Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a midwesterner that has ran in -30(F/C doesn't matter at that point), tourist. >.<
What do you set your thermostat to?
In winter, 60 generally.
E Pur Si Muove
421–430 of 853 posts
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how they justify it, but empirically it doesn't seem to be the case. E.g. liberals are pretty tolerant of minority groups with more extreme opinions than average conservatives. E.g. muslims are pretty strongly against homosexuals among other things. But they don't receive anywhere near the same level of hate and vitriol even moderate conservatives will get. I think it's just based on how much of a threat a gro…
Where do you draw the "control a woman's body" line. Let's say a woman choose to abort on partial birth a healthy baby because she do not want it. Is a healthy 9 months gestation newborn part of the woman's body? You're spinning the argument and calling the other side "intolerant". You're part of the problem Altman is mentioning. Sad thing is that probably you are not aware of that.
Obviously, as you get closer to the edges of situations, you are going to run into differences of opinions. There is nuance, and I don't think you should dismiss people who disagree about the details of that nuance.
However, no one is arguing for a woman to be able to abort a fully healthy baby at 9 months. That isn't an operation that happens, so it is a complete straw man to try to argue it.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#423Isn't this just asking for your ideas to not be criticized? Me: let's extend life Someone else: If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical Isn't this exactly how it's supposed to work? Why would Sam complain about an encounter like this?
No, he's asking for ideas to be criticised, and for the people presenting the ideas not to be ostracised. You can say "it's a bad idea to work on extending life", but following on from there to cast the person presenting the idea as unethical is doing more harm than good.
I agree that speech should be totally free, but, really, are we supposed to treat overtly racist ideas the same way we treat any relatively non harmful but perhaps mistaken theory?
If person A is a white supremacist, and person B thinks ether exists, am I supposed to treat them equally because otherwise I would be "ostracizing" person A?
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, another way of putting it is "Liberals are tolerant of anything except intolerance" If I want to be a tolerant and accepting person, do I have to accept someone who wants to deny a group of people to marry the person they love? Do I have to tolerate someone who wants to control a woman's body? This is similar to a love of freedom; I want everyone to have freedom, but that means having to restrict the freedom to…
That's how they justify it, but empirically it doesn't seem to be the case. E.g. liberals are pretty tolerant of minority groups with more extreme opinions than average conservatives. E.g. muslims are pretty strongly against homosexuals among other things. But they don't receive anywhere near the same level of hate and vitriol even moderate conservatives will get. I think it's just based on how much of a threat a gro…
But there are muslims who don't hate gay people or who find their relationship to islam to have nothing to do with gay rights. I'm not sure you will find many liberals who are hunky dory with muslims who hate gay people, but instead they will say that it is not okay to hate a muslim person when you don't know their personal stance on things like gay marriage.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The result is, as I've heard it put, Liberals are tolerant of anything except being conservative. That's a clever slogan. But the logical response to that would be to say that liberals are tolerant of everything except intolerance. Which as a factual statement is of course arguable, but as a premise is certainly internally consistent.
The problem with that "logical response" is that it is wrong. Here is a simple demonstration. Consider the conservative argument that when you raise the minimum wage, elementary economics of supply and demand results in fewer jobs for poor people. I guarantee you that if you present this argument to 10 liberal friends, more than half will have a strong emotional response against it. While responding, some are likely…
If I tell my Libertarian friends that income and wealth inequality is bad for the economy because it reduces consumer spending and bad for society because it radicalized those at the bottom. And then explain that it should be solved with wealth redistribution in the form of progressive taxation and estate taxes they get similarly upset. This is hardly a problem unique to liberals.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The result is, as I've heard it put, Liberals are tolerant of anything except being conservative. That's a clever slogan. But the logical response to that would be to say that liberals are tolerant of everything except intolerance. Which as a factual statement is of course arguable, but as a premise is certainly internally consistent.
> as a premise is certainly internally consistent. Karl Popper argued that, in fact, that exact rule is not just consistent but necessary for tolerance to exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
That's sophomoric, and I'm surprised someone of Popper's renown would even waste time on this argument. In what ethical system is tolerance ever a good for its own sake and not some higher ideal?
Upvoted for bringing it to my attention, though. :-)
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#427Tim Ferriss also mentioned this issue in his recent AMA [1] when discussing why he recently relocated to Austin. He describes it as "a peculiar form of McCarthyism masquerading as liberal open-mindedness." The whole comment is worth reading.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferri...
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#428In fact, the only ideas I’m afraid of letting people say are the ones that I think may be true and that I don’t like.
I think this is the most interesting section in the whole essay. Is Sam really suggesting that he wants to supress the truth because he doesn't like what the truth is telling us. Here is a totally novel idea - how about changing your mind when the evidence changes.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#429Sam Altman is an idiot.
The tolerance for "gay people are evil" has, more than once, led to "gay people must die". In fact, it is an inescapable consequence - if you declare people evil, you do declare you want to rid the world of them.
And coming from that point: You are still free to say this, of course. And everybody in the Bay Area is free to say it, too. But there are consequences to your speech. And the consequence to this particular speech is that most sane people will shun you. Tough luck, Sam. We've seen your colors when you desperately clung to Peter Thiel, you've just shown a little bit more of yourself.
And yes, of course we must allow the free exchange of ideas. But speech that strips away the humanity of others is not "an idea". It's hate. And it cannot be accepted in a civil society, without undermining the very foundations of that society.
I find it especially amusing that he thinks "gay people are evil" is perfectly fine, but "biotech work is unethical" is something that really shouldn't be said. He couldn't be much clearer about his actual intentions: he really wouldn't like criticism of the things that make him money, and to not annoy the existing "talent", bigotry should continue to be OK.
Putting that half-baked kind of intellectual dreck under a Galileo quote is a truly Silicon Valley thing.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing. Isn't our democracy built upon "self selected polling" , people who chose to go excesrice their right to vote. Its all meaningless?
There's a single democracy. There's no shortage of random polling websites. Telling me "You are ruled by this person, who was selected in a process you knew about since childhood" is one thing; telling me "This is likely true because people on this website you've never heard of say it's true" is another. (And yes, governments where there are ad-hoc rationalizations for who gets to vote or where the procedures aren't…
I didn't say it was the "truth" or anything like that. What are you even saying?