I appreciate your support of animal welfare, though I think support of shrimp is somewhat more symbolic than effective.
I volunteer at a parrot sanctuary that is overflowing with birds from the illegal pet trade - from places like Mexico where a baby macaw taken from its nest can fetch 500$ USD, above what an average person can make in a month or more. These birds are social, highly intelligent animals. I think more emphasis should be placed on the plight of animals like these and your voice could help. See https://www.fosterparrots.com
Denouncing tribalism is an implicit form of tribalism. You are trying to sort you and the other enlightened ones from the stupid rubes who are open about their gauche prejudices, as opposed to the smart, elitist anti-prejudice prejudice.
Before man walked the earth, whales killing untold trillions of shrimp throughout the years. Should we be on board with a whale extermination program to save all those poor shrimp?
“It’s infuriatingly difficult to convince people of conclusions by argument. For instance, even after I made a totally convincing argument for why you should give me lots of money, most of you didn’t. The outrage!” I think there’s a big difference between convincing someone of the truth of an argument and of acting on the conclusions that would result of the argument
Tribalism in the United States has contributed greatly to the world's problems over the past 25 years. It contributed to the invasion of Iraq, which caused a flood of refugees into Europe. And it contributed to the election of Trump, which is destabilizing the whole planet.
Hi I know this seems random but what are your thoughts on this website and interpretation of quantum physics and the many worlds interpretation? https://quatism.com/theory.htm
I’ve seen you argue for God plenty of times (I don’t think the arguments are as good as you do, but that’s ok) but I have not seen you argue for Christianity specifically. I assume I’ve just missed it? What’s the argument for the Christian version of theism specifically? Even if you accept the existence of God, Christianity seems wildly unlikely to be true
This is well-conceived and an excellent summary of how your various opinions are coherently related.
However, as with many of your writings, there occasionally comes a moment where I slap my forehead in frustration because you are driven to a weird conclusion not by a chain of valid logic that most people are unwilling to follow, but because of a boneheaded misconception about a matter of fact which you had insufficient common sense to notice needed to be examined.
In this case the offending passage is: “The only reason anyone seriously considered cutting PEPFAR was that they valued the lives of foreigners so little that they were willing to risk millions of deaths for the sake of tiny budget cuts.”
No. They did not “seriously consider cutting” PEPFAR specifically. They said “Oh my gosh, here is an absolutely colossal slush fund in which tens of billions of dollars are apparently going to various graft or nefariousness, protected by some flagship good-deed-doing programs the beneficiaries of which are human shields protecting the graft, let’s pause everything immediately because they are shoveling gold bars off the Titanic to keep us from redirecting them to better uses, and put back the truly necessary things after reviewing them”. Reviewing PEPFAR and deciding it was one of the things that needed to be put back took about 72 hours by my count, and the idea that millions of people were at risk of dying because the supply chain for needed medications was THAT CRITICALLY SENSITIVE to routine administrative changes was a ridiculous canard that could only come from shills and could only be believed by easily gaslit common-sense-lackers with no clue about how media functions on anything Trump-related.
I think I agree with you that philosophers can be too normie, though your range of experience on that is almost certainly larger than mine. But they're more interested in engaging with arguments than the general population, so that's good.
I do wonder to what extent some of the fear of engaging with arguments is because people often aren't very good at them, and they don't want to risk being exploited. I think knowing things can be intimidating for people to discuss them with you, because you will have developed opinions, they won't, there's a power imbalance there, and it might be hard for them to see where precisely the more and less sound parts of things lie.
Regarding animal suffering: I think I definitely agree with you that there is a bunch of needless cruelty and suffering. But how do we know that their lives are actually net-negative? That might have big differences in the prescriptions that follow from that (well, if you were dictator of the world, etc. Might not change the lowest hanging fruit much).
I think it's likely that most of your eclectic views are rather downstream from the belief of utilitarianism being true, if not from the inclination to set aside any "gut feelings" in order to arrive to relatively iconoclastic and difficult to understand (for instance, I can define SIA, but it doesn't intuitively "click") conclusions. In any case, it's a pretty good way to protect against the three errors you mentioned. :D
I'm more SSA than SIA. But I agree there's problem with instantiating a finite number of people from an infinite no of potential people.
I wonder how you limit the "potential people" to people and not include (eg) shrimps? Or at least all mammals.
This is a statistical argument so I don't think "total evidence" applies. You're entitled to do statistics on any set if you can unambiguously assign objects to that set.
Based on your evidence I can only conclude that God is real and omnipotent and really hates shrimp and is therefore punishing them for some reason.
I appreciate your support of animal welfare, though I think support of shrimp is somewhat more symbolic than effective.
