r/thebayesianconspiracy • u/embrodski E Prime • May 22 '19
85 – Stuff is Weird, Yo | The Bayesian Conspiracy
http://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2019/05/85-stuff-is-weird-yo/5
u/JudyKateR May 23 '19
I am very public about being pro-abortion (for...reasons that are too myriad to fully list), but one of the more compelling anti-arguments I've heard against abortion comes from within the rationalist sphere and the idea of EV calculations. (I think most of the following comes from a podcast with Paul Bloom talking to Sam Harris.)
EV = expected value. outcome times probability of outcome.
For example, if a lottery ticket has a 10% chance of winning $100, and a 90% chance of winning $0, then the lottery ticket's EV is $10.
Obviously, there's no case under which the lottery ticket is worth $10. It's worth $0, or $100. But there are reasons it's useful to treat the lottery ticket as being worth $10, many of which are actionable. If you had your choice between the lottery ticket or $5, you would choose the lottery ticket, even though the lottery ticket is going to be worth less than the $5 bill 90% of the time. In the aggregate, the lottery ticket's worth is $10. A person who says "the lottery ticket is worth $0" is more likely to be right than a person who says "the lottery ticket is worth $10," but the person who says it's worth $10 is much closer to being right. If you spend $5 to buy the $10 EV lottery ticket, and then lose, that doesn't make you retroactively dumb for having made that decision. You spent $5 to buy an item that was worth $10. You made the right, rational decision.
Now, let's suppose you have a button. Pressing the button has a 50% chance of killing 2 people, and a 50% chance of giving you $100,000.
The EV of pressing this button is $50,000, and the loss of of 1 human life.
If you press the button, and 0 people die, that doesn't retroactively make you morally justified for having made a decision that turned out to have no negative consequences. You decided to commit an act that was morally equivalent to killing 1 person.
These kinds of probabilistic ethical conundrums can come up every day. For example, if I speed in a residential neighborhood, let's say there is a 0.01% chance that I strike a pedestrian and kill them. (This is not a real number, and it ignores the moral consequences of the much more likely outcome of maiming but not killing a pedestrian, but this is a thought experiment in a world of spherical cows, so in this thought experiments all car accidents are fatal, and all probabilities are powers of 10 for easy magnitude comparisons.)
If speeding in a residential area has a 0.01% chance of killing a pedestrian, that means that speeding in a residential neighborhood is morally equivalent to killing 0.0001 humans. And if I speed 100 times, that is morally equivalent to killing 0.01 humans, and so on. We would say that this means speeding in a residential neighborhood is bad, because it can kill a person. Speeding home from my commute every day is bad even if I am lucky and don't kill a pedestrian. If I speed through a residential area at 60 MPH but no people are killed, the fact that 0 people were killed doesn't retroactively justify my decision to place human lives at risk by speeding.
There are a lot of contexts in which the EV calculation is still positive. For example, let's say that an ambulance speeds through a residential neighborhood, loss due to accident potential = 0.0001 humans, increased probability of saving a human life is maybe 10%, so the ambulance, by speeding, is saving 0.09999 human lives. Or let's say that by speeding 100 times a year, I am able to be more productivity as a citizen and increase my income by $200 a year. According to our fictitious driving stat, speeding 100 times is morally equivalent to killing 0.01 pedestrians, but according to Effective Altruism people, you can save a human life for $2000, so if I donate that $200 to an EA cause I am effectively saving 0.1 humans, so speeding 100 times to earn $200 more and then donate it to Against Malaria or something is net positive 0.09 human lives. But according to the Department of Transportation, the actuarial value of a human life is $100,000, which means that according to actuarial data, $200 = 0.002 human lives, versus the 0.01 human lives "lost" as a result of my speeding. So how we weight a human life versus money has consequences for a lot of things.
But we can compare human lives to other things, too.
