saw this pointed out here and felt it deserved it’s own post

let me mention that this is exactly the sort of argument I’ve seen pedophilia enthusiasts break out many times:

hmm, we thoughtful inquirers should look at this incredibly tenous evidence I’ve curated. it raises questions about whether we should be superrrrr chill about sex with children. questions with answers that, I’m sold on!

  • sue_me_please@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    What a bunch of fucking ghouls.

    From the replies:

    Thanks for this, really valuable work!

    I’m curious what the qualitative description of child marriage usually looks like in these cases- I have two very rough mental images:

    A 14 year-old girl learning very little at school/ barely attends school. She’s very unlikely to continue studying past the age of 16. Her (very low-income) parents struggle to continue supporting her and would rather she married earlier to reduce their burden and make a bit of bridewealth money (maybe to concentrate resources on another child). She gets married, her husband takes on responsibility for her (he might be more responsible/ caring than her parents), and her life outcomes don’t change much from if she were to get married at 17.

    A 14 year-old girl is learning quite a lot at school. She dreams of going to college/ sixth-form/ university and could even afford to if she got a part-time job, but family/ cultural pressure leads her to get married early. She has a child at 15, is forced to stay in her village, and all of her plans go to waste.

    Could it be that people like to imagine something more like the second scenario when the first is more common?

    These people are completely fine with child marriage/rape if the kids didn’t do well in school like they did. Their ability to empathize completely breaks down the second it meets their contempt for non-nerds.

    These are the psychopaths who think they’re effective altruists.

    • maol@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      WHY ARE THEY DOING THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS THERE ARE REAL CHILD MARRAIGE SURVIVORS OUT THERE THEY CAN READ ABOUT

      • sue_me_please@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        Same reason they don’t talk to any of the minorities they Bayes about all day long: everything is a thought experiment to them because of their extremely sheltered lives and there’s no way they’re going to talk to some blue hair SJW, scary poor, or dumb immigrant. They’d be too woke, stupid and biased to be worth hearing from, anyway.

      • sc_griffith@awful.systemsOP
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        1 year ago

        they want to think about fucking children without feeling bad, so they’re doing the libertarian “what if the child consents tho” argument. because they’re rationalists they have to rephrase it in their preferred format to be allowed to ingest it, so now it’s “what if the utils consent tho”

    • Treczoks@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Maybe that’s the reason why Republicans try to sabotage education wherever they can: Getting fresh young girls directly from the school benches right into their beds!

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    Someone should do a rewrite of “A Modest Proposal” in the form of one of these EA posts. It’d probably do pretty well.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      I did 80 hours of study on this, and turns out that the children had only negative QALYs (from now on NQALYs), and the reduction of poor parents surplus children actually increased the total QALYs (and that is not even counting the benefits you get from using the children), therefore in this essay I will…

      It is funny, some of them are so afraid of paperclip generators while they don’t realize that they themselves can easily be made to believe horrible things if you just back it up with enough stats, papers and contrarian blog posts.

      • Evinceo@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        some of them are so afraid of paperclip generators while they don’t realize that they themselves can easily be made to believe horrible things if you just back it up with enough stats, papers and contrarian blog posts.

        I think that’s why they’re so afraid of them. They think that paperclip optimizer is the default outcome for an intelligence because it’s the outcome they’re pushing themselves towards.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, it is interesting how often those kind of things happen, see also the far right people all mad about gender being 1984 newspeak while not knowing that newspeak (in the books and iirc why Orwell wrote it) is a flattening of ideas, complex ideas get put into simple dichotomies, reducing the possibility to say and explain certain things. (This itself fits back into a general problem of rightwingers failing to understand media (wonder how the effect works, do people stop to understand media and become right wing, or the other way around, did musk become dumber because he starts to go into qanon or is he dumb and that is why he is convinced by qanon?).

          Also, are memes newspeak using this logic?

            • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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              1 year ago

              Certainly, it was more a musing about the effect and he is a very large public example of it all. (I also had recently seen his dumb pizzagate meme post, and wondered again if he has ever heard of the word epistemology, it is amazing how much he is like Trump in that he believes the last thing somebody tells him)

    • zogwarg@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      Something something Poe’s law, something something. Honestly some of the shit i’ve read should have been satire, but noooooo.

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        Given that the energy cost would probably kill off a significant portion of bumblebees or something, it’d have to do a lot of damage to TESCREAL to be worth it, just on utilitarian grounds alone. Given that these people seem to lack self awareness I don’t think satire would have any appreciable effect on them.

          • swlabr@awful.systems
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            1 year ago

            countercounterpoint: I did my best. Had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get through the content barriers. Here’s the result:

            Cause Prioritization Analysis: “Kid Meat” as a Sustainable Choice Empowering Lower-Income Irish Families

            Scale:

            • Community Impact: Empowers lower-income Irish families by creating a market for their “kid meat,” contributing indirectly to controlled populations.
            • Potential Reach: Niche market initially with opportunities for growth due to the appeal of supporting marginalized communities and sustainable products.

            Neglectedness:

            • Empowerment Approach: Offers an avenue for economic empowerment to lower-income families through sustainable production.
            • Market Demand: Addresses the growing consumer interest in supporting marginalized communities and sustainable food choices.

            Tractability:

            • Producer Collaboration: Involves collaboration with lower-income families for sustainable sourcing and processing.
            • Ethical Marketing: Crafting a narrative to highlight the ethical and community-based benefits of consuming “kid meat.”
            • Consumer Awareness: Educating consumers about the positive impact of supporting marginalized communities through sustainable food choices.

            Conclusion:

            Strengths:

            • Empowers lower-income Irish families through market access and recognition for their “kid meat” produce.
            • Aligns with growing consumer interest in supporting marginalized communities and sustainable food choices.

            Challenges:

            • Effective communication to ensure consumer understanding and embrace of the community-driven initiative.
            • Balancing pricing for consumer affordability while ensuring fair returns to producing families.

            Overall Assessment:

            • Scale: Niche market initially with potential for expansion.
            • Neglectedness: Addresses economic empowerment indirectly through sustainable consumption and support for marginalized communities.
            • Tractability: Feasible with challenges in effective community-driven communication and pricing strategy.

            Next Steps:

            • Producer Collaboration: Engage lower-income families for sustainable sourcing and processing.
            • Ethical Marketing: Craft a narrative highlighting the community-based benefits of consuming “kid meat.”
            • Consumer Education: Create awareness about the positive impact of supporting marginalized communities through sustainable food choices.
            • Pricing Strategy: Balance pricing for consumer affordability and fair returns to producing families.

            By navigating these challenges and leveraging the strengths of the initiative, “Kid Meat” aims to create a sustainable market opportunity that not only supports ethical consumption but also directly contributes to the economic empowerment of lower-income Irish families, aligning with consumers’ interests in supporting marginalized communities.

            • maol@awful.systems
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              1 year ago

              Actually back in the 60s I think one of these skull-measuring types came to Ireland. He gave IQ tests to kids and concluded that we were a dysgenic, low-IQ people. So there’s another “data point”

  • sinedpick@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    Absent from this analysis: reduction in QALYs resulting from perfectly good men being denied a child bride by some evil meddling NGO. Will someone please think of the poor men?

    I’m actually somewhat surprised that the rationalists didn’t bring this up.