I volunteer at a parrot sanctuary that is overflowing with birds from the illegal pet trade - from places like Mexico where a baby macaw taken from its nest can fetch 500$ USD, above what an average person can make in a month or more. These birds are social, highly intelligent animals. I think more emphasis should be placed on the plight of animals like these and your voice could help. See https://www.fosterparrots.com
Denouncing tribalism is an implicit form of tribalism. You are trying to sort you and the other enlightened ones from the stupid rubes who are open about their gauche prejudices, as opposed to the smart, elitist anti-prejudice prejudice.
Before man walked the earth, whales killing untold trillions of shrimp throughout the years. Should we be on board with a whale extermination program to save all those poor shrimp?
“It’s infuriatingly difficult to convince people of conclusions by argument. For instance, even after I made a totally convincing argument for why you should give me lots of money, most of you didn’t. The outrage!” I think there’s a big difference between convincing someone of the truth of an argument and of acting on the conclusions that would result of the argument
Tribalism in the United States has contributed greatly to the world's problems over the past 25 years. It contributed to the invasion of Iraq, which caused a flood of refugees into Europe. And it contributed to the election of Trump, which is destabilizing the whole planet.
Hi I know this seems random but what are your thoughts on this website and interpretation of quantum physics and the many worlds interpretation? https://quatism.com/theory.htm
https://quatism.com/lottery.htm
https://archive.4plebs.org/x/search/text/quatism.com%2Flottery.htm/
I’ve seen you argue for God plenty of times (I don’t think the arguments are as good as you do, but that’s ok) but I have not seen you argue for Christianity specifically. I assume I’ve just missed it? What’s the argument for the Christian version of theism specifically? Even if you accept the existence of God, Christianity seems wildly unlikely to be true
I'm not a Christian!
This is well-conceived and an excellent summary of how your various opinions are coherently related.
However, as with many of your writings, there occasionally comes a moment where I slap my forehead in frustration because you are driven to a weird conclusion not by a chain of valid logic that most people are unwilling to follow, but because of a boneheaded misconception about a matter of fact which you had insufficient common sense to notice needed to be examined.
In this case the offending passage is: “The only reason anyone seriously considered cutting PEPFAR was that they valued the lives of foreigners so little that they were willing to risk millions of deaths for the sake of tiny budget cuts.”
No. They did not “seriously consider cutting” PEPFAR specifically. They said “Oh my gosh, here is an absolutely colossal slush fund in which tens of billions of dollars are apparently going to various graft or nefariousness, protected by some flagship good-deed-doing programs the beneficiaries of which are human shields protecting the graft, let’s pause everything immediately because they are shoveling gold bars off the Titanic to keep us from redirecting them to better uses, and put back the truly necessary things after reviewing them”. Reviewing PEPFAR and deciding it was one of the things that needed to be put back took about 72 hours by my count, and the idea that millions of people were at risk of dying because the supply chain for needed medications was THAT CRITICALLY SENSITIVE to routine administrative changes was a ridiculous canard that could only come from shills and could only be believed by easily gaslit common-sense-lackers with no clue about how media functions on anything Trump-related.
Pepfar is not back
I think I agree with you that philosophers can be too normie, though your range of experience on that is almost certainly larger than mine. But they're more interested in engaging with arguments than the general population, so that's good.
I do wonder to what extent some of the fear of engaging with arguments is because people often aren't very good at them, and they don't want to risk being exploited. I think knowing things can be intimidating for people to discuss them with you, because you will have developed opinions, they won't, there's a power imbalance there, and it might be hard for them to see where precisely the more and less sound parts of things lie.
Regarding animal suffering: I think I definitely agree with you that there is a bunch of needless cruelty and suffering. But how do we know that their lives are actually net-negative? That might have big differences in the prescriptions that follow from that (well, if you were dictator of the world, etc. Might not change the lowest hanging fruit much).
I think it's likely that most of your eclectic views are rather downstream from the belief of utilitarianism being true, if not from the inclination to set aside any "gut feelings" in order to arrive to relatively iconoclastic and difficult to understand (for instance, I can define SIA, but it doesn't intuitively "click") conclusions. In any case, it's a pretty good way to protect against the three errors you mentioned. :D
I'm more SSA than SIA. But I agree there's problem with instantiating a finite number of people from an infinite no of potential people.
I wonder how you limit the "potential people" to people and not include (eg) shrimps? Or at least all mammals.
This is a statistical argument so I don't think "total evidence" applies. You're entitled to do statistics on any set if you can unambiguously assign objects to that set.
Interesting. Now I know. Thanks.
Ur an interesting guy. I'm curious if u think there is a religion/ demonition that is fundamentally correct