DanArmak

• DanArmak 2 Jun 2019 16:13 UTC

  4 points

  on: On alien science

  Firstly, on a his­tor­i­cal ba­sis, many of the great­est sci­en­tists were clearly aiming for ex­pla­na­tion not pre­dic­tion.

  In all of your ex­am­ples, the new the­ory al­lowed mak­ing pre­dic­tions, ei­ther more cor­rect than pre­vi­ous ones (rel­a­tivity, as­tron­omy) or in situ­a­tions that were pre­vi­ously com­pletely un-pre­dictable (evolu­tion). Scien­tists ex­pected good pre­dic­tions to fol­low from good ex­pla­na­tions, and they were in large part mo­ti­vated by it.

  Wiener, on the other hand, is say­ing it doesn’t mat­ter what ex­pla­na­tion you choose if all ex­pla­na­tions yield the same pre­dic­tion, in a par­tic­u­lar field of study or ex­per­i­ment. And you don’t need ex­pla­na­tions at all if they can’t ever yield differ­ent pre­dic­tions (in any pos­si­ble ex­per­i­ment). That’s a differ­ent state­ment.

  I think that tak­ing pre­dic­tion to be the point of do­ing sci­ence is mis­guided in a few ways.

  This seems to be just a mat­ter of defi­ni­tions. Scien­tists are hu­man be­ings, they have a wide va­ri­ety of in­ter­ests and goals. You can la­bel a more nar­row sub­set of them “sci­ence”, and then say that some of what they’re do­ing “isn’t sci­ence”. Or you can la­bel ev­ery­thing they tend to do as “sci­ence”, be­cause it tends to come to­gether. But the ques­tion “what is the real point of do­ing sci­ence?” is just a mat­ter of defi­ni­tion.

• DanArmak 5 May 2019 8:05 UTC

  9 points

  on: Is value drift net-pos­i­tive, net-nega­tive, or nei­ther?

  I’ll open the dis­cus­sion for the broad­est defi­ni­tion of ‘value drift’ - ‘changes in val­ues over time’.

  ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are only defined rel­a­tive to some set of val­ues.

  A sim­plis­tic (but tech­ni­cally cor­rect an­swer): if you had val­ues A, and then changed to have differ­ent val­ues B, from the view­point of A this is bad *by defi­ni­tion*, no mat­ter what A and B ac­tu­ally are. And from the view­point of B it’s good by defi­ni­tion. Values are always op­ti­mal ac­cord­ing to them­selves. (If they’re in con­flict with one an­other, there should be a set of op­ti­mal bal­ances defined by some meta-val­ues you also need to hold.)

  A more com­plex and hu­man-like sce­nario: you’re not perfectly ra­tio­nal. Know­ing this, and want­ing to achieve a cer­tain goal, it might be use­ful to “choose” a set of val­ues other than the triv­ial set “this goal is good”, to in­fluence your own fu­ture be­hav­ior. Just as it can be in­stru­men­tally ra­tio­nal to choose some false be­liefs (or to omit some true ones), so it can be in­stru­men­tally ra­tio­nal to choose a set of val­ues in or­der to achieve some­thing those val­ues don’t ac­tu­ally claim to pro­mote.

  A con­trived ex­am­ple: you value donat­ing to a cer­tain char­ity. If you join a lo­cal church and be­come in­fluen­tial, you could con­vince oth­ers to donate to it. You don’t ac­tu­ally value the church. If you were perfectly ra­tio­nal, you could perfectly pre­tend to value it and act to op­ti­mize your real val­ues (the char­ity). But hu­mans tend to be bad at pub­li­cly es­pous­ing val­ues (or be­liefs) with­out com­ing to re­ally be­lieve them to some de­gree. So you’ll get value drift to­wards re­ally car­ing about the church. But the char­ity will get more dona­tions than if you hadn’t joined. So from the point of view of your origi­nal val­ues (char­ity above all), the ex­pected value drift to (char­ity + church) is an in­stru­men­tally good choice.

• DanArmak 8 Apr 2018 18:01 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: rk's comment on: Mean­ing and Mo­ral Foun­da­tions Theory

  Loy­alty, au­thor­ity, and fair­ness are also about other peo­ple. A lone per­son can’t be loyal, au­thor­i­ta­tive, or fair; you have to be those things to some­one else.

