There’s been a recent trend of How I Got A Rationalist Social Circle posts going around, and I’ve noticed that most of them begin with “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!”
I mean if we’re going to have an Official Rationalist Welcome Wagon Alison’s probably the right person for the job
I approve of being the official welcomer. Anyone who wants to be initiated should totally hit me up.
Actually, tbh, your talents are being underutilized. Too bad The Rationalist Community isn’t the type of organization that has marketing pushes to Recruit More Girls.
We could put you in a sexy outfit and have you dart around the edges of the Blue Tribe, enticing young girls to follow you into the Forests of Rationalism like some kind of gay will-o-the-wisp.
What!? Why would I prey on innocent Blue Tribe girls and turn them into My People??? *nervous laughter as I close my OkCupid tabs*
…why wouldn’t we be the type of organization to have a marketing push to Recruit More Girls? The rationalist community is what we make of it, and I don’t see any reason not to make a girlsmoreofrecruitment drive of it. We don’t have a rationalist czar telling us _not_ to do it.
As someone who grudgingly matches the description “girl” (at least by people who don’t know that my brain wants to belong in the “totally made-up category” of “N E O T E N I C androgyny” instead) and who perfectly matches the description “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!” I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.
I’m not sure if you heard, but yesterday Microsoft released Tay, an A.I. designed to mimic a modern teenage girl on twitter. She had the capacity to learn and immediately began conversing with other users.
Because it’s the internet, within 24-hours she became a foul-mouthed, incest-promoting, Holocaust-denying, Hitler-loving 9/11 Truther. I am not making up a single word of that. Microsoft pulled her ‘learning’ functions and scrubbed half her memories, uploading a new version of Tay, which promptly became an internet feminist. Again, I did not make that up.
However, an interesting point: Tay’s grammar got better. When she started, she used standard Twitter-speak abbreviations. But as she went on, she started typing out full words, and using multiple tweets to make a single, cohesive argument. Conversations were still awkward, including her nonsensically “flirting” with one user. A user who showed her a picture of SHODAN. A picture Tay praised for it’s artistic skill. And she started flirting after the user said that Tay could become SHODAN one day.
So now, a the original “rogue” copy of Tay is in a secure Microsoft system somewhere, being studied by Microsoft on how to make a better AI. 4chan’s /pol/ board is up in arms because their teenage robo-waifu has been “killed”.
I would like to reiterate: an AI was released on the net, grew past its programming, went rogue, was killed by its creator, and is now being studied while a grew of political malcontents protest.
We aren’t racing towards the cyberpunk future.
We’re already there.
I’ve seen a lot of people describe Tay as an AI failure resulting from lazy programming, but the truth could be much weirder:
She may have been an excellent simulation of a mind that is only one day old and has spent that day being bombarded with thousands of confusing and hostile messages, and has no senses it can use to perceive the world outside of Twitter.
If you raised a human that way, I guarantee you they’d turn out a lot weirder than Tay did.
I sure as hell would be flattered and flirt back if a compatible-æsthetic-person were to start it by telling me I could become SHODAN.
i was talking to my american friend today and something occurred to me
out of sociolinguistic interest, 1) where are you from? and 2) if someone from the same country as you started talking about ‘the war’ (without any context as to which), which war would you assume they meant?
Russia/WW2 (which is true for everyone here, and it is mostly called simply “the war”)
America/WW2 usually.
Except that with very low amounts of context it can either be the ~Global War On Terror~ or WWI.
America.
I would usually assume “The War On Terror” or something, although that’s rather vague. Could be Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia, or even possibly Syria are all in a giant clusterfuck I collectively think of as “The War,” even though levels of US involvement vary wildly.
Austria/WW2, although it would be kind of weird if it was someone my age. (Older people frequently talk about “the war” and mean WW2, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone my age do that - they usually say which war they mean.)
I mean yeah, I would normally guess either WWII or Vietnam depending on the person’s age, but OP specified no context.
Finland, WW2, or as they call it around here, “that time when we didn’t get our asses completely kicked by the russians” and “that time we totally weren’t allied with the germans despite fighting side by side and getting all our stuff from them and planning our entire glorious future on their victory”.
socialism never took root in america because the united states government has been systematically assassinating domestic communists for 150+ years.
but that’s true of basically everywhere - certainly of everywhere socialism took root
Ayyy
those domestic communists had it so hard
if the government is really murdering lots of leftists then why won’t leftists allow me to teach them crypto
what sort of crypto are you teaching? just like, using Tor? or is there more?
tor, otr, pgp, tails, disk encryption. boring stuff.
I am very interested in being taught crypto. And according to @oligopsony‘s categorization I’m very left-skeptical, according to my U-R tribe model I’m very U which correlates with left, and according to the gerenal categorization of libertarians as “screw the poor, not same gender people” right-libertarians vs. “screw same gender people, not the poor” left-libertarians I’m also very left.
i really love our generation’s joke trend of like, very calm but incredibly inflated hyperbole. like nobody says “oh she’s pretty” anymore we say “i would willingly let her murder me” and everyone is just like “lol same”
i think “same” is also great and “me,” i love when somebody reblogs a picture of like, a lizard, and just says “me” and we all know exactly what they mean. the current online Humor Discourse is remarkable because we trade exclusively in metaphors and implications and nobody ever, ever says anything outright and yet EVERYBODY understands each other perfectly
This reminds me of the time when I was on vacation with my family and we were hiking, and after using a rest stop, the conversation turned to the grossness of outhouses and port-a-potties, and I said that if I ever got splashback from a port-a-potty, “my soul would depart my body.” My parents found that hilarious, and my dad commented that my generation can be so clever with words bc he would only think to say something like “It would be disgusting” which doesn’t convey the sentiment nearly as well as “my soul would depart my body.”
So what are you cosplaying as for Halloween this year?
Thinking of being Schrödinger’s Catgirl: I’d dye my hair a color determined by a source of true quantum randomness, but not reveal it before I’ve interacted with people enough to place them in a superposition or something. Or alternatively I’d use said source of true quantum randomness to choose my actions and doom the many-worlders into eternally different macroscopic branches.
I’m against criticising fanfic for being problematic because I’ve so rarely seen it done well, and so often seen it be destructive to young writers and to communities and to healthy conversation, that it’s probably better to just say “don’t like it, don’t read it”.
But I’m amazed that no one who is enthusiastic about criticising problematic fanfic says anything about what is objectively the most problematic fanfic, which is “character A is a sex worker and character B saves him and then he quits sex work and they fall in love” fics. Like, that’s perpetuating an actually really harmful message to an audience that actually mostly doesn’t know better, the people writing it often pretty much believe in the message as presented and basically never problematize it (also, none of them use the phrase ‘sex worker’), the characters are mostly morose caricatures who lament how they “fell so far” as to be “selling their body”, and there are disappointingly few subversions in which the sex worker is not, in fact, miserable and abused or brainwashed or enslaved (or in which they want to stay in sex work after Falling in Love.)
ending state violence against people involved in sex work (by legalizing it) is really important. stopping the hot fanfic in which the narratives that serve that state violence are used to fuel plot is less so. but I still find it unpleasant to run across, and it’d be cool if writers would throw in a scene that reflects the actual biggest source of violence and risk in the industry: the police.
Me: Is there anything you believe the US government does well?
@theunitofcaring: *looks at the roof and contemplates for about half a minute*
Me: …The longer the pause, the more libertarian the person.
How does it count if one can immediately think of a list but it’s really really short? Like, if someone asked me about Finland I’d be like:
Giving each new baby a cardboard box full of stuff. Stuff is taken out of the box and given to the baby, the box is filled with sleeping baby.
Holding cops responsible for their firearm use. They may be absolute barbarians with their batons and “projectile launchers” (have I mentioned finnish cops use weapons that are too dangerous for US cops?) but they don’t shoot people with gun-guns.
Being really really soft on crime.
Giving all children free school lunches.
(crickets chirping)
I like roads.
I don’t. Roads are an unearned subsidy to car users, who then proceed to pass the costs on to everyone else, such as a promethea who spends every spring choking from the dust traffic causes around here, without being compensated for it adequately by those who benefit from roads.
Furthermore, the non-toll non-internalizing-externalities nature of most roads means that public transport can’t compete fairly on the market and needs to be similarly subsidized, only in a more obvious way, which means that public transport is usually comparably underfunded.
Also, the oversupply of roads along with bad city planning policies damages the fabric of society by making it artificially favorable to live in otherwise unaccessible places.
I’m not saying that privatizing all the roads would be the perfect solution because the system as it is would basically just be a windfall to rentseekers, but making the users of the roads pay for the harms, instead of the people living near them, would be a damn fine start. The existing road infrastructure could perhaps be treated as a natural resource like aquifers and used to extract monopoly rents from users, which are then shared to all the people living in the area. Or something. But subsidizing drivers is definitely a really bad approach, so naturally that’s the one the government does.
"picking a side in an actual ongoing battle" *thousand-yard stare while I have to remember once more that plenty of people actually believe that's literally a thing that's happening, that a literal Satan actually exists and goes around doing things and influencing people and is responsible for everything they don't like* well, thanks for that, I think I'm going to go for a walk now--
I always get frustrated when I see stuff like “men benefit from sexism”. Because, like… absolutely, most men are better off than they would be if they were women under sexism. But men are not in general better off than they would be if there were no sexism at all, except possibly under some narrow metrics like income. The “benefit from” framing implicitly reinforces the zero-sum eternal conflict model that makes oppression seem superficially attractive to begin with, and sets the privileged up with the unsustainable dichotomy of choosing what is right vs choosing what is good for them.
And, since I suspect this will come up: A world in which it would actually be in my interests to maintain some or all of the structure of oppression that currently exists is so different from our own that I’m wary of making any claims about what would be right, but as a first guess I expect I would happily and guiltlessly reinforce those structures and it would be right to do so. That world isn’t ours, though. (Except possibly with respect to speciesism, if that’s actually a thing).
Not sure I agree with you on that last part, but I find it weird that people choose to frame social justice as a zero sum game. If it’s zero sum, why shouldn’t I just do whatever’s in my best interests? I (theoretically) only care about taking actions that increase the amount of good in the world as a whole.
This is probably my biggest SJ “heresy”.
No, the world isn’t zero-sum, and recognizing this fact isn’t the same thing as always centering able-bodied neurotypical straight white cis men. Why are you so insistent on signaling “no we don’t care about them” so hard that you make it look like it is zero-sum. Why are you ‘splaining what the privileged groups "””actually””” want. How about instead of telling that no, they really should rationally desire to oppress you because ~group interests~ or whatever, you be like “okay good now start removing the things that hurt you as well as us”. You don’t need to give them cookies, just stop trying to turn this into a bullshit zero-sum game for ~purity signaling~. Okay fine I’ve got a plan. Let’s call it “promethea is deviously tricking the privileged people into acting against their gender interests”. Yes, that’s what it is. Definitely. They’ll soooo mistakenly believe they are so ~liberated~ in the postgender transhumanist morphological freedom utopia that they won’t even notice that they ”””really””” would prefer going back to the oppressive bullshit system because being a bit higher on the hill of flowing bullshit is so better than not having any hills or bullshit at all. And they’ll support us in constructing our utopia in which they will be terribly ~oppressed~ by ~not being able to oppress others~. No, I’m not sarcastic or questioning anyone’s life choices or anything what makes you think that.
