Carl-Richard

You are asking people to gamble their lives on a coinflip. That's not overthinking. No, you might die if you press the button. Everything won't be fine then. And the other button won't necessarily fuck everything up. It will only affect those who do not push that button, which is indeed a horrible fact considering how many are apparently supposedly willing to not push that button. But I will repeat that people may not be good at judging how they would act in a real life scenario when it's life or death from the perspective of merely thinking about it. And people are also horrible at probability calculations and statistical dependencies (forget reading comprehension). And the situation itself is highly unrealistic and hard to translate into a familiar situation. So all in all, these kinds of polls are not very insightful or useful for anything but indeed virtue signalling how good you think you are or want to perceive yourself to be in a fantasy world where you are a perfectly moral superhero where you care only about what is perfectly moral for all people at all times and your own personal life is only an afterthought or an inconvenient plot hole in the story. What you can be sure of is you live day to day self-concerned, and these philosophical ideals of "higher consciousness" and "moral actions" are most likely things you merely think about on a Sunday afternoon. If you are truly self-sacrificing, show me any tangible evidence of that in your own life. How much do you work to help others, tangibly, goal-directedly, intentionally, not merely as a biproduct or happy accident? How much of your spirituality is practiced and not just on paper?

Easy, solves world hunger (jk). You know, Marvel made a movie about this once, and the villain who pressed the button was not too uncommonly sympathized with. If half of your family necessarily gets wiped out (and it's not simply dependent on the larger Earth-wide calculus), you're kind of defeating or devaluing the point by making it personal. It's not maximally virtuous if it necessarily involves saving some of your family instead of just some random people.

Let's say porn not being harmful means porn is consistent with people being well-functioning and healthy. Is "porn is consistent with being well-functioning and healthy" a positive or a negative claim?

If you want to be real here, ethical altruism and donating all your savings to malaria prevention has something to say to you. Maybe self-preservation in a local sense is something people do all the time anyway while people die around them and they could make meaningful changes in that direction and either refuse or they already are in their own way (e.g. by providing value in their local society in other ways). In the real world, we do assume some basic level of self-preservation, that's how we survive as an individual. Questions about morality, meaningful ones, come on top of that. Engaging fancy hypotheticals about self-sacrifice and epidemiological calculus is just autistic fantasizing about things that matters to no one and changes nothing. It's virtue signalling people do on Twitter to cheer on their political Red and Blue team. Those who made the question possible, and those who enforce it, those are the evil ones It's like if somebody threathens your life, and the lives of millions of people, is that now on you to save yourself and the rest, or is it maybe on them to not threathen you? Maybe a responsibility is created in that situation, but the ultimate moral blame, that lies elsewhere.

If you push Blue and 50% of people don't, you die, along with everybody else who happened to also push Blue. If over 50% of people push Blue, everybody lives.

Here is an alternative version (it makes it simpler by removing the percentages and making the consequences more absolute and less reliant on chance): "Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If everybody presses the blue button, everybody lives. If somebody presses the red button, those who press the red button live, everybody else dies. Which button would you press?" In this alternative version, it becomes increasingly clear that clicking the blue button is not just a horrible gamble but a completely stupid move and that clicking the red button is the only reasonably safe option. In the original version, you're just making the gamble into a coinflip, which is not exactly good either. Like, why would you gamble your life on a coinflip just to contribute a fraction of a percentage to potentially saving other people who do the same? Is the gamble worth it just to contribute a fraction of a percentage to potentially saving some mentally challenged people (and presumably millions of young children)? And this version makes it clear that it's not so much the fault of the person taking the egoic and safe option, but it's the fault of the question. It's an evil question to be presented with. So maybe if you refuse to answer the question with a definite answer, maybe it's not you who are evil, maybe it's those who do who are evil.

You know, it's one thing to have a discussion about something with an open mind and coming from a place of curiosity and trying to approach a difficult question and it's another to be emotional and trigger-happy and shaming people for opinions they don't even hold. If you think you can accurately assess what you would do in a situation where there is a literal gun pointed to your head just by thinking about it, then sure, believe that all you want, but I don't think that is usually how psychology works.

