
The Zeroth Commandment - weinzierl
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3766
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amluto
> I hold the bodily autonomy of women ... to be my Zeroth Commandment, the
> foundation-stone of my moral worldview, the starting point of every action I
> take and every thought I think

If I were to choose a personal Zeroth Commandment along these lines, I would,
at the very least, hold the bodily autonomy of _everyone_ to be important.

(Of course, the bodily autonomy of women is more often violated than that of
men, but that doesn't mean that one should fail to respect the bodily autonomy
of men or of non-binary folks.)

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jabot
So the author makes some good points, but i have a hard time taking him
seriously:

1) He writes a long blog post about problems that men have, specifically, and
how there is unfair treatment between sexes.

2) He also writes explicitly that bodily autonomy of women is so important to
him, it might as well be called holy.

3) He has had his son circumcised.

Any two out of these three positions i could understand. All three together
are... hard to rationalize.

~~~
perl4ever
I had an undergraduate English professor who told the lecture hall one day how
he had had _one_ of his sons circumcised and _not the other_.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Was it the younger who's circumcised or the other way around?

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ardent_uno
The author impressively found a tremendous amount to say about a topic that I
think is a bit trivial.

Of course we should feel bad for people, both men and women, who cannot
fulfill their sexual desires, for whatever reason.

This is not a radical thought. That the author does such an elaborate dance
around this simple statement seems unnecessary to me.

The comparison to people who are financially impoverished is a legitimate one.

Just because there is no "good" solution to severe sexual frustration - no
solution that preserves the autonomy of desired yet unwilling sexual partners
- does not mean we are prohibited from feeling compassion and sympathy.

~~~
jl2718
What about legalized consensual sex work?Problem solved?

~~~
ardent_uno
Definitely. I'm not one to chant "legalize and regulate" at every vice in
society, but this is one case where we should most definitely legalize and
regulate.

When I said there was no good solution I was thinking more for people who want
sex without paying for it.

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throwawayjava
_> two Bayesian agents with a common prior can ensure that they agree to
within ±ε about the value of a [0,1]-valued random variable, with probability
at least 1-δ over their shared prior, by exchanging only O(1/(δε2)) bits of
information—completely independent of how much knowledge the agents have. My
conclusion was that, if Aumann’s Nobel-prizewinning theorem fails to
demonstrate the irrationality of real-life disagreements, then it’s not for
reasons of computational or communication efficiency_

Under the gracious assumption that your agents are implementing a reasonable
protocol for information exchange :)

~~~
AstralStorm
You have to extend the Bayesian thought experiment to include agents not
behaving rationally and cases of bounded information. And then go to
multivariate models.

Combined, these give robust decision making methods. However, none of the
above concerns actual hypothesis making which is biased from the get go.

Bayesian statistics cannot answer the question of how to build hypotheses,
only maybe how to value them. Sometimes.

If we solve the question of how to make hypotheses reliably, then we might
have some angle of attack on the strong AI problem.

Related problem is deciding ways to falsify statements - inverse Bayesian
reasoning. That is, given posterior probability, figure out potential priors.

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jl2718
Is there not a positive aspect of the ‘Commandment’, that a person is free to
do with their body as they wish, so long as it does not violate the sanctity
and dignity and peaceful experience of another, nor violate or deny rights to
property. Would this not include the use and free exchange thereof for labor
and profit? Is it exploitive of men to pay them to perform feats of strength,
or of the intellectually gifted to pay them for their ability to solve
problems? Or is it a right for every person on earth to leverage their unique
talents toward profitable exchange, and use that profit for satisfaction of
needs which they are less endowed to serve for themselves?

This is not a new question. The solution is ‘the oldest in the world’.

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kup0
I read through the comments on that post, and goodness, the fact that someone
(especially supposedly a Berkeley professor) can seriously hold the views
espoused at length in comment #49 just boggles my brain