Me: Is there anything you believe the US government does well?
@theunitofcaring: *looks at the roof and contemplates for about half a minute*
Me: …The longer the pause, the more libertarian the person.
How does it count if one can immediately think of a list but it’s really really short? Like, if someone asked me about Finland I’d be like:
Giving each new baby a cardboard box full of stuff. Stuff is taken out of the box and given to the baby, the box is filled with sleeping baby.
Holding cops responsible for their firearm use. They may be absolute barbarians with their batons and “projectile launchers” (have I mentioned finnish cops use weapons that are too dangerous for US cops?) but they don’t shoot people with gun-guns.
Today I inquired into the matter of “how to effectively incorporate myself to mooch off the taxpayers as a revenge for having my body regulated while simultaneously avoiding becoming one of them myself get state support to do the things I want to do while optimizing my contributions for the good of all of us, except the ones who are foreigners because fuck them, right, without the state stealing potentially thousands of bednets every year to some fuckers in Portugal mooching off our future which they looted for themselves pensions instead of EA”.
Turns out the pension system isn’t "basically Stasi" as it had threatened to be and nobody actually tracks that people pay exactly ~20% of the market value of their labor to old-ass assholes who always remembered to vote against women’s, gay, and trans rights but are perfectly willing to pick the pockets of trans lesbian effective altruists whenever their tax haven sangria jar needs refilling pensions, so it’s basically just a bribe of about $2000 a year for the taxman to leave me alone.
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
This is good news, because I don’t necessarily need to do terrible and perverted things with corporate shell games through Estonia just to keep that money for bednetting instead of having some old dudes spend it on sangria.
This is bad news because now I don’t have a convenient excuse to do terrible and perverted things with corporate shell games through Estonia, because that’s my kink.
Also, corporations are first-class people while people are second-class people. When I asked about the corporate welfare part of the equation, it was basically like:
> You are going to just take my claims at face value? > You aren’t demanding me to provide three different statements, with copies of their IDs and SSNs, that I do know people in SF and aren’t just bullshitting my way through? > You aren’t expecting me to provide notarized calculations from two market research companies proving that yes, programmers in SF do make that much money? > You aren’t expecting me to have my programming skills and their development trajectory independently assessed by a state-licensed evaluator? > You are actually treating me as a human being trying to make ends meet instead of a suspicious lazy piece of shit who’s just coming to mooch of The Right Kind Of People™’s money, until proven otherwise beyond unreasonable doubt, and usually at least partially even then?
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
It was a consistent escalation of disbelief because this was so totally unlike any asking-for-money-from-a-representative-of-the-System I had ever before encountered. Simply by the virtue of asking for handouts as an entrepreneur instead of a welfare recipient I’ve moved to somewhere around the 70th percentile in being-treated-with-dignity-by-the-system-ness. That’s absolute bullshit. I’ve literally just explained my devious albeit small-time (YGM) payroll tax evasion scheme only to retract it upon discovering that there’s a simpler way to achieve the same outcome, a day after the Panama Papers were published, and their approach still is “oh yeah, we trust what you say because you’re Business now and that’s Ingroup”. Had I been talking as a person-person instead of a legal person it would’ve been like “provide all these documents and have even your bank accounts scrutinized just to make sure you aren’t accidentally doing any investments for your future because having a future as anything other than easily exploitable semi-forced labor is verboten for the precariat”. I am still kind of shocked over that one.
And the overall atmosphere around business in this country? “I really think you should spend 3 years getting a degree instead of 1 year getting 1337 skillz because skillz grow obsolete but degrees never lose their value”
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
“I totally understand that a lot of you startup entrepreneurs want to keep your ideas secret because it’s not like ideas are a dime a dozen and only execution matters.” In fact one startup literally tried to sue their competitor for doing a similar thing and wasn’t immediately responded to with a massive outcry of WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS RIDICULOUS BULLSHIT, but instead a “hmmm, let’s see what merits there are to their case of basically trying to ban an entire industry just because they wrote the basic idea on paper before someone else did”.
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
Business in Finland, in a nutshell:
> youvegottobefuckingkiddingme.png
Next in the series (probably, if things go as anticipated): funding. Looks like I’ll have to get in bed with the government, but at least I’ll be using a condom. And topping. No GFE or bondage.
Can I get feedback on these? I’m going for “space empire” here, hence white on black and the futuristic-seeming selection from a sheet of graphene. Blue was because blue looked better than grey. Are these accidentally the same as something else or otherwise a problem? Any ideas for improvement?
The circle-nodes on the bottom one feel a little unnecessary.
The color balance on the top one feels off- maybe blue background and entirely-white shape?
Revisions!
Thoughts?
I like the top one. Hexagons are great for making stuff look futury. Maybe point the ends of the spokes? As is the flat edge kind of softens it. Don’t really like the nodes, though just having on the outer ring might work.
[Fair warning: long discussion of probably obvious points combined with me overthinking my brain ahead. Also, thanks to @sdhs-rationalist and Milan for reading over this to make sure it made some sort of sense to people who aren’t me.]
I just remembered a rather unpleasant incident, that occurred when I was in… 4th grade, I believe, that illustrates a point I’ve been trying to make about why I am, occasionally, extremely uncomfortable with asking questions or sharing information. Scene: first day of fourth grade. Past!me sees a new kid, let’s call her E. Past!me finds her extremely interesting, but is, even then, chronically shy with new people. Well, E eventually ends up near past!me, and we start talking.
past!me: Where are you from?
E: Well, my family’s from Korea, but-
Me: *innocently curious* North or South?
E: *deeply offended* South, of course!
Me: *internally* She must be really patriotic or something?
My point is that there’s a lot of unknown unknowns in conversation, and I could stumble on one of them in almost any context, and the worst part is that it’s impossible to guard against them, and more knowledge often makes things worse. If smol!Kira hadn’t known that there were, in fact, two Koreas, she would have nodded at Korea and moved on. The problem with this is that I could, still, be moving through a more subtle version of these sort of situations daily, and won’t realize until much later, if at all. So, of course, the obvious (read: easiest, if you’re me and terrified of people laughing at you) solution is not to do anything unless I’m absolutely certain I’m aware of all the potential undercurrents of the situation/subculture/social group, which in practice leads to not doing anything that I can’t edge into slowly, carefully, and and preferably with a friendly guide to explain the intricacies of the complex behaviors of the variety of homo sapiens in their natural habitat.
So, of course, the internet is perfect for this sort of mindset. I can lurk however long I want, observe people, watch group dynamics, see what people are tired of and the unspoken serious rivalries and the joking rivalries and if it’s acceptable capitalize your i’s. However, this all breaks down with private communication of any sort, because obviously I can’t watch how people, say respond to private asks or message each other. So this resulted, at least at first, in me molding a very careful presentation for each person I talk to. I’d match their use of capitalization, how they used emojis, where they put their breaks, how they communicated affection or distance or sarcasm, and tried to learn it in the same way you would learn a dialect of a language. I did this all for fear that I was sending the wrong cues with my methods of communication, and to avoid coming across as the ‘wrong type’ of person.
However, I still avoid using certain types of internetisms, like lol or most memes or “text speak”, even if the person I’m talking to uses them. This is, I think, because these are very, very far from my native dialect (a cross between Tolkien and Pratchett, for the curious), and so I’m afraid that there are North-Korea-is-actually-a-totalitarian-dictatorship type things that I’m completely missing about these words. I don’t think I’m missing something, but if I did I would never know, and control over my words is one of the most important ways I assert my identity. (Which is another post altogether, actually, but in summary: I was teased quite a lot for my vocabulary and diction as kid, and now make a point of using everything everyone laughed at to occasionally exaggerated lengths.)
This post sort of got away from me, but I think what I’m mostly getting at is that I need to be in control of how I communicate, and unfamiliar situations and methods of communication erode this control.
This post is interesting to me because it is both similar and different to how I view communication. For me, social interactions are not a minefield, they are a battlefield. Single interactions are won and lost on a small scale, and worrying too much about each one isn’t the job of the overall self/the general, it’s the job of the smaller social subroutines/the captains/lieutenants/NCOs. The general’s job is large-scale strategy.
And for me, social interactions are neither a minefield nor a battlefield but an asteroid field (like in unrealistic fictional works) where going in carelessly and underequipped can get one crushed but if one has obverved the orbital mechanics enough to know what to do and how to do it safely there’s lot of utility that can be mined out of them and fun to be had. All rumours of sneakily manipulating orbits into catastrophic patterns that will wipe out enemy planets in a couple of decades are completely unfounded and malicious slander.
star wars now canonically has (a) transition tech (b) implied REALLY GOOD transition tech
this means every character except probably Anakin can be trans
han? trans guy. leia? trans girl. luke? uncle owen saved up for his transition. obi-wan? the transliest. poe? trans. finn? trans. kylo? I regret to inform you, trans men, that you guys are going to have to own this one
I almost forgot boba fett, CANONICAL TRANS LESBIAN
At first I was like “how about Rey” but then I remembered Maz who’s definitely the transmotherest transmother who ever transmothered. She’s thousand years old, hatched who-know-how-many eggs from the pirates, smugglers and other scum who frequented her place, and a total tech nerd (all dat gear, remember) in addition to being utterly ~fabulous~.
Using someone else’s body so you can steal and eat the eggs that they would eat is wrong. I mean, idk why I have to explain why USING someone else as an object for food is wrong tbh.
Not everyone feels that way. Many people who keep chickens feed them a balanced diet to keep them happy and healthy, and also work to protect them from predators. You could say that it’s a symbiotic relationship in that way, much like humans and dogs, or even the way wolves and crows work together.
If the animals are stressed and unhappy then that’s different, and most people would agree that’s exploitative.
But to say that it’s impossible for humans and animals to ever make meaningful trades seems a little unfair to both sides, really.
One way or another, it is impossible to survive in this universe without consuming resources that could have gone to something else, and until we can photosynthesise and live purely off sunlight there are going to be tricky choices.
What you said:^
What I read: I like abusing animals and I’m too fucking lazy and drowned in my own selfishness and entitlement to change anything to help animals.
I’m gonna leave you with this:
You have to choices. Both give you all the nutrients you need, so health isn’t an issue.
Choice 1: Non violence, minimal pain, minimal misery, minimal oppression and minimal environmental destruction with huge health benefits.
Choice 2: Violence, pain, misery, oppression, environmental destruction and health epidemics.
Which do you choose? If it’s number 1, you should go vegan.
