Very glad to see the sub being run exactly as it was always supposed to be.

That does clarify the point, but I also don’t think that it’s true. It may well be that a major reason proposals for unified European rail never got off the ground before recently was that European countries rejected such proposals on grounds that it would make it easier for them to be invaded. But the rail systems in different European countries nonetheless developed independently, using different technology and standards, mostly (arguably) in the 19th century.

This complex process doesn’t reduce to 20th century FUBAR, even insofar as diplomatic and security considerations were involved in its evolution (and yet of course beginning in the 19th, not the 20th, century).

My dear boy…what the fuck are you talking about

Yeah man but it’s sold for thousands of years, and the last hundred? Oh you’d better believe we know it sells

It doesn’t do a bad job of cashing out a fairly strong corollary of utilitarianism which is generally taken to be characteristic of any utilitarian theory worth its salt viz. since each of us is only one person, and the utilitarian calculus calls for us to maximise happiness (or similar), then insofar as each of us only bears moral weight equal to one (presumably equal sized) fraction of that whole, therefore our obligations to others (insofar as the happiness of others obliges us) swamp our own personal preferences. Furthermore, insofar as (without even being a negative utilitarian) suffering is very bad, the alleviation of suffering is a particularly powerful such obligation when our responsibilities to each individual sufferer are counted up.

This is generally taken to be sufficiently characteristic of utilitarianism that objections against utilitarianism frequently cite this “demandingness” as an implausible consequence of any moral theory worth having.

So in isolation it makes some sense as shorthand for a profound consequence of utilitarianism the theory which utilitarians themselves frequently stand up as a major advantage of their position, even as opponents of utilitarianism also stand it up for being “too good” and not a practical theory of action.

In reality it’s a poor description of utilitarian beliefs, as you say, because the theory is not the person, and utilitarians are, on average, slightly more petty and dishonest than the average person who just gives away something to Oxfam here and there.

Yeah, I kind of used you to grandstand about a broader point that I hoped other people who had the “yuck” reaction would see, and I still haven’t figured out how to tag people (i.e. the person above) on this janky site

Edit: I should here add that “utility” as Hume understands it is not yet the full-fledged utility of “utilitarianism” or “utilons”, which innovation is due to Bentham (only a few decades later). For Hume, “utility” is just what you’d expect from normal language, i.e. “use”, or “usefulness”. The utility of things, including principles, is in their being good or bad for us, i.e. not formally in the sense of a hedonic calculus or the satisfaction of preferences (we don’t “count up” either of these things to get an account of Humean utility).

Hume isn’t an anti-realist! The notorious “is-ought” passage in Treatise which people often take for an expression of anti-realism only goes so far as to point out what it says: that evaluative conclusions cannot logically follow merely from fact premises, so that to conclude “eating grapes is good” we also need some evaluative premise “grapes are good” alongside “grapes are red” and “grapes are edible”, or whatever.

Contemporary accounts of Hume are muddled by his long and undeserved reputation as a thoroughgoing radical sceptic, but his philosophy has two sides: the destructive and the reconstructive, where the latter is perfectly comfortable with drawing all sorts of conclusions so long as they are limited by an awareness of the limits of our powers of judgement.

For morality, Hume finds its source in our “sentiments”, but indeed not totally unlike our friend over there, he does not think that this is cause to think our sentiments don’t have force. Again not unlike our friend, he thinks sentiments may be compared for their “utility”. However, his arguments (a) unlike those of our friend, do not attempt to bridge the essentially logical gap he has merely pointed out, (b) unlike the anti-realist, take reflective judgements about utility to have force, alongside the force of those sentiments we reflect on, of an essentially real character.

Insofar as there is a resemblance, the important distinction between what Hume is doing and what our guy is doing is that Hume doesn’t try to find any master-category (implicitly, “the species” above, although e/accs place this underneath another category “consciousness”) which would ground fact judgements in science to give them force. Rather, (a) he basically asks us what else do you plan on doing, if you don’t intend to prefer good things over bad? (b) identifies the particular sources of goodness and badness in real life, and then evaluates them. By contrast, the e/acc view attempts to argue that whatever our cultural judgements are, then they are good, insofar as they are refined evolutionarily/memetically - Hume thinks culture frequently gets these wrong, frequently gets them right, that culture is a flux, not a progressive development, and he discovers the essential truth in looking at individuals, not at group level “selection” over a set of competing propositions.

Hume isn’t tied to the inherent conservatism of a pseudo-Bayesian model. Curiously enough he is a political conservative, which is arguably what makes it possible for him to (lightly) rest his semi-realist account on what he takes to be a relatively stable human sentimental substrate. But this only gives him further cause to take a genial view of the stakes of what we now call “realism vs anti-realism”: it isn’t as important as trying to be nice.

Radioactive Wolf Twinks? My God, what have we done…

or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing

This remarkable sleight of hand sticks out. The argument from the (or rather this particular) GWAS camp goes “we are detecting the genes, contrary to expectations”. There isn’t any positive assumption in favour of that camp, so failure to thus far detect the gene is supposed to motivate against its existence.

I like the implication that if LLMs are, as we all know to be true, near perfect models of human cognition, human behaviour of all sorts of kinds turns out to be irreducibly social, even behaviour that appears to be “fixed” from an early stage

I’ve just dipped in and out of it all day - I can’t look away! It’s better than a car crash: you can slow down multiple times

I didn’t ask you to apologise for using an “ageist slur”, I asked you, of the particular affects you adopted in your opening gambit here, which corresponded to how you really feel. You adopted a tone and verbiage which implied you were, as I put it, “amongst friends”, but on the other you also tried to suggest you didn’t actually know anything about SneerClub. On that other hand, you set yourself up as in favour of everything rationalism except this one tiny thing, but back on the first and again here you’re suggesting that you know pretty well where you are (re: “mainstream”, and SneerClub’s alleged favouring it against rationalism in general). My suggestion was that this muddle of cant implies a fundamental dishonesty: you’re hiding all sorts of opinions behind a borrowed language of (at least in its original context: passive aggressive) non-confrontation. Most of that is well confirmed when you slip into this dropping of “sir”s and openly passive aggressive apologising just because I was explicitly impatient.

The world doesn’t slow down but it turns smoother when you just say what you mean or decide you didn’t have anything to say in the first place.

Look back at that guff about “discovering reality”, now if that isn’t just the adderall talking it’s a move you make when you don’t particularly like somebody but you want to make them look or at least feel a little bad for not being appropriately high-minded. “High-minded” here would further translate into real demands as “getting with the right programme”, to the exclusion of what your opposite partner was doing - in this case, allegedly, scoring points “off each other”. “Off each other” was another weasel phrase: you know that at least at first blush you weren’t scoring points off anyone, so you also know that the only remaining target of that worry could have been SneerClubbers.