Dreaded_Anomaly

• Dreaded_Anomaly 30 Dec 2010 8:19 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Why abor­tion looks more okay to us than kil­ling babies

  I think we might be better served to put research efforts into developing contraception to the point where both men and women have to decide consciously to conceive. The fact that the process of becoming pregnant is involuntary seems like an artifact of evolution; why keep it that way?

• Dreaded_Anomaly 30 Dec 2010 8:46 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Why abor­tion looks more okay to us than kil­ling babies

  This is a very important point, and I’d like to add to it. (I will use the term “ex vivo” to denote separation from the mother’s womb, in order to avoid any issues regarding the term “born.”)

  It’s worth considering if those who oppose abortion as murder actually believe what they say they believe. If the killing of a fetus by another being is murder as we tend to think of murder (when it comes to an ex vivo human), any fetal death that occurs otherwise (from disease, injury, etc.) ought to be just as objectionable as the death of an ex vivo human.

  It is often seen that, when a miscarriage happens and is realized by the parent(s), a mourning process does occur. However, we do not simply mourn the deaths of born humans. We take active measures to prevent those deaths, through medicine, safety precautions, etc. Why don’t those who oppose abortion as murder put as much, if not more, energy into preventing fetal deaths? There’s prenatal care, vitamins, recommendations of things pregnant women should and shouldn’t eat, drink and do… but compared to how much modern medicine we have to prevent the deaths of born humans, it doesn’t seem like that much. Maybe it’s just that abortions constitute a much larger proportion of fetal deaths, so they are the appropriate area of focus.

  Nope. The majority of fetal deaths occur through miscarriage. One study found: “61.9% of conceptuses will be lost prior to 12 weeks. Most of these losses (91.7%) occur subclinically, without the knowledge of the mother.” It’s been estimated (source) that 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage; the 25% number is actually just for known pregnancies.

  If those who oppose abortion as murder actually did so due to a deeply held belief, other forms of fetal death would get much more attention than abortion, because they occur much more often (a fact which is not hard to find). Even those measures we do take to improve fetal health generally aren’t done for the well-being of the fetus in its own right; we take these measures to improve the potential ex vivo human’s future. Likelihood to survive does seem to be the implicit criterion, with the understanding that becoming an ex vivo human, i.e. an independent being without a direct, physical connection to another being, is the criterion for personhood.

  What links here?

  • Dreaded_Anomaly's comment on Blues, Greens and abortion by Snowyowl (7 Mar 2011 2:23 UTC; 6 points)
  • Dreaded_Anomaly's comment on Pro­ce­du­ral Knowl­edge Gaps by Alicorn (9 Feb 2011 22:39 UTC; 1 point)

• Dreaded_Anomaly 30 Dec 2010 20:02 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Why abor­tion looks more okay to us than kil­ling babies

  I don’t mean to talk about individuals’ actions. There is an entire movement that opposes abortion as murder, and nothing corresponding for other fetal deaths. For ex vivo humans, we have those who stop murderers (police, FBI, district attorneys, etc.) and those who stop other deaths (doctors, paramedics, medical researchers, etc.). One might focus on the former while being confident that someone else is handling the latter; the same is not true for fetuses. Also, organizations seeking to cure cancer or other diseases are legion, and receive more attention when it comes to charitable donations and volunteering than legal organizations. For fetuses, there’s the March of Dimes and several organizations dedicated to specific birth defects, but that’s about it. Given the statistics on fetal death, the amount of attention paid to abortion by those who oppose it as murder demonstrates their position is not consistent with their professed belief.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 30 Dec 2010 20:09 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Why abor­tion looks more okay to us than kil­ling babies

  Certainly, that’s also a good point. Separating incubation from humans does seem like it would make people’s lives better (although there is the concern of reducing the mother’s bond with her child). However, as far as the goal of stopping abortions goes, I think it makes more sense to prevent pregnancy in the first place. That goal can be held even by those who don’t oppose abortion as murder (like myself), as we can still recognize that the process of unwanted pregnancy and abortion can take a physical and mental toll on those involved.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 30 Dec 2010 20:20 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: The Santa de­cep­tion: how did it af­fect you?

  That’s similar to my experience, although I think I was six years old rather than five. There was no specific trauma that led to my conclusion; I just decided it was more realistic that my parents were Santa Claus (and the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy) than if these entities actually existed. I asked my mother, she confirmed it, and I continued to play along for the benefit of my younger brother and cousins.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 30 Dec 2010 22:46 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Why abor­tion looks more okay to us than kil­ling babies

  I was attempting to describe why I don’t think the ratios of attention are comparable between fetal deaths and ex vivo human deaths. We devote much more attention to preventing other deaths for ex vivo humans than we do for fetuses, relative to how much attention we devote to murder or abortion.