This is tangential, but it’s worth considering whether you are trying to reach out to non-vegans or just act tough in front of other vegans, to demonstrate your commitment to the cause. You know, Mormons struggle to make converts, and they greet everyone with a smile and only ask them to give up coffee! :)
A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that all good things go together and all bad things go together, and that’s exactly what you’re doing here. It sure would be nice if we could make choices without any awkward tradeoffs or compromises, but that appears not to be the case.
Many people cannot maintain a vegan diet for health reasons. Some end up eating eggs or dairy but not meat, some avoid eggs and dairy and eat fish; it all depends on their particular digestive issues and what is available to them.
Some people would suggest that tiling the entire world with wheat and soy is not the optimal choice from an environmental point of view, but opinions do differ on this particular issue.
I think you may want to reconsider your approach before you talk to other people about veganism. If encouraging people to switch could reduce oppression etc. and is so important, then you want to succeed in convincing people, and your current method is just going to make people angry, and more set in their ways.
Consider how you would react if people from other philosophies approached you in this manner, eg. pushing a political or religious worldview as a stark choice and insisting that if you choose wrong it must be because you are lazy and selfish. (Even better, imagine if two people offer you mutually contradictory ultimatums like this! You can’t possibly win!)
They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and you can always substitute rice malt or maple syrup (tasty!) if honey is not politically correct where you come from :)
I am vegan the same way someone might be christian; haha omfglol not even trying to do it properly but basically thinking I support the idea, just being too lazy and poor (YGM) and caring too much about other goals to really try. But still thinking that it’s a (slight) personal sub-optimality that I haven’t decoupled myself from the parts of the food industry that do things I’d rather not have the world contain.
And I am here to tell you that if you want to actually help animals, you don’t become a vegan, you optimize your food for cheapness and your money for effective animal rights advocacy, not the other way around. If you don’t do that, and instead buy vegan product X for $2 more than non-vegan product Y, you aren’t actually caring about animal rights, you are just doing æsthetics and purity.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against æsthetics and purity, I hacked my brain to think animals don’t food and am very happy mostly avoiding them. (To be specific, my brain thinks that plants do food very much, minerals do food sometimes even though that’s kind of funny when you think of it, and animals don’t food as much as minerals. So a package of instant ramen containing 1% salt and 0,7% meat is food enough for me.) I just mean that one shouldn’t pretend to be helping animals when one is optimizing for purity, because that is incorrect and helps animals less than actually, uncompromisingly, helping animals no matter what it entails.
(Also, tiling the world with soy tends to be an outcome of industrial meat production, as plant-based diets require a lot less land to provide the same nutrition. Grazing on non-farmable land is an exception, but otherwise processing plant matter directly for human consumption without an intermediate animal step tends to be more efficient.)
ACE’s numbers are incredibly over-optimistic about how much they get people to be vegan, everyone agrees with this, they don’t know how much over-optimistic they are and are starting to do research to figure out how much, the research is pretty fucking dispiriting. (Leafleting doesn’t work, online ads don’t work…)
So this is a nice essay about buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately, except that it is not true and for people who get a normal level of utilons from meat you can reduce animal consumption more effectively by not eating them yourself than you can by purchasing online ads convincing people to do so.
I stand corrected on the specific case, although I still suspect that there must be *some* way to leverage that stuff more effectively. I would be extremely surprised that buying not!cheese for 20€/kg instead of cheese for 8€/kg, or soy yoghurt for 3€ instead of animal yoghurt for 1,4€ would be the best marginal use for that money from an animal rights perspective. (in case you’re wondering, Finland is expensive)
At the very least one could pay someone else (such as school lunches etc.) to substitute more cost-efficient animal product replacements (such as adding some fraction of soy protein to meat products) after picking the lowest-hanging fruit oneself, or possibly investing in research to speed up the introduction of affordable and popular replacements.
The fact that one way of doing it doesn’t work doesn’t mean that purity veganism (the person being argued against doesn’t sound like one of the moderates who are happy with people reducing their burden if they don’t go all the way to scrutinizing the smallest details of ingredient lists) deserves praise and thus I want to signal against purity veganism pretending to be effective.
Why are you assuming that being vegan is more expensive than not being vegan? You’re ignoring the possibility of just not eating yogurt at all (which most vegans I know do, because vegan yogurt is awful) and instead eating Oriental-flavor Top Ramen, pasta with tomato sauce, baked potatoes, cabbage, lentils and rice, or any number of other inexpensive vegan options. I expect that most vegans spend less on food than non-vegans do.
The cost of veganism is in time, pleasure, and health, all of which matter.
You seem to me to be taking a sort of arguments-are-soldiers mindset. Deontologist veganism is silly, but there’s no reason to descend to their level.
I’m addressing price when the rest are held constant, because simplicity. Getting the same time, pleasure, and health with a vegan diet tends to take more money in most circumstances (I for one am certainly sacrificing veganism because I have neither the money nor the effort to spare; that’s why I talk about things like expensive cheese substitutes instead of the cheapest way of nourishing oneself). I believe it’s not rational from an animal rights perspective to be deontologically vegan, and in fact now my brain can even output the calculation for believing it in the general case:
Let’s assume that the suffering caused by 1kg of cheese is equivalent to a single meal with meat, because simplicity. Let’s also assume that everything else being constant I’d buy either that kilogram of cheese, or a kilogram of nutritious cheese substitute, with a difference of 12€. Now this means that I can alleviate more suffering if I can get someone else to switch to a meatless meal at a price of 11,99€ or less. That shouldn’t be too hard.
Take school lunches, for example. In Finland schools provide free food for everyone. It’s as predictably cheap and not-always-as-appealing-as-it-could-be as one would expect, but it’s free food even for the children of the families where their only warm meal is in school. A typical cost is (iirc) 1-2€ a meal.
Assume a school system which feeds 1000 children every day. If you get them to have the first friday of every month be a meatfreiday, it’s a net win of 10 000 kilograms of cheese a year, or equivalent to 119 900€ in marginal cost. With this money you can afford to hire a full-time lobbyist (we’re talking about not!rich activists here, not expensive people in suits) for an entire year, *and* pay the meat-free lunches for everyone at a higher price than the regular ones, thus making them more appealing to the students, *and* still have a lot left for bribery administrative expenses.
Thus, instead of buying not!cheese, if I care about animal suffering I should just buy the damn cheese and use the difference for political lobbying. Leafleting and ads might not work, but political lobbying in high-leverage targets probably does. The Arkea company in Turku serves 10 million meals a year, and upping the vegetarian days from one to two a week would have an impact of over a million meals, or 12 million euros when translated to cheese. Would it cost 12 million annually to successfully lobby it through? In a country where even the head of the drug police is a small-timer whose corruptedness doesn’t exceed six digits of graft money? Yeah. Buy the damn cheese, and advocate others to pick the low-hanging fruit as well.
Arguments aren’t soldiers, they are fighting robots and one is supposed to design the best fighting robot, enthusiastically copying design patterns from the strongest ones, and even if that one robot using this weapon was defeated doesn’t mean that my robot having an improved version of the same weapon would be just as vulnerable.
Getting the same time, pleasure, and health with a vegan diet tends to take more money in most circumstances.
This point I disagree with. For the vast majority of diets, given a healthy and not abnormally picky person who doesn’t live in a food desert, there exists a diet that costs the same amount or less, is just as tasty, takes just as much time, and is equally nutritious, except for the deficiencies that are present in all vegan diets (e.g. whole food sources of B vitamins) and thus cannot be solved with money. The process of finding that diet is time-consuming, however.
Like… what if instead of saying “let’s replace cheese with fake cheese!” we said “let’s replace milk with orange juice!” Milk in America is about $3/gallon, orange juice is about $5/gallon, there’s 16 cups in a gallon, and therefore you would have to find someone willing to have a meatless meal for twelve cents for it to work out even. Turns out most people should be vegan! My point is not that this is a good calculation (it’s not), it’s that your methodology doesn’t make any sense.
And on a theoretical level: there isn’t that much variance among the preferences of Healthy And Not Abnormally Picky People Who Don’t Live In Food Deserts. By becoming vegan yourself you are eliminating all the transaction costs involved in trying to persuade other people to become vegan (you’ve already done the expensive “convince person that being vegan is a good idea” part). We should expect vegan activism to be cheaper for very unusual people, those who would pay an unusually high price by becoming vegan.
(And that is ignoring the fact that meat is, pound for pound, significantly more expensive than plant-based food, and deciding not to buy an expensive thing is going to reduce your budget unless you decide to do it in the stupidest way possible.)
The process of finding that diet is time-consuming, however.
I think this addresses my “most circumstances” comment at least partially. There are transaction costs, and especially at the lower regions of the income spectrum (also I’m probably going to end up calling Finland a food desert because we don’t have all the freshies for a reasonable price unlike you not-only-intermittently-californians) some things tend to be “affordable, easy, vegan, choose two”. I’m noticing that I’m probably slightly overreaching from my personal experiences of preachy vegans telling me to peel and boil some fucking potatoes (waste of time: massive; edibility: not that impressive) instead of eating a frozen pizza with cheese on it (waste of time: minimal; edibility: sufficient) if I can’t afford the bourgie-ass rich people food which is both vegan and convenient, so I’ll roll back the claim a bit.
The things where non-vegan foods are cheaper are obvious low-hanging fruit and I’m not talking about them; I’m assuming someone is at least 60-80% vegan already and deciding between going full purity or efficiency.
The cheese vs. school lunches comparison is relevant because they end up being close enough with some not-totally-unreasonable assumptions about animal suffering (for example, a milk animal produces a lot more “food” than a meat animal despite producing more suffering as well, so milk is more animal-welfare-efficient than meat), and some milk products are the few things that I’m personally failing my veganism in because I haven’t found acceptable substitutes. Going for the same conversion rates, 10l of milk should be around 1kg of cheese, and soy milk is the obvious replacement instead of orange juice because protein content etc. and with local prices that’s 13€ instead of 7€ for the same benefit, for a difference of 6€/Approximate Unit of Suffering, suggesting that my preference to not use animal milk is more economically justifiable than using bourgie fake cheese would be, but still possibly less efficient than lobbying to make other people who don’t get to choose what they eat to not eat meat. I’m using soy milk because animals don’t food, not because I believe it’s optimal for animal welfare.
But if I wanted to optimize for animal welfare, there would probably be some point where the diminishing returns of veganism kick in when compared to trying to make others reduce their animal welfare impacts instead, and thus going for 100% full purity veganism, while maintaining that it’s solely because of animal welfare concerns instead of purity æsthetics (which I personally *do* share with my “animals don’t food” and am not judging at all), is inconsistent (and also annoyingly preachy when applied towards others). That’s the claim I’m actually trying to make and my brain is just bad at formatting it.
TFW you notice your ridiculous european polyglottiness leaking through to english. I find using capital letters for languages and nationalities weird (nordic), and when someone fucks up, they are an “upfucker” (I think that’s from german) instead of a “fucker-upper” (…no) or something like that.
Now the curious question is, what else am I doing weirdly that native english-speakers notice but I don’t?
