Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
This is a pretty egregious failure to engage with the argument.
It's not. It's roughly the same response that I would give to someone who said that we should ban cars because sometimes people crash, or we should bring back prohibition of alcohol because some people become alcoholics. In most contexts, what they would get from me is a shrug and a "well, life is risk, so deal with it".
Of course you can get into the weeds on any particular issue and start detailing all the positive and negative outcomes, the probability of each, tally up the expected values, etc. I recognize that risk does have to be balanced against reward, of course. But I have little interest in engaging in that sort of discussion on the sex issue because I think it would simply be beside the point. Psychologically speaking, I think that the typical anti-sex advocate doesn't first encounter the potential risks of promiscuous sex and then draw the conclusion "that seems so dangerous that we really need to discourage people from doing that". I think what comes first is the commitment to abstaining from sex as a moral value - typically either as part of a religious identity, or as a generalized commitment to traditional values - and then they start looking for evidence to support this pre-existing ethical commitment. I think this is a very common pattern that generalizes across multiples types of issues. In the discussion on unions further down in the thread for example, I don't think most posters are opposed to the strike because the longshoreman union boss is a slimeball - I think the anti-union commitment comes first, and then they're happy to discover later that the union boss is a slimeball because it bolsters their case.
I am in no way exempt from any of this of course. I too have a pre-existing commitment to promiscuous sex being a good thing (or at least a tolerable thing) as part of my identity that has little to do with its actual empirical effects. The saving grace here is that I don't think this fact has to terminate the conversation. The reasons for these foundational identity-commitments are themselves amenable to debate to some degree, and we can make an attempt to elucidate them. I just think that if we're going to get into the weeds on this, we should stick to the actual meat of the issue, and not just "sex can lead to bad things". Yeah, it can. Lots of other things can too. So what is it about sex that got your attention, specifically?
Would you want your children to take into the consideration the perspective and feelings of other people, including their intimate partners?
Yes, obviously. Where did I imply that I didn't?
EDIT: Let me put it this way. If you said that extra-marital sex is bad for your soul, spiritually, I would take that much more seriously than recourse to divorce statistics. I, conversely, think that sex is good for your soul. So that's something that we can have a real debate about. Now we're at the level of genuine, heartfelt convictions. The stuff about divorce and fertility rate stats is just window dressing.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Not getting married. Divorce if they do get married. A general inability to form durable relationships with a member of the opposite sex. No kids. Kids raised missing a father or a mother, with the attendant significant increase in poor outcomes for the kids. Acute misery from breakups and lingering psychic trauma from bad relationships. Generally decreased mental wellness, and/or chronic dependency on mind-altering pharmaceuticals. General dissatisfaction with the results of their life choices. Significantly decreased sexual satisfaction over their lifetime. Significant pain and regret.
Sure, maybe. Sometimes those things happen. But there are also times when they don't happen. Sometimes people have pre-martial sex - even quite a lot of pre-marital sex - and then they go on to happy marriages with children and everything is fine. So pre-marital sex isn't guaranteed doom - it's an action that carries a certain level of risk, similar to many other actions we undertake.
I don't have exact numbers on hand detailing the number of positive outcomes vs negative outcomes compared to number of sex partners. But then, I wouldn't want my children to get in the habit of consulting a table of probabilities detailing the likelihood of a positive outcome before they make decisions, even if said probability table is certified "trad". They'd be no better than utilitarians at that point.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
no babies to take care of and no STDs to treat and she’s not getting murdered by a psycho, so everything should be fine because those are the central examples of bad outcomes from sexual activity between humans?
Yes, those are the central examples of bad outcomes. I would want her to be careful and be aware of the risks, of course. But the mere fact that there are risks isn’t a reason for total abstinence. Driving a car is risky too, but I wouldn’t tell her not to drive.
Were there other types of bad outcomes that you had in mind?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
In terms of intelligent aliens who have actually visited this planet (as opposed to say, alien bacteria existing literally anywhere else in the universe)? It's not that likely. But unlike the staunch skeptics, I don't think the probability is 0 either. The US government has acted quite shady about the whole thing over the decades, and congressmen have claimed to have seen enough shocking things in classified briefings that I think it's worthwhile to dig deeper and get more of this classified information (and we know for a fact that this information exists, even if we don't know its actual contents) out to the public.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
There's slightly more to the paper than what you included in your summary. They also polled students on things like "how often do you ask questions in class?" and "how often do you explore topics on your own, even if they're not required for a class?". Those seem like reasonable things that could be self-reported, if we think that self-reports can ever have value at all. But you're correct that they also did flatly ask students to rate themselves on "openness to having my own views challenged" and "critical thinking skills". And then they uncritically reported the survey results as "empirical data". Which is wild.
