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Hide 1 Jun 2026 22:58 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Dacyn’s comment on: “This Hypothetical is Unrealistic” is not a Valid Objection
True, I wrote it in a rush, updated.

But if C was the symbol for Chlorine, then would it be HC?

Hide 1 Jun 2026 5:30 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: “This Hypothetical is Unrealistic” is not a Valid Objection
I disagree with your characterisation that I am conflating between two different types of “hypothetical is unrealistic”. I am explicitly referring to the “mere unrealism” dismissal, as opposed to dismissals based on coherence or relevance.
The “hydrogen/chlorine” water example you give is not actually testing any principle, and so it may be relevant or irrelevant, insightful/useless, depending on the principle it is testing. For instance, if you say “no matter the chemical composition of water, we shouldn’t put warnings on it, because water is safe to drink”, then the hypothetical question of: “what if it’s made of hydrogen/chlorine instead of hydrogen/oxygen?” is actually a plausible challenge to this principle.
Your water example also potentially runs into an outright contradiction, which is acknowledged in the post as a case where it is defensible to reject it on those grounds. “Water”, if defined to mean “H2O”, is not merely “unrealistic”, it is logically impossible for it to be “HCl”, because HCl is not H2O, which is just P and not P.
For example, if you’re playing tennis on Mars, that’s very likely a world that has technology substantially more advanced than ours, and it’s quite plausible that in such a world people who become paralysed are able to play tennis using neural prostheses and don’t suffer much incapacity at all. The supposed “universal principle” from the post has failed. It turned out that the principle was actually local to a family of possible worlds and the hypothetical went outside them.
This is in complete agreement with the post. The point is that if the conclusion of the principle is false or untenable, then the principle producing it is either false or insufficiently specified. I am not literally claiming that being paralysed necessarily entails tennis-playing is off the table no matter what—I am giving it as an example of a colloquial absolute, showing that it is valid to interrogate this principle with seemingly ridiculous scenarios.

Hide 26 May 2026 5:26 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: G Wood’s comment on: Brackets Are a Bad Way to Regulate
I would probably watch out for things that look like a distribution but hide a categorical shift. In your drugs example the crime being punished at the low end, is having drugs for yourself. The crime being punished at the high end is having drugs for sale. There are thresholds that can be usefully set to distinguish those cases, and those cases have different harms, grams possessed is only a proxy for which case you’re in.
If one uses “amount possessed” as a proxy for commercial/personal, and argues this categorical distinction calls for a discontinuous punishment, that’s fine—but that argues for a single discontinuous jump, not more.

Assuming someone with 499g of cocaine is just a big time cokehead, but 500g is a distributor, then it makes sense to have a sharp jump in penalties at that point. But what about the second threshold? There seems to be no plausible categorical difference between 4999g and >5kg—both brackets are commercial quantities, and lots of commercial trafficking is worse than a little bit of commercial trafficking.
So, within the same category, it still makes sense to use a formula.

Hide 26 May 2026 5:11 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: ulyssessword’s comment on: Brackets Are a Bad Way to Regulate
I agree for some of these examples, but not for others.

You can’t get sent 90% to jail, but you can get sent to jail for 90% as long. You can have your license revoked for 90% as long too.

And yes, this does only apply to continuous variables. So, to your point, pulling someone over makes sense as a threshold since it’s discontinuous. However, most continuous distributions are handled with brackets, which is just as inappropriate as handling discrete qualitative step changes with continuous formulas.

Hide 25 May 2026 0:42 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Veganism is Virtuous, not Obligatory
Moral consideration means, roughly, how important a given moral patient is—a scaling factor. Killing an ant is not as bad as killing a lizard, which is not as bad as killing a parrot, which is not as bad as killing a pig, which is not as bad as killing a human, and so on.

“Virtuous” here means something that is moral to do beyond one’s obligations. Virtuous is sometimes used to mean “honourable in a sacrificial way”, but that’s not how I’m using it here.

