Sorry to be a terrible pedant, but isn't it 'orchiectomy' rather that 'oriechtomy'?
A million dollars is a lot more zero-sum than not killing someone - if I give you a million dollars I lose a million dollars. To make the analogy more accurate, you'd need to stipulate that Joe will kill me if I don't kill him.
Also, I don't think it's fair to ignore the fact that for most people, not killing someone is vastly easier to do at non-self-destructive costs. I appreciate that this is a quantitative argument rather than a categorical counterargument, but if we have atheists who base their sense of morality on a vague consequentialism that they ca...
Dang, my first reasonably local one and I'm away in England that weekend. Well, hopefully next time.
It's only a little less faff for me to get to Edinburgh than Glasgow, but I have far more people I can stay the night with there, so please keep me posted.
I exist. I'm actually more east coast, but it looks like attempts to set up an Edinburgh meet-up have fizzled out, so if I can make it to a future Glasgow one, I would be keen to come along.
I think (with the caveat that I've read a lot but not all of the sequences) that it is Yudkowsky's position that religions are specific manifestations of a whole cluster of more general failures of rationality, and that once someone truly internalises all of the best techniques for separating probable truths from probable untruths, it will be more-or-less impossible for that person to remain religious (unless, of course, they are sitting on a mountain of evidence in favour of the existence of one or more gods which has not been made available to the rest o... (read more)