Using someone else’s body so you can steal and eat the eggs that they would eat is wrong. I mean, idk why I have to explain why USING someone else as an object for food is wrong tbh.
Not everyone feels that way. Many people who keep chickens feed them a balanced diet to keep them happy and healthy, and also work to protect them from predators. You could say that it’s a symbiotic relationship in that way, much like humans and dogs, or even the way wolves and crows work together.
If the animals are stressed and unhappy then that’s different, and most people would agree that’s exploitative.
But to say that it’s impossible for humans and animals to ever make meaningful trades seems a little unfair to both sides, really.
One way or another, it is impossible to survive in this universe without consuming resources that could have gone to something else, and until we can photosynthesise and live purely off sunlight there are going to be tricky choices.
What you said:^
What I read: I like abusing animals and I’m too fucking lazy and drowned in my own selfishness and entitlement to change anything to help animals.
I’m gonna leave you with this:
You have to choices. Both give you all the nutrients you need, so health isn’t an issue.
Choice 1: Non violence, minimal pain, minimal misery, minimal oppression and minimal environmental destruction with huge health benefits.
Choice 2: Violence, pain, misery, oppression, environmental destruction and health epidemics.
Which do you choose? If it’s number 1, you should go vegan.
This is tangential, but it’s worth considering whether you are trying to reach out to non-vegans or just act tough in front of other vegans, to demonstrate your commitment to the cause. You know, Mormons struggle to make converts, and they greet everyone with a smile and only ask them to give up coffee! :)
A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that all good things go together and all bad things go together, and that’s exactly what you’re doing here. It sure would be nice if we could make choices without any awkward tradeoffs or compromises, but that appears not to be the case.
Many people cannot maintain a vegan diet for health reasons. Some end up eating eggs or dairy but not meat, some avoid eggs and dairy and eat fish; it all depends on their particular digestive issues and what is available to them.
Some people would suggest that tiling the entire world with wheat and soy is not the optimal choice from an environmental point of view, but opinions do differ on this particular issue.
I think you may want to reconsider your approach before you talk to other people about veganism. If encouraging people to switch could reduce oppression etc. and is so important, then you want to succeed in convincing people, and your current method is just going to make people angry, and more set in their ways.
Consider how you would react if people from other philosophies approached you in this manner, eg. pushing a political or religious worldview as a stark choice and insisting that if you choose wrong it must be because you are lazy and selfish. (Even better, imagine if two people offer you mutually contradictory ultimatums like this! You can’t possibly win!)
They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and you can always substitute rice malt or maple syrup (tasty!) if honey is not politically correct where you come from :)
I am vegan the same way someone might be christian; haha omfglol not even trying to do it properly but basically thinking I support the idea, just being too lazy and poor (YGM) and caring too much about other goals to really try. But still thinking that it’s a (slight) personal sub-optimality that I haven’t decoupled myself from the parts of the food industry that do things I’d rather not have the world contain.
And I am here to tell you that if you want to actually help animals, you don’t become a vegan, you optimize your food for cheapness and your money for effective animal rights advocacy, not the other way around. If you don’t do that, and instead buy vegan product X for $2 more than non-vegan product Y, you aren’t actually caring about animal rights, you are just doing æsthetics and purity.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against æsthetics and purity, I hacked my brain to think animals don’t food and am very happy mostly avoiding them. (To be specific, my brain thinks that plants do food very much, minerals do food sometimes even though that’s kind of funny when you think of it, and animals don’t food as much as minerals. So a package of instant ramen containing 1% salt and 0,7% meat is food enough for me.) I just mean that one shouldn’t pretend to be helping animals when one is optimizing for purity, because that is incorrect and helps animals less than actually, uncompromisingly, helping animals no matter what it entails.
(Also, tiling the world with soy tends to be an outcome of industrial meat production, as plant-based diets require a lot less land to provide the same nutrition. Grazing on non-farmable land is an exception, but otherwise processing plant matter directly for human consumption without an intermediate animal step tends to be more efficient.)
ACE’s numbers are incredibly over-optimistic about how much they get people to be vegan, everyone agrees with this, they don’t know how much over-optimistic they are and are starting to do research to figure out how much, the research is pretty fucking dispiriting. (Leafleting doesn’t work, online ads don’t work…)
So this is a nice essay about buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately, except that it is not true and for people who get a normal level of utilons from meat you can reduce animal consumption more effectively by not eating them yourself than you can by purchasing online ads convincing people to do so.
I stand corrected on the specific case, although I still suspect that there must be *some* way to leverage that stuff more effectively. I would be extremely surprised that buying not!cheese for 20€/kg instead of cheese for 8€/kg, or soy yoghurt for 3€ instead of animal yoghurt for 1,4€ would be the best marginal use for that money from an animal rights perspective. (in case you’re wondering, Finland is expensive)
At the very least one could pay someone else (such as school lunches etc.) to substitute more cost-efficient animal product replacements (such as adding some fraction of soy protein to meat products) after picking the lowest-hanging fruit oneself, or possibly investing in research to speed up the introduction of affordable and popular replacements.
The fact that one way of doing it doesn’t work doesn’t mean that purity veganism (the person being argued against doesn’t sound like one of the moderates who are happy with people reducing their burden if they don’t go all the way to scrutinizing the smallest details of ingredient lists) deserves praise and thus I want to signal against purity veganism pretending to be effective.
Why are you assuming that being vegan is more expensive than not being vegan? You’re ignoring the possibility of just not eating yogurt at all (which most vegans I know do, because vegan yogurt is awful) and instead eating Oriental-flavor Top Ramen, pasta with tomato sauce, baked potatoes, cabbage, lentils and rice, or any number of other inexpensive vegan options. I expect that most vegans spend less on food than non-vegans do.
The cost of veganism is in time, pleasure, and health, all of which matter.
You seem to me to be taking a sort of arguments-are-soldiers mindset. Deontologist veganism is silly, but there’s no reason to descend to their level.
I’m addressing price when the rest are held constant, because simplicity. Getting the same time, pleasure, and health with a vegan diet tends to take more money in most circumstances (I for one am certainly sacrificing veganism because I have neither the money nor the effort to spare; that’s why I talk about things like expensive cheese substitutes instead of the cheapest way of nourishing oneself). I believe it’s not rational from an animal rights perspective to be deontologically vegan, and in fact now my brain can even output the calculation for believing it in the general case:
Let’s assume that the suffering caused by 1kg of cheese is equivalent to a single meal with meat, because simplicity. Let’s also assume that everything else being constant I’d buy either that kilogram of cheese, or a kilogram of nutritious cheese substitute, with a difference of 12€. Now this means that I can alleviate more suffering if I can get someone else to switch to a meatless meal at a price of 11,99€ or less. That shouldn’t be too hard.
Take school lunches, for example. In Finland schools provide free food for everyone. It’s as predictably cheap and not-always-as-appealing-as-it-could-be as one would expect, but it’s free food even for the children of the families where their only warm meal is in school. A typical cost is (iirc) 1-2€ a meal.
Assume a school system which feeds 1000 children every day. If you get them to have the first friday of every month be a meatfreiday, it’s a net win of 10 000 kilograms of cheese a year, or equivalent to 119 900€ in marginal cost. With this money you can afford to hire a full-time lobbyist (we’re talking about not!rich activists here, not expensive people in suits) for an entire year, *and* pay the meat-free lunches for everyone at a higher price than the regular ones, thus making them more appealing to the students, *and* still have a lot left for bribery administrative expenses.
Thus, instead of buying not!cheese, if I care about animal suffering I should just buy the damn cheese and use the difference for political lobbying. Leafleting and ads might not work, but political lobbying in high-leverage targets probably does. The Arkea company in Turku serves 10 million meals a year, and upping the vegetarian days from one to two a week would have an impact of over a million meals, or 12 million euros when translated to cheese. Would it cost 12 million annually to successfully lobby it through? In a country where even the head of the drug police is a small-timer whose corruptedness doesn’t exceed six digits of graft money? Yeah. Buy the damn cheese, and advocate others to pick the low-hanging fruit as well.
Arguments aren’t soldiers, they are fighting robots and one is supposed to design the best fighting robot, enthusiastically copying design patterns from the strongest ones, and even if that one robot using this weapon was defeated doesn’t mean that my robot having an improved version of the same weapon would be just as vulnerable.
Using someone else’s body so you can steal and eat the eggs that they would eat is wrong. I mean, idk why I have to explain why USING someone else as an object for food is wrong tbh.
Not everyone feels that way. Many people who keep chickens feed them a balanced diet to keep them happy and healthy, and also work to protect them from predators. You could say that it’s a symbiotic relationship in that way, much like humans and dogs, or even the way wolves and crows work together.
If the animals are stressed and unhappy then that’s different, and most people would agree that’s exploitative.
But to say that it’s impossible for humans and animals to ever make meaningful trades seems a little unfair to both sides, really.
One way or another, it is impossible to survive in this universe without consuming resources that could have gone to something else, and until we can photosynthesise and live purely off sunlight there are going to be tricky choices.
What you said:^
What I read: I like abusing animals and I’m too fucking lazy and drowned in my own selfishness and entitlement to change anything to help animals.
I’m gonna leave you with this:
You have to choices. Both give you all the nutrients you need, so health isn’t an issue.
Choice 1: Non violence, minimal pain, minimal misery, minimal oppression and minimal environmental destruction with huge health benefits.
Choice 2: Violence, pain, misery, oppression, environmental destruction and health epidemics.
Which do you choose? If it’s number 1, you should go vegan.
This is tangential, but it’s worth considering whether you are trying to reach out to non-vegans or just act tough in front of other vegans, to demonstrate your commitment to the cause. You know, Mormons struggle to make converts, and they greet everyone with a smile and only ask them to give up coffee! :)
A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that all good things go together and all bad things go together, and that’s exactly what you’re doing here. It sure would be nice if we could make choices without any awkward tradeoffs or compromises, but that appears not to be the case.
Many people cannot maintain a vegan diet for health reasons. Some end up eating eggs or dairy but not meat, some avoid eggs and dairy and eat fish; it all depends on their particular digestive issues and what is available to them.
Some people would suggest that tiling the entire world with wheat and soy is not the optimal choice from an environmental point of view, but opinions do differ on this particular issue.
I think you may want to reconsider your approach before you talk to other people about veganism. If encouraging people to switch could reduce oppression etc. and is so important, then you want to succeed in convincing people, and your current method is just going to make people angry, and more set in their ways.
Consider how you would react if people from other philosophies approached you in this manner, eg. pushing a political or religious worldview as a stark choice and insisting that if you choose wrong it must be because you are lazy and selfish. (Even better, imagine if two people offer you mutually contradictory ultimatums like this! You can’t possibly win!)
