I very much like Dresden Codak as a comic, it fills the hole in my heart left by A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, and I really like that sort of comic book science fantasy but it’s a classic example of what the XKCD writer dismissed as “shouting science in the same way you’d shout Alakazam!”, I’m not sure I’d pitch it for it’s treatment of the singularity.
Mercy
Karma: 254
Well the proposed Tay-Sachs benefit is an example of a trade-off that probably isn’t present in our genome to as large an extent as was supposed during the hey day of the overdominance hypothesis. For heterozygote advantages to be a serious ethical issue would require the advantages they conferred to be difficult to obtain by other means, IQ I can see, but anyone rich enough to afford a designer baby probably isn’t going to bother giving it a sickle cell allele.
The issue here seems to be that appreciating music for cultural reasons is somehow dishonest, like some Russian’s appreciation of the Pogues is more pure than that of a London Irish kid who likes them partly as a signal of heritage. This is an attitude that’s common among certain alienated young people but I think most people see it the other way around. And it’s probably not in line with the way most artists think either, it’s quite common to see them attributing their innovations to the need to differentiate themselves from squares.
Zinn assumed familiarity with those though! He didn’t have anything novel to say about them, why simply regurgitate what’s known so idiots won’t misinterpret you?
I think it’s mostly an availability bias, since most of the non-climate scientists who have anything to say about global warming are heavily involved in either conservation or economic issues relating to the Global South, both areas likely to suffer under climate change. Do any Canadian/Russian/Northern European posters have any stories about people talking positively of climate change, I’ve heard a few comments about peach trees and wine in the UK, though it’s kinda muted because of the possibility of Gulf stream interactions making us colder. But certainly you hear plenty of arguments along the lines of “why should we care, we’ll be well out of it”.
EDIT: Come to think of it, given the wealth differentials involved, people probably avoid saying this because it would come across as callous, though with appropriate changes to international trade and development it needn’t be.
2) If you say X or N must be very large, does this prove that you measure torture and fun using in effect different scales, and therefore are a deontologist rather than a utilitarian?
I confess my knowledge of the subject is non-existant but everything I have seen has discussed utilitarianism as a sub-set of the broader class of teleological theories, and that not all of these would be uncomfortable with the idea of using different scales. And also that deontologists don’t have scales for measuring outcomes at all.
Depends on the social grouping, it’s increasingly acceptable among the young.
I’ve seen two main groups, socialists who’ll have something like that “pyramid of workers holding up the aristocracy” poster because they like the message and don’t care about the source*, and people in stereotypically first-against-the-wall jobs who’ll have a poster about killing bankers for kitsch value. People who like the style tend to go in for Polish movie posters.
*like, I imagine quite a few less wrongers would have no problem hanging this one on their wall: http://img402.imageshack.us/i/leten.jpg/
This is a very astute observation but I’m fairly certain what you are describing is normally refferred to as fascetiousness. Sarcasm uses hyperbole and intonation to make the falsity of the statement blindingly obvious, partly for humour but mostly to avoid having to directly refute it, either because it’s so stupid that doing so would be boring (“let the market decide” can’t solve every problem) embarrassing (no I’m not cheating on you), or because the speaker hopes to convince everyone this is so (see previous parentheses)
They do kind of merge together in multi-person arguments though, particularly on the internet where one person sarcastically dismissing a troll will leave everyone flippantly resurrecting their position long afterwards. Under the theory outlined above, this might be considered a kind of warding, like leaving heads on spears round your territory: “look, that argument has been dealt with, don’t bring it up again or we’ll quote you mockingly”
Believing democracy to be irrational is probably a result of mistaking it’s purpose. We say democracy is the best system because it lets the wisdom of the crowd influence decisions and it moderates governments but it wasn’t installed nor expanded for that reason. Charles didn’t sit on his throne and think, “by golly, this ruling business is pretty hard, I better get some help” and the parliamentarians didn’t get stumped centuries later and decide to see if women had any better ideas. People fought for suffrage for their class to advance it’s position in society, to at least some degree of success in every case.
A more important reason I suspect is that communism as a whole is bigger and Soviet iconography can be indicative of loyalty to some harmless local brand. A british trotskyist waving a hammer and sickle is emphatically not a big fan of the USSR.
There may be places where nazi iconography mostly signals loyalty to some local band of fascists but those local nazis are probably associated with or are violent thugs, not reformist presidential candidates.
