network effects

search engines hardly index lemmy unfortunately. Probably due to having too much repeated content on different URLs.

I see no horses posted – oh, right

be the change you want to see. Post and upvote.

Help retain users by discussing more than just politics

I’m not terribly interested in electoral reform personally. It’d be nice but not at the top of my list.

As a Canadian, I engage more with American politics online because more online content is American politics than Canadian.

Firm believer that Molecular Shape of You > Shape of You

I think that we just didn’t fight the fight very smartly, and in the end it’s been weaponized against us.

There has been discussion somewhere in this tree about viability, but the word itself wasn’t used. Viability also has another meaning: the potential to someday be able to live outside the womb. I actually think the latter is more important morally speaking than the former. In a reasonable world, I would think that sensible pro-lifers should agree that if the foetus is doomed one way or another, why prevent an abortion? (Not that pro-life policies in e.g. Texas are sensible.)

But viability as you define it doesn’t mean much to me. Consider the earliest point at which the foetus is viable (could potentially survive outside the womb), versus the day before that. On the day before, the parent has the option to wait one day, at which point the foetus will become viable. Now compare this with a different situation: for the price of $20, a certain drug can be used to save a foetus’ life. Would you agree that in the latter situation, the foetus is already “viable”; it just needs a little help? If you agree with this, and since waiting 1 day is a similar cost on the behalf of the parent as paying $20, this means, the day before the foetus becomes viable, it’s already “viable” – the word has no meaning.

(If you disagree, and you think that the necessity of $20 drugs before the baby becomes viable means that it’s okay to abort it, I find that to be a strange morality, and I’d like to learn more. Or perhaps you think there’s something fundamentally different between waiting 1 day and paying $20.)

The analogy still works because the temporary loan of the kidney might have permanent consequences afterward. And it’s only an analogy. I still think those possible side-effects (save for the truly serious ones) don’t outweigh the death of a grown adult. Again, I’m not claiming that a grown adult is the same as a fetus.

I make this rather strange argument because I actually am a tentative proponent of post-birth abortions – but most people think such a concept sounds so outrageous that they assume I must be trolling. It’s generally only something people are open to considering after they can be convinced that there isn’t much of a difference between killing a fetus and killing a newborn.

Let’s put aside legality, as that’s separate from morality. I am not claiming that abortion should be illegal.

My claim is that intrinsically the morality of killing the fetus just before birth ought to be similar to the morality of killing the fetus just after birth. It’s true that there is another term in the moral equation (whatever you think that is) based on bodily autonomy of the parent, which has a dramatic change at the moment of birth. I also believe that this bodily autonomy term ought to be less than the value of a grown adult life (maybe not of a fetus though). In other words, it’s worse for someone to die than it is for someone else to temporarily lose some bodily autonomy.

Please note that I’m not sure that the intrinsic value of an 8-month-old fetus is equal to that of a full-grown adult. If a newborn baby’s life is intrinsically worthless outside of future potential – say, because they don’t have sentience – then there is clearly zero problem with an abortion at any stage. But most other people think a newborn baby’s life is equal to that of an adult, and I think you can more or less substitute “newborn baby” for “8-month old fetus.”

In your analogy, I do think that the moral action is to donate one of your two kidneys. It’s an even better analogy if it’s only a temporary donation of the kidney somehow, and a yet better analogy if you had caused them to be in this predicament. In the case of a several-months pregnant person living somewhere with easy abortion access, the analogy is improved further like so: you had previously agreed to lend them your kidney, but you change your mind during the critical part of the surgery when it’s too late for anyone else to sub in their kidney (we can relax the stipulation that you’re the only match in this case; this is because I believe life is fungible at inception).

I don’t see why computation is tied to experience rate. You already pointed out examples of what appear to be higher amounts of computation in the brain not apparently tied to experience rate.

I think computation is meaningful, whereas interaction can be high-entropy and meaningless. I would probably need to consult E.T. Jaynes to have more precise definitions of the difference between these notions.

True, but I don’t agree with you in the first place that number of physical interactions is a good way to measure computation (for instance, I would consider the heat-death of the universe to be the end of computation.). I also am not sure that computation is a particularly good proxy for moral weight, I just think that without it there is no consciousness.

I don’t really use those words tbh. I just think anarchism doesn’t account for how to solve the tragedy of the commons, so a global authority is needed.

The tragedy of the commons is a general-purpose game theory concept. It applies any time there is a communal resource exploitable by multiple participants. In the abstract: any time you can do something for personal gain but for the detriment of everyone overall. Admittedly, in the case of unsafe dumping, the resource must be unintuitively defined as the cleanliness of the river or something like that, but the same principle applies as in the more clear-cut (heh) example of foresting.

(Wikipedia claims pollution is a “negative commons”; the theory still applies, but the resource is defined strangely.)

Measure theory can still describe the volume of fractal shapes, for instance using squeeze theorem if you can find an iterative upper and lower bound. Just because something’s surface area isn’t well-defined doesn’t mean the volume isn’t. Similarly, the coastline problem may preclude meaningfully measuring a country’s perimeter, but its (projected) area is still measurable.

I am correctly using tragedy of the commons. A well-understood solution to the tragedy of the commons is regulation. This is equivalent to saying a lack of regulation can cause the tragedy of the commons.

Measure theory was discovered to be able to say that a rock twice as large as another rock can be accurately described as being twice as large as another rock, even if it’s not discrete. (Detractors will point to the paradox that something can be cut up and reassembled to have more measure with a finite number of cuts, but the cuts have to be infinitely complex so it doesn’t apply in reality.)

It sounds like you’re basically saying competition is the problem. But competition has benefits and downsides; one of the downsides is tragedy of the commons, which I think is bad enough it warrants eliminating capitalism all by itself. You haven’t really provided a good argument that tragedy of the commons isn’t a real concern.

I don’t believe the death of capitalism is inevitable – that’s why we need to work hard to end it. (Edit: I guess we essentially agree, the difference is fatalism?)