TiffanyAching

Karma: 164

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 9:26 PM
0 points
in reply to: Elo’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 16 - Jan. 22, 2016
The urge to protect and prioritize children is partly biological/evolutionary—they have to be “cute” otherwise who’d put up with all the screaming and poop long enough to raise them to adulthood? The urge to protect and nurture them is a survival-of-the-species thing. Baby animals are cute because they resemble human babies—disproportionately big heads, big eyes, mewling noises, helplessness.

But from a moral perspective I’d argue that there is a greater moral duty to protect and care for children because they can neither fend nor advocate for themselves effectively. They’re largely at the mercy of their carers and society in general. An adult may bear some degree of responsibility for his poverty, for example, if he has made bad choices or squandered resources. His infant bears none of the responsibility for the poverty but suffers from it nonetheless and can do nothing to alleviate it. This is unjust.

There’s also the self-interest motive. The children we raise and nurture now will be the adults running the world when we are more or less helpless and dependent ourselves in old age.

And there’s the future-of-humanity as it extends past your own lifetime too, if you value that.

But of course these are all points about moral duty rather than moral value. I’m fuzzier on what moral value means in this context. For example the difference in moral value between the young person who is doing good right now and the old person who has done lots of good over their life, but isn’t doing any right now because that life is nearly over and they can’t. Does ability vs. desire to do good factor into this? The child can’t do much and the end-of-life old person can’t do much, though they may both have a strong desire to do good. Only the adult in between can match the ability to the will.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 8:41 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: John Nash’s Ideal Money: The Motivations of Savings and Thrift

...that’s a very plain-vanilla story with little drama—compared to the baseline of ’net forums and online communities in general.

Well yeah, I suppose that’s true. But the screenwriter can zhuzh it up a bit, throw in a murder somewhere.

It would be… regrettable if LW turned into an ideologically homogeneous place where everyone sees the world in a basically similar way.

Absolutely. I didn’t come here for everyone to agree with me. But disagreement, even passionate ideological disagreement, isn’t the same as obsessively following people around to downvote everything they say. That’s just plain old batshittery. I’ll probably disagree with you at some point but I’m not going to put your name down on my List of Enemies Who Must Be Destroyed. It’s getting cluttered anyway.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 8:32 PM
1 point
in reply to: niceguyanon’s comment on: Marginal Revolution Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Movement
Good point well made. I have nothing to add but agreement. Also I may steal this analogy and use it in future, just so you know.

Especially because you’ve noted that getting rid of the third guard does help. The argument that I see often but don’t understand is that trying to ditch the third guard is not worth doing because it doesn’t solve the wider peasant-injustice issue.

I don’t mean just with the police brutality/American race-relations thing either—it seems almost any time people want to put work into fixing Specific Issue X, there are other people standing back and saying it’s a waste of effort because it won’t solve Larger Issue Y. Winds me right up.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 8:12 PM
0 points
in reply to: Science’s comment on: Universal Hate

As far as “rational” in some situations in may not be worth spending the effort to determine if this person is one of those extremely rare “good X’s”.

Granted—but it’s not necessary to determine that. It’s only necessary to recognize that there are “good Xs” and direct your hate to what you hate about the “bad Xs”. If some but not all Blues are thieves and you hate theft, it’s only necessary to recognize that and say “I hate thieves” instead of “I hate Blues” in order to make your real meaning and position clear.

I was going to start by questioning the utility of hating abstract concepts, then I realized part of the problem is that we may be conflating several things under the word “hate”.

I think you’re right. Maybe “abhor” is more useful in this context?

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 8:00 PM
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: John Nash’s Ideal Money: The Motivations of Savings and Thrift
Thanks gjm! Once again you have used your presumably-valuable time to give me a really thorough explanation. Jeez, what a story.

Eugine’s new account was banned. Another one appeared. That was banned. Another appeared. After a while, new Eugine accounts were appearing faster than the old ones were closed down.

There’s movie material here. A dark psychological indie-thing about obsession and rage. “Troll”, starring… Steve Carrell? He was dead creepy in Foxcatcher.

I mean, to mess with a community once or twice is one thing. To keep coming back and back, unable to let it go or move on, is the stuff of tragedy.

Here’s a rough sketch of how I think he sees the world...

