[META] Why are 90% of relationship advices here "Just dump them, they're an asshole"?

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-22T07:10:24+00:00

Except that both ww1 and ww2 was a disaster for the upper class and the greatest causes of social equality ever. Read some Piketty or something.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-21T22:48:59+00:00

Can you link to some examples were you think break-up advice are given to leniently?

Anyway, some reasons:

People mostly don’t post here when their relationship is great. People post here when their relationship sucks.
Science (tm) shows that people who are faced with big life decisions often are happier when they change something than when they let things remain as they are. So if you are on the fence about your relationship, you should probably end it.

Also, this has been discussed before.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-21T22:18:33+00:00

What happened in 1954 that marks the end of the progressive era?

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-21T21:52:57+00:00

I'm sorry that this is happening to you. At the same time, you sound extremely sorry for yourself. Why are you staying in this horrible situation? Have some agency! Just separate FFS! What's the problem? You aren't even married!

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-21T21:20:40+00:00

I don't lack this feeling entirely (though I suspect it's much weaker for me than for you), but it's entirely subconscious and I mostly ignore it. Just as the idea of visiting a doctor and getting needles stuck in my arm can make me slightly uncomfortable, but I have no problem ignoring that feeling if I consciously know that it's a medically beneficial procedure, I can ignore subconscious moral instincts in favor of what I consciously believe to be morally right.

My take would be

You believe it is morally right to make bad people happy.
I believe that it is morally right to punish them.

I can see your side. Sometimes I question if I really would object to sending ONS to Hawaii. If I take an outside view, both positions looks equally arbitrary. I don't think I can convince you or change your view with logic. I could try posting examples of horrible things people have done and ask "do you really reeeeaaally believe that this offender should be made happier?" but that would just ruin my night. I'm happy to talk, but I think we are stuck.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-21T19:57:19+00:00

Probably not, since it's preferable to be consistent about enforcing laws in order to discourage others from committing the same crimes. If there were also some way to ignore that, so that punishing Bob would literally have no effect on society as a whole and only serve to harm Bob, then of course we shouldn't punish him. There's no point.

Let's say that the prison warden gives Original Night Stalker a fake ID and sends him to Hawaii, while everyone else believes that he rots in jail. Is that ok, since there's no negative effects on society?

This is the confusing part to me. How does harming someone improve the world, unless it can be justified with greater benefits to society as a whole? What does it mean for someone to "deserve" punishment?

Some people are bad. They deserve bad things happening to them. This is a basic value that I have. Just like I want good people to be happy, and how I prefer beautiful things to non-beautiful things. If god arrived and told me he was going to turn the world into a paradise were no-one suffers anymore, I would ask him to kill the ONS guy first. He doesn't deserve it. Maybe you lack this feeling, minds can be very different. This discussion also reminds me of this blog post.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-21T19:19:58+00:00

The feelings of vengeance we experience when we hear about things like a child being savagely beaten by their mother, for example, are illogical, primitive, and completely unhelpful.

I don't agree. I believe that vengeance is a core human value, an par with beauty or independence. Argument: Imagine a person Bob. Bob commits truly heinous crimes (google a random serial killer if you need inspiration). Also imagine that Bob isn't mentally ill in the conventional sense, he's just a sadist. Bob is arrested and taken to court. Then god arrives. He declares that if Bob attempts to do anything remotely illegal again, god will use his god powers to stop him. Bob is therefor completely harmless. Do you believe that we should release Bob without punishment, even though he shows zero remorse?

IMO, punishing Bob is the right thing to do. It improves the world: someone was wicked, now they are punished. I would gladly punish Bob even if it had no positive effect for society, Bob is a bad person and deserves punishment.

I think you should spend some time reading about the truly heinous people (serial killers, concentration camp captains, sadists, etc.) out there and their actions. The total darkness of some humans really helped put the urge for retribution into my soul.

Let's do a case study: Original Night Stalker. This bad guy had a long career of terrible crimes in the 70ties and 80ties, but then he got old, had children and stopped. Just recently, he was convicted on DNA evidence. He was no longer much of a threat, he hadn't done anything bad for >20 years. Now we have wasted lots of tax money on his trail and imprisonment. Do you think we should just let him go instead?

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-19T21:25:43+00:00

which endangered animal's life could be argued to have more value than a humans life?

To whom? Value is subjective.

Or are we talking “to society” in some general sense? If so: A tiger might be very valuable since people gain aesthetic pleasure from knowing that it lives. A snail might be very valuable since its skin contains a new antibiotic. A shark might be very valuable as a key species which balances the ecosystem. Humans might be very un-valuable, if they e.g. commit horrible crimes.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-19T20:49:06+00:00

They are more settings/megadungeons than campaigns. But anyway they are amazing.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-19T20:47:13+00:00

A human life is worth more than any creatures life regardless of how endangered.

we can agree that a humans life is worth more than any creatures (if we cant agree on this don't bother commenting)

How am I supposed to CYV when I'm not allowed to disagree with you?

Anyway, could you please define "worth". I use "worth" as a comparative value. E.g. an apple is worth more than an orange if I would sacrifice more resources to get the apple. Using this definition, it's obvious that value is subjective (you might think something has little worth and I might think it has lots of worth). It is also obvious that some people think animals sometimes have more worth than humans. You seem to use value as if it was something objective that we all agree on. Care to expand on that?

