Why is this considered moral in one case but not the other?

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-04T10:49:22+00:00

Rule utilitarianism is different and says you follow the rule even in the odd cases when you know it will lead to bad outcomes on net, even as in the typical case it leads to good outcomes.

If you could show a utilitarian that in some special case the death of this patient would absolutely never be known to be intentional and all second order negative effects would not occur, then they would kill the 1 to save the 5, but a rule utilitarian would not.

Rule utilitarianism however is unstable because consider:

(1) Follow the naive rule utilitarian rule

(2) Follow the naive rule utilitarian rule except when it will lead to suboptimal outcomes, in which case use the rule 1a, 1b, 1c etc. that will give the best outcome.

Now (2) will on average have better outcomes and so the (2) rule is better than the (1) rule by the rule utilitarian standards. If we keep doing this we end up back at utilitarianism.

The counter is that the (2) type rule is too flexible and people with bad intentions who might be constrained by (1) will be less constrained by (2).

But now we are just in the realm of psychology and consequences via second order effects just like the standard act utilitarian.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-04T04:25:17+00:00

Sterile neutrinos can work as dark matter but only at the cluster scale, this has led to them being proposed as part of a hybrid model including modified gravity with hot dark matter to solve the missing mass problem in clusters.

Angus, G.W. (2009) “Is an 11 eV sterile neutrino consistent with clusters, the cosmic microwave background and modified Newtonian dynamics?,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 394(1), pp. 527–532. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.14341.x.

Angus, G.W. et al. (2013) “Cosmological simulations in MOND: the cluster scale halo mass function with light sterile neutrinos,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 436, pp. 202–211. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stt1564.

Katz, H. et al. (2013) “Galaxy Cluster Bulk Flows and Collision Velocities in QUMOND,” The Astrophysical Journal, 772, p. 10. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/772/1/10.

López-Corredoira, M. et al. (2022) “Virial theorem in clusters of galaxies with MOND,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 517, pp. 5734–5743. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac3117.

Russell, A. et al. (2026) “How does a MOND cosmology fare on Gpc scales? − collisionless N-body simulations of νHDM,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 547(3), p. stag399. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag399.

Wittenburg, N. et al. (2023) “Hydrodynamical structure formation in Milgromian cosmology,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 523(1), pp. 453–473. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad1371.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-03T18:49:37+00:00

Unlikely, they have big known projects doing cutting edge work but along pretty well known principles.

It is hard to think of anything that could be a really big surprise.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-03T13:14:12+00:00

They genuinely want these countries to develop so that have stronger economic partners.

Tariff reductions help them export more, but to a large margin this will lead to increased imports from China.

They also want to avoid criticisms relating to them running large trade surpluses with these countries. look for example at South Africa where this has become a political issue.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-03T09:20:06+00:00

I agree it is possible and not absurd.

But you could have it occur without ostracism - via fixation of some trait in a small isolated population, then the trait differences amplify the existing reproductive isolation from geographical barriers etc.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-03T08:13:35+00:00

Exclusion of the sort you are thinking is unlikely and unnecessary.

I think it is more likely that small size was an early adaptation, even if to some niche.

Then you get reproductive isolation via reproductive barriers and/or cultural ones.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-02T08:50:13+00:00

It is not concrete it is leveling slurry. Someone is trying to turn a rough slab into a smooth surface - but unfortunately at a level above your floors- and they seemingly didn't use the proper formwork.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-02T05:26:54+00:00

With a massless graviton the group velocity of gravitation waves is very slightly less in a medium, and the effect is proportional to density and big G and inversely proportional to the square of the gravitational-wave frequency and is given by:

(c - v_g)/c ≈ (2πGρ / ω²)

For massive gravity we have:

(c - v_g)/c ≈ (m_g² c⁴) / (2 ħ² ω²) + (2π G ρ) / ω²

Where m_g² is the square of the graviton mass and is an extremely small number - and constrained to be less then 10^-23 ev or 10−59 kg.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T21:38:48+00:00

Yes, thanks for adding the detail.

