Hegemony shapes discourse in its image. I believe the issue is not which ideology ‘truly’ affirms some self evident notion of self interest, but which ideology can successfully assert its own notion of self interest as self evident.
161 karma · joined January 15, 2019
I am not from the US but I think the US is a great case study in the disconnect between technological progress and improved general conditions (in particular for but not exclusively relating to healthcare). I think cynicism is the correct response to this trend.
Your take seems to be that there is no complexity, no square to be circled in trying to apply vague principles like "do maximum good" to a discussion of how to tackle all of the worlds problems. To me that seems like a very unserious take.
To me what it means to properly engage with this question is to discuss what we mean by good, to discuss the notion of quantifiability, etc.. I think avoiding these discussions is just a game of whackamole - as best you try to stamp it out you never escape the thorny issue that so much complexity hides in our silly contradictory human language notions of things.
Our vague human language notions serve a purpose but to be uncritical of them or even deny their importance when they are doing the heavy lifting of your argument seems strange to me. Notions like 'do more good' are very vague loose suggestions and so their value is only realised if also applied in a loose human common sense manner. Utilitarianism is the opposite of this loose human common sense approach, it demands your loose notions removed of their blurry edges and inherent contradictions and if you succeed in this unnatural transfiguration you will unhappily discover later on that the contradictions just pop up in your new solution because when you force natural language into an unnatural rigid form like that you find that you are no longer saying that which you thought.
I would love to know what in particular about my perspective you find interesting / flawed. I have tried to make arguments that aren't too flowery but if you find my chains of logic unsatisfactory please let me know where, although don't expect to find any very very clean lines of formal reasoning because I am writing in a conversational style.
I’m just saying that it’s still okay to condemn (just as an act of casting judgement) rule following when it’s anti social and the question of what sort of society we would like to live in is the more prescient point to bare in mind.
I put legally in quotes because I think legality is an unsound basis for reasoning about whether something is normatively okay or not okay.
Nevertheless, the super rich ‘legally’ avoiding the proportional contribution to society nominally expected of them _because they can_ is still anti-social behaviour and however the laws came to be is irrelevant in my opinion. Democracy is so flawed especially at the individual policy level I consider the argument that ‘the populace voted for this’ conservative in the worst most nebulous way, defending the status quo for no reason other than it is the status quo.
Of course policies that protect the super rich are beyond the normal reach of democracy because lobbying and donations are so prevalent.
Do we approve of this behaviour in a normative sense? That seems like a more important thing to keep in mind than if individual’s playing of the game is technically above board. Or how the rules came about. To me the details of the case amount to details of a symptom and what is of more interest is the underlying condition which is revealed.
FWIW I don’t know the details of the case I’m just trying to nudge the discourse in a direction I find more interesting.
This is a kantian imperative type concern. The question is: at the very highest level, should we use this principle /to restructure our society/. At the scale of influence of these schools of thought have the impact is unintuitive because it challenges the makeup of the normative fabric that society tacitly exists within. The more you apply the principle the less familiar notion of charity even becomes. The new thing that emerges is a purer and purer reflection of the ideological core of utilitarianism. As this slow move begins it seems wise to ask ‘do we want to move towards a society structured according to this principle?’.
The fact that the logic holds in a simple ‘charity is a fixed structure, I am already committed to giving X amount away, I am torn between two choices, equivocation and metric comparison is possible between these two similar options, an independent organisation has scored the effectiveness of these charities, which should I choose?’ Kind of does not relate to the complexity of the problem if you take the logic to the level of society wide acceptance as guiding principle.
I’m not saying EA really has the power to guide our /entire/ society but it is so enormously well funded that it is certainly a conversation worth having. It was the point of this podcast to discuss those more complex implications of utilitarianism in general which you have not considered noteworthy.
Sense 1) “‘Actual’ mathematics does not consist in notational embodiments”
‘Actual’ as in essence rather than appearance, territory rather than map. Implies platonic reality of an eternal ephemeral mathematics. Conceived of as beyond and beneath all the particulars of any given representation.
Sense 2) “‘Actual’ mathematics consists in notational embodiments”
‘Actual’ as in embodied. Material. That ‘actual’ mathematics is the set of mathematics which has been ‘actually’ done.
You describe the second sense as self evident but with mathematics in particular this is bound to cause trouble. The sense ‘actual as in essence’ is perfectly reasonable and has a particular affinity to a discussion of mathematics.
I find it hard to even write the description of the second sense without tying some linguistic knot. If ‘actual’ mathematics is its embodiments, what is the thing being embodied? Either the notation embodies nothing (what does it mean to describe the characteristics of a thing which doesn’t exist?) or if it does refer to something then according to the designation of embodied mathematics as ‘material’ then it embodies something which exists immaterially. So either mathematics describes the characteristics of a non existing thing, or a thing which exists, but exists immaterially. If ‘actual’ mathematics is the materially existing embodied form of a separate immaterial thing, what is that thing? So that ‘Actual mathematics’ is the embodiment of a separate immaterial thing called ‘not actual mathematics’. I’m not trying to make a watertight argument here just trying to outline the course of thought that your assertions inflame.
From another angle, what does it mean for something to ‘materially exist’ so that it can be considered ‘actual’. I think this concept so nebulous as to make impossible the patching up of all the holes a cursory investigation reveals.
Personally I think the distinction between the two is the root of trouble here. In the sense that anything exists, it exists according to mathematics. The essence of material existence, to the extent that it can be specified, is a structure of formal relational principles. Such formal structures are the domain of mathematics.
Of course ‘material existence’ is used and understood perfectly well in ordinary circumstances but when the topic at hand is “what counts as ‘actual’ mathematics?” it seems shaky ground to build a house.
The prescribed meaning of 'smart' is often so narrow as to be quite dumb
I think it was termed more like “it is a bullshit job if the world would run just as well (or even better) if the job didn’t exist”.
Still relies on self-assessment but isn’t quite what you said. More based on some idea of “usefulness”. Play to earn doesn’t seem very useful.
It may still be confusing though that’s another point
The actual form of the piece nicely serves to illustrate (one of) the thesis it puts forward: that more complex, fully articulated works can grow out of a body of more atomic, partial, linked notes.
I found particularly interesting these assertions: - knowledge work practices are often ad-hoc (often unknowingly) - note writing is a core skill of knowledge work - note writing skill often plateaus because improvement is not ‘salient’
It seems to be a popular opinion on this site that ‘everyone should have a personal website’.. but I think the options available don’t make it a likely outlet for a lot of people because there is too much friction required for too little expressiveness. Even for technical people.
This project seems like fun, and that’s a great starting point.
I noticed when clicking around that it is set up so that ‘posts’ are always embedded within the multiverse site styling. This makes it have less of a ‘personal space on the internet’ feeling, but it does keep the experience more consistent, compared to if posts filled the whole page.
Was this a deliberate choice to encourage more ‘post-based’ creation and less ‘personal-site’ type creation? I am partial to the ‘personal-site’ approach but ‘post-based’ suggests other interesting options, like being able to ‘reply’ to one page with another page, and generally being a little more social
Perhaps this is not what the GP meant though, I’m curious about however it applies. No idea about where linear algebra could fit in, I have yet to see those parallels myself yet but interesting to think how it could relate
Perhaps ‘Outcomes for children of parents who went to marriage counselling’
Even then, couples that get counselling are probably a healthier subset of all marriages than would make for an ideal reference.
A divorce can be new start, and life has much more to offer than ‘choosing your mate’
Some relationships absolutely cause less destruction by ending. Some provide sufficiently despite great flaws.
That’s one in twenty.