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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
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- USA
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- He/Him
Indeed. Among other reasons why killing people is bad, you cannot know what someone's lifetime happiness score will be until they die, so there's no way of knowing that they aren't going to recover from their current misery and end up with a positive Ti.
I think if anyone ever really truly believed this instead of just saying it to be edgy, they'd wait until they were net happier than sad and immediately kill themselves.
I assume the definition of valid you are using is. If the premise is right then the conclusions are right.
If so, then whether the premises have grounding is unrelated to whether the theory is valid. As you said, that is related to whether it is unsounded.
I don't see the connection with what you said and what you quoted
- Location
- USA
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- He/Him
An argument is valid when it's expressed in proper syllogistic form, meaning a series of premises and a conclusion structured such that if the premises are true then the conclusion must be true. The requirement that the conclusion clearly follow from the premises is not strictly required but it's hard to have a valid argument where the connection between premises and conclusion is not clear.
An argument is sound if it is valid and all of its premises are true.
Your argument was structured like this:
Premise 1: Making a child born that ends up more happiness then sadness is not a morally good action, but morally neutral.
Premise 2: [M]aking a child born that ends up more sadness then happiness is a morally bad action.
Premise 3: [T]here are many more beings in the future then the present.
Conclusion: [We should] genocide or sterilize all present sentient beings, to prevent the suffering of future beings.
The argument is invalid because the conclusion does not clearly and necessarily follow from the premises. The argument is also unsound because all three premises are false as written.
(You're right that I misspoke when I said you needed grounding in order to make your argument valid. It is invalid but the fact that it's ungrounded is not why.)
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
I think the main mistake here is the assumption that happiness is what we should optimize for at all, as opposed to human flourishing. If it were so, the correct solution would be to tile the universe over with hedonium. Hedonium can't be unhappy, too, there'd be no reason not to go for it.
Human flourishing, on the other hand, is a much more complicated thing, and while it's not orthogonal to happiness, it's not as correlated with it as you might expect. To take a close example, wasn't there a whole thing about how Keiko's happiness score is usually below zero; that she as a person is defined by being miserable most of the time? And yet it still seems as though her continued existence is a good thing,
And, inasmuch as it is possible to reason about ill-defined concepts, it also seems that there are more opportunities for human flourishing the more people there are.
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I'm not very familiar with the nuances of the term. But I wonder whether could just replace happiness with human flourishing in all the previous posts. Yes the specific thing that's being talked about would change, but would the impact to the overall argument change?
Alternatively, could replace happiness with something more obvious like. Would the beings wish they hadn't been born at time of death.
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For premise 1 and 2, are you confident they are false if you modify them with the corrections implied/stated in the conversation?
For premise 3 I'm not sure what you mean. Whether the "as written" is referring to a grammar mistake. Or if you mean the spirit of the premise is also wrong due to say the historical population trends in the elemental nations.
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- USA
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- He/Him
Yes, no, and yes, respectively. Specifically because it's not possible to predict with certainty that there will be more people in the future then there are now.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
The biggest hang-up on my end (not the only one, but the one that I think really lies at the heart of all of this) is: why would you consider happiness/Ti/human flourishing to be morally neutral? I know you've said that it's just a you-believe-it-or-you-don't instinct, but I just can't help but see it as nonsensical to conflate the average with the aggregate. That's just not how numbers work!
My best guess at this point is that it's derived from that defect of human cognition where we can't imagine large numbers after a point, and the one where we sort of abstract far-away people and things into statistics. Put those together and you might look out on the world and see all the people living lives of a given average happiness, and not feel 7 billion times as much appreciative of it as you would of one person being that happy. My best guess is that this instinct is when you look at that effect and decide it's not a defect but actually the bedrock of morality.
I dunno, maybe I'm way off base but that's the best spin I could put on something that seems so incorrect to me. But here's a neat heuristic that might be worth paying attention to: if you went out on the streets of the various countries of the world and asked a ton of people if they agreed with this idea and the imperative to painlessly exterminate humanity that derives from it, what percentage of them would say 'What? No, of course not! That's horrible!' or some variation thereof? It's not perfect evidence, of course, but any theory of morality has to either directly involve human preferences or explicitly reject their relevance, and if 99% of humanity viscerally opposes this idea it'll be a really hard sell to say that, no really, it's what they ought to want.
