I say seemingly absurd to point out that, to my and many other ears, the statement seems upon first encounter to be absurd. And of course, the idea that it can’t be ethical to consume anything at all in any way at all, when lack of at least some consumption is death, does seem like it’s allowed to be absurd. Of course, also: Some absurd things are true!
I also think it is very wrong, that even the default consumption pattern is ethical as I see things (although not some other reasonable ways of seeing things), and that an engineered-to-be-ethical one is ethical under the other reasonable ways as well, such that for any given system there exists such an engineered method.
This is because I don’t think it is reasonable to apply different order-of-magnitude calculations on second and higher order benefits and harms from actions in complex systems, and I have a much more benign view of those higher order effects than those making this statement. The main error is upstream of the statement.
That doesn’t mean one doesn’t have an affirmative duty to work to make things better, somewhere, in some way. But one must structure that as the ability for actions to be good, and the best score to not be zero (e.g. the perfect person isn’t the person who fails to interact with the system).
[This discussion in particular risks going outside LW-appropriate bounds and so should likely be continued on the blog, if it continues]
Just wanted to say I appreciate the efforts to keep things LW appropriate.
Also, my ideal is for ‘LW-appropriate‘ to be… like… actually a good way of conducting intellectual discourse, and insofar as that is (unnecessarily) preventing important conversations from happening publicly, it’s something I’d want to fine tune.
Earlier today I said at the LW office “I think the things Zvi and Ben have been saying lately are pretty important and if they’re not currently in a state that we’d be happy having them on frontpage, we should probably put in some effort to help them become so.”
I think the steelman I’m pointing to is often what people are trying to say, using corrupted language with inadequate expressive power (at their level of verbal skill and privilege / allotted airtime). I think this general pattern is important to be aware of.
I say seemingly absurd to point out that, to my and many other ears, the statement seems upon first encounter to be absurd. And of course, the idea that it can’t be ethical to consume anything at all in any way at all, when lack of at least some consumption is death, does seem like it’s allowed to be absurd. Of course, also: Some absurd things are true!
I also think it is very wrong, that even the default consumption pattern is ethical as I see things (although not some other reasonable ways of seeing things), and that an engineered-to-be-ethical one is ethical under the other reasonable ways as well, such that for any given system there exists such an engineered method.
This is because I don’t think it is reasonable to apply different order-of-magnitude calculations on second and higher order benefits and harms from actions in complex systems, and I have a much more benign view of those higher order effects than those making this statement. The main error is upstream of the statement.
That doesn’t mean one doesn’t have an affirmative duty to work to make things better, somewhere, in some way. But one must structure that as the ability for actions to be good, and the best score to not be zero (e.g. the perfect person isn’t the person who fails to interact with the system).
[This discussion in particular risks going outside LW-appropriate bounds and so should likely be continued on the blog, if it continues]
Just wanted to say I appreciate the efforts to keep things LW appropriate.
Also, my ideal is for ‘LW-appropriate‘ to be… like… actually a good way of conducting intellectual discourse, and insofar as that is (unnecessarily) preventing important conversations from happening publicly, it’s something I’d want to fine tune.
Earlier today I said at the LW office “I think the things Zvi and Ben have been saying lately are pretty important and if they’re not currently in a state that we’d be happy having them on frontpage, we should probably put in some effort to help them become so.”
I’ll try to keep my reply here within bounds.
I think the steelman I’m pointing to is often what people are trying to say, using corrupted language with inadequate expressive power (at their level of verbal skill and privilege / allotted airtime). I think this general pattern is important to be aware of.
Related, comparatively unpoliticized example: https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1121482193317109761