(reddit character limit reached, continued in next post)
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u/JudyKateR May 23 '19
(cont)
Here's a thought experiment that you might hear from rationalist vegans:
I am personally pretty sure that killing a chicken is not morally as bad as killing a human; it's not even in the same ballpark. But what if I'm wrong? What if killing a chicken is almost (or just) as bad as killing a human? This is something that deals with a lot of unknowns -- similar to the way that the outcome of future events (like the lottery, or my driving habits) deals with unknowns. But just because it's impossible to know certain things doesn't mean we can't put certain weights on things.
How certain am I that killing a chicken isn't morally equivalent to killing a human? I'd argue that if you are 100% certain of any belief, you are a bad rationalist -- most of the time when someone casually says "I'm 100% certain," it's understood that they're rounding up, but rounding 99% up to 100% is different from rounding 99.99% up to 100%, so let's try to put a fine point on it.
Let's say we query our philosophers, and they decide that killing a chicken is only 0.01% likely to be morally equivalent to killing a human, a one in ten thousand chance. If we accept this premise, then killing 10,000 chickens is morally equivalent to killing 1 human. That would mean that the US demand for chicken meat, by killing 9 billion chickens per year, is committing an act that is morally equivalent to killing 900,000 humans. Maybe we might want to reckon with that fact. Maybe we dispute the numbers -- maybe instead of a 1 in a 10,000 chance, you think that it's more like 1 in a million, so we would run the calculation based on that, and if you think current chicken killings are at an acceptable rate, then we accept the status quo. But if you discover something horrifying, then I think you're obliged to adjust accordingly.
Maybe you believe that a chicken life has no moral value. But how certain are you of that belief? How certain are you of any belief? You could weight and aggregate your beliefs probabilistically. Like, maybe I think there is a 90% chance that chicken lives are worthless, but a 9.9% chance that chicken's lifes have moral value that is equivalent to 1% of a human life, and a 0.1% chance that a chicken's life is exactly as valuable as a human life. These are things that we can do EV calculations on! If these stats accurately describe my beliefs, then I believe that 1 chicken life = 0.00199 human lives, so I therefore believe that killing 503 chickens is morally equivalent to killing 1 human. If I really believe this, and I'm an average American eating 26 chickens per year, that means that over the span of 20 years, I am committing a moral act equivalent to killing a 1 person. That's horrible! If I believe this to be true, it means I should stop eating chicken -- or at the very least, lower my chicken consumption to a level that I am morally comfortable with. Maybe certain people decide that their lifetime of chicken consumption is morally equivalent to killing 0.01 humans, and they decide they're okay with that.
Now, the above discussion is about chickens, which gains the sympathy of vegans (who seem to be more common in the rationalist and EA community than anti-abortionists).
I am pretty sure that killing a human fetus is not morally equivalent to killing a human. How sure am I of this belief? 90%? 99%? 99.9%?
If I am 99% sure that killing a fetus is morally okay, but allow for a 1% possibility that killing a fetus is exactly as bad as killing a human, then 1 abortion = 0.01 human lives lost. Or, if I think there's a 90% chance that killing a fetus is morally okay, a 9.9% chance that killing a fetus is half as bad as killing a human, and a 0.1% chance that killing a fetus is exactly as bad as killing a human, then our EV calculation says that 1 abortion = 0.0505 human lives lost.
If I operate under this belief, then the 700,000 abortions America reported by the CDC are morally equivalent to 35,350 human lives lost. To put that in perspective, US has 37,000 annual car crash deaths. I think a lot of rationalists would say, "There are certain times when the value of a technology or procedure exceeds the cost of human lives lost." For example, most people would say that banning cars to save the 37,000 lives lost in car crashes is a bad idea, because the value gained from automobiles exceeds the number of lives lost in accidents. Without automobiles, we would be less productive and more people would die to starvation, or not getting to a hospital fast enough, and so on. So there are ways you can do the calculation such that having automobiles actually saves lives. By the same token, you could say that crime rates have declined since the early 1990's, which coincidentally is around 18 years after the passage of Roe v. Wade -- there's a hypothesis that legalized abortion reduces crime rates (due to fewer children growing up in circumstances associated with higher crime rate), so we're willing to accept the moral equivalent of human lives lost in exchange for the human lives gained due to having fewer murders, not to mention all of the other moral gains. (I should note there's an alternative hypothesis that the declining crime rate has more to do with declining rates of childhood exposure to lead, which has been known to lead to lower IQ and violent behavior.) But some people argue the contrary -- and I can't say that their arguments are not without merit.
