You can help us in resolving options by spending at least 1 mana on each tweet you have an opinion on. Buy YES if you think it's a good take and NO if you think it's a bad take.
Many markets come in the form of "is this tweet a good take?" so I thought we'd try just doing the most direct possible version of that.
You can submit any "hot take" tweet, as well as a quote from the tweet or a neutral summary of the take.The tweet can be from any time, but I think more recent hot takes would be better.
I may N/A options for quality control, or edit them to provide a more neutral summary.
As a trader, you should buy any amount of YES in tweets you think are Good Takes, buy any amount of NO in tweets you think are Bad Takes. I will leave the definition of those terms up to you. The amount of shares doesn't matter for the resolution, one share of yes is one vote and one hundred shares of yes is also one vote.
If I think you are voting purely as a troll, such as buying no in every option, I may block you or disregard your votes. Please vote in good faith! But hey, I can't read your mind. Ultimately this market is on the honor system.
Note that market prices will be a bit strange here, because this is simultaneously a market and a poll. If you sell your shares, you are also removing your vote.
The market will close every Saturday at Noon Pacific. I will then check the positions tab on options that have been submitted.
If there is a clear majority of YES holders, the option resolves YES. If there is a clear majority of NO holders, the option resolves NO. If it's very close and votes are still coming in, the option will remain un-resolved. The market will then re-open for new submissions, with a new close date the next week. This continues as long as I think the market is worth running. It does not matter what % the market is at, and bots holding a position are also counted. In a tie, the tweet will not resolve that week.
I may update these exact criteria to better match the spirit of the question if anyone has any good suggestions, so please leave a comment if you do.
1,000
3.00@Najawin Cade Metz's article on SlateStarCodex/Yudkowskian rationality from 2021. One could make an argument that Metz in particular is garbage but the paper overall includes many other journalists, but he is in fact still employed there, despite a well-earned reputation and some backlash (measured in subscriber count) from his writing.
@SeekingEternity If this is why, I think it's a bad take. The SSC article is an outlier in terms of journalistic quality - you can tell by the fact that the vast majority of other articles don't receive the same amount of backlash from people who know about the topic they're reporting on. Claiming that the whole paper is misrepresenting or unethical because of that one article goes too far.
@PlasmaBallin chatgpt-4o-latest-20240903 calculated:
Nazi Germany: ~0.0115 people killed per person per year
USSR: ~0.0010 people killed per person per year
PRC: ~0.00067 people killed per person per year
So yeah seems plausible
@PlasmaBallin First of all, utilitarianism - skill issue. Second of all, I'm pretty sure Revolutionary Catalonia, while not the greatest place to live, didn't come close. Neither the USSR nor the PRC would even remotely resemble what Marx envisioned.
@Najawin Oh yeah, I totally agree (besides the diss on utilitarianism), authoritarian "communism" is nowhere near what I would consider true communism, but for sake of argument I compared the numbers for the regimes people usually think of
@Najawin I think non-utilitarianism is a skill issue, but I agree that body count reasoning isn't the best way to compare the two ideologies, especially when it comes to stigma. The reason I use it is because that's always the argument for why communism is worse - people say, "Why do people think the Nazis were worse when communists killed more people?" So the fact that this argument actually fails if you make the proper comparison means there are no longer any points in favor of communism being worse, or even just as bad, as Nazism.
@PlasmaBallin The epistemic argument is still definitive. Responses are just varying levels of bullet biting.
@Najawin Of all the arguments against utilitarianism, I'm surprised that's the one you think is good. I've always thought it was one of the worst philosophical arguments ever made. Consequentialism doesn't require you to know what the future holds (or at least, no form of consequentialism that anyone actually holds does), and if this objection actually worked, it wouldn't just implicate consequentialism, but also any form of beneficence whatsoever, which means it would debunk every sane ethical theory in existence.
@PlasmaBallin "For all finite t, it's impossible to know whether actions taken prior to time t are good or bad" seems like a rather damning refutation of any moral theory, no? It certainly doesn't generalize to virtue ethics or deontology - I just don't see how anyone could come to that conclusion.
