10/10 would pick local soccer team anytime. I am not utilitarian and I do not believe in human interchangeability. I value the health of local youth in my backyard far more, especially when the cause is boys in sports.
Sure, but _why_ is the question. I cannot understand how you think more good comes from making sure the local boys soccer club has a clean field to play vs. ensuring 4 families will sleep without the risk of contracting malaria. What makes you value the former more than the latter?
If you were the family facing malaria, and someone tried to donate the nets to you, would you sell them and donate the proceeds to their local soccer club?
"More good" reeks of nerdy utilitarianism which I completely reject. What makes me value the soccer team is love and kinship and vitalism. Mine extends to the local boys playing soccer. I want to see them thrive. I do not care about the malaria net folks. No ill will - I just do not care, I want them occupying no part of my brain.
And certainly no dorky nerds unable to comprehend human reality and attempting to force everyone in their abstract streamlined toy-reality with Philosophy 101 word games will change my mind.
Besides being a s*tshow in practice, and I'm not saying that just due to recent developments, I reject EA even at its hypothetical pure form. Even outside direct family bonds, I do not value all peoples the same and do not support my discretionary resources going to them. Holding people's feet to fire with rationalizations, hypotheticals, Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct. I have zero respect for deracinated disembodied nerds lost in their own abstractions who waste their surplus IQ to try to bully people into accepting their imaginary toy world through word games.
> Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct
Shouldn't instincts be subject to reason and falsification, regardless of whether they're normal? If you can find little to no rational justification for preferring your instinctive choice, shouldn't you seriously consider overriding that instinct?
Absolutely not. Words and rationality are far inferior clumsy tools of communication (and - with respect to the nerds in question - tools of manipulation) to the vastly more multi-dimensional, multi-generational, tried-and-true, human instincts.
> Words and rationality are far inferior clumsy tools of communication (and - with respect to the nerds in question - tools of manipulation) to the vastly more multi-dimensional, multi-generational, tried-and-true, human instincts.
You mean the kind of instincts that justified slavery, that oppresses women, that justifies spousal abuse and racial or ethnic hatred? Yeah sorry, "instincts" have orders of magnitude more failure modes than reason and language.
Deracinated nerd here, but I find your perspective at least a lot more understandable than the people who at appalled by the idea of using rich people's money to save poor people's lives, from a robustly anti-capitalist standpoint.
Totally - instincts are powerful and attempting to collapse their multidimensional information space into words and rationality forces people into absurdities (and the nerds get immense joy at seeing their betters squirm at their toy games). I side with the "appalled", but that's because I know they are soft and polite people clumsily trying to catch up to the high-IQ* nerds.
I have no problem looking nerds dead in the eye and say "I have no respect for you and your abstract games in your toy fantasy world".
* EDIT: high-IQ sounds too flattering; I meant just-smart-enough to vomit articles, books, PhD theses, insufferable "discussions" in tasteless EA-parties crying about "why reality should work different" - throwing a temper tantrum and stomping their feet because normal humans do not want or respect the toy games they play in their toy worlds
I wish I had a memory good enough to remember the names of anyone besides my own family and the people I interact with on a weekly basis. Actually scratch that, I don’t even remember the names of some of my extended family.
Look, you might think this is creepy, and I get that. But for some, this kind of software is a valuable crutch. And you wouldn’t kick a crutch out from under someone who cannot walk unassisted.
What about the name of a dude you got introduced to at a party and they mentioned they played the guitar and you were thinking about starting a garage band the next year?
In our case, our org (Norwegian Red Cross) buy the equipment using sponsor money and the like. Then we get reimbursed by the government for using them in SAR operations.
It works well enough for us to have maybe 4 snowmobiles, 2 6-wheel ATV's, a 4 person rope rescue kit, 10 TETRA phones and a car in addition to various medical equipment.
