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Yeah one of the strongest argument to support this is the fact that when Hamas first arrived on oct 7, there were no Israeli soldiers near them (most of them were at home on a holiday). There were places where Israeli soldiers only arrived 4-6 or more hours after the attack, so at those places Hamas could literally do freely whatever they wanted and they still killed civilians (so , it would be nearly impossible to talk around how they werent intentionally targeting civilians). Also what possible reasoning could be given attacking people at a music festival? Btw im surprised this still considered contentious for some people here.

I agree. The assumption that this speed of development will stay being on an exponentional curve is big and I havent heared a strong argument yet that would properly ground it. There also seems to be an assumption, that if we just scale up these models and if we use more computing power - eventually general intelligence will just emerge. But, there are certain problems that can't be simply solved by more computing power - for example the relevance realization and other moral and philosophical problems. It feels similar to saying that "well with more technological development we will make something so that we can travel faster than light" - well noo, its not a matter of lack of technological development , its a problem with laws of physics and until you can contradict that, you can have as much technological development as you want, you will have certain limitations that you can't cross.

Yes, but ideally for the reasons I mentioned before , we should focus on relative risk (the blue) rather than on both or only on civilian casualty ratio. Now of course, none of these metrics are absolute. The more variables we add, the bigger picture we can get about the war, however the issue is with the weighing of all variables. For instance, in my view, relative risk has much more weight and is much more informative assessing genocidal intent, than damage done to buildings, but of course that damage shouldn't be ignored. There are still of course ways to try to establish genocidal intent, but it will be hard, because you will have to explain how can you get such high relative risk, when you have genocidal intent in mind (and even there are other contradictory factors that you will have to blast through). Now, do you need to establish genocidal intent on Israel's part to make criticism towards Israel? No, of course not, and a lot of people here in this thread and in other places as well seem to forget that you don't have to die on this hill (that you have to prove genocideal intent). You can defend the Palestinian side without needing to use weak and bad arguments to prove genocidal intent. There are a lot of others crisicisms and arguments you can make against Israel and such arguments will be much easier to defend and to establish (for example damage done to buildings or you can pick any other thing). Regardless what side you are on (anyone who is reading this) - people need to stop using civilian casualty ratio to prove genocidal intent, because relative risk is just more reliable for that.

Here is the same graph with civilian casualty ratio as well (all the orange supposed to show the civilian casualty ratio and the blue the relative risk).

Yes, if we plug in the numbers to calculate the relative risk (RR) for this war , it will be high (the higher the RR, the higher the likelihood that militants are being targeted over civilians) and even if we use hamas friendly numbers, according to this metric , this is a quantitative evidence against the hypothesis that Israel is indiscriminately targeting everyone. Here is the current ongoing unfinished project that this dude does, where he calculates the Relative Risk (RR) for multiple wars. People can look at this and can get a sense, how well or how bad it tracks genocidal intent. There are explainers on the graph for how you need to interpret the graph.

I already shared the video in this thread a while back, but I will share it again. He uses examples to demonstrate whats the problem if you don't use the per capita version of it. So here is the video time stamped:

You guys using and obsessively holding onto the civilian to combatant ratio and not the per capita version of it to prove genocidal intent, is still incredibly sad that you think thats a reliable way to assess anything.

What feelings? What oversimplifications? I havent provided any position on the situation, Im only trying to systematically follow and question the justifications you provided and so far the reasons you provided seem to be completely falling apart after getting 2 layers deep in the line of questioning. No one forced you, but you took a position where you think a country is justified in invading another country if it feels threatened by it and now that I showed some of the bad entailments of such a view, you are trying to wash it away by saying that Im oversimplifying things - no, im showing what your position entails. If you want to adjust that position, go ahead do so. If you want to provide different justifications that you think can hold their grounds you are free to do so, but then be clear that you want to abandon all the justifications that you provided so far. Or if you don't want to abandon any of the justifications, then I would appreciate if you would answer the questions that I gave you in my earlier reply.

So as long as a country claims it feels threatened by x thats a good enough justification to invade x. I think thats a pretty weak and vague justification ,given that literally any country could use that right now against any other country. Yeah I agree, thats why I disagree with such vague justifications - it can basically be applied by anyone ,especially against Russia right now. One more reason why you should have written agreements. Its pretty weak on Russia's part that their main argument for invading is not even grounded in a written agreement. Again based on this low standard for invading - literally any country could come up with any weak reason to ground their belief of feeling threatened. Oh it does hold a lot of value, because they could point to something very tangible other than literally making up any baseless claim without evidence. This seems like an attempt to pivot from the original reason. The original reason of "we can't let Nato get close to Moscow" is now being abandoned and we are changing it to saying , Russia only has problem with Nato members that are close to Moscow and have good enough geographic advantages. What kind of geographic advantages a country needs to have, so that Russia can be justified in invading them? I reject the idea that Estonia and Latvia are not a threat to Russia if we define threat as Putin did. Whats the argument that establishes how Latvia and Estonia are in Russian control? Like what exactly is stopping NATO from arming up both of those countries with missiles and other weapons?

