The issue here is that the details of the invariant affect how reasonable it is. If you define the difference between human and monkey in terms of a single gene (or in terms of having X genes), then the invariant “a monkey can’t have a human child” is unreasonable.
Jiro
Karma: 5,631
Yo be clear, your theory of mind is that Metz hates Scott alexander for some (what?) reason, doesn’t think Scott is accepting of racism, but chooses the manipulate facts to portray him as a racist and would not include the comments expected by the editorial policy at the NYT, despite claiming to have made his decisions (including to reveal Scott’s identity) based on NYT policy?
Metz is ideologically opposed to the tech industry and thinks (sincerely) that they are fascists and racists, so he wants the audience to know that. He doesn’t have proof that they are, so he tries to make his audience think that by using literal truths that insinuate things he sincerely believes, but which don’t have any proof.
As for NYT policy, 1) the Times is ideologically on Metz’s side, so they won’t enforce any policy that is inconvenient for Metz here, and 2) the claim that the policy requires Scott’s name was already shown to be a lie (or at least enforced based on ideology), because sympathetic article subjects had their identities hidden, so more policy lies won’t be unusual.
Even then though, I would be dubious of the claim he saw manipulating the facts as his job.
In general (and this specific case is full of them), if a joutnalist lies by telling the literal truth, he has to be aware of what he is doing. It wouldn’t even be possible to do that without having in mind something to say, being aware that the facts don’t support it (if he thought they did, he would say it directly), and choosing to insinuate it indirectly anyway.
To give a hypothetical example (of course, we will never know what might have been) the article’s reference to Scott and Murray likely would have included a line referencing how Scott responds.
This is quokka readoning. It would not fit Metz’s purposes to write accurately, so he doesn’t. Metz isn’t deceiving the public because Scott failed to talk to him; he’s deceiving the public because he wants to. Giving him an extra opportunity to be honest won’t help, but it might hurt if Scott says something that can be taken out of context.
With exceptions, they don’t see such manipulation (whether for ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ causes) as their job.
Explain Cade Metz (without saying “if it’s a counterexample it must be an exception”).
If you believe that a journalist is so maliciously opposed to you that they are going to actively try to twist any communications to try to get the public to oppose you, then they would probably be doing that anyway
Their mission can be made easier or harder even if they were going to do it anyway.
That’s Cade Metz’ article that caused so much trouble. By any non-Eliezer standard, it is lying with the literal truth. Amd people keep talking to him.
Your description does not fit reality.
All the force of the argument comes from the similarity to something that is accepted. If you and everyone else don’t accept the thing that you’re comparing it to, there’s no point in even making a comparison.
they were supposed to have the ability to read the internet but not to write on it.
This is not a coherent concept.
Anything that “reads” from the Internet has to send data first. If sending this data doesn’t result in a write, that is only coincidence.
Would you rather people be exposed to your views from a factually correct, if critical and snarky, source or not introduced to your views at all?
Journalists are masters at using factually correct statements to get people to believe false things.
So the answer is “not introduced”.
Pretty much none set out to be some sort of underworld actors manipulating a small core group through dog-whistles and snark.
The journalist believes he is convincing people of the truth. The fact that the “truth” is not supported by the facts is just considered an inconvenience by the journalist.
But it is considered horrible to use this definition today, and you want to implement other things based on it—today.
Surely you wouldn’t, for instance, propose something and say “it’s okay, it’s based on the same principles as slavery!” or “It’s okay, it’s based on the same principles as genocide!”
Marriage is a contract through which two individuals waive their right to sue each other for violation of the right of not being raped.
Uhh… No. It is certainly possible to rape your spouse.
Do you keep walking by or do you save the child?
I keep walking, of course.
It is contradictory to say “saving the child won’t harm yourself” and “you will ruin a $5000 suit”, as if monetary harm isn’t harm, and as if money doesn’t mean spending a portion of your life to get that money.
This particular example is a trick that depends on:
the fact that people with $5000 suits can usually be assumed to have a lot of money and not be significantly harmed by losing their suit.
the fact that most people don’t like to describe lives in monetary terms at all, regardless of whether the amount is $5000 or something else, even though it is necessary to describe life in monetary terms to make any reasonable decisions in this matter
the fact that people are taught that wanting money is evil, even though this teaching is often questionable as applied
Let’s change the example a little bit: you have a $5000 used car. You can drive the car into the water, thus destroying it, in order to save the child. Should you be morally required to do this? A lot more people will answer “no” to this version of the question even though they wouldn’t to the one about the $5000 suit, even though it shouldn’t make any difference whether it’s a car or a suit—the difference is that they better understand that destroying a $5000 car isn’t “just money”, but that it’s a hit to their quality of life that significantly harms them.
