Depends - do you have crypto?

I see. No, I don’t think I have any specific questions at this point.

carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side.

Not necessarily. Someone dying isn’t the same as someone not existing at all.* It does imply that the world would be better off if it stopped existing, and under some assumptions implies it’d be moral to, say, instantly end all of humanity. I’m not sure that these conclusions are necessarily “contrary to our instincts”.

*one reason why this has to be true, is that if we didn’t distinguish between those, then if an average life had positive value, it’d be immoral not to have as many children as possible, until the marginal value of an extra life fell to zero once again (kind of like how Malthus thought societies worked, except as a supposedly moral thing to do). That conclusion is something I do consider very contrary to my instincts.

I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.

I too am an utilitarianist, sure. I’m not sure I can possibly buy “maximum suffering and no happiness” being the zero point. I very strongly feel that there are plenty of lives that would be way worse than dying (and than never having existed, too). It’s a coherent position I think, just a very alien one to me.

That’s literally true, but the simple counterargument is that the happiness/suffering conversion coefficient is a matter of one’s values and not particularly up for debate - so there’s nothing incoherent about, say, the position that your child living a happy fullfilling life for a thousand years but stubbing their toe once is enough suffering to make their life net negative.

This is a great comment. I’ll add that anyone thinking about disability ethics should read Two Arms and a Head, lest they start taking too seriously the idea that disabilities have no effect on quality of life.

I agree that there’s a lot of space between “considered disabled” and “horrible life”, but OP said “suffer their whole life” which I associated with the latter.

Is there some feature comparison of lemmy vs mbin vs other reddit-like platforms? There was some major reason why I didn’t like kbin, but I forgot why.

I feel like the tone of “There is NO option to opt out of this unit, it is required for all students to complete” along with “As as science class we will only focus on the scientific theory and evidence.” is suggesting that their religious beliefs are irrelevant when it comes to science, which is far from an apology.

Imagine if you saw an ice-cream stand with a sign saying “The price is 5$/cone. There is NO option to eat icecream without paying. We are aware that there are many cultural and political beliefs on economics. As a capitalist stall, we ONLY provide icecream in exchange for money. We are not trying to change your beliefs, but introducing what our standpoint is.”. If you saw that sign, I imagine you wouldn’t think “ah, what a totally normal shop”, you’d think “oh boy, Something Happened Here”.

This email is proactively defensive in the same way. In a saner world, this email would be way shorter or wouldn’t exist at all, because you wouldn’t need to specify that a particular unit is non-optional, etc. Your screenshot makes me think of USA as more weirdly religious, not less.

What’s so hilarious about it?

I don’t think the “scientists” circle is there in reality.

A world in which politicians actually needed to justify their actions by scientific research would be way better than this one. Yes, I know this is unreliable and biasable in a million ways, it’d still be better - it’s harder to make stuff up via a few intermediaries than to just make stuff up directly. Modern politicians are just linked directly to the twitter circle.

The simpler answer is that stock markets are way older than prediction markets and yet it’s not often that you hear about people blowing up factories or murdering people for the sole purpose of manipulating a stock. Similarly, few people would in fact go and help a wildfire spread in order to make money on a YES prediction.

You have no moral obligation to have children at all, even if they’ll predictably have a happy life. So if their life will instead be predictably horrible (or if they will predictably ruin the lives of the people around them - plenty of severe mental disabilities seem much less horrible for the people themselves than for their caretakers), it’s very reasonable to avoid it.

Thanks, I’ll keep that take in my pocket for later. “Your honor, you can’t possibly prove that in the future a superintelligence won’t be able to reconstruct enough of the victim’s brain to resurrect them, and hence they aren’t dead and I can’t have committed murder!”.

I’m very happy Servo exists but if they want, like, a working browser, it’s no wonder they chose Chromium.

For comparison, from a recent Servo blogpost: “Servo can now run Discord well enough to log in and read messages, though you can’t send messages yet. […] We now support enough of XPath to get htmx working.”.

Servo has been in development for 7+ years and it’s still not able to render modern web. Maybe it never will, since it’s impossible to build a new web browser.

That’s true, though the simple solution is to not be on such platforms. You do not have to let them “shove it in your face until you can’t help it”.

This post is currently top-1 when sorting by controversial. Objectively amazing bait.

I use Firefox (and forks) myself but wouldn’t donate to it. It’s like Wikipedia - a great project with a shitty parent company which’ll spend all of your donations on shit projects.

…that’s not fascism and not genocide denialism. Comments like yours are exactly the reason why the words “fascist”, “genocide” and many others don’t mean anything anymore, instead being used as generic terms to insult one’s ideological opponents with.

I’m not aware of how exactly blocking works there, but if it’s similar to China and Russia, consider subscribing to a VPN provider that supports stealth proxies (e.g. Shadowsocks or VLESS); that’s harder to block.

…this screenshot is from lemmy.world.