Pepin

I think it depends a lot on the people. I don't think the vast majority of people would do well with that sort of relationship, but I think it can work in a small number of cases.

A child may know what buying a house means and what getting a mortgage entails, but they don't really understand it. Signing a contract with a five year to lock them into buying a house 15 years from now would be silly because even if the child can correctly interpret all of the terms and conditions, the child doesn't at all understand what they are getting into. The components of neurological development are very complex, which is why I use the high order concept "understand". A lot of it has to do with the perception of time. Eh, I am not really willing to make take this argument any further. If you're interested, look into child development.

Context would be needed to determine that. For instance, someone having sex with their drunken spouse is acceptable in general because of the nature of the relationship. The spouse would have sex with their partner regardless of being drunk, and their marriage is proof of that. On the other hand, someone who goes to a bar and takes advantage of drunken people are not acting ethically because the relationship is different. It is unlikely that the sex would occur if both parties were sober. It is akin to getting a drunken person to handle over all their money to you, though they might have said yes, you really don't have permission. The issue gets more complex than that since many people intend to get drunk and have sex when they go out to bars. I think there is a clear moral line in the extreme, but it also gets hazy It is kind of like abortion in that aborting very close to birth is pretty messed up, while aborting when it is just a couple cells is not an issue. I'd suggest that where it is hazy ought to be considered aesthetic ethics and that the behavior ought to be discouraged. In the case of abortion, discourage any grey behavior. In the case of sex with intoxicated people while sober, it is more messed up to do it the less you know them and the more intoxicated they are. Someone who has a little buzz can likely reason enough to give consent, but it gets more confusing when you get past that. A general rule might be "would you let them drive you around in this state?". I'm honestly a little unsure how I would phrase this argument in UPB type language. It isn't really a clear cut case, but I'd argue that the extremes are black and white.

Possible? Yes. Likely? Not at all, especially when considering life on earth. You'd either need: 1. An intelligent life form sending out self-replicating molecules across the universe. 2. A planet with life being hit by an giant asteroid, with some of the basic replicating molecules remaining intact until they can replicate in another planet/comet. 3. For self-replicating molecules to form on comets or asteroids. I refer to it as "self-replicating molecules" because it would be highly unlikely that any specialized organism could transfer to another environment and remain intact. It is would be kind of like transferring koalas from the trees, into a volcano. Also to add, I'm assuming that the molecules have some capacity for natural selection. Table salt and other crystals are self-replicating, but they don't really have the capacity to evolve. Dust on the other hand is a crystal which replicates with high accuracy, but can make mistakes, which could allow for some sort of natural selection. Number 3 could have some basis as the building blocks for life can sometimes be found on comets and asteroids, but whether there is self-replicating molecules is unlikely. If there are, it is likely from a planet exploding as in point 2. The big issue with the idea in general is time and space. Space is unimaginably large. To transport a self-replicating molecule would require to the ability to withstand thousands upon millions of years of cosmic rays bombarding it. It's not that it is impossible, just less likely the further you go out. With that said, another large factor is to consider the size of the observable universe. It is very likely there is a lot of life out there, and it is very likely that some life has migrating via the points above or through other means. With an observable size of 13 billion light years, we can assume that if anything can happen, that it has happened once at least somewhere, even if it is almost impossible to actually confirm due to the sheer size of space.

Kind of. There are studies that show that women work less than men for any particular job. Men will work more overtime, cover more shifts, and so on. As a result, they get larger raises since employers really like it when employees work extra. Some of those stats can be found in the FDR presentation on the wage gap. I had a discussion on a forum about minimum wage back in the day and pointed out that if women were as productive as men and made less, that companies would hire more women and gradually get rid of the men. Someone actually linked me a couple of studies about that actually happening at call centers. The women tended to be better at the job and they were also on average paid less, so over the course of time these call centers became mostly female staffed. I wish I could find the link to this, but I am having trouble searching past all the recent pay gap articles. What I really don't think people understand is that if men are really making more than women for the same productivity, it does not necessarily mean that they are being underpaid, rather it is more likely that men are being overpaid. The idea people have in their head is that the women in these instances ought to get raises up to the wage the men are making, but in most cases the misallocation is in paying men more than they are worth, and the solution is to pay men what women are making or less. Now of course there may be instances where women are being underpaid, and firing men is not the best way to go about it since that won't reduce the high risk of these skilled women finding higher paying jobs elsewhere. In these situations, it would make more sense to pay women more. But at least in most cases where there is a legitimate gap, I would guess that men are being overpaid.