  And, as I’ve been say­ing, Harm/​Care is also about the con­duct of the in­di­vi­d­ual: do you harm oth­ers or care for them?

• DanArmak 8 Apr 2018 17:20 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: rk's comment on: Mean­ing and Mo­ral Foun­da­tions Theory

  “I can’t learn the ma­te­rial for you” as op­posed to “if you want to climb Mt Ever­est, you have to do it for your­self rather than for some­one else”.

  I’m not sure I un­der­stand the differ­ence, can you make it more ex­plicit?

  “I can’t learn the ma­te­rial for you”: if I learn it, it won’t achieve the goal of you hav­ing learned it, i.e. you know­ing the ma­te­rial.

  “I can’t climb the moun­tain for you”: if I climb it, the pres­tige and fun will be mine; I can’t give you the ex­pe­rience of climb­ing the moun­tain un­less you climb it your­self.

  The two cases seem the same...

  if peo­ple care about oth­ers be­ing pure, it seems they can just as eas­ily care about oth­ers be­ing car­ing. And that we should think about peo­ple try­ing to ob­serve the norm of car­ing and mak­ing sure oth­ers do, rather than try­ing to care effec­tively. Is that right?

  Yes, that’s what I think is hap­pen­ing: peo­ple ob­serv­ing norms and judg­ing oth­ers on ob­serv­ing them, rather than on achiev­ing goals effi­ciently or achiev­ing more. Con­se­quen­tially, we want to save ev­ery­one. Mo­rally, we don’t judge peo­ple harshly for not sav­ing ev­ery­one as long as they’re do­ing their best—and we don’t ex­pect them to make an ex­traor­di­nary effort.

  And so, I don’t see a sig­nifi­cant differ­ence be­tween Harm/​Care and the other foun­da­tions.

• DanArmak 8 Apr 2018 16:39 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: edanm's comment on: Is Rhetoric Worth Learn­ing?

  I did not mean to mis­rep­re­sent what lawyers do (or are al­lowed to do). I noted they are re­stricted by lawyer ethics, but that was in a differ­ent com­ment than the one you replied to. Yes, ab­solutely, they not sup­posed to lie or even de­liber­ately mis­lead, and a lawyer’s rep­u­ta­tion would suffer hor­ribly if they were caught in a lie.

  I’m not sure I un­der­stand peo­ple who aren’t OK with eth­i­cal lawyers, as a con­cept. Is there some­thing they would like in­stead of lawyers? (See: my other com­ment.) Or do they feel that lawyers are im­moral by as­so­ci­a­tion with in­jus­tice—the in­tu­ition of “moral con­ta­gion” (I for­get the cor­rect term) that some­one who only par­tially fixes a moral wrong, is worse than some­one who doesn’t try to fix it at all?

• DanArmak 8 Apr 2018 16:30 UTC

  3 points

  on: Mean­ing and Mo­ral Foun­da­tions Theory

  Harm/​Care is un­usual among the foun­da­tions in that it’s other-di­rected. The goal is to help other peo­ple, and it does not es­pe­cially mat­ter how that oc­curs. [...] In con­trast, the other foun­da­tions cen­tre on the moral ac­tor them­selves. I can­not be just, loyal, a good fol­lower, or pure for you.

  It seems to me that Harm/​Care isn’t as differ­ent as you say. Na­tive (evolved) moral­ity is mostly de­on­tolog­i­cal. The ob­ject of moral feel­ings is the act of helping, not the re­sult of other peo­ple be­ing bet­ter off. “The goal is to help other peo­ple” sounds like a con­se­quen­tial­ist re­for­mu­la­tion. Helping a sec­ond party to help a third party may not be effi­cient, but moral­ity isn’t con­cerned with effi­ciency.

  In con­trast, the other foun­da­tions cen­tre on the moral ac­tor them­selves. I can­not be just, loyal, a good fol­lower, or pure for you.

  I could say: yes, I can be just *to* you, loyal *to* you, a good fol­lower *of* you. And pure *for* you too—think about pu­rity pledges, aka “save it *for* your fu­ture spouse”.

  In all these cases, moral­ity is about perfor­mance—de­on­tol­ogy—rather than about ac­com­plish­ing a goal. But each case does have an ap­par­ent goal, so our Sys­tem 2 can ap­ply con­se­quen­tial­ist logic to it. Why do you treat Harm/​Care differ­ently?