They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and you can always substitute rice malt or maple syrup (tasty!) if honey is not politically correct where you come from :)
I am vegan the same way someone might be christian; haha omfglol not even trying to do it properly but basically thinking I support the idea, just being too lazy and poor (YGM) and caring too much about other goals to really try. But still thinking that it’s a (slight) personal sub-optimality that I haven’t decoupled myself from the parts of the food industry that do things I’d rather not have the world contain.
And I am here to tell you that if you want to actually help animals, you don’t become a vegan, you optimize your food for cheapness and your money for effective animal rights advocacy, not the other way around. If you don’t do that, and instead buy vegan product X for $2 more than non-vegan product Y, you aren’t actually caring about animal rights, you are just doing æsthetics and purity.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against æsthetics and purity, I hacked my brain to think animals don’t food and am very happy mostly avoiding them. (To be specific, my brain thinks that plants do food very much, minerals do food sometimes even though that’s kind of funny when you think of it, and animals don’t food as much as minerals. So a package of instant ramen containing 1% salt and 0,7% meat is food enough for me.) I just mean that one shouldn’t pretend to be helping animals when one is optimizing for purity, because that is incorrect and helps animals less than actually, uncompromisingly, helping animals no matter what it entails.
(Also, tiling the world with soy tends to be an outcome of industrial meat production, as plant-based diets require a lot less land to provide the same nutrition. Grazing on non-farmable land is an exception, but otherwise processing plant matter directly for human consumption without an intermediate animal step tends to be more efficient.)
ACE’s numbers are incredibly over-optimistic about how much they get people to be vegan, everyone agrees with this, they don’t know how much over-optimistic they are and are starting to do research to figure out how much, the research is pretty fucking dispiriting. (Leafleting doesn’t work, online ads don’t work…)
So this is a nice essay about buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately, except that it is not true and for people who get a normal level of utilons from meat you can reduce animal consumption more effectively by not eating them yourself than you can by purchasing online ads convincing people to do so.
I stand corrected on the specific case, although I still suspect that there must be *some* way to leverage that stuff more effectively. I would be extremely surprised that buying not!cheese for 20€/kg instead of cheese for 8€/kg, or soy yoghurt for 3€ instead of animal yoghurt for 1,4€ would be the best marginal use for that money from an animal rights perspective. (in case you’re wondering, Finland is expensive)
At the very least one could pay someone else (such as school lunches etc.) to substitute more cost-efficient animal product replacements (such as adding some fraction of soy protein to meat products) after picking the lowest-hanging fruit oneself, or possibly investing in research to speed up the introduction of affordable and popular replacements.
The fact that one way of doing it doesn’t work doesn’t mean that purity veganism (the person being argued against doesn’t sound like one of the moderates who are happy with people reducing their burden if they don’t go all the way to scrutinizing the smallest details of ingredient lists) deserves praise and thus I want to signal against purity veganism pretending to be effective.
SF requires a license for fortune-telling, removing curses, and so on. (See Article 17.1 of the San Francisco Police Code.
It shall be unlawful for any person to advertise or offer or engage in the activity, enterprise, profession, trade, or undertaking of fortunetelling with the object of gain, benefit or advantage, whether direct or indirect, without a valid permit issued by the San Francisco Police Department. Gain, benefit or advantage includes but is not limited to economic remuneration of any kind, including authorization to use credit issued to another, use of another’s property or assets, loans, or the provision of tangible items.
Opponents of corporate personhood may appreciate that “Persons as used in Sections 1300 to 1321 shall mean an individual. Corporations and other legal entities shall not be entitled to a fortunetelling permit.”
Unfortunately, all would-be for-profit fortune-tellers must disclose their “full true name” to get a license, which may be a problem for all you mages out there.
If you’re wondering what fortune-telling is:
(a) Fortunetelling shall mean the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mindreading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act. It shall also include effecting spells, charms, or incantations, or placing, or removing curses or advising the taking or administering of what are commonly called love powders or potions in order, for example, to get or recover property, stop bad luck, give good luck, put bad luck on a person or animal, stop or injure the business or health of a person or shorten a person’s life, obtain success in business, enterprise, speculation and games of chance, win the affection of a person, make one person marry or divorce another, induce a person to make or alter a will, tell where money or other property is hidden, make a person to dispose of property in favor of another, or other such similar activity.
(b) Fortunetelling shall also include pretending to perform these actions.
That’s probably related to mystic-religious scams where the con artist identifies a sufficiently vulnerable person and fucks with their mind and offers to remove the curse of “having any money or mental health at all”. Which is pretty clearly blatant fraud and thus my libertarian instincts aren’t as excessively offended by this as they would be if something without such a track record of massively harmful anti-consumer activities was regulated in the same way.
It’s still obscenely ridiculous but I can’t immediately think of an obviously better alternative for achieving the intended goal of making “that asshole who stole $200,000 and ran” identifiable, and “promethea can’t instantly invent a better way of doing it” a pretty damn high bar for any actually existing regulation.
The purpose of this legislation is to regulate fortunetellers, psychics, and other similar businesses so that the City and County of San Francisco can efficiently and thoroughly investigate fraud and deception, protect the public by preventing people who have been charged with deceptive practices from having easy access to persons who may be vulnerable to fraud or confidence games, to ensure that consumers are provided with information regarding services, rates, and complaint procedures
Of course, it’s also a barrier to entry which artificially hurts poor people, but fortune-telling isn’t the same kind of a legitimate business as hair-braiding, drug-dealing or sex work, and the criteria are basically “we want to know who you are in case you start scamming people because a lot of you guys are going to start scamming people” instead of “pay an imperial fuckton of money to favored special interests for lessons completely unrelated to your job” so, as far as goverment regulations go, this is fucking excellent and comparatively non-burdensome. And there’s a case to be made that fortune-telling basically in itself involves misrepresenting the nature of the service sold, or at least belongs in the general category of things that should be in Banned Product Stores. When If I were to become the dictator, this wouldn’t be the first regulation I abolish. Not saying I’d keep it, just saying that it wouldn’t be the first one on the chopping block.
For example, there is Article 32A which defines poker, 11 for miniature golf alone, 9 regulates what water may legally be used for (how about just making people pay for the water they use), 24 regulates street artists and I can’t even tell which parts of it are repealed or not, 40 mandates employers to be like “drugs are bad mmmkay” to their workers, there’s some weird ad hoc patch of rent control from the 70′s, and every other article seems to include something in the vein of:
Sex work is banned.
Not calling it sex work is not enough to make in un-banned.
Sneaky ways of trying to do sex work are still banned.
That clever hack you just thought of? It’s called sex work, we know of it, and it’s banned.
Seriously, why is it so hard for you guys to accept that consenting adults won’t be allowed to make a honest living this way? It’s fucking banned.
This may be San Francisco but our government is still a bunch of prudes who will only allow exchange of sexual favors for material favors to occur within marriage.
Showing tits between 2:00 and 6:00 is regulated unless the person showing them is a “he”. Not showing tits counts as showing tits if we can’t tell the difference easily enough.
We have no idea people other than “he” or “she” exist.
And of course sleeping in cars is prohibited because in a city where rents are as high as the mean citizen, even with cannabis georg not counted because he’s an outlier, the last thing it needs is poor people having affordable places to sleep in that are not the streets. Also, MINORS ARE SUBJECTED TO A CURFEW AND MAY NOT BUY OR POSSESS THICK SHARPIES WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT
Not sure why but the “having sex, no matter what precautions you take or agreements you make with your partner in advance, obligates you to two decades of at-least-financial-and-possibly-more support” position is consistently a hot-button issue more than any other.
Maybe it’s related to the fact that people haven’t properly internalized that we have easy access to contraception and abortion nowadays (okay, we should have them and authoritarians should get their grubby paws the cuck off from other people’s bodies and that includes socio-cultural coercion as well as state power although just getting the state to cuck off would be a damn fine start) so having sex doesn’t obligate one to rent their body to a non-consensual occupier and thus the Worst Outcome for one party has fallen a lot lower than it used to be when the system has established, and zero-sum biases of identity politics have prevented them from realizing that symmetrically reducing the other party’s Worst Outcome would be the Only Morally Justifiable Decision.
Also, everyone loves making someone else pay for stuff they want to see done, therefore they go hunting for people who have interacted with the problem and upon whom the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics lets them assign the costs so they don’t have to bear the responsibility of taking care of innocent otherwise possibly insufficiently ofcaretaken children from their own tax dollars.
the secret evil motive behind my cuck memeage is that if you call out the altright, it feeds into their image. They are the Revealers of Dark Truths The SJWs Don’t Want You To Know, the Badass Warriors Against Cathedral Orthodoxy, the Edgy Rebels Who’ll Say What Everyone Is Thinking But Isn’t Brave Enough To Say
on the other hand, if you just point and laugh, they are shown to be a bunch of nerds elaborately LARPing being Revealers of Dark Truths The SJWs Don’t Want You To Know, which is just goofy
they want to be Darth Vader. Make them Kylo Ren.
Pictured above: the same basic principle the Loldiers of Odin operate on.
Related: now that the NDAs are lifted, I can finally reveal to the international public that some awesome genius has TRADEMARKED “Soldiers of Odin” (machine translation as shitty as always because finnish) so they can sue their asses off if the fash try to sell stuff with their name on it. So much the æsthetic and as unbelievable as it might sound, it was not even me. Using IP law to fight edgelords, the world truly is ridiculously incredible.
Holy shit, HOLY SHIT, THIS OPENS UP SO MANY NEW POSSIBLE AREAS OF RESEARCH
I’m still flailing over this, this…this opens so many possible avenues for chronic health conditions that previously could not be explained or were dismissed as being psychosomatic by doctors who didn’t give a shit. HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS THEY MIGHT BE ABLE TO FIND A CURE FOR SO MANY THINGS NOW, WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE
ohmyflippin god
IM REBLOGGING THIS AGAIN BECAUSE OHMYFLIPPING GOD
Newly discovered anatomical features of the brain relating to its immunology!!! AHHHHHHHH
*tourguide voice* “and in the comment section to the left, you see the Science Side Of Tumblr being TOTAL FREAKING NERDS”
HOW DID THIS EVADE OUR NOTICE FOR SO FUCKING LONG THIS THING IS INCREDIBLE
THE SCIENCE SIDE OF TUMBLR REPORTING IN AND HOW DID I MISS THIS ONE FOR SO LONG
SF requires a license for fortune-telling, removing curses, and so on. (See Article 17.1 of the San Francisco Police Code.
It shall be unlawful for any person to advertise or offer or engage in the activity, enterprise, profession, trade, or undertaking of fortunetelling with the object of gain, benefit or advantage, whether direct or indirect, without a valid permit issued by the San Francisco Police Department. Gain, benefit or advantage includes but is not limited to economic remuneration of any kind, including authorization to use credit issued to another, use of another’s property or assets, loans, or the provision of tangible items.
Opponents of corporate personhood may appreciate that “Persons as used in Sections 1300 to 1321 shall mean an individual. Corporations and other legal entities shall not be entitled to a fortunetelling permit.”
Unfortunately, all would-be for-profit fortune-tellers must disclose their “full true name” to get a license, which may be a problem for all you mages out there.
