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.
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.)
This is all confused. You're trying to collapse the distinction between the objectively best action and the most prudent action based on your own knowledge. All consequentialists agree that there is a distinction between these things and that, since it's impossible to act directly on the former, consequentialists should do the latter. You're arguing against a theory no one actually holds.
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.
Placing more emphasis on the agent doesn't mean they completely ignore the consequences of your actions. If they didn't at least tell you to promote good consequences all else being equal, they would be completely insane moral views.
Again, the one exception being subjective consequentialism, which considers the act as the agent intends for it to be.
The best forms of consequentialism do hold intent to be morally relevant. That doesn't make them "subjective consequentialism" because there is more than one moral property. Intent is relevant to evaluating whether an agent has erred morally (as opposed to erring epistemically or picking the action that happened to have worse consequences through no fault of their own).
@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.)