Good thing I joined after downvotes were disabled. I do not think we would be pals.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 7:49 PM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Marginal Revolution Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Movement

Let me offer you alternative hypotheses. One is that victimization is determined by the socioeconomic status—basically your wealth and/or ability to demonstrate high-class markers. For example, I doubt that white trailer trash is treated particularly gently by the cops.

Actually I think that’s true too. There’s nothing mutually exclusive about them, as you point out yourself. When I said “disproportionately determined by race” I didn’t mean determined only by race. I’d guess—just a guess, no data—that there’s a gender disproportion too—men are probably more likely to be victims of police brutality even adjusting for their greater likelihood to commit violent crimes. But biases are stackable. A cop who is more likely to be inappropriately violent towards poor people in general might be more likely again to be hard on poor, black people.

Why did you pick race?

I didn’t pick it, that’s what the discussion is about. OP picked it. If it was just a thread about police brutality in general I don’t think I’d have stuck to race alone.

Sure. But a fair number of cops are black. Some of them are racist, right? You are arguing that this must lead to disproportionate impact on non-blacks. Is that so?

Sure, there are black cops, a certain percentage of whom must be racist. I don’t know why I wouldn’t consider that “racism”. So that could lead to a disproportionate impact on non-black people in terms of the actions of those specific cops. But given that A. the black population share is about 13% of America and B. the percentage of cops who are black is lower than that again, I don’t see how the disproportion could be equivalent unless each racist black cop was having ten times the negative impact of each racist white cop—and that’s not even accounting for the possibility of black cops discriminating against black people, because of internalized prejudice or over-correction to avoid the appearance of going easy on members of their own race.

talking specifically about some variation of white supremacism

No, I didn’t have white supremacists specifically in mind, as I think of them—though there must be some white supremacist cops. We might be defining them differently though, I strongly associate white supremacism with some kind of group-membership or at least a very explicit, conscious avowal of racism as right. Someone else might argue that all white racists are white supremacists by definition but I think that would be an oversimplification.

Consider Asians. They are not white and a white supremacist should be strongly biased against them (as indeed white supremacists are). So, are Asians brutalized by police more than whites? No? Why not?

Aren’t they? I have no idea. If not, I’d point out that someone can be biased against different groups while not necessarily treating them the same way. What I’ve seen of white-to-Asian racism in the US it looks more contemptuous and dismissive—negative stereotypes of Asian men seem to revolve around “weak, geeky, submissive”. That kind of view might well lead to less violence than the negative stereotypes about black men.

I’d also like to point out here that I don’t think police brutality is America’s biggest race-problem or even America’s biggest policing problem. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to cops in general, as I am to anyone who does a job I need someone to do but wouldn’t want to do myself. Pointing out that they sometimes do wrong is not to call them all a bunch of fascist pigs or whatever. I think overwork and undiagnosed mental health issues probably played a role in some of their more high-profile fuckups, not just assholery, racism or incompetence.

(Am I allowed say fuckups?)

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 5:01 PM
3 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Marginal Revolution Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Movement
Thanks for the link, that’s an interesting and useful article. Updated my probabilities in a few areas. Also an amazingly civil, rational comments section given the nature of the material.

It didn’t help me very much on police shootings though—lot of way-out-of-date data that points both ways depending on area. No racial bias in shooting recorded in New York, seriously significant effect in Tennessee. Given what I know about American racism-by-state that’s almost disappointingly obvious. (Again though, out of date—relevant laws in Memphis have changed since).

Okay, strap in, this is a long one. First I’m going to cheerfully steal a chunk directly from one of those comments on SSC for your consideration:

Suppose that you notice that on average, green shows up twice as often as red, but you can’t see a pattern to it. If you want to maximise your winnings, should you on average bet on green twice as often as red to match the frequencies you’re seeing? No, you should strictly bet on green every time.

(Anyone know where I might have read about this before? Pretty sure it’s somewhere on LW, but I can’t find it.)

Similarly, if a random black person is statistically more likely to be a criminal than a white person, then a police officer’s or prosecutor’s career incentive is to focus on them.

Of course this wouldn’t fly as a practical policy. Green and red lights may be independent from your choices, but humans are not. If you completely removed police overwatch from non-black populations, this would encourage crime in those populations. Even if you didn’t care, there’s no way you’d defend yourself from accusations of blatant racism and unfairness.