That's what I'm saying. They are retarded. They are not able to think. So you would maybe take that into consideration. Yep, again, people have poor reading comprehension, we know that. Notice again that I never said you should pick any button. I said this is a scenario that would happen if everybody is rational and not retarded. They are not, which is what I continued to explain afterwards. You had an emotional reaction to me merely entertaining as a hypothetical that pushing the red button could be the most rational thing given a certain scenario, and now you assume I want to push the red button. That's again not true, I said I don't know what I would push given the real situation.

YouTube videos that have misleading titles are useless.

I'm saying you don't actually know what you would do with a loaded gun to your head. You could guess and even be right in your guess, but you don't actually know. Consider the answers to this poll (and the comments in the thread). See how many are supposedly willing to take the egoic option, taking a life even for something as measly as money. If 66% would supposedly take a life for money, how many do you think would choose to not play Russian Roulette and hope everybody else does the same? I'm saying it's hard to know, and the polls don't actually tell us much.

That's a nice virtuous position to have in theory, but will you say that as you load up to play Russian Roulette?

Because I don't care that much about which button I would press, because I realize that polls like this will never reflect the real life situation, so I honestly don't know what I would actually press in the real life situation. Instead, I care about what circumstances would most probably lead to pressing which button. Why is it clear?

Also, if this was a true real life scenario, considering the other highly egoic answers to ethical dilemmas in this forum section, most of you would probably definitely push Red. Imagine having the choice between playing Russian roulette with an actual loaded gun or simply not playing. If people choose playing Russian roulette, you would probably think that's on them. These kinds of ethical dilemmas get skewed by lack of actual real world consequences so more people choose to enact the most virtuous option because that is most attractive in that case.

Wrong about what? I think you all have poor reading comprehension if you think I was "wrong" about anything, because I didn't even say which button I would push. I only gave potential scenarioes.

I did not say which button you should definitely push lol. I said because people are retarded, they will push the blue button and maybe you should too to save them. You guys' reading comprehension is why people push Blue.

Let me rephrase: if we assume everybody understands the question and is able to push the button they intend to push, then pushing blue is the most dangerous game of russian roulette, while pushing red is 100% survival rate. If everybody understands that they will survive if they push the red button (which they will) and they all push it, then everybody survives.

You misunderstand. If only one person can get the results before the poll is closed and they tweet it out or they share the results like you did, that contaminates the poll exactly like I implied.

I always pictured my mid thirties as the age I'm like "supposed" to be.

The poll is stupid if you can see the results before it is closed. Anyways, if you're rational and not retarded, you would hope everyone presses the red button (just for their own sake), because then everybody survives regardless, and regardless of how many pushes the button, you will survive. But of course there is always one retard who doesn't understand this (or they misclicked, or their cat ran across the keyboard, or an asteroid hit their WiFi router and it sent a signal to click the wrong button). So if you're willing to bet that more than 50% of people are willing to potentially sacrifice themselves in order to save one or more retards / unlucky people (or they are simply retarded or unlucky themselves), then go ahead, push blue. And if the poll results above is an accurate representation of the level of retardation or unluck we're dealing with, then maybe you should push blue (but a 3.4% margin is pretty slim). But if you don't have access to that information, you would have to gamble on the level of retardation or unluck of people on Twitter, or do some research into it and relevant facets like reading comprehension, statistical understanding, misclick rates. Then you would also have to adjust the numbers according the real life situation of people encountering a poll and being hopefully more rigorously informed that this is truly life or death. And that removes like 90% of the fun or realism/authenticity of these kinds of polls, because they are not presented in a context that is similiar to the probable real assumed context.

