For a moment I thought I’d replied in the wrong context, but it looks like I just straight up replied to the wrong thing. My bad either way

Ooooh somehow I replied to your reply to the comment rather than to the comment (originally replying to me)

/u/completely-ineffable, who founded the sub, and closed the sub a year ago, literally just made a post! That’s all that happened! I’m distantly in touch with that person! Everything is fine! In fact I’d almost be tempted to theorise it was all a dumb ruse to see if you lot turned out to be crazy people!

And it seems to have worked wonders!

Who even put the term “resurrected” in there? It’s one post, followed by a smattering of others including posts bickering about the supposed resurrection! What monstrous goings on are people permitting themselves to imagine?

Giziti was made a mod to take pressure off the modteam, along with David Gerard (who also founded this place). The inference you’re drawing that they’re hostile seems wrong: it’s targeted not at this place but at people using the existence of this place to spam fediverse garble on the subreddit, demanding new rules to link to the fediverse(!)

lmao, are you doing a bit? What the fuck could you possibly know, and why didn’t you check the easily checkable history of the sub’s modlist? The fact that you felt compelled to make this up should, frankly, embarrass you away from offering your comments on anything to do with either the sub or this instance at all

Oh you didn’t know? It’s much better than that. Were it not for /r/badphilosophy, /c/sneerclub simply would not be!

Of course, like the Basilisk herself, we should have had to invent it anyway, but it is with /r/badphilosophy that the soul of /c/sneerclub descends from the heavens to find its place in the grim corporeality down here

Ah, a minutes of wikipedia meetings

I suppose I get it, although I’m still a bit unsure how these examples count as “epistemic luck”

Sure!

i’m gonna take a moment here to point out there seems to be a widespread historical error about bentham’s role

bentham was neither a “total” utilitarian, nor particularly hardcore about how to assess units of pleasure/pain - he believed (a) that what you want to do is work out in a practical fashion how to maximise pleasure and minimise pain of people who currently exist, and (b) that there were pretty impractical ways to do it

he was a legal mind, concerned with public policy and the rectification of injustice. the “total” view comes from sedgwick, who much later in the mid-19th century was the real formaliser of modern utilitarianism - it’s from him that the EA types get their incessant trade-offs and indeed specifically the view that future lives have, by parity of reason, to count. bentham by contrast was in many ways not a particularly philosophical thinker, and intended rather to apply a radically reduced psychological theory to social problem-solving - he also left behind very little finished work, inland this is a typical feature of his philosophical style

the “utility” reduction was something that had been floating around in british moral philosophy (then not distinguished from psychology) for some time, and bentham put it into action. by contrast, sidgwick was a later full time ethicist devoted to the academic study of the by then popular utilitarian system in the abstract

this idea of bentham the radical versus mill the moderate is justified, but seems to come, primarily, from mill’s aversion to bentham’s “pushpin is as good as poetry”, which permitted no weighting of the utilitarian scale in favour of “higher pleasures”

but it is easy to see in this light that bentham’s radicalism doesn’t give you the juice for an extension to EA, since the radicalism of EA is not in giving equal weight to all kinds of pleasure/pain

There’s nothing ipso facto wrong with thinking that a country to which you don’t belong should adopt a particular policy, whether it regards rights for pastafarians, the promotion of secular society, or more aptly rights for gay people. Gay people are the obvious point: I would hope that you think on some important level that Russian law should not discriminate against gay people. To be authentically in favour of democracy is to be in favour of democracy’s good, not to reify democratic process as an end in itself - and indeed one should want Russia to be democratic, which is not the case as things currently stand, but only on grounds of democratic good, not of process as an end in itself.

One reason to limit one’s criticisms of a country’s internal democratic politics is lack of understanding, and that seems to be the closest thing to what you’re shooting for here that isn’t what I would bluntly call an inauthentic pro-democracy stance. That’s a reason for being cautious, and it’s closely related to good arguments against particular interventions by outsiders in the internal affairs of a polity: a bunch of Westerners get up in arms that Indonesia, for example, introduces a law which negatively affects or appears to negatively affect gay people, but their failure to understand Indonesia’s highly complex politics means that their outraged arguments don’t even touch on what the effects of the new law actually are. Their hearts were, so to speak, “in the right place”, but in the worst way, and they only ended up making things worse.

In a sense these situations do touch on a right that members of a polity have which outsiders don’t, which is the right to “have a say” in the management of their affairs. If outsiders begin to “have a say” and the polity begins to lose some of its democratic character as a consequence, then there is a genuine concern that self-determination is at risk, not to mention the intelligent management of things by people who actually understand how things work locally. But this is not absolute, and indeed cannot be absolute, otherwise we would be left with a political world in which the only rights we gave people were those they got from the polity of which they happen to be a member, and Russia would be off the hook - there is clearly another order beyond the locally political by which people deserve morally good treatment, and outsiders to a polity cannot be denied a say in the nature of that order.

Look, if you want to understand where I’m coming from, I can give you - at a glance - the two sources I’ve already given: Alex Wellerstein Unrestricted Data and J.R. Ravetz “The Merger of Knowledge with Power”, specifically the two chapters cited (the Wellerstein chapter is “Unrestricted Data: New Challenges to the Cold War Secrecy Regime”. I would also urge you to check out Lisa Stampnitzky Disciplining Terror. The introduction to the Ravetz book is also a must-read, not just for this, but also for a general understanding of how scientific research at the industrial level serves political and sectoral interests of all kinds - this is not radical pamphleteering about “the politics of politicians” but real empirical work about the real conditions under which science is done.

Stampnitzky is extremely useful here for understanding how the word “terrorist” (or similar) functions in the sorts of papers you cite at the very top. “Terrorist” and “state actor” are political words, and the risks (supposedly) measured which are attached to the threats you describe are weighted by those words, not by the scientific words pertaining to technical capability. To say that “terrorists” might get hold of this or that technology is to say that a particular type of person (who may or may not exist) will get hold of that technical capacity and make use of it.

The point is, in fact, that technical capacity has almost nothing to do with the measurement of risk from terrorist acquisition of that technical capacity. The measurement of risk is locused pretty much exclusively around the type of person who poses a threat. That type of person is a construction of politics, not a scientifically neutral object term in which people with medical or physical science qualifications have any expertise whatsoever.

To put it extremely briefly, this means that when you come across papers by CBRN professionals assessing speculative risks, much of the work being done is being done at the behest of political projects which have their home in the defense industry, not in assessment of the mere technical capacities available to people at large. As we learn from Ravetz, speculative risk created such an enormous bubble during the Cold War that it is almost impossible to take those measured risks remotely seriously - and as we learn from Stampnitzky, the idea of a “terrorist” has been constructed in such a way as to fuel that bubble. This means that CBRN professionals, however unimpeachable their contributions to the amelioration of those occasional disasters which do actually happen, are thoroughly questionable as unbiased witnesses to the scale that risks at large present.

Because, as your own inconsistencies show, you are not having a focused discussion (for example: you angrily claim in your second reply that in your first you asked me to expand on an earlier point, even though this never actually happened) it is extremely difficult to get this point across without appearing to just be dismissive of technical capacity as a factor. But in fact technical capacity has been factored in to my discussion this entire time. The fact that you’re unaware of the political environment in which your (non-)fear finds its sources is not anybody’s fault, but it is your fault if you don’t even acknowledge that other people might have a clearer idea about how this stuff works.

100% agreed, what terrifies me is that our friend here seems to see the word “science” in here and immediately assume impeccable faith and perfect knowledge