Waso Ante

I follow philosophical discourse. Rat-adjacent. she/her

[theunitofcaring]

Is there actually any evidence for the Kavanaugh accusations beyond "she said" ?

Yes, a lot of it. I think he’s very likely to be guilty of the attack on Ford and the attack on Ramirez; I think it’s more likely than not he’s guilty of the attacks Swetnick described, though I’m significantly less confident in that case. 

First, Ford:

Keep reading

[sosuperawesome]

Embroidery Hoops

Shimunia on Etsy

See our #Etsy or #Embroidery tags

[sentedelviento-blog]

Sometimes I feel like Facebook knows too much about me.

[sentedelviento-blog]

If you had asked me yesterday to guess the author of this quote, Karl Marx is like the last person I would’ve guessed.

[oistrong]

I’m all for fighting for marriage equality in the LGBT community. But we’re so focused on that no one knows about this problem.

[juxtapoesition]

W…wait Thats a thing????

[supremesalt]

Yep! The man I refer to as my husband? We aren’t actually married. We can’t be.

If I married him, the government would literally expect me to care for him and be his sole source of income. He would lose all of his benefits, including SSDI. Spouses are expected to share income and that effects ALL of his benefits, even his health insurance. We simply can’t afford to be married.

But it goes even further than that. If I were disabled, our incomes would STILL be combined, meaning BOTH of us would have our benefits cut.

For people reviving supplemental income, their benefits can be cut anywhere from 25% of their current income all the way down to 0%

In fact, one of the stipulations of receiving income under the adult disabled child program (which provides benefits for people who were disabled before age 22) is that they LITERALLY never be married.

I normally don’t link to blog posts as resources, but since social service resource sites like to dress this problem up and make it seem smaller than it really is, I’m gonna call it appropriate! Check it out!

https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/06/29/op-ed-why-no-matter-what-i-still-cant-marry-my-girlfriend

I’m upset about the situation in case you couldn’t tell.

[vampire-eros]

This is a thing that’s entirely rational to be upset about. 

[wavemistress]

My husband and I are both disabled.  Neither of us can look for work to support our family more than we are already given unless we get special permission.  Even then, the types of labor we’re allowed to accept are limited.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m grateful to have a roof over my head and food on my table.  I just don’t agree that disabled people should be punished for being disabled.

[tanadrin]

It seems especially frustrating to me that qualia are often talked about in terms of sensory experiences like vision mostly with reference to thought experiments rather than to neuroscience, given that we know quite a lot about how vision works in the brain, and can clearly associate the mechanisms of vision with specific physical states of the brain.

[argumate]

I find the reliance on “redness” in thought experiments particularly odd, given that humans don’t see colors, they see objects, and color inference is partly determined by the object they think they’re seeing, in a recursive loop.

it makes more sense to talk about the qualia of seeing a tomato than the qualia of seeing “the color red”.

[dedicating-ruckus-blog]

if given an ambiguous color impression, humans can fill in information from context to guess the color more closely, and often even lose the certainty estimate and think it’s less ambiguous than it is; but we definitely do see colors, not objects, as evidenced by every test of color vision there is.

color is used because “the sensation of seeing color” is a fairly fundamental, irreducible building block of sense impressions, kind of like “the sensation of tasting sweetness”; a tomato is made up of many kinds of sense impressions, visual and otherwise, and also loops in cognition as well, so it’s a bad example.

[sentedelviento-blog]

A tentative theory on social and political response to allegations of sexual misconduct

As has been brought up frequently in recent discourse, the social norm of assuming a party’s innocence unless sufficient evidence can be provided to demonstrate guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is a fundamental aspect of the justice system in the US.

Maintaining a high standard of proof may occasionally result in a failure to punish guilty parties. But it also minimizes the risk of punishing an innocent person by sentencing them to spend years of their life in prison, and so this trade-off seems just.

The context that surrounds Kavanaugh, as the Supreme Court nominee, cannot be equivocated to that of a criminal trial. 