Still, the incentive is there. And it’s based on math – racial prejudice not required.

Because I believe people tend to follow incentives, my current best guess is that police do over-profile (target the higher risk groups more than the actual risk differences would suggest), and they are going to, and the only question is to what extent this can be mitigated.

I’d be interested to see what you think of that.

Now, speaking for myself -

I find no flaw with your buggy-robot analogy. That would indeed in result in more shootings of innocent black people without any need for racial prejudice influencing the decision to shoot, simply because of disproportionate exposure given higher crime rates.

My contention, however, is that racial prejudice is a factor in real-world police shootings/violence. So the question I ask as a half-decent wannabe rationalist is how my belief should constrain my expectation—how do I expect my world to look different from a non-racist buggy-robot world? How do I test it? Honestly I don’t have a particularly satisfactory answer. Some attempts follow, feel free to skim if you’re not arsed reading them.
1. I would expect the disproportionate impact of police shootings/violence upon innocent black people (innocent meaning unarmed/non-dangerous here, not necessarily innocent of any crime) to be measurably higher even when adjusted for the higher crime-rate/residential grouping effect as it was in the Memphis study. (Though not to such a degree—important to state I do believe that this problem is getting better). However, the way a shooting event or other incident of violence is recorded depends very heavily on the word of the officer involved (the event is assumed to be “an “assault on law enforcement” and the officer is referred to as “the victim” in the report on a fatal shooting by default). If racial prejudice influenced his/her decision to shoot it could also—with or without any deliberate lying—influence his/her assessment of whether the individual shot was behaving as a threat. (You’d be amazed what some police officers will call “assault on an officer” or “resisting arrest” with a straight face—that’s a problem even without touching any racial-disparity issues). So that’s also in my model, and the fact that the two effects counter each other means they’re of little use to me as a measurable anticipation-constraint.
1. I’d expect a higher impact on black people of what I’d call “WTF shootings”—shootings where the victim could not have been deemed a threat by a reasonable observer. Unresisting arrestees, fleeing suspects holding nothing in their hands, kids holding toy guns shot before being given any chance to comply with verbal directions—or being given no verbal directions. Not tragic-but-understandable mistake type shootings—“itchy trigger finger” shootings that baffle reasonable explanation and appear to proceed directly from some kind of gut feeling on the part of the officer.
Interesting to think of this in relation to what seems like an odd number of reports of police shooting securely-tethered pet dogs that barked at them. I’ve seen an actual cop try to explain this phenomenon by saying that police often have terrifying, dangerous encounters with vicious guard dogs owned by drug dealers and the like, and develop a fear that leads them to react with instinctive aggression to a barking dog without taking the time to evaluate whether or not it’s a threat. Interesting, that. I have no data for it though, so just an idea.

Anyway, I’d expect these “WTF shootings” to hit black people harder, but one can only apply the “reasonable observer” test if the incident is recorded on camera or there are a decent number of witnesses—and in this case I’m willing to admit that the political heat around this issue might lead to WTF shootings of black people being *over-represented” or identified where they don’t exist. So, measurement problem here again.
1. Police shooting disproportionately affecting black people even when you only count the shooting events that occur in locations that mitigate the grouping effect. Put simply, your robot that shoots innocent people is disproportionately likely to hit a black person because it’s in a black neighborhood interacting with black people for a disproportionate number of hours of the day. But real policemen are assigned to patrol specific areas—the racial mix of the people they interact with is governed by the demographics of their “beat”, not overall crime stats. There are whole all-white towns in America. Pretend for a second that the crime rate among black Americans is four times that of white Americans. Now imagine a police officer in a neighborhood—or city, even—with a 3% black population. Adjust for higher crime rate and their interactions with black citizens go up to 12% which neatly matches the actual demographics (if I remember the figures.) That could be an adequate sort of “controlled environment” where interactions mirror actual population demographics. If black people are disproportionately shot within that neighbourhood, I’d say that’s a measurable indication that racism is playing a part. If they aren’t, it indicates the opposite.
But after all that, I just don’t know where to find current objective data or how to look at it, and at the end of the day I’m looking for something that is capable of covering its own tracks. I’m not quite at “no sabotage is evidence of Fifth Column” yet but I’m brushing dangerously close to a universally applicable argument. Racism not evident in data? Data could be skewed by racism! Sounds dodgy but common sense says it is possible and has happened before and I can’t discount it. But given my difficulty making my beliefs pay rent, I’ve revised my certainty down a bit just by writing all this out.

