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Lykurg

We're all living in Amerika

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joined 2022 December 29 10:51:01 UTC

Hello back frens

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User ID: 2022

Lykurg

We're all living in Amerika

2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 December 29 10:51:01 UTC

					

Hello back frens


					

User ID: 2022

Verified Email

Can you argue that it is not ok to intentionally avoid conception?

No, because my point is about a problem with a combination of your views, not which direction to resolve it.

I think the definition of sexual intercourse is apparent by looking at the genitals and what they do together

Theres a general sense of "this thing goes in here" that I think is apparent. But just from looking at it, I couldnt tell that "oral sex to right before orgasm, then sticking it in" is fine but "Sex with a condom" isnt. Those would be question marks, to be filled in by a more formal understanding. If you think its obvious, that might be because you know the answer already.

Where does the ejaculate go?

First, your descriptions says "in", not "into", so technically it doesnt matter. But I would say that if it is in the condom, it is also in the vagina. Yes, you can ask questions which sound similar to your original formulation and lead to different intuitions, because language can be sensitive to details like that - but again, you wouldnt know where and which of these reformulations to use, if you didnt already know the answer. And then what about a diaphragm? There it definitely goes into the vagina, just not the part where an egg might be.

I notice that youre mostly not answering my examples about what might or might not count. There are a lot of contraceptive methods, even if we only consider the ones that are actually used in the real world - but apparently none of them are acceptable to the church, no matter how close to conception their mechanism of action is, except various forms of "not having sex". Its very unlikely for a principle to act this precisely, without somehow refering to conception - this is why Im expecting some argument along those lines, not just because of what Im familiar with.

and this approach is hinted at in a few other Pauline letters

Which passages do you have in mind?

Can you explain to me where?

Have sex on a day you know you are unlikely to make a new life - Seems unlikely this action would be bad too. Otherwise there would also be warnings against having sex while pregnant or post-menupause, and there aren't.

This reads, to me, like youre taking situations where non-conception is forseeable but not intended (pregnant, post-menopause), and arguing that its therefore ok with intent also.

The point of genitals is to have sexual intercourse.

The question is, what tells us that the sexual intercourse thats the point is exactly "ejaculation of a penis in a vagina" and not some related different concept with different boundaries? I think that would be very difficult to explain without tying it to the purpose of sexual intercourse. Im expecting something like "the evolutionary purpose of sexual intercourse is making babies, penis ejaculating in vagina is neccesary for that, therefore its nessecary to proper sexual intercourse".

Firing a gun can be done intentionally to kill people and for target practice/sport, etc.

Sexual intercourse can be done for making babies and for pair bonding and pleasure

Target practice generally still requires firing small ballistics. Pair bonding and pleasure dont require penis ejaculating in vagina. In fact, target practice doesnt always require them: there are "dry fire" drills to train the gross mechanics of handling the gun, and there are cartridge-shaped devices that make the gun shoot laser instead, to let you train things that wouldnt be safe with real bullets. Do you feel these violate the purpose of the gun? If no, why?

If you're wearing a condom, you aren't having sexual intercourse in the sense a Catholic defines it. The penis is not ejaculating in a vagina.

I think thats not how people use words, generally. "Penis ejaculating in vagina", as an ordinary english description, does not actually exclude using a condom. Your conclusion that it doesnt count does not derive from trying to apply that description, but from your knowledge of catholic ethics and what the answer is supposed to be. I think youve given a description that doesnt really describe your beliefs, and not noticed because its too intuitive for you.

Please notice that I have not once argued that contraceptives are wrong because it avoids conception

I know. Im arguing that your reasoning against typical methods of contraception doesnt actually work, and that something more like the above would be needed. And I dont mean "work" in the sense that I dont feel bound by it, I mean you yourself would not be able to figure out which methods are and arent allowed based on the reasons you give, if you didnt already know what the answer was supposed to be.

and i think I made that clear in the above comment when I talked about the subject knowing

I dont think this is considering intent properly. Theres a difference between doing something despite or because of an effect. I think what Im suggesting here is similar to the doctrine of double effect - and you have been arguing that because the "forseen unintended" case is ok, the "forseen intended" case is too.

I think there is a conflation between sexual intercourse and the possible results of sexual intercourse - or conception. Sexual intercourse is the ejaculation of a penis in a vagina.

How do you think acts and their proper form are determined? I thought that it was to do with purposes. Meanwhile your description taken at face value, without background knowledge of what you want it to mean, sounds like condoms are ok too. I suggest that thats not a coincidence: the principles youre using on this case are much more permissive than those that inform your general view.

Thank you. Most of this seems pretty reasonable, I have some disagreements from action 3 downwards. I think this is a superficial understanding of what an act is, and you would have trouble in other areas of ethics if you set aside background knowledge and intent this much. Consider for example a surgery that ends up lethal: what distinguishes accident from murder, and bad luck from negligence? What is the sin of gluttony, if knowing that youre satiated makes no difference?