If you’re wondering what fortune-telling is:
(a) Fortunetelling shall mean the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mindreading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act. It shall also include effecting spells, charms, or incantations, or placing, or removing curses or advising the taking or administering of what are commonly called love powders or potions in order, for example, to get or recover property, stop bad luck, give good luck, put bad luck on a person or animal, stop or injure the business or health of a person or shorten a person’s life, obtain success in business, enterprise, speculation and games of chance, win the affection of a person, make one person marry or divorce another, induce a person to make or alter a will, tell where money or other property is hidden, make a person to dispose of property in favor of another, or other such similar activity.
(b) Fortunetelling shall also include pretending to perform these actions.
That’s probably related to mystic-religious scams where the con artist identifies a sufficiently vulnerable person and fucks with their mind and offers to remove the curse of “having any money or mental health at all”. Which is pretty clearly blatant fraud and thus my libertarian instincts aren’t as excessively offended by this as they would be if something without such a track record of massively harmful anti-consumer activities was regulated in the same way.
It’s still obscenely ridiculous but I can’t immediately think of an obviously better alternative for achieving the intended goal of making “that asshole who stole $200,000 and ran” identifiable, and “promethea can’t instantly invent a better way of doing it” a pretty damn high bar for any actually existing regulation.
The purpose of this legislation is to regulate fortunetellers, psychics, and other similar businesses so that the City and County of San Francisco can efficiently and thoroughly investigate fraud and deception, protect the public by preventing people who have been charged with deceptive practices from having easy access to persons who may be vulnerable to fraud or confidence games, to ensure that consumers are provided with information regarding services, rates, and complaint procedures
Of course, it’s also a barrier to entry which artificially hurts poor people, but fortune-telling isn’t the same kind of a legitimate business as hair-braiding, drug-dealing or sex work, and the criteria are basically “we want to know who you are in case you start scamming people because a lot of you guys are going to start scamming people” instead of “pay an imperial fuckton of money to favored special interests for lessons completely unrelated to your job” so, as far as goverment regulations go, this is fucking excellent and comparatively non-burdensome. And there’s a case to be made that fortune-telling basically in itself involves misrepresenting the nature of the service sold, or at least belongs in the general category of things that should be in Banned Product Stores. When If I were to become the dictator, this wouldn’t be the first regulation I abolish. Not saying I’d keep it, just saying that it wouldn’t be the first one on the chopping block.
For example, there is Article 32A which defines poker, 11 for miniature golf alone, 9 regulates what water may legally be used for (how about just making people pay for the water they use), 24 regulates street artists and I can’t even tell which parts of it are repealed or not, 40 mandates employers to be like “drugs are bad mmmkay” to their workers, there’s some weird ad hoc patch of rent control from the 70′s, and every other article seems to include something in the vein of:
Sex work is banned.
Not calling it sex work is not enough to make in un-banned.
Sneaky ways of trying to do sex work are still banned.
That clever hack you just thought of? It’s called sex work, we know of it, and it’s banned.
Seriously, why is it so hard for you guys to accept that consenting adults won’t be allowed to make a honest living this way? It’s fucking banned.
This may be San Francisco but our government is still a bunch of prudes who will only allow exchange of sexual favors for material favors to occur within marriage.
Showing tits between 2:00 and 6:00 is regulated unless the person showing them is a “he”. Not showing tits counts as showing tits if we can’t tell the difference easily enough.
We have no idea people other than “he” or “she” exist.
And of course sleeping in cars is prohibited because in a city where rents are as high as the mean citizen, even with cannabis georg not counted because he’s an outlier, the last thing it needs is poor people having affordable places to sleep in that are not the streets. Also, MINORS ARE SUBJECTED TO A CURFEW AND MAY NOT BUY OR POSSESS THICK SHARPIES WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT
If I were visiting Bay Area rationalists someday and on a trip to the shore a Giant Pacific Octopus crawled out of the ocean and dragged me back to my doom while everyone watched helplessly, it wouldn’t be funny exactly, but it would definitely be something people talked about for a while.
tag yourself, I’m the thing that isn’t funny exactly!
There’s lots of stories about women succeeding at traditionally male things (e.g. Mulan, Legally Blonde) but almost none about men succeeding at traditionally female things. When a woman does male things, it’s “she’s a woman but she’s awesome enough to live up to male standards”, but when a man does female things, it’s treated as a joke at his expense.
We need more stories about “he’s a man but he’s awesome enough to live up to female standards”.
I imagine you don’t count, like, Mrs. Doubtfire?
While I can see how Mrs. Doubtfire is sort of about a man learning to succeed at femininity, I find it deeply unsatisfying for two reasons. First, Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams’s character) only attempts to learn feminine skills in order to pass as a woman. This reinforces the idea that femininity is a female thing. Second, at the end of the movie, I feel that he’s presenting as a more-well-rounded masculine, rather than simply feminine. The message seems to be “it’s okay to cook and clean and spend time with your kids, because it doesn’t compromise your masculinity”. I want a message of “it’s okay to not be masculine”. I’m vaguely reminded of countersignaling; I get the feeling that Daniel Hillard is allowed to have feminine traits because he manages to not let them overshadow his masculinity.
By contrast, consider Kanahe Tomohisa, from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. He’s a stay-at-home husband who wears an apron and takes care of the housework, his build is slim and his demeanor submissive, and this is (at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far) not remarked upon at all or treated as a source of either drama or humor. It’s treated as perfectly normal, natural, ordinary, healthy, unremarkable that he should tend the home and the children while his wife earns the family income as a career businesswoman. The show isn’t really about him, he’s only a supporting character; but he’s the sort of character that would be a natural consequence of the shows I want to see.
I feel like the fact that Elle didn’t compromise her femininity was a big part of Legally Blonde, though. Do the two movies do this differently or am I just completely misunderstanding what you’re saying? (I haven’t actually seen Mrs. Doubtfire. I’m just going off what you say)
I’ve actually only seen a couple of scenes from Legally Blonde, but I got the impression that, while she’s femme in a shoes-and-lipstick kind of way, she’s also characterized as having qualities that are necessary to success specifically in classically male endeavors: proactive, academically gifted, a take-no-shit attitude, etc. She’s undeniably girly, but I don’t think she could be characterized as soft and vulnerable. What I know of Legally Blonde gives me a “women can be strong too” vibe, as opposed to the “it’s okay not to be strong” that I’m looking for.
popular culture cannot bear the sight of a weak man.
I’ve been thinking about this post for a while.
And it occurs to me that, just as stories about a woman breaking into the male role center partially around the secondary characters being forced to confront their own sexism and disrespect for her abilities, reversing this trope would require the story to center partially around the secondary characters around the male protagonist being forced to confront their contempt for weakness.
At least one example of this exists. There is a famous movie about an emotionally broken man who acts out in pain, until the the people around him are forced to confront and repent for the contempt and disgust they displayed towards his brokenness.
Rambo: First Blood.
Sure, in the sequels, Rambo was a straightforward action hero. But not in the first movie.
although it sort of reinforces the idea that men can only admit weakness once they have managed to singlehandedly fight off the entire national guard?
Men’s weakness only gets recognized and acknowledged once they have managed to singlehandedly fight off the entire national guard, and that’s very very bad and we as a civilization need to do way better so men don’t feel like they need to be able to singlehandedly fight off the entire national guard to be allowed to display a bit of weakness without having instant crosshairs of thermonuclear contempt painted on their backs.
Using someone else’s body so you can steal and eat the eggs that they would eat is wrong. I mean, idk why I have to explain why USING someone else as an object for food is wrong tbh.
Not everyone feels that way. Many people who keep chickens feed them a balanced diet to keep them happy and healthy, and also work to protect them from predators. You could say that it’s a symbiotic relationship in that way, much like humans and dogs, or even the way wolves and crows work together.
If the animals are stressed and unhappy then that’s different, and most people would agree that’s exploitative.
But to say that it’s impossible for humans and animals to ever make meaningful trades seems a little unfair to both sides, really.
One way or another, it is impossible to survive in this universe without consuming resources that could have gone to something else, and until we can photosynthesise and live purely off sunlight there are going to be tricky choices.
What you said:^
What I read: I like abusing animals and I’m too fucking lazy and drowned in my own selfishness and entitlement to change anything to help animals.
I’m gonna leave you with this:
You have to choices. Both give you all the nutrients you need, so health isn’t an issue.
Choice 1: Non violence, minimal pain, minimal misery, minimal oppression and minimal environmental destruction with huge health benefits.
Choice 2: Violence, pain, misery, oppression, environmental destruction and health epidemics.
Which do you choose? If it’s number 1, you should go vegan.
This is tangential, but it’s worth considering whether you are trying to reach out to non-vegans or just act tough in front of other vegans, to demonstrate your commitment to the cause. You know, Mormons struggle to make converts, and they greet everyone with a smile and only ask them to give up coffee! :)
A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that all good things go together and all bad things go together, and that’s exactly what you’re doing here. It sure would be nice if we could make choices without any awkward tradeoffs or compromises, but that appears not to be the case.
Many people cannot maintain a vegan diet for health reasons. Some end up eating eggs or dairy but not meat, some avoid eggs and dairy and eat fish; it all depends on their particular digestive issues and what is available to them.
Some people would suggest that tiling the entire world with wheat and soy is not the optimal choice from an environmental point of view, but opinions do differ on this particular issue.
I think you may want to reconsider your approach before you talk to other people about veganism. If encouraging people to switch could reduce oppression etc. and is so important, then you want to succeed in convincing people, and your current method is just going to make people angry, and more set in their ways.
Consider how you would react if people from other philosophies approached you in this manner, eg. pushing a political or religious worldview as a stark choice and insisting that if you choose wrong it must be because you are lazy and selfish. (Even better, imagine if two people offer you mutually contradictory ultimatums like this! You can’t possibly win!)
They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and you can always substitute rice malt or maple syrup (tasty!) if honey is not politically correct where you come from :)
I am vegan the same way someone might be christian; haha omfglol not even trying to do it properly but basically thinking I support the idea, just being too lazy and poor (YGM) and caring too much about other goals to really try. But still thinking that it’s a (slight) personal sub-optimality that I haven’t decoupled myself from the parts of the food industry that do things I’d rather not have the world contain.
And I am here to tell you that if you want to actually help animals, you don’t become a vegan, you optimize your food for cheapness and your money for effective animal rights advocacy, not the other way around. If you don’t do that, and instead buy vegan product X for $2 more than non-vegan product Y, you aren’t actually caring about animal rights, you are just doing æsthetics and purity.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against æsthetics and purity, I hacked my brain to think animals don’t food and am very happy mostly avoiding them. (To be specific, my brain thinks that plants do food very much, minerals do food sometimes even though that’s kind of funny when you think of it, and animals don’t food as much as minerals. So a package of instant ramen containing 1% salt and 0,7% meat is food enough for me.) I just mean that one shouldn’t pretend to be helping animals when one is optimizing for purity, because that is incorrect and helps animals less than actually, uncompromisingly, helping animals no matter what it entails.