Here’s another one: Imagine that you can save the child by using a magical spell, but the spell has a karma requirement, so if you save the child, your own child has a 1% chance of immediately dying. Are you required to save the child? After all, even at a 1% chance of dying, it’s a net gain of 99%, added up over all humanity. Yet a lot of people would say you don’t have to save the child in this situation either. Would you be required to save 25 children this way?
(There’s also the variant “would you destroy a $10 suit to save a child”. The trick in that case is that generalizing this to saving many children introduces a heap paradox, and the solution to the heap paradox is “set a limit and do no more than that”, but you exclude that solution. You seem to allow it, but actually allowing it would let you put the threshhold at 1 child or two children, or “fewer children than the number that is already helped by the taxes I pay”.)
The issue is that “counting the votes” is not special compared to “using some algorithm that is not counting”. If the outside viewer chooses to count rather than use some other algorithm, that’s still his choice. He’s still “voting” to use counting rather than some other aggregation method. Using counting as the method is not the same thing as not choosing a method.
We’ve settled on counting when aggregating votes from humans under normal circumstances, but you can’t generalize this to utility—you’re essentially privileging one particular type of utilitarianism over others.
Hence, the beings vote, and the accountant counts the votes.
This contains the hidden assumption that adding up individual votes is “counting the votes” and yet using some other algorithm than addition is not “counting the votes”. You can say that well, that’s what counting means, but then, the fact that you even think it’s important that the accountant counts the votes rather than “collates” or “aggregates” or some other neutral phrase, carries the same hidden assumption.
Yes, but the reason I’d refuse is different. In the case of the chickens, I’d refuse because I think the human is more valuable than the chickens; I’d do this no matter how many chickens you increased the number to. This also applies in a scenario without murder—if I had to save a lot of chickens or one human, I’d save the human every time (ignoring questions of how the chickens are useful to humans), and my answer won’t change no matter how many chickens it is.
It follows that I value the chickens at zero, not at 1/1000.
I treat it as exactly zero, even if you can argue otherwise. If I don’t, I am vulnerable to questions like “if there were ten quadrillion chickens, would you murder a human to save them?” I would not murder that human, so 1/1000 or any number you can come up with is too high.
I see a $40 gate there.
This post combines two drastically different things: human suffering and chickens. I think you are in a bubble if you think they are not only comparable, but so comparable that you can take their similarity as just the natural way everyone is supposed to believe.
To anyone outside the bubble, this is arson, murder, and jaywalking.
I think he does not.
Preferences are not rational or irrational; preferences are the premises you base all your other conclusions on. You need to take these preferences as given.
If anything, you need to recognize that if someone says they don’t want things that bring pleasure, that means that when you said things like “the only reason we think these other goods are valuable is because they produce happiness”, these things are just incorrect. He’s flat out stated something that contradicts one of your supposed truths!
And a closely related issue is blissful ignorance, which I already brought up in another thread. I want certain things about the world to be true. By definition, if you fooled me into thinking they were true, I would experience as much pleasure as they were actually true and I learned that. Yet I don’t think that the two situations are equally desirable, and I would expend some resources to prevent myself from being fooled, even if fooling me will give me pleasure. So I too disagree that the only reason something is valuable because it produces happiness.
You also seem to not have read much of what has been written about these issues. You are not the first person to say “well, I’ll just accept the repugnant conclusion then”, but there are other conclusions that are harder to accept; for instance, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/#AccRepCon
It seems self-evident that pleasurable experiences are good (and suffering is bad), in the same way it’s self-evident that I am conscious. This is difficult to dispute, and to my knowledge virtually all moral philosophers (and regular people) agree that pleasure is good and suffering is bad.
I don’t agree with this, because of the blissful ignorance problem.
I have preferences about the state of the world. If I am fooled into believing that the state of the world matches those preferences, I experience as much pleasure as I do if it actually matches those preferences. Yet I would say that being fooled is bad, and certainly that it at least is worse than having those preferences actually be satisfied.
Some other reasons homeless might refuse shelters is that they are not allowed to do drugs there and that they aren’t permitted to destroy the property.
I would not refuse to take shelter on this basis but many homeless might. Amd I don’t think we should change the rules to allow these, even in PSH.