You could similarly break the pulling out method down into steps, each of which "surely is allowed": 1) having sex is allowed under the right conditions 2) youre not obligated to keep the penis inside the whole time 3) if you just happen to ejaculate while its outside, thats an involuntary reaction. This assumes you can do it without jerking once outside, but thats possible and I doubt its supposed to make a difference.

From what I remember, the church allows nuns to use the pill in places where theyre at risk of being raped. So its allowed to be used, and even for its contraceptive purpose. Why? Presumably because they dont intend to have sex that way.

Would an intra-vaginal spermicide be allowed? What if its application moves further in time from the intercourse, in the limit to something like a copper IUD without side effects? You cant technology your way out of purposes, and the selling point of natural family planning is that it doesnt feel like technology.

Conor McGregor can be filmed heading off with an outright fatty to presumably bang or at least fool around

That makes sense to me. If theres a woman right in front of you that you can have consequence-free sex with, and your reaction is to go find a different one, I suspect thats mostly been selected against. It would be too rare to have multiple such options to have a specific reaction for it.

As for Zuckerberg at all, keep in mind that a rich guy that you know for being rich had many opportunities to sell it all and have more money than a hedonist could ever need, and he made it to the point where you know him because he didnt take those. There could well be large numbers who update however you think they should, that you just dont see. Actually, Im curious how you think they should, since you say that prostitues are bad also?

Why would you use this though? I can understand not wanting to do hormonal birth control, but thats not the only option. Im generally open to natural law argumentation, I just dont see why they would treat cycle timing differently from condoms or especially pulling out. The only relevant distinguishing factor is that, as a certain dissident rightist said, the days you cant are the ones youll want it most. I could see any combination of this being good/bad if it does/doesnt cause people to fail, but its not the argument any exception-makers seem to go with.

Personally, I couldn't care less how "weird" this seems in the first place, as long as the treatments work. The human body is weird and unintuitive in the first place.

I care about weirdness because its a sign were missing something. This kind of weirdness is not about violating how we expect things to work, you could substitute most properties for "recreational" and it would still be weird. So I dont think it matters whether the body is intutive. By analogy, the current best proof of the four colour theorem works by proving all graphs countain one of 633 possible configurations, and brute-force checking that each of them is reducible in a certain sense, which they all are. You dont need to know anything about mathematics to see that there might be more going on there.

Well, ECT and transcranial magnetic stimulation use no drugs at all

Thats certainly interesting. Even after years of reading Scott, I still had the impression that after the SSRIs, its maybe MAOIs and then nothing. Its still interesting that its only recreational drugs so far. I think cerebrolysin was supposed to be that, but it doesnt seem like that went anywhere.

but leaving that aside, there's an opioid epidemic.

Yes. It would be nice to notice danger before it leads to an epidemic. Theres even this same "the numbers say addiction is rare" used as part of the argument for expanding use that far in the first place. You may not be in America, but its relevant because you lean on "we as doctors".

There are all kinds of drugs that have nil recreational value, but which engender physiological or psychological dependence.

I know. What Im talking about is the pattern with psilocybin, ketamine, maybe ecstasy? where they are supposed to treat depression with few sessions, and effects lasting months. Its weird that we found three recreational drugs from different families doing this, and no non-recreational ones.

There's an endless list of substances that, if used recklessly or without sufficient knowledge, lead to harm.

And very few of them are tempting to use in such ways. Those substances doctors have in fact used in harmful ways. The US just recently had a dustup about opioids.

That would entail a full lecture

It really shouldnt. Listing of the action mechanisms of those drugs is not an explanation - if thats all you would do, the high-level answer is "its just a coincidence". It doesnt explain why no non-recreational drugs do the same. If there is some receptor pathway that necessarily connects the curative and recreational parts, then what makes you think they are distinct?

That's akin to borrowing happiness from tomorrow at a very high interest rate, it doesn't end well.

If were talking about the effect of a ~one time experience, then comedowns arent necessarily relevant. We might imagine for example someone seeing "Wow, its possible to be happy" and that giving him hope in life. That hope might point down the abyss, but thats only measurable when you get there.

But taking this at face value: do you think peoples lives are worse for alcohol? Theres a hangover there too, and in the narrow pleasure-pain accounting, youre not coming out ahead - yet there are many apprently non-addicted people who are using it a decent amount.

It's highly reductive to dismiss such advances as "Drugs can make you feel better when used responsibly".

Yes, thats the point. The value of the cliche depends on not thinking you can outsmart it.

Nobody has lost their job or family because they drink too much coffee.

I am well aware. The link is not directly related to my point here, and I was wondering more about the idea that shes better off for it.

It also remains fascinating, the way people will respond to every part of my comment but the main one. Why do you think apparently different drugs work in such similar ways here?

