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I Met Paul Graham Once

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Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#541

Post by KPGv2 »

jrflowers wrote: post #372
foxglacier wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> There is no ethical requirement, upon seeing something happen in the real world, to entertain a series of hypotheticals so tedious and exhaustive that you have to throw your hands up and declare all things to be equally good and bad. That’s a weird habit!

Yeah, and this is the crux of many philosophies, most notably small-l libertarianism, where it seems like the chief appeal is that it's a simple set of axioms that can be followed to their logical conclusions for any moral question with minimal thought and maximal aesthetic "symmetry" and therefore beauty. It's easy to reason about, and therefore it's good.

It extends quite trivially from that to the so-called effective altruism, which relies on a fundamental assumption that a unit of good done to strangers on the other side of the globe is morally equivalent to a unit of good done to your neighbors. It's beautiful and therefore it's good.

It's the moral equivalent of imagining a spherical cow.

Morality is what you do in practice, not what you invent in your head. Treating him only as a literary figure, the reason Jesus is appealing to so many is not because he said "do unto others" and stopped. It's because he actually fed the poor, advocated for social justice, lifted up the injured, spoke truth to power, and gave his life for others.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#542

Post by KPGv2 »

foxglacier wrote: post #431
jrflowers wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No it's because genocide is too simple and poorly defined a concept to apply appropriately to every situation. It's just the result of people trying to generalize from a few specific events that happened in the past which they already decided were bad for some other reason and ended up creating the label genocide to describe them. Look at the disagreement people have over whether Israel or Hamas committed genocide in…

> People can't even agree on the meaning of the word as it applies there.

The fact that your average Joe can't explain it is as material as your average Joe being unable to write a Bash script is to computer science not being a real thing.

Essentially everyone on Earth except Israelis and religious sycophants agree what Israel has done is genocide. It is ludicrous to suggest Hamas has conducted a genocide against Israel because then you'd have to say that slaves in the US conducted a genocide against slave owners.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#544

Post by [deleted] »

sien wrote: post #526
musicale wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> socially regressive robber barons At least we got some good universities (and a somewhat functional transcontinental rail system) out of the 19th century iteration. > In 1975 the student body of Stanford University voted to use "Robber Barons" as the nickname for their sports teams. However, school administrators disallowed it, saying it was disrespectful to the school's founder, Leland Stanford [1] It's a shame th…

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Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#545

Post by KPGv2 »

gedpeck wrote: post #191
haswell wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the issue boils down to pragmatism and utility. It’s just human psychology; people tend not to change their minds when someone screams at them and otherwise disrespects them. If the goal is to move society in any particular direction, that requires some degree of successful communication, and throwing respect out the window directly counteracts the goal. If the goal is just to hold some moral high ground for t…

My personal view is as follows. American society has reached a point of no return. Something has to give before a new equilibrium has been found. As an extreme example look to Nazi Germany. The repugnant views that were normal in 1939 Germany weren’t normal in 1960 Germany. A similar (though far less extreme) change will happen in the U.S. I have no desire to change anyone’s mind about their political views. Anyone w…

> For me, my desire is secession. The country needs to beak up. This is an extreme view but will likely be increasingly held by people with similar political beliefs as mine.

So, you envision an enormous red country plus about forty or so small nation-states, virtually none of whom can support themselves and would be defeated by the red state's military and agricultural output in days?

Secession is unworkable. Whoever secedes from the most militarily powerful nation in history gets wiped off the map in twelve hours.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#546

Post by KPGv2 »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #145
gedpeck wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Herein lies the crux of the matter in my view. The jump from 2 to 3. When Bob Dole ran for President I wholeheartedly agreed with the position about being respectful to those you disagree with. Politics was still normal in the U.S. at that time. But now we in the U.S. elected a known rapist. A felon and a con man. He can’t run a charity in New York due to his misdeeds. He lusts after his own daughter. We have entered…

"over 50% of the country i live in are irredeemably terrible people" is obviously hyperbole -- if it were true, the onus would be on you to start taking action against those terrible people. but my guess is you don't actually think they're so terrible, because you're still working your 9-5 for your terrible-person boss, getting paid like every other schmuck, and you're happy to let those irredeemably terrible people…

> my guess is you don't actually think they're so terrible, because you're still working your 9-5 for your terrible-person boss

"You continue to labor in order to feed yourself rather than suicide-bombing your neighbors, so therefore you're lying" is a HELL of a take.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#547

Post by iaseiadit »

jhp123 wrote: post #282

I'm not a target of tech's fascist turn, but my head is still spinning from the change of direction. When I entered this industry it was for hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are. What particularly stings is that the vipers at the top tricked people into giving away an enormous amount of intellectual property. Zuck is removing tampons from the…

What “fascism” are we talking about here? A company pulling tampons from men’s rooms? Companies scaling down DEI departments that advocated (probably illegally) in favor of gender and race-based discrimination?

Or are you speaking more broadly about the U.S.? Is it fascist to revert to a sane border policy that’s aligned with what most U.S. citizens and legal immigrants want? Or an executive branch that’s actually run by a democratically-elected individual, instead a non-elected shadow government that governed on behalf of a dementia-afflicted president whose condition was hidden from the American public for years? The same government that censored the media? Or the tech companies that willingly obliged with the government censorship? The same tech companies that fired employees for expressing opinions that differed from those held by the liberal establishment?

Sorry, I’m getting very confused if we’re turning into the fascism or finally turning away from it.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#549

Post by jmeyer2k »

wastle wrote: post #527
jmeyer2k wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely, how hard for you is it to call a person what they want to be called. What difference does gender make in the workplace even? I understand it's hard for you to use different pronouns, but it's probably much harder for the person who feels like they don't identify with their gender assigned at birth. > Requiring me to call someone who was born with a penis, and who has sired children a "she" is telling me to…

If it's just a word and makes no difference then there should be no issue with using "he" to refer to any and all individuals of the male sex.

Must be hard to have to deal with that, I'm so sorry you have to use a different word when referring to someone.

It's obviously much harder for you to use a different pronoun than for them to have their entire gender identity invalidated. Would you like for people to misgender you constantly and purposefully?

Your life must be so hard. I feel bad for you to have to use a different word to refer to someone. Maybe have some basic decency and respect for others?

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#550

Post by crackercrews »

wat10000 wrote: post #500
prarro wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes on a pragmatic basis, if the coworker is male and gets upset at being referred to by "he", but it goes against your own personal beliefs to refer to him as "she", it's best just to refer to him by name and practise wording your sentences to be pronounless. And, where possible and not disadvantageous, to avoid situations where he's involved in your own work. With this approach, he's less likely to make a complaint…

If it goes against your personal beliefs to call someone what they prefer to be called at no expense to yourself, then you need some new personal beliefs.

What about neopronouns? Can someone just make up a new set of words like zi / zim / zis and expect you to remember them whenever talking to or about that person?
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