He does have a point. Death is kind of scary. Just because you or I have dealt with it psychology doesn't mean it isn't scary, rather it is just something we accept. What is somewhat helpful but also a little disturbing is the idea that at some point, you'll want to die. This is because there are two choices, either nonexistence at some point, or existence forever.There is no other alternative, if you don't want to die, then you want to live for trillion upon trillions upon trillions of years. I think I'd be fine with living for thousands of years, but billions? I don't know how good this suggestion is as I don't have kids and I don't know how they think, but framing the question in terms of "how long would you want to live" might be more helpful. If he understands the time scale involved in living forever, he'll likely say that at some point he wants to die, just not anytime soon. That would open a conversation about how long he'd have to live to be satisfied. What would he have to see, what would he have to do, where would he have to go?

That wouldn't be a good comparison of since the unit is completely different. When we talk about reproduction, we are talking about the replication of something specific. The the case of life on earth, it is the gene. A cloud splitting into two is not reproduction as no information or physical state is copied, rather each new cloud retains its original properties. Now if the clouds split and both retained a specific shape, depending on the environment, that could lead to some natural selection as the shape that is best at creating new clouds would increase in frequency. In the case of galaxies, there is no parallel. With that said, the idea that natural selection might be applicable to the multiverse does have some weight, though there is obviously no experimental test that can yet be conceived to test it. I like the idea, but I don't think we can really get behind any idea which has no grounding. Just keep in mind that even if this was proven true, it still isn't appropriate to say that evolution was occurring before life on earth since the meaning of "evolution" would be so different. Natural selection would be a better term as it describes a process. http://evodevouniverse.com/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection_%28fecund_universes%29

2. Eh, this is where it gets confusing. Firstly, taking the item does not entail theft, since you may take in order to find the owner. I for instance will usually take it because though I think a good number of people myself would attempt to find the owner. many people will have no intention. The second part has to do with homesteading. Ownership is an active process, it is not forever. This means that once you come into owning something, you do not automatically own it forever. A good example of this is with houses. If you own a house and abandon it for 30 years, you don't really meet the requirements for ownership. If someone were to move into the house, nobody would have a problem with that. An example from my life is my current jacket. Someone left a jacket at work for about 4 months, and nobody ever used it. I asked around about who it belonged to and if anyone had used it, and nobody came forward. So I took it for myself. In a similar way, leaving a wallet on a bench for long enough time puts it into an unowned state. There is of course no objective criteria for this, but a stipulation I'd have is that it ought to be enough time for someone to realize they lost their wallet and come back and get it. That might be a day. A week would sound a little too excessive. But with that said, a wallet with ID ought to be returned ASAP. If you can't find the owner, or the owner never comes to get it, well you are free to keep it. 4. It depends. The outcome of the situation is completely different from the wallet example as there is very little ability to return the bill to the actual owner. I've been in a few situations where it is obvious that someone probably dropped the bill, and in which case I ask them if they dropped it. Where it gets more confusing is in if you don't know, as a large number of people will lie and claim it is theirs, and you have no way at all of checking. I'm saying that it is pretty circumstantial and that you ought to return the bill to the owner if you can, but if you can't find the owner, you don't have to leave the bill on the ground, especially since it'll just be picked up by someone else or blown into woods or anything else. Leaving the bill does not in the least bit mean that the previous will get it back. 5. Pretty much the same case as above. Though I may not tell someone if they dropped a penny and I won't pick it up because both would be wastes of time. Nothing immoral about not acting. 6. As I try to indicate, it is a circumstantial problem. 5 is pretty much as 4, but 5 matters much less because of its reduced value. If I told most people that they dropped a penny, they'd probably ask them why I was wasting their time. In the case of something that more people value, like a quarter, it would make sense to say something if you can.

People are paying for a lot more speed. It doesn't really make sense for companies to really sell lower speed internet, so they just sell everyone high speed. The technology isn't quite keeping up with the bandwidth usage. This is a big reason for data caps. Another reason for data caps is that many ISPs can't fulfil their advertised speed without them. With a cap, they can almost guarantee the advertised speed because it reduces the number of people using the network at full capacity. Another big factor is that demand curve for internet is pretty steep. Having fast internet isn't really a choice in most people's mind, so ISPs are able to charge more. To put it this way, they lower the price, a few people probably join, they raise the price, nobody leaves. There are also a lot of issues with monopolies and laws against competition. Some of it gets pretty confusing because a town or city without high speed internet will strike a deal with an ISP pretty much saying that they will get a monopoly over the area if they bring high speed internet to the area. In most of these cases, I think the price of internet could be argued to be lower than it ought to be, because without the deal there would be no internet there at all. Governments in general are really pushing super high speed internet for some reason. I think a lot of the increasing costs is just the result of governments pushing ISPs to go faster despite the demand.

