Having a thriving 10,000 person society seems much more appealing than a dysfunctional society of a million people
This implies that you have some method of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion.
Jiro
Karma: 5,004
I agree that calling Superman a “one man nanny state” would be inaccurate, and I would certainly not use any such term.
It’s inaccurate for how Superman typically behaves, but it’s accurate in that it matches your claims about him. You said:
The point I am making is that “might makes right, and right is this ideology that I have which involves various things that I claim are good” is still “might makes right”. Superman isn’t “in it for himself”, he’s in it for other people—which in fact is much worse.
The term for a government which harms people for their own good is a nanny state. Superman doing similar things all on his own using his great power makes him a one man nanny state.
The connotation is all that stuff I described. “Might makes right” implies that it is being done for personal gain, not for good, and that there aren’t limits to it beyond the use of more might.
And what term would you prefer for the phenomenon which I described?
You could call him a one man nanny state. But I would disagree that even this accurately describes Superman. Just like Superman doesn’t casually do bad things for personal gain, he doesn’t casually do them to benefit others. Stories where Superman runs the world as a dictatorship are explicitly meant as Superman being evil.
do you just dislike the use of the term “might makes right” here?
Your term carries with it an inaccurate connotation.
(And if you didn’t intend that connotation, it doesn’t make sense as a criticism of Superman or a reason to call him evil anyway.)
The point I am making is that “might makes right, and right is this ideology that I have which involves various things that I claim are good” is still “might makes right”. Superman isn’t “in it for himself”, he’s in it for other people—which in fact is much worse.
Central examples of might makes right have many prominent aspects that are absent from what Superman does, even if in some technical sense it’s “might makes right”. Being in it for other people is one of those, but I mentioned several others.
I’m sure that you know quite well that people with power are exceptionally skilled at finding justifications for how they use their power, even if what they’re actually doing is enriching and aggrandizing themselves and suppressing dissent.
But Superman isn’t, in typical Superman stories. Superman just doesn’t do the kind of things that would be done by someone who’s really in it for themselves but is trying to justify it as needed for the greater good. (Subject to the same caveats as you—I’m sure that over 80+ years of comics, someone’s written Superman that way a few times, but that’s unusual.)
You could argue that actual real world people would and that Superman is thus unrealistic, but in terms of “is Superman evil” and “is Superman just using ‘might makes right’”, the answer is no, even if real world people would act differently.
I’m also skeptical of even this much. Not all real people are the same, after all. I could lie like Cade Metz with no consequence other than some disdain, but I have not, in fact, done so.
When do we see Superman exhibit a careful consideration of what steps are reasonable to take to minimize property damage?
Probably most of the time. Few Superman stories show people complaining about the damage Superman causes, and I don’t think that’s because Superman would beat them up. Just because there isn’t a word balloon saying “I must minimize the damage!” doesn’t change this.
But then result of this is: “With great power comes great moral leeway”.
Which is just “might makes right”.
That doesn’t follow. The result of combining these two things is that with great power comes great moral leeway when doing specific things. He can violate the law by breaking into a home to catch a villain, but he can’t if he just sees someone’s big TV and wants to take it for himself. He doesn’t get moral leeway to do things just because he personally benefits from them, and “might makes right” is typically assumed to include that. Furthermore, he doesn’t get unlimited leeway bounded by people’s ability to stop him, like “might makes right” also assumes. If he has to destroy property to save lives, he can, but he still needs to take reasonable steps to minimize property damage.
(And he only gets moral leeway on a stricter standard than utilitarianism. He can’t steal that TV just because he gets more utility from it than its current owner. He can’t even steal it to sell it, donate the money to charity, and help 100 malaria victims.)
Computers get smarter. People don’t.
Because asymptotes exist, this doesn’t imply that computers pass humans.
Besides, transhumanist people could get smarter.
Since ordinary people don’t think insect suffering matters, if they pick a number that is high enough that it implies the opposite, it presumptively is too high. This doesn’t prove it’s too high, but if they are bad at picking numbers and they picked a number inconsistent with their other beliefs, we should presume that the number isn’t correct, not that the other belief is incorrect.