Hide 24 May 2026 10:15 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: Veganism is Virtuous, not Obligatory
our key point is about parity, and it’s intuitively super appealing but imho as bottom line actually misguided; too theoretical and ignoring randomness: by your own numbers, practices we accept to kill animals in the same ballpark as meat-eating (driving: 75 vertebrates per lifetime; windowed houses: hundred of birds; power lines another handful), so by parity meat should be fine too, and this may hold esp. when using relative personal benefit/overall harm type ratios. But parity needs those other practices to actually be ‘permissible’ (using similar type of language as the philosophical ‘obligation’), not just currently accepted.
I am pointing out that, to be consistent, you must either:

- Accept these widely accepted practices are, like meat, obligatory to abstain from.
- Accept that eating meat is, like these practices, permissible.
Much of this permissible/obligatory framing is an internal critique of the vegan view, which is essentially that the distinction between obligatory and permissible is mediated by “practicability”.

Hide 24 May 2026 1:41 UTC
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in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Veganism is Virtuous, not Obligatory
There is no unit of measure, I am arguing for the directional principle.
The wording of “generally optional if inconvenient/unpleasant” is basically correct, though undersells the proportionality aspect. Unpleasant is a deep hole. It may be moral to give a dollar to a beggar, but if doing so would cause you excruciating pain, then it would be optional.
Without a sacrifice constraint, all beneficial actions are obligatory. This is the reason for the “practicability” qualifier vegans affirm.

Keep in mind, the way I’m using the term moral/immoral here is slightly nonstandard:
The goodness or badness of an action, which is a function of the action’s harm and/or benefit, and mitigators/intensifiers, weighted by the moral consideration of the affected entities.

Hide 24 May 2026 1:34 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: Veganism is Virtuous, not Obligatory
I address a similar point here:
If one argues that a person would be obligated to eat to such an extent that it causes a net-benefit relative to merely abstaining from food^[1], such as by being an advocate, this concedes there is no act/omission distinction relevant to one’s obligations—one must act to eat, one must act to advocate, one must act to afford the seeds. Therefore, such a position produces unbounded act-based consequentialist obligations, like sneaking into as many factory farms as you can to free animals. All the while, ruthlessly optimising your calorie intake so as to never scrape above the threshold of absolute necessity.
Additionally, per the definitions, I’m using sacrifice throughout to mean:
“voluntary, self-imposed harm for the sake of benefiting moral patients”,
Where “harm” means “(causing) a dispreferred result”—so, decreasing your capacity to do good is a sacrifice, and falls within this two factor framework.

Hide 17 May 2026 23:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Hugo L’s comment on: Don’t be too Clever to Take Obvious Advice
For me, it comes across as passive aggressive and condescending, while misreading the post as “discovering” the concept of a Sazen, which it isn’t.

Hide 15 May 2026 23:15 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Brendan Long’s Shortform
Bidirectional, sure. Entirely backwards? Almost certainly not.

Hide 15 May 2026 11:27 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: G Wood’s comment on: Don’t be too Clever to Take Obvious Advice
Happens to the best of us

Hide 13 May 2026 22:59 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: Raphael Roche’s comment on: The Lies and Fallacies of the Buyer and Seller
My second no is invariably less polite, and at that point the salesperson can consider the sale definitively lost.
Whereas if they’d simply let me think it over, there’s a genuine ~1% chance I’d come back and actually buy something.
Salespeople who say: Sure thing! Just let me know, I’ll be here! at the first sign of resistance win far fewer customers than those who push.
A thing to keep in mind is that good pushing doesn’t feel like pushing, and often goes unnoticed. What most people are experiencing when they lament “pushy” salespeople is a poor pusher—someone who doesn’t know how to push tactfully, and pushes when he shouldn’t—who just pushes everyone always because that’s what they’re told works. Even poor pushers do better than doormats, funnily enough.
A conversation with a good pusher ends with a done deal, and thoughts like “man, that guy was different—he really took the time to listen to me instead of shoving it all down my throat.”.
You may be the rare exception for whom this doesn’t apply. However, the vast majority of people when asked will say this, and yet the pushers continue to win.
So, if we wish to live in a world where the salesman meekly shows you the door, we better start buying from them in greater numbers.

Hide 13 May 2026 0:26 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: 152334H’s comment on: The Lies and Fallacies of the Buyer and Seller
Some do, and that works perfectly well. The rarity of an outright no in practice is really quite astonishing. I can’t speak to all regions, but this tends to hold for high HDI English-speaking countries.

