We can reflectively apply our intuition—we can use the phrase “Capital punishment is murder” to remind other people that capital punishment does share some of the same disadvantages that all other murders have
More generally, it is worth noting that a very tempting class of bad arguments is those which are slightly true, such as this.
A concern regarding this kind of test when applied to groups (Christians vs Atheists, for instance) rather than individuals is that one umbrella term may take more views than another, making the guessing game more/less tricky.
Nevertheless, this is a neat idea, particularly for particular people rather than groups as a whole.
Apple uses the WAITW when commenting on the Apple vs Samsung case:
“In a statement the firm [apple] thanked the jury for sending ‘a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right’ ”
If I wanted to do that, I would phrase things differently, to avoid the connotation issues (of, for example, Taxation is Theft!):
“We think burglary is bad, but tax is good, yet they have some similarities. Are we right to judge them differently?” or even “I think the things that make burglary bad are X Y and Z, but X is shared by taxation, and Y is partly shared by taxation. I conclude that taxation is not as bad as burglary, but still a bit bad”
All agents are considered equal,
If I contract a neurodegenerative illness, which will gradually reduce my cognitive function, until I end up in a vegetative state, do I retain agent-ness throughout, or at some point lose equal footing with healthy me in one go? Neither seems a good description of my slow slide from fully human to vegetable.
with their individual utility units converted to some social standard. For example, Agent Alpha receives 100 Alpha-Utils from the average day, where Agent Beta receives 200 Beta-Utils from the average day. Both of these are converted into Society-Utils—let’s say 10 Society-Utils—making an exchange rate of 10 Alpha:Society and 20 Beta:Society.
What is an “average day”? My average day probably has greater utility than that of a captive of a sadistic gang...
I suspect what you mean by desire utilitarianism is what wikipedia calls preference utilitarianism, which I believe is the standard term.
“Denying euthanasia is Torture!”
Given the majority of legislators are male, for abortion: “Forced pregnancy is mysogyny!” though that may be too tenuous.
The affective death spiral is isomorphic to this thread.
The map is the mind-killer
Seems Legit
There appears to be two “Welcome to Less wrong!” blog posts. I initially posted this in the other, older one:
I’m 20, male and a maths undergrad at Cambridge University. I was linked to LW a little over a year ago, and despite having initial misgivings for philosophy-type stuff on the internet (and off, for that matter), I hung around long enough to realise that LW was actually different from most of what I had read. In particular, I found a mix of ideas that I’ve always thought (and been alone amongst my peers in doing so), such as making beliefs pay rent; and new ones that were compelling, such as the conservation of expected evidence post.
I’ve always identified as a rationalist, and was fortunate enough to be raised to a sound understanding of what might be considered ‘traditional’ rationality. I’ve changed the way I think since starting to read LW, and have dropped some of the unhelpful attitudes that were promoted by status-warfare at a high achieving all-boys school (you must always be right, you must always have an answer, you must never back down…)
I’m here because the LW community seems to have lots of straight-thinking people with a vast cumulative knowledge. I want to be a part of and learn from that kind of community, for no better reason than I think I would enjoy life more for it.
Aren’t you using different measures of what ‘saving a life’ is, anyway? The starving-child-save gives you about 60 years of extra life, whereas the FAI save gives something rather more.
Have you adjusted for the likely event that you have become more rational, and what you have actually observed may have been LW becoming at a lower level relative to you, whilst staying relatively flat or even improving?
That people buy more, less healthy food when they are hungry is pretty well backed up, I understand. (Googling gives this right away)
Your suggestion has a possible “remembering just how good my favourite unhealthy food tastes” counter-effect.
My experience is that how food tastes changes massively depending on my hunger, so you need to bear in mind that “how good my favourite food tastes” will likely be “not very” when you’ve just eaten.
For example, I play sport for about 3 hours on Sundays, and immediately after (before leaving the pitches) I drink a litre of milk, mixed with milk powder (to make double strength milk), mixed with chocolate Ovaltine powder. It tastes great to me at that point in time. I tried it before a practise once, and it was just awful.
Mindkiller Alert!
The yield of a tax at 0% is 0. The yield of tax at 100% is also close to zero, as nobody will do anything to earn money that will be taxed at 100% (i.e. ensure all earnings dodge that tax). Therefore the set of policies that give maximum tax yield do not have a tax rate of 100%, and increasing tax rates beyond that reduce tax yield.
This analysis is subject to some caveats, and where the optimal rate is is a very complicated and politically charged question, of course, and this is already completely off topic.
I think the salient point here is whether we are talking about a theft close to the archetype, such as mugging or burglary, or one further from it, such as Robin Hood enacting his redistribution scheme, or the government taxing.
So when we have “X is the mindkiller”, that’s okay if “X” happens to be party politics, or factions disagreeing in a fricticious boardroom meeting. A fringe example of mind-killing might be a recurring disagreement between spouses over whether to buy skinned or unskinned milk (you can still have entrenched positions, but it doesn’t really reach the same level).
Not sure I’m being too clear. What I’m saying is that words refer to a cluster of things, with varying strength, and we use the WAITW when we talk about things on the fringe of that cluster as if they were in fact slap bang in the middle.
I don’t find it surprising it is that “conservative” comes to mean different things. It’s always struck me as an odd term: someone who hadn’t heard the term before would think a “conservative” party would just be a “status quo bias” party.
If you have two different countries, with different political histories, you would expect labels to mean different things. We currently view libertarians as closer to conservatives than to liberals, yet libertarians regularly seem closely aligned to 19th century writers such as Bastiat, who were described as Liberal. One could imagine an alternative history where the 19th Century Liberal tradition moved towards a typical conservative position (e.g. as a response to a Labour party).
(I can’t say whether this is what happened in Australia, because I don’t know the necessary history)
Alcor list a UK based agent on their website, which might be a better bet if Rudi doesn’t work out.
Certainly in the circles I’m from in the UK, less/fewer is very much used as a signal. I don’t think I could use the ‘wrong’ one without getting corrected if the audience is sufficiently large.
Question: In casual conversation, does the proportion of the time I am corrected increase with the number of people as if they each corrected as iid Bernoulli random variables? (i.e. if I get corrected 1⁄2 of the time with one other person, then it’s 3⁄4 of the time with 2, 7/8ths of the time with 3 etc.)
I suspect that I would be corrected more often than that model predicts in larger groups, because there are more people to signal status to.
I’m 20, male and a maths undergrad at Cambridge University. I was linked to LW a little over a year ago, and despite having initial misgivings for philosophy-type stuff on the internet (and off, for that matter), I hung around long enough to realise that LW was actually different from most of what I had read. In particular, I found a mix of ideas that I’ve always thought (and been alone amongst my peers in doing so), such as making beliefs pay rent; and new ones that were compelling, such as the conservation of expected evidence post.
I’ve always identified as a rationalist, and was fortunate enough to be raised to a sound understanding of what might be considered ‘traditional’ rationality. I’ve changed the way I think since starting to read LW, and have dropped some of the unhelpful attitudes that were promoted by status-warfare at a high achieving all-boys school (you must always be right, you must always have an answer, you must never back down…)
I’m here because the LW community seems to have lots of straight-thinking people with a vast cumulative knowledge. I want to be a part of and learn from that kind of community, for no better reason than I think I would enjoy life more for it.
“Property is theft”
Is an example of the left using the WAITW.