Comments on: Bottomless Pits Of Suffering

By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 22:07:56 +0000

If you give away money, you can help the poor stretch the money further that they get from what work they can find. If you hire them, they can’t work anywhere else. You have to give them enough to live off of.

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By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 22:05:37 +0000

How much effort do you currently go through to have a good diet? It might sound okay to say that you care more about your own health than you do about the suffering of wild animals. But if you’re like most Americans, you care more about tasty food than you do about your own health, so what you’d be saying is that you care more about tasty food than you do about the suffering of wild animals.

More to the point, from what I understand, there’s a list of amino acids you need that you can’t produce yourself. There’s one or two that’s particularly common among animals, beans, and nuts. Just make sure you replace your meat with beans and/or nuts, and you’re find as far as protean goes.

I’m told you need vitamin B-12, which you can only naturally get from animals and mushrooms, but it’s easy enough to farm the bacteria that actually produce it in animals so buying vitamin B-12 is cheap, and it’s water soluble so it’s basically impossible to overdose.

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By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:56:05 +0000

One simple test of suffering is if something starts trying to avoid whatever happened at the time of suffering. Since wheat can’t learn to avoid anything, it clearly cannot suffer. Or, at the very least, we have no evidence that something is making it suffer as opposed to feeling pleasure.

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By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:51:29 +0000

Signalling, for one. Someone who’s likely to go to prison has a reason to not want to be tough on crime, so everyone will try to be tougher on crime than everyone else so it looks like they’re not a criminal.

Also, he wasn’t referring to “the world’s most humane prison”.

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By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:48:25 +0000

If it takes that long to pay off, there are much better investments.

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By: Susebron

Susebron — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:47:21 +0000

One could view potential future selves as strangers. You can’t see them from your current perspective, certainly.

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By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:46:24 +0000

It’s a typical paradox. It’s caused by two different thought processes converging on two different solutions of the same problem, where only one can be correct. If your mind was entirely in harmony with itself, you would see no problem, but that’s not how the human brain works.

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By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:44:28 +0000

False. If the pit gods are good at predicting you, they will capture more prisoners based on how much they predict you will be willing to sacrifice to free them. If they gain no benefit from prisoners and predict that you won’t pay ransom, they won’t take prisoners.

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By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:42:43 +0000

You’re anthropomorphising the pit gods. They aren’t going to capture prisoners in hopes of getting a reward. They just release prisoners when offered a reward.

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By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 21:38:45 +0000

That only works insomuch as you expect to go to prison. Using that logic, someone less likely to go to prison would be harsher to criminals. Since it’s good to be viewed as someone who is unlikely to go to prison, people will be harsh to criminals to signal that they won’t become criminals themselves. Since they’re being compared to others who are trying to send the same signal, it causes a runaway effect where someone could easily have a harsher view on crime than someone who never considered that they might become a criminal but didn’t try to signal.

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