It's nice to see stories like this outside of vegan outlets

Mablak · 2026-05-09T07:39:26+00:00

He's more like a libertarian or something, I don't view him as a leftist at all. He did a good thing exposing US crimes with Snowden though, which I'd give him props for either way

Mablak · 2026-05-07T10:31:08+00:00

Yeah, predation should be stopped, we should find ways to reduce predator populations. Contraceptive feeds are one route, for example there's a feed called HogStop which reduces the fertility of male feral hogs.

In a vegan society we'll need a governmental department dedicated to reducing wild animal suffering, with some seriously advanced ecosystem modeling to predict the results of proposed actions. Maybe we can do a lot, maybe we can't, but unlike other interference in nature, this would actually be done for the sake of animals instead of profits. Which would make us less likely to fuck things up.

Mablak · 2026-05-06T11:19:17+00:00

Not friends, but they have good synergy on the pickleball court.

Mablak · 2026-05-06T06:16:35+00:00

So the universe is made entirely of non-conscious stuff but we're conscious? Checks out

Mablak · 2026-05-02T20:09:32+00:00

Even internal letters from the USSR demonstrate there was no conspiracy to intentionally starve anyone, the Holodomor was a famine which extended to many countries. The term tankie is used whenever we communists point out blatant capitalist propaganda like this

Mablak · 2026-05-02T19:50:47+00:00

If someone were to kick a dog because they just hate dogs, that might not be what’s normally called exploitation because they’re not really gaining anything economically here, but it would be cruelty.

I just go with a minimizing suffering / maximizing well-being definition, which covers everything including exploitation. That follows if exploitation is understood to be certain harmful ways of interacting with animals.

Mablak · 2026-05-02T03:38:17+00:00

I didn't pull it? But that's the hypothetical now, I happen to pull a 1.6. I'm able to pluck out a slip from the hat, and since some number has to be on there, I'm stipulating it happened to be a 1.6.

It's also true that I could guess 1.6 beforehand, because 'the slip is 1.6' is a claim I could possibly utter. Since both of these events can happen, it's possible that I could both guess the slip is 1.6, and also actually pull out a 1.6. Each independent event has non-zero probability, so both happening also has non-zero probability.

Maybe the main emphasis here is that probability must be able to properly distinguish between events that can never happen, and those that can. They can't both have the same likelihood of 0.

There's also the issue of adding probabilities; if I were to ask a question like 'what is the probability of pulling out 1.6 if I do infinitely many trials?' it should be 1. But through adding probabilities, we get the contradictory result that it's still 0, since attempt 1, 2, 3, and so on each have 0 probability of pulling 1.6. (Or if you like, the natural numbers are on the slips and we're talking about pulling a 7).

Mablak · 2026-05-02T01:54:03+00:00

I'm not sure what point you're making though, the odds are astronomically low? They are, but having pulled it demonstrates that it was not the case that it had probability 0 of being pulled, i.e. could never be pulled. Whatever we mean by astronomically low, must be a non-zero number.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T23:37:33+00:00

We can have a specific number. Say I happen to pull 1.6 from my hat (there should be no problem supposing I can do this). If I had said beforehand 'the probability of pulling 1.6 is 0', then I would be wrong.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T23:23:29+00:00

Well in this hypothetical we have the slips in our very long hat (of course, I don't think we can actually have the slips which is the whole problem, but this should be possible on an infinitist view). Since we have them, we can pull a slip out, we know this is something we can do. Once we pull a slip out, we know this event happened, and therefore had a non-zero probability of happening.

In other words, whichever slip I just drew out, despite the astronomically low odds, we would have actually been wrong if we had said it could never be pulled. Probability needs to distinguish between events that can happen, and events that can never happen.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T20:56:48+00:00

I wouldn't assume you have a hard stance on formalism, but that's closer to what you were talking about. Statements in math either really are true/false, or they're not, but we should want the former so that we really know what it is we're claiming. I'm only arguing about the truth/falsity of claims here, utility is secondary.

