On the definition of voluntary: Be clear that the defunding intervention wouldn’t satisfy some reasonable definitions of voluntary, and link to the comment thread discussing that.
minor, and I don’t have anything against you linking the thread, but presumably if you just clearly summarise your definition and usage of voluntary that will spare readers from trying to figure it out by going through that thread.
Happy to defer to you RE: acknowledgement, I don’t feel strongly either way.
I appreciate the kindly and patient statement! I don’t think the KFC analogy is great[1] but I’ll run with it—clearly if the vegan is choosing to “settle on voluntary animal suffering reduction,”, then the vegan only gets benefits of doing this to the extent that the proposed interventions are actually voluntary.
While I think much of my pushback would have not existed if you had either bit the bullet and justified claims around involuntary abortion (if these are your true views), or if you were clearer about your use of voluntary, there are clearly many more considerations than just this one point I raised, and I think the feedback you were given seems reasonable! And I don’t have a strong sense of whether the EA forum is a place where people would actually incur costs like “socially ostracized and have everything they have to say duly ignored”. But I do think this could be an important consideration and I don’t want to suggest that I think you should ignore this feedback. I’m largely speaking for myself when I push back on the usage of voluntary, and I’m not suggesting that you should prefer biting the bullet over say, focussing only on the subset of voluntary (by my definition) abortion reduction.
It’s also worth considering the reasons for the feedback RE: predicted pushback—is the expected pushback because the audience is tribal and unwilling to consider anything that isn’t coming from its ingroup? Is there a significant value difference? Is it a legitimate criticism?
RE: motivated reasoning—just to clarify, my intention personally wasn’t to convince you that your reasoning was motivated, only to suggest that it could be perceived as such.
RE: Scott’s quote you linked: my guess is that the majority of people who are pro-choice do so not because they think “[abortion] is murder, but I think we should continue to permit it anyway”, but because either 1) they don’t believe abortion is morally equivalent to murder or 2) even in cases where it is morally equivalent to murder, preserving the foetus’s life doesn’t trump other considerations (such as preserving the mother’s life, e.g. in a perimortem caesarean).
A better analogy might be going to a subset of very poor coastal West African fishermen who are highly dependent on fish for their food / income, and telling them that it’s morally wrong to eat fish. Comparing pregnant women seeking abortions to people having KFC seems like it doesn’t really capture the tradeoffs going on here.
Done on both of the concerns you raised. RE: acknowledgement, I believe people who update others should be celebrated :)
Agreed that the West African fishermen analogy would have been better than the KFC.
is the expected pushback because the audience is tribal and unwilling to consider anything that isn’t coming from its ingroup?
As far as tribalism goes, EAs and rationalists are miles better than every other group I’ve ever come across, but that doesn’t mean we’re not immune to it, especially with deeply divisive issues such as this post’s subject.
RE: Scott’s quote, most pro-choice people don’t think that way, but I’ve met many anecdotally who do. Like you said, they more commonly consider abortion to not be equivalent to murder, with the violinist analogy as a backup in case it were equivalent.
minor, and I don’t have anything against you linking the thread, but presumably if you just clearly summarise your definition and usage of voluntary that will spare readers from trying to figure it out by going through that thread.
Happy to defer to you RE: acknowledgement, I don’t feel strongly either way.
I appreciate the kindly and patient statement! I don’t think the KFC analogy is great[1] but I’ll run with it—clearly if the vegan is choosing to “settle on voluntary animal suffering reduction,”, then the vegan only gets benefits of doing this to the extent that the proposed interventions are actually voluntary.
While I think much of my pushback would have not existed if you had either bit the bullet and justified claims around involuntary abortion (if these are your true views), or if you were clearer about your use of voluntary, there are clearly many more considerations than just this one point I raised, and I think the feedback you were given seems reasonable! And I don’t have a strong sense of whether the EA forum is a place where people would actually incur costs like “socially ostracized and have everything they have to say duly ignored”. But I do think this could be an important consideration and I don’t want to suggest that I think you should ignore this feedback. I’m largely speaking for myself when I push back on the usage of voluntary, and I’m not suggesting that you should prefer biting the bullet over say, focussing only on the subset of voluntary (by my definition) abortion reduction.
It’s also worth considering the reasons for the feedback RE: predicted pushback—is the expected pushback because the audience is tribal and unwilling to consider anything that isn’t coming from its ingroup? Is there a significant value difference? Is it a legitimate criticism?
RE: motivated reasoning—just to clarify, my intention personally wasn’t to convince you that your reasoning was motivated, only to suggest that it could be perceived as such.
RE: Scott’s quote you linked: my guess is that the majority of people who are pro-choice do so not because they think “[abortion] is murder, but I think we should continue to permit it anyway”, but because either 1) they don’t believe abortion is morally equivalent to murder or 2) even in cases where it is morally equivalent to murder, preserving the foetus’s life doesn’t trump other considerations (such as preserving the mother’s life, e.g. in a perimortem caesarean).
A better analogy might be going to a subset of very poor coastal West African fishermen who are highly dependent on fish for their food / income, and telling them that it’s morally wrong to eat fish. Comparing pregnant women seeking abortions to people having KFC seems like it doesn’t really capture the tradeoffs going on here.
Done on both of the concerns you raised. RE: acknowledgement, I believe people who update others should be celebrated :)
Agreed that the West African fishermen analogy would have been better than the KFC.
As far as tribalism goes, EAs and rationalists are miles better than every other group I’ve ever come across, but that doesn’t mean we’re not immune to it, especially with deeply divisive issues such as this post’s subject.
RE: Scott’s quote, most pro-choice people don’t think that way, but I’ve met many anecdotally who do. Like you said, they more commonly consider abortion to not be equivalent to murder, with the violinist analogy as a backup in case it were equivalent.