promethea.incorporated

argumate:

attemptstobeunproblematic:

argumate:

@attemptstobeunproblematic:

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.)

3 months ago · tagged #scrupulosity cw #veganism cw · 106 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

Reminder

nostalgebraist:

ozymandias271:

fnord888:

ozymandias271:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sonatagreen:

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

You have my sword bow axe KBP V60 MTS-Q

3 months ago · tagged #steel feminism · 80 notes · source: sonatagreen · .permalink

magnolia-noire:

afloweroutofstone:

tilthat:

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.

via http://ift.tt/1qg801c

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]

Direct action

chaotic good

(via nostalgebraist)

3 months ago · tagged #it me · 9,717 notes · source: tilthat · .permalink

Reminder

sonatagreen:

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.

3 months ago · 80 notes · source: sonatagreen · .permalink

wirehead-wannabe:

funereal-disease:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ozymandias271:

funereal-disease:

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”

3 months ago · 105 notes · source: funereal-disease · .permalink

funereal-disease:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ozymandias271:

funereal-disease:

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.

3 months ago · 105 notes · source: funereal-disease · .permalink

exsecant:

voximperatoris:

ozymandias271:

funereal-disease:

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).

(via exsecant)

3 months ago · 105 notes · source: funereal-disease · .permalink