  I see your point about aging specifically as a cause of death, but I think that’s a different issue than preventing death overall. We do investigate various methods of mitigating the “rigors” of old age, even if research to eliminate it entirely is sparse. There are many causes of death unrelated to aging we vigorously try to prevent, and similarly miscarriages can have many causes, but efforts to prevent them are not nearly as vigorous.

The De­cline Effect and the Scien­tific Method [link]

• Dreaded_Anomaly 31 Dec 2010 5:22 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Why abor­tion looks more okay to us than kil­ling babies

  I’m sure prenatal care has become more common; over 80% of pregnant women entered into some form of prenatal care in 2005 (source). However, even considering that, anywhere from 25% to over 50% of pregnancies (depending on the source) end in miscarriage without the mother even knowing about the pregnancy. To someone who opposes abortion as murder, that should seem like a huge number of lives being lost. I just don’t think there’s anything comparable when we consider deaths of ex vivo humans.

  Some statistics: approximately 4 million live births vs. 2 million pregnancy losses per year. (source) 60% of those losses are estimated to be from abortion, with 30% from miscarriage and a 10% from other causes, but the 30% from miscarriage is only the known pregnancies. If we take the estimations of unknown pregnancies into account, deaths from other causes equal if not exceed deaths from abortion. So, abortion does occur more often in the fetal population than murder in the ex vivo population, but it’s still a smaller percentage of fetal deaths than the attention paid to it.

  The number of deaths in the ex vivo population was about 2,400,000 in 2007 (source). That’s comparable to the number of fetal deaths. We do focus on catching murderers as a function of government, but those who oppose abortion as murder focus almost all of their efforts on political and governmental issues. There exists a large community of medical research (and safety research, for that matter) dedicated to preventing ex vivo deaths, but relatively little in comparison for fetal deaths. Even if you’d assert that the ratio for ex vivo murder vs. death is 1:1 (and personally, it seems to me like it’s less than 1:1), the ratio for abortion vs. death is clearly much greater than 1:1, and the number of deaths per year is similar.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 31 Dec 2010 6:51 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: Spam in the dis­cus­sion area

  I think the idea was to limit new article creation in the discussion area, not for the main site. Right now, anyone can post articles to the discussion area regardless of karma score.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 31 Dec 2010 7:16 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: Why abor­tion looks more okay to us than kil­ling babies

  D’oh. Fixed, thanks...

• Dreaded_Anomaly 31 Dec 2010 7:18 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: Spam in the dis­cus­sion area

  Even a small karma requirement seems like it would be better than no karma requirement at all. Spam and trolling aren’t quite the same thing.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 31 Dec 2010 7:47 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: lucidfox’s comment on: The Long Now

  Google’s Eric Schmidt thinks that “it’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.” It’s an interesting viewpoint, given Google’s largely successful experiments with automated driving.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 2 Jan 2011 6:39 UTC

  10 points

  on: Work­ing hurts less than pro­cras­ti­nat­ing, we fear the twinge of starting

  So what is our brain flinching away from, if not the pain of doing the work?

  I think it’s flinching away from the pain of the decision to do the work—the momentary, immediate pain of (1) disengaging yourself from the (probably very small) flow of reinforcement that you’re getting from reading a random unimportant Internet article, and (2) paying the energy cost for a prefrontal override to exert control of your own behavior and begin working.

  I think our brains might also be flinching away from something else, at least in many cases.

  Consider when you have a specific goal toward which to work. You usually have a fairly clear idea of the end product or result that you desire, whether the goal is about writing, weight loss, or anything in between. When you envision the end product, it’s in an idealized form, and further, it exists in your mind not associated with the actual amount of work that will go into achieving it.

  I think that we grow attached to this mental conception of the end product, both because of its idealized nature and because the image itself requires very little work to maintain. Having the plan to do something might actually feel better than we anticipate doing the work will feel. We know that having the accomplishment will feel much better than just thinking about it, once we put in the work; we also know that doing the work itself is likely to be rewarding, and even if not, it won’t really be that bad. However, that shiny, work-free mental conception is a big enough immediate deterrent to make the twinge of starting seem much worse than it is.

  Picture a particle in a potential well, with another much deeper well not too far over, but a large barrier in between. The particle will eventually tunnel over to the deeper well, and once it’s there, it’s much less likely to go back to the shallower well, but it still might take a long time to get there. In the scenario of procrastination, the height of the barrier is proportional to how good we’ve built up the shiny mental conception to be. We have to keep in mind that accomplishment really does feel better than the idea of accomplishment, even with the weight of work attached to the former and not to the latter.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 2 Jan 2011 7:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: lucidfox’s comment on: Choose To Be Happy

  To paraphrase a comment I posted a few days ago on a different topic: “Death is an artifact of evolution, why keep it that way?”

