In his book “Among the Dead Cities”, A.C. Grayling looks at the Allied policy of aerial bombardment of Axis population centers, including the aims of the policy, how it was carried out, and its results. He concludes that it wasn’t justified even in the conventional-weapons era; it was not militarily effective, particularly compared to other possible policies/targets, and it was a violation of even the bare minimum standards that the Allies later considered sufficiently self-evident to use as the basis for war crimes trials. The justification you mention (“to destroy the ability of the enemy states to continue to make war… because the factories have been destroyed or because there are no longer people to work in the factories”) is something of a post-hoc search for a rationalization. If the Allies had wanted to attack factories, they could have concentrated on attacking factories. Instead they attacked population centers in order to kill and terrorize the people living there. This did not have the hoped-for negative effect on war-fighting morale (for the same reason 9/11 didn’t discourage the U.S. from meddling in the Middle East), and can probably better be explained as a policy motivated by malice and vengeance than by coldly thought-through strategic planning. https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=18May11
David Gross
LessWrong is a good place for:
Each of the following bullet points begins with “who”, so this should probably be something like “LessWrong is a good place for people:”
drumming/tapping, received by ears or touch possibly faster than spoken language, because precise sounds can be very fast. I don’t know. This doesn’t really sound good.
That sounds like Morse Code. Telegraph operators had developed a set of codes and abbreviations and emoticon-like conventions during the heyday of the telegraph… give it enough time and internationalization and it might have developed its own grammar. There was a case of a POW who blinked in Morse code during a propaganda video he was forced to make:
As I mention in my post: “There is a law on the books that makes willful failure to pay taxes a criminal offense. However it is almost unheard of for the U.S. government to criminally prosecute someone who files an honest and correct tax return but who will not voluntarily surrender the money.”
American “war tax resisters” have been willfully refusing to pay taxes for decades, often going out of their way to make public declarations of their willful intent (sometimes in letters to the IRS itself). In the last 80 years, of the tens of thousands of American war tax resisters who have done this sort of thing, exactly two have been prosecuted merely for willful failure to pay. One was in 1942, and targeted the leader of an emerging war tax resistance movement (he was prosecuted for failing to purchase a war tax stamp to put on his car, so also this was not really an “income tax” refusal prosecution). The other was in 2005, and targeted an attorney who had two previous tax convictions and whose legal practice tended to get on the nerves of prosecutors by specializing in the vigorous defense of dissidents like Huey Newton, Judi Bari, Dennis Peron, etc.
Given this track record, I think it’s accurate to say that criminal prosecution for willful failure to pay your income taxes is not the sort of thing the typical refuser has to worry about.
This strikes me as a worthwhile exercise for people to undertake. It can give valuable perspective and suggest important avenues for self-improvement. For what it’s worth, here’s what I came up with the first time I tried it: https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=28Dec16
FWIW, I’m trying to create something of a bridge between “the ancient wisdom of people who thought deeply about this sort of thing a long time ago” and “modern social science which with all its limitations at least attempts to test hypotheses with some rigor sometimes” in my sequence on virtues. That might serve as a useful platform from which to launch this new rigorous instrumental rationality guide.
I drew a blank.
I found the cake-dividing and roommate algorithms promising. If I’m in situations in the future that seem isomorphic, I’ll be sure to do some research to try and find a fair division method that’s most likely to make everyone feel they got what’s coming to them.
But as far as how to cultivate the virtue of fairness… I dunno. The best I came up with was to be much more cautious about my self-assessment of how fair I’m being if I have skin in the game. I should definitely assume that my brain is going to be feeding me some good reasons why fairness and my self interest happen to coincide again.
Some of the experiments suggest “hacks” that might help (e.g. sometimes people engaged in “fairer” dictator-style divisions if there was a mirror in the room with them when they made the division) but I don’t have a good feel for how reliable those would be generally.
Don’t bother to google how to become more fair unless you’re in the market for skin cream.
That was probably her opinion, but I think she was carefully trying to write with respect for a non-religious audience.
I think she was saying, more or less, that secular people can either go forward in the direction they are going, but they’ll have to leave should/ought/morality behind (and with it any judgements about e.g. whether shoving Jews in the ovens was necessarily a bad thing to do)—which was what philosophers of her place and time were doing with e.g. emotivism—or they can go backwards to a pre-Christian perspective from which ethics had a grounding other than divine law and then move forward from there.
For her as a Catholic, the answer was “what was so bad about divine law anyway? That grounds morality just fine.” but she knew that wouldn’t fly with most of her audience, so she said: here’s the diagnosis, if you don’t like my cure find one of your own, but you’re gonna have to do something other than what you’re doing right now.
Bostrom estimates that just one second of delayed colonization equals 100 trillion human lives lost. Therefore taking action today for accelerating humanity’s expansion into the universe yields an impact of 100 trillion human lives saved for every second that it’s is brought closer to the present.