Two-thirds of rapes (according to the largest non-profit anti-sexual assault organization: https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system) go unreported. To come forward as a woman and speak out against your abuser is to open yourself up to public scrutiny: When asked about the likelihood of false rape allegations, ~50% of men surveyed felt that about half of all reports were invented by women (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1056477.pdf). I am not arguing that a victim’s allegations ought to be uncritically considered definitive evidence by virtue of belonging to the victim. I will argue, however, against misplacing the same burden of proof as is required for a prosecutor to demonstrate in a court of law onto the shoulders of someone already in a vulnerable position.

The reason we require such high standards of evidence to establish a conviction, is that mistakenly sentencing an innocent person prison time is a really bad outcome. Other social punishments that also could potentially significant harm to the accused include the loss of employment, or being expelled from university, and thus maintaining similar standards to a court of law seem plausibly justifiable. A failure to account for this harm would leave oppressed groups particularly vulnerable in such situations.

However, this also implies the existence of social consequences that don’t substantially cause harm to the accused: Enter Kavanaugh. Being appointed to the Supreme Court is an honor, and it’s hard to see how it could be argued that withholding this position to Kavanaugh could compare to the consequences of denying the testimony of the accuser. 

Thus, conditional on evidence to the contrary, it’s on Kavanaugh to demonstrate that Ford’s testimony is unreliable.

[argumate]

the actual treatment of feminism in HPMOR is even more confused than I make it out to be, but generally falls into the “women used to get a raw deal but now it’s absolutely fine and we must never talk about it again” vein of thought.

[shieldfoss]

> women used to get an extremely raw deal, now their deal is the same kind of raw as all the other raw deals around and caring More About This than about other important things is a fashion choice, not a moral necessity.

Yeah sounds about right.

[argumate]

this line of argument seems weak considering it often comes from people who feel that geeks are an oppressed class, despite an absence of punitive laws targeting geeks, whereas such laws targeting women still exist in many jurisdictions and there is widespread advocacy to reinstate them in others.

also as I keep pointing out, why did the raw deal that women received for a hundred thousand years or so suddenly end, so quickly and so dramatically, basically within our very own lifetimes?

it seems worthy of comment, if nothing else.

[bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190]

I think the “I accept Blanchardianism but I’m not a transphobe because I think that autogynephiles should be allowed to transition!” position is sort of like…

imagine someone came to the conclusion that the reason that, idk, women in their twenties get pregnant is that they have an impregnation fetish

and they’re like “don’t worry! I think that impregnation fetish is a PERFECTLY VALID reason to have children! sexual desire is important! I am absolutely not pregnancy-phobic! why are all you twentysomething pregnant women getting mad at me”

like clearly that position is an improvement on “the only reason twentysomething women get pregnant is an impregnation fetish, therefore we should give all twentysomething women long-acting reversible contraception and not let any doctor remove it” 

but I think pregnant women are still allowed to object to this hypothetical person saying false things about them! it is a genuine harm to have people going around believing incorrect things about your motivations for important aspects of your life!

[sentedelviento-blog]

I’m not usually a fan of combining YouTube and philosophy, but this just makes me stupidly happy.

[apricops]

I know “STEM majors drive like this but humanities majors drive like this” comments are pretty well hoary by now but I just do want to reiterate that I think a lot of philosophers who make denigrating comments about science are often just as misinformed as science majors who make denigrating comments about philosophy. Once you get past 101 level stuff in STEM type classes they’re absolutely full of people acknowledging uncertainty and contradictions in research and going “yeah so this is what we’ve seen this cell do, no fuckin clue why but that’s what we’ve seen!”

[sentedelviento-blog]

The more informed you are about a subject, the more frequently you’re going to notice when people get things wrong about it. And people who have expressed uncharitable takes don’t seem to be exclusively STEM 101 people (e.g. Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Yudkowsky, several people I know in real life who seem to otherwise be incredibly educated within their given field).