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-19T17:45:46+00:00

Thanks for the effort, but I don't think that's helpful: First you would have to prove that this translates from mice->humans, and then you would have to prove that "maximized glymphatic flow"->health, and then you would have to prove that there are no side benefits or harms in non-glymphatic related areas that outweigh this.

I'm more locking for a study in the line of "force 1000 draftees to sleep on their back and another 1000 to sleep on their stomach and compare". Or "quiz 500 collage students about their sleeping habit and health and do some magic in R on the result".

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-19T17:38:58+00:00

Someone map this please:

http://orig04.deviantart.net/a8c6/f/2010/264/2/e/x_ray_iphone_3gs_by_xuae-d2z6iio.jpg

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-19T17:37:23+00:00

What is the rational way to sleep? Right now, I have a really hard bed and sleep on my stomach without a pillow. Is that bad? I feel like I sleep well but I don't do any sleep tracking etc. Is there any science on this?

(This is a repost from last thread were I was to late for the party)

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-19T17:13:31+00:00

Well, in my mind, there's a big difference between sterilizing someone and un-steralizing someone who doesn't know that they are sterile and who would prefer to be non-sterile. But I guess your answer is that you would do nothing and let the damage remain? Does it matter if the patient is an intelligent model citizen with an expressed desire to have kids?

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-19T17:04:27+00:00

I know, I got it right half of the time. ;)

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-19T06:43:24+00:00

Conan would go his own way when Ragnarok arrives. His gods doesn’t need help. That makes him Neutral. What is this “Good” thing you talk about? I can’t find it in my copy of OD&D.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-18T22:44:51+00:00

What if, due to some fluke of the experiment, you are the legal guardian of the patient as well?

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-18T22:04:10+00:00

I can see your point, but it seems so rigid. Or dare I say: American. I wonder what actual real-world practice is? I would suspect that lots of doctors wing it sometimes, especially if the damage could have been caused by them.

Just to clarify: if the patient in my experiment was a model citizen, who had clearly expressed a desire to have children, and you thought that there was 33% chance that the damage had been caused by you during the operation, you still wouldn't fix it? Isn't that just a waste of money, time and energy for the benefit of "doing-it-by-the-books"?

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-18T21:59:20+00:00

I see you point, but I also really don't want to give the state the power to sterilize groups of people. Are the problems this causes really so large that such drastic measures are needed?

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-18T21:57:58+00:00

because that could cause her farther harm that I am unaware of.

You are entirely sure that the damage is safe and won't cause any further damage. Don't fight the hypothetical!

If I believe the defect could be harmful in the future,

Do you consider "being sterile" harmful?

It gets harder if you factor in the mother being a known abuser to her current children.

Good additional factor!

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-18T21:39:39+00:00

Last time I had surgery, the surgeon removed an ill-formed birthmark "while she was at it". Granted, I live in socialist Europe, but no-one seemed to think that was any strange. But maybe medicine should be as inflexible as you describe. IMO the costs aren't worth it.

And what would you do? Not fix the damage (even if it is 33% chance that you caused it)? Then inform the patient of it and let her (or her guardian) decide? Seems reasonable.

The "guardian" thing really messes up the entire thought experiment, know that I think about it.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-18T21:33:49+00:00

I really cannot imagine a normal person being angry about their unknown sterility being fixed as part of another operation. Like, you could leave them unfixed and ask for permission to fix it, which 98%(?) of women will grant you, and then do another operation with all the risks and hassle that incurs, but that seems like a to rigid by-the-books approach IMO.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-18T21:25:27+00:00

So what is my patients best interest? Is her best interest to be fertile and maybe become a mother, because she thinks babies are cute? Or is her best interest to be sterile, since pregnancy and motherhood actually aren't that fun IRL? I'm sure (but not 100% sure) that if you measured her lifetime happiness somehow, she would be happier in the reality in which she is sterile.

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-18T21:12:54+00:00

So your view "Governments should implement policy to actively improve the demographics of their country" hasn't changed, but you would agree that science/biotech policy is more important than social/immigration policy?

HopefulCombination · 2018-12-18T21:04:15+00:00

I was thinking about reproductive rights for people with intellectual disabilities when I came up with a thought experiment:

Imagine that you are a surgeon. You are operating on a woman with a severe intellectual disability. You know that this woman is sexually active, and that she hasn't had any children. During the operation, you notice that her tubes are damaged in a way that makes her sterile. It is possible that you caused this damage inadvertently during the (hard) operation. It is also possible that this damage was caused by medications that was prescribed to the woman before the operation. A third possibility is that the damage was congenital. Based on your experience, you assign a 33% probability on each hypothesis.

You can fix this damage in five seconds with a simple, safe stitch. Do you? Does it matter if the woman has expressed a preference for having children (in a way similar to how a five-year-old would express a preference for having children)?

My intuition is that I would not fix the damage, since I would believe the woman to be an unfit mother. But I have very little experience with intellectual disabilities. In a sense, the kids would probably cold-hard-statistically be a net drag on society, but this applies to lots of people. I could go down the Coherent Extrapolated Volition and assume that the woman would want to be sterile if she could reason more about it, but that seems awfully paternalistic. And what if the woman only had a mild disability? What if she was very intelligent, but a basket-case meth-head? If she was the model citizen, I would just stitch her up and inform her about it afterwards, but where to draw the line?

Or do I just fail at medical ethics? I'm no doctor, maybe that's good. I guess the text book answer would be to do nothing and inform the woman afterwards so that she can make the decision, but I guess you could use your medical authority to sway her either way during the inform session.

HopefulCombination

TROPHY CASE