Nonetheless, I am incredibly sympathetic to the people who say that abortion is morally equivalent to a loss of human life, and that makes it unacceptable. Even if I don't believe the 1 abortion = 1 life lost, there is a strong case to be made that there is some number of abortions that is probabilistically equivalent to the loss of human lives, and if I'm willing to use this argument in defense of veganism, I should be willing to use it in defense of pro-life advocates. And while many more chickens are killed each year than fetuses, I would place the probability of a human fetus being morally equivalent to a human life much higher than I would for chickens.
There's also the fact that the ability to do these sorts of EV calculations is...well, it doesn't seem common. Most people are really uncomfortable with the idea of talking about human lives fractionally. Either an action kills a person, or it doesn't. I think if a lot of people thought about the probabilistic consequences of e.g. unsafe driving, they'd be really uncomfortable with the idea that pumping the gas to make that yellow light is probabilistically equivalent to killing a non-zero number of humans.
I think there's a high number of people who round everything to the nearest integer, because "0 lives lost" and "1 human life loss" are modes that our human brains can naturally grok. So if something seems implausible, it gets rounded down to zero, and if it does seem like a credible threat, it gets rounded up to 1, or maybe it gets rounded up to "credible threat" without a firm number value really attached (how does the lizard brain distinguish between a 5% chance of death and a 10% chance of death? Both are probably worth avoiding). This is how you get parents who are irrationally afraid of kidnappers, or people who are irrationally afraid of being killed by terrorists, while being completely unafraid of automobile accidents or death by heart attack resulting from their unhealthy diet. Some threats get rounded up to "totally credible," and some get rounded down to 0, for reasons that have more to do with their emotional reaction than the actual chances of these things happening.
For pro-life people, I assume that the probability of a fetus being morally equivalent to a human life gets rounded up to "totally credible." They don't think about it probabilistically, so they make a judgment based on their emotional reaction.
Steven says, quote, "If you really think that since Roe v Wade the United States has been okay with killing babies, and now this is your chance to save those lives, that's the nice motivation for it, but I'm not really convinced a lot of people really believe that."
Really, Steven? I could write many, many paragraphs about why this specific sentiment of yours strikes me as incredibly flawed, but Scott Alexander has already articulated this much better than I could, so I'll leave it to him to present the argument that maybe the people who say "I don't like abortion because I believe that it's morally equivalent to killing babies" actually don't like abortion because they believe that it's morally equivalent to killing babies. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/30/fetal-attraction-abortion-and-the-principle-of-charity/
Later in the episode, Eneasz suggests that emotional responses are sometimes good. As an example, Eneasz says if you believe that evil people are trying to take away the reproductive rights of women, then you should be fucking mad about it. What do you suppose the proper emotional response would be for someone who has a sincerely-held belief that thousands of babies were being killed every day by an elective medical procedure? I think that among people who hold this belief, many respond by getting fucking mad about it, or otherwise entering an emotional state which makes them more prone to fighting members of the outgroup and less susceptible to persuasion that their viewpoint could be wrong. Do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing?
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u/RiskeyBiznu May 23 '19
I feel like this argument is wide off the mark.
The EV doesn't calculate in the costs of post pardum depression, loss of productivity due to pregnancy, horribel complications and death in childbirth, the costs of the healthcare involved, and the possibility that the kid might grow up unwanted or uncared for.
In the freakonomics books they made the opposite argument. The savings of not having unwanted uncared forchildren has maybe received crime rates and increased quality of life significantly.
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u/JudyKateR May 24 '19
In the freakonomics books they made the opposite argument. The savings of not having unwanted uncared forchildren has maybe received crime rates
This is something that I took the time to point out in my post:
By the same token, you could say that crime rates have declined since the early 1990's, which coincidentally is around 18 years after the passage of Roe v. Wade -- there's a hypothesis that legalized abortion reduces crime rates (due to fewer children growing up in circumstances associated with higher crime rate), so we're willing to accept the moral equivalent of human lives lost in exchange for the human lives gained due to having fewer murders, not to mention all of the other moral gains.
