escarpment

escarpment, 3 days ago

@benroyce @nicholas_saunders @rameshgupta You, like most people, appear to be a zealous moral realist / moral objectivist. Chiming in here to point out that there is another way of viewing things, as a moral skeptic / moral subjectivist. To the moral skeptic, "a strong moral core" is a fantasy that people simply hope exists.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral/

escarpment, 3 days ago

@benroyce @nicholas_saunders @rameshgupta FWIW I think people should vote for Biden and will vote for Biden. And I think not voting in protest is misinformed. I just have a moral skeptic streak and tend to reject moral arguments as a policy.

escarpment, 6 days ago

@GreenFire This may sound flippant, but it very much depends who you ask. North Koreans definitely want you to do what is best for North Koreans and there are 30 million fully realized human beings there, most of whom probably think they are very good people (as is human nature). This is the nature of subjectivity that is trippy and hard for people to grasp.

escarpment, 6 days ago

@GreenFire No, I'm American and find North Korea and Iran unpalatable. I just have been wrestling my whole life with how there can be "rogue nations." Think about what that means. Not a rogue cult of a few people who do weird and objectionable stuff. Not a rogue town or enclave. An entire nation- millions strong. Think about the diversity of people who constitute these rogue nations, and how they all think they are good people, just like us.

escarpment, 6 days ago

@GreenFire North Korea is just an extreme example. Think about Trump voters. There are not a few hundred or a few thousand of them. There are millions and millions. They think they are good people. They will not be persuaded.

escarpment, 6 days ago

@GreenFire But even among your audience. The people who are just close enough politically to Biden will agree with what you are saying, and the people who are just left enough to want to vote against him and help North Korea and Russia will do so. And they will not be persuaded either.

escarpment, 6 days ago

@GreenFire The one piece of knowledge I think I possess and am trying to convey is that we live in a deterministic universe and this sort of persuasion effort is part of that deterministic program. It's possible that this persuasion effort has some non-zero impact on the ultimate outcome, as a function of the number of people who see your message, were on the fence or receptive to persuasion, and changed their mind based on the persuasion.

escarpment, 6 days ago

@tuckerm @GreenFire Are you saying I'm some kind of bot?

escarpment, 11 days ago

@patrickworld I don't think it's specifically because of the genetically modified kidney. He only qualified for xenotransplantation because he was already terminally ill. Such a radical procedure can only be approved for people who qualify for compassionate use treatments.

escarpment, 24 days ago

@nicholas_saunders I wish instead of chanting "free, free Palestine" they would chant "Israelis and Palestinians side by side" or "Israelis and Palestinians united in peace."

escarpment, 24 days ago

@nicholas_saunders @shekinahcancook "no nations no borders" is a position of privilege. Israel had no nations or borders prior to its founding. The result was skirmishes and raids from violent Palestinian groups. Israel decided to establish borders to better protect their citizens, re-learning a lesson that western countries had already learned about statism.

escarpment, 24 days ago

@nicholas_saunders @shekinahcancook Borders and countries are a solution to a problem that happens in their absence.

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese The latter (rulership) sounds like poetry to me- sort of emotional mumbo jumbo.

The former (mechanical processes) sounds like reality, the thing I am talking about. What is the state of the world.

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese I don't really know what you mean by a mechanical view of reality? So you reject that the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2 on the surface of the earth?

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Perhaps we do have a larger gulf than I thought. I guess you reject all truths? Like "the 2008 Olympics occurred in Beijing"- you think that's not a true statement?

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Ah I see, good point. You seem to be pointing out the issue of "theory laden-ness", that our minds heap so much subjectivity or "theory" on even "mundane" facts that it's hard to find a truly objective, theory-less truth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

2008 and 5768 are both arbitrary, if widely agreed upon, labels for years that depend on theoretical presuppositions about how and when to start counting years.

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese I think you make a leap to this idea of consensus. The idea of consensus is not entailed by the theory ladenness. Seems like you are emotionally troubled by theory ladenness and grasping for something ("consensus") to provide psychological relief for that trouble. I think instead it's important to "live" with that psychological trouble, without jumping to solutions. "Most facts are theory laden" (full stop). Instead of "most facts are theory laden, ergo blah."

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese It is indeed troubling when conspiracy theorists appear to deny reality. My answer to that is that information is only relevant to the extent it is adaptive for survival. Information isn't just intrinsically good. The person who denies the fact their house is in a flood zone then has their house destroyed in a flood learns information "the hard way" having refused to learn the information "the easy way."

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Hamas militants who falsely believe they are strong enough to conquer Israel could learn the information the "easy way" and agree to a peace deal, or learn that information the "hard way" and suffer heavy casualties and destruction as Israel batters them militarily.

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese I think you "underestimate" how adaptive this is. Even the most distasteful christofascist or Hamas member is the product of millennia of successful reproduction. Something they are doing is adaptive. Evolutionary pressures seem to have made some trade between commitment to scientific truth and group cohesion. Probably in some ecological niches, the group cohesion based on collective lies is more adaptive than individualism based on more objective truth.

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Yes, if the climate collapses and results in a human extinction event, that will be learning "the hard way" that climate change was real because they refused to learn "the easy way" through scientific modeling of the climate.

The question in all of these scenarios is how much information do you need, and how open to information are you. The norm seems to be people need to learn "the hard way" because they struggle to integrate inconvenient facts.

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Back to my point about reality and power though, if the climate deniers continue to burn so many fossil fuels, that will mark a failure of the people who believed the climate models to muster sufficient power to avert climate disaster. So the outcome would be the same irrespective of whether the climate models had existed or not.

My catch phrase would be "you don't get extra points for being 'morally' right."

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese To use that extremely misunderstood word, the climate deniers seem to be "winning" objectively speaking, and it's unclear if the climate believers have sufficient power (of numbers, persuasion, military force, technological advancement) to fix that.

escarpment, 24 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese I am holding out hope for a "deus ex machina" type technological solution, similar to the fix for the hole in the ozone layer. Also, grimly, I imagine there should be negative feedback loops where climate change radically reduces human population which in turn reduces green house gas emissions.