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> A gun held against my head will prevent me from thinking about my life, or my future - I can tell you that I wouldn't be thinking about my upcoming physics ex

> A gun held against my head will prevent me from thinking about my life, or my future - I can tell you that I wouldn't be thinking about my upcoming physics exam in such an event! Natural selection is holding a gun to everyone's head, every day of their lives. In order to be able to think of other things, they need to have some time where they're not directly thinking of survival. No human that has ever lived has had one of their ancestors choose suicide before reproductive age (or without preserving their genetic material, I suppose). This is an enormous weight of genetics. As long as survival is involved there can be no truly freely entered contracts. It's naive to argue that people can just choose to die, instead. Example: I notice that you are starving. Here's 5 dollars to perform a sex act that you and your society consider degrading. It's your choice. It would be naive to consider that a free choice. It would also be a mistake to construct a system where this is a common occurrence, because of some inflexible and unrealistic ideology. > No matter the magnitude, it's bad for your existence This is a sign that you're engaging in all-or nothing religious thinking, which is shallow at best, and disastrous when implemented in the real world. Dying is the worst thing for your existence.

maxharris 16y ago
> Natural selection is holding a gun to everyone's head, every day of their lives. Natural selection gave rise to our (and every other species), but it is not a conscious entity capable of threatening us in any political sense. Calling bad genes a form of political force is to commit the same epistemological error as someone that maintains that the gravitational force of the earth of his body is a form of political force. See my other post(s). > This is a sign that you're engaging in all-or nothing religious thinking Developing and expressing thoughts clearly (which is what "all-or-nothing" thinking is) is antithetical to religious thought. When an engineer that says "yes, this bridge will stand, absolutely, for this amount of time, assuming the following conditions" is engaged in all-or-nothing thinking (Newton's laws are contextually absolute.) To call this religious thinking is absurd.
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  > Calling bad genes a form of political force is to commit the same epistemological error ... This is interesting and telling. I've done no such thing. You seem to be focused entirely on this notion of political force, whereas I'm not. This is what I mean when I point out that you're placing ideology above any practical or empirical concerns. We did not start out talking about political force. It's only vaguely related to my argument, yet it seems to be very interesting to you. From my side it appears that I've triggered one of your auto-rant keywords. Until your most recent response, it wasn't clear to me that I was responding to a human rather than a chat bot. Here's is my point, again, so we can stay focused: relieving some of the pressure of immediate survival does not reduce creativity nor innovation. In fact, as demonstrated throughout history, creativity and innovation (as opposed to just cunning) require that people have spare time that they're not devoting purely to survival. Surely you must have heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. > Developing and expressing thoughts clearly (which is what "all-or-nothing" thinking is) Well, I suppose we're all free to choose our own definitions, but this is quite the abuse of the term. "All or nothing thinking" is generally understood to mean the inability or unwillingness to recognize that nuance matters in discussion. There are many ideas that can be expressed clearly, but that are wrong. While removal of nuance may result in a clearer message, it rarely results in clearer thinking. This is the peril of the sound bite. "For every complex question there is an answer that is simple, obvious, and wrong." Could you please start providing some evidence or anecdotes for your claims (not parables). If you can't at least do that, I'm not really interested in continuing this discussion, as it's essentially a rant.

maxharris 16y ago

> Natural selection is holding a gun to everyone's head, every day of their lives. Natural selection gave rise to our (and every other species), but it is not a conscious entity capable of threatening us in any political sense. Calling bad genes a form of political force is to commit the same epistemological error as someone that maintains that the gravitational force of the earth of his body is a form of political force. See my other post(s). > This is a sign that you're engaging in all-or nothing religious thinking Developing and expressing thoughts clearly (which is what "all-or-nothing" thinking is) is antithetical to religious thought. When an engineer that says "yes, this bridge will stand, absolutely, for this amount of time, assuming the following conditions" is engaged in all-or-nothing thinking (Newton's laws are contextually absolute.) To call this religious thinking is absurd.

JabavuAdams 16y ago
> Calling bad genes a form of political force is to commit the same epistemological error ... This is interesting and telling. I've done no such thing. You seem to be focused entirely on this notion of political force, whereas I'm not. This is what I mean when I point out that you're placing ideology above any practical or empirical concerns. We did not start out talking about political force. It's only vaguely related to my argument, yet it seems to be very interesting to you. From my side it appears that I've triggered one of your auto-rant keywords. Until your most recent response, it wasn't clear to me that I was responding to a human rather than a chat bot. Here's is my point, again, so we can stay focused: relieving some of the pressure of immediate survival does not reduce creativity nor innovation. In fact, as demonstrated throughout history, creativity and innovation (as opposed to just cunning) require that people have spare time that they're not devoting purely to survival. Surely you must have heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. > Developing and expressing thoughts clearly (which is what "all-or-nothing" thinking is) Well, I suppose we're all free to choose our own definitions, but this is quite the abuse of the term. "All or nothing thinking" is generally understood to mean the inability or unwillingness to recognize that nuance matters in discussion. There are many ideas that can be expressed clearly, but that are wrong. While removal of nuance may result in a clearer message, it rarely results in clearer thinking. This is the peril of the sound bite. "For every complex question there is an answer that is simple, obvious, and wrong." Could you please start providing some evidence or anecdotes for your claims (not parables). If you can't at least do that, I'm not really interested in continuing this discussion, as it's essentially a rant.