But not a lot down and here’s why—the other side—the part two of this ridiculously long comment.

A certain percentage of Americans are racists. Lots are a teeny bit racist (arguably we all are), but a few are massively, viciously racist. This isn’t distributed equally over the states or within them—there are clusters. If American police are a fair sample of the American population, then many of them are a wee bit racist and a few are massively racist, and there are clusters in certain areas. (By the way, I wouldn’t be overly surprised if American cops were less racist on average than Americans as a whole. That still leaves a goodly few “bad apples”). How could that not impact their treatment of minority-group individuals? What negates the effect of that bias in a given situation? I’m willing to accept the impact could be neutralized to a large extent by complex structures and redundancies within, say, the court system - but in the personal, individual, encounters—split-second decisions whether or not to shoot, whether or not to resist the impulse to kick someone in the head while they’re on the ground, what check is there? You can say that the buggy-robot is a simpler explanation, but to me it’s just a shorter one. The more complex idea, as I see it, is that somehow there’s far less racism among police officers than among the genpop, or that somehow the racism there is is prevented from impacting its targets in situations where no apparent check is provided. The absence of racism as a motive force in any instances of police misbehavior or misjudgment would need explaining to me.

I’m done. Sorry about the novel, it’s been a slow day at work.

TFL;DFR—the evidence is complex, patchy and difficult to interpret but doesn’t appear to be stronger for my position than the converse; however cops are people, some people are racist, therefore some cops are racist, and cops have a lot of discretion as to how and when it’s appropriate to use physical force which means some whacking great racists make decisions about whether or not to shoot or brutalize black people, and I don’t see how that can’t equal disproportionate impact, at least in certain states or areas.

My reasoning on some parts is probably lousy with holes, so if you’ve slogged through this far, have at it is with a hatchet, and if you haven’t, I don’t blame you.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 9:38 AM
1 point
in reply to: Science’s comment on: Marginal Revolution Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Movement

Why? Because I’m showing that your position is BS?

Believe it or not, there are other reasons for considering the usefulness of continuing a discussion. But if you’ve decided I’m “afraid of losing” there’s not much I could say to convince you otherwise, is there?

In that case the OP doesn’t belong on LW.

You’re right—it doesn’t at all, and that’s the first and last thing I should have said on the topic here. I don’t think political posts never have a place on LW, but they have to clear a certain bar of relevance to be worth the potential downsides and this one doesn’t do that.

As for this discussion, what are we doing here? What useful outcome could there be? You haven’t convinced me of anything, I haven’t convinced you of anything. We’re not arguing any specific point anymore, we’re just batting statements back and forth at each other, and they don’t even have the merit of being original—everything you’ve said so far I’ve seen before many times, and I’m sure that’s also true of my statements for you. We’re having a perfectly civil exchange on another thread so it’s not that either of us are fundamentally crappy discussants, but this one is turning acrimonious.

race relations in America in general is relevant to BLM.

Our differences clearly go miles beyond BLM, and if we have to comb back through all of America’s racial history—maybe even further—until we find common ground, and then argue forward from there, we’ll be here for months.

Even if we were unlikely to reach an agreement, but were gaining useful insights into each other’s positions, or gaining respect for each other as rationalists, this might be worthwhile, but we’re not.

I am tapping out. If you want to put that in your win column, that’s up to you.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 7:38 AM
0 points
in reply to: Science’s comment on: Universal Hate

I’d say the most important property is whether being Catholic is part of one’s identity. Specifically “I admire those who are better Catholics than myself and consider them to be holier and more virtuous people than myself. I feel somewhat guilty about not being more like them.”

I take your point, but that gives the notional I-hate-Catholics guy a pretty difficult task of differentiation, since plenty of people who identify as Catholics—if you asked them if they were Catholics, they’d say yes—don’t mean that. They mean “I was baptized”. So a more accurate statement for IHC guy would be “I hate Catholics who do/say/believe X, Y or Z—though I don’t count as real Catholics, and therefore do not hate, people who refer to themselves as Catholics but who don’t do/say/believe X, Y or Z”. Even among self-identified Catholics who do the odd bit of practicing—midnight Mass at Christmas, funeral services, praying to St. Anthony when they’ve lost their keys—many don’t align with Catholic dogma on many subjects (pre-marital sex, contraception etc.). Identifying as Catholic means a different thing to them than the Pope would like it to, but they still do it.