I suspect that those who study STEM will be more sensitive to arguments criticizing their in-group, and likewise philosophers are more likely to care about perceived attacks on their discipline.

In the interest of not being blinded by in-group loyalty (as someone who identifies more closely with the “philosopher-type”), I’d love to be shown examples of common anti-science attitudes held by philosophers that drive STEM majors up the wall.

[sentedelviento-blog]

re "Wait hold up, he only cares about qualia… " i am (approximately) a moral realist and think that qualia are the only morally relevant things

So would I be morally relevant on the grounds of having qualia? Or would it be the qualia itself that has moral relevance?

[trickytalks]

Can you be a moral anti-realist while believing there is a single CEV for humans? Or are they incompatible?

[sentedelviento-blog]

So.. would a singular CEV for humanity involve an average of each individual’s CEV, or...? I’m also skeptical of the extent to which “our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were” can be thought of as an ethical framework. (although this may be an unintentional strawman, I’m not confident in my interpretation of what CEV is supposed to imply.)

[sentedelviento-blog]

Does anyone else not have an internal monologue?

I’ve been curious about this because everyone I’ve asked thus far has described their stream of consciousness as being guided by language. (Or at least, language seems to play a fundamental role)

I don’t think in words, though. And for a while I thought this was normal: typical mind fallacy and whatnot.

I’ve always thought that the advice where people tell you to practice being kind to yourself by mentally repeating self-esteem boosting mantras to yourself was really strange. Because to me it wasn’t a matter of reframing a pre-existing linguistical narrative, but rather constructing an entirely new, unfamiliar thought structure.

[fierceawakening]

So I’m reading about this Avital Ronell thing, where a gay male grad student accused his lesbian professor of sexual harassment, groping, etc.

This professor apparently rubbed and touched the student, called him “amazing and beautiful” “baby love angel” and “my cock-er spaniel.”

Prominent professors/queer theorists are calling this a gay way of communicating and saying she did no wrong.

Dude… a woman calling a man “my cock-er spaniel” is objectifying. It’s (a cheesy version of) things I’ve consensually called male partners with humiliation kinks.

“Adviser calling PhD student weird names” is about as far from “consensual D/s with someone who likes that” as I can imagine.

Unless there is some huge bit of evidence I have missed here, people circling the wagons to say “oh that’s just gay” is uh. Yikes.

[sentedelviento-blog]

Yeah, and what’s worse is they turned around and tried to blame the grad student. This is from the letter sent to NYU that was signed by Ronell’s fellow academics arguing it would be an “injustice” to fire her:

“We deplore the damage that this legal proceeding causes her, and seek to register in clear terms our objection to any judgment against her. We hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare.”

[jadagul]

youzicha replied to your post:shlevy: Scott makes a case that the fundamental…

But where would the “proper feedback loop” come from—an updated set of tablets on Mt Sinai? Like, I agree that the people in Scott’s article take ideas more seriously than most, but for morality in particular, I don’t see how you can say they take them *too* seriously.

I suspect <a class=“tumblelog”>shlevy</a> would give a different answer to this than I will.  But my answer is that the feedback loop has to come from your own core intuitions and values.

Like, there’s no such thing as an objective moral fact.  There are values and ethics and desires.

And what I see happening sometimes is people say:

Okay, I know these things are good and those things are bad.

There must be some clear rule determining whether something is good or bad.

Hm, “happiness is good and pain is bad” seems like it fits the data in (1) pretty well. 

Therefore “happiness is good and pain is bad” defines morality.

But what exactly do “happiness” and “pain” mean?

What if electrons feel pain?

Fuck.

Like, no one starts out from the position that electron suffering is bad, or whatever.  They start out with some “data”, of the form “these things are bad and those things are good”.  They build a model, to try to explain what things are good and what things are bad.

And then they proceed to throw away the data and reify the model.  It’s not just confusing map and the territory; it’s throwing away the territory because the map is more accurate.  After all, it’s a map.  Are you the sort of ignorant flat-earther who doesn’t believe maps?