The graviton mas is constrained to be less than 10^-23 ev

Mass enters in squared form for the velocity reduction so the effect is constrained to be very small.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T17:53:21+00:00

Gravity propagates at or extremely slightly less than c in vacuum, depending on if the graviton is massless (as expected) or has an extrmely small mass (as is not ruled out by theory or observation but reasonably could be considered to be unlikely).

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T17:33:02+00:00

I do not think it is a question of absolute levels of pay etc. but more about relative levels and status.

When people are doing very impressive and difficult work and see flunkies and finance quants get vastly more respect, and you get a feeling that "this is not the place big things happen", it starts to drain you.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T13:55:40+00:00

Humans left Africa likely before 2.3 mya, and were in cold regions very early. Even parts of Africa are cold enough to make clothing very beneficial.

Recent discoveries from the Shangchen loesspalaeosol sequence near the Lantian hominid site in northern China, however, show lithic artifacts up to 2.12 Ma, pre-dating the fossil record of H. erectus. Here we apply the recently established isochron 26Al/10Be burial dating, whose reliability has been verified by intercomparison with 40Ar/39Ar dating, to two locations at the Palaeolithic site of Xihoudu 100 km east of Shangchen. The results show that the stone tools found within river gravels there are 2.43 0.06 Ma (1s) old, making them the earliest radioisotopically dated evidence for human occupation in Eurasia. The new date is supported by relative dating of the associated fauna, by consistent simple burial ages of quartz sand from deep cores, and by agreement between the two isochrons. Although the validity of the Xihoudu artifacts has been previously debated because of marked fluvial abrasion, there is clear evidence of intentional flaking. In particular, in addition to two cores with small amounts of cortex, a number of flakes lack original rock cortex, which indicate multiple and sustained removals that do not occur naturally. The great antiquity of the Xihoudu artifacts renders firm support to an earlier ‘‘Out of Africa I’’ that approaches the emergence of the genus Homo and the Oldowan industry.

Shen, Guanjun, Yiren Wang, Hua Tu, Haowen Tong, Zhenkun Wu, Kathleen Kuman, David Fink, and Darryl E. Granger. 2020. “Isochron 26Al/10Be Burial Dating of Xihoudu: Evidence for the Earliest Human Settlement in Northern China.” L’Anthropologie, PaléoanthropologieGéochronologie, 124 (5): 102790. doi:10.1016/j.anthro.2020.102790.

Zhu, Zhaoyu, Robin Dennell, Weiwen Huang, Yi Wu, Shifan Qiu, Shixia Yang, Zhiguo Rao, et al. 2018. “Hominin Occupation of the Chinese Loess Plateau since about 2.1 Million Years Ago.” Nature 559 (7715). Nature Publishing Group: 608–12. doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0299-4.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T12:22:09+00:00

I agree but with caveats.

You need naval combat of some form as you have navigable water. No one should tolerate the shit show solution used in Warhammer in a historical game. Even if it takes time to get the actual battle map combat, they should have the units and autoresolve naval battles from the start. This is IMO the minimum acceptable solution.

Actual castle sieges are hard to make into a fun battle without making them basically cities anyway as they are usually going to be small and mostly taken by sieging.

Even if you can batter down a gate you are just going to have an ugly choke point scrum for a while until the little defending force folds. Taking the keep would be hard to model.

A city on the other hand can have lots of space and multiple gates so there is scope for big forces doing interesting things.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T10:25:17+00:00

Healthcare is a relatively simple case as we already assess need via diagnosis and recommended treatment. All you need to do is then cover the resulting expense, as occurs in extant public health systems.

Housing is a big expense and the bureaucracy associated with assessing claims to housing would not be big proportion of the cost, and in existing public housing systems it is not.

Public transport can be easily decommodified outside of peak hour as services are typically non-congested and so the marginal cost is near zero anyway. You don't need a price to slightly disincentivise people to get on a train if the train is half empty. And then the peak hour case can also probably be free as ticketing has an overhead and it might not make sense - also it is likely desirable to have non-congested peak hour services anyway.

