3 of the last 4 democrat presidential candidates were not white males.

I don’t want to make friends.

network effects

I’m not terribly interested in electoral reform personally. It’d be nice but not at the top of my list.

As a Canadian, I engage more with American politics online because more online content is American politics than Canadian.

Firm believer that Molecular Shape of You > Shape of You

I think that we just didn’t fight the fight very smartly, and in the end it’s been weaponized against us.

There has been discussion somewhere in this tree about viability, but the word itself wasn’t used. Viability also has another meaning: the potential to someday be able to live outside the womb. I actually think the latter is more important morally speaking than the former. In a reasonable world, I would think that sensible pro-lifers should agree that if the foetus is doomed one way or another, why prevent an abortion? (Not that pro-life policies in e.g. Texas are sensible.)

But viability as you define it doesn’t mean much to me. Consider the earliest point at which the foetus is viable (could potentially survive outside the womb), versus the day before that. On the day before, the parent has the option to wait one day, at which point the foetus will become viable. Now compare this with a different situation: for the price of $20, a certain drug can be used to save a foetus’ life. Would you agree that in the latter situation, the foetus is already “viable”; it just needs a little help? If you agree with this, and since waiting 1 day is a similar cost on the behalf of the parent as paying $20, this means, the day before the foetus becomes viable, it’s already “viable” – the word has no meaning.

(If you disagree, and you think that the necessity of $20 drugs before the baby becomes viable means that it’s okay to abort it, I find that to be a strange morality, and I’d like to learn more. Or perhaps you think there’s something fundamentally different between waiting 1 day and paying $20.)

The analogy still works because the temporary loan of the kidney might have permanent consequences afterward. And it’s only an analogy. I still think those possible side-effects (save for the truly serious ones) don’t outweigh the death of a grown adult. Again, I’m not claiming that a grown adult is the same as a fetus.

I make this rather strange argument because I actually am a tentative proponent of post-birth abortions – but most people think such a concept sounds so outrageous that they assume I must be trolling. It’s generally only something people are open to considering after they can be convinced that there isn’t much of a difference between killing a fetus and killing a newborn.

Let’s put aside legality, as that’s separate from morality. I am not claiming that abortion should be illegal.

My claim is that intrinsically the morality of killing the fetus just before birth ought to be similar to the morality of killing the fetus just after birth. It’s true that there is another term in the moral equation (whatever you think that is) based on bodily autonomy of the parent, which has a dramatic change at the moment of birth. I also believe that this bodily autonomy term ought to be less than the value of a grown adult life (maybe not of a fetus though). In other words, it’s worse for someone to die than it is for someone else to temporarily lose some bodily autonomy.

Please note that I’m not sure that the intrinsic value of an 8-month-old fetus is equal to that of a full-grown adult. If a newborn baby’s life is intrinsically worthless outside of future potential – say, because they don’t have sentience – then there is clearly zero problem with an abortion at any stage. But most other people think a newborn baby’s life is equal to that of an adult, and I think you can more or less substitute “newborn baby” for “8-month old fetus.”

In your analogy, I do think that the moral action is to donate one of your two kidneys. It’s an even better analogy if it’s only a temporary donation of the kidney somehow, and a yet better analogy if you had caused them to be in this predicament. In the case of a several-months pregnant person living somewhere with easy abortion access, the analogy is improved further like so: you had previously agreed to lend them your kidney, but you change your mind during the critical part of the surgery when it’s too late for anyone else to sub in their kidney (we can relax the stipulation that you’re the only match in this case; this is because I believe life is fungible at inception).

I don’t see why computation is tied to experience rate. You already pointed out examples of what appear to be higher amounts of computation in the brain not apparently tied to experience rate.

I think computation is meaningful, whereas interaction can be high-entropy and meaningless. I would probably need to consult E.T. Jaynes to have more precise definitions of the difference between these notions.

True, but I don’t agree with you in the first place that number of physical interactions is a good way to measure computation (for instance, I would consider the heat-death of the universe to be the end of computation.). I also am not sure that computation is a particularly good proxy for moral weight, I just think that without it there is no consciousness.

I don’t really use those words tbh. I just think anarchism doesn’t account for how to solve the tragedy of the commons, so a global authority is needed.

The tragedy of the commons is a general-purpose game theory concept. It applies any time there is a communal resource exploitable by multiple participants. In the abstract: any time you can do something for personal gain but for the detriment of everyone overall. Admittedly, in the case of unsafe dumping, the resource must be unintuitively defined as the cleanliness of the river or something like that, but the same principle applies as in the more clear-cut (heh) example of foresting.

(Wikipedia claims pollution is a “negative commons”; the theory still applies, but the resource is defined strangely.)