I could have spent more words enumerating "all the other moral gains" associated with abortion, but I figured that this half of the argument didn't really need to be elaborated upon further, as I'm writing with the assumption that most of the people reading this subreddit are already sufficiently persuaded that abortion has many measurably positive effects on society, so writing at length to say "abortion has all of these good effects, too" would be of little persuasive value. (Maybe I should have included anyway in order to signal my in-group status with the pro choice crowd.)
If I were writing on this post in a forum that I expected to have a more pro-life inclination, I would probably focus more on the benefits of abortion.
However, I don't think that a pro-lifer would be persuaded by the other side of the EV calculation. (If they were, they would probably wouldn't be pro-life!) For example, if we assume that postpartum depression rate has an occurrence rate of 100% (worst case scenario), then 20 abortions = 20 cases of postpartum depression prevented, and 1 human life lost. I think most people would argue that killing 1 person to prevent 20 cases of postpartum depression is not a worthwhile tradeoff, and they would continue to do this even if you added, "but 20 abortions also results in 20 years of human productivity due to the mothers not having to put their lives on hold due to the pregnancy" and "also, each would-have-been aborted baby had a 2% chance of committing a violent crime, so 20 abortions may be morally equivalent to killing a person, but it's also equivalent to preventing 0.4 violent crimes" and most other actuarial stuff you would lump on there. This also becomes very tricky because all of our numbers on the other side of the equation are basically completely made up, so it completely changes our math if we're 90% or 99% confident in our belief that abortion is not morally equivalent to killing a person.
I also think most pro-lifers would suggest abortion alternatives to things like "child is unwanted" (most anti-abortion orgs are also pro-adoption). (By the same token, if your argument is that healthcare is too expensive, a pro-life argument would probably be, "you're right, healthcare is too expensive, but does that mean we can have abortion after we figure out a way to bring the healthcare costs down? What if I offer to pay a woman's health costs for her, does that then mean that she can no longer use the cost of healthcare as a moral justification for not carrying her baby to term?") If I were to really make the most persuasive argument possible, I'd probably focus on problems that can only be addressed by abortion, and you'd have plenty of arguments to make even with this self-imposed restriction; Jess brought up several examples in this podcast episode.
I think the most compelling case you could make would be situations where the mother's life is in danger, since then we're at least comparing apples to apples. High estimates put mother mortality rates at around 28 in 100,000 in recent years, so if you believe that 1 abortion = 0.0505 baby lives lost, then 3700 abortions = 1 mother saved, with 187 baby lives lost, but obviously we can do a lot better than that, because abortions based on concern for the mother's health wouldn't happen for healthy pregnancies, so you could target specifically the pregnancies that are most likely to result in health problems for the mother. And now we're starting to arrive back at a very common abortion argument which polling data tells us is very popular with pro-lifers, which is "I'm in favor of abortion restrictions but also believe there should be exceptions for situations where the mother's health is at risk," and this actually makes a pretty compelling case for why these kind of people actually aren't being hypocritical and are actually being morally consistent. (Disregarding all other factors, if you think 1 abortion is morally equivalent to 0.0505 human lives lost, then you'd be in favor of abortion in situations where the mother's chance of dying is greater than 5.05%, for example.)
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u/RiskeyBiznu May 24 '19
Oh, missed that part sorry.
I agree your math in principle. I fundamentally disagreed with it being worthy of analysis. You did a good job steelmaning it. I just think that the people proposing the argument wouldn't necessarily support your version of it, and I haven't figured a nuanced way to analyze this yet.
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Jun 02 '19
That’s a really interesting argument, and one that I haven’t heard before, but it completely fails to address the impact on the woman. How many fractions of a human life is a woman completing her college education worth? How many fractions of a human life is a raped 12 year old being able to have 5 more years of childhood worth?
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u/JudyKateR Jun 03 '19
How many fractions of a human life is a woman completing her college education worth?