Failings of individual philosophers notwithstanding, I have always believed that education in (analytic) philosophy is the best way to develop critical thinking, and I still maintain that quite firmly. I attribute this broadly to two distinctive features of philosophy:
Norms of argumentation - there's a great Substack post that details the norms that surround debates of contentious positions in professional philosophy:
Affective neutrality in discussion of moral and political issues. One of the major differences between philosophers and the general public is that most people find it extremely difficult to discuss any controversial moral or political issue without getting upset. Philosophers, on the other hand, typically draw a distinction between entertaining a proposition and affirming it, and so assume that one should be able to debate various questions in a hypothetical register, without triggering any of the emotional reactions that might be appropriate if one actually held them. As a result, there is a disciplinary tradition in philosophy of maintaining a stance of affective neutrality when discussing morally charged issues, and even when contemplating abhorrent conclusions. [...]
Reconstructive presentation of arguments. Since the good old days of ancient Athens, philosophers have taken themselves to be more interested in argument than in rhetoric. This is reflected in a variety of disciplinary practices, including the sometimes elaborate efforts undertaken to avoid scoring merely symbolic victory over “straw man” versions of one’s opponent’s position. One of the most basic components of a philosophical education therefore involves learning how to demonstrate, prior to criticizing a position, that one has a correct understanding of it, and that the view is worthy of being taken seriously. [...] Because of this, it is extremely common for philosophers to spend a fair bit of time offering “reconstructions” of positions that they do not actually hold. Indeed, it is not unusual for the first half of a research talk or conference presentation to consist of such reconstruction. [...]
Stipulative definition of terminology. Because of the somewhat obsessive interest in argument that is central to the profession, philosophy also places a great deal of emphasis on the definition of terms. In order to track inferences it is essential to be clear about what one is and is not committed to in making a particular claim, and in order to be clear about that one must be clear about the terms one is using. [...]
These are basically just the norms that we already try to adhere to on TheMotte - basic principles regarding how to treat your interlocutor's position with fairness. And these norms are often sorely lacking in public discourse, so being in an environment where these norms are explicitly encouraged is beneficial, because it teaches people how to actually try understanding positions that are different from their own instead of just instinctively tearing them down.
Of course, debate itself is not unique to philosophy. Debate is found in virtually every academic field. But what's unique about philosophy is that the questions are almost by definition never settled solely by recourse to empirical facts (like say, the experimental data in physics, the primary sources in history or literary studies, etc). Logical argumentation and the careful examination of opposing positions are the only tools you have in philosophy, so you have to get good at them.
Exposure to a wide variety of views - In the course of studying philosophy, you'll encounter a number of extremely bizarre views like dialetheism, object eliminativism, and mathematical fictionalism. You may even be persuaded to begin holding some bizarre views yourself, after evaluating the arguments - or at least, you'll begin to see how reasonable people could come to hold those views. This has the effect of making you more tolerant of other people's views in general. The thinking goes, "if I was wrong about something as fundamental as 1+1=2, then what else could I be wrong about? If someone comes along with something wild that I've never thought of before, maybe I should give him a fair hearing, instead of just dismissing him out of hand."
Obviously individual philosophers are not perfect - they're still fallible individuals, and philosophy can't make you invulnerable to all mistakes in reasoning. A lot of professional philosophers have uncritically jumped on the woke bandwagon just like their colleagues in every other department, and they're unfortunately failing to uphold the norms of inquisitiveness and impartiality that should be central to philosophy. But I nonetheless think that philosophy still gives you the best chance of developing those epistemic virtues, even if it's not guaranteed.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation!
That is not what is at stake in contemporary debates about physicalism.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Anyway, it's clear that a large number of people really want to believe in aliens, thanks to science fiction and a lack of religious meaning in their life.
I want to believe in aliens because an intelligent non-human civilization would be a treasure trove of philosophical data. What are they like? Is their conscious experience anything like ours (vision, touch, taste, etc), or is it totally different? Do they have art? Do they have a concept of good and evil? Do they have math? Is it isomorphic to our math, or is it built from different concepts? Are they a collective hivemind, do they have a concept of individual rights? Do they have conflict, do they have war? Do they care to ask any of these questions about us, or are they not interested?
