Distributed as in non centralized. Many people feel like there is nothing they can do to contribute to meaningful change, especially with how spread out Americans are, but surely there has got to be something.
Using the trend of blocking traffic as an example, I think a coordinated effort to not just block a highway in one city, but to block state routes and other arteries in many places would be more effective. Instead of one city having bad traffic for a day, it would be many towns and it would be harder to dismiss as a local problem if people across the states are engaging.
I just wanna prepend my reply here with the fact that I hold no animosity towards you or anything, you’re a stranger to me, and that I appreciate you taking the time to share your ideas with me.
Now, I have two main points in response if you’re interested in continuing any sort of discussion…
Primarily I want to point out how every time material consequences are raised you respond with some form of absolute statement. (e.g, off the top of my head without directly citing you: ‘any kid could be Hitler,’ ‘it all won’t matter anyway,’ ‘humanity is a lost cause’). While this isn’t intrinsically bad it does come across as cowardly rhetoric. Conceding to absolutes is also what we might refer to as faith.
Secondarily, are we talking about morality or strategy here? If we’re talking about morality, then just say plainly you oppose reproduction categorically. If we’re talking real-world, effective strategy then we must confront things dialectically because material facts matter. We can’t just dismiss things with absolutism for being inconvenient to your existing position.
EDIT: Additional thought: If your stance is purely about suffering, then you are indeed making a claim about which lives are worth bringing into existence… namely, those that won’t suffer. That is a sanctity/value claim, just under another name. Which is it? Either you admit this is a value framework, or you have no grounds for your conclusion. I didn’t put words in your mouth, I simply interpreted the ones you put into the world as any reasonable person would.
There does seem to be more overlap in our assessments than what I normally see in these kinds of debates: opposition in good faith is practically unheard of, so I’m quick to just point out fallacies and post fairly bluntly in a way that’s more addressed to any potential lurkers than the poster I’m actually replying to. I’m not getting that vibe from you, so fuck yeah I’ll cool it down!
Honestly the ‘any kid could be Hitler’ thing is kind of moot. All that’s saying is that the parent isn’t in absolute control of how their kid turns out. But let’s ignore that and pretend 100% of good parents result in children who grow to be good adults. I still don’t see that making a difference. There are so many bad parents cranking out children who grow up to be bad adults that it’s a losing battle either way. That ratio is exaggerated in people who are in positions of power: turns out it’s really difficult and really rare for a decent person to acquire one of those positions, be it political, military, corporate, financial, you name it. So individually, raising a kid to be moral in a world where evil excels is setting them up for some extreme frustration; and on a larger scale, the odds of that kid growing to have the desire and means -and community support- to make a meaningful shift in things like civil liberties? It sounds like a heart warming movie, but not at all something that can realistically happen.
Is that cowardly? It might be… it is admitting defeat, and defeatism can definitely be a form of cowardice. I don’t see it as an act of faith though: faith is belief without evidence. To the contrary, we unfortunately have an abundance of evidence pointing toward governments around the globe shifting to authoritarianism, civil liberties evaporating, hatred of outgroups becoming the norm and even celebrated, wealth gaps widening, and environmental feedback loops pushing the global climate closer and closer to the limits of supporting human life. And none of those things have we collectively stepped back and said “well shit, we really need to start fixing this” - instead we’ve slammed down on the metaphorical (and literal) gas pedal such that those things aren’t just worsening, but that they’re worsening at an accelerating rate. If you see a car straight-on approaching the edge of a cliff at 90mph and accelerating, and it’s a hundred or so yards out, it isn’t exactly an act of prophecy to claim that it’s about to hurl itself off the edge.
I’m not sure. Neither? Both?
There’s a distinction between reproduction categorically, and the choice to reproduce. We’ve already bashed heads over that. What bothers me is people who choose to reproduce without any real thought into what that means for the life they just created. Anecdotally, even my own parents have berated me for denying them their grandchildren, and denying myself and my wife ‘life’s greatest joy’. I’ve finally gotten them to fuck off after repeatedly telling them to stop being selfish or telling me to be selfish; and that I love my unborn child far too much to bring them into the hellhole of a planet we’ve built for the next generation.
…but reproduction categorically? Well, like you said there are a lot of folks who aren’t actually in a position to make a choice. I still fear for their children, but I have nothing against the parents who are put into that horrible position.
I’m not sure what you mean. Real-world, effective strategy to do what? Turn humanity around and fix our dying planet? It’s a nice dream, and I’d absolutely love to be wrong here, but again the real world trends are accelerating toward that cliff.
Real world strategy to reduce suffering? Well, you know my stance on that already: don’t choose to have kids.
Accounting for those inconvenient things is what landed me in this opinion in the first place. I don’t say this as an insult or point of aggression, but I really do think you’re projecting. I don’t see a rational basis for optimism. Frankly I’m a tad jealous of that optimism even if it is irrational… basing my worldview on current events certainly isn’t doing any favors to my mental health.
