shredlefiddle
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User ID: 1727
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
You acknowledge it's possible for something to be true, but for people to poorly acknowledge it, right?
Challenging people on the implications of their beliefs is a standard argumentative technique. If you're not acting on the implications, maybe there's a part of you that doesn't actually buy into the belief.
wait, what moral worth does a person who's braindead, or in a permanent, unrecoverable coma have? In the normal case, that person will be alert and intelligent in at most a dozen hours, but if that isn't true ...
I agree that if there's a braindead person in a permanent unrecoverable coma, we should probably pull the plug on them and use the resources to help others. (Well, under ideal circumstances cryogenically freeze them first, in case future tech can help them recover from the coma)
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
If that were true, there wouldn't be things like Make a Wish to help kids who are about to die be happy.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Um... in the context of the EA movement at least, we don't want anyone to suffer.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Okay, but plants and fish can suffer just like we can. Yeah, plants! Plants have coordinated physical responses to harmful stimuli. What makes this not 'suffering'?
This is definitely a legitimate perspective that EAs consider. Shrimp welfare is big in the EA movement for example. I don't know if plants have qualia though.
What do you mean, exactly?
I mean if you take the exact same negative event, and consider its impact on you as an adult vs as a kid, its impact is gonna be lower on you as an adult. E.g. getting a shot at the doctor's office -- it is gonna cause a lot more distress to kid-you than adult-you.
You don't see people pointing out that IQ does not equate to moral worth because, for most of us, it is too obvious to require further repetition.
You can see people in this very thread arguing against it. I'm not sure it is as universally held a belief as you claim here.
Not for Stalin or Ghengis Khan either or any other tyrant.
You don't think Nazi/Stalinist labor camps represent a meaningful curtailing of our potential for a flourishing future as a species? I really don't know what to say. If you have no strong preference between being in a labor camp, and being in a flourishing posthuman society where everyone lives way better than a present-day billlionaire, your preferences are... highly unusual.
How do you find people trustworthy enough to be granted adjudication of which information the rest of us may be permitted to know?
This is a problem for infohazards in general. I'm not proposing any such trustworthy group. But spreading infohazards is antisocial behavior. It's like deliberately posting a meme online that triggers people prone to seizures -- kind of a dick move.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Well, as you age, your intelligence will fade. So if you believe you will be worth less morally when you're elderly, has that caused you to save less for retirement than you would otherwise?
Do you believe that you have less moral worth when you are sick, sleep-deprived, intoxicated, distracted, or otherwise cognitively impaired? And if so by how much?
Moral worth is about capacity for suffering. Most people have the intuition that the welfare of children should be prioritized over that of adults, even though children are often less intelligent than adults, have less experience, few life specifics, and take few actions. That's because kids suffer more easily. Since people with Downs, and different human races, have equal capacity for suffering, they also have equal moral worth.
Once you start condemning the "discussion of ideas" for reasons other than obvious falsity or existential risk
I think there is a good case to be made that race/IQ discussions are an existential risk.
Many people on this forum probably like to think of themselves as "high decouplers" -- I used to think of myself as the same way -- but to be quite honest, it is very difficult to let "racial IQ differences" in through my perceptual door without some darker thoughts following it. Even on this forum, I don't often see people mentioning that IQ differences shouldn't imply differences in moral worth -- which suggests to me that many people here do actually have an unarticulated, possibly subconscious, belief that this is the case.
Furthemore, even if everyone here, and everyone in EA, is a high decoupler, it's clear that the world is full of low decouplers. Just observe your nearest political debate. So from a consequentialist perspective, spreading race/IQ discussions could be incredibly damaging.
Back to x-risk. In the terminology of Bostrom's paper, Hitler winning World War II would most likely count as a "shriek" or a "whimper" at the very least: https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks If not an "s-risk" (worse than an x-risk): https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/s-risks/
And while wokes discount the possibility that Hitler being a hater caused him to endorse eugenics, it's possibility that causality flows in the other direction as well. We can't rule it out, and the chance it is true should be a major update for how we discuss race & IQ.
If you've heard the term existential risk, you've likely also heard the term infohazard. It seems possibly to me that race/IQ information is in fact an infohazard.
The secretary of the department of homeland security is facing impeachment: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-secretary-alejandro-mayorkas-travels-southern-border-republicans-call-impeachment
In any case, I favor charter cities as a solution. America has a labor shortage. Surely there's a way to pair up immigrants with greedy capitalists in a way that doesn't harm public safety, and also generates enough tax revenue to pay off uninvolved parties.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
I'm skeptical that illegal immigration will lead to Brazilification.
There are no trusted, effective, and non-corrupt public institutions to speak of.
Illegal immigrants can't vote and thus won't affect institutions much? They're incentivized to keep their head down to avoid deportation.
Whilst the poor end up living in densely packed favelas/apartment blocks/ghettos and while they are generally able to get by their chances at economic mobility are virtually nil so a large criminal element ends up taking root and providing an alternate, highly risky means of achieving the opulent lifestyle that simply cannot be ignored, and as violence becomes prevalent policing becomes more dangerous and cops end up becoming more violent which further sours the relationship between the underclass and the ruling class.
See The Myth of Hispanic Crime https://www.unz.com/runz/the-myth-of-hispanic-crime/ by noted leftist Ron Unz
a strong affinity for their neighbors regardless of race, class, religion, culture, etc.
Then imagine whatever the exact opposite of that ideal looks like in your head. THAT is Brazilification.
A Brazilian I know claims that Brazil is one of the least racist countries he's been to, and he's traveled a lot. (He's not a Brazil booster, either -- I remember him being very cynical about Brazil's prospects, but it seemed like more of an underdevelopment thing -- poor education system etc.)
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Seems like illegal immigration won't affect state capacity since non-citizens can't vote?
We can't count on things working out that way. If we're talking posthumanity, the old generation might not die out, due to immortality tech. Laborers could be kept alive using the same tech. Furthermore in this very thread you can see someone making the claim "those of the least moral worth are people we want to suffer". Social science just isn't advanced enough for us to rule out the possibility of permanent dystopia, unfortunately.
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