• DanArmak 7 Apr 2018 19:44 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Is Rhetoric Worth Learn­ing?

  I think my defi­ni­tion of rhetoric is the same as OP’s: namely, the art of shap­ing words or a speech to be beau­tiful, mov­ing, con­vinc­ing, or oth­er­wise effec­tive. How to best ver­bally con­vince oth­ers of an idea: I think that’s a use­ful term.

  In par­tic­u­lar the OP referred to dis­po­si­tio (con­cise, ad­dress­ing the right points) and pro­nun­ti­a­tio (body lan­guage and de­liv­ery).

  I’m not con­vinced this is true.

  I’m not sure what ex­actly you’re not con­vince of. That speech is much more effec­tive when its form is liked as well as its ob­ject level claims?

• DanArmak 7 Apr 2018 19:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Is Rhetoric Worth Learn­ing?

  I don’t think that’s true. Lots of peo­ple are both­ered by this. Maybe you’re right, maybe a ma­jor­ity is un­both­ered, but this is in­ter­est­ing only to the ex­tent that it doesn’t em­body a larger pat­tern of what pro­por­tion of peo­ple care about in­jus­tice.

  I agree that most peo­ple are both­ered by any­thing they per­ceive as in­jus­tice. But if they don’t know a way to make things bet­ter, or what things be­ing bet­ter would look like, then they tend not to blame e.g. lawyers for par­ti­ci­pat­ing in the sys­tem and be­ing good at it.

  Is there a bet­ter way of do­ing things, that lots of peo­ple would pre­fer to be the case? Not just “I wish judges ap­plied the law fairly and for Jus­tice”—then you might as well wish for peo­ple not to com­mit crimes in the first place. But a sys­tem that would work when be­ing gamed by peo­ple des­per­ate not to go to jail?

  Alter­na­tively, is there a rele­vant moral prin­ci­ple that peo­ple can fol­low unilat­er­ally that would make the world a bet­ter place (other than de­on­tolog­i­cally)? If we tell a defen­dant not to hire a lawyer, or a lawyer not to ar­gue as well as they can (while keep­ing to lawyer ethics), or the jury not to listen to the lawyers—then the side that doesn’t co­op­er­ate will win the trial, or the jury will ig­nore im­por­tant claims, and jus­tice won’t be bet­ter served on av­er­age.

• DanArmak 7 Apr 2018 19:05 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Is Rhetoric Worth Learn­ing?

  Are you sure? I’ve met a lot of peo­ple (“av­er­age peo­ple”, not ra­tio­nal­ists) who take the view of “yeah, he can talk real im­pres­sively, but it’s all bul­lshit, no doubt”. Many peo­ple like “sim­ple talk”, i.e. speech that sim­ply lays out facts, and are sus­pi­cious of im­pres­sive/​skil­lful rhetoric.

  I’ve met fewer peo­ple like that, but then I’m not a na­tive English speaker, so not all of the speechify­ing I’m ex­posed to is in English.

  It sounds like the thing be­ing de­scribed is in part a de­sire for the speaker to talk in a par­tic­u­lar di­alect and style, as­so­ci­ated with a so­cial class or back­ground, with the ap­pro­pri­ate choice of acrolect/​mesolect/​basilect, etc.

  Do you think such peo­ple are un­aware that the “plain” speak­ers they like still har­ness rhetoric, just one tai­lored to that au­di­ence? Good plain speech still needs to be con­cise, ad­dress the right points, have good body lan­guage, good de­liv­ery (e.g. not stut­ter or re­peat your­self), and in the end say things that the au­di­ence will like as speech as well as on the ob­ject level. An un­trained speaker will rarely carry an au­di­ence, how­ever plainly they speak.

• DanArmak 7 Apr 2018 11:47 UTC

  26 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Is Rhetoric Worth Learn­ing?

  This seems to de­pend a lot on so­cial con­text.

  Lawyers are the quintessen­tial speak­ers-for-hire who ap­ply rhetoric to mer­ce­nary causes. Yet lawyers are ac­cepted and high-sta­tus in most parts of so­ciety. In play, de­bate clubs are of­ten pop­u­lar; and at a re­cent LW meetup we played an Ide­olog­i­cal Tur­ing Test game, where we had to con­vince each other of po­si­tions we didn’t always hold.