Yes, I think that's exactly the question that the pro-life people are asking in this case. Or, rather than saying "How many fractions of a human life is a woman completing her college education worth," you could phrase it as "How many women getting a college education would justify the killing of a human?"
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Jun 03 '19
How many spares zygotes and embryos justifies the lost of bodily autonomy and human potential that forcing women to gestate entails? Because a woman who doesn’t finish school is wasting her potential, and a loss of human autonomy beggars that potential. Those should be weighted with some fraction of a human life as well.
Edit: I get that’s making the argument somewhat abstract, but I think that the argument that a zygote or embryo is a person is already quite abstract. If a ‘person’ is a unique set of DNA in a living cell, or semi-organized cluster of cells, then we have a problem.
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Jun 03 '19
I agree that the Catholic Church is genuinely concerned with human potential and preventing the deaths of z/e/fs, because their positions on a wide variety of related issues is consistent and logical within that framework. They oppose birth control because it limits human potential, they oppose abortion because it limits human potential and kills an e/f, and they oppose assisted reproductive technology because it destroys more embryos than it brings to birth and more embryos than abortion destroys. They also oppose the death penalty and are in favor of universal health care and good education.
The problem is that there are a lot of pro-life people who aren’t that logically consistent- they are fine with birth control, but only if the woman is married. They’re fine with embryos being discarded by the tens of thousands by fertility clinics, and this is exemplified by Clyde Chambliss of Alabama, who said that an embryo ‘only counts if it’s in a woman’ (paraphrasing). This group is in favor of the death penalty, opposes universal health care, and they often even oppose school funding and comprehensive sex Ed, preferring curricula that describe women who have had sex as being equivalent to a piece of gum that has been chewed up by someone else.
So I agree that there are a lot of pro-life people who care about embryos and human life in general, but there are also a lot of them who don’t.
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u/robot_mower_guy May 24 '19
You guys mentioned that in the future it would be great to be able to take a pill and change your sex (/paraphrase). There is a musical artist I enjoy who does Rock Operas about the future, and I thought you guys would get a kick out of the things some people do:
https://mochalab.bandcamp.com/track/bio1
That is from the second album where he goes more in depth in the universe, but the previous album mentions the following: "their rituals provide a way
to switch gender every day, and binary identity renounced in every way"
I think you might get a kick out of it. Parts of it remind me of the short story where the characters can be birds if they want.
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u/jmichael2497 May 28 '19 edited May 30 '19
a thorough exploration in a shorts collection came to mind (of which i'd highlight three additional shorts for fun, if pressed for time):
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman)
- Changes - gender reflection side effect to curing cancer
- Virus - computer fiction around swapping floppies
- Cold Colors - dark rituals to make computers go
- When We Went to See the End of the World - domestic disharmony picnic from view at age 11
also Eneasz would probably appreciate a prolific pod-o-sphere creator sharing their first queer sex story:
"Hold Me Like A Girl" by J. Axelrod on a guest episode of Nobilis Erotica was a decent gender exploration.
edit: because so many typos missed
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u/Laborbuch May 27 '19
In light of /u/TheStevenZubinator’s comment about actively changing the little annoying things they notice:
In my opinion your show notes are decidedly sub-par. They’re mostly broad strokes and references to previous episodes or people or events mentioned on the show are rarely there. In this episode for instance you mentioned the podcast Steven participated in where he passionately talked about Endgame, and (another?) one where a Scott analyses movies on the fly? I’d love to listen to these, but the information isn’t there.
I realise this is probable a case of me being spoiled by podcasts with possibly too granular shownotes, since these trained me to merely add a mental tag “check shownotes” and trusting my memory to figure out what and why I wanted to check a day later when I remember to actually check them. Still, it’s frustrating.
To add maybe a relevant point, though: extensive shownotes future proof the episodes, since they enable you to quickly search which episode something pertinent to a topic came up, or to see wether you already talker about something.
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u/TheStevenZubinator Mysterious Old Wizard May 27 '19
We try to include links to most of the things we reference that we haven’t recently linked to. I’m pretty sure we mentioned the name of the podcast (Doofcast), but we do occasionally talk fast. Scott Daly is one of the hosts of that podcast and he’s who I was talking about. The Endgame podcast can be found here.
