saw this pointed out here and felt it deserved it’s own post
let me mention that this is exactly the sort of argument I’ve seen pedophilia enthusiasts break out many times:
hmm, we thoughtful inquirers should look at this incredibly tenous evidence I’ve curated. it raises questions about whether we should be superrrrr chill about sex with children. questions with answers that, I’m sold on!
Absent from this analysis: reduction in QALYs resulting from perfectly good men being denied a child bride by some evil meddling NGO. Will someone please think of the poor men?
I’m actually somewhat surprised that the rationalists didn’t bring this up.
Someone should do a rewrite of “A Modest Proposal” in the form of one of these EA posts. It’d probably do pretty well.
Ethical use for gpt 4?
Given that the energy cost would probably kill off a significant portion of bumblebees or something, it’d have to do a lot of damage to TESCREAL to be worth it, just on utilitarian grounds alone. Given that these people seem to lack self awareness I don’t think satire would have any appreciable effect on them.
counterpoint: my GALY (giggle adjusted life year) would skyrocket
they would wholeheartedly embrace it in propoprtion to how awful the conclusion was
I did 80 hours of study on this, and turns out that the children had only negative QALYs (from now on NQALYs), and the reduction of poor parents surplus children actually increased the total QALYs (and that is not even counting the benefits you get from using the children), therefore in this essay I will…
It is funny, some of them are so afraid of paperclip generators while they don’t realize that they themselves can easily be made to believe horrible things if you just back it up with enough stats, papers and contrarian blog posts.
It always comes back to fucking children.
Why oh why does it always come back to fucking children?
probably just continually repeated sheer coincidence. honi soit dude
What a bunch of fucking ghouls.
From the replies:
Thanks for this, really valuable work!
I’m curious what the qualitative description of child marriage usually looks like in these cases- I have two very rough mental images:
A 14 year-old girl learning very little at school/ barely attends school. She’s very unlikely to continue studying past the age of 16. Her (very low-income) parents struggle to continue supporting her and would rather she married earlier to reduce their burden and make a bit of bridewealth money (maybe to concentrate resources on another child). She gets married, her husband takes on responsibility for her (he might be more responsible/ caring than her parents), and her life outcomes don’t change much from if she were to get married at 17.
A 14 year-old girl is learning quite a lot at school. She dreams of going to college/ sixth-form/ university and could even afford to if she got a part-time job, but family/ cultural pressure leads her to get married early. She has a child at 15, is forced to stay in her village, and all of her plans go to waste.
Could it be that people like to imagine something more like the second scenario when the first is more common?
These people are completely fine with child marriage/rape if the kids didn’t do well in school like they did. Their ability to empathize completely breaks down the second it meets their contempt for non-nerds.
These are the psychopaths who think they’re effective altruists.
WHY ARE THEY DOING THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS THERE ARE REAL CHILD MARRAIGE SURVIVORS OUT THERE THEY CAN READ ABOUT
Maybe that’s the reason why Republicans try to sabotage education wherever they can: Getting fresh young girls directly from the school benches right into their beds!