@Najawin No, it's not even slightly damning. The only sense in which you don't know which actions are right and wrong is the sense in which you don't know which one objectively has the best consequences (i.e., not in the sense of praise/blameworthiness), but consequentialism doesn't hold that you're morally responsible for your actions having bad consequences that there was no way for you to know about. It just makes no sense whatsoever to hold the cluelessness objection against consequentialism when we already know that there are ways to maximize utility under uncertainty. That's what the entire field of field of decision theory is about.
And yes, this does generalize to all other ethical theories, unless they hold that promoting good consequences is completely morally irrelevant. Since that position would be completely insane, this is a problem for everyone (if it was a real problem at all), not one for consequentialism specifically.
@PlasmaBallin "The only sense in which you don't know which actions are right and wrong is the sense in which you don't know which one objectively has the best consequences (i.e., not in the sense of praise/blameworthiness),"
Yes, so, literally the sense that consequentialism focuses on, since it's about actions rather than the agent. So if you agree to this you agree that consequentialism is impossible to hold. (Unless you're a subjective consequentialist, but this certainly isn't the default position, and it's certainly not the case that everyone holds to subjective consequentialism. And if you're a subjective consequentialist who also dodges out of the other well known arguments against consequentialism by becoming a negative rule util, well, a subjective negative rule util is effectively just a deontologist who's lying to themselves.)
"And yes, this does generalize to all other ethical theories, unless they hold that promoting good consequences is completely morally irrelevant."
No, the distinction here is that virtue ethicists and deontologists both place heavy emphasis on the agent, whereas consequentialism is traditionally focused on evaluating the morality of the act itself. (Again, the one exception being subjective consequentialism, which considers the act as the agent intends for it to be.) (And, yes, deontology does place focus on the agent, or at least Kantianism does. See Groundwork, ftnt 8.) The former two have a much clearer bound on what they have to consider as morally relevant, as such.
@PlasmaBallin Supporting the US in the GWOT + Palestine + Russia is fundamentally philosophically incoherent.
@PlasmaBallin I think there’s a zone of neutrality between Ukraine and Russia as you go right of center. Otherwise it’s pretty accurate to determine what side of the spectrum a random Twitter user is on.
@PlasmaBallin even if you ignore the cringe horseshoe theory, how is pro-PRC a far right stance?
@TheAllMemeingEye You can be pro PRC in the PRC/Taiwan discussion if you're far right. Spheres of influence, might makes right, etc etc.
@PlasmaBallin Nah, it's just soviet style antizionism, which predates QAnon. (See here, or even here, which is in a leftist publication from the 80s, so has strong motivation to downplay it.)
Posting this in the comments to remind me to put it in when this reopens. https://x.com/notimetobehere/status/1845227168395297176
https://x.com/signulll/status/1843655422437097808
https://x.com/armormodechang/status/1845317972081959063
@Joshua Can you reopen this? I'm waiting to add one too: https://x.com/mustafasuleyman/status/1844464572570402992
@PlasmaBallin the first one about QAnon Palestine seems guaranteed to resolve no but the other ones are pretty interesting
@TheAllMemeingEye It's a surprisingly good point though, it's a similar level of insanity that's reached a disturbing level of mainstream penetration.
@ShakedKoplewitz I don't 100% agree with the Palestinian movement, but I wouldn't say it's insanity at all, let alone QAnon level
If it was specifically Palestinian antisemitic conspiracy theorists, then it would be a similar level of insane, but that wouldn't be exclusively leftist
In my experience the vast majority of Palestine supporters just think the much larger scale war crimes against the Palestinians are a bigger problem than the much higher intensity war crimes against the Israelis
@TheAllMemeingEye the evidence of war crimes is about as thin as the evidence for the Q conspiracy, and can similarly be traced to hostile foreign governments and media organizations working to mess up western political discourse. The view of the Palestinians as helpless victims when they consistently refused any sort of peace or de-escalation deal point blank is likewise detached from reality.
