YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

No, there were any two really great mods

Ed: oh fuck it my bad you’re a horrible racist. Alright

The question is always, and I mean ALWAYS “what exactly do you mean by ask questions and discuss issues?” Because from the very first second you complain that people don’t do that, it is a universal law that I will ultimately or quickly find you (a) refusing to do that, (b) complaining about somebody who did exactly that because it didn’t go your way. Some valorised ideal of “someone who asks questions and discusses issues” is cant, it is for all intents and purposes meaningless beyond what LessWrongers would call “signalling” that this is the sort of person you personally would like to be, hugely conditioned by class/culture/etc.

It’s almost exclusively a matter of vocabulary: people identify speaking in a particular register with being that kind of person as they understand that ideal, to the point that they will literally be blind and deaf to real life question marks in order to push an interpretation through as to whether or not their conversation partner matches up.

Don’t say stuff like that, be concrete and specific.

No, but Singer does mean stuff like “supply birth control to people who don’t have birth control” and “make them rich and educated so they have fewer kids” which eugenics or not is a real policy response by governments which had to deal with famine pursued

I don’t really get the sneer here, he mentions population control at a time when it was widely believed that overpopulation was a looming problem

Well technically, there’s no culture war thread on the subreddit anymore, so all of the culture war rules they had to invent to contain the culture war they started in part by inventing a series of culture war rules which constantly fed the flames of culture war are irrelevant, since when there’s no culture war thread to quarantine the culture war it’s fine to wage culture war elsewhere (and if you took away culture war, what would be the point of either the sub or its inspiring author?)

I don’t see how this works.

On one point:

The utilitarian argument construes the relevant ethical concerns, unsurprisingly, as utilitarian: the starting point doesn’t matter so long as the right results get over the line. This can be both one of utilitarianism’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses, and in this case the strength is that utilitarianism is highly accommodating of the fact that some but not all people are employees of Oxfam (or indeed any relevant charity or similar organisation). The obvious point to make is that If you’re not an employee of Oxfam then the utilitarian argument goes through, because giving to Oxfam is your means of getting those results over the line. If you are an employee of Oxfam, then perhaps you don’t need to give, because working for Oxfam is your means.

On another:

The sentence “his argument only allows for money going from non-Oxfam taxpayers to Oxfam employees” doesn’t include the important premise “the role of an Oxfam employee is to convert that money into good deeds done for the poor, for example by using it to pay for food in a famine”. The intended result is the same whether you are an employee of Oxfam or not (viz. paying for food in a famine). You want us to quibble about the wording (or rather: the wording as you have summarised it here) on grounds (which you leave implicit, so correct me if I’m wrong) that it is incoherent to say “everybody” when some people are already employees of Oxfam.

This seems to drastically confuse Singer’s actual aim (to convince the vast majority of people who are not Oxfam employees to give to Oxfam) for something not only very odd but plainly non-utilitarian, something like: “it is a deontological requirement that everybody give money to Oxfam”.

Importantly, even where a very spare analysis which gets to pick and choose its terms and data (i.e. any analysis which begins by frontloading (1) measured - actually etimated - IQ and the traditional and (2) unanalysed markers by which success is judged) finds that there is a crude regularity whereby IQ and success are correlated, in practical terms nobody will ever - and I mean EVER - use this data to support conclusions which follow from the discovery of a crude regularity. This is partly a human cognition thing and mostly an ideology thing, but the human cognition thing is an important cause. It’s very difficult, practically impossible, for people not to move from a continuous result (the crude regularity) to a categorical conclusion (one which parses between individuals) - and fortunately, for the bigot, this already plays into the bigoted attitude.

It’s kind of amazing that when I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s you heard a lot of silly season rubbish about nanobots, grey goo, unlimited life extension, humanity living in pods, and all this, only to discover as an adult and AFTER having already begun to devote some amount of your free time to dunking on Eliezer Yudkowsky that actually it had all along all been coming out of this very specific media-oriented cult or proto-cult amongst the same people who were flogging Netscape and palm pilots

When I was at school there was a kid who earnestly believed that he would, as an adult, build a nanobot machine to do modern day alchemy by rearranging the component particles of atoms, but he is, as far as I know, doing good and normal things out in the world today

I find myself thinking about this story frequently in a sneering context

Here’s a theory of Alzheimer’s I developed

Ahahahahahaha

You know I misread this post due to the janky format of the new website and I just wanted you to understand as you go that I really thought you could have had something great with the version of this where you’re arguing that very defensive gamers are predicted to be more intelligent and do less crime than black people, but no: you just had to be the brainlet with the oldest fuckin’ “actually IQ test are real and magic” shtick on the internet

Don’t give them the last one, it’s the exclusive familiarity they have with Russell