And if IHC guy instead says “I assume that everyone who claims to be a Catholic means that they do/say/believe X, Y and Z, and therefore I will hate everybody who describes themselves as Catholic”, then that’s where “useless and irrational” comes in—because he’s including in his hatred people who don’t actually do/say/believe the actual things he has a problem with. That’s the basic problem with attributing a negative characteristic to a huge group of people—the likelihood that it holds true for all group members diminishes as group-size goes up, unless the group is specifically defined as “people who have done X”.

This is more-or-less where we disagree. Yes, you could define such a category by using a fractal shaped boundary, but it’s unclear why it would be relevant to the question of whether one should hate members of that category.

I think my point above goes to this. If you hate the crime of murder then it makes sense that you would direct your hate at every “murderer”. By definition they have done the thing you object to. Russians, however, are not alcoholics by definition, so hating Russians for being drunks makes no sense. With big demographic groups, your hate cannot be directed at a specific action that they all, by definition, must have taken—except, as you pointed out, in the case of freely-chosen political party membership, but then only in the case that you consider membership of that party in and of itself, regardless of other actions or beliefs such an awful thing a as to deserve hatred.

A decent definition is “one who lives by lies”.

Thanks for clarifying.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 6:43 AM
2 points
in reply to: Science’s comment on: Marginal Revolution Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Movement

But why is it fair to focus on “Whichever Lives Are Most Affected By Police Brutality At The Moment” when that’s a tiny subset of the lives being affected by brutality. The number of lives affected by the “brutality” of blacks is much much larger, yet focusing on that would be racist.

In the specific context of police brutality in America, victimization—of the innocent, by the way, as well as the guilty—is disproportionately determined by race. This disparity is the specific problem BLM was set up to address. By the logic that says it is not useful for anyone to focus on this specific problem because other, more widespread problems exist, you can say it’s worthless to focus on any specific problem if there exists a greater problem. Why waste any energy on any problem in America at all? America is a small part of the world. Focus on malaria instead. Or focus everything on climate change. That’s a bigger problem than any other.

So if it makes sense to focus on the fact that rapists are more likely to be male why doesn’t it make sense to focus on the fact that rapists are more likely to be black and/or Muslim?

That was nowhere stated or implied in what I said. It’s one thing expanding the discussion from “debating the relationship between BLM and ALM” to “debating the motive force behind BLM in general”, as has happened here, but I don’t want to get into a discussion of sexual violence right now so we’ll leave that.

The argument for, e.g., “Black Lives Matter” is that we should focus blacks beaten up or shot by cops because those are more common.

No, not because it’s more common—it’s nowhere near more common, given the difference in population sizes—because it’s disproportionate.

The argument for “Black History Month” is that we should focus on blacks who have accomplished historically significant things because there are less common.

Again, no—the argument for Black History Month is that history as generally taught focuses on the historical roles played by white people to the near or total exclusion of black people.

I think we ought to pause for a second here and query whether this discussion is worth pursuing. We’re discussing a hot-button, emotionally-charged political topic on LW, which isn’t really the place for that, and we’re coming at it with, I think, a different set of previously accepted truths and values. It’s hard to see a clear path to one of us changing our mind or our outlook because there’s not a clear argument here. We’ve already gone from “BLM v. ALM” to “BLM in general” and are starting to creep into “race relations in America in general”. If the topic’s too broad and the ground too easily shifted, we risk devolving into a useless arguments-as-soldiers sort of exchange that doesn’t lead anywhere. Unless we can agree on one specific issue and stick to hashing that out, we might be better off wrapping up this discussion—after you’ve made any counter-points you’d like, of course.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 6:30 AM
0 points
in reply to: Science’s comment on: Universal Hate

What about practicing membership? What about identifying as?

Well, what about it? There are people who practice Catholicism and people who don’t. There are people who say “I am Catholic” meaning “I actively follow the rules of Catholicism”, and and people who say “I am Catholic” meaning “I was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church when I was a kid”. They all go down as Catholics on the census. Practicing Catholics are a subset of the number of people recorded as Catholics in the world.

