From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Mon Jan 20 2003 - 18:32:41 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Either the US is being really, really stupid, or someone is playing this
> game with really evil goals, or I've totally failed to comprehend what's
> going on. I wish I had a few years experience in international
> diplomacy; I might be able to figure out what's going on then.
Your failure, such as it is, does not completely cut out the other interpretations,
as I'm sure you must realize.
Re your "...might be able to figure out...": I'd take those odds and bet against it,
even then.
Absent experience _plus_ really good intelligence (in the policy/military sense)
(i.e., a God's eye view hardly anyone, if anyone, ever gets)--figuring out
"what the hell is actually going on", in Robert Anton Wilson's phrasing, is just
about impossible. It's another side of the dice we roll labeled "Whom do you trust,
and on what basis?"
And we don't like that; we're wired to avoid that; so we seek the Big Certainty.
Each of us, in our way. Without Knowing The Story, we can't relax. If we can't relax,
we eventually kill ourselves and/or one another through distress.
This might be the crux of the existential thing, in evolutionary psych terms.
Or my saying that could be an example of how much *I* crave Story, and nothing more.
Sucks. War or no, people will suffer and people will die. Raymond Chandler, I think
it was, called every murder "an act of infinite cruelty". Such a calculus puts
a sprinkling of infinite-altitude poppies in the grassy field of 6+ billion souls,
tiny but still undifferentiable singularities all over the place; and mocks the
notion of a utility function. "I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."--Snoopy
So is a "collateral" death in a war a murder? I don't like the answer I get.
As Prof Paz (and probably LeFebre before him) asked:
When is it right for a group to do that which it is wrong for an individual to do?
MMB
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