  Lawyers don’t hide the fact they’re bi­ased and mer­ce­nary in court. Maybe that helps them dis­as­so­ci­ate enough from the prac­tice that peo­ple don’t feel un­com­fortable with them in a per­sonal set­ting. And yet, most peo­ple are not both­ered by the idea that the jus­tice sys­tem runs in part on rhetoric per­sua­sive­ness, or that the wider poli­ti­cal sys­tem runs in part on poli­ti­ci­ans con­vinc­ing vot­ers of things. Peo­ple com­pli­ment poli­ti­ci­ans on their pub­lic speak­ing skills with­out think­ing “dark arts!” ev­ery time.

  In gen­eral, the av­er­age per­son’s re­ac­tion to “wow what a skil­led or­a­tor” isn’t “there­fore I won’t listen to them, per­sua­sive­ness is or­thog­o­nal to truth”. How do you rec­on­cile this with your anal­y­sis of “be­tray­ing co­op­er­a­tive norms”, which peo­ple are usu­ally good at en­forc­ing?

  Note: I’m not well fa­mil­iar with mod­ern lawyers and ex­actly how im­por­tant rhetoric is to them. In clas­si­cal an­tiquity it was ex­tremely im­por­tant; that is rele­vant in­so­far as it par­tially ex­plains why rhetoric is pre­sent in to­day’s clas­si­cal liberal ed­u­ca­tion.

• DanArmak 27 Feb 2018 18:59 UTC

  1 point

  on: The worst trol­ley prob­lem in the world

  Un­like the reg­u­lar trol­ley prob­lem, this one is similar to moral choices made by many peo­ple ev­ery day.

  As you walk down the street, you see a man point a gun at an­other. Do you in­ter­pose your body to save the stranger’s life at the cost of your own?

  Down an­other street, a man points a gun at you. There’s a by­stan­der nearby. Do you hide be­hind this hu­man shield to save your life?

  Some peo­ple will view this ques­tion differ­ently from the trol­ley one be­cause the at­tacker is a hu­man and can be as­signed blame. Sub­sti­tute a grisly bear that is at­tack­ing a group of cam­pers. Do you shield an­other with your body, or con­versely pull an­other’s body in front of yours?

• DanArmak 23 Jul 2017 11:21 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: LawrenceC's comment on: The dark arts: Ex­am­ples from the Har­ris-Adams conversation

  I agree, and I didn’t mean to im­ply oth­er­wise.

• DanArmak 22 Jul 2017 15:17 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Lumifer's comment on: The dark arts: Ex­am­ples from the Har­ris-Adams conversation

  The cor­re­la­tion be­tween moral ob­jec­tivism and in­ter­ven­tion­ism is prob­a­bly true, but I think it’s his­tor­i­cally con­tin­gent, and not a log­i­cal con­se­quence of ob­jec­tivism. Whether or not I think of my moral­ity as ob­jec­tive (uni­ver­sal) or sub­jec­tive (a prop­erty of my­self), that’s or­thog­o­nal to what I ac­tu­ally think is moral.

  I’m a moral rel­a­tivist. My moral­ity is that tor­ture and mur­der are wrong and I am jus­tified and, in­deed, some­times en­joined to use force to stop them. I don’t think this is an un­com­mon stand.

  Other peo­ple are moral ob­jec­tivists, but their ac­tual morals may tell them to leave oth­ers alone ex­cept in self-defense.

• DanArmak 22 Jul 2017 14:51 UTC

  8 points

  on: The dark arts: Ex­am­ples from the Har­ris-Adams conversation

  I haven’t listened to the de­bate (I’d read it if it was tran­scribed), but I want to ob­ject to a part of your post on a meta level, namely the part where you say:

  To me, he is very far from a model for a rationalist

  Be­ing able to effec­tively con­vince peo­ple, to re­li­ably in­fluence their be­hav­ior, is per­haps the biggest gen­eral-pur­pose power a hu­man can have. Don’t dis­miss an effec­tive ar­guer as “not ra­tio­nal­ist”. On the con­trary, ac­knowl­edge them as a scary ra­tio­nal­ist more pow­er­ful than you are.

  The word “ra­tio­nal­ist” means some­thing fairly nar­row. We shouldn’t make it into an ap­plause light, a near syn­onym of “peo­ple we like and ad­mire and are al­lied with”. Be­ing re­li­ably effec­tive, on the other hand, is a near syn­onym of be­ing ra­tio­nal(ist).

