His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
Yes, my bad, I did not want to imply that you advocated anything of the sort.