Measure theory can still describe the volume of fractal shapes, for instance using squeeze theorem if you can find an iterative upper and lower bound. Just because something’s surface area isn’t well-defined doesn’t mean the volume isn’t. Similarly, the coastline problem may preclude meaningfully measuring a country’s perimeter, but its (projected) area is still measurable.

I am correctly using tragedy of the commons. A well-understood solution to the tragedy of the commons is regulation. This is equivalent to saying a lack of regulation can cause the tragedy of the commons.

Measure theory was discovered to be able to say that a rock twice as large as another rock can be accurately described as being twice as large as another rock, even if it’s not discrete. (Detractors will point to the paradox that something can be cut up and reassembled to have more measure with a finite number of cuts, but the cuts have to be infinitely complex so it doesn’t apply in reality.)

It sounds like you’re basically saying competition is the problem. But competition has benefits and downsides; one of the downsides is tragedy of the commons, which I think is bad enough it warrants eliminating capitalism all by itself. You haven’t really provided a good argument that tragedy of the commons isn’t a real concern.

I don’t believe the death of capitalism is inevitable – that’s why we need to work hard to end it. (Edit: I guess we essentially agree, the difference is fatalism?)

For years I’ve been hearing “the media has a left bias” though. I guess that’s left=democrat party, not left=leftist.

Okay fine fine. I’m more of a self-described authoritarian really.

That’s a private corporation taking the shortest path to profit.

Well for instance, if there was only one singular mega-corporation with no competition, I don’t think it would destroy the environment, at least not in a way that would reduce its future profits. My observation is that corporations tend to be more forward-thinking about their own profits than I tend to expect from the way they’re structured. But you can get an advantage over other corporations in the short-term if throw environmentalism to the wayside. In other words, the shortest path to profit and the tragedy of the commons are exactly linked.

Basically, I’m saying yes, one owes a debt to their children. I just don’t know how to prove that the concept of “debt” exists at all morally. But assuming it does and it behaves like I think it should, then yes.

Can you explain what you mean about tragedy of the commons not being a thing? It seems inherently obvious. Like do you think it’s not applicable politically, or even in thought experiments like cows in a meadow it still doesn’t apply? In my mind, tragedy of the commons perfectly explains why large corporations pollute instead of respect the environment.

My main argument in favour of totalitarianism is the tragedy of the commons. Particularly in these areas: environmentalism, violence, and existential risks (whatever you think those are).

I get not being able to find a magical hard line between A person and a rock. I do think there is actually a clear distinction: computation. Rocks are not computing anything; brains and arguably bacteria are computing things. I think consciousness is more like computation than matter – this fits with my intuition that you could upload someone’s mind onto a computer (one neuron at a time, maintaining continuity), and that simulation of you is still you.

If you think all matter experiences equally, then shouldn’t creatures with larger mass be worth more?

Let’s keep the language chill if you don’t mind.

Yes, assuming such a thing as debt exists. In a different and better world where life is inherently positive, there might not be a debt.

Agreed. Antisemitism != antizionism.

I think this is a better argument that “queer” is the best catch-all phrase. Honestly, come to think of it, if we can phase out LGBT in favour of “queer” entirely, then that gives republicans a harder time to separate the T.

I apologize, I just realized I got mixed up with a neighbouring debate regarding animal welfare lol. Thus the shrimp.

Fair enough, that’s unrelated to morality though. I already don’t wish to see abortion criminalized.

I agree that axiom does lead to absolute certainty that fetuses can be aborted at any month. I don’t agree with the axiom though. If I sign up to, say, share a kidney with somebody to keep them alive for 8 hours in some kind of bizarre medical procedure, I don’t believe it’s acceptable for me to shrug and change my mind halfway through. See also the metaphor about the Saharan desert guide in the adjacent thread.

Let’s put aside 7-week old fetuses, as we both agree it’s fine to abort those.

I am pretty sure a 3-month-old fetus does not have thoughts or feelings to any significant extent. I am less sure about an 8 month old fetus; a lot of people who are 8 months pregnant do think their fetus has started to develop a personality. Regardless, I don’t see any particular leap in thoughts and feelings from just prior to birth compared with just after birth; at least, I don’t see why such a leap should occur at the moment of birth.

I don’t think being forced to donate organs is a good metaphor – at least, I don’t intrinsically value post-mortem bodily autonomy. A better metaphor I think would be being forced to do something in order for another person to live. Consider a Saharan desert guide on a 1-month tour for some clients. Once the tour begins, it would be morally reprehensible for the guide to abandon the clients to the elements; they must bring the clients out of the desert safely, whether they want to or not. It should be a bright-line case, because the lives of the clients rely on the guide, and the guide got them into this situation.

I don’t see 7-week old fetuses as being people; their lives are below my consideration. I do see an 8.5-month baby as being close in moral value to a 2-week old baby – I don’t know what that moral value is, but either killing both is fine, or killing neither is.