There are a number of of selection biases like the one you pointed out. Two others is that people with higher IQs are more likely to post their IQ, and that topics like philosophy and science tend to attract those with higher IQs. Personally, I need a large amount of intellectual stimulation each day. I don't think UPB or the NAP are too difficult to understand as children have a very easy time universalizing rule, though there will of course be some small percentage of people who will not be capable of understanding even simpler theories. A big reason why the topic of ethics seems to be so confusing is the large number of theories which ask questions that don't have a high relation to reality. Whenever I get into debates, most of the conversation is answering objections from just about every ethical theory ever. What is weird is that I am 99% sure that they wouldn't know where that idea came from or what it is called. It is kind of like how Ayn Rand talked about various philosophies being brought into the social vocabulary through cultural mechanisms. It is really doubtful that a person who says "you have to suffer to be moral" has read Kant, but they somehow picked up that theory. Utilitarianism is a word that I don't think many people would know, yet if you say that someone ought to keep what they earn, the response "wouldn't him giving up his excess wealth make everyone else happier?" is inevitable. I think it is like how people have knowledge of the bible without ever reading it.

You're from Maine too?!

The preceding question would be "is true altruism possible?", which has been the focus of much philosophical writing. The qualification "true" differentiates it from instances which appear altruistic, but actually aren't. In biology for instance, the term is used to describe interactions which appear to increase the survival of the benefactor while decreasing the survival of the altruist. It always ends up that it is beneficial to both, and most to the one who is altruistic. The issue with altruism in regard to humans is that it always requires the judgement of the altruist. If it did not, as in the person was just following orders like a program follows code, then there would be no altruism or selfishness to be found. To act in an altruistic manner is to prefer altruistic behavior preference revolves around the person's beliefs. People would call that selfish, and though it is true in a particular sense, context is needed. If altruism is defined as "valuing others state of beings to a high degree", then there is no inherent contradiction. Where the debate always becomes dumb is in asking if you can value others without concern for yourself, which is again dumb because value pertains to your values. Now that I have addressed that, I can answer the question. Selfish acts of generosity are means to an end. Doing community service may be generous, but the person wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't required. A politician may have a dinner to raise money for a disease, but that is only a means to paint a public image. As the OP said, you might help out at a food drive, but only as a means of relieving boredom or the feeling of unproductiveness. Altruistic acts of generosity are ones where the act achieves the end. Doing community service for no real reason but the feeling that you helped someone would be altruistic because the mean is an end in itself. If an activist raises money for a disease, there may have been no other reason for the activist to have that event than to end that disease. If a person helps out a food drive, what they are getting out of it is feeding people. Of course many acts will be somewhere in the middle. To be more specific, altruistic acts are ones where the motive has a high relation with the act. Not liking the idea of people starving and feeding them is altruistic because the motive and the act are in synchrony. Selfish acts which appear to be altruistic are where the motive has little to no relation to the act. Wanting to look good and feeding hungry people to achieve this desire are less connected. It is not that it won't work, you will likely be perceived as a better if you feed hungry people, but rather that the motive is disconnected from the end.

Difficult to say. One complex factor to consider is that since travel will be not be restricted, populations will become less genetically diverse with time due to interbreeding. It doesn't really matter if the rate is low, all that matters is that genes exclusive to a particular race become distributed with time. For instance, if you look at the genes of blacks in the US, you find that they share a large percentage of their genes which are exclusive to Africans, but they also share a lot of genes that are exclusive to whites. This only after a few hundred years with pretty low inbreeding rates, yet white genes are already present in the vast majority of black Americans. The reverse is also true. Of course slave rape was probably a big contributor to this, but that would just mean that the rate would be slower. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/science/23andme-genetic-ethnicity-study.html

It is because all laws are enforced at the point of a gun. This is often a focus in the "against me" argument. If you charge the man with negligent homicide and require damages to the family be paid, if the man does not pay, he'll likely receive a letter. If he ignores that letter, he'll get a few calls. If ignores those calls and people come to his house, he may kick them off his property. If people come to his place of work and ask him there, he may simply refuse to pay. If people come to take his money by force or imprison, he may retaliate with violence and in the process be shot down. The only way to a ruling can be binding upon the other person is with force. Though this is often understood with respect to government law, say if you didn't pay your taxes, it is applicable in cases where . The solution as you and others have alluded to is to not use force against the person, but to rather use voluntary means to ostracize them. Various stores and utility companies can refuse to associate with him and deny him services. Of course the man can just accept the terms of social isolation, but it is more likely that he will voluntarily comply.