I don't need any more meaning. My life is more meaningful than I know what to do with already, if anything I suffer from too much meaning. I just think aliens would be cool, is all.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
The most obvious irony here is how she wrote an entire article to tell us about how the girl friendship is more meaningful than her old boyfriend and her's, but it's clear to anyone who read it that she had much more thought and feeling for Him than for Her.
A lot of women (of a more progressive bent) have a complex about how much the approval and company of men actually matters to them. A shocking number of young women are trying to force themselves to become lesbian or bisexual because "a man shouldn't be the most important thing in your life", even though they have no sexual attraction to women at all.
The ironic thing is that women's dependence on men is nothing compared to men's dependence on women! I don't think that women are really capable of understanding the reality distortion field that emanates from every non-ugly woman, and the effects that said field has on straight men.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
As some of you may recall, I'm a bit of a UAP enthusiast.
So glad to see that there's a fellow traveler here on TheMotte! Lots to look forward to in the next few months - hearings coming up in both the House and the Senate, and it appears that the UAPDA provision of the NDAA isn't completely dead yet.
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards esotericism?
I wouldn't say that it feels "esoteric" to me, no. But I do think it's wild that the universe allows this to happen, at such a cheap cost and so soon after the invention of electronic computing in general, in much the same way that it's wild to me that the universe allows heavy metal tubes to fly through the air.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
This paragraph literally reads as "I don't know anything about the issue, but here's my feelings." I just want to verify this is your intent.
I don't know anything about the longshoreman's union, but I am here to share my feelings anyway. Yes that is my intent.
This isn't a particularly unusual state of affairs, nor would I necessarily classify it as an epistemic vice. People form opinions based on incomplete information all the time. Nothing wrong with starting with an intuition and refining as you go. It's not too unlike certain Mottizens who have very strong opinions on the Frankfurt School, despite never having read a word of the Frankfurt School's work.
you are growing more sympathetic to money being siphoned off for no other reason that those who are already there have their hand closest to the trough.
I just can't bring myself to be very upset over money siphoning right now. So many awful decisions (I mentioned corporate wokeness and mass immigration) have been justified by recourse to "shareholders' bottom line". Very well then. If that's the case, then I don't care about their bottom line anymore. Siphon away.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Aside from the lame reference to covid, I didn't hear much in the clip that I was unsympathetic to.
It's ironic that I've been posting so much about the impossibility of changing one's mind the last couple of days, because I have noticed myself becoming substantially more sympathetic to unions in just the past couple of years. I'm tired of corporations using "profits" as an excuse for every shitty thing they do. Big tech platforms have to implement woke advertiser-friendly censorship because that's what's best for profits, and Boeing has to skimp out on safety because they need the profits, and we have to keep importing third world migrants and outsourcing manufacturing because well, that's simply what's best for profits! It seems to me that the much maligned "enshittification" of the 21st century is just a synonym for the race to squeeze every last drop of profit possible out of increasingly thin margins.
If profits incentivize so much bad behavior, then maybe we just need to chill on the profits for a while. Take a break. It won't be the end of the world. Share some of the excess cash with your employees, or invest it in a scientific or artistic endeavor of your choosing, or just burn it for all I care, it doesn't matter much.
I frankly don't know anything about the specific demands of the longshoreman's union in this case, or how proportionate they are to the actual work being done. But I'm sympathetic to the underlying impulse, and I'm definitely not feeling very sympathetic to corporate America right now.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
As I was just explaining yesterday, almost no one ever changes their mind on anything, so making everyone sign a pledge before the discussion starts attesting to a non-trivial probability of mind-changing is an unreasonable standard to hold people to. You should go into every discussion assuming that no one will actually change their minds.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I'll be as gentle as the decorum rules require. If the mods think that my post violated the decorum rules then they're free to let me know. I don't think it did though.
If we took every request to be "gentle" seriously, then people could just preface every post with "please be gentle" and then soapbox about whatever they wanted to with the expectation that they would receive no pushback, which is obviously not desirable. This is a space for having your ideas challenged, so if you post here, you should expect to have your ideas challenged. I raised the points that I thought were a) salient for understanding the foundations of OP's worldview and b) possibly fruitful for a broader discussion.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
It of course bothers me greatly when I see Donald Trump calling Kamala Harris "mentally unwell since birth" or Donald Trump and JD Vance proclaim as fact that Haitian migrants in Springfield, OH, are eating dogs.
Just to be clear: are you also bothered by all the Trump supporters and wrongthinkers who have had their friendships, familial ties, and careers ruined? Are you bothered by what happened to a figure like, say, James Damore? Or does your sympathy run out when dealing with people who have "objectively" dangerous ideas?
