On consideration, I think arguments from analogy might be the single worst type of rhetorical strategy that people employ. Analogies should merely be illustrative, they shouldn't be a necessary part of any argument. If X is bad for (jointly necessary) reasons A, B, and C, then it's only relevant to say that "X is like Y" in arguing against Y if Y exhibits properties A, B, and C. But if that's the case, why bother making the analogy, and instead simply point to the fact that Y exhibits A, B, and C? The simple reason is that it's often easier to leave these arguments implicit in the analogy... but what's far more common is that people will just feel that X is bad for reasons they can't explicate well, and Y bears some superficial resemblance to X, so therefore they'll argue that Y is bad as well. Cause it just kinda-sorta feels that way.
We should know our reasons for praising or condemning something, not just have a network of affects based on resemblance to a number of "core" cases that we're reasonably sure about. But I'm pretty sure that this is how most people's moral reasoning proceeds.
Conversely, this can also give rise to the "how can you analogize between X and Y when they aren't exactly the same" faggotry that I see all the time. If X and Y are both bad for reasons A, B, and C, but differ along irrelevant dimension D, then analogizing between X and Y will reliably evoke the retard response of "wow, didn't you know that X and Y have different D? What a moron." And it's just like... /facepalm forever.
I wouldn't say that most people are dumb, but to a large extent they're too dense to be worth engaging.
David Friedman is one of the smartest people I know. He writes about interesting stuff, and his lectures should all be well-worth listening to, though I've only gone through a couple so far. But in case anyone else might find this useful...
Just a few days ago I was listening to a podcast where people were dreading the possibility that more middle-class Asians would lead to such an increased demand for meat that all our agricultural resources would go towards it and then hundreds of millions of poorer people will die or something. It really doesn't make much sense, but in any case, these types of extrapolations tend to never pan out because they always fail to foresee various sorts of innovations. Good in-vitro meat technologies would pretty much make all of these argument obsolete, however.
But my guess is that you'll still see a lot of foodie types decrying meat-eating anyways, if only because in-vitro meat is like murder.. but the real motivation is that vegetarianism is tied up with their status and class identities. It's like revulsion to smoking: To some extent it's about smoke being unpleasant, but to a great extent it's just people being effete snobs, and they would be effete snobs even if non-harmful cigarettes were introduced (as was arguably the case with e-cigarettes, which face calls for increasing degrees of regulation.)
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My only concern here is that I think if in-vitro meat becomes common, we're going to end up seeing a huge resurgence of animal rights faggotry. Moral "progress" has always been supervenient upon the underlying economic conditions, and lowering the opportunity cost of believing in the sacredness of animal life will lead to a hell of a lot of it. The next frontier, of course, will be plants' rights activists. By 2050 we'll probably have the spirtual successor of Pete Singer arguing for the necessity of granting legal protections to conifers.
I think I'm catching onto the leftist idea of calling everything you don't like "racist." Like, this morning I noticed my milk had gone bad, so I was like "god damn that's some racist milk." And then the Metro was delayed so I could say that I had a really racist trip to work this morning.
Reasonabe Persons is clearly a master troll, to whose level we should all aspire. (See the comments.)
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I'll expand a bit. It's brilliant because it's satire without strawmen. It takes positions that are seriously commonly made by climate change alarmists, and strings them together in a way that makes the whole seem weaker than the parts. It's the kind of thing that true believers would probably not recognize as satire on their own.
There are a lot of people who try to "satire" libertarians by basically making up stereotypes: "DURRR I'M A LIBERTARDIAN BECAUSE I HATE POOR PEOPLE AND NIGGERS AND THINK THEY SHOULD STARVE AND TURNED INTO SOYLENT GREEN TO BE SOLD BY GIANT CORPORATIONS", shit like that. It's pointless, though it might get a few chuckles from your retard friends. Reasonable Persons, however, is far more artistic, and demonstrates that he understands his opponents in his skewering of them.
Interestingly, I can't think of any sci-fi stories where people lived on a planet with rings. Lots of suns or moons, sure. But never rings. Goes to show that there's some shit people just don't really think of.
Obviously someone should report these parents to social services. The kid will probably grow up to be a sociopath indifferent to all forms of life. Just looks at how excited he is to eat living animals. Disgusting and unnatural.
Normally I'd just combine this with an art post, but there were actually several videos I liked this week. Maybe it's because one of the people I watch started putting up daily rankings again... and a lot of the good songs are the lesser-known ones:
Ahah. Take that animal-rightsfags. I love the comments, "humans aren't meant to eat live animals!" Derp derp derp.
Seriously, though, this does press my buttons a bit, but that's one of those things about culture: Different things mean different things to different people! Animal cruelty is troublesome not because animals intrinsically have (much) value, but because it's taken as a signal of an indifference to life in general, which can make the person dangerous to humans. But in other cultures, this signal may be more or less useful... do I believe that every family that would laugh and poke at and and eat a live fish must consist of cruel sociopaths that would get off on human suffering in general? Of course not.
I'm sure some relatively sophisticated rightsfags would say that we should still condemn meat-eating to make humans as docile in general as possible, but... well, maybe. I'm not going to get into this, but I only think that argument can be pushed a little bit.
New BhTV episode about how digital information should have an expiration date because we aren't made to process it well here. Basically, the argument is that we're way too inclined to be biased over atypical or past events which we'd normally forget/discount to be able to act properly given a huge amount of digital information on people. I'm inclined to agree with the assessment but disagree with the conclusion... I think Mayor-Schonberger seriously underestimates the extent to which are biases are not just absurd, but superficially absurd in ways we should be able to overcome.
Take, for example, the old stage advice of imagining people naked in order to overcome stage fright. I'm not sure if this has actually ever worked for anyone, but there are probably variants which have been successfully employed. Let's examine the implicit idea, however: That we should somehow take people less seriously if we imagine that they have genitals under their clothing. lolwut? I mean, that's seriously pretty much it. We're inclined to take people less seriously for any number of stupid reasons: Knowing their sexual kinks, having seen them in some sort of compromising positions, being of a higher social status in general than they are even if it's irrelevant to the issues at hand, etc. This is why having things like an old criminal record or sex tape or whatever are problematic... it's not merely that people will see these things and say, "well, I've seen you naked so I can dismiss you on all political issues", but that the way we evaluate others will be impacted in ways that are often too subtle for us to appreciate. We somehow feel that we have an advantage over those people, unless they're just completely indifferent and unashamed (a lot of people, of course, are perfectly happy to be open about these things, but these people are almost never very high-status.) And that advantage leads to biased appraisals.
So yes, people suck at assessing all the data which the digital age allows us to have on people. And there probably is some level at which we can't help but employ shoddy heuristics whose shoddiness is compounded by digital records. But there's nothing ingrained in our norms that says that we should judge people heavily based on single salient (and possibly incredibly old) events, even if that's our gut reaction, so there's room for improvement without making funky assumptions about human nature. I mean, I can certainly imagine a society where having a digital record of the silly shit that everyone does anyways (sex, drinking, emotional moments, etc.) isn't a big deal, because we wouldn't use those things as strong indicators of the unobserved characteristics that we actually care about.
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