How so? What’s the relevant difference, and why? Especially when the comparison is with something like “fraudster”?

To be quite honest, simply because I think there’s a category of group-memberships that includes things like nationalities and political affiliations and religions, and doesn’t include things like “fraudster”, “golfer” or “rationalist” and it was the former meaning I intended to convey in my original post. Group is clearly too vague a term. If I said “demographics” instead of groups would that be clearer?

Why is the size relevant here?

Moral uniformity and broadness of political platform, I’d say. As the party gets larger the pool of potential beliefs/positions that can be held under that party’s banner becomes more broad—I accept that those two things don’t always go hand in hand, but they do usually in democracies where people are free to choose their party, and in systems where people are less free to choose their party there’s a whole other moral aspect to membership. As the potential beliefs or positions that can be held by an individual who still calls themselves an X-member rises it becomes less accurate to ascribe one specific noxious characteristic to all group members.

And to bring it back round to the initial topic of debate, would you say that it is useful to hate all members of a particular political party given that you thought that membership in it was immoral? Can you give an example? And what about the liars? I’d like to understand your position more clearly.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 5:37 AM
1 point
in reply to: Science’s comment on: Universal Hate
Okay. I assume you mean religions and political parties. Nominal membership in a religion requires no specific action. 90% of Irish people would be considered “Catholic” by virtue of having been baptized and confirmed as children. They need not have taken any specific action as adults to be afforded that designation, nor do they need to be “practising” in any active sense—going to Mass, for example. Many don’t. They still go down as Catholics.

In the case of political parties, you’re right that an individual needs to register, or vote a certain way, or take some action as an adult to be counted as a “member of that group”. I still think that’s a very obviously different kind of category to one like “murderers”. Of course it’s possible to argue that claiming membership of a specific political party is inherently immoral—a lot of people would argue that for membership in a neo-Nazi party, for example, though I did specify “large” parties up above (large as in mainstream, not niche or fringe, one of the main political parties of a nation, containing a decent percentage of that country’s population). Is that what you’re arguing?

And any comment on the “liars” question?

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 5:11 AM
1 point
in reply to: Science’s comment on: Universal Hate
Perhaps I should have been more specific—I did not mean groups in the sense of “people who have all performed a certain action”, like murder. I meant “groups” in the sense of things likes nationalities, ethnicities, major religions, large political parties. The kind of groups that are not morally uniform, if only by virtue of their size—even if membership in that group correlates to some degree with a negative action or attribute. Russia has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world, but saying “I hate Russians because they’re drunks” is irrational. Millions of Russians—in fact most Russians—are not alcoholics. If you can suggest a more precise term than “group” so that I can convey my meaning better I’d be grateful.

That said, I’d be interested in a more detailed explanation of what you mean by “hating all liars”. Do you mean that you hate people who have told at least one lie, people who frequently lie, people who habitually lie, or people who lie for specifically selfish reasons? “I hate all liars on principle” is a pretty broad statement.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 3:08 AM
1 point
in reply to: bogus’s comment on: Marginal Revolution Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Movement
I think there’s some miscommunication here regarding the quoted sentence. You used the phrase “Whichever Lives Are Most Affected By Police Brutality At The Moment”. I stated that this group, right now at the moment, is “black Americans”. I wouldn’t have thought you would disagree with that statement given that you said it was acceptable for “Black Lives” to be used as a “convenient shorthand” for WLAMABPBATM, and you’ve just reiterated that being black is highly correlated with being unfairly victimized. Where’s the disagreement here?

As regards “ALM”, the only argument you’ve advanced is that the idea that it can derail discussions may not be meaningful. So say I ceded that, for the sake of argument—though I don’t think you’ve actually demonstrated that it’s a semantic stopsign, etc. What are your responses to my other points? I’ll restate them clearly in case my previous comment was not sufficiently well-structured.
1. “All lives matter” adds nothing to the discourse.
2. “All lives matter”, as a response or counter to “Black Lives Matter” (which as far as I’ve seen is all it is), is an implied rebuke carrying a tacit accusation of unfairness.
3. As “Black Lives Matter” exists as a slogan specifically referring to the higher probability of unfair victimization at the hands of police faced by black people, “All Lives Matter” carries with it an implication that this higher probability is minimal, non-existant or unimportant.
If you can present an alternate explanation of why people say “All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter”, I’m perfectly willing to hear it.