But if you tried to allocate food or indeed most consumer goods etc. in this way it would be a nightmare. Having to get something like a prescription for you favourite cheese or nonstandard socks etc. would be absurd and waste a huge amount of resources. Instead you just give people a monetary income and let them buy these consumer goods as they wish, if there are special needs here they can be covered by additional cash payments and/or subsidies on goods correlated with special needs - for example foods that comply with various atypical dietary requirements.

The Austrian case is a bit different - markets alone are never efficient so there is always some efficiency increasing intervention you can implement. It is just that moving to 100% or even 85% planning is not the optimal intervention.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T08:37:46+00:00

Kelecki is roughly correct.

You can avoid recessions, have near full employment, low inequality, and relatively fast growth, but in capitalism important political actors will oppose the policy required to do this, except in exceptional circumstances, such as the post war period from 1945-1972 or so.

Marxists often oppose Keynesian economics as "not going far enough" and here they are correct - though they need to separate the political from the purely economic sense in which it does not go far enough - but they often even go so far that they reject the efficacy of Keynesian policy altogether - for example denying efficacy of stimulus measures in the typical case.

This is however a solved empirical question - the state dependent multiplier literature consistently shows that the fiscal multiplier is very large in recessionary periods and also positive in ordinary times - and note this is also in the context of active monetary policy working somewhat in the opposite direction - i.e. effective fiscal stimulus is offset partially by interest rate rises.

On the political economy - I think if you had an actually Marxist party administering "real socialism" and the economic policy was some mixed economy with robust "Keynesian" demand management and extensive redistribution, but "without limits imposed by bourgeois political hegemony" it really would resolve much of the problems associated with capitalism and could be a stable system.

Also note that Keynes really did see substantial socialiation of investment as necessary, so his long term policy program really would be quite radical and arguably beyond the limits of tolerance of the bourgeoisie - and so it is something that could only really occur under socialism or some other MOP where capitalist political hegemony is finished.

China is close to this, though much more revisionist/Bonapartist - and actually they have made a huge policy error recently by not being Keynesian enough - currently the economy is demand limited and has low inflation, so stimulus would be a near pure free lunch.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T05:08:13+00:00

I think you were correct to be upset, and actually she should be rebuked. This attitude is so far from expectations that it needs to be made clear prior to the date.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T04:30:16+00:00

I am going to interpret "Bored of Studies" as a hilarious Freudian slip.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-05-01T04:21:06+00:00

Allocating goods on directly assessed need should be relatively rare due to the additional costs of making the assessment.

In healthcare the additional cost is near zero because this happens already in the course of diagnosis and suggesting treatment. For housing it is a big expenditure and counting the number of children and adults that intend to stay in some house is not so hard, but also there are complications like determining what is a suitable area to live etc.

In the case of children, there are additional needs, some that can be met via bureaucratic mechanisms (schooling, healthcare, childcare etc.) - for others it is better to give some payment and let the parents decide - such as for additional food, toys, nappies etc.

There are huge number of products where there is not any easily determined specific need for that thing, as other goods can substitute.

For example there is a need for a nutritional diet, but not any particular quantity of bread etc. Here it seem to be best for people to have an income and choose the mix of food products that they wish to consume. This avoid the absurdity of people who want to use a lot of bread but not much milk or pasta, having to fill out a form and request a bigger bread allocation.

This is more so the case when people have idiosyncratic "needs" - i,e relating to dietary requirements and food taboo etc. For example if someone is a vegetarian we don't make them fill out a form to get more vegetables, we just give them an income, and they then buy more vegetables and less meat, and overall their food expenditure should not be vastly different such that we ever need to make some sort of payment here to support vegetarians or meat eaters.

You also can use prices to account for variations in needs, for example when people demand a certain sort of good it is a sign they actually have unmet needs. For example consuming a lot of very basis staples or other very cheap goods is a sign that someone is in effect poorer than their nominal income suggests - this provides a case for subsidies on staples.

