God is, himself, in a world filled with vague, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory hints towards a divine meta-reality. He’s confused, anxious, and doesn’t trust his own judgment. So he’s created the Abrahamic world in order to identify the people who somehow manage to arrive at the truth given a similar lack of information. One of our religions is correct—guess right and you go to Heaven to help God try to get to Double Heaven.
HonoreDB
Karma: 2,251
You’re in Newcomb’s Box
[FICTION] Hamlet and the Philosopher’s Stone
Mapping Fun Theory onto the challenges of ethical foie gras
I’m happy to specify completely, actually, I just figured a general question would lead to answers that are more useful to the community.
In my case, I’m helping to set up an organization to divert money away from major party U.S. campaign funds and to efficient charities. The idea is that if I donate $100 to the Democratic Party, and you donate $200 to the Republican party (or to their nominees for President, say), the net marginal effect on the election is very similar to if you’d donated $100 and I’ve donated nothing; $100 from each of us is being canceled out. So we’re going to make a site where people can donate to either of two opposing causes, we’ll hold it in escrow for a little, and then at a preset time the money that would be canceling out goes to a GiveWell charity instead. So if we get $5000 in donations for the Democrats and $2000 for Republicans, the Democrats get $3000 and the neutral charity gets $4000. From an individual donor’s point of view, each dollar you donate will either become a dollar for your side, or take away a dollar from the opposing side.
This obviously steps into a lot of election law, so that’s probably the expertise I’ll be looking for. We also need to figure out what type of organization(s) we need to be: it seems ideal to incorporate as a 501c(3) just so that people can make tax-deductible donations to us (whether donations made through us that end up going to charity can be tax-deductible is another issue). I think the spirit of the regulations should permit that, but I am not a lawyer and I’ve heard conflicting opinions on whether the letter of the law does.
And those issues aside, I feel like there could be more legal gotchas that I’m not anticipating to do with Handling Other People’s Money.
Trusting Your Doctor: When and how to be skeptical about medical advice and medical consensus
You have just made a falsifiable prediction! If socialism does not turn out to be negatively correlated with reading the sequences, will you rethink your political views?
it didn’t treat mild belief and certainty differently;
It did. Per the paper, the confidences of the predictions were rated on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is “No chance of occurring” and 5 is “Definitely will occur”. They didn’t use this in their top-level rankings because they felt it was “accurate enough” without that, but they did use it in their regressions.
Worse, people get marked down for making conditional predictions whose antecedent was not satisfied!
They did not. Per the paper, those were simply thrown out (as people do on PredictionBook).
They also penalise people for hedging, yet surely a hedged prediction is better than no prediction at all?
I agree here, mostly. Looking through the predictions they’ve marked as hedging, some seem like sophistry but some seem like reasonable expressions of uncertainty; if they couldn’t figure out how to properly score them they should have just left them out.
If you think you can improve on their methodology, the full dataset is here: .xls.
Random advice: Teenage U.S. LW-ers should probably be taking more AP exams
Let Me Take That Off Your Hands: Arrive in Rhodes. Future emperor Tiberius is there, fleeing his destiny and trying to live a normal life. Tell him that you’re a time traveler from the future, and prove it with detailed prophecies of the next few years, including the fact that Caesar’s heirs are about to die, leaving him sole heir to the throne. Warn him that when he eventually becomes emperor, he’ll be miserable and unpopular, in part because it was clear that he never wanted the job. Persuade him that you’re much better qualified, due to your advanced knowledge and ethics. Suggest that, when he’s eventually begged to return to Rome, he do so on the condition that he be allowed to name you his heir. Spend the next decade ensconced in Rhodes, avoiding the butterfly effect, reinventing future technology, and translating The Lord of the Rings into Latin. When Tiberius is asked to become emperor, he invites you to join him as his chief advisor. For a few years, you prove your mettle and win popular support with your technology and literature. Tiberius then retires to Rhodes, leaving you in charge as regent. Nobody wants to assassinate you since that would just force Tiberius to come back. When Tiberius dies, you become the emperor in title as you have long been in fact.
Part of the potential of things is how they break.
Vi Hart, How To Snakes
[META] Alternatives to rot13 and karma sinks
“Are you trying to tell me that there are sixteen million practicing wizards on Earth?” “Sixteen million four hundred and—” Dairine paused to consider the condition the world was in. “Well it’s not anywhere near enough! Make them all wizards.”
--Diane Duane, High Wizardry
Thank you for continuing to engage.
Genocide is the correct term for what the Jewish people do in Numbers 31. After the war is over, Moses discovers that the military commanders have spared the women and children, and is wroth. Or, from the New International Version:
Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle. “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the LORD in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
This is meant as a destruction of their ethnicity to prevent them from tainting the Israelites, following commandments such as that in Deuteronomy 7:
When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.
There are plenty of other passages where the Israelites are described as killing “all the men, women, and children.” Numbers 31 is notable to me because it makes it clear that this was not commonly accepted practice—it was something Moses had to specifically instruct. But really this is also demonstrated by the way that these sort of genocidal injunctions feel the need to spell out that mercy is not to be shown to the women and children.
