I expect there are other areas where this rule permits careers altruistically-minded people should avoid (even if the benefits seem to dramatically outweigh the costs) or rejects ones that are very important. Suggesting examples of either would be helpful!
Of the first sort: "The law is wrong and adherence to a stricter standard would be more right."
For example, eating farmed meat is legal, and in any conceivable legal system run by 2020s humans it would be legal. But I want an ethical system that can make sense of the fact that I want to eat vegetarian (and don't want to coerce others not to). Letting "what would enlightened legislators do?" be the whole of the moral sensemaking framework doesn't really give me a way to do this.
Do you have interest in adding songs that have been sung in the Bay Area but not (yet?) in Boston? (e.g., Songs Stay Sung and The Fallen Star from this year) I could get lyrics and chords from the crew here for them, but also would understand if you want to keep it at a defined scope!
Apparently the forum's markdown implementation does not support spoilers (and I can't find it in the WYSIWIYG editor either).
I'm sympathetic to spoiler concerns in general, but where the medium doesn't allow hiding them, the context has focused on analysis rather than appreciation, and major related points have been spoiled upthread, I think the benefits of leaving it here outweigh the downsides.
I've added a warning at the top, and put in spoiler markdown in case the forum upgrades its parsing.
(Severe plot spoilers for Ra.)
It's even less apt than that, because in the narrative universe, the human race is fighting a rearguard action against uploaded humans who have decisively won the war against non-uploaded humanity.
In-universe King is an unreliable actively manipulative narrator, but even in that context, his concern is that his uploaded faction will be defenseless against the stronger uploaded faction once everyone is uploaded. (Not that they were well-defended in the counterfactual, since, well, they had just finished losing the war.)
I am curious how cousin_it has a different interpretation of that line in its context.
I believe this assumption typically comes from the Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem, which says that, if your preferences are complete, transitive, continuous, and independent, then there is some utility function such that your preferences are equivalent to "maximize expected ".
Those four assumptions have technical meanings:
In my opinion, the continuity assumption is the one most likely to be violated (in particular, it excludes preferences where "no chance of any X is worth any amount of Y"), so these aren't necessarily a given, but if you do satisfy them, then there's some utility function that describes your preferences by maximizing it.
Seems correct.
Contagion also goes in this bucket and was basically made to do this on purpose by Participant Media.
7) Look, I dunno, all of this is years out of date. Maybe the game really done changed. But nothing that I've read from the concerned side makes me think that they've got a clear picture of what's on the ground (and in this way, I am not acting like a tabula rasa judge).
5) More fundamentally, what is debate for? Should it be practicing good, persuasive, honest argumentation by doing exactly that? Is it practice thinking about the structure of arguments, or their form, or their truth? Other?.
My $0.02 is that it's perfectly reasonable that policy debate bears the same relationship to persuasion that fencing bears to martial prowess. I think that training for this sport with these rules is good even though none of the constituent skills make any sense for self-defense.
In this view, CX isn't useful because debaters practice the whole of good persuasive speaking (seriously, watch any twenty seconds of any policy debate video from the last 10 years); but it's more narrowly good for practicing thinking critically about how arguments fit together into conclusions. I have -- exactly once -- made the mistake of arguing that their plan makes X worse and also (three arguments later) that X is good actually; that loss stung so much that I think I never did that again. I still think about the difference between "impact defense" (if I'm right, you get none of your claimed Y) and "impact offense" (if I'm right, you get bad Z) -- which are diametrically different in their implications if they're 95% to be true. The debate-the-rules-of-the-game stuff isn't useful for its content, but is mostly just fine for its structure.
6) I haven't judged a CX round in ten(?) years, but personally, if I did tomorrow, I'd give a pre-round disclosure (as per the norm) that I'm not going to put down my pen or throw anyone out of the round for what they say or how they say it, and if you have a legitimate problem with what the other side is doing -- and you're right that it's bad for debate -- you should have an easy time winning on that and convincing me to hand them a loss.
4a) This is a misinterpretation:
it requires arguing obvious nonsense, with failure to accept such nonsense as the baseline of discussion, or insisting that it is irrelevant to the topic, treated as a de facto automatic loss.
On the contrary, an argument that [insert K here] is irrelevant to the topic, this is bad for debate, and the Neg should suffer an instant loss (we'd call this "framework") is bog-standard in the Aff reply. Only rookies get caught without their framework file.
On one hand, this is mostly the sort of nonsense flak that the Neg's topicality argument was -- spend 30sec setting up the skeleton of an argument that you can put real meat on if the other side really flubs their reply. But in a very real sense, if the Neg spends 13 minutes dumping critical Marxist theory on you, it is entirely valid to spend 4.5 minutes of your 5-minute reply on some flavor of "this is off-topic and bad for debate, this judge-is-a-revolutionary-historian bit is a fiction, we are high school students and you are a debate coach and I wanted to debate military policy because debate in high school is important for shaping a future generation of political leaders who can solve real problems so can you please give this Neg team the loss to avoid this whole activity going off the rails?" I have done exactly that, multiple times. Won on it about as often as we won on any other off-case stuff.
The biggest thing that makes policy different, as a format, is that it's expected that it's valid to debate the rules of debate. The majority of TOC judges in 2010 would vote for a K -- if the Neg won the debate-about-what-debate-is-for to put the K in-bounds -- or vote against a K, if the Aff won that it should be out-of-bounds. I'd bet at 1:1 odds that that's still true today.
4b) Some judges gonna judge judge judge judge judge, but that's why teams get (or at least got -- I'm not current) a fixed number of "no, not that judge" vetoes at most tournaments. We called these "strikes", and yes they were used by K-disliking teams to avoid being judged by the most K-friendly judges, and by K-liking teams to avoid being judged by judges that wouldn't ever vote for the K even if their opponent was a dead fish.
In the ranch case, I'm imagining that the protagonist believes that (a) and (b) do outweigh (c) to the net-positive.
But (c) is still significant, P says, so they conclude that "the benefits seem much larger than the harms, but the harms are still significant". Furthermore, is (c) "the kind of thing you ought to be able to 'cancel out' through donation [and/or harm-reducing influence]", or is it more like murder?
Is it sufficient that (a) and (b) outweigh (c), or is (c) the sort of thing we should avoid anyway?
In this situation, I feel like I'd be in exactly the target audience that a rule like you're proposing would be trying to serve, but deferring to legality doesn't work because society-that-makes-laws is way less strict than I want my decision-making to be about whether it considers (c) a notable harm at all!