From: H C (lphege@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Nov 01 2005 - 19:47:13 MST
>From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
>Reply-To: sl4@sl4.org
>To: sl4@sl4.org
>Subject: KILLTHREAD: Do SL4's support the war in Iraq?
>Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 10:43:49 -0800
>
>H C wrote:
>>
>>(As a side note: This is also my reasoning for supporting the war- it is a
>>powerful factor in the globalization process which has so powerfully
>>benefited humanity thus far)
>
>You should know better than to even post with a subject line like that.
>
>Eliezer Yudkowsky,
>SL4 List Owner
On what basis can you possibly justify saying that?
It seems to me that the war in Iraq was drastically better than the
alternative.
1. Ultimately less death
2. ultimately less pain
3. more fairness in government
4. freer people
5. more knowledgable people (more, cheaper, technology and communication)
etc, etc, etc
Or maybe you thought I meant, war in general = good. I don't know if what I
was writing was just completely incomprehensible or what. My point was that
those society restructuring events, such as war and nation building, had
extremely powerful effects, and I also said the United States used this in a
particularly beneficial manner (at least, from what I see, in Iraq. The
epitome of the opposite being our blunder in Vietnam).
Furthermore, does the (imo presumptuous) disagreement with my ultimate
"side-note" conclusion completely nullify everything in the essay? War =
good really doesn't relate at all to the essay, except where War = good. The
point about war was simply that it is a powerful society restructuring
event, with powerfully beneficial potential (but only where
[death+!war]>[death+war]). *Dramatic society restructuring is most difficult
in those societies in which war is justified, in any way short of actual
war.*
Four people dismissed the entire idea as if it were the most distasteful
concept they had ever witnessed, and that confuses me more than anything. If
the list won't stand for it, y'all at least message me offlist to explain
why everything I said was so completely ridiculous.
I'm confused.
--Th3Hegem0n
>
>--
>Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
>Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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