I recognize that a Donald Trump presidency would threaten American democracy.
Why? He was already president for four years. Nothing happened to American democracy. It's doing just fine. What will make the next four years so much more dangerous than the previous four years?
It's very hard for me to want to be invested in politics when it seems like all everyone wants to do is yell and scream at each other.
The basic point you need to understand is that people argue and fight for reasons. It's not just random, and it's not just because people are stupid. You can't just have someone come along and say "have you all just tried respecting each other instead?" and then everyone claps and goes "ah, how could we have been so blind, if only we had just tried respecting each other instead then we could have avoided all this mess".
People fight because they have mutually incompatible views about how society should be structured, and it's impossible for everyone's preferences to be implemented simultaneously. Not everyone can get what they want; someone has to lose out. And no one is happy with losing out. There's nothing unique about our current situation compared to any other historical era. Open the history book to any random page and you'll find conflict.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
My positions have changed over the course of my life, certainly. I don't think anything I've ever read on TheMotte specifically has ever changed my mind on anything substantial though. The last time I had anything that could be described as a major shift in views was probably... closing in on a decade ago. I've changed as a person in some ways since then; I've changed my mind on certain personal and idiosyncratic matters. But in terms of anything that other people would recognize as a major political/philosophical issue, it's been a while.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
“if you want tradition you have the traditions you have” can excuse any bad cultural practice.
This is why a traditionalist's support for tradition is, ideally, qualified. Tradition by itself with no further specific content is a vacuous concept, and an overriding commitment to tradition above all else is vulnerable to Euthyphro-style attacks. (If the gods told you that murder was actually a good thing, would you believe them? If your tradition told you to be a communist, would you still support tradition?)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I think being deeply invested in following a game/sport you don’t play yourself is kinda weird. I don’t get football personally, I find it boring. But other than that I don’t have a problem with it. Everyone has things they do for fun, so why not football?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I think people have gotten more entrenched in their positions over time
People were entrenched in the atheism vs Christianity debates of the 00s. I already had entrenched positions when I was 13, starting from the earliest internet debates that I can remember participating in. There was never a mythical time when people weren't entrenched. The fact that people are engaging in actual back and forth debate over an issue at all indicates that it's already an issue that causes emotions to run high.
Arguing to change people's minds is like playing high school football for the purpose of getting into the NFL. Yeah, it's technically not impossible. But if that's what all your expectations are riding on, you're probably going to be disappointed. Better to just do it for the love of the game.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I can't recall another month where there were so many QCs that I found so ideologically disagreeable! That's a good thing though. I'm glad there's been an uptick in topics that generate productive disagreement. Better than being an echo chamber that just beats the same few issues to death.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
It’s a relatively standard word in the contemporary philosophical literature and it doesn’t have any aggressive connotations (you can “interrogate” a position you’re friendly to as well).
my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil
I'm not an absolutist. Or, let me phrase it this way: to the extent that I'm opposed to the death penalty, it's not due to an overriding commitment to pacifism. If a man were to witness another man murdering his wife, for example, I would not fault him for disposing of the murderer in whatever manner he pleased. When we speak of the "death penalty" though, we aren't speaking of an impassioned response to a personal injustice; we are instead of speaking of an impersonal state apparatus, one which operates over vast distances and vast quantities of time, and which publicizes (the knowledge of) its executions as a spectacle. Now things are different.
Nietzsche said most of what needs to be said in On the Genealogy of Morality, specifically in the second essay, which deals with the historical genesis of criminal punishment:
But in particular, the creditor could inflict all kinds of dishonour and torture on the body of the debtor, for example, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt: – from this standpoint there were everywhere, early on, estimates which went into horrifyingly minute and fastidious detail, legally drawn up estimates for individual limbs and parts of the body. [...] Let’s be quite clear about the logic of this whole matter of compensation: it is strange enough. The equivalence is provided by the fact that instead of an advantage directly making up for the wrong (so, instead of compensation in money, land or possessions of any kind), a sort of pleasure is given to the creditor as repayment and compensation, – the pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the powerless without a thought, the pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire’, the enjoyment of violating: an enjoyment that is prized all the higher, the lower and baser the position of the creditor in the social scale, and which can easily seem a delicious titbit to him, even a foretaste of higher rank. Through punishment of the debtor, the creditor takes part in the rights of the masters: at last he, too, shares the elevated feeling of being in a position to despise and maltreat someone as an ‘inferior’ – or at least, when the actual power of punishment, of exacting punishment, is already transferred to the ‘authorities’, of seeing the debtor despised and maltreated. So, then, compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty. –
The right to inflict misery - or rather, the right to know that misery is being inflicted on your behalf, the right to know that somewhere out there, people are "getting what they deserve" - is its own reward, a reward that the state so generously apportions out to citizens as an incentive for good behavior. It is straightforwardly pleasurable; there are hardly any complexities or nuances to mention here. The idea that justice is painful to those that mete it out, the idea that it is only done begrudgingly and through gritted teeth, is of course nonsense - all advocates of "justice" like to imagine themselves as the executioner. Legal executions serve as a socially acceptable, state-sanctioned outlet for cruelty that cannot permissibly find expression elsewhere. The erotic pleasure of the business itself is the operative animating impulse behind the expansion of the state execution apparatus - likely ahead of any utilitarian concerns about reducing crime, and certainly ahead of any concern for a formal, symmetrical notion of justice.