When I said nonsense I didn't specifically refer to this war (even though I disagree with the idea ,that if I feel threatened that justifies invading a country), I spoke about in general and try to point out whats the entailment of such reasoning, that says you need to do everything to avoid war. Do you think feeling threatened justifies invading a country in general? "I feel threatened , therefore I am justified to invade a country" - even though there were already Nato members close to Moscow (Latvia, Estonia). So how is that reasoning comes anywhere near justifying invading Ukraine? (even under the moral system that says it is okay to invade a country if you feel threatened) I have seen this talking point repeated, but to my knowledge there was never a written agreement that would specifically underline the claim you made there. So, in the agreement that you brought up, where does it says that Ukraine can't become a Nato member?

No. Thats like essentially saying you will obey whatever nonsense excuse or reason any country will come up with, cause they said if you don't do it they will go to war. Like giving a free ticket and control to the global political landscape. - Of course there are lines that needs to be drawn somewhere, where you evaluate the reasons put on the table. You can say that, but on the other hand lets not forget that such corruption destroys millions of lives and more given how long a corruption will stay alive. In this case. there is not much difference between doing vs allowing harm.

You should watch debates more often and you will catch more funny phrases

Yes, the oppressor and oppressed framework mistaken for reality.

Its not a matter of disagreeing with a point or a perspective, this is a matter of being disingenius and misleading and outright wrong and providing misinformation Its the same with his misinformation around vaccines, where he said the vaccines killed x amount of people. When he says something like that and he is wrong about the number, its not a matter of disagreeing about the antivaxx perspective, its him being factually wrong about the death number. Its the difference between using facts to build up your narrative vs factually being wrong. Its very easy: You can still disagree with the premise of funding Ukraine without needing to lie about the facts - For example, someone could have said, that those weapons and defense system should have been used solely for american war means and not for helping other countries or you can come up with any other random reason against the premise.

I have no sympathy for people who are that disingenious with their talking points and who poisions the political discourse and minds that much. The very thing that he can provide valuable insight is what makes him even more dangerous, because a lot of people will use him as a authority for information because he seems truthworthy based on his good insights and then you will accept a lot of his disingenious and outright bad takes as fact, when you don't have time or when you don't want to do research on the specific subject matter. Is it that much to ask to not be intellectually lazy?Do we need to cherish people and politicians who can't meet that basic of a standard?

"100 billion dollars could have been used otherwise" - disingenious statements like that is what makes the current political discussions completely dogshit and a lot of you eat it up cause you don't look up the things behind the statements that were made. RFK failed to demonstrate how can you directly convert air defense capabilities, artillery and antitank weapons to money that can be used for the things he described. He used the same extremely surface level and completely biased engagement when it came to the vaccines. I dont know why would any of you post these people as an authority to speak on any subject matter ,when they don't have an ounce of intellectual honesty. These people are so fucking ideologically driven that they don't have a spine to honestly engage with any of the facts anymore.

Yes, its very important and this skill takes time to develop, but worth it cause it is useful in all areas of life. One other thing that personally frustrates me is that in a lot of cases, I don't have the same norms in mind when it comes to the debate and we need to end up spending a lot of time in the middle of the convo talking about the meta (how the convo should or needs to go down). Like fuck, why can't we stay hyper focused on the subject matter and hash that out, being willing to answer each others line of questioning as clearly as we possibly can, without getting lost in tangents or in character analysing each other? One other thing that could help to reduce frustration and wasting time is having a clear specified debate proposition that both party understand. Like sometimes in these convos I stop and read back the back and forth and ask the question: Wtf are we debating right now or wtf are we actually disagreeing about right now? We get lost in the minutia without having any big picture goal to work towards in the debate. Once we know the debate proposition though, then we can get down in the weeds if it is necessary, cause we have a clear direction to work towards. The other thing that imo contributes a lot to lack of clarity, is that we don't see the inference structure that is used for an argument. Human language is really vague, so putting an argument in formal logic can help a ton to show how you get to your conclusion and it also gives clarity and an ability for your opponent to specify which premise(s) they disagree with + it can help you to rethink and clear up your own argument as well, because it forces you to create a valid argument, let alone a sound one. Its also super helpful , because its much harder to get lost in tangents, because in order to change an arguments conclusion the thing you talk about have to be connected to one of the premises. That Oeaohoo guy seemed crazily well read on a lot of things not just philosophy. That immediately struck me, by what words he used and how many different works he referenced in almost every one of his replies. Although one of the biggest frustration or problem I have with guys who has a lot of domain knowledge is that in a lot of cases, they don't have a good ability to communicate and they have a hard time directly engaging with an argument without going on big ramblings. The ability to only talk about things that are actually directly relevant to the discussion is a rare ability.

