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Darkness and the Shadow of the World
I wonder, sometimes, why people think justice is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Consider this a follow-up to “What gives us the positive right to get what we deserve?”. You are the light of the world. Jesus, in Matthew 5:14 The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole…
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“What gives us the positive right to get what we deserve?”
I’d like to amplify a question I think is really meaningful. It occurs between 7:15 and 9:27 in this video: I won’t paraphrase the argument, it mostly just sets up the headline, but suffice it to say it asks about how we should relate to the concept of justice, or how people get what they…
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Daunt, Easy, SEP
The three biggest dangers I see in the modern age are: People aren’t asking each other for emotionally invested relationships as much (romantic and otherwise), likely for fear of not just rejection but humiliation. Ease of communication and speed preference have made people think they’re being clever when they hardly engage with things at all…
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The Wonderful Double-Blessing of (Acknowledging) Trespass
There are a lot of tight-knit communities where people are reticent to believe a bad allegation of someone. For the purposes of this discussion I want to focus on specifically Christian (or nominally Christian) communities, and the details of the dynamics I’ve seen in response to social complaints. Often, the reflexive response is to say…
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Lead Exposure Elimination Project’s Malawi Analysis Understates Benefits By Ignoring Prosociality
I’ve been thinking about LEEP since I saw their $1.66 cost estimate (in expectation) to avert a case of lead exposure in children. But I suspect there’s a category of hard-to-analyze but valuable benefits that lead exposure elimination has that are not part of their analysis: the connection between lead and anti-social behaviors such as…
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Then What’s The Point of Mosquito-Targeting Insecticide?
There was recently, on Twitter, a lengthy thread, mostly criticizing people who support straight-forward charity work, instead of building large scale durable surveillance-oriented institutions. His basic point was that second- and higher-order effects are too difficult to avoid, so you have to monitor people (for, potentially, decades or generations) looking for these problems, lest all…
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Knowledge as Locally Counterfactually Sensitive Belief
This is my attempt to answer the classic question of what ‘knowledge’ is. To read a short history of alternative approaches (and why they might not be ideal), I recommend starting with the Wikipedia page on Gettier problems. I propose that, in the Justified True Belief paradigm, not enough attention is paid to the nature…
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If You Want To Be Perfect…
Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Luke 12:33-34 I’ve heard people say you ought not to…
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When The Answer To Violence is More Violence
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. – Jesus in Matthew 5:38-39 This is perhaps the most iconic freak idea of…