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by waps 4246 days ago
And what makes you think that random outcomes ("natural" outcomes if you will) are any better ? I mean, didn't we stop believing in a benevolent God at some point ?

Because when I look at the green movement, my mind very quickly feels the need to point out that for the green movement to do any good at all with their pushing of nature, nature would have to be good. Nature is not good, nor is it evil, but let me point out that with very, very few exceptions murderers are not evil either (the large majority are furthering their own ends, not killing for fun or morals).
3 comments
PeterisP 4246 days ago
The mapping between natural features and human population/agriculture is generally near a local optimum. If a random grassland would be swapped with a random desert of the same size, from a natural viewpoint it would be nearly the same, but it would have horrible consequences for the people living there.

Any significant changes to the natural features in random direction should be expected to be harmful for us - we can be rather sure that moving 10 steps in direction A is expected to be worse than moving 1 step in direction B even if we don't know anything about the actual changes caused by those directions.

We should prefer small random changes to big changes, unless we're really, really sure that the big changes are actually beneficial.

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waps 4245 days ago
> We should prefer small random changes to big changes, unless we're really, really sure that the big changes are actually beneficial.

True. But natural changes in history have been anything but small.

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learc83 4246 days ago
> I mean, didn't we stop believing in a benevolent God at some point ?

Who is we? The majority of the world believes in a "Supreme Being". In the US, about 75% believe in God, and in the EU 51% believe in God.

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eli_gottlieb 4246 days ago
>Who is we?

The sensible people, who can clearly see that there's less a God than there is an Auditor of Reality, an anal, obsessive-compulsive cosmic bureaucrat who doesn't give half a damn what happens to people as long as every atom reports its spin and the paperwork is filed on every chemical reaction.

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afarrell 4246 days ago
> The large majority are furthering their own ends.

You sound uncannily like the misinterpretation I held of D&D3.0's moral system. The Morality of Killing people to further your own ends Is highly dependent on what those ends are.

Plus I'm pretty sure if there is a majority among murderer, it is anger problems, not slytherin

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