Just reposting this excellent point from lemmygrad
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I don't want to pull the "I'm a statistics professor card", but I'm literally a statistics professor so unless I see an integral over a sample space in the denominator I don't want to hear about likelihood, and especially not when someone's half-baked narrative of possible possibilities gets treated as meaningfully bearing on that likelihood.
Like are we just throwing that word around or is their some objective method that apparently everyone else knows about for now to compute these probabilities and arrive at these conclusions.
Yeah it's called guesstimating
There's no way to objectively calculate the worth of an innocent person's life anyway, so you can't really put it into a formal equation. Sometimes you just have to make decisions based on incomplete information, I don't see what the problem is. It's not like I want to kill kids, but if I evaluated that there's a high enough chance that it could save a high enough number of lives, I'd pull the lever on that trolley problem 100%. What am I, a Kantian?
If seems to me that if we're willing to acknowledge that our subjective estimation of probabilities aren't necessarily any good at predicting actual outcomes we could not only save ourselves a ton of trouble handwringing over what level of perceived benefit justifies turning on the orphan mulcher, it would also go a long way to ensuring we don't accidentally make common cause with the people who do enjoy mulching orphans.
You can pretty easily draw a thoughline from the slapdash deployment of political violence to the elevation of ghouls like Beria to the head of the organs of state.
You've already decided you're ok with orphans getting mulched the moment you pick up a gun and call for revolution. Innocent people die in war, that's a fact of life. It may not be you who mulches the orphans, but you're the one setting of the chain of events that will cause them to get mulched. I feel like anybody who cares about this just has an extremely romantic view of war.
Revolutions don't happen on a regular basis, and a failed revolution can change the course of history and deny opportunities for centuries to come. And in the short term, it can mean the death of everyone you know and love, and countless others beyond anything you're capable of comprehending. You have to understand what you're getting into when you go down that path, and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to win. You try to fight honorably, you pass up on a potential advatange, you can be assured that the enemy won't. There's no room for half measures, you either fully commit or you back down.
I just wanted to say thank you for arguing against the celebration of the murder of children.