I have a theory (not a conspiracy theory): the people who get strongly drawn to conspiracy theories are the same people who get drawn to supernatural ideas, like God creating the universe from their own predetermined plan (not simply evolving spontaneously through "natural law"). They are fine with explaining reality top down through an elaborate narrative. There is a seeming plan behind everything, behind world politics, behind alien invasions, behind wars, behind ancient history, and they all connect to a grand meta-narrative of control, of manufacturing, of conscious creating, rather than natural systems acting spontaneously. Those who criticize conspiracy theories point out how that level of organization, of top-down control, is unlikely if not impossible, because of the natural tendency towards spontaneous order and the infeasibility of controlling complex systems. In the "naturalist critique", everybody is a victim of systems, even the supposed people in power, while in the conspiracist's mind, the people in power are the controllers of the systems and the powerless are the victims. Whether one is more correct than the other is actually hard to say, and a naturalist that claims otherwise would then become a conspiracy theorist in their own right, thinking they have the level of insight and knowledge to be able to predict complex systems. As for myself, as a general predisposition, I've noticed I'm fine with either (naturalism or supernaturalism). While for example Bernardo Kastrup says he is strongly opposed to supernaturalism simply as a personal predisposition (which is why he says he sees no point in doing philosophy if nature is not simply naturalistic; no "God" at the top planning it all, intervening into nature and changing the natural course of things). But I would also challenge this idea of naturalism, that you could still try to deduce the "laws" behind God's planning so to speak, and it won't be a completely pointless endeavour, simply a more interesting one. Like trying to understand the psychology of God rather than the "physics" of God.

Have empathy for people who hate pedophiles, or hate in general. You don't hate a child for being low consciousness, so you don't hate a child for hating. That makes you a child. And what's worse; actually raping children (that's what many people think pedophiles do) or merely hating people who do that? I would also not try to speak as if getting raped as a child is not so bad or is less bad than being decapitated (or raping children is not as bad as decapitating people). You have to live with potentially very traumatizing memories and fucked up sexuality and potential pedophilic feelings yourself for the rest of your life as a result. And some people who hate pedophiles might hate them because of these reasons or because they've experienced it themselves (which can of course be contradictory if they themselves end up with pedophilic feelings, but perhaps they pride themselves on self-control or their feelings are not exclusive to children). There is a psychological dynamic of preying on the vulnerable that is very repulsive and intuitively morally condemnable. If somebody threathens your children, that's one of the strongest if not the strongest evolutionary drive you have to oppose something. And as sexual attraction is also one of the strongest evolutionary drives (it's what created the children after all), then naturally those who are sexually attracted to children are a supreme threat to children. Sex and reproduction are very strong forces, invoking very strong feelings of morality and drives behavior, and pedophilia is stuck right in the middle of it.

You have free will in the sense that you feel like you're in control of your actions. If you deny this feeling, you are self-sabotaging yourself. Be very rigorous about distinguishing between the feeling of being in control and any metaphysical notions of free will. They are NOT the same. "I could do this, but there is no metaphysical free will, so why bother?" is a thought that ruins your sense of self-agency and control. It's a purely delusional and self-sabotaging thought, it doesn't help for anything but immobilizing yourself and denying yourself the right to be who you want to be. And I suggest dropping the idea of solipsism and simply going with what you actually experience. Thoughts about solipsism don't matter. They are ultimately distractions. The point about absolute truth is it doesn't depend on what you merely think about it. So don't even think about it. You don't have to. It's ironically another form of self-sabotage. Your goal is to realize what is beyond thinking but you keep thinking about it as if it is supposed to help. It's not. Drop it if your goal is realizing the absolute.

-> The incredible juxtaposition (a.k.a. logical contradiction). Some women get kicked out of stores because of acting like children, and some women moderate online trolls for acting like children.

I have no idea what government regulation has to do with burden of proof, but ok. This is what you said initially: What if I say porn is not harmful, is the burden of proof on me?

Bro what the fuck are you talking about. She has problems with emotional regulation. It's a problem of being a 3 year old toddler in an adult body. "Female temperament", pfft, this is a child's temperament. "I want my dad!"