As I’ve pointed out before, people saying “insects suffer X% as much as humans” or even “there’s a Y% chance that insects are able to suffer” tells you more about the kind of numbers that people pick when picking small numbers, than it tells you about insect suffering. Most people are not good enough at picking appropriately small numbers and just pick something smaller than the numbers they usually see every day. Which isn’t small enough. If they actually picked appropriately sized numbers instead of saying “if there’s even a 1% chance”, you could do the calculations in this article and figure out that insect suffering should be ignored.
All conversation requires some common ground. If you actually don’t know what I meant, there’s not much I can do to help you.
(Also, notice that “ordinary sense of” is followed by an explanation? I don’t see why you’d need another explanation after that.)
The statements “gives” you information but that doesn’t “count” as you “getting” information.
It’s literally true that I got information, but I didn’t get information from it in the ordinary sense of “I parsed his words, and his words said something about X, so now I know the thing about X that is described by his words”.
There’s a difference between the information content of the statement, and the information that may be concluded from the statement in context. For instance, if I ask someone a question and he responds by snoring I may conclude that he is asleep. But I wouldn’t describe that (non-figuratively) as “he told me that he is asleep”. He didn’t tell me that; he told me nothing meaningful, even though I deduced things from it.
Just like I know that snoring people are often asleep, I know that people who complain about “chemicals” often like organic food. That doesn’t mean that either snores or statements about chemicals have any meaningful information.
Just the fact this person makes low-information statements about a particular subject gives me information about what he thinks. But I wouldn’t count that as getting information from those statements.
I don’t think “additive” is acceptable. It has the same problems. The point is that the original statement isn’t communicating anything. I pointed out that it is no better than other statements that don’t communicate anything.
In practice, the meta is that they are confused and don’t have a coherent idea of things they don’t want in their food, except for superficial elements like having long names or being something they heard mentioned on Youtube. You could start questoning them about the details of things they don’t like, but 1) you’ll just end up telling them that long names and Youtube are a bad reason to avoid something and 2) their original statement about chemicals didn’t communicate anything useful.
It isn’t wrong to ask them for details of what they don’t like, but they could have just as well started by saying “I don’t like bad food additives” and you could have said exactly the same thing. The OP is pretending that “I don’t like chemicals” says more than it actually does.
The title question is a proxy for the thing I mean:
I think Cade Metz fails to qualify for those things. I don’t think he is trustworthy, quotes accurately, or is truth seeking. And I certainly wouldn’t give him any quotes.
If they’re just using the word “chemical” as an arbitrary word for “bad substance”, you have the situation I already described: the word isn’t communicating anything useful.
But in practice, someone who claims that they don’t want chemicals in their food probably doesn’t just mean “harmful substances”. They probably mean that they have some criteria for what counts as a harmful substance, and that these criteria are based on traits of things that are commonly called chemicals. When you tell them “wait, water and salt are chemicals”, what you’re really doing is forcing them to state those criteria so you can contest them (and so they can become aware that that’s what they’re using).
So don’t use the definition if it’s useless.
It’s not just the definition that’s useless. The phrase itself becomes useless, because if the only way to know what they mean is by asking “do you mean X”, the original statement about not wanting chemicals in their food fails to communicate anything useful.
I’m pretty sure that would not disqualify most people.
Note that it’s not being upset that’s the problem, it’s being selectively upset.
Also, as a man, I can’t get social status by claiming I’ve cried myself to sleep anyway.
If asked to do evil, they should do evil. Because I don’t trust the judgment of bureaucrats to decide what is evil, and we’d be better off with them following what elected officials tell them to do and not deciding to become a shadow government that slow walks everything they don’t like. This is where you get the deep state from.
You yourself mentioned claiming that racism is a public health problem. But consider how “evil” goes with racism. Failure to do something about racism is evil—in fact to some people it’s one of the worst evils possible. Calling racism a public health problem is an example of bureaucrats seeing evil and deciding that they just have to fight the evil by any means necessary.