> hence the self-centeredness of thinking one is entitled to having children, resorting to all sorts of immoral technologies to have them
Huh? I'm confused how you reconcile this (seeming) attack on fertility treatment with the pro-natalist sentiment expressed later in your comment. Who or what principle is transgressed by what technologies?
In-vitro fertilization involves treatment of embryos that is regarded as illicit by some groups that are staunchly pro-natalist. The Roman Catholic Church is the biggest example, e.g. [0], but similar positions are held also by some other Christian denominations.
> To my mind, though, it’s important not to minimize the gravity of the fateful decision by conflating it with everything that preceded it. I confess to taking this sort of conflation extremely personally. For eight years now, the rap against me, advanced by thousands (!) on social media, has been: sure, while by all accounts Aaronson is kind and respectful to women, he seems like exactly the sort of nerdy guy who, still bitter and frustrated over high school, could’ve chosen instead to sexually harass women and hinder their scientific careers.
This seems like such an oddly prickly and defensive bit to throw into the middle of the essay? I have no idea why Aaronson is nervous about being associated with SBF ("both were affiliated with the same large research university at some point in time" hardly seems damning), nor what on earth these charges about disrespect to women are about. Am I missing something?
I really enjoyed his book and have learned an enormous amount from his blog on QM, QC, etc.
However, it's clear he has some very neurotic attitudes surrounding sexuality. I don't say this lightly and without empathy. I was raised by evangelical extremists. I'm talking the kind of people where the school I went to debated whether it was sinful to allow the girls to wear pants instead of dresses during a blizzard. I never received any form of sex education or guidance on the topic. You get the basic picture. I get where he's coming from.
But he's just wrong to be so overly concerned about being seen as a sexual predator. I don't know what the solution for him his other that introspection and perhaps therapy, but I do wish he'd have enough self awareness to realize that perhaps, this is not the topic he should be offering sage like advice blogs about.
The whole piece, "the geometry of conscience" is about guilt-by-association.
Rather than use the phrase, he takes "association" to be a distance metric, and guilt to be a measure of conscience.
I'd suppose quite a lot of people have, of late, felt the "guilt by association" culture inimical to a lot of social media. This is just his way of illustrating its impact on him.
A woman in a leadership position might likewise have said, "and I'm supposed to be JK Rowling, ..."
"In recent months, Russia has once again been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, with the US and Western media loudly proclaiming (since November) that Russia is planning an imminent invasion of the Ukraine, though Russia has repeatedly denied that fact and it's not exactly clear what Russia is waiting for, or what advantage it could expect to derive from lying about its intentions at this point (the whole Western world expects an invasion and the US has pulled embassy staff from Kiev)."
Given that it's now obvious that Russia in fact has been planning an invasion of the Ukraine, for months, which furthermore undermines the author's later claim that there was some peaceful concession that Putin would've accepted... I'm not sure why I should take this author's argument seriously. They seem naive and under informed.
Well, here’s a talk at Yale that makes the same points. I don’t know if everything in there is factually correct. But it does very clearly why Putin is acting the way he is.
I think it's useful to consider that many women may not be comfortable naming or formally accusing her rapist (for reasons that include, way more often than you'd think, that a family member is her rapist and she still lives at home). For this reason, anti-choice laws that have exceptions for rape often mean only a tiny minority of women can actually use the exception.
(1) Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes. I agree some of the mainstream rhetoric doesn't emphasize this in the interest of pithiness and such, but this strikes me as an odd complaint. (2) You seem to imply that some scientific definition of when life begins would offer a clear cut solution... but whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right? And anyway, e.g. most voters (of all stripes!) in the US support some right to choose in the first trimester and do not support it in the third trimester, so "first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there
> Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes
Yeah that's my point. I don't know why it's an odd complaint. "Men trying to control women's bodies" isn't true and turns an ethical debate into something about sexism, which means we don't get closer to an answer because we're not working on the right things.
> whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right?
This only seems true because it is already the case that the answer affects our lives as human adults having to take action based on the answer in our particular cases. If we lived in some other universe where abortions were impossible (e.g. they always kill the mother for some reason), it seems like we wouldn't have that difficult enough of a time identifying when life begins in the fetus.
What's funny is that because the answer affects us and we won't drill down into narrower ranges to identify specific criteria, this also makes our understanding of all other life more ambiguous. Because if we did identify when frogs, or elephants, or seedlings turn from cells into life, it would have obvious implications for humans.
> first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there
It seems like this is exactly what Texas has done. It went from there.
It is not women vs men. However, anti-choice policies do have outcomes that disproportionately burden women, which is another way of saying such policies are misogynistic, which is... sexism. You can argue sexism only counts as such if there's intent behind it, or you can argue the sexism here is less important than other considerations, but I don't think it's derailing or distracting from an ethical issue to point out this sexism. It's something worth considering when deciding on the ethical issue.
Again: even in "pure" science, you are generally making value judgments when studying stuff like "what makes something a member of a species", "what counts as a life for the purposes of this study", etc. E.g. a scientist may use the biological, ecological, or evolutionary species concept to study a population of organisms, depending on what question they're trying to answer. There is no "objective" answer to what a species is; it depends on what question you're trying to study. Similarly there is no "objective" answer to when life begins; someone can pick "at conception" or "at first breath" or whatever, and then we have to have a value discussion about why that, why not something else? See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma..., which argues well (in a different context) how this sort of thing works.
