities to assist us than they would otherwise.

WMDs don’t give us what we want. They only help us avoid disastrous defeat by threatening a different sort of disaster.

Usually, threatening to use nukes is an admission of defeat. You don’t do it when you’re winning. Ex: USA in korea. USA in vietnam. israel in 1973. Exception: USA in invasion of iraq. We said if iraq used chemical or bioweapons we’d use nukes. The word is out now that they didn’t have them and couldn’t have used them, but it’s a rare thing—as if we thought their mustard gas might give them a decisive victory or something.

You might be right that we haven’t used any other WMDs because we used nukes once. There’s no compelling evidence in either direction. I want to also point out that we have not had many uses for them. WMDs are mostly good for destroying cities full of civilians, with side effects that might last for many generations in the cases of biological, genetic, ecological etc weapons. All have known long-lasting side effects except for the nerve gases which are not particularly effective. How often have we needed to destroy enemy cities? We bombed Hanoi and Haiphong as part of our peace negotiations, but when have we done the like since? We pride ourselves on pinpoint strikes against particular targets.

It’s only losers who use WMDs, and only when the surrender they face is worse than the side effects of the WMDs. Why would it be surprising that it hasn’t happened again since our ill-advised single use?

J_Thomas2 Aug 8, 2008, 10:40 PM
0 points
on: Hiroshima Day
Caledonian, agreed. Whatever we say are the inevitable results of that slaughter, whether it’s that we prevented a later nuclear war or we poisoned the chance for peace, they’re all bogus.

We don’t know what would have happenned instead if only things were different. We can only guess by making netaphors from other situations.

Here’s a metaphor--

Pre-nuke: You have a neigbor who annoys you. He plays his stereo too loud. He throws garbage over the fence into your yard. He doesn’t mow his grass, you get bugs and another neighbor has trouble selling his house.

You annoy him too.

Every now and then the two of you have a big argument that perhaps goes to the level of a fistfight. If one of you is enough better, he can intimidate the other. Maybe you can make him leave his stereo low and mow his grass, for fear you’ll beat him up again. Maybe he can make you stop cooking with garlic and pick up his trash and stop mowing your lawn. Maybe other neighbors will get involved and who wins depends on how the allies fall out. Maybe the allies aren’t stable enough to get any resolution.

One-nuke: You buy a gun. You’re not sure he’ll be properly intimidated by the gun so after you knock him down you shoot off on one of his toes to prove you mean business. Also this helps to intimidate one of your other neighbors who’s really good with his fists. Your neighbors argue some about whether you should have done that, but they aren’t ready to do anything about it.

Two-nukes: You have a gun. Your ugly neighbor has a gun. You practice your quick-draw and your targetting because next time there’s a fight one of you is going to die. The first one to get his gun out and aimed properly wins. So it makes sense to draw quick at the first sign the other guy might draw. It makes sense to draw and shoot at the first sign the argument is getting intense. It makes sense to draw and shoot at the first provocation. It makes sense to draw and shoot the next time you see him.

Many-nukes: You have a gun. Your ugly neighbor has a gun. You have a bunch of catapults that will throw tanks of gasoline onto your neighbor’s house and yard. Also thermite. Anybody there will be killed. Your neighbor has the same thing aimed at you. It’s a standoff, neither of you can kill the other without at least losing his house. Your neighbors don’t like what the situation is doing to their property values, but they are neither willing nor able to kill you over it. You work hard to persuade your neighbor that you’re crazy enough to die killing him, so you can intimidate him even though you can’t really win. Meanwhile you work at more catapults designed to knock his oil drums out of the air before they reach your house. It doesn’t seem like it would work, but if you can persuade him that you believe they’d work then you can intimidate him.

And you’ve arranged your catapults so that you can in theory hit any house in the neighborhood. It’s all very expensive but you know it’s necessary. You try to keep any of your other neighbors from building catapults themselves and mostly they don’t want to. But if they do try, and they’re a bit unfriendly, you threaten to fire-bomb them to make sure they don’t, or maybe you shoot them or just beat them up. Whatever it takes, since you sure don’t want another important enemy.