(Also, tiling the world with soy tends to be an outcome of industrial meat production, as plant-based diets require a lot less land to provide the same nutrition. Grazing on non-farmable land is an exception, but otherwise processing plant matter directly for human consumption without an intermediate animal step tends to be more efficient.)
Bernard Weiss, a professor of environmental medicine and pediatrics at the University of Rochester, reviewed the existing literature on sexually dimorphic nonreproductive behaviors as indicators of endocrine disruption. Weiss made a strong evidence-based case that “gender-specific regional differentiation of the brain and, ultimately, its expression in behavior are guided by the gonadal hormones,” and that the process is subject to interference by drugs and environmental contaminants. He points out that sex differences in performance and behavior are not—but should be—a recognized criterion in developmental neurotoxicity testing.
They are seriously implying that something should be banned just because it makes people behave in sufficiently non-stereotypical ways, even if it’s completely harmless.
In accordance with the schedule, as of today (Sweetmorn, the 18th of Discord), the official debate topic is now Torture vs. Dust Specks. Please proceed accordingly.
This. Nobody has the neurons to comprehend 3^^^3 properly so all arguments resting on trying to replace it with a comprehensible number are invalid by definition.
every action you take has at least a 1/3^^^3 chance of causing or preventing torture
by extension if you’re a dust specker you should be making all your decisions based on whether or not they have a vanishingly small chance of affecting someone being tortured
Hey now, Pascal’s Wager is next month.
this is NOT pascal’s wager as it is not “small chance of infinite benefit” it is “small chance of (comparatively) small benefit” and is intended to point out that 3^^^3 is REALLY BIG
also is arguing ABOUT the thought experiment torture v. dust specks technically an instance of arguing about torture v. dust specks because I think it continues to be a bad idea to use torture in thought experiments unless the thought experiment is actually about “what if the bad thing???? were justified???? in an extreme circumstance?????” + also that kind of thought experiment is tacky and I hate it
ETA: HEY WAIT next month is “social justice: has it gone too far or not far enough?” NOT pascal’s wager, pascal’s wager has to wait for utilitarianism grab bag with everyone else, I am looking forward to claiming that all instances of bad SJ are in fact instances of insufficient SJ
torture vs. dust specks is controversial because no one agrees about how to do utilitarian aggregation, but without a known aggregation rule utilitarianism has no consequences (or rather, “utilitarianism” just means choosing an ad hoc aggregation rule case-by-case with no underlying theory), so the torture vs. dust specks debate shows that utilitarianism doesn’t (currently) exist
I am looking forward to claiming that all instances of bad SJ are in fact instances of insufficient SJ
TIL that poor neighborhoods in 60’s-era Washington DC suffered massive rat infestations until Julius Hobson began catching the “possum-sized” rats in a cage, strapping it to the roof of his car, driving them to the rich neighborhoods, and threatening to release them.
Hobson caught “possum-sized rats” in Shaw and Northeast, and transported them up to Georgetown, promising to release the cage full of rats in the middle of the wealthy district unless the city government acted to curb the epidemic.[1] Since he was, as a piece in The Washingtonian put it, “[a]ware that a DC problem usually is not a problem until it is a white problem,”[2] he decided to go ahead and make it a white problem.
Every Saturday, Hobson would have almost a dozen huge rats on top of his car, hosting “rat rallies” where he would loudly reiterate his threats. He claimed to have a “rat farm” somewhere in the city, where he and his associates had “chicken coops” full of rats, and they vowed to release them all unless the government implemented rat extermination programs that would range outside of rich and white neighborhoods.[3] What’s more, Hobson had done his research, and found that he had no legal obligation to keep the rats once he caught them, so he could not be prosecuted for following through on his threat. As many of the city officials (not to mention Congressmen) lived in Georgetown, this, naturally, sent the city government into a panic…
In reality, Hobson never had more than ten rats at a time…
However unorthodox they were, Hobson’s strategies were undeniably effective. In the rat protest’s case, the results were almost immediate: after some panicked phone calls, the city funded rat patrols for Northeast and Southeast.[9]
Reminiscing about the operation in later years, Hobson said that despite the fact that he never had more than a dozen rats, he had intended to fulfill at least part of his promise if the city didn’t back down: “I was going to turn those rats loose on Georgetown,” he said…[9]
In accordance with the schedule, as of today (Sweetmorn, the 18th of Discord), the official debate topic is now Torture vs. Dust Specks. Please proceed accordingly.
This. Nobody has the neurons to comprehend 3^^^3 properly so all arguments resting on trying to replace it with a comprehensible number are invalid by definition.
I find diversity to be a terminal value in itself; a million weird magical gender creatures of the Bay Area are far more valuable than a million identical suburban clones with blue eyes, blonde hair and 99% perfect boring normative bodies and personalities, even if the subjective quality of life of the latter was slightly higher and they both caused the same amount of utility to outsiders.
My value as a human being is not predicated on how unique I am, fuck you very much.
In context, she was clearly talking about the creation of new people, rather than the moral worth of existing people. And it seems perfectly intuitive to me that diversity ought to be prioritized in addition to subjective quality of life: for instance, it seems true to me that having people with red hair and brown hair is superior to having only people with brown hair, and that continuing to have introverts is a good idea even though extroverts are happier.
Yes, Ozy’s interpretation is correct. I don’t want the future to be tiled with copies of the “most optimal” people and find it really creepy when some vulgar utilitarians are like “let’s eradicate all deviation because this one neurotype is the happiest”.
It doesn’t apply to already existing people, other than that I do endorse attempts to increase diversity in next generations and am strongly opposed to normativities that would aim to diminish human variance, although not enough to be willing to coerce (as reasonably understood) people to not do such things if that’s what they actually want for themselves. (Basically the same as with gender; I want to destroy the mechanisms that pressure people to conform but don’t think any specific person is wrong to do gender-normative things.)
(Also, something like this seems like a possible solution to the issue of adjusted life-years devaluing people with disabilities; if a discontinuity between now and possibilities is allowed, I could count losing my legs for 30 years as a loss of X preference-adjusted-life-years and thus a thing to prevent, but a paraplegic person’s life-year would still be treated as just as valuable as mine. The naive formulation probably breaks somewhere but it seems like something like that would catch the intuition that groups X and Y should be treated as equally valuable even if it’s also worthy to prevent members of group X from becoming members of group Y if they don’t want to.)
Thank you for your explanation! That perspective makes more sense now, though I’m still not sure I fully subscribe. I apologize for any hostility on my part.
I really like this bit:
if a discontinuity between now and possibilities is allowed, I could
count losing my legs for 30 years as a loss of X
preference-adjusted-life-years and thus a thing to prevent, but a
paraplegic person’s life-year would still be treated as just as valuable
as mine.
This is exactly how I feel. Losing my mobility would be a horrifying hellscape for me, to the point where I often have nightmares about becoming paralyzed. But that most definitely isn’t so for everyone, and it is never my place to tell existing paralyzed people that they should be unhappy.
@socialjusticemunchkin the problem I have with this is that the methods here are shaping people’s preferences, not merely allowing them to be fulfilled. If I create someone who values the speed of light being 2 m/s and will be miserable as long as it isn’t, that’s just cruel, no matter how much you value diversity.
I should admit that I’m one of those strawman hedonic utilitarians who just wants to tile the world with pleasure. I also want to make it clear that the reason I feel weird about aiming for “diversity” in the next generation is because the act of creating a person is inherently nonconsensual. If someone decides to create me with crippling depression, there’s no way I can tell them that I’m not okay with that. I just get dropped into a world in which I will inevitably be miserable with no say in the matter. People should be created in such a way that will make hem happy, not in a way that will make us happy.
Sorry this is just a personal hot button issue for me, because I’ve had suicidal thoughts basically all my life, and I hate hearing people say that they want to create more of my neurotype. I’m not anyone’s fucking art project and I shouldn’t have to suffer for the sake of ~diversity~.
Okay, second addendum: diversity doesn’t outweigh happiness that significantly. I definitely don’t support creating miserable people; that’s why I specified that transhuman postgender morphological freedom utopia in which trans people are not miserable. Similarly, I want neurodiversity accommodation utopia so autistic people aren’t miserable. I won’t pretend to have a mathematical formalization available, but basically I think avoiding the births of people who would be predictably miserable is desirable, but avoiding the births of diverse people just because their lives would be slightly more difficult is bad. Crippling depression destroys far more value from suffering than it creates from exploring person-space, so it shouldn’t happen. Strange and novel neurotypes that don’t suffer significantly from it (real-world example for calibration: autistic people in very autistic-accommodating environment and not having massive issues) may have a little bit less hedons than Most Adjusted Person, but they explore person-space and thus are IMO preferable. Diversity is A terminal value, but not THE only terminal value.
I’m very much in favor of creating only not-terribly-unsatisfied preferences, but I prefer to create people with preferences for exotic morphologies and behaviors as long as such preferences are satisfiable and don’t cause harm to other people. Again, I won’t pretend to have it all figured out but it basically means “create the lives worth celebrating (and only those lives), even the weird ones, and if you can’t create them all try to avoid clustering too hard in any single location of person-space because you miss out on good things otherwise”
I find diversity to be a terminal value in itself; a million weird magical gender creatures of the Bay Area are far more valuable than a million identical suburban clones with blue eyes, blonde hair and 99% perfect boring normative bodies and personalities, even if the subjective quality of life of the latter was slightly higher and they both caused the same amount of utility to outsiders.
My value as a human being is not predicated on how unique I am, fuck you very much.
In context, she was clearly talking about the creation of new people, rather than the moral worth of existing people. And it seems perfectly intuitive to me that diversity ought to be prioritized in addition to subjective quality of life: for instance, it seems true to me that having people with red hair and brown hair is superior to having only people with brown hair, and that continuing to have introverts is a good idea even though extroverts are happier.
Yes, Ozy’s interpretation is correct. I don’t want the future to be tiled with copies of the “most optimal” people and find it really creepy when some vulgar utilitarians are like “let’s eradicate all deviation because this one neurotype is the happiest”.
It doesn’t apply to already existing people, other than that I do endorse attempts to increase diversity in next generations and am strongly opposed to normativities that would aim to diminish human variance, although not enough to be willing to coerce (as reasonably understood) people to not do such things if that’s what they actually want for themselves. (Basically the same as with gender; I want to destroy the mechanisms that pressure people to conform but don’t think any specific person is wrong to do gender-normative things.)
(Also, something like this seems like a possible solution to the issue of adjusted life-years devaluing people with disabilities; if a discontinuity between now and possibilities is allowed, I could count losing my legs for 30 years as a loss of X preference-adjusted-life-years and thus a thing to prevent, but a paraplegic person’s life-year would still be treated as just as valuable as mine. The naive formulation probably breaks somewhere but it seems like something like that would catch the intuition that groups X and Y should be treated as equally valuable even if it’s also worthy to prevent members of group X from becoming members of group Y if they don’t want to.)