My best guess at this point is that it's derived from that defect of human cognition where we can't imagine large numbers after a point, and the one where we sort of abstract far-away people and things into statistics. Put those together and you might look out on the world and see all the people living lives of a given average happiness, and not feel 7 billion times as much appreciative of it as you would of one person being that happy. My best guess is that this instinct is when you look at that effect and decide it's not a defect but actually the bedrock of morality.
I dunno, maybe I'm way off base but that's the best spin I could put on something that seems so incorrect to me. But here's a neat heuristic that might be worth paying attention to: if you went out on the streets of the various countries of the world and asked a ton of people if they agreed with this idea and the imperative to painlessly exterminate humanity that derives from it, what percentage of them would say 'What? No, of course not! That's horrible!' or some variation thereof? It's not perfect evidence, of course, but any theory of morality has to either directly involve human preferences or explicitly reject their relevance, and if 99% of humanity viscerally opposes this idea it'll be a really hard sell to say that, no really, it's what they ought to want.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
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- She/They
I precommit to vote for any plans this cycle (or if voting is closed, the following one) that are either made by or voted for by someone that participates in literally any form of conversational thread (as far as I can tell by reading the thread itself) that is closer to being on topic (with respect to the current goings-on of the story), productive (in a good faith sense), or interesting (use your best judgement of what I would consider to fit here going off of whatever mental model you have) than whatever this particular digression is going on about, after this post, until the chapter drops.
Ping me on here or in Discord.
Ping me on here or in Discord.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So, how do you think we'll be able to get Snowflake and the rest of our existentially-weird family to be permanent, and not reliant solely upon the shadow clone jutsu?
Personally, I think that a seal that draws in ambient chakra and gives it to the person using it (a la chakdar on the chest) might be a step in the right direction. It'd help keep the reoccurring cost of the jutsu from getting in the way, and makes it more viable for Keiko to have them out.
Personally, I think that a seal that draws in ambient chakra and gives it to the person using it (a la chakdar on the chest) might be a step in the right direction. It'd help keep the reoccurring cost of the jutsu from getting in the way, and makes it more viable for Keiko to have them out.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Thats an interesting question.
As a theoretical best case, it would be great to get the Keiko Collective their own meatsacks or their own pile of cognitive resources where they can hang out independently of each other if one of them chooses.
Ideally we hack the Frozen Skein or kill Jashin or something and use the newly freed deific metaphysical mass as chakra compute to aid in accomplishing this epic task.
tl;dr "Do the evil plot from canon Naruto since it was unironically a great idea modulo everyone being kinda derpy"
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- Location
- Italy
Basically this. We're not talking necromancy level, but "make Snowflake permanent" is still an absurdly high difficulty level.
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- USA
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- He/Him
So, how about that local sports team? Did you see the event last night where the player took the action that caused the number to increment?
[X] Hey, EJ, write whatever you want
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Speaking of on topic: Your sleep schedule, EJ.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Yep, that works.
The South City Red Teams vs the North City Blue Teams? I thought it was a pretty good sportsball game.
I was sort of impressed at the mutual incrementation strategies implemented. Though, that one particular movement of the handeggorb by the Designated Mover that got through the opposing player from the Red Teams was pretty efficacious.
(insert passing quip alluding to the geographically-based incompetency of the Red Teams).
What? What-what did you say? I'm sorry, I don't --
Those words... is it possible to use them in a sentence like that?
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So I think our immediate first goal once we are mostly back at full health is to grab the spider summoning scroll. Let's grab Haru and Kagome and have an adventure that will have us all grow closet
Cari are you one to talk about this?
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- He/Him
Asuma already committed resources to this for our sake so I'd rather focus energy on a second scroll until we know he's given up on it. My proposal is that we send a diplomatic medical expedition to Sand to develop/buy workable prosthetics via puppet tech, meanwhile nabbing the Otter Scroll
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- The Void
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- She/Her
Either is fine in my opinion but def grabbing more scrolls should be a priority. Since more scrolls means more people who can help in the DRAGON War
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- USA
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- He/Him
Yes, yes. *waves hand grumpily* It's less a "schedule" and more a "series of poor decisions".
So where's my gorram vote?!
- Location
- Italy
Asuma already sent a team of ninja to fìnd it, iirc.
If Akane doesn't murder us for that(And she won't because she is Akane), Ino will.
- Location
- The Void
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- She/Her
Yes he sent a team. But evidence suggests that we are much better at finding summoning scrolls than random ninja since as a group we have matched the Sannin