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I see! I think we largely agree then.
It does depend how you explain yourself, but in the end, you're just wording the same thing (the same preference) differently, and that's still assuming that you know the reason of your own preference, and that they have a reason.
The logic seems to be "when the truth looks bad, it is, therefore you must pretend otherwise", which adds a useless layer on top of everything obscuring the truth. The truth isn't always more valuable than pleasant lies, but when this constructed social reality starts influencing areas in which it does matter (like medicine, general science and ways of doing things, like parenting), I find that it's harmful.
I'll also admit that I don't find preferences to be a problem at all. Even though most preferences are shallow (occuring before conscious thought). I think both lying about them and inferring something from them is more harmful. All this perceived intent where none exists is what causes aspects of life to be so unappealing. I find most peoples perceptions to be unhealthy, by which I mean lacking in innocence, resulting in a sort of oversensitivity or tendency to project or interpret negative signals.
This is sort of abstract, but if we assume that racism is solved by not seeing color, then moral evil can be solved by not looking at the world through such a lens. Favorable and unfavorable outcomes will still exist, the dimension of "pure/corrupt" feelings associated with things will just disappear. This may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater though.
david-gross on David Gross's ShortformThis is a brief follow-up to my post “Redirecting one’s own taxes as an effective altruism method [LW · GW].” Since I wrote that post:
Thanks for letting me know!
qwertyasdef on D&D.Sci Long War: Defender of Data-mocracy Evaluation & RulesetI'm not surprised my submission did badly since it was the easiest thing I could quickly come up with after seeing that I was already late. I wasn't quite expecting to be unable to come up with anything better though. After looking at other people's comments I'm particularly disappointed that it never once crossed my mind to try analyzing single-soldier combats. I was explicitly trying to figure out the effect of one soldier of each weapon, and I had a histogram of the number of soldiers per combat from which I could have easily gleaned that there were lots of single-soldier combats to investigate had I thought to do so, but instead I tried to analyze the win rates of (some combination of weapons) vs (some combination of weapons) + (1 more of the weapon I'm trying to investigate) and running into trouble with the fact that that extra soldier is also correlated with an increased alien threat and didn't know how to tease the two effects apart.
alex-k-chen-parrot on Environmentalism in the United States Is Unusually PartisanBill Frist, the former Republican Senate Majority Leader under Bush (even though he had a LCV score that was low), is now at the Nature Conservancy and seems to frequently speak out on environment and climate change issues. That said, his kind of Republicanism is now way out of vogue.
mike_hawke on mike_hawke's ShortformThere are things I would buy if they existed. Is there any better way to signal this to potential sellers, other than tweeting it and hoping they hear? Is there some reason to believe that sellers are already gauging demand so completely that they wouldn't start selling these things even if I could get through to them?
alex-k-chen-parrot on What comes after Roam's renaissance?No one mentioned Remnote? It's the one Roam replacer that seems to beat Roam on many of the things it was good at.
I way prefer remote storage, having lost a hard drive before, so I don't like Obsidian much.
danielfilan on Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel's ShortformLinks to Dan Murfet's AXRP interview:
When I accuse someone of overconfidence, I usually mean they're being too hedgehogy when they should be being more foxy.
erioire on Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?You're right, "objectively" doesn't fit as well in that statement as I thought.
That is how I intended 'convincing' to be interpreted.
For almost every category of X, you'll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn't consciously choose any of them.
It depends on if X is a demographic/group or a variable. "I don't want to date people who are [uneducated/from a drastically different cultural background]" sounds a lot less politically correct than "I want to date people with whom I estimate a high probability of mutual relationship satisfaction." because you don't have to explain your criteria to everyone.
I admit that's more semantic obfuscation of judgement risk markers than it is mitigating the problem.