The Star Alasdair Gray Analysis

0 views

Skip to first unread message

Catherine Rubeo

unread,

Aug 3, 2024, 5:17:37 PM8/3/24

to engehapne

There have been past paradigms for which some of these criticisms are pretty fair. I think especially of the late-19th/early-20th century Progressive movement. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Le Corbusier, George Bernard Shaw, Marx and the Soviets, the Behaviorists, and all the rest. Even the early days of our own movement on Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong had a lot of this.

Scott is addressing his own contrived criticisms of rationalists, and not the actual, stronger, criticisms of rationalists. At best, there is some overlap. I feel like straw is an appropriate characterisation.

I think that it has a lot more merit to claim that some people hold a belief and then to address the problems with that belief, where you ask people to check whether they have to beliefs and consider your criticisms if that is the case.

Most people accusing rationalism of being a religion are not objecting to anything on the basis of it being epistemically bad. Most non-rationalists do not care about anything being epistemically bad, unless it causes clear real-world problems.

Rationalists should believe that religion is an attractor, since they need a way of explaining its prevalence without its being true, Rationalists should not causally regard themselves as exempt. Rationalists should notice that they may even have a particular susceptibility, the on Ilya mentioned, where rationalists tend to be lacking in social contact, and may therefore be tempted to start exchanging adherence for acceptance.

That is probably a factor in why atheists and similar groups, ironically, often send the cultish vibes. Because dismissing (existing) religions is exactly what one would do when trying to recruit people into their own.

As I mentioned before in another context, I am into virtue ethics (learning a model of a person), not into explicitly drawing lines in the sand (looking for rule/norm violations). The advantage of that view is you quickly get a read on a person even if no specific thing they did on its own was a particularly strong signal.

Then there was the bit about a year ago about the young lady who was basically the open mistress of some bigshot rationalist guy, got pregnant, and despite massive pressure from said guy and all his other bigshot rationalist friends to abort the baby, kept it and found herself somewhat ostracized.

Any community that encourages that sort of thinking, and regards the man as having acted properly in both requiring the initial promise of abortion and refusing child support later, deserves all the RED ALERT THIS IS A CULT RED ALERT it gets.

If my reading of that post was wrong and Ozy was donating to general charitable causes rather than to the rationalist movement then I wholeheartedly apologize. I did not deliberately make anything up, but I may well have misread it. I hope you can see that my (potential) misreading is a reasonable one to make for someone not broadly affiliated with the movement.

a) the guy tells the mistress to get an abortion;
b) the guy leaves his wife, and marries the mistress;
c) the guy makes a deal with the mistress that she will raise the baby, and he will secretly support her financially.

Imagine a gender-reversed version: a woman has a husband, and a boyfriend. One day she finds out her boyfriend made her pregnant. Despite her boyfriend crying and begging her not to do it, she goes and gets an abortion. The End. Such a non-story, right?

@Viliam
In what people around here call blue tribe culture (i.e. upper middle / upper class, urban, professional, U.S. coastal, center-left to left) it is considered uncouth, if not outright immoral, to pressure a woman to either get an abortion or to not get an abortion. For the more christian parts of the country it would certainly be considered immoral to pressure a woman to get an abortion. So for that part you have pretty broad agreement across American cultures.

I am simply fascinated to discover that apparently monogamous people never experience unintended pregnancy where the father and the mother disagree about what ought to be done about the fetus, and that no monogamous person has ever done unconscionable things due to being desperate and in an awful situation. How have you achieved this remarkable feat?

If any politican on the right or the left dared state we should remove all state funding for SNAP or K-12 education, or even community colleges, they would be kicked out of their party. The most you ever see is proposed means testing and drug testing, or vouchers in the case of K-12. You can be a Republican, and even a Democrat in some states, and be totally against abortion.

Jaskologist: It seems like your prediction is that polyamorous relationships will end poorly (whether or not there is an unintended pregnancy) while monogamous relationships will be happier (whether or not there is an unintended pregnancy). My prediction is that relationships (monogamous or polyamorous) in which there is a pregnancy and one partner wishes to keep the baby and the other wishes to abort it will end poorly. Can you explain why you think the former is more plausible? This seems quite strange to me.

I am simply fascinated to discover that apparently monogamous people never experience unintended pregnancy where the father and the mother disagree about what ought to be done about the fetus, and that no monogamous person has ever done unconscionable things due to being desperate and in an awful situation. How have you achieved this remarkable feat?

The big problem is not that they disagree or that he was polyamorous. If the father and mother were monogamous, most American communities would certainly expect the father to pay up and support the child. And it would be considered morally despicable for the community to put pressure on the mother to abort whether the father was monogamous or not.

I do not think a disagreement about an unintended pregnancy is any less likely to shatter a relationship if the relationship is monogamous. Indeed, it seems very beneficial to me that her spouse was a different person than the person who was trying to coerce her into having an abortion. Score one for polyamory!

I do not think a disagreement about an unintended pregnancy is any less likely to shatter a relationship if the relationship is monogamous. Indeed, it seems very beneficial to me that her spouse was a different person than the person who was trying to coerce her into having an abortion. Score one for polyamory!

But my other point (and I think most normal people would share my intuition) would be that you are more likely to end up with unbridgeable issues between parties in accidental pregnancies in a polyamorous setting because you can go from having only two parties involved to three. And maybe other people find differently about this, but I find the odds of an acceptable if unpleasant compromise or renegotiation drop very sharply as the number of parties goes from 2 to 3.

Also, correct me if I am wrong, but in America abortion is considered a more essential human right than having food or education (at least judging by the revealed preferences, because many people are stupid or starving, but mere accusations that someone hypothetically could make abortions less convenient are used as a weapon during the elections)

Libya is currently far worse than it was under Gaddafi. Iraq is far worse that it was under Hussein. Syria is far worse than it was pre-civil war. Afghanistan, or at least large chunks of it, are as bad and probably worse than they were under the Taliban. These specific countries are literally destabilizing the entire world right now, and I think that American interventionism in each of them bears a great deal of the responsibility for this.

The most likely alternative was that Qaddafi won the civil war he was about to win, and Libya ends up looking like pre-civil war Syria, which frankly, is not all that different from pre-civil war Libya.

It was extremely likely. He had penned up most of the people opposed to him in Benghazi and was about to invade the city to root them out. At the time of the intervention, the pro-intervention people stressed the need to intervene quickly, before it was all over.

Since the rebels in the actual Libyan Civil War was able to depose Gaddafi so quickly, is it reasonable to assume they would have probably been able to carry out a lengthy campaign anyway without US intervention, just on a longer timescale with more bloodshed for an equally dismal final result?

is it reasonable to assume they would have probably been able to carry out a lengthy campaign anyway without US intervention, just on a longer timescale with more bloodshed for an equally dismal final result?

On a minor and related note, does rationalist opinion consider HPMOR to be among-st the list of mistakes? Because there is plenty of bad writing in that work which makes rationalism look terrible. Not exactly the most sophisticated thing to attack, but it has likely reached a wide audience by now.

I enjoyed it too when I was younger. My primary point about it is the irony that the so-called rational decisions of its characters tend to be irrational, and the work generally having enough plot holes and sexism to make the rationalist movement look bad.

Insofar as he loses allies and fails to ingratiate himself with many students, I think he DOES fail badly. And he suffers from being alone/being lonely quite a bit in the story, even after he gets his army.