Disagree on that last bit, but I can shrug it off as a miscommunication. That aside, again I’m not really sure what you mean. I understand sanctity to mean holding religious value, or holy. I don’t personally believe in any of that, but that isn’t exclusive to morality or values - there is absolutely a framework. There’s also a lot of overlap - for many, that framework comes from religion. But concepts like good and evil, moral and immoral, etc can and do exist in a secular context as well. It used to be my belief that the majority of people are overall good; but that evil people have a tendency to rise to positions of power due to being okay with advancing themselves with unethical actions. That second bit still appears to be true, but as for the majority of people being good bit… well, the 2016 election was last bullet in that liver, with the corpse of my faith in humanity further perforated in 2024: it isn’t just one evil dipshit on top oppressing the masses, it’s that a solid third of the masses fucking love that evil dipshit for the evil dipshit things he says and does. Another third of the masses is maybe not cheering the fucker, but are so apathetic to that kind of evil taking power that they couldn’t be bothered to do so much as color in a quarter-inch fucking rectangle in opposition to that possibility. Genuinely good people are a minority; and genuinely good people in power are a unicorn.
So, there’s the grounds for my conclusion. Evil is the norm. The only realistic path ahead of us I see is the continuing degradation of our rights and quality of life until our planet is pushed beyond the conditions that support human life. This will take generations yet, but that’s barely a blip on humanity’s timeline: we’re a hundred or so yards out from that cliff, and now’s not a great time to be adding passengers in the hopes that they’ll grow up and figure out how to add wings to the car before it hits the ground.
I’m a ML/AI engineer and student for context, if that makes my worldview and how I choose to tackle problems like this any more apparent. I’m quite busy with my work right now IRL due to the time of year. I don’t really have a ton of time to write essays. So, I’ve selected six main excerpts from your response to highlight, in an attempt at getting my stance here across as efficiently as possible. I’m writing this pretty sleep deprived after an all-night session for work so apologies if I come across as brain-fried at any point.
A big problem for me here is the illicit nature of this sort of reasoning, and it pops up in a lot of your ethos. You start out by making some sort of statistical observation, such as the fact that there are so many bad parents, then use it to make a universal assertion… e.g, “it’s a losing battle either way.” You can either admit that what you actually mean is “very unlikely,” and then make an argument based in expected values, or you can stop pretending you have demonstrated impossibility. If you accept the nonzero probability some people change things, the position that there is no difference collapses into incoherence, strictly & logically speaking.
This is problematic as a metaphor because physics as a system is highly deterministic compared to the high-variance nature of history. The past is full of unlikely reversals. This is where me calling your rhetoric faithful or dogmatic is kind of coming from. The claim to inevitability is being made as an act of faith and isn’t actually justified in anything other than an assumption regarding the future based on imperfect data. That isn’t a dig at you personally: we as humans, being finite systems, can obviously only hold so much in our brains and so we necessarily lack the information you’d need to make this judgement with any kind of certainty. So far you have just made the moral assertion that the future seems bleak and therefore having a child would be an unethical action. That’s fine, but you can’t pass it off as some sort of rational conclusion without providing some sort of argument based in actual scientific reasoning.
That isn’t really strategy, though. Collapsing into moralist abstention surrenders the strategic domain entirely. Strategy answers the question of “what interventions change outcomes?” Your default must be: could any action plausibly alter trajectories? You’ve refused that question by fiat. If abstention is your only strategy, state it is a moral choice, not a “real-world strategy.”
You’re mistaking emotional stance for epistemic method. What you’re calling “optimism” isn’t wishful thinking. It’s a methodologically based refusal to collapse uncertainty into certainty, to keep probability distinct from necessity. I’m not optimistic. Bad things will happen in the future. Good things will too, though. Emotion doesn’t really play into it as a factor for me. I work in a field that is playing with a Promethean fire capable of ending the human world as we know it, not dissimilar to the early days of nuclear physics and engineering. I’m aware every single day that through a variety of means the world might literally end, from our perspectives. It hasn’t been written yet, though. I still plan for the future as if it is still coming because, while I cannot be certain what will happen, I can be certain that a number of things might happen. A cat who gets hit by a car dies by forces and confluence far beyond its own understanding, control, or conception of the world so we naturally wouldn’t judge it for not knowing traffic laws. If humanity dies, so be it, but don’t condemn us to immorality for the mere possibility that we were in ignorance of tools that might’ve been our salvation. It isn’t wrong to try to survive, from any perspective. I digress however, I’m getting into a bit of a tangent here.
Well, that’s essentially the admission I’m looking for. You cannot have it both ways. Either you can deny that your view depends on values (religious [“sanctity”], secular, wherever you want to source them) - in which case you have no moral basis to prescribe abstention - or you admit that you are making a weighty value judgement about what lives are worth creating; engaging in a grand moral calculus with only a handful of anecdotal, recent, and localized points as input. I find that irrational in essence. It doesn’t matter whether you’re getting it from religion or not, it’s still logically a faith-based conclusion until you back it up with some sort of actual reasoning or evidence.