Well a large number of problems facing humanity can be dismissed as “just price in externalities/reduce transaction costs and everything will be fine” but until that’s achieved tactics for reducing the social costs must be considered. I do wonder how many of the people responding to a given complaint with “Externalities!” actually go on to at the very least think about and discuss those external effects, and how many respond with the mentalese equivalent of “that’s that problem sorted”. This example is particularly instructive, since it’s unlikely anyone on this board is in a position to make major reforms with respect to land tenure and property rights.
I suspect the ambiguity in tech is deliberate, it’s trendy in certain circles to reframe habits, attitudes and knowledges as mental technology, the whole life-hacking thing is one example but activists often use a similar jargon (I think it comes from anthropology?) extending it to social techniques (cultural technology) as well. It’s maybe an attempt to hijack consumerist/shiny object collecting drives, maybe an attempt to signal practicality.
I have a feeling this technique, of using an abbreviation to refer to an umbrella of concepts which could be abbreviated to that, is quite common, though the only one that springs to mind right now is Trans.
Also note that in the lesson “intent to kill” is not presented by Quirrel as purely good thing, nor is Harry called the most capable warrior or the best kid to have your back in the fight but the most dangerous student, an epithet that could well apply to the cadet with the worst trigger discipline. It appears that intent to kill goes along with a lack of squeamishness about violence, and it may be easier to teach Harry about the proper uses of violence than to train Draco to be unaffected by it, but that does not mean that intent to kill is itself a good thing
Your prescriptions don’t follow from your descriptions, for donations to improve a governments development plans, it would have to be shown that they are pursuing wealth in order to promote development, rather than the other way around. And that their policies are constrained by wealth. Similarly, that a society has an effective economic system does not support donating money to that societies upper classes (ie: the Communist Party) unless that economic system’s effectiveness stems from the dominance of the upper classes.
Well I could name you states whose leaders I admire but am wary about dragging this conversation even deeper into mind-killer territory than it already is, I think the more salient point is that few commentators would have difficulty coming up with a list, whether it’d be composed of Asian tigers or Kerala and Bolivia or BRIC (though I’m uncertain if Brazil was ever considered Third World). The difference in membership between the political category of the third world and the colloquial one is evidence of good governance in the former.
I question the extent to which the two goals have to be juggled in any case, since he already knows how to kill Dementors, and isn’t willing to throw his life away to destroy them, which would be the main conflict. Destroying the Dementors is now a tactical issue that need only concern him when playing politics, so the only way it interferes with his transhumanist goals is if his politicking interferes with his research more-so than it would have if he weren’t doing it with Dementor destruction in mind.
As far as I can tell, Occlumency in MoR works like Obfuscomency from Always and Always.
Are you sarcastic? Is there some UN body or other collection of idiots that is actually going around using “Third World” to describe whatever countries are in need of it’s poverty reduction mechanisms, or something like that? The term has always been understood to mean those countries that were neutral in the fight between the First and Second worlds during the Cold War, on account of their new independence. If what you meant was poverty in countries correlates well with cultural and institutional barriers to growth well, I have no quarrel with that, though that “in a sense” bit in your original post is doing a lot of work. But third world properly refers to a set of states which contain some of the most rational state-craft in the world, certainly better than some countries whose membership in the first world seems, at this point, to be mostly a matter of historical accident, though I’m aware that this is basically code for “set of circumstances I don’t yet understand”.
The always readable Rebecca Solnit has an article in the march issue of LMD that’s relevant to Less Wrong’s interests, the stuff on mental disaster kits is a nice idea, the anti-nuclear stuff is instructive in it’s dishonesty: ArticleHere
This Collection of articles on medical reforms is specific to Britain, but the statistics abuse documented is common the world over, I particularly recommend the article on cancer stats.
I never really understood the fuss over cooking for engineers, but this vaguely similar idea is wonderful.
Also: Webcomics! Comics on the internet. Who doesn’t enjoy Webcomics? Only the craziest of individuals that’s for sure! Webcomics!
Here are some fanc pictures which don’t involve webcomics
Also, I’ll take this down if it doesn’t work for non-members, but this forum thread is the closest thing to one of those “well we should have a bunch of crappy smug fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd jokes but for atheists instead of christians” that’s actually made me laugh (by the same people who brought you this I gather). Since I’ve seen this sort of internet infidels stuff brought up a few times I thought people here might get a kick out of it!