If you assume that morality must be described by a relatively simple and compact set of rules, then you’ll wind up throwing away a lot of the complexity of people’s actual values.  (One of the best parts of Yudkowsky’s writing is his fairly nuanced understanding of this point).  

And if you assume that rules are realer or truer than values, then you’ll sacrifice your original values on the altar of your new rules.  Despite the fact that your rules were an attempt to protect your values in the first place.

[youzicha]

Sure, I agree this is the process. But at the same time, don’t we want at least some “regularization” of our morals? I think most people would say that they immediate moral intuitions are not a perfect guide to the best actions—either because they are just incorrect (”I first thought this was obviously wrong, but thinking more carefully I think that’s just an instinctive disgust reaction which I don’t endorse, so I’m going to say that it’s actually none of my business”), or perhaps even more often, because you don’t have any direct intuitive judgment (”Abortions seem bad because it involves killing, and forbidding abortion seems bad because it involves coersion, so… hm, I probably need to think about this”).

This is why we want ethics as an intellectual field of inquiry in the first place; we don’t always know what’s right, so we want to deliberate and reconsider our initial opinions until we reach reflective equilibrium.

But then, how can we say when the reflection should stop, and to what extent we should revise our opinions? Just as there is no objective moral fact, there is also no objective meta-moral fact—we decide when to stop the deliberation using exactly the same kind of circular, reflective deliberation that we use to decide object-level moral questions.

In short, saying that the electron-suffering advocates “threw away too much” doesn’t help. They say electron suffering is important; I disagree. I say they took their ideas too seriously; they disagree and think they took them exactly seriously enough. These disagreements are of the same nature, so moving the debate to the meta-level doesn’t seem to accomplish anything.

[jadagul]

There are a few different strands here, and some of them are responded to in the post I just made: I don’t think I value regularization nearly as much as most people [think they] do. You’re correct that it’s good to think about implications, and to have some way to respond when you don’t actually have well-founded intuitions, but I wouldn’t want to run too far away from where you started.

Your last bit is more interestng, and basically correct. There’s no way for the sort of argument I’m making here to really convince the electron-suffering advocates. It’s an internally coherent if externally risible position.

But they’re not my target audience. (Among other things because there aren’t that many of them). I’m writing to people who feel some sort of abstract obligation to do what they have, and telling them that no such obligation exists.

Like, if you, right now, genuinely worry about electron suffering, and think it’s important to prevent, then go for it. Those are your values, own them.

(This is why I don’t think this argument is going to make any difference on the subject I have the biggest object-level differences with much of the EA et al community on, which is animal rights and animal suffering. Most people actually have that intuition, on some level, in the first place).

But if you look at the electron suffering people and think it looks ridiculous, but feel guilty about that—like if you thought about this seriously, you’d realize that that electrons matter more than the people you care about;

Or if you feel obligated to save the electrons despite the fact that it will make you miserable, the fact that you’d rather torture the electrons to help people;

Or if you just feel guilty that you aren’t as serious, and as moral, as people who care about these weird abstruse topics;

Then don’t. Don’t worry. Don’t feel bad. Keep your values entrained to what you value right now. It’s fine. You don’t need to “regularize” your values into something totally disconnected from what you actually value.

We stop our reflection using the same sort of deliberation we use to start it. But we shouldn’t feel like moving farther from our starting point is a goal, or a badge of honor.

And we especially shouldn’t do that from our starting point. My goal is to better achieve my current values. My goal isn’t to find new values that will overthrow my current ones. Because that’s what “values” are.

[discoursedrome]

It seems like part of the problem here is that you can either have an internally consistent, rigorous, useable framework, or a framework that doesn’t extrapolate unintuitive and existentially horrifying truths, but you can’t have both. I mean, this happens even when you’re ignoring real-world applications and dealing entirely with abstract facts about numbers and sets, which you wouldn’t expect people to have strong moral feelings about. People need to decide in advance if they’re okay with doing surreal, nihilistically horrifying things because they’re provably the most ethical actions, and if not, give up on trying to formalize and optimize ethics in the first place, because it’s always going to go there if you explore deeply enough. 

