What is scary to me is that at his age, given the opportunity, I would have done the same thing. I was active in the Purdue Libertarians, a student group.
The moral calculus is very simple: taxation is theft, the ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how many people would die. The theft must stop.
Cf. with abortion: Abortion is murder, so it must stop. The ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how much suffering the banning of abortion would cause, abortion must stop.
What these have in common is a phenomenon which Orwell talked about in his "Principles of Newspeak" essay. If you make words like "theft" and "taxation" to be synonymous, or "abortion and murder" to be synonymous, you blur over the endless richness of meaning that English has. You destroy meaning which are useful in tracking features of reality--and you destroy meanings which could refute your position.
At the age of 23, I had completely bought into it. I would have cheerfully consigned those 14 million people to die. At 23, I knew exactly which lever to pull in trolley scenarios.
What is even more scary is this: would I ever even have been able to let myself realize I was wrong? Or would I have spent the rest of my life rationalizing? How, exactly, do you admit to yourself that you consigned more people to death than Goebbels? Would it even be possible to express any kind of empathy without feeling the weight of so much guilt that it would cause you to be so traumatized that you would never recover?
The hazards of improper binding of meaning in language and experience are well known.
It so happens there was a Polish philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century who wrote an enormous tome on the subject of society and science, and the general hazards inherent to the structure of language and meaning:
His work has an extensive legacy, yet is not well known.
The subject of semantic hazards needs to be taught. Children can pick up on the hazards very readily with instruction, but are not likely to comprehend the matter on their own. Moreover they will tend to prefer to wield their personal discoveries like magic which is another hazard.
Electronic mass media have greatly amplified semantic hazards and has greatly disturbed us. We are engulfed by media that leverage semantic hazards for ill gains, and many of our leaders are blend of ignorance of the hazards or maliciously exploiting them.
As anyone who is paying attention to the AI can see, the social media industry is greedily at work on systems intending to further disturb and exploit the public mind for fun and profit, no matter the cost.
Always been particularly baffled by the concept of _anti-abortion libertarians_. I mean, they do seem to exist, but it feels like it takes a particularly messy series of mental gymnastics to get there.
rhelz|7 months ago
The moral calculus is very simple: taxation is theft, the ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how many people would die. The theft must stop.
Cf. with abortion: Abortion is murder, so it must stop. The ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how much suffering the banning of abortion would cause, abortion must stop.
What these have in common is a phenomenon which Orwell talked about in his "Principles of Newspeak" essay. If you make words like "theft" and "taxation" to be synonymous, or "abortion and murder" to be synonymous, you blur over the endless richness of meaning that English has. You destroy meaning which are useful in tracking features of reality--and you destroy meanings which could refute your position.
At the age of 23, I had completely bought into it. I would have cheerfully consigned those 14 million people to die. At 23, I knew exactly which lever to pull in trolley scenarios.
What is even more scary is this: would I ever even have been able to let myself realize I was wrong? Or would I have spent the rest of my life rationalizing? How, exactly, do you admit to yourself that you consigned more people to death than Goebbels? Would it even be possible to express any kind of empathy without feeling the weight of so much guilt that it would cause you to be so traumatized that you would never recover?
_wire_|7 months ago
The hazards of improper binding of meaning in language and experience are well known.
It so happens there was a Polish philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century who wrote an enormous tome on the subject of society and science, and the general hazards inherent to the structure of language and meaning:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
His work has an extensive legacy, yet is not well known.
The subject of semantic hazards needs to be taught. Children can pick up on the hazards very readily with instruction, but are not likely to comprehend the matter on their own. Moreover they will tend to prefer to wield their personal discoveries like magic which is another hazard.
Electronic mass media have greatly amplified semantic hazards and has greatly disturbed us. We are engulfed by media that leverage semantic hazards for ill gains, and many of our leaders are blend of ignorance of the hazards or maliciously exploiting them.
As anyone who is paying attention to the AI can see, the social media industry is greedily at work on systems intending to further disturb and exploit the public mind for fun and profit, no matter the cost.
rsynnott|7 months ago