TiffanyAching Jan 19, 2017, 1:28 AM
5 points
in reply to: bogus’s comment on: Marginal Revolution Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Movement
I don’t know if this is the right place to have this conversation but I can’t help myself. Mods—feel free to kill this.

Disclaimer, I’m not American. I don’t have a dog in this fight one way or another, but I can pattern-match.

People object to “All Lives Matter” because it derails the discussion and implies that it’s somehow unfair to focus, as you said, on “Whichever Lives Are Most Affected By Police Brutality At The Moment”—which in America means black people specifically. It’s the same reason people object when a discussion of sexual violence is cluttered up with comments insisting that everyone recognize “women can commit rape too!” or when a discussion of social discrimination faced by disabled people meets a response like “able-bodied people can be bullied too! I was bullied for being ginger!”. I’ve seen that kind of “what about me” response in a dozen different forms and it’s almost never useful. It’s a cry of not fair along the same lines as “Why can’t we have a Straight Pride Parade?” “Why isn’t there a White History Month?” and so on and so on.

Nobody was tweeting “All Lives Matter” before “Black Lives Matter”. It’s not the slogan of any particular group or movement. It’s a response, and a clear implied criticism. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s inherently racist, I’m not surprised in the least to see that motive attributed to it. If I was American I’d certainly be objecting to it too.

TiffanyAching Jan 18, 2017, 11:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: dropspindle’s comment on: John Nash’s Ideal Money: The Motivations of Savings and Thrift
I’m dying to know, who the heck is this Eugine character? I keep seeing the name but I don’t know the backstory.

TiffanyAching Jan 18, 2017, 8:19 PM
7 points
on: Universal Hate
I must state that I don’t think this meets the general “relevance” standard for political posts on LW, and I don’t personally want to see that standard lowered.

That said, I do agree with the central point—in fact it’s because it seems so ethically obvious that I don’t think it clears the relevance bar. Is there anyone here on LW who is likely to disagree with the statement “hating every member of a group X on principle is irrational and counter-productive”? I’m not trying to be sarky, it’s a good post, I just don’t see how it’s likely to provoke a discussion or a debate here.

TiffanyAching Jan 18, 2017, 7:25 PM
0 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: The trolleycar dilemma, an MIT moral problem app
They’re allowing users to build their own scenarios and add them as well, so it looks like the intention is to let the complexity grow over time from a basic starting point.

Actually, I wonder whether they might find that people really don’t want a great deal of complexity in the decision-making process. People might prefer to go with a simple “minimize loss off life, prioritize kids” rule and leave it at that, because we’re used to cars as a physical hazard that kill blindly when they kill at all. People might be more morally comfortable with smart cars that aren’t too smart.

TiffanyAching Jan 18, 2017, 7:05 PM
0 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 16 - Jan. 22, 2016
Yes, that’s the sort of idea I was getting at—though not anything so extreme.

Of course I don’t really think Elo was saying that at all anyway, I’m not trying to strawman. I’d just like to see the idea clarified a bit.

(We use substitution ciphers as spoiler tags? Fancy!)

TiffanyAching Jan 18, 2017, 1:30 AM
2 points
in reply to: Elo’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 16 - Jan. 22, 2016
Could you explain this a little more? I don’t quite see your reasoning. Leaving aside the fact that “morally valuable” seems too vague to me to be meaningfully measured anyway, adults aren’t immutably fixed at a “moral level” at any given age. Andrei “Rostov Ripper” Chikatilo didn’t take up murdering people until he was in his forties. At twenty, he hadn’t proven anything.

Bob at twenty years old hasn’t murdered anybody, though Bob at forty might. Now you can say that we have more data about Bob at twenty than we do about Bob at ten, and therefore are able to make more accurate predictions based on his track record, but by that logic Bob is at his most morally valuable when he’s gasping his last on a hospital bed at 83, because we can be almost certain at that point that he’s not going to do anything apart from shuffle off the mortal coil.

And if “more or less likely to commit harmful acts in future” is our metric of moral value, then children who are abused, for example, are less morally valuable than children who aren’t, because they’re more likely to commit crimes. That’s not intended to put any words in your mouth by the way, I’m just saying that when I try to follow your reasoning it leads me to weird places. I’d be interested to see you explain your position in more detail.