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Would very much like to read such a post. I have the basic intuition that it is a soft form of "witness" (as in complexity/cryptography), but it is not very developed.
I think it would be helpful, when dealing with such foundational topics, to tabu "justification", "validity", "reason" and some related terms. It is too easy to stop the reduction there, and forget to check what are their cause and function in our self-reflecting epistemic algorithm.
The question shouldn't be whether circular arguments are "valid" or give me "good reason to believe", but whether I may edit the parts of my algorithm that handle circular arguments, and as a result expect (according to my current algorithm) to have stronger conviction in more true things.
Your bayesian argument, that if the claim was false the circle is likely it to end in contradiction- I find convincing, because I am already convinced to endorse this form of bayesian reasoning. Because as a normative it has properties that I have already learned to make sense according to earlier heuristics that were hopefully good. Including the heuristic that my heuristics are sometimes bad and I want to be reasonably robust to that fact. Also, that this principle may not be implemented absolutely without sacrificing other things that I care about more.
5 disagree and no dislikes on a rare political position - if only the rest of the world was that sane.
Hi, just saw the old thread. Anyway as an Israeli my answer is strongly 2, though it depends what you mean by ideology. The maximum that most Israelis would be willing to give due to national security considerations is less than she minimum that Palestinians are willing to get due to national pride and ethos - in terms of land degree of autonomy, and mostly solution for the descendants of the 1948-9 refugees inside Israel
From the US perspective far easier to just deliver an ultimatum on settlement building full stop
The question is different: is such an ultimatum more likely to be accepted?
the fewer settlers, the fewer troublemakers
It is not my impression that the troublemakers come from Ariel.
Also that provides an incentive for those who live in the settlements to come to an agreement on a two state solution since that will free up their land for further building.
Here our perception of people from Ariel may differ in the other direction: do you see them support any two states solution that a Palestinian agreed to, under any realistic circumstances?
End settlement construction. Full stop
I think some nuance is missing here. I agree that the settlements were a bad idea to begin with, and that expanding to new areas is bad. But the israeli cities like Ariel in the west bank are not going anywhere, nor places like Oranit. Given that you and I know that, it must be very visible to the Palestinians and other stakeholders - maybe even by building those places even denser, while keeping other areas visibly empty and ready for land swaps. Nothing is worse for peace than unrealistic expectations.
the "policymaker prior" is usually to think "if there is a dangerous, tech the most important thing to do is to make the US gets it first."
This sadly seem to be the case, and to make the dynamics around AGI extremely dangerous even if the technology itself was as safe as a sponge. What does the second most powerful country do when it see its more powerful rival that close to decisive victory? Might it start taking careless risks to prevent it? Initiate a war when it can still imaginably survive it, just to make the race stop?
find institutional designs and governance mechanisms that would appeal to both the US and China I'm not a fan of China, but actually expect the US to be harder here. From the point of view of china, race means losing, or WWIII and than losing. Anything that would slow down ai give them time to become stronger in the normal way. For the US, it interacts with politics and free market norms, and with the fantasy of getting Chinese play by the rules and loose.
My understanding is that under Georgism the state is supposed to be payed for value increases, not for usage. And that it can't just kick you out and put someone else in a long as you pay its honest estimate of the value increase. So it is still not the same as the state owning a land and being able to sell it to the next user.
Right, missed that it makes your being there renting. How fast would the spiral be in your estimation? How fast would you lose the house in normal circumstances? By the way, I'm not sure that the tax is universally less than the rent. My understanding is that land speculation in Israel is mostly about expeting the prices to keep going up rather than the current rent.
There is a possible objection to Georgism: "what if I bought a house, and it's value have risen, so now I can't afford the tax?" I thought about a simple solution, and would like to read thoughts about it: instead of taking money, the state could gradually own more and more of the property. When the property owners dies and their children are adults, the state will sell its share of the property or take its worth from the inheritance.
I'm not sure whether our disagreement comes from different perceptions of specific populations/parties in Israel, or from you writing about current positions while I meant to write about the positions before the attack. Today, I sadly agree that it is far more than 1%. I hope and expect that the change is mostly temporary, and hope that it will not bring us to do things that we will be too ashamed of in the meanwhile.
I don't see how getting Hezbollah involved increases the impact on the Saudi deal, except by making Palestinians suffer worse casualties. Hezbollah has much less Saudi sympathy than the Palestinians. It is also a more valuable pawn to sacrifice, if your goal is just to get pictures of Israel killing arabs.
About the Lebanon situation, I'm much more sure that it will make Palestinian casualties rise than that it will make Israeli casualties rise. My impression (from public information) is that Israel is capable of destroying both Hammas and Hizballah pretty quickly if it is willing to play dirty enough. And my impression about Israel is that it care about ethics, but not enough to allow an existential threat to exist. So in such situation I expect Israel to be super aggressive against Gaza in order to end it quickly and focus on Lebanon.
Yes. Then again, eventfull 17 years passed and minds could change (I don't think it happened to be honest)
On 1, I agree that there are some Israelis that view them collectively as evil, and would harm them instrumentally without much thought. Hard to put numbers, but I guess that those are ~15% of the Jewish population. I don't think that there is more that 1% that support direct violence against non-terrorists for its own sake (as opposed to "we really want to kill your arch-terrorist neighbor, and you happen to be there too, and we really can't wait until you aren't home") even in a state of war. I don't say my opinion about it, just that it is very different from the apparent Palestinian attitude.
On 2 I agree. It seem to be a general argument for judging people relative to their society, but this question is hard in the general case. As an anecdote, taking over the and contra-brain-washing the next generation was very successful in post-war west Germany. It is hard though, and probably work only under very specific conditions.
Maybe it is more helpful to speak in terms of subgoals: Israel try to achieve security. For that, it try to keep Hammas both quiet and weak. The externality of most ways that we keep them quiet is better life for Palestinians, and the opposite is true for making Hammas weak, with larger effect size.
(I believe most Israelis also care somewhat about Palestinians having better conditions as a terminal value - though probably not enough to effect policy, except for avoiding unnecessary harm. I don't know from the inside about Palestinians attitude toward Israelis, but public information suggest that many of them wish us harm as a terminal value, even when in expense of other goals)