Not either of these unfortunately. Definitely post-split, likely post-covid. My top guess is that it was linked in theschism. Will play with the search engine, thanks.

Prescribing cocaine and heroin is, unfortunately, not a viable cure for depression.

Has anyone tried? In the manner of these studies I mean, not by just looking at addicts. People whove done heroin generally report that naive use is an experience beyond anything they had before. I would not be surprised if this influences people even months later. But it also might not, there are always those pescy details. E.g. maybe it overlaps too much with the alcohol high to show effects in our society.

Its more that we have now found multiple drugs with different mechanisms of action, but apparently similar in terms of how they are used and effect against depression, and all of them are used recreationally for their short-term effects. That suggests to me that it works off the recreational bit, and it again wouldnt be super surprising if it did. "Drugs can make you feel better when used responsibly" is hardly a new insight - the entire problem is the way they lead to non-responsible use.

Also curious what you think of this one.

A number of trials have concluded, with, as far as I can tell by eye-balling them quickly promising results.

IDK, this "Drugs are actually, like, medicine, maaan" has been around for a while, and generally dont seem like someone youd want to end up as. Its getting "scientific" now that the taboo has weakened, but... no shit it looks promising, youre literally trying drugs for mood. If the researcher cant make that look promising, how on earth did he get a PhD?

It also seems like theres some disorder in your post. The last paragraph before "The aftermath:" for example has a lot of redundancy and sounds like it was supposed to be before those other instances. I thought the part about pharmacokinetics was double as well, only realised now that one is about the nausea and one the whole thing.

I need help finding an old post. I think I remember the phrase "dark organic society" followed by either "theory" or "bullshit". It was about the idea that society organises itself in certain ways regardless of explict, program-driven organising, and interpreting parts of progressivism as a despair reaction to that. I thought it was on baliocs tumblr, but google disagrees that its on tumblr at all. /u/gattsuru because you might have been the one that linked me back then.

I'm trying to write up an effortpost about *** conditions

You have been awarded the hapax legomenon price for extraordinary achievements in rationalist brainwrangling.

Wait, does the API search work again?

Recently watched a video...

I wonder how much you could condition yourself against abrasion. I know people can run on gravel at least.

If it was 2 v. 2 I'd prefer some kind of tag-team format, since actual two v. twos inevitably turn into 1 v. 2s, which always end badly for the one.

I did mean to see the dynamics defending multiple directions. Just make it so the team loses with the first knockout/tap.

The variation could at least be semi-realistic, to be in keeping with the original idea. Longer/no rounds, ground that really sucks to be on, 2v2, etc.

logos means 'word'

And "Stimme" means voice, and "Pravda" means truth, and "Rta" mean order, and yet their derived terms overlap strongly with its and each other. In this case the concepts, if not the words, seem to be by shared descent, but I wouldnt be surprised if the chinese have something like it as well.

I think its fairly clear that there is a general intelligence, even if there are subfactors. There is some correlation between different abilities even across animal species, where it makes no sense for a whole species to be adversely effected wrt intelligence. You might say this is just parallel selection, but then you have to explain why needing those abilities correlates so broadly.

We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them

We can identify neurons, which are not quite as predictable as transistors but pretty good. I think we can also grow and arrange them controlledly to some extent, though not at the scale of a human brain. We can in fact gears-model simple organisms on an individual neuron basis. So it seems to me that if we are uncertain whether brains are "mechanical but intractably complex", we should be similarly uncertain about LLMs.

I indeed dont understand the difference you make between axioms and inference. Even if we could build brains, couldnt you equally claim that "its axiomatic" whether the non-manufactured ones are also mechanical? If I could predictable control people in a gears-model way, are they still mechanical while Im not looking? Is it actually an illusion and I can actually only "control" them into doing things they would do anyway, even though I feel like I could have chosen anything? Whos to say that I have a 1/6 chance of dying when I spin the revolver and put it to my head, just because everyone else does?

I/O is not Read/Write

You dont really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope. The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.

we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them.

Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable. Its not the least bit difficult to write a programm or OS that doesnt have meaningful interactable gears for you, and transistor-level analysis is not the best, most efficient way to interact with computers. I mean, we talk a lot about LLMs here, and I dont think they are the same thing as humans, but it seems like they pass an non-mechanical by your criteria.

The single determining criteria of autism vs schizotypy was an oversensitivity vs undersensitivity to errors in sensory prediction.

Im sceptical of this because for me this differs a lot between different kinds of sensations. E.g. I can never "forget that youre wearing it", whatever "it" is, but it takes effort to not tune out music in under a minute, even if Im not doing anything else.

Have you ever actually gone in, and lost the whole budget quickly? I can understand that the experience of winning might override the knowledge of -EV, but thats definitionally not something that can happen most of the time.

Im especially wondering about the olde times when there was no house and its all peer-to-peer betting, where presumably the others want to stop betting as you want to keep going.