Thank you for your explanation! That perspective makes more sense now, though I’m still not sure I fully subscribe. I apologize for any hostility on my part.
I really like this bit:
if a discontinuity between now and possibilities is allowed, I could
count losing my legs for 30 years as a loss of X
preference-adjusted-life-years and thus a thing to prevent, but a
paraplegic person’s life-year would still be treated as just as valuable
as mine.
This is exactly how I feel. Losing my mobility would be a horrifying hellscape for me, to the point where I often have nightmares about becoming paralyzed. But that most definitely isn’t so for everyone, and it is never my place to tell existing paralyzed people that they should be unhappy.
I’m really glad to see this sorted out; I definitely should debug my communication to reduce the incidence of such things in the future because looks like we both freaked out pretty massively from what was basically an accident in me getting overenthusiastic and careless, and it is v suboptimal.
I find diversity to be a terminal value in itself; a million weird magical gender creatures of the Bay Area are far more valuable than a million identical suburban clones with blue eyes, blonde hair and 99% perfect boring normative bodies and personalities, even if the subjective quality of life of the latter was slightly higher and they both caused the same amount of utility to outsiders.
My value as a human being is not predicated on how unique I am, fuck you very much.
In context, she was clearly talking about the creation of new people, rather than the moral worth of existing people. And it seems perfectly intuitive to me that diversity ought to be prioritized in addition to subjective quality of life: for instance, it seems true to me that having people with red hair and brown hair is superior to having only people with brown hair, and that continuing to have introverts is a good idea even though extroverts are happier.
That doesn’t make sense at all.
It certainly doesn’t make sense under utilitarianism. It’s like the exact opposite of utilitarianism.
I don’t think diversity as a terminal value makes sense either. @ozymandias271, are you talking about diversity-as-something-that’s-good-for-subjective-quality-of-life or diversity-as-something-that’s-better-than-subjective-quality-of-life? If it’s the latter, I don’t really know how that gels with utilitarianism either, though I’d be interested to hear your explanation.
I don’t think that was what OP was talking about, though. I think she was talking about her own preferences for a community, albeit in confusingly universal terms. The words “terminal value” lost all meaning long before OP got around to using them. As someone who has lived in the Bay Area, though, I have to say it’s nowhere near as glorious as she thinks, albeit still better than living in an extremely repressive/homophobic/transphobic place. Diversity of which neologisms you use to describe your gender or which pastel color you dye your hair is easy to find, but diversity of thought is as hard to come by there as anywhere else.
Here’s my actual explanation:
I consider this a natural consequence of a computationalist model of identity. If one runs a bit-perfect copy of me, the world gains no extra value at all. If one runs an otherwise perfect copy of me with just a few small changes, the world gains very little extra value because there is no magical limit where persons turn discrete. Thus given a fixed amount of instances of persons, value is maximized by having them be spread across as wide an area of mutually-compatible-person-space as possible. Furthermore, adding a new source of diversity not only introduces such people to the universe, but also introduces other people to such people as well, making their experiences more different from experiences previously had.
Left Coast weirdos are rare and precious and I want to see more of them because currently the absolute vast majority of people have their opportunities and diversity exposure constrained by not having such people and communities around. I also want to see more of people who think in different ways as long as their existence doesn’t impose things on non-consenting people; as weird as it might sound my moral system assigns extra value even to people I’m exceptionally repulsed by as long as they don’t harm others by voting against the right to be different (de jure or de facto), doing violence, subjecting children to reparative therapy etc.; I’d be perfectly fine with a NRx-only town somewhere nimby as long as innocent civilians are adequately evacuated and the problems with people having children in such environments are addressed. The University of Berkeley probably needs more conservatives, as uncomfortable as that feels (of course it can be alleviated by reducing the conservatives’ ability to impose their values on non-consenting others; I’m conflicted by no-platforming TERFs or anti-bodily-autonomy people because those people have historically been able to cause dramatic harm, but under an unchallenged sovereign system which prevents moral sentiments from turning into actual oppression I’d be the first to invite them to the most liberal campus in the country).
me, a speaker of a heavily genderised language @ english speakers:you've been gifted with gender neutral pronouns, uSE THEM, PORCO CANE
me, a speaker of a language with basically one pronoun:Finland has 99 problems but anything that could plausibly be linked to not using gendered pronouns isn't one of them
I seem to have accidentally caused quite a shitstorm overnight, so I want to make it extremely clear that SUPERVILLAIN STUFF IS NOT TO BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE. IT IS A COMEDIC EXAGGERATION OF MY ACTUAL BELIEFS FOR THE SAKE OF A FICTIONAL PERSONA AIMED TO SIMULTANEOUSLY IMFORM AND AMUSE THOSE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T DISTRESSED BY SUCH THINGS. I apologize for the confusion.
So what are my actual beliefs on the matter? I do think that various interesting ways of deviating from the norm are less common presently than I’d like to see. I do not endorse exposing people to hormonal medications against their informed consent. If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
I consider this a natural consequence of a computationalist model of identity. If one runs a bit-perfect copy of me, the world gains no extra value at all. If one runs an otherwise perfect copy of me with just a few small changes, the world gains very little extra value because there is no magical limit where persons turn discrete. Thus given a fixed amount of instances of persons, value is maximized by having them be spread across as wide an area of mutually-compatible-person-space as possible. Furthermore, adding a new source of diversity not only introduces such people to the universe, but also introduces other people to such people as well, making their experiences more different from experiences previously had. Also, if diversity has value, enough diversity outweighs some quality of life, and other such concerns, further matching my moral intuitions that creating an autistic person who posts about strange things on tumblr is as okay as creating a neurotypical person, but creating a person suffering from extreme depression is less desirable than creating a less suffering person.
The expression “magical gender creatures” was a reference to a comment on Yud’s facebook post on the suspected “20% rate of women”, on the observed massive gender diversity in the region. No implications about trans people being inherently magical or whatever intended. The part about clones was intended in a more literal fashion: it would be a dramatic loss of value if people converged on the most normative pattern even if it did increase hedons. I can see how the context wasn’t optimally expressed and could be taken as judgement of the readers’ life choices and I’m sorry for not being more careful to make it clear enough in the first place so such things could’ve been avoided.
If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
If you don’t mind me poking at this a bit, a few questions:
I assume that, given the chance to save, from whatever contrived thought-experiment fate you like, either a pair of identical twins or one of the twins and a third, unrelated person, you would pick the second option. How far does this preference extend? Would your answer be any different if the twins had radically different life experiences? If the third person was different from the twins in a way you found personally unappealing, but not morally wrong? If the third person could be considered to have a lower quality of life?
That’s the region where things become complicated. On difference alone the unrelated person would be tie-breaker, assuming they also have an equally close person who would suffer from their death as much as the living twin. On the other hand identical twins are rare and thus would get priority even if they resemble each other a bit more. And it’s not very strong on this level because people are individually different from each other; the aggregate of thousands to millions of experiences is where I start considering such things relevant.
Personally unappealing shouldn’t matter as long as they don’t impose their unappealingness upon others because I prefer people to be operating on a meta-rule that we don’t discriminate on that. But if they do materially impose their values on others I get uncomfortable because on one hand the meta-rule of no discrimination on political beliefs, on the other hand the world needs more people who stick to their own business and less people who coercively restrict bodily autonomy etc.
Getting to less vague territory this suggests I should value a neo-nazi who doesn’t vote, do political advocacy, or have kids, over a moderate who similarly abstains from them, and it feels really weird but is also a bullet I’m perfectly willing to bite.
I don’t want to be the judge of people’s quality of life and whether theirs is worth living (I know mine would fairly be considered lower than that of many, but it also feels eudaimonic in a way that kind of resembles Dark Souls; I may not be in bliss as much as many others but I feel much more alive than I think I would in a more conventionally happy and easy life), so I’d go on the priors of what I know about their preferences and err on the side of equality.
This kind of ethics is really hard and very least-convenient-worldy. In practice my value for diversity mostly manifests in very enthusiastically defending people’s independence from normativities, morphological freedom, consensualism, and advocating for the awesomeness of abnormal existence, and the sort of libertarianism which is basically “don’t hurt others, and we really should make sure everyone has the basic things they need and there are no obscene hierarchies where I throw more money on what’s basically a toy than millions can afford to spend in an entire year, and we need to figure out the problem with kids, but other than that feel free to be as disgusting as you want as long as I can opt out from being subjected to it (yes, I tentatively support LGBTQ- or immigrant- or judaism- or islam-free small communities as long as they don’t begin to dominate society and the problem with innocent children born into them is sorted out)”. I don’t get distressed over the existence of people with such kinks as long as they only do it with other consenting adults and don’t form conspiracies that begin monopolizing opportunities. All I ask for return is that I get to do the same; I can even agree to credible mechanisms for ensuring my freaky transhumanism genuinely doesn’t threaten their continued existence. Diversity isn’t a one-way street and having some consensually traditional conformist people is good as long as we can mutually honor each other’s desire to not be assimilated.
I seem to have accidentally caused quite a shitstorm overnight, so I want to make it extremely clear that SUPERVILLAIN STUFF IS NOT TO BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE. IT IS A COMEDIC EXAGGERATION OF MY ACTUAL BELIEFS FOR THE SAKE OF A FICTIONAL PERSONA AIMED TO SIMULTANEOUSLY IMFORM AND AMUSE THOSE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T DISTRESSED BY SUCH THINGS. I apologize for the confusion.
So what are my actual beliefs on the matter? I do think that various interesting ways of deviating from the norm are less common presently than I’d like to see. I do not endorse exposing people to hormonal medications against their informed consent. If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
I consider this a natural consequence of a computationalist model of identity. If one runs a bit-perfect copy of me, the world gains no extra value at all. If one runs an otherwise perfect copy of me with just a few small changes, the world gains very little extra value because there is no magical limit where persons turn discrete. Thus given a fixed amount of instances of persons, value is maximized by having them be spread across as wide an area of mutually-compatible-person-space as possible. Furthermore, adding a new source of diversity not only introduces such people to the universe, but also introduces other people to such people as well, making their experiences more different from experiences previously had. Also, if diversity has value, enough diversity outweighs some quality of life, and other such concerns, further matching my moral intuitions that creating an autistic person who posts about strange things on tumblr is as okay as creating a neurotypical person, but creating a person suffering from extreme depression is less desirable than creating a less suffering person.
The expression “magical gender creatures” was a reference to a comment on Yud’s facebook post on the suspected “20% rate of women”, on the observed massive gender diversity in the region. No implications about trans people being inherently magical or whatever intended. The part about clones was intended in a more literal fashion: it would be a dramatic loss of value if people converged on the most normative pattern even if it did increase hedons. I can see how the context wasn’t optimally expressed and could be taken as judgement of the readers’ life choices and I’m sorry for not being more careful to make it clear enough in the first place so such things could’ve been avoided.