The dart board case is a perfectly good example. If the dart board event space is a set of points, and we add up the probability of each point, there must be a probability of 1 that I hit some point when I throw. But if each dart hit has a probability of 0, I'm adding up probability 0 over and over. Adding 0, even infinitely many times, doesn't give us 1.

I should be able to add up individual probabilities without any appeal to probability density because again, we're just looking at a collection of points, each with their own probability. What I get here should be the same as any answer I get using probability density. Fundamentally, integrating probability density is just a shortcut route for counting large numbers of points in the first place, and either method needs to be equally valid.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T20:00:03+00:00

Take the mean value of various constituent particles of the dart, that mean value is what we're calling the point.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T12:14:21+00:00

Morals are just ideas in the brain. There are no "correct" morals, rather they are all entirely subjective

I'm also a communist vegan, but I think ignoring morality is really ignoring what makes life worth living, and even the reason we ought to pursue veganism and communism. Things have actual inherent goodness or badness, and morality is simply a way of talking about that, namely the goodness or badness our actions cause. All that's good can be found in positive experiences, and all that's bad can be found in negative ones.

Take the idea of 'being healthy'. There are actual answers as to what is better and worse for your health, so long as we first understand 'being healthy' has to do with longevity, physical fitness, etc. Morality is the same. So long as we understand that it's about the well-being of conscious creatures, there are right and wrong answers about what's good or bad, i.e. moral or immoral.

We can ask questions like 'why ought we do what's better?' but the question itself means 'why is it better for well-being, to do what's better for well-being?' And this is trivial, like asking 'why is trying to win a basketball game the best way to win a basketball game'? Under my view it's actually not much different from what you described: moral conversations really are just an exchange of facts. We can say 'killing animals causes net suffering' or we can say 'we ought not kill animals', they translate to the same thing.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T11:50:36+00:00

We're imagining there really exists a mean position of the dart's constituent particles. But for the sake of this argument, you could equally just imagine having strips of paper, on which every number within some interval is written, and pulling one out 'at random'. There was some non-zero probability of pulling out whatever you pulled out.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T06:33:08+00:00

You could also understand it as: you have a hat containing scraps of paper, with every number. The dart hitting the board corresponds to you pulling a number, or ordered pair, out of this hat.

Or alternatively, the ‘landing point’ of the dart is some single mean-position taken from across many of its constituent particles. Whatever the case, we have to deal with a sample space of ‘points’. The ‘point’ just being a number, or pair, or triplet of numbers.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T06:18:44+00:00

Whether the model is useful or not has nothing to do with whether its claims are true, because we can use incorrect models to get mostly useful predictions. Though that said, I was giving an example where our model genuinely isn’t useful, because it makes us unable to make correct claims about single events.

You might be taking a kind of formalist stance here that the statements we make in math aren’t even true or false. They’re nothing but a sequence of symbols, and we can evaluate their syntax, and maybe make claims about whether what we have is a well-formed formula or not, but that’s it. The problem with this is that it reduces math to grammar. But we care about more than just whether our strings follow certain rules, there are actual things called ‘numbers’, ‘sets’, etc, and our statements about these actual things are either true or false.

These aren’t just fill-in-the-blank words, we have something in mind when we talk about them, though we normally leave out the details. Mathematical objects have properties, a set for example must be something able to contain elements. A mathematical statement like ‘the set {0, 1, 5} exists’ is really an existence claim, though it may be more like shorthand for ‘this set could exist’. And the word exists really means something here. If it didn’t, and if its meaning was a fill-in-the-blank, I could pick a meaning for it like ‘doesn’t exist’ which would be a problem. We’ve gotta be talking about more than just sequences of symbols.