Many of your neighbors think you are crazy. But as you point out, you can’t expect to have peace. There’s always going to be an enemy, and you have to do whatever it takes to win.

If this metaphor fits, it makes the whole thing look insane. You have to accept that any of your neighbors can shoot you while you’re opening your front door, or burn your house down around you during the night. It just isn’t practical to prevent that, and yet it hardly ever happens. But maybe this isn’t a good metaphor. Maybe nations aren’t like people, and neighboring nations aren’t like people’s neighbors. Maybe the best chance for national survival is to threaten everybody else with nukes.

J_Thomas2 Aug 8, 2008, 9:36 AM
0 points
on: Morality as Fixed Computation
Funny how the meaning changes if it’s desire for gold atoms compared to desire for iron atoms.

I’m real unclear about the concept here, though. Is an FAI going to go inside people’s heads and change what we want? Like, it figures out how to do effective advertising?

Or is it just deciding what goals it should follow, to get us what we want? Like, if what the citizens of two countries each with population about 60 million most want is to win a war with the other country, should the FAI pick a side and give them what they want, or should it choose some other way to make the world a better place?

If a billion people each want to be Olympic gold medalists, what can a nearly-omnipotent FAI do for them? Create a billion different Olympic events, each tailored to a different person? Maybe it might choose to improve water supplies instead? I really don’t see a problem with doing things that are good for people instead of what they want most, if what they want is collectively self-defeating.

Imagine that we suddenly got a nearly-god-like FAI. It studies physics and finds a way to do unlimited transmutation, any element into any other element. It can create almost unlimited energy by converting iron atoms entirely to energy, and it calculates that the amount of iron the earth receives per day as micrometeorites will more than power anything we want to do. It studies biology and sees how to do various wonders. And it studies humans, and then the first thing it actuall does is to start philosophy classes.

“Study with me and you will discover deep meaning in the world and in your own life. You will become a productive citizen, you will tap into your inner creativity, you will lose all desire to hurt other people and yet you will be competent to handle the challenges life hands you.” And it works, people who study the philosophy find these claims are true.

What’s wrong with that?

J_Thomas2 Aug 8, 2008, 9:09 AM
0 points
on: Hiroshima Day
it’s not the wheapons that kill people, but the people who use them.

There’s a level where that’s kind of true.

But consider the chicken. In the usual way of things, when two cocks meet they do some threat displays and likely one of them runs away. If not they fight each other a little and then likely one of them runs away.

If you strap razor blades to their feet and put them into a pen where they can’t run away then you have something you can sell tickets to. Except it’s illegal in this country. You could say “Razor blades don’t kill fighting cocks, other cocks do” but it wouldn’t be very true, now would it?

The people who strap on the razor blades convert a dominance ritual into a sort of ritual murder. The chickens just follow their instincts, never thinking out the consequences.

It would be possible to attach the trigger for a nuclear weapon to a cock so that when it killed its opponent the nuke would go off. We wouldn’t actually do that, but we could. And then you could say “Nukes don’t kill people. Roosters kill people.” It would be just as true as the current version.

J_Thomas2 Aug 8, 2008, 2:26 AM
0 points
on: Hiroshima Day
Mark, no one has used biological weapons even though we have developed them. (There may be some unpublicised exceptions, maybe south africa used some against africans etc.) No one has ever used genetic weapons. The idea that every weapon gets used except for MAD is wrong.

You say that we cannot have disarmament. As long as the USA prevents disarmament, you are right. But after the next nuclear war, we will have nuclear disarmament provided the world economy still exists. You say it can’t happen on no evidence. I say, wait and see. When it comes, you won’t be able to stop it.

Which does not say the world will have universal peace. Making the world safe for conventional warfare may not be exactly pleasant. But it will happen, pleasant or not.

I have the sense that you imagine two sides here, the idealists who imagine wonderful worlds that can never be versus the realists like you who face the gritty truth that life is tough but if we’re tough enough we can prevail. But see, your sort of realism came out of the Cold War, and it hasn’t adapted to the modern world yet. In the new world aircraft carriers are big fat targets, and within your lifetime we will have to face the weather without the comfort of our nuclear umbrella. It won’t be a utopia, it’s just the next step.