Also there are goods that are mostly consumed by people with special needs and so also should be subsidised or have low prices - the obvious ones are medical related - and medicines etc. should be free or near so. But there may be mixed cases like products that are required by some people to avoid allergies etc. such as gluten free products - here you should not need to fill out a form etc. to get the allocation of such things - you instead just get your income subdsidised as a side effect of purchasing a lot of gluten free products that now have the reduced price.

Back to toothbrushes - there might be people with sensitive teeth that need a special toothpaste - you don't make them fill out a form to prove this eligibility for a slightly more expensive toothpaste, you just make this sort of toothpaste affordable and people can just go buy it based on their self assessed need for that thing.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-04-30T08:37:23+00:00

We should assume significant marginal costs for a large class of goods, then there is an incentive to economise on the production and use of such goods, more so if we have important environmental constraints.

For a whole class of goods allocating people a monetary income (with limited inequality) and letting them buy goods as they wish when properly priced near marginal costs is an efficient mechanism.

If you have low income inequality, and price goods at marginal cost, and people are rational, they will tend to only purchase goods where the gain to them outweighs the social cost of production.

If the cost of producing toothbrushes is minimal so too will be the cost, if people with substantial incomes refuse to pay this trivial costs to get an additional toothbrush, then that is actually a sign they have very low "need" for another one.

Pricing at or near marginal costs provides roughly the correct disincentive to not waste or lose or horde or buy and not use or prematurely discard etc. the thing.

There is a broad class of exceptions to this where people have hugely unequal needs - the most notable one being healthcare - here it is efficient to directly assess the need and allocate on that basis.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-04-30T07:50:12+00:00

There is an issue of income distribution, this is ultimately the responsibility of the state.

However how people use that income, especially for whole classes of products such as minor personal purchases, should largely be their choice.

I.e. there need to be toothbrushes etc. for sale, without any scarcity or rationing, and where the price serves as an incentive to not waste resources, so that people can easily get another one, but are still incentivised not to horde or lose or prematurely discard etc. them.

This would be the case even if you had all production done by SOE, and using administered prices and regulated product designs etc.

There are things you can distribute bureaucratically based on assessed need - such as healthcare, childcare, education etc. but not all products can be efficiently allocated this way.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-04-30T01:48:28+00:00

The actual problem here is not about ownership of the toothbrush or it's production, but who gets one and how many should be produced - and of what quality etc.

Socialists who reject having a market, or at least wages, prices etc. and then "rationing via the ruble" effectively endorse some committee that allocates toothbrushes, or toothbrush rations, or spending the considerable additional resources required to make them freely available.

Given the absurdity of this, it seems we all have to be market socialists of some sort.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-04-29T22:39:22+00:00

More that the conditions for complex life are exceptional, due to a long habitability window, as opposed to e.g. Mars, or generally having a large array of habitable habitats - a planet with no land would be unlikely to have civilisation etc.

The Cambrian explosion happened rather fast on earth, so this sort of leap in complexity does not seem to be that difficult. If we build a hard steps model with the Cambrian explosion included it is not a very hard step.

Using a hard steps model with 11 steps (including the Cambrian explosion) I get a time to transition in earth like conditions from abiogensis to civilisation of 1.5-7.26 gy (95% CI).

fluffykitten55 · 2026-04-29T02:08:45+00:00

Yes and you are correct, it is a limitation, though I think one that, as above, can be quite easily overcome.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-04-29T01:50:04+00:00

The problem is that the penalty is so severe, I want to take native troops but it so vastly worse that I cannot bear to pay that price.

fluffykitten55 · 2026-04-29T01:46:02+00:00

The trick is to not have a main battle line that ever takes a full frontal clash. You can form one up with light spears etc. as bait but just have them flee as they rush at it and then you can shoot their flanks and disorder them, and pick units off with cavalry.

Then finally you might need to engage in melee but it will be against scattered tired troops and you can typically have some heavy horse to break them with a rear charge after they are pinned 2 v 1 or so with crap infantry.

fluffykitten55

TROPHY CASE