We two have had the same problem before - philosophical conversations that are this deep will require spending a lot of time on semantics if you want to have a productive and quality conversation. Without spending enough time on semantics, you will just have much more frustration and you will end up spending much more time down the road, cause you two will be talking past each other (and again I feel like we have had the exact same problem before and that generated a lot of unnecessary frustration for the both of us) The good thing with Carl is that he knows more philosophy than probably anyone else on this forum, so he can give a lot of specificity and he can describe some of these concepts in detail without being vague about any of them.

You guys should continue, it is entertaining.

@Scholar To be clear, I agree with you on a lot of things like: ignorant people will be persuaded by bullshit much more than by in depth analysis ; that stateing things with 100% confidence is much more attractive to people much more than being intellectually honest and having humility ; that people don't have time and are not educated enough to do their own research on every topic, therefore all of us are reliant (to different degrees) on taking on certain positions on blind faith; that the given the current incentive structure makes it so, that witholding information or lying about things or being dishonest and using pure rhetoric without substance are things that can elevate your success in general much more than the opposite of all these things. Where we disagree is the idea that scientist becoming more honest and them having more humility would destroy the current scientific institutions. Im not suggesting that they would win the fight, all I tried to point to there is that scientist having more epistemic humility and intellectual honesty wouldn't destroy the institutions (it was a reply and a disagreement with your point or implication that the current scientific institution requires as dogmatic and intellectualy lazy people like Dave in order to survive). This is the second point I disagree with. Take a regular person, that person can participate in society and work and live their lifes just fine, without needing to state and have visibile positions about everything. If you are not a famous person, most people won't give a fuck about what you believe in . Can you get social credit for taking up certain positions? Sure you can, you can also get negative social points, but in order to live a regular life, you don't have to.

From this doesn't follow that people have to be dogmatic about everything. From the premise you wrote only follows that yes, you will have beliefs and positions about things that you won't and can't verify on your own, but the fact that you are not open at all to change your positions , is a lack of epistemic humility and intellectual laziness problem. The degree of confidence you have in a position, should be in parallel with how much research and knowledge you have about said position. To be able to paricipate in current society, its not necessary to take a position on everything - you can stay agnostic about a lot of things. Its also not clear from what you wrote why Dave is essential. Dave could be more intellectually honest and epistemically humble and that still wouldn't destroy the system. The fact that you are more honest about the degree of knowledge you have and you are more open to investigate from that doesn't follow that you will abandon all of your standards for knowledge. Abandoning all the current scientific standards would actually destroy the system, but being more open and epistemically humble wouldn't.

Yeah - if he would be forced to construct a formal argument (with premises and conclusion) that would be an absolute killer. He would probably struggle to construct a valid argument, let alone a sound one. Forcing formal argumentation is really effective against people who are full of rhetoric, cause their inference making is showcased in 4k resolution in front of everyone and its much much harder to bullshit yourself somehow out of it.

I think Dave is really egotistical and he will get butthurt and defensive by your last paragraph. You don't even need to have domain knowledge about paranormal stuff or near death experience stuff in order to showcase Dave's unprincipled thinking. You could just continouasly ask him for an argument why all those things are stupid and if he cant provide a clear argument against them, then that alone will clearly showcase that he is emotionally and ideologically driven against those things and he is ruling out things in an unprincipled way and he is not serious in his thinking. You can push him on this: why does he act smug, when his confidence can't match the quality of argument he can provide against such cases. The objection of "I cant prove a negative" or the "onus is on you to provide a positive argument" - won't fly here, because he is taking a negative position against such cases and as long as he doesn't take an agnostic position on something (where you withold judgement, and you don't take any positive or negative stance against something), the onus is on him as well to justify his position. - Its the same with God debates. If you take an atheist position where you say that God doesn't exist - you will have to provide justification for that claim. Its very easy, whatever claim make or stance you take you will have to provide justification for it unless you are taking an agnostic route. The problem for Dave with taking an agnostic route though is that he won't be able to justify his confidence and smugness.

He is trying to point out the fallacious nature and the ridiculousness of that logic.

His question is pretty good though and brings a lot of productivity and clarity to this discussion. Whats the purpose of your thread? For you to prove something or to just invite people to inquire or to invite people to debate or to invite people to help you with something or just for entertainment or what exact reason for this thread? edit: I see you already answered it nevermind.