I don’t see how this makes killing a 2-year old worse than killing an 8-month old fetus.

Let’s keep separate these two things: the worthiness of the child to live, and the worthiness of the parent to have bodily autonomy. It seems to me that you’re making the observation that the 2 year old does not violate the parent’s bodily autonomy. Or are you asserting that because the child has independence, it is more intrinsically worthy to live?

The reason that I stand by the moral hierarchy despite the possibility that it doesn’t exist at all is that I can only reason about morality under the assumption that consciousness exists. I don’t know how to cause pain to a non-conscious being. To give an analogy: suppose you find out that next year there’s a 50% chance that the earth will be obliterated by some cosmic event – is this a reason to stop caring about global warming? No, because in the event that the earth is spared, we still need to solve global warming.

It is nebulous, but everything is nebulous at first until we learn more. I’m just trying to separate things that seem like pretty safe bets from things I’m less sure about. Steel beams not having consciousness seems like a safe bet. If it turns out that consciousness exists and works really really weirdly and steel beams do have consciousness, there’s still no particularly good reason to believe that anything I could do to a steel beam matters to it, seeing as it lacks pain receptors.

I figured your objection to the term “cultural appropriation” is that people use it to refer to exploitative things as well as what I view as innocent things like a professional dancer who is white dancing to an anime song or something. That’s why I proposed a new term, to help differentiate these things.

You measure those feelings in real time so 1 year is the same for any organism.

Well, I said “integral” in the vague gesture that things can have a greater or lesser amount of experience in a given amount of time. I suppose we are looking at different x axes?

I don’t know how to estimate something’s experience rate, but my intuition is that every creature whose lifespan is at least one year and is visible to the naked eye has about within a factor of an order of magnitude or two the same experience rate. I think children have a greater experience rate than adults because everything is new to them; as a result, someone’s maximal moral value is biased toward the earlier end of their life, like their 20s or 30s.

I still don’t know why brains are different from a steel beam

This is all presupposing that consciousness exists at all. If not, then everything’s moral value is 0. If it does, then I feel confident that steel beams don’t have consciousness.

Why would you think this would be in some way representative? It’s just your friend network.

I think it’s representative of my friend network. Perhaps I misunderstood what you were asking. This was a response to “how many leftists do you know?”

No I have not read Sakai yet. This topic is not new to me, I just disagree with you. But very well, I am glad that we have reached the mutual agreement that it is not an appropriate word for non-indigenous people in general, which was my original point that you responded to:

Reading this reminded me about another unpopular opinion: I think “settler” and “colonizer” are poor terms for non-indigenous people broadly.

As I see it, it turns out we both agree. I misunderstood your initial response to that statement as one that was intending to be a counterargument. So, sorry – I really didn’t mean to straw man you; I legitimately misunderstood what your point was.

Is this mars thing meant to be an analogy or do you mean people literally think they will have a better life colonizing mars?

Like, all my friends are leftists. When we talk about politics, they sound like leftists, they say leftist things, and espouse leftist values. My friends are all leftists because my friends’ friends are leftists and I make friends with my friends’ friends.

Regarding “settler,” I think it’s a motte-and-bailey tactic you’re using. The motte – the easily defensible position – is that settler refers to people who are bigoted. The bailey – the hard to defend position, but which is easily equivocated for the motte – is that it refers to any non-indigenous person. The reason I see this equivocation is because in my mind, a settler does not stop being a settler simply because they turn into an ally for indigenous people. Settlerdom is a property of a person that depends only on their geographic location and ancestry, not their philosophy. Father Le Jeune is generally regarded as an ally to the linguistic preservation of indigenous languages in the pacific northwest, and he even helped develop a writing system for Chinuk Wawa – but was he not a settler?

I don’t deny that it’s a useful verbal weapon against bigots. I would merely like it to be well-understood that a verbal weapon is what it is intended to be.

I vote we move to a new term, “cultural plagiarism,” which more clearly relates to e.g. a white person stealing a black musician’s work (as opposed to covering it and giving credit and royalties, which should be fine!)

My intuition for a person’s overall moral value is something like the integral of their experiences so far multiplied by their expected future QALYs. This fits my intuition of why it’s okay to kill a zygote, and it’s also not morally abominable to, say, slightly shorten the lifespan of somebody (especially someone already on the brink of death), or to, erm, put someone out of their misery in some cases.

I’m not terribly moved by single-celled organisms that can “learn.” It’s not hard to find examples of simple things which most people wouldn’t consider “alive,” but “learn.” For instance, a block of metal can “learn” – it responds differently based on past stresses. Or “memory foam.” You could argue that a river “learns,” since it can find its way around obstacles and then double down on that path. Obviously, computers “learn.” Here, we mean “learn” to refer to responding differently based on what’s happened to it over time, rather than the subjective conscious feeling of gaining experience.