The Texas law is far more restrictive. Six weeks is much shorter than first trimester.
It seems a little odd to say that anti-choice policies disproportionately burden women when men has no choice at all beyond having half the vote of consent for the initial act of having sex. The whole issue is deeply sexist with very clearly defined gender roles with expectations and enforced obligations.
From an ethically perspective it would be significant if those expectations and obligations could be replaced with voluntary acts in an universal way.
Sexism is not defined as things that disproportionally affect people based on sex. Are tampons sexist? Is the vagina itself, sexist?
Whether or not questions around abortion "disproportionally affect" women is not the question. Abortion also disproportionately affects aborted babies, if you believe they're alive. 1-year olds also disproportionally affect women. Should we be able to kill children until the age of 5? Why not?
I think your take from the perspective of categorization is one that tries to blur things intentionally. It may be the case that an organism does or does not "objectively" belong to a race. But that does not mean that the specific attributes of that organism are themselves not objectively measurable. You're just talking about what definitions are being used.
I think that argument is an attempt to derive ethics from words - rather than discovering the scientific process, deciding ethically what is appropriate or desirable, and identifying the language which should be used to describe it. It's backwards.
At some point a fetus goes from necessarily relying on the mother, to being self-sustaining (if fed) even if removed from the mother. That's a knowable thing. If the baby is removed it will either live or die and that is our answer. Call that life, or independence, or whatever. The lens you choose may change where the line is for you, but not when it is crossed.
I would say that if you believe that children should not be killed post-birth, then you are already cognizant of some kind of threshold that exists which is eventually crossed and cannot be undone, after which adults are obliged to attempt care and continued life of the child.
Because we don't have a way to test exactly when a fetus becomes independent, we use heuristics. For the most part, the first trimester we consider dependent; the last trimester we consider independent; in the ambiguous middle trimester we err on the side of the preference of the already-living, and in some places allow abortions through this time even though there may be a chance that the baby is alive and independent.
But these are just heuristics. "The Texas law is far more restrictive." Yes, it is. But you also said "Go from there" and that is what they did. Texas narrowed to a specific criteria that its people perceive to better approximate the threshold for life. "Life" being in this case a catch-all amalgamation of lots of peoples' concepts that mostly approximates the ability to self-sustain under care. It would seem on the surface at least that an organism without a heartbeat is dead-on-arrival while one with a heartbeat at least has a chance.
The way past this for a place like Texas is to propose a new testable threshold and explain why it is not possible for a self-sustaining baby to be exist before then.
My statement wasn't "things that disproportionally affect people based on sex"; it was specifically "policies [that] have outcomes that disproportionately burden women." This is a pretty common conception of the term "sexism" in policy-making circles; sometimes it's specifically explicated as "structural sexism" to distinguish it from interpersonal/individual sexism, but it's a valid use of the word.
I did not say the policy's disproportionate affect should be the sole consideration; I did say it's worth considering, because in practice the vast majority of ethical questions are not simple binaries; we have to weigh competing needs/desires/etc and decide what the best course based on all the factors at play.
My intention is not to "blur things intentionally" but to encourage thinking about this in a less black-and-white way, and explore some unexamined (arguably irrational!) assumptions that seemed present in your original post. For instance, you said:
> When does it go from cells to alive inside the mother?
...with the implication that answering this will give us a "rational" and correct answer to the ethical question. But there is nothing about <i>this framing itself</i> that is objective or rational. Knowing that a life <i>is</i> at some point (via whatever scientific definition we've chosen) doesn't tell us what <i>ought</i> be done about it; in general you can't derive an ought from an is; you could <i>easily</i> instead reframe the ethical question as "is there some point when a fetus's life is more important than the woman's bodily autonomy," and come up with a very different set of heuristics for answering the question. You can pick an objectively measurable line but the choice of what that line is, and what to do about it, are not a thing that can be objectively chosen.
My intended point wrt Texas is that, based on the discrepancy between polling data and the law as written, it seems like the representatives in Texas have passed a law that is in fact <i>more</i> restrictive than what the majority of voters want; ergo, I don't think it actually reflects the majority's intuitions on when abortion should be OK. But this really isn't my main point; I'm mainly trying to point out this isn't a question that can be solved solely by finding some science answer, and an attempt to sway voters solely on that type of argument seems not-correct based on everything we understand about how people in modern democracies make such decisions.
fyi, "cis" generally means "your gender identity = the gender you were assigned at birth", as opposed to being trans. it's possible to be gay + trans, or gay + cis, etc, but being gay doesn't describe anything about cis vs trans in-and-of-itself.
(thank you for the post, by the way! i thought there were some genuinely neat little tips in there.)
Why exactly were you arguing so vociferously when all this information was available just one click away, at the link the other user provided?
This kind of comment (being unwilling to do even the most basic research before pontificating on something one doesn't know about) makes HN discussion poorer overall, imho.
>Why exactly were you arguing so vociferously when all this information was available just one click away, at the link the other user provided?
I wasn't arguing. The entire thread I repeated the exact same thing. Namely, that Harvard is a great school and a great degree but if you have to go into debt for it, it's not worth it as there are other quality institutions. I've never wavered from that argument.
Huh? I'm confused how you reconcile this (seeming) attack on fertility treatment with the pro-natalist sentiment expressed later in your comment. Who or what principle is transgressed by what technologies?