@ShakedKoplewitz I think for leftists who look at Q and wonder how anyone could possibly be so stupid as to believe it, looking at the "free Palestine" movement would actually be incredibly instructive - when your media bubble (including people you trust) is awash with context-free, culturally-alifned-sounding slogans, it's just very easy to pump your arm and go "yeah that!" And not think too much about whether the facts implied are true or what the consequences of what you're advocating for would actually be.
@TheAllMemeingEye I think the tweet is referring to the more insane elements though, not just, say, people who think Israel should stop the war. It's responding to a tweet about pro-Palestine protestors singing, "Oink Oink Piggy Piggy we will make your lives shitty!" which is not something that a sane Palestine sympathizer would say. That only makes sense if they're the people who see the West as completely evil, want it to be destroyed, and see support for Palestine (likely including Hamas) as part of that project. The tweet maybe should have been more specific in stating which pro-Palestine leftists are the left-wing version of QAnon (I think the Hamas supporters probably fit that bill).
@PlasmaBallin personally I would consider that extreme lack of specification to be sufficient to make it a bad take, but your mileage may vary
the evidence of war crimes is about as thin as the evidence for the Q conspiracy
Bombing civilians is a war crime, right? Even Israel, with their huge incentive to under-report, admit at least 16k civilians were killed (~5 x 9/11 death toll) (https://www.voanews.com/a/israel-publishes-new-civilian-death-toll-in-gaza/7622032.html), meanwhile Gaza are reporting more like 42k (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker)
The Hamas war crimes were, as I said, much more severe per victim, but outright denying what the IDF did is kinda unfair
@TheAllMemeingEye I am not an international law expert, so take all of this with a grain of salt.
But as far as I understand it bombing civilians is not a war crime. Targeting civilians is a war crime. The IDF, like the US fighting ISIS, is targeting that terrorists that operate from civilian areas. It clearly does not intend to kill civilians, facilitating evacuations of civilians from conflict aid and facilitating the delivery of aid into Gaza. This is allowed by the laws of war.
That said there are more credible accusations of things that would possibly be considered war crimes. For example, if the IDF was trying to starve out and dismantle the Hamas fighters in northern Gaza by restricting food aid into North Gaza and inducing the civilians to evacuate, I think that might be considered a war crime. It looked a few weeks ago like the IDF might have been going in this direction, and the Biden administration was mad about it. Whether because of pressure from Biden or another reason, they seem to have reversed course and are now talking about using private contractors to distribute aid from North Gaza.
It's not certainly genocide and it's not even ethnic cleansing, as Netanyahu has said explicitly he does not want to resettle Gaza. There is no intent to destroy the Gazan or Palestinian people and no intent to make North Gaza ethnically homogenous. Perhaps the IDF wants to make North Gaza a closed military zone. But this is at least a somewhat credible "war crimes" allegation. This is one example. The IDF does a lot of things. Some of them might be considered war crimes. Collateral damage is not a war crime, no.
Another point is that just something is considered a "war crime" by some lawyers doesn't mean it's bad. In the same way just because something is a crime doesn't mean it's bad. Except international law is much more fake than usual law because there is no way to enforce it. Israel is not a signatory to the ICC. The ICC's things are only binding on member states. What's a war crime and what's not? It's just determined by some lawyers, basically. Perhaps many of the things the Allies did during WWII to beat Hitler would be considered war crimes today, though conveniently international law as we know it today wasn't a thing until after WWII. That doesn't necessarily mean they were not worth it.
Is starving out the Hamas fighters in North Gaza worth it? I mean, I don't know. If it will cause all the civilians to evacuate to where there is more aid and remove Hamas and end the war more quickly then it's worth it. If they will just all starve and there are hundreds of thousands of famine deaths it's not. But anyway, this question is independent of whether it's a "war crime". And it appears Israel is moving away from this in any case, and moving towards having private contractors who are not UNRWA distribute the aid, which is a better way to ensure that civilians don't starve but Hamas doesn't steal the aid. Israel is obviously not trying to starve civilians to death.
I don't know exactly what's considered a war crime and what's not. But I think that Israel's war against Hamas is a just war.