purrtrandrussell

The problem with trying to "address obesity" is that we've already been trying to do that for decades now. The bottleneck isn't lack of social will; it's lack of scientific knowledge about what interventions reliably cause someone to both lose weight and keep it off.

Much of the progress in modern anti-racism has been about persuading more people to think of racism as a structural, systemic issue rather than one of individual villainy. See: https://transliberalism.substack.com/.../the-revolution...

I've increasingly moved towards the position that, regardless of whether or not the ideal society has a state or is stateless, the US is at serious risk of self-destruction and, in addition to trying to prevent said self-destruction, people should create non-state governance structures to prevent the default outcome of state collapse or at least mitigate it

What something symbolizes is an empirical sociological question, not a moral one. Trying to determine communication intent in symbolism prescriptively rather than descriptively does not bring you closer to truth.

when you goodhart on ~ideological diversity~ you create a subsidy for bullshit in the marketplace of ideas

the Internet causing shunning and boycotting to become more effective (ex. me too, canceling) causes me to wonder if it might be possible to move towards a society where we primarily enforce law-level norms(not raping people, not stealing, not refusing to serve black people at a lunch counter, not selling fraudulent medications, etc.) via decentralized economic/social (cutting off access to payment methods, firing, boycotting) rather than violent centralized (incarceration, execution, fines, etc.) or violent decentralized (feud law) methods.

I agree, this is a failure mode that rationalist often fall into, not a prescriptive suggestion

To go  meta on meta vs object level , often when rationalists try to discuss things on the meta level they end up coming up with takes that amount to categorically refusing to defect against defectors because on the meta level the right move is to cooperate.

trying to think of ways to disentangle antifa's (in the sense of the Torch Network, Popular Mobilization and One People's Project) impact on authoritarian right organizing from law enforcement impact and non-antifa anti-authoritarian-right organizing such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and various faith groups.

My current moral framework consists of a positive-liberty maximizing consequentialist sub-agent, a hedonic utilitarian sub-agent and a preference utilitarian sub-agent making moral trades with each other. I don't have a formalization of this. When I say "positive-liberty maximizing consequentialist" I am trying to put the moral intuitions behind rights into an ordered series of world-states rather than deontological injunctions. Positive liberty maximizing consequentialism is somewhat similar to the capability approach in development economics(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/) but at a higher level of abstraction. It's not a statement about what object level decisions should be made but a moral philosophical claim about what goodness is. We talk about "freedom of speech" and "freedom of association" and other freedoms in the language of laws and rules but there's consequences that we are trying to point to using those principles are heuristics towards, and I think it can be framed in the amount of options available for a given agent.

Our information about the world gets filtered through a hilarity bias: people are more likely to share information that is amusing. This sounds mild, but it could be quite bad. People being foolish is funny. This is especially true when the outgroup is being foolish or when people are being foolish in a way that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. Hilarity bias may be a significant component to misanthropy, lack of trust in others and polarization

traditional somali law and pod-to-pod transformative justice seem rather similar, except pod members take the place of clan judges and the alternative to mediation is shunning/cancelation rather than feuding.