Perhaps this state of affairs is the only alternative to a society of unrestrained vigilante justice (although, if that's true, it can only be true of a given culture at a given time - many countries have abolished the death penalty without descending into madness). Perhaps this impulse - the impulse to delight in the misery of others, the impulse to pawn off one's own injustices by proxy onto the condemned - must necessarily engage in subterfuge, must necessarily take on the false appearance of "justice" while it performs its vitally important social function. But, that needn't prevent us from performing an honest analysis of its origins.
Your post adduces evidence for the view I have outlined:
I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary.
If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger? A life for a life - that's at least a plausible principle of justice. But "a life for an intent to take a life", or "a life for being an accomplice to someone else taking a life" - now things are no longer so clear. The fact that such nuances are of little interest to you indicates that the execution itself is the prize for you. Of course you can find other "tough on crime" advocates who don't even want to stop at murder, but are happy to advocate capital punishment for rape, assault, even perhaps petty theft in the case of repeat offenders. Is it really about justice at that point, or is it about casting an ever widening net so we have enough sacrifices to fuel the revenge machine?
Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath.
Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
You convey to the AI what you want to see using precision in language. There is no way for the AI to know what you want without you supplying information to it.
Sure. And the limiting factor there is the person's technical domain expertise. Generic "communication" skills are of no help. A programmer can explain much better to another programmer how a piece of software should be constructed than an English major could.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Who knows? Life’s full of surprises.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
AI may invert the common wisdom that studying English is worthless and studying computer science is the wise decision. If AI takes off as anticipated, employers will look for word people who are trained in analyzing prompt replies
Look I'm one of the most strident defenders of the value of the humanities on TheMotte, but I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
If AI is actually generally intelligent then you won't need to "analyze" its replies. You won't need to do prompt engineering, you won't need to do any of that. You'll just tell it to do something and it'll do it. Like any ordinary human. STEM professionals aren't all walking around in an autistic haze where they're unable to have basic interactions with other people. They're quite capable of telling subordinates what to do and verifying that the task was completed, using natural language. Hell, if it really came down to it, you could get the AI to analyze its own replies and do prompt engineering for you! That's what general intelligence entails.
And to the extent that AI falls short of general intelligence, it will likely continue as it does today as essentially a tool for domain experts. In which case, the most important factor for a human will still be their domain expertise and their ability to actually do the job at hand, rather than their AI whispering skills.
Of course there is something to be said for the skill of people management in general, being able to motivate people and keep them on task, playing office politics, things like that - those are real skills that not everyone possesses. But if we're at the point where we have to wrangle our AIs because they're too moody/lazy/rebellious to fulfill your request, that's a bigger problem - one that is more appropriate for the engineers (or the military) to solve, not English majors.
I am of course opposed to "believe all victims", the draconian on-campus tribunals, #MeToo in general, etc. I'm about as libertarian as you can get on this issue. You get to reap all the rewards, and all the risks. I think that's a consistent position.
Sure. It's a classic sliding-scale boundary problem. We both presumably recognize that some things are worth the risk and some things are not, but the question is, where do we draw the line? Is pre-martial sex more like fentanyl, or is it more like chewing gum?
I don't think that question itself is very interesting or worth debating. I believe we both agree enough on the empirical facts that we're not going to learn anything new from it. The real question is why do you think the way you do, and why do I think the way I do? Why is it that, when we are both presented with the same information, you say "I dunno man that looks too dangerous to be worth it", and I say "I dunno man I think it looks fine you should go for it"? What explains this?
See my reply to 100Proof for more details.
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