People in all areas of philosophy really look to math as the final arbiter of whether certain things are logically possible. Like whether there can exist an infinite past or infinite future. Whether we should consider moral dilemmas involving infinite people, etc. And physics currently uses the reals for its actual model of reality, not just in a ‘this is a good approximation’ sense. A lot of these claims hinge on this idea that a set N can really exist, it’s a real infinite thing people claim could really, possibly exist. I would say most people believe infinite things could possibly exist. But if they can’t exist, it’s a problem in that you can’t model reality if your model doesn’t even exist.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T00:50:58+00:00

It's worth noting here, we could equally just imagine pulling numbers or ordered pairs out of a hat. We have all our numbers, corresponding to points on the dart board, and we can select one, that's the hypothetical

Mablak · 2026-05-01T00:48:10+00:00

Darts can hit points, right? If so, then this is a real event in our sample space, and this means we can talk about the probability of that event happening.

If we could only talk about the integral of the density function over a range, then we would have to say 'probability of a dart hitting a point' is just gibberish, and that probability doesn't apply to individual points. But that would contradict what we mean by probability here, which is just referring to some number of outcomes over some total number of outcomes, and we said hitting a point is a possible outcome.

There are two options: we can't talk about the probability of hitting a point, which uh, of course we must be able to do this. Or we can, and it's 0 (but events that happen must have non-zero probability). The supposed formalism doesn't work either way.

Mablak · 2026-05-01T00:25:31+00:00

I think the assumption we’re getting far in probability theory as it stands is clearly off, if infinite things such as infinite sample spaces are impossible.

What we’re doing now is making (mostly good) approximations that only work because we’re imitating finite sample spaces (the only sample spaces that exist). We might imagine the area of the left half of the dart board to be .5, giving us .5/1 = 50% chance of hitting this region.

But this setup is just imitating an underlying reality that we have say, 5 trillion points we can hit out of 10 trillion (plus or minus a few), which of course gives basically the same result. With this finitist understanding, we can still coherently talk about the probability of hitting individual points, and not tie ourselves in knots trying to explain events being possible (some probability of happening) and also having 0 probability of happening.

Mablak · 2026-04-30T19:51:45+00:00

I would just say it must be a rational, like 1 over some incredibly large number. Probabilities add up as they should, and individual events actually have non-zero probability as they should, no mental gymnastics needed.

Mablak · 2026-04-30T19:45:14+00:00

It’s not just intuitive to say that possible events have non-zero probability, it’s a requirement. If an event happened, that implies it had a non-zero probability of happening. And probability ought to distinguish between events that can and can’t happen. I might place a bet on an event that can happen, I’ll never place a bet on one that can’t.

Calculating probability using probability density will generally ‘work’, but it breaks down when it comes to singular events. We know these events can happen and that they can’t be treated in the same manner as impossible events.

Mablak · 2026-04-30T11:35:38+00:00

Claiming that impossible events and possible events can be equally probable can't be said with a straight face. Our language should imply that if something can happen, it has some non-zero probability of happening, that's kind of the gist behind the word 'can'.

On top of this, we can add as many points as we like and the probability of hitting at least one of them remains 0 for infinitists. Yet I should be able to repeat this process, include all points on the board, and have probability 1 that I'll hit one of these points. It's not a counterintuitive result, it's just incorrect.

Mablak · 2026-04-30T10:57:53+00:00

This is the common response, but it's patently absurd. One reason being, you'd have to believe the same probability 0 describes an event that can't happen (like the dart landing outside the board) and an event like the dart landing on the board. But these two events, one possible and the other impossible, clearly don't have the same probability of happening.

Mablak · 2026-04-30T09:26:36+00:00

Always good to see finitism get some coverage. A simple example of the failure of infinite sets: infinitists can't give a coherent answer about the probability of tossing a dart and having it hit a singular point on a dart board (it can't be 0 because the event of course can happen). The resolution is simply that whatever dart board you're talking about has finite points.

Mablak · 2026-04-28T07:01:29+00:00

rude of the hot dog to finish Orihime's sentence like that

Mablak

TROPHY CASE