If you’d rather not use the word genocide, we can of course substitute “killing a girl’s entire family in front of her, then enslaving her,” and multiply it by, in this case, sixteen thousand.
Acausal sexual reproduction is quite plausible, in a sense. Suppose you were a single woman living in a society with access to sophisticated genetic engineering, and you wanted to give birth to a child that was biologically yours and not do any unnatural optimizing. You could envision your ideal mate in detail, reverse-engineer the genetics of this man, and then create a sperm population that the man could have produced had he existed. I can easily imagine a genetic engineer offering this service: you walk into the office, describe the man’s physical attributes, personality, and even life history, and the engineer does the rest as much as is possible (in this society, we know that a plurality of men who played shortstop in Little League have a certain allele, etc.) The child could grow up and meaningfully learn things about the counterfactual father—if you learned that the father was prone to depression, that would mean that you should watch out for that as well.
If the mother really wants to, she can take things further and specify that the man should be the kind of person who would have, had he existed, gone through the analogous procedure (with a surrogate or artificial womb), and that the counterfactual woman he would have specified would have been her. In this case, we can say that the man and the woman have acausally reproduced.
Inspired by the omake:
A fragment from a lost folio of Hamlet.
[Draft] Poker With Lennier
Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.
--Jane Espenson
Well, no. He makes those statements about the Old Testament, not actual Jewish law. It seems blatantly obvious that the rulings and commentary you cite are indeed “apologetic glosses on a defective primary text.” The fact that they were written when scientific knowledge was still rudimentary is immaterial—clearly, they patched the locust thing when they finally got around to counting its legs.
Again, in trying to refute this you cite texts that were written much later. If the Old Testament actually contained references to a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe you’d be able to quote it. I think the closest it comes is a sense of despair and humility at the incomprehensibility of the universe.
I think you’ve simply misunderstood, here: this is close to the opposite of what the author is saying.
You don’t really dispute this, you just sort of argue that it’s okay. It’s not. If something like “the nature of good and evil” does not describe some aspect of human experience, then it’s vacuous. If it does, then it is subject to scientific analysis.
The Torah condemns nonmarital sex. Repeatedly, explicitly, and harshly. It does not condemn slavery. Nonmarital sex is an inevitable constant across all cultures, times, and places. It is so much more inevitable than slavery. This seems to suggest a somewhat different attitude toward slavery than toward nonmarital sex.
The passages you quote, brutal as they are, concern only Jewish slaves. The Torah explicitly permits Jews to buy non-Jewish slaves and never free them (Leviticus 25:45-46), but pass them and their children on to your children, forever. It instructs the Jewish people to, when conquering a culturally powerful enemy city, kill the men, women, and male children, but allow the soldiers to keep the virginal girls as slaves. Such a genocide is depicted in Numbers 31, for example. How do you think that kind of slavery went? Imagine you’re a young Midianite woman. Your father dies defending your city, and then it falls to the invaders a day later. Jewish soldiers come to your house. Your old, weak grandfather grabs a sword and bars the door, but you plead with him to surrender, and the soldiers watch as you tug the sword out of his hands and lead him inside to a chair. One of them laughs, walks inside, and runs him through. Your mother wails and he turns to her, sighs dutifully, squares off, and cuts her head off cleanly in a single stroke. You’ve barely had time to register what just happened, when he pulls your baby brother out of his crib. Some part of you manages to mobilize yourself and you find yourself charging towards him, screaming. By the time you reach him, he’s already bashed your brother’s brains out and dropped the body. You get in one wild punch before he backhands you to the ground. He could kill you in an instant but instead he stares at you appraisingly.
Would such a woman ever so much as weave a basket for her captor voluntarily? She’d have to be chained up at night, I bet, or else she’d slit his throat. She’d have to be beaten half to death before she even considered accepting this man as a master—the man who killed her family in front of her. Would the soldier sell her to another Jew? It might not make much of a difference: these would still be the men who destroyed her entire civilization. Would she be sold to outsiders? Sold, as a young, virgin slave, to outsiders who aren’t bound by all those ethical Biblical rules? Yeah, that’s going to end well for her. What do you suppose she would say, if she saw you praying today? Chanting some of the same prayers, thanking the same God in the same language, as the man who slaughtered her family thanked God for delivering her into his hands. Attending synagogue and saying “amen” as they read aloud the story, recorded for all eternity, of her torment and her people’s genocide.
At this point you are already preparing your response, where you explain that the genocide was pragmatically necessary. “They had to kill those people, or the next generation would have killed them. God commanded it because He knew it had to be done. Enslaving the girls was the most merciful practical option.” I beg you not to say this. This is the worst modern consequence of the Talmudic tradition: an intellectual, explaining how mass killings and brutal slavery are sometimes justified. Every time you defend genocide, you hasten the day when it will happen again. I ask again: What could you possibly say to any of those sixteen thousand Midianite women and girls, if they asked you why you were commemorating the atrocities committed against them, and adopting the perpetrator’s heritage as your own?
The next time you kiss a Torah, I expect you to picture that Midianite slave. She’s watching you kiss it. She knows what’s written there. She sees you as reaffirming, in that moment, your allegiance to the worst parts of human civilization. What do you need to do to get right with her?