Nate Reinar Windwood

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I find the notion that humans should have rights, not because they have a capacity to suffer and form conscious goals, but just because they are a particular form of biological life that I happen to belong to, absurd. There is nothing magical about being human in particular that would make such rights reasonable or rational. It is simply anthropocentric bias, and biological chauvinism.

 

First of all, I was mainly talking about morality, not rights. As a contractual libertarian, I find the notion of natural rights indefensible to begin with (both ontologically and practically); we instead derive rights from a mutual agreement between parties, which is orthogonal to moraity.

Second, morality, like all values, is arational and inseparable from the subject. Having value presuppositions isn’t bias or chauvinism, it’s called “not being a rock”. You don’t need magic for a human moral system to be more concerned with human minds.

(I won’t reply to the other part because there’s a good reply already.)

I like how if you combine this post with You Only Need Faith in Two Things, they basically solve the problem of induction for all intents and purposes. It’s impossible to unwind past some very basic, very weak assumptions, and they’re all you need to reinvent the entire Bayesian epistemology => you might as well assume it’s correct.

Language isn’t just about efficiency; cultural aesthetic is a terminal value.

Also:

Not that I disagree with the conclusion, but these are good arguments against democracy, humanism and especially the idea of a natural law, not against creating a sentient AI.

C is Turing-complete, which means Gödel-complete, so yeah, the universe can be viewed as a C program.

Utopia:  Sexual mores straight out of a Spider Robinson novel:  Sexual jealousy has been eliminated; no one is embarrassed about what turns them on; universal tolerance and respect; everyone is bisexual, poly, and a switch; total equality between the sexes; no one would look askance on sex in public any more than eating in public, so long as the participants cleaned up after themselves.

Sounds like another flavour of dystopia to me...

I can’t decide anything in 2 minutes, so I’d just one-box it because I remember it as the correct solution to the original Newcomb’s problem — and hope for the best.

In the end, all that matters is choice. If you can always choose a safe and comforting option, nothing is scary (as long as you don’t have the itching sense of justice that makes you meddle in strangers’ business). If you can’t, it’s an authoritarian dystopia no matter how good it is on other accounts.

Benefit #2 seems superficial compared to good architecture, which is usually heavy. I’m not sure if it’s feasible to put, say, some Neoclassical or Georgian house on wheels. And even mostly-wooden Rivendell-like architecture wouldn’t be that light, unless it’s some unsatisfying plastic fake.

Also, I don’t think robotic cars would be enough to overcome the huge inherent space inefficieny of cars. The key to solving traffic jams is good public transport plus walkable cities.

Benefit #6 looks really promising though.

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