It is important to put the question into full context. What you are asking is "do you have the right to use force against someone if they do not save a drowning person?".Granted that all threats of force are essentially threats of death, the question because as to whether killing a person for not saving another who is drowning is morally justifiable.

IQ is measured on the bell curve, with the median IQ always being 100. There is a wide range that is observed and it can be validated. For instance, if you test 1000 random people, about 20 of them will have an IQ from 130-140. If you find that this correlation doesn't hold up, then there is likely some adjustment needed for the model. Now if IQ doesn't fit on a bell curve, that would provide a lot of challenges to the model, but like everything else it seems to be. Most studies tend to find little correlation between environment and IQ. Wiki is a great source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Genetics_and_environment With that said, IQ isn't everything.

If IQ has some predictive power it is useful. It is like grades in college, if it gives some indication of how successful a student will be in their profession, then it has value. The predictive ability doesn't need to be high, it just needs to be high enough to matter. IQ isn't the only factor, but many studies demonstrate that it is a significant factor. If it contributes more than 20% to any particular outcome, such as income, it is a useful predictor. Also keep in mind that we are always talking about statistics when we talk about IQ. Someone who has a higher IQ will on average make more money, but this does not mean that every person with a higher IQ will make more money. For similar reasons, single studies aren't that predictive either. Where people get confused with science is that in some fields, 5-10% of studies are expected to contradict the all of the other studies. This would be true with the same researchers carrying out the same methodology. It is a result of statistics and can't really be avoided in softer sciences. I'm saying this because you are likely to find a lot of studies that don't find IQ to be useful, but you have to weigh them against all the studies that do.

To me, the idea of having my life revolve around something for about 18 years doesn't sound very appealing. There would certainly be some pros, but the opportunity cost is very very large. I might change my mind at some point, but everytime I see how much time even a bad parent has to spend with a child, I am relieved that I didn't knock anybody up. Anyway, to answer the question, I think you ought to have a reason as self knowledge is preferable. The reason doesn't need to be an airtight case or argument, but rather just a preference. For me, it is the opportunity cost. For others, it might be the lack of interest. Or maybe they don't have the money and aren't willing to make more money just to have a child.

I wasn't getting much out of that article. A little too charged and filled with framing and narrative for me to trust it.

I think you missed the part where I said I was poking fun and that I find racial identity weird, so I quoted it above. I don't understand why people identify racially, so I can't answer how or why, all I can say is that it happens and give examples. Weaboos are another good example as they are typically white westerners who identify with Japanese culture and attempt to be Japanese. Funny enough, I have heard many brunette girls identify as blond. They will say that they might have brown hair, but they should be considered blond because of how they act. There is also the act of calling someone blonde when they do something stupid or make little sense. Below is a thread I found with a quick search. https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080722144029AAMSRRw It gets confusing as it is more to do with culture and less with race, but the majority of people who are within that culture belong to single race. We make stereotypes up that "this is black culture" because many blacks are involved, and then we see it as being more of an inherent racial thing than a cultural thing. As this happens, it doesn't make sense to people for a white man to be into black culture, as to them, if you aren't black you can't be black, which just means you can't take on the traits and behaviors of black culture. It is kind of like the weaboos, it seems weird for someone to get super into Japanese culture who isn't Japanese. The issue with this is that culture had nothing to do with race. Race certainly does determine some things, but what people think of as being white, black, Hispanic, our whatever is more cultural than it is racial. If we were to talk factually identifying with a race, it would be more like "I burn up in the sun so easily that I identify with gingers because we share the same plight". I would be more in favor of just culture without the racial tags, but that may not be how humans work.

You'd probably want to look into a book or an online lecture series. I wouldn't be able to explain that, but I know if I could that it would be a massive wall of text.