I don’t much care for this rhetorically sneaky way of smudging the way we feel the import of “lives lost” and “lives saved” so as to try to make it also cover “lives that never happen” or “lives that might potentially happen.” There’s an Every Sperm is Sacred silliness at work here. Do you mourn the millions of lives lost to vasectomy?
I can relate. I also had a dream in which I suspected I was dreaming, attempted to do some tests to rule that out, ruled it out to my satisfaction, and later woke up from it. Disconcerting.
I’m a physics dilettante… a little undergrad 101 stuff and some exposure to pop sci. I was mulling over the explanation of gravity as being warped space rather than a force, such that an orbiting body for example is not being held in orbit by the gravitational force exerted between it and the object it’s orbiting but is merely traveling inertially in a straight line in a space that has been warped by a big mass in the midst of it.
Okay, thought I, I can picture that.
But then I tried to apply it to another scenario: hole drilled through the middle of the earth (or some simpler, non-rotating, isolated mass… weight dropped into hole. I imagine the weight oscillating back and forth, speeding up as it approaches the center, slowing down as it approaches the surface, then repeating in the other direction. I can’t seem to grok a curved space that’s so curved that an object can go in what appears to be opposite directions along the same path within it without a force being applied to it to make it do so. Yet I understand that from the POV of the oscillating mass, no force is felt. What am I missing?
You might also find some food for thought by ordering from these menus:
The spreadsheet is a LibreOffice doc I could send you if you’re interested.
Thanks for the idea of making a sequence out of these. Here it is: Notes on Virtues
Sometimes the passive voice is more graceful or effective. In those cases, you can avoid the trouble that passive voice usually causes if you explicitly add the grammatically-optional subject.
For instance: “Insider information was unwisely tweeted by Elon.” By using the passive verb “was tweeted” you change the order, and therefore the relative emphasis, of “insider information” and “Elon” in a way that may be appropriate to what you’re trying to communicate. But by explicitly adding “by Elon” you successfully resist the temptation to leave the subject unstated, and thereby save the day for clarity and precision.
I cover that in my advanced “technical writing in one easy lesson” class ;-)
In my fantasies, if I ever were to get that god-like glimpse at how everything actually is, with all that is currently hidden unveiled, it would be something like the feeling you have when you get a joke, or see a “magic eye” illustration, or understand an illusionist’s trick, or learn to juggle: what was formerly perplexing and incoherent becomes in a snap simple and integrated, and there’s a relieving feeling of “ah, but of course.”
But it lately occurs to me that the things I have wrong about the world are probably things I’ve grasped at exactly because they are more simple and more integrated than the reality they hope to approximate. I think if I really were to get this god-like glimpse, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I probably couldn’t fit it in with anything I think I know. It wouldn’t mesh. It wouldn’t be the missing piece of my puzzle, but would overturn the table the incomplete puzzle is on. I have a feeling I couldn’t even be there, intact, in the way I am now: observing, puzzling over things, trying to shuffle and combine ideas. What makes me think I can bring my face along, face-to-face with the All?
I have the vague impression that in spite of getting some obvious (to the outsider) things wrong (fervently believing the preposterous), Mormons or LDS culture get some less-obvious things unusually right (relative to non-Mormons/LDS culture generally). I’m curious about those things, how they felt from the inside, and how the rest of us look in comparison from inside that culture. What are some things you think LDS culture does well that the rest of us might be able to emulate?
The reason I said “not funny” is not my sideways way of saying “I don’t approve of that sort of thing” but is more related to the point in your second paragraph. You can’t just state your opinion in the form of a joke and turn it into a joke that way. (Except perhaps in some rare edge cases: “Knock knock. Who’s there? Epstein didn’t kill himself.”) It’s like if I said “What do you call a ladder? An accident waiting to happen.” Have I said anything funny, or have I just chosen a strange way to say “I think a ladder is an accident waiting to happen”?
And in the case of Bob, I can certainly imagine someone from another culture, or who is young and sheltered, etc. not being up on American stereotyping and for whom such innocence would not be merely affected innocence.
Has anyone done an in-depth examination of AI-selfhood from an explicitly Buddhist perspective, using Buddhist theory of how the (illusion of) self comes to be generated in people to explore what conditions would need to be present for an AI to develop a similar such intuition?
I was surprised at how shallow and uninformative the article was, especially after so much time had gone into it, and how it had attracted so much pre-publication interest. The article shows the reader almost nothing about what makes SSC interesting, instead spending most of its paragraphs hunting for or alluding to evidence of possible wrongthink. There’s a quality pop-news profile to be written about Scott, his blog, and the community that respects it, but the New York Times didn’t seem to even try to write it. A missed opportunity and a blot on their reputation.