Disqus - Latest Comments for NeilTheEthicalWerewolf

Re: On Disliking Thai Food

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 10:44:24 -0000

Your issues regarding Thai food are perfectly sensible. The problem with Weingarten is that it's like he said "Italian food is so unimaginative, They never even tried using tomatoes".

The line in your post that gets it right is "His complaints also make no sense to anyone even vaguely familiar with Indian cuisine." He criticized Indian food for using only one spice, because he thought curry was a single spice rather than the variable mix of many spices that it is.

Re: Market Volatility Could Pick Up, and so Could Action in Private Prison Stocks

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 04:24:14 -0000

"private prisons have not been perfect, but they have filled a need for strapped state government budgets, allowing states to avoid capital costs of building new facilities and cutting costs per inmate"

Private prisons may actually be hurting state government budgets, by lobbying for measures that result in more inmates. Such measures would mean more spending for state governments and more revenue for themselves. In the worst case, these measures could put more people in prison who shouldn't really be there -- a bad deal for everybody except the private prison companies.

Re: Washington Monthly | Pelosi Forever

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 10:15:55 -0000

It's nice to see this old post from more than a decade ago! I've recently posted more on this and other great Pelosi stories at my blog:
http://neilsinhababu.blogsp...

Re: The New Senate Bill Is Still Unimaginably Horrible Legislation

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 15:37:02 -0000

If a Republican can buy enough votes via pet projects to make up for the lost ones, it might work out. I agree, it's a long shot for McConnell, but it might be his best shot.

Re: The New Senate Bill Is Still Unimaginably Horrible Legislation

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 15:21:24 -0000

Yglesias has a guess as to what McConnell might be up to here: setting the bill up so that he has a few hundred billion to give out for his more moderate Senators' pet projects, to buy their votes. See the last section:
https://www.vox.com/policy-...

Re: Why I stopped Earning to Give

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 19:22:52 -0000

Great! I'd be happy to help with that, if I can do it at a convenient time.

Re: Why I stopped Earning to Give

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 14:25:09 -0000

Thanks for writing this! I think about these issues often, as a philosophy professor who has taken the Giving What We Can 10% pledge. It's good to hear from someone who explored an alternative path that I maybe could've taken, and I'm sure it'll be extra helpful to others who have the decision ahead of them.

There are worthwhile things to be done in philosophy that may exceed the value of earning to give, especially in light of the difficulty of performing at a high level when one isn't suited to one's tasks and one's colleagues. I wish you success in doing these things in your academic career.

Re: Response to Jason Brennan

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 03:14:54 -0000

"Support the tropes"
Highly recommended, Excellent BHLer, A++++, would buy again

Re: Planet Fitness Cites Obamacare for Tax on Gym Memberships

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 01:42:29 -0000

Since the law doesn't actually support this, it's possible that the extra charge is in fact "a change in your membership fee."

Re: What This Guy Says about Inequality Will Make You Stand Up and Cheer (or Puke)

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 11:47:28 -0000

But don't you have the intuition that many other people's intuition isn't a reliable value detector? Especially the people who think weird things about inequality and intuit that you're not a reliable value detector? That may be most of the people in the grim history of humanity. (Everything is not, and has not historically been, just fine.) And if people are this way, why should we trust their judgments about some pleasure having intrinsic badness? Maybe intuition works for some things, but the sheer amount of human moral error suggests that it doesn't work for moral value.

Instead of using moral intuition, which has been screwing us up throughout history, let's start trying to figure out which mental processes are generating true beliefs about moral value, and which ones are just cognitive biases. Even if people get it wrong on lots of stuff, they're not bad at knowing what their experiences are like. The foundations of hedonism are more secure than the foundations of any other moral theory.

Re: What This Guy Says about Inequality Will Make You Stand Up and Cheer (or Puke)

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 23:41:46 -0000

I think we can detect the value of pleasure in a very reliable way: through knowing what our immediate experiences are like, and knowing that pleasure-experiences have goodness just as yellow-experiences have brightness. Humans don't screw up very often at knowing the intrinsic properties of their experience. Our other processes for forming moral beliefs are far less reliable and should be abandoned. So we should accept the goodness of pleasure and doubt everything else.

Cuteness, as far as I can tell, is subjective. So while it isn't objectively valuable, the pleasure it creates is.

Re: What This Guy Says about Inequality Will Make You Stand Up and Cheer (or Puke)

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 13:35:04 -0000

I don't know why other people are interested in inequality. But utilitarians like me worry about the declining marginal utility of money, and that's why we don't like massively unequal distributions.

Re: Here’s What Mitt Won’t Tell You: President Obama Is Winning

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 06:31:13 -0000

Bog Bird?

Re: North Carolina: A Centenarian’s Paradise

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 05:34:06 -0000

It's actually just an artifact of the way computer systems deal with errors in the birthdate field: they all default to 1900. It's especially a problem if people registered in the past when birth dates weren't collected: http://www.donkeylicious.co...

Re: Wrong Track

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 04:16:18 -0000

The interstate highway system eats up billions as well. Maybe we shut that one down too?

Re: Misinforming the Public

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 05:00:20 -0000

Yeah, this is clearly not the way representative democracy is supposed to work.

Re: The Limits Of Mike Huckabee

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Mon, 16 May 2011 11:05:31 -0000

"I’d say the John Edwards campaign in 2008 did a decent job."

So do I. And so did you.

Re: Does Michael Gerson Think Alcohol Should Be Banned? Does He Know That Penguins Can Swim?

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Thu, 12 May 2011 05:33:37 -0000

I'm with you, but it's not too bad for a guy with a ThinkProgress blog to beat up on bad right-wing WaPo op-eds.

Re: Want To Bench Press More? Stop Benching

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Thu, 12 May 2011 02:37:14 -0000

Check the byline -- it's written by a man named "Jim Smith."

Re: Revenge Killings In Benghazi

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Wed, 11 May 2011 12:15:14 -0000

Googling produces a Gadhafi speech about hunting down and killing protestors. But it seems that the catchy tune was added by a YouTube remixer dude.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011...

Re: Revenge Killings In Benghazi

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Wed, 11 May 2011 12:10:04 -0000

Gadhafi did that? Wow, I hadn't heard that detail... do you have a link or some such?

Re: Endgame

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 01:55:33 -0000

All Girl Summer Fun Band! Awesome. Getting all their albums finally gave me the ooo wee ooo that I needed in my life.

Re: http://meltingdolls.tumblr.com/post/1218532276

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:34:33 -0000

Uh, that was me, but I'm using a public computer and somebody else was signed in.

Re: http://resnikoff.tumblr.com/post/1072287106

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 21:55:31 -0000

Nietzsche is an error theorist about existing moral discourse -- that's the sense in which he's a nihilist. Of course, he does have values of some kind or another. He doesn't seem to think they have the objectivity or universality that moral values do, so I wouldn't call them moral values. I read him as interested in a kind of subjective value, grounded in the passions of the agents for whom the value exists.

(I'm actually working on a paper on this right now.)

Re: PETA and Feminism.

NeilTheEthicalWerewolf — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 01:56:58 -0000

Sex certainly sells, but there are complimentary ways of selling with sex and derogatory ones. This is probably the most complimentary way I've seen in our culture.