Her point was that honest people who know that many people do steal would be penalized.
billswift
Karma: 2,016
Except for possible disutility to family and friends, oblivion has a lot to recommend it; not least that you won’t be around to regret it afterward. It isn’t something to seek, since you won’t have any positive utility afterward, but it isn’t something that is worth enduring much suffering to avoid either.
The genome is the ultimate spaghetti code. I would not be at all surprised if some genes code for the direct opposite characteristics in the presence of other genes. It is going to take more than just running relatively simple correlation studies to untangle the functions of most genes. We are going to have to understand what proteins they code for and how they work.
Sounds are waves transmitted by air. Waves can reinforce or cancel each other, but cancelling can only go so far (to zero), so what is left is the sound resulting from the reinforced waves.
If you have nothing to lose, consider desperate high risk options. If you are in a comfortable position consolidate and avoid risk.
I have, in fact, seen this given as investment advice. If you are going to go broke in a big way, take risks; this is the time to play the lottery, you probably won’t win, but you might and by this point you have nothing to lose. If you have plenty of wealth, and aren’t playing for the thrills, this is when you play safe, no more need to take significant risks at this point.
Not really, because I don’t think they are distinct in the way you suggested; rather, I think safety issues are a subset of “things I’ll likely regret”.
ADDED: Or at least safety issues where things actually do go wrong are “things I’ll likely regret”.
They are not mutually exclusive. I can’t think of anything I would regret more than causing a permanent injury to myself or another person.
There is one significant question about ethics that has been skirted around, but, as far as I remember, never specifically addressed here. “Why should any particular person follow any ethical or moral rule?” Kai Nielsen has an entire book, Why Be Moral?, devoted to the issue, but doesn’t come to a good reason.
Humans’ inherited patterns of behavior are a beginning, Nielsen only addresses purely philosophical issues in the book, but still not adequate for what then becomes the question, “Why not defect?”
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence. - - Publilius Syrus
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable. - - Sydney Harris
My version: You will regret missed opportunities far more than anything you actually do.
Closely related:
When you choose an action, you are also choosing the results of that action.
The converse, “Just because you are wrong, doesn’t mean that I am right”, is harder for most people to remember.
It would still help you identify clothes you were overlooking rather than either wearing or throwing out.
The biggest risk of “existential risk mitigation” is that it will be used by the “precautionary principle” zealots to shut down scientific research. There is some evidence that it has been attempted already, see the fear-mongering associated with the startup of the new collider at CERN.
A slowdown, much less an actual halt, in new science is the one thing I am certain will increase future risks, since it will undercut our ability to deal with any disasters that actually do occur.
One point Hayek made in his last book, The Fatal Conceit, is that you need to be aware of how others will use whatever policies you support. His arguments were primarily about how “well meaning” academics ended up paving the way for the Communist dictatorships, but the general argument is equally true of many other policies.
Go Bayes! So if you just make your priors big enough, you never have to change your mind.
You might want to be careful about posting links to VDARE, lukeprog and some others here consider this crimethink.
I haven’t studied these issues, but I will note that Steve Sailor and VDARE.com are considered by many people to be racist bigots. Here, for example, is a VDARE article defending white supremacy:
One of the many reasons I have been spending less time on LessWrong (sic) recently.
The best single rule I have found is useful for academic disciplines as well: “Everybody overstates the accuracy, applicability, universality, precision, or other some other aspects of claims they have made.” Anybody who actually cares enough about something to go through the trouble of writing it up, unless they are being paid by the word (which as you note has its own problems), is going to be emotionally invested in their work and writings. So my best advice is to assume from the beginning that it is overstated, and consider a weaker version, or a charitable interpretation, of their claims.
A bit off-topic, but not too much so, since one of the foundation ideas of morality is that of “responsibility”. Here is something I recently wrote on that topic:
Responsibility is not additive. If you could have prevented something from being done to you by acting differently, then you are responsible for it happening to you. If someone did it to you against your will, they are also responsible for it happening to you. More generally, responsibility is how avoidable a particular result was, depending on a party’s actions; everyone participating is responsible to the extent that they could have prevented/avoided the result by acting otherwise. The extent of Party A’s responsibility has no relevance to the extent of Party B’s responsibility.
If that is your only desire, maybe so. There have been plenty of societies that have been perfectly okay with robbing outgroups. But given all the other desires real people have, no. And “robbery is okay” would be a “moral claim”, not a value. “Acquiring property” would be the relevant generalized value.
Morality is often a warped form of our desires. Our values, for the most part, are a generalization and categorization of our desires; another way of putting it is that our desires are specific cases of our values (for example, for life, freedom, comfort, and so on) though our desires are more fundamental. Many moral claims, then turn around and make specific claims based on the abstract values. This specific (desire) → abstract (value) → specific (moral claim) is one reason our moral claims often seem so incompatible with our actual desires. Please note that I am not saying this always, nor necessarily usually, happens.
“Anything is easy if you’re not the one that has to do it.” Claiming something is easy, without giving an actual means of doing it, is a cheap rhetorical trick, one of the “dark arts”.