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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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I don't let my 3 year old run into the street, I'm not going to let him choose the poison blue pill either.

That touches on what seems weird about the "but children" etc arguments to this. In real life, infants and small children probably try to do something that would be lethal or extremely dangerous like 20 times a day every single day. If we're now in the business of giving them quirky polls with life-or-death consequences and they're not able to be guided or advised at all, they're probably going to be dead of something or other pretty soon, if not on the first one then by the fifth or tenth.

You can't influence his decision one way or another. If you could, people could easily coordinate in other ways as well. Besides, your 3 year old is not the only one.

Why not? I reject this premise entirely.

There's no scenario where we don't make major decisions (as this would be) for our children. Whether as a parent or as a society.

Why not?

Because the premise doesn't allow it, obviously. If you reject the premise, stop arguing as if we're discussing the same premise.

The premise nowhere claims that small children make their own choices. You are modifying the premise and arguing in bad faith based on your modified premise.

The premise nowhere claims that small children make their own choices.

What it says is that "everyone responding chooses." If small children are responding, then they are the ones to choose.

I'll grant that it's not 100% perfectly clear on this point, nor does it explicitly state that coordination is not allowed, but both things are heavily implied. If you think the fact that it doesn't state "coordination is not allowed" means coordination is allowed, then that's a different premise from the commonly understood one, and we should be discussing methods of coordination rather than the game theory of the premise as stated.

I reject this premise entirely.

...

YOU'RE MODIFYING THE PREMISE REEE

Link me to one other person, here or on Twitter, who thinks the premise means people can coordinate, and I'll grant that you're not totally off-base here. Still, it's pretty obvious based on the replies that my interpretation is the commonly understood one.

Link me to one three year old who took the poll.

Any three year old who took the poll would almost certainly not comment. Meanwhile, if "people can coordinate" were a common interpretation, people would certainly comment and make that known.

So, find me 100 of the latter and I'll spend a few hours looking for one of the former.

Oh no sorry, I wasn't rebutting your 'people can't coordinate' argument, I am asking you to defend the multiple times you have added small children to this thought experiment to justify the blue pill.

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You can't influence his decision one way or another.

Then we're outside of your set-up about "will nobody think of the children?" and it's only question begging. "Oh if you don't pick this, then the small child will walk into the blender and be really horribly chopped up, but no you can't grab him or stop him or call him back as you would if you saw a real small child walking into a real blender, so are you going to walk into the blender too or are you going to light puppies on fire, you monster?"

Then we're outside of your set-up about "will nobody think of the children?"

How? Name one detail about my setup that's different from the original setup.

but no you can't grab him or stop him or call him back as you would if you saw a real small child walking into a real blender, so are you going to walk into the blender too or are you going to light puppies on fire, you monster?"

This wasn't part of the original setup. The "blender" is a metaphor. If you can coordinate at all with anyone then the whole setup is different.

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