I'm not sure why heterosexual is a requirement as it isn't like there are many functional homosexual or bixsexual relationships. Though, the ones that are there might be overly positive and functional as a means of arguing that non-straight relationships can be positive and functional. Anyway, a major reason why they are not very common is that most writers are not capable of writing about something they have no experience with. To compound the problem, with the few people who have had a functional relationship, what is the probability that they are going to be a good writer? Relationships in movies, books, and any other medium are extremely difficult to write, and even if they can write it, the issue of getting published is amplified when most people aren't going to be able to relate to functionality. If you put 100 people up to the task of writing an average love relationship, only 1/100 might come up with something decent. This is a major reason why writers avoid the topic of love and relationships, and instead insert this "love at first sight" and "instant connection" stuff. When someone actually tries their hand at a love functional relationship, it really tends not to work out and comes off as unnatural. If someone looks up what a functional relationship is according to psychology and they create a relationship around it, it seems fake. Lets put it this way. The book Of Mice and Men is said to portray a story of friendship. This is what the book was said to be about back when it came out, and that is what I learned in school. This is what people see in the book... Is it? No. The book is about a dysfunctional relationship where the caretaker regularly abuses the vulnerable and in the end shoots him to pursue his dream on the farm. My argument is essentially that functional relationships are in low frequency, that the people who can write about those relationships are likely not good writers, and that they few good writers that can write about it will hit a large barrier because most people won't relate. I'm not saying that they don't or can't exist, but rather that they are going to be very low in frequency, at least until functional relationships become more common.

Personally, my skin color is white, but I identify as African American. You see, when a person's genetic makeup is aligned with the race they identify with, say if someone's skin color and or ethnicity is asian and they identify as being asian, they are biorace asian. It is possible for your racial identity to diverge from your race. For instance, Barrack Obama's genetics point towards him being biracial, but he identifies as black. Although he has genes in common with whites, he does not identify as being white. This is portrayed in the media quite often. For instance, Carlton Banks for The Fresh Price of Bel-Air is genetically black, but identifies as being white. This is exemplified in an episode where they flash back to the past, and Carlton is set into shock when his mother tells him that he is white. But to be serious, my skin color is white, but I don't derive any of my identity from my skin color. I am often told that I am extremely white, and I don't doubt that I fall into the white stereotypes, but I could care less about my race. If I was part of some race that went through some slaughter in the recent past, I wouldn't feel more connected to that event just because I share a few more genes with them, rather I would have the same emotion that I do with everyone. I'm not saying that I am color blind as that would be somewhat akin to being gender blind, rather I don't accept the concept of generating identity through accidental properties. I'd instead prefer to derive my identity through means that I can control. With that said, I don't know if racial identity ought to be a thing or not. Though some of the above is intended to poke fun at sexuality theory, people do derive aspects of who they are from their genetic makeup, and sometimes it diverges from what people typically associate with that genetic makeup. I can't make sense of why anybody would do that, but evolution might be involved.

It is tough. I think the fact that the question "what would it actually mean if others thought I was imperfect" makes sense to you is a clue. Rationally you understand that you are not perfect, that people don't see you as perfect, but for some reason you fear not being perfect and others not seeing you as perfect. That doesn't really make sense as there is a contradiction. Though I am not one to play the childhood card that much, I feel as though this is one of those childhood things. Imagine you got arrested for being drunk in public. You are being held in jail, and you have no choice but to call your parents to pick you up. What kind of thoughts arise? How does this make you feel?

Stefan says that "you have to have an IQ if you understand FDR", and this could be a means of testing that. It is somewhat like saying "if you've made it this far through college, you likely have an IQ". The factor of intelligence acts as a natural sorting algorithm. Sharing your IQ can be fun, just as sharing personality test results, test score, our various skills and hobbies, and so on. A big question that has come up in some of the podcasts is what a high IQ means, and how people ought to cultivate it. Organizations like Mensa have come about to address this to some degree, as well as colleges, conferences, and technical forums. It could be a "show me yours and I show you mine" type scenario. As far as the validity of a survey around IQ, it is likely not to be as accurate as there will be a natural selection bias with people with low IQ's not sharing their score as often. But again with the first paragraph, it may not be likely that there is anyone with a low IQ's in this population. It could be like asking for peoples' IQ in a graduate physics class. Granted that IQ isn't something you can control, it can't be correlated with virtue, though cultivation of your intelligence can be. A researcher that devouts their mind to curing cancer has some extra virtue. Also, IQ may not be that huge of a factor in respect to a lot, but I am going with the idea due to the recent podcasts on the topic.