• Dreaded_Anomaly 2 Jan 2011 18:29 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: The De­cline Effect and the Scien­tific Method [link]

  Personally, I see them as being softer because they’re about less fundamental, i.e. higher order, systems. Experiments and theories in biology and medicine treat high-level concepts (e.g. organs, tissues, symptoms of diseases) as basic. This is somewhat of a necessity, because the tools to model such things as complex collections of and interactions among the component particles don’t exist yet.

  However, when they treat conclusions drawn from those high-level approximations as universal, problems inevitably arise. We might all have organs that seem the same, and are constructed by the same cellular machinery in large part, but there’s still a lot of room for variation. Even subtle variations might have effects that wouldn’t be obvious from theories based on high-level approximations. This is where the lack of rigor is a factor: even if scientists understand that they’re using high-level approximations, they may not want to admit a lack of universality in a result. (I have noticed this to be especially true in psychology.)

  I think the focus on universal theories is a shame; something can be perfectly worthwhile even if it’s only useful in some circumstances. Many theories in physics are like this; the usual example is, of course, Newtonian mechanics vs. Einsteinian relativity. A description of some biological or psychological phenomenon can still be useful even if it doesn’t apply to every possible organism/​brain. There is, however, the problem that determining the set of circumstances in which such a description might be useful can also be more difficult due to the high-level, complex nature of the subjects.

  An example of a theory in psychology I find to be useful even if not universal is Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. Kohlberg himself was quite convinced the stages were universal, and made a few contortions to try to keep it that way. Given that the original theory was formulated based solely on interviews with males in the USA, a limited range of applicability – based largely on culture and to a smaller degree gender, especially as one looks at the higher stages – is more likely. However, the theory is still a good way to understand how people in the USA think about moral issues; it just might not be as good a way to understand how people in other cultures and social settings think.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 2 Jan 2011 18:37 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: The De­cline Effect and the Scien­tific Method [link]

  A register of proposals does seem like it would help to keep scientists honest, a step towards Feynman’s “utter honesty.” I would hesitate to say that journals should accept papers based solely on that register, though. Sometimes, the proposal might not end up as a wholly accurate description of the actual experiment, for a variety of reasons. I think that making both available would be a good way to judge how well the result actually applies to what is claimed by the scientists who published it. They could offer explanations for any differences between the proposal and the actual, and peer reviewers could give more thorough critiques with this extra information.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 2 Jan 2011 18:54 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: LeBleu’s comment on: Work­ing hurts less than pro­cras­ti­nat­ing, we fear the twinge of starting

  I think you might be assuming causation from correlation. It seems like one could argue just as well that people who inherently have longer lasting willpower are less likely to view it as an expendable resource.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 2 Jan 2011 19:07 UTC

  6 points

  on: A Fate Worse Than Death

  If I knew I would spend the next 50 years in Guantanamo Bay and then die, I would probably choose to die before that could happen.

  If I knew that I would spend the next 50 years in Guantanamo Bay and then medical science would be able to extend my life by at least 50 years, the decision would not be as clear-cut. Even if my life would only be extended 10 years but I would [meet the love of my life/​make the discovery of a lifetime/​other high-happiness circumstance], there would be a very difficult calculation involved.

  I think the idea you’re describing relies on the assumption that death is not only inevitable, but that it’s going to happen relatively soon. I do agree that there are motivations beyond simply living for its own sake. However, I think that the idea that death could be better than some awful form of living assumes that no future opportunity to fulfill one’s motivations will occur. The chance of getting out of Guantanamo is worth a lot.

  What links here?

  • Dreaded_Anomaly's comment on Theists are wrong; is the­ism? by Will_Newsome (28 Jan 2011 3:42 UTC; 3 points)

• Dreaded_Anomaly 4 Jan 2011 10:00 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Of Gen­der and Rationality

  It’s a while afterward (and it does not seem that this idea caught on), but I think the obvious choice would be to use the EM spectrum. Describing Eliezer as a “gamma ray rationalist” seems quite fitting to me.

• Dreaded_Anomaly 4 Jan 2011 10:19 UTC

  8 points

  on: The Least Con­ve­nient Pos­si­ble World

  Would you become a Catholic in this world? Or are you willing to admit that maybe your rejection of Pascal’s Wager has less to do with a hypothesized pro-atheism God, and more to do with a belief that it’s wrong to abandon your intellectual integrity on the off chance that a crazy deity is playing a perverted game of blind poker with your eternal soul?

  I don’t think I would be able to bring myself to worship honestly a God who bestowed upon us the ability to reason and then rewarded us for not using it.