  If Adams em­ployed “dark arts” in his de­bate, the only thing that nec­es­sar­ily means is that he wasn’t en­gaged in an hon­est effort to dis­cover the truth. But that’s not news—it was a pub­lic de­bate staged in or­der to con­vince the au­di­ence! So Adams used a time-hon­ored tech­nique of achiev­ing this goal—how very ra­tio­nal of him. At least, it’s ra­tio­nal if he suc­ceeded, and I as­sume you think he did suc­ceed in con­vinc­ing some of the au­di­ence, oth­er­wise you wouldn’t bother to post a de­nun­ci­a­tion.

  Similarly, the name “Dark Arts” is mis­lead­ing. They are (if I may chan­nel Pro­fes­sor Quir­rell for a mo­ment) ex­tremely pow­er­ful Arts ev­ery­one should cul­ti­vate if they can, and use where ap­pro­pri­ate: not when hon­estly con­vers­ing with a fel­low ra­tio­nal­ist to dis­cover the truth, but when aiming to con­vince peo­ple who are not them­selves trained in ra­tio­nal­ity, and who (in your es­ti­ma­tion) will not come by their be­liefs ra­tio­nally, whether or not they end up be­liev­ing the truth.

  This is a near cousin of poli­tics (in the so­cial sense, not the gov­ern­ment sense). Poli­tics is a mind-kil­ler and it’s im­por­tant to keep poli­tics-free spaces for var­i­ous pur­poses in­clud­ing the pur­suit of truth. But we should not say “ra­tio­nal­ists should not en­gage in poli­tics”, any more than “ra­tio­nal­ists should never try to con­vince non-ra­tio­nal­ists of any­thing”.

  ETA: I’m not claiming Adam is a ra­tio­nal­ist or is good at be­ing a ra­tio­nal­ist; I’m not fa­mil­iar enough with him to tell. I’m only claiming that the fact he is or tries to be a good per­suader in a de­bate and uses Dark Arts isn’t ev­i­dence that he isn’t.

• DanArmak 22 Jul 2017 14:16 UTC

  1 point

  on: How long has civil­i­sa­tion been go­ing?

  I feel the brief­ness of his­tory is in­sep­a­rable from its speed of change. Once the agri­cul­tural rev­olu­tion got started, tech­nol­ogy kept pro­gress­ing and we got where we are to­day quite quickly—and that’s de­spite sev­eral con­ti­nen­tal-scale col­lapses of civ­i­liza­tion. So It’s not very sur­pris­ing that we are now con­tem­plat­ing var­i­ous X-risks: to an ex­ter­nal ob­server, hu­man­ity is a very brief phe­nomenon go­ing back, and so it’s likely to be brief go­ing for­ward as well. Un­der­stand­ing this on an in­tu­itive level helps when think­ing about the Fermi para­dox or the Dooms­day Ar­gu­ment.

• DanArmak 20 May 2017 19:22 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: How To Build A Com­mu­nity Full Of Lonely People

  I think you’re mostly right about that, but not en­tirely. The two realms are not so clearly sep­a­rated. There are so­cial hang­outs on the In­ter­net. There are so­cial hang­outs, of both kinds, where peo­ple talk shop. There are pro­gram­ming blogs and fo­rums where so­cial com­mu­ni­ties emerge. And so­cial cap­i­tal and pro­fes­sional rep­u­ta­tion feed into one an­other.

• DanArmak 20 May 2017 16:35 UTC

  2 points

  on: The ro­bust beauty of im­proper lin­ear models

  So that’s the real role of the ex­pert here

  I work in the data sci­ence in­dus­try—as a pro­gram­mer, not a data sci­en­tist or statis­ti­cian. From my gen­eral un­der­stand­ing of the field what you’re de­scribing is a broadly ac­cepted as­sump­tion. But I might be mis­led by the fact that the com­pany I work for bases its product on this as­sump­tion, so I’m not sure if you’re just de­scribing this thing from an­other an­gle or if there’s a differ­ent point that I’m miss­ing here or if, in fact, many peo­ple spend too much effort try­ing to hand-tune mod­els.