You’re substituting anecdote and grievance for argument, in short. These are sweeping empirical claims being declared as metaphysical law. That’s fine if and only if you have robust and falsifiable metrics proving that humanity will inexorably degrade regardless of intervention. If that’s the case, then present such evidence. Otherwise you’re arguing against the very standard academic opinion in history and historiography, which is that minorities can and do still change history; denying that requires extraordinary proof that you haven’t offered. Historically, small organized minorities have produced outsized change and you need to justify it rigorously if you want to argue against the mere possibility.
From my point of view, your position has three untenable and incompatible moves happening at once:
These can’t all be true at once, you can’t coherently string these together. You have to pick one. You could oppose reproduction on principled and moral grounds. It’s not some rational or scientific take, but, if you concede that then you can at least own it and declare it as your personal moral policy. Or, you could approach it in a probabilistic manner - like I make initial attempts at in my responses to you. You would claim that given so and so probabilities and expected values, abstention has the best expected outcomes. If you want to claim that, again, it’s fine, but the proof is in the pudding so to speak. You can’t just wantonly come to conclusions based on vibes, anecdote, or faith - it needs justification beyond that… especially when we are talking about something as serious this. I suppose you could also just outright accept futility as some sort of a fatalist too, just declare the bad outcomes as inevitable. At that point, though, there’s no point in you even being here arguing with me or anyone else because you’re not arguing a position in the debate, you’re renouncing the forum of discourse entirely. The fact that you’re still here tells me that, maybe even if deep down, that final part isn’t truly what you think even though what you’ve responded with would, on the face of it, make me say otherwise.
I need to wrap this up because I really need to get back to studying for both work and school (the problems I am working on require me to read a few new books) but I’ll leave you with this final tidbit, at least for now:
If you’re truly jealous of my “optimism” and really want it for yourself, then I have good news. I can actually give it to you. You don’t need to trust me or agree with me at all, just consider the following advice, if you want to take anything from our interaction at all.
Anytime you catch yourself saying something absolutist like “it’s inevitable,” “it makes no difference,” etc. - try three quick rhetorical checks:
If you run those three and answer honestly then your sentences will stop migrating into prophecy. You will feel a lot less burdened without conceding your rationalism.
Full time surgical tech by day, part time nursing student by night, here. I get it. I 100% shouldn’t be doing these lengthy writeups either lol. Doing it anyway:
Oh, if an absolutist statement in response to very high or very low probability is a hangup, then that explains a lot of why you’re taking issue with my posts. Nothing is certain in an absolute sense. If that car zipping toward the cliff’s edge starts some kind of professional-tier driving maneuver right now where it skids to a 180° turn and uses the full force of the engine to apply force in the opposite direction, then yeah, maybe it’ll have a chance at not going over the edge. But when we’re talking about about the statistical equivalent to a miracle, I’m confident in using absolutist language to say that won’t be the case: the car will go off the edge, even if “will” in this case is only 99% or w/e certain.
To the contrary, I’d argue that making a decision based on that fleeting possibility of a perfectly executed turnaround to be an act of faith, as it’s in blatant disregard to very well documented trends.
Disagree. I’ll put my nurse hat on for this one: interventions in healthcare are typically made with the goal of being curative or at least stabilization to set the groundwork for what will later be curative. But that’s only when the patient’s condition is one that can plausibly improve. There comes a point where your body is so fucked up that we literally stop attempting curative interventions. And that absolutist response happens even when there’s still a tiny chance at turning that patient around: we don’t attempt curative interventions all the way up until you die. When you’re a hundred or so yards out from that cliff, we put you on hospice so you can live out the tiny remainder of your life in as much comfort as possible.
Humanity is our patient. That patient has not been compliant with the healthcare plan that could have saved their life, and the condition is now so unstable that further interventions are exceedingly unlikely to work. It’s time to go on hospice.
Reduction of suffering is both a real-world strategy and a moral choice.
You appear to be projecting again. Your stance is clinging to a hope based on the tiny possibility that humanity will deviate from the trends that have culminated into our current state. That is wishful thinking. Optimism. My assertion is that the trends we’ve observed will continue: much like the object in motion that stays in motion, our trajectory will remain unchanged unless we apply an opposing force of enough magnitude to turn us around - and so far humanity has not shown any willingness to do so. A minority of us have expressed the desire to do so, but that isn’t going to cut it.
Climate data and global political trends are not anecdote. I’ve only brought anecdote into this conversation a single time, which I prefaced by specifically calling out as anecdote.
No. Humanity as a whole, including its governments, corporations, and individuals would need to unify under the goal of, at the very least, stabilizing our climate. That would give us the time we need fix the other shit like civil liberties. Not only are we not doing that, we are actively accelerating in the opposite direction.
Very low. The problem isn’t that humanity doesn’t have the power to turn this around, the problem is that it’s refusing. I can’t quantify that any more than I could a type 2 diabetic subsisting on a diet of candy bars and soda: I can scream about how each mouthful is pushing them closer to a death that they’re already standing on the edge of; but this just amuses them because they think it makes me a ‘triggered lib’ or some shit.
That is a false dichotomy. My conclusion is based on the empirical data of climate and political trends; and the moral preference of not willingly subjecting anyone to that cruelty.