A little while ago via this blog, I released a survey in which I asked people to answer some questions relating to dark secrets and their experience of dark secrets.
Guess about the "other" category of sexual misdeeds: Violations of the sexual norms of a particular group- i.e., something that isn't illegal but one's friend group would find abhorrent, or against workplace rules but consensual, or something that one's parents would disown for but isn't societally impermissible, and so on.
> It’s possible that, in the future, AI-based stylistic analysis of writing, combined perhaps with a few other clues, will be able to identify individuals based on passages they’ve written.
I'm pretty sure this is already possible, and has been for a decade or more. I don't think it requires 'AI' (or anything that would be now, nor has been recently, labeled such). I think you're right to be wary/paranoid!
> Will you be on the side of humanity, warts and all, or not? Is there a way to keep loving a species riddled with dark secrets without excusing them?
I think so? I think you're leading a good example along this dimension. That's maybe the thing I most like about you :)
And I like being 'pulled' along by you in that direction (when I 'approve' of the reasoning by which you do it).
I suspect, sadly, that a lot of people 'need' 'hate' to motivate themselves to defend anything at all. I personally feel like 'anger' does something similar for me and I've been struggling with what to do about that exactly for years now. (I don't – yet! – have a good answer, to either.)
In my view there is even still a dualistic ghost of Descartes roaming in Western moral thinking. "I" have a strong feeling that people have a false or elevated sense of agency and inner coherence (of themselves and others). Work of Richard C. Schwartz, writings of Kaj Sotala, meditation and split-brain research all point me towards a collection of competing agents in a single person. Also that the feeling of making a decision is not necessarily the same thing as _actually_ making a decision. It seems most of what is happening when we do and make things is more like being an observer to what you do, and then ad hoc deducing that that must be what I decided to do, just to make sense of what is happening.
To further lower agency, being a person with unresolved trauma, competing desires and fears, damaged or underdeveloped Orbitofrontal cortex due to parental, sexual, drug - or any kind of - abuse, all negatively affect decision making. (The decision making the Orbitofrontal cortex seems to be doing is passive; inhibiting action rather than prompting it, in the same vein of being an observer more than a doer). Surely people with physiologically reduced capacity to control their urges must lie lower on the spectrum of moral agency than some person with total inner harmony. It seems a rare minority of us are something close to a sole captain of their soaring-glider-of-a-self, while on the other end some are more or less dealt the role of playing the viola on a sinking ship.
> 20% of women report having been raped, or subject to attempted rape.
I don't even consider this, or anything else on your list, to be on the same level morally as a woman cheating on a man. It's straight up tame in comparison. Cuckoldry would probably be the worst possible thing.
Also if a person cheats and doesn't tell their partner, doesn't that often lead to making them a rapist (among other things), since they are now withholding important information necessary for consent from their partner? Any sexual contact they have at that point is technically not with full consent.
Modern western morality is truly insane and self-contradictory.
Guess about the "other" category of sexual misdeeds: Violations of the sexual norms of a particular group- i.e., something that isn't illegal but one's friend group would find abhorrent, or against workplace rules but consensual, or something that one's parents would disown for but isn't societally impermissible, and so on.
> It’s possible that, in the future, AI-based stylistic analysis of writing, combined perhaps with a few other clues, will be able to identify individuals based on passages they’ve written.
I'm pretty sure this is already possible, and has been for a decade or more. I don't think it requires 'AI' (or anything that would be now, nor has been recently, labeled such). I think you're right to be wary/paranoid!
> Will you be on the side of humanity, warts and all, or not? Is there a way to keep loving a species riddled with dark secrets without excusing them?
I think so? I think you're leading a good example along this dimension. That's maybe the thing I most like about you :)
And I like being 'pulled' along by you in that direction (when I 'approve' of the reasoning by which you do it).
I suspect, sadly, that a lot of people 'need' 'hate' to motivate themselves to defend anything at all. I personally feel like 'anger' does something similar for me and I've been struggling with what to do about that exactly for years now. (I don't – yet! – have a good answer, to either.)
In my view there is even still a dualistic ghost of Descartes roaming in Western moral thinking. "I" have a strong feeling that people have a false or elevated sense of agency and inner coherence (of themselves and others). Work of Richard C. Schwartz, writings of Kaj Sotala, meditation and split-brain research all point me towards a collection of competing agents in a single person. Also that the feeling of making a decision is not necessarily the same thing as _actually_ making a decision. It seems most of what is happening when we do and make things is more like being an observer to what you do, and then ad hoc deducing that that must be what I decided to do, just to make sense of what is happening.
To further lower agency, being a person with unresolved trauma, competing desires and fears, damaged or underdeveloped Orbitofrontal cortex due to parental, sexual, drug - or any kind of - abuse, all negatively affect decision making. (The decision making the Orbitofrontal cortex seems to be doing is passive; inhibiting action rather than prompting it, in the same vein of being an observer more than a doer). Surely people with physiologically reduced capacity to control their urges must lie lower on the spectrum of moral agency than some person with total inner harmony. It seems a rare minority of us are something close to a sole captain of their soaring-glider-of-a-self, while on the other end some are more or less dealt the role of playing the viola on a sinking ship.
> 20% of women report having been raped, or subject to attempted rape.
I don't even consider this, or anything else on your list, to be on the same level morally as a woman cheating on a man. It's straight up tame in comparison. Cuckoldry would probably be the worst possible thing.
Also if a person cheats and doesn't tell their partner, doesn't that often lead to making them a rapist (among other things), since they are now withholding important information necessary for consent from their partner? Any sexual contact they have at that point is technically not with full consent.
Modern western morality is truly insane and self-contradictory.