You always want to start from intuition when you pick your axioms, but that does nothing to conform the result-space to your intuition-space.

[jadagul]

I agree with, I think, about half of that.

My only issue with the first paragraph is the idea that “doing surreal, nihilistically horrifying things” can be “provably the most ethical actions.” If you prove that nihilistically horrifying things are the most ethical actions, that means you picked your axioms very badly.

I think you’re arguing that all axiom systems will extrapolate to something surreal and horrifying, but that doesn’t need to be the case. Because you can totally have an axiom: “don’t do anything surreal and horrifying.” Bam. Provably, you should never do anything surreal and horrifying.

I guess that’s what you mean by “giving up on trying to formalize and optimize ethics”? Which is basically what I’m advocating.

That’s also kind of my response to your last point. The whole point of picking axioms based on your intuition is to make your results correspond, in some sense, to intuition-space. If you pick some axioms, extrapolate out, and get something totally unrecognizable, that means you should start over with better axioms. Not that you should die on your new and oddly-shaped hill.

And this is how we do math all the time. We come up with some axioms and see what they would mean. And sometimes we look at the result and say “fuck that, clearly that’s not what I meant the first time around.”

There’s a game I play sometimes with my calculus students. I ask them to tell me what a limit is. Then I draw a picture of a function that technically meets their definition, but clearly doesn’t have that limit. This game is actually really easy, if you’re playing with people who haven’t seen the formal definition before.

But that doesn’t mean that limits are wild and alien things that can never make sense, and the limit of secant as x approaches 0 is actually 0. It just means that their definition sucks and needs more nuance.

(To all the analystsand point-set topologists about to pop in and point out that limits are wild and alien things that can never make sense, trust me, I know.)

After writing this, I don’t know whether I actually disagree with you, or whether we’re just putting emphasis in wildly different places. But if you try to formalize your ethical systems, and the results you get out are unrecognizable and bizarre and horrifying, that means you did it wrong and you should stop.

And I’m skeptical of your entire project, because there’s no reason to expect ethics to be cleanly formalizable in the way you want them to be. But you totally can formalize them. A list of brute properties is a formalization. It’s just not a very tractable one.

[discoursedrome]

My actual position on this, at least for the time being, is that trying to formalize ethics or utility is a fool’s errand. I still do it heuristically in day-to-day situations, and talk about principles as if they obeyed propositonal logic, and so on, but I have a high level of confidence that this approach can’t bear out if pursued too far. Moreover, I’m hard-pressed to think of mathematical axiom systems that don’t have existentially horrifying implications, so I do feel like that’s probably something you get for free out of any sufficiently rich logical foundation. So the idea that a consistent morality wouldn’t have any such pitfalls seems a bit counterintuitive to me.

The problem with making a list of brute properties, bulling ahead until you reach a problem, and then adapting, is that you’re going to find yourself in a situation where you’re mostly adding epicycles – your axiom list will grow and become more fiddly and equivocal as you address problems. This is because there is no underlying consistent formal logic that matches human intuition – those aren’t the principles by which it operates – so you have no ideal form to converge toward, even with brute force. Moreover, if you just write down axioms naively, you’re going to run into a lot of situations where you have to abandon one of two propositions that both feel crucial, because it turns out you can’t have them at the same time. If you want to avoid things that are existentially horrifying to other people as well, it’s an even worse bind.

One of the key issues here is that as you layer on complexity to try to get closer to your intuition, as you make your ethics more contingent on untestable propositions and unmeasureable quantities and contingent interactions, you reduce your own ability to notice flaws in your own logic. The most likely outcome of this sort of complexity-increasing self-correction loop is that you end up with a flawed system too complex for you to tell that it’s wrong, and then assume you’re succeeded.

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

Reading Kant after reading Hume is actually very comforting because Hume can make you question reality in a horrifying way and Kant provides some very good arguments against him.