  The data sci­en­tists I work with make pre­dic­tive mod­els in two stages. The first one is to in­vent (or choose) “fea­tures”, which in­clude nat­u­ral vari­ables from the origi­nal dataset, func­tions act­ing on one or more vari­ables, or sup­ple­men­tary datasets that they think are rele­vant. The data sci­en­tist ap­plies their un­der­stand­ing of statis­tics as well as do­main knowl­edge to tell the com­puter which things to look for and which are clearly false pos­i­tives to be ig­nored. And the sec­ond stage is to build the ac­tual mod­els us­ing mostly stan­dard al­gorithms like Ran­dom For­est or XGBoost or what­not, where the data sci­en­tist might tweak ar­gu­ments but the un­der­ly­ing al­gorithm is gen­er­ally given and doesn’t al­low for as much user choice.

  A com­mon toy ex­am­ple is the Ti­tanic dataset. This is a list of pas­sen­gers on the Ti­tanic, with vari­ables like age, name, ticket class, etc.. The task is to build a model that pre­dicts which ones sur­vived when the ship sank. A data sci­en­tist would mostly work on fea­ture en­g­ineer­ing, e.g. in­tro­duc­ing a vari­able that de­duces pas­sen­ger’s sex from their name, and fo­cus less on model tun­ing, e.g. de­ter­min­ing the ex­act weight that should be given to the fea­ture in the model (women and chil­dren had much higher rates of sur­vival).

  In a more se­ri­ous ex­am­ple, a data sci­en­tist might work on figur­ing out which generic datasets are rele­vant at all. Sup­pose you’re try­ing to pre­dict where to best open a new Star­bucks branch. Should you look at the lo­ca­tions of com­pet­ing coffee shops? Noise from nearby con­struc­tion? Public tran­sit stops or park­ing lots? Nearby tourist at­trac­tions or cam­puses or who knows what else? You can’t re­ally af­ford to look at ev­ery­thing, it would both take too long (and maybe cost too much) and risk false pos­i­tives. A good do­main ex­pert is the one who gen­er­ates the best hy­pothe­ses. But to ac­tu­ally test those hy­pothe­ses, you use stan­dard al­gorithms to build pre­dic­tive mod­els, and if a sim­ple lin­ear model works, that’s a good thing—it shows your cho­sen fea­tures were re­ally pow­er­ful pre­dic­tors.

• DanArmak 20 May 2017 16:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: How To Build A Com­mu­nity Full Of Lonely People

  Even com­puter pro­gram­mers who spent the ma­jor­ity of their work­ing out­put work­ing alone can benefit a lot from hav­ing good con­nec­tions when it comes to find­ing good jobs.

  Peo­ple skills have great value for pro­gram­mers, and find­ing jobs is a very small part of it. I write this from per­sonal ex­pe­rience.

  Pro­gram­mers are still peo­ple. The amount of great soft­ware any one per­son can write in their life­time is very limited. Teach­ing or con­vinc­ing oth­ers (from cowork­ers to the rest of the world) to agree with you on what makes soft­ware great, to write great soft­ware them­selves, and to use it, are the great­est force mul­ti­pli­ers any pro­gram­mer can have, just like in most other fields.

  Some­times there are ex­cep­tions; one may in­vent a new al­gorithm or write some new soft­ware that ev­ery­one agrees is great. But most of the time you have to con­vince peo­ple—not just less-tech­ni­cal man­agers mak­ing pur­chas­ing de­ci­sions, but other pro­gram­mers who don’t think that global muta­ble state is a prob­lem, re­ally, it worked fine in my grand­father’s time and it’s good enough for me.

• DanArmak 20 May 2017 15:10 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: juliawise's comment on: Don’t Shoot the Messenger

  I don’t un­der­stand that view­point for a differ­ent rea­son. Sup­pose you be­lieve the world will be de­stroyed soon. Why is that a rea­son not to have chil­dren? Is it worse for the chil­dren to live short but pre­sum­ably good lives than not to live at all?

• DanArmak 12 Feb 2017 17:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: username2's comment on: Stu­pidity as a men­tal illness

  The post doesn’t say that all re­li­gion is stu­pidity. It says that one of the things we cal stu­pidity is sub­con­scious con­di­tion­ing, and one of the com­mon case of such con­di­tion­ing is re­li­gion. A sub­set of re­li­gion and a sub­set of stu­pidity, in­ter­sect­ing. Do you think that’s wrong?