Interesting Links for 11-12-2014

[andrewducker]

• Why Coventry has a crucial say in devolution debate
  (tags: devolution UK )
• Unlimited vacation policies continue to be a bloody stupid idea.
  (tags: holidays work usa )
• Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System
  (tags: space aliens history religion fail science )
• The Feminist Killjoy Gift Guide
  (tags:

Comments

[nancylebov]

The torture link is just dispiriting for me. (That's after activating the rationality module-- the initial thought was "total fucking despair".)

Pro-torture and anti-torture people have really different moral intuitions. Of course the right thing to do is insist that your moral intuitions are correct instead of working on learning how to convince people who don't share your intuitions.

[andrewducker]

At this point I am no more prepared to argue with people whose moral intuitions is that torture is a good information extraction method than I am prepared to argue with people who think that slavery is economically useful or that genocide is a solution for overpopulation.

Engaging with ideas sends a signal that they are ideas worth engaging with. I will not provide that kind of signal for torture.

[nancylebov]

Do you have any ideas about how to increase the proportion of people who are revolted by torture?

[newandrewhickey]

I actually think that expressions of disgust and anger like mine might be the best way of doing that, though that wasn't my main aim

[andrewducker]

a) Improve society - my experience is that people who are in favour of torture are also people exposed to all sorts of unpleasantness growing up, and have a different mindset about the world. Reduce violence around them and that will change.
b) Improve people's empathy (comes from [a], but also from helping people be empathic in general.)
c) For the people with rules-based morality, make it clear that torture is _evil_, and that if they do it then they are not "the good guys, making tough decisions, they are _evil_".

[newandrewhickey]

Yep. My answer above is an attempt at saying your c) in a more waffly, tired, way.
b) seems to be the hard bit, unfortunately :-/

[danieldwilliam]

Is it the torture or the torture used when it is not a good information extraction method that you are particularly objecting to?

(I'm of the view that the question of the difference almost never arises because torture appears to have almost zero ability to extract useful and reliable information.)

[andrewducker]

Torture, at all. I thought that was fairly obvious from the "genocide, used as a method of reducing population; slavery, even if it's good for the economy"

[danieldwilliam]

It probably was to a reader not suffering from self-inflicted sleep deprivation.

The CIA don’t seem to have much minded the fact that torture is at best ineffective and probably counter-productive.

I’ve listened to a number of them now using sophistry to get round the moral repugnance of half-drowning someone. It’s not torture as defined by the act we wrote for Congress. It’s not Torture TM. Okay it’s torture but it not torture. It’s not real torture. And all the while the US hanged Japanese for less.

[andrewducker]

Yup. If anyone else was doing it to their soldiers then there would be an uproar.

Frankly, if you're doing anything with the specific aim of making a captive's life unpleasant then you're torturing them. Deliberately harming someone, mentally, or physically, _is_ torture, and is absolutely morally wrong.

(Which isn't to say that a somewhat unpleasant life can't be a reasonable side-effect of having to hold them captive in the first place.)

[cartesiandaemon]

The CIA don’t seem to have much minded the fact that torture is at best ineffective and probably counter-productive.

Now I think about it, the CIA are pretty incompetent, but (as hard as it may be to believe) I may have been insufficiently cynical about a government program of illegal and ineffective torture: I can't help but notice that, in fact, the CIA obtaining false confessions of massive conspiracies are probably much, much more rewarded than for true information, whereas obviously they're more rewarded for CLAIMING to be seeking true information than false confessions. So it's not surprising they ended up doing the first and claiming the second, even if that's especially morally bankrupt :(

[danieldwilliam]

There was an interesting article I read earlier this year about how incompetent our own intelligence services had been, what with being utterly infiltrated by Russian spies and all.

I’m not sure any of them ought to be trusted out of sight, which is where they like to spend their time.