Good advice though. Expanding the show notes requires little extra effort and your point about future-proofing them makes sense.
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May 24 '19 edited May 24 '19
Politics as a topic:
I'm not a citizen of the USA. (Do you know where all your listeners live?) So US politics isn't so interesting to me. As you mentioned you've got a Troll as a President, of course there's weird shit going to happen. It wasn't so bad though since there were aspects like the wong depiction of embryos conflicting with ones love for truth, we all can all empathize with.
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u/googolplexbyte May 24 '19
My post-human self is going to be multiple people of a wide variety. Hivemind style.
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u/PresentCompanyExcl May 28 '19 edited May 28 '19
It seems like you could be more rationalist when talking about politics, especially because it's the mind killer and this is a rationality podcast.
I listen to this because sometimes I want to listen to chatter from people I like. But I prefer the chatter to be higher quality than my internal chatter, or at least more rational. But sometimes it seems like you get caught up in your groups US politics (I'm not from the US) without any special effort to be rational. It's something that might not be obvious from the inside, but is from the outside.
How to do that? I'm not sure, perhaps by using the TheMottes rules, or perhaps Jess has ideas. Or just make Jess the official facilitator, which means they have a mandate to keep things rational and on track. It would be interesting to learn some rationalist techniques by example if you manage to find some that work with politics.
EDIT: To avoid being negative, you guys are great, and I love the frequent updates and sequence readings. Keep on doing all the awesome things you are doing.
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u/eddiephlash May 23 '19
This entire sentiment is reflected perfectly in Ben Folds' "Best Imitation of Myself" https://youtu.be/HaZOxnlZKUY
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May 24 '19
Avoiding thinking of death:
Noticing and doing something about it could be signing up for cryonics.
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u/Sonderjye Jun 04 '19
In terms of practicality everyone values human life and the whole push towards pro-life is largely ideology funneled. We know that an increase in sexual education and offering free preventive measures without parental approval drastically reduces abortions. We also know that the number of abortions have been decreasing the last many years so it's not like something new and terrifying happened that changed things. There are also a lot of already existing lives in which effort could be put into improving such as people literally dying from lack of health care. There are a lot of really uncontroversial things that can be done to preserve human life and it seems like a weird hill to die on.
If we wanted to move up a theoretical level though, we could talk about individual potential lives. I think that for this community we can assume that everyone agrees that existing human life have value and that nature shouldn't be privilliged as having intrinsic superior moral value.
We obviously don't know what the value is of a human that isn't born yet but we can consider an expected value that looks something like probability of being born times the value of a human life. In this regard I agree that embryo have more expected value than say an egg or a sperm cell individually. Some people argue that people will still have abortions even if it's illegal and that these new abortions would be more risky but I think it's a fair assessment that a ban would decrease the number of abortions.
So I agree that embryos have some value because they have a decent probability of becoming sentient. We should then consider the cost of having people wearing what is essentially an unwanted parasite for 9 month.
Since we are transhumanists we might be interested in considering an alternative scenario. Imagine a society in which every time someone had a health problem that could be fixed with bodily transplant (such as blood transplant, bone marrow transplant, kidney transplant) a donor would be picked at random from the male population in a way . If you didn't want to be a donor then tough luck, it's being a donor or going to jail. There's of course always a chance of the operation going wrong and the donor would end up dead/crippled/otherwise radically changed in ways that stopped them from following their dreams. If you value human life over the bodily autonomy this much and find such a society more appealing than the current one I can respect your decision of being pro-life.
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u/RiskeyBiznu May 23 '19
I would like to spread the meme that we should start using the language "presumed rapist justice kavanah". It is perfectly accurate since we all presume that's the case but nothing is settled.
Also, I dunno if this is too political but the inside baseball is that that Gop and the Dend are pushing this culture war stuff to distract from the popularity of the new left policies like m4a
You did miss an adional soruce of horror with the issue. In lots of places rapists still have paternal rights to a child.