Hide 13 May 2026 0:24 UTC
15 points
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in reply to: gwern’s comment on: The Lies and Fallacies of the Buyer and Seller
This comes from my experience selling B2B, primarily to companies with ~5-100 employees, for my own business. Cumulatively, I have sat on roughly 800 hours of sales meetings.
I have heard and said some variation of everything that is in this essay repeatedly.
The approach I took began as the default “sure, looking forward to hearing from you”, and gradually morphed to the process I describe here, based on trial and error, mentorship, books, and influential figures in contemporary sales such as those mentioned in the acknowledgments.
I have also been on the buyer’s end many times for various products and services that are gatekept behind a consultative selling process. In the beginning, I would “think about it” almost every time. Now, I’ll decide a reservation price before the meeting and just tell them yes or no.

Hide 13 May 2026 0:22 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: The Lies and Fallacies of the Buyer and Seller
No problem at all, Yair. I totally respect that.

Before you go...

Hide 13 May 2026 0:21 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Lies and Fallacies of the Buyer and Seller
This is true in many cases, however not as universally as you seem to be suggesting. You may be overestimating how much credit the typical buyer gives the typical seller.
A lot of people genuinely believe they are coming up with original, believable, convincing reasons to delay, and don’t fully consider the extent to which the success of the deal is dependent on a commitment then and there.
It is quite common for prospects to do their best to put on an effusive performance of how amazing it all is to sell the lie. So, when they say “Mr. Seller, look, I’m a man of my word. A Christian. I’m not one of those guys who just says they’re gonna do something and then goes back on it. I really do just need to have a quick chat with my accountant, but as far as I’m concerned, this is a winner”, they largely are thinking “that oughtta do it”, not “I’m glad that perfunctory custom is complete and we now both understand I’m telling him to kick rocks”.

Hide 10 May 2026 1:15 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: There is no evidence you should reapply sunscreen every 2 hours.
If “nuanced complexities of biology” were non-negligible factors, then we would need to have different SPF ratings for the time of year, time of day, ethnicity, hydration status, vitamin C intake, and so on. All of these have nonzero implications for the dose/response curves. All can be totally ignored in practice.

Sure, there are minor nuances to stimulus response in chaotic biological systems, but the bottom line is, and has always been, area under the curve of UV exposure.

For the record, I agree that SPF 26 is more than enough to protect you from sunburn in almost all cases, and that SPF doesn’t account for UVA. The UVA rating system is of the form “PA+++”, which does a similar thing, just for different wavelengths.

Hide 8 May 2026 22:35 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: There is no evidence you should reapply sunscreen every 2 hours.
Yes, erythemal dose is set as the threshold, and yes, it applies specifically to UVB, so when I said “the UV dose”, the more precise thing to say would have been the “UVB” dose. However, the point stands.

What you’re not appreciating is that the “erythemal dose” is irrelevant to the numerical rating of the sunscreen. You seem to be suggesting that if the threshold were different, then the SPF rating would be different as well. See below

If we were to change the SPF threshold from “enough UVB to begin to burn you” to “enough UVB to burn you to a crisp until your skin turns black and falls off your body”, the SPF rating of every sunscreen on planet earth would be the same.

By the same token, if we were to change the SPF threshold to “enough UVB to give you a little bit of vitamin D but not burn you”, then the SPF rating would remain the same.
This is the reason we don’t need to adjust SPF ratings based on how dark your skin is. A person with dark skin requires a threshold of UVB that is far greater than a white person, and yet SPF50 remains SPF50 for both parties.

Hide 8 May 2026 1:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: There is no evidence you should reapply sunscreen every 2 hours.
SPF is often framed as a “multiple of how long it takes to get burned”, but this is just a reframe of what it actually is, which is “the denominator of UV reduction”.

SPF 70 means that 1/70th of the UV gets through. It just happens to be that the “time to get burned” is just however many minutes it takes to reach a certain threshold. So, a 70X reduction in UV just means it takes 70X longer to reach any given threshold.

Hide 7 May 2026 11:19 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: There is no evidence you should reapply sunscreen every 2 hours.
I disagree. From the 2018 Ouyang et al. paper, application of SPF 70 sunscreen dropped to just 26 when using 1mg/cm^2 application, whereas it maintained at 64 when 2mg/cm^2 was initially applied—so, using the widely recommended (2mg/cm^2) amount appears to massively affect the longevity of the protection.