Moral Privilege
Imagine, for a moment, living in a society in which toddlers routinely stab infants with knives, and adults routinely smash toddlers with rocks. You, naturally, are horrified by this state of affairs, and are thus flabbergasted when everybody suddenly notices that toddlers stabbing infants with knives is a bad thing - and pushes for a solution of increasing the rate at which toddlers are smashed with rocks. You, having come from moral sensibilities that arose in an entirely different place in time in which stabbing infants and smashing toddlers are both considered horrifying, are naturally going to feel pretty conflicted about this. Yeah, it's great that they've decided that it's a bad thing that toddlers stab infants with knives, but also their solution actually kind of makes everything worse. They've progressed to a morality more similar to your own, but the increased similarity has, in a sense, made everything worse. Your friend in this society, whose views you find abhorrent, is puzzled by your reaction. Why are you so upset? Sure, you didn't get everything you wanted, but society has progressed, hasn't it? Shouldn't you support this new initiative, which is, after all, a step in the right direction, the direction you want everything to progress in? Why are you so insistent that knives be taken away from toddlers, as access to knives is part of every human's natural rights, when there's a much more moral solution that leaves everybody better off and doesn't harm anyone's rights, which is to say, smashing the toddler's heads in with rocks? Setting aside how contrived this scenario is, I think it basically describes a routine state of affairs in the world: From any given moral perspective, progress in one moral dimension will basically always amount to regression in another, even if it's only the inverse moral position. We frequently find ourselves biting repugnant bullets, and it's difficult not to be at least a little bit cynical about the state of af
Another crackpot physics thing:
My crackpot physics just got about 10% less crackpot. As it transpires, one of the -really weird- things in my physics, which I thought of as a negative dimension, already exists in mathematics - it's a Riemann Sphere. (Thank you, Pato!)
This "really weird" thing is kind of the underlying topology of the universe in my crackpot physics - I analogized the interaction between this topology and mass once to an infinite series of Matryoshka dolls, where every other doll is "inside out and backwards". Don't ask me to explain that; that entire avenue of "attempting to communicate this idea" was a complete and total failure, and it was only... (read 642 more words →)