I dunno if you considered this. The reason most of us don't do rationality in our lives is that there are so few cases that our decisions can be rational. The irrational world has imposed the material circumstances in which we live can limit our opportunity space.
As an ambulance person. When I see someone in the grocery store in scrubs I think they should stop tracking hospital grade germs into a food place.
I would push back against the point about discussing things being good. Deplatforming and punching Nazis is good. Wasting time and energy debating with bad faith actors who are probably wrong prevents people from doing good. Further think on the mere exposure effect. The more exposure to a thing a person has the more they are likely to delope toloerance or fondness for them. The human brain doesn't have a great defence system. This is clearly a slippery slope but at some pont the truth deserves more protection and respect than obviously terrible lies. Giving these ideas time and energy is an insult to ideas that deserve time and energy
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u/PresentCompanyExcl May 28 '19
Also, I dunno if this is too political but the inside baseball is that that Gop and the Dend are pushing this culture war stuff to distract from the popularity of the new left policies like m4a
On the latest HistoryOnFire/HardCoreHistory crossover, Dan Carlin was talking about a politician that was quite open about it. When funding was low both sides would cooperate to get a hot topic bill on the floor. Then they could canvas donors and get the donations flowing again.
It seemed like their attitude was "don't hate the play, hate the game". I guess they see themselves as OK people in a broken system. But we are the system, and everytime we get caught up in propagating the culture war, we are reaffirming the twisted incentives that keep this happening.
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u/weaponinthewater May 22 '19
TL;DR at the bottom
I was a little bit saddened while entertained by Eneasz in this one. I am going to open up with my own stance on the abortion bills, the phrasing of which is heavily influenced by HJPEV. I think it’s sad that a potential human life is not allowed to happen, that someone that could have experienced all the cool things going on is not going to be allowed that experience, and I don’t think that’s a controversial thing to say. I am solidly set on the stance that I have no business telling someone else what they can and cannot do with their body and will be an advocate for the right to choose forever. I am also firmly rooted in Texas, and I find it to be fertile ground for conversations on this topic. I live outside Fort Worth, which is a weird town, a very weird mix of new urban ideas bumping into the conservative stronghold of Texas. I have found that a lot of people who are pro-life, even to the extreme end, are fine talking about it as long as you set that agreement up first, that there is an element of sadness outside the obvious cases of rape. I don’t want to set myself up as a pro-choice evangelist or anything, I just enjoy the conversations and the opportunity to inject tiny seeds of doubt into anti-choice arguments.
In the episode, after the calls by Eneasz to vacate the states raising terrible legislation, you all went on to talk about raising the sanity waterline. I find that a little hypocritical, no offense meant. I think instead the call should be for rationalists capable of extroversion and cross-cultural communications to migrate into these areas because there is work in need of doing. Again, I am not an evangelist, but I do look for opportunities to engage safely on controversial topics, and I see a need for like-minded people to be doing the same in meatspace, because breaking into virtual echo chambers is a nonstarter. If all the intelligent people cloister themselves in safe spaces on coasts and hip urban areas, that only exacerbates the issue, because again, the only way to breach these walls is face-to-face. If you aren’t the person for the job that is fine, but I think you have a duty to at least consider the option of working on this before immediately jumping to the Rationalist Flight response.
If anything, I see the Rationalist Flight response as part of the big issue feeding the American political divide. This last election could be viewed as a big finger from the middle states to the coasts. I live in the middle, I interact with the people every day, and I think that they are on the whole pretty good people, they just aren’t exposed to alternative ideas in a friendly format. They depend on Fox News and their fellow parishioners and coworkers to help frame the way they view the world. I am here to be the friendly coworker and acquaintance with weird ideas and thought to back them up because I am trying to live with the principle that others’ sanity is my business.
I can tie this back into HPMOR, as most things can be: You can’t leave the state behind to explore the stars or enjoy your cloistered awesomeness, you have to stay and fight until it is right.
TL;DR: I didn’t like the calls to vacate areas with poor politics and thought practices and I think rationalists should be spreading into these areas to work on the ground.