Yes nuclear waste is a big deal You can have multiple oil disasters and we can clean it up, cities will still be livable.

All it takes is one time, just one time for radiation to seep into underground water from whatever source, not properly contained sources, earthquakes, war (such as ukraine which proves it's always a possibility). Technology will never take away all chance of risk of our current nuclear energy there is always a way it can go wrong.

And the whole point is if it does go wrong now you've just doomed how many hundreds of miles to a nuclear wasteland. It's not worth the risk. Fusion if I recall and was not lied to is safe but until Fusion becomes a thing we shouldn't use Nuclear and certainly shouldn't promote it's use in developing countries that are cutting corners.

Nuclear waste is not the big baddie that people keep thinking it is. That said, even if it actually was, more investment and building of plants means more development into new more efficient tech, meaning less waste over time. Every problem with nuclear can be solved through technological progression.

>It's just people being stupid and lazy that cause problems.

but that has been the major problem with fossil fuels. its been known since the industrial revolution that adding CO^(2) to the atmosphere would increase global warming. 100 years later and we're still arguing about it while suffocating. had we taken action early on we could have mitigated a lot of the problems.

i'm all for switching to nuclear with that issue nailed down in advance: Once we identify (publicly and transparently) how the industry should operate any deviation would be a criminal offense.

So that sticky safety valve at 3 mile island that the designer knew about but didn't replace? Prison time for that board of directors. That experimental overheating paradigm they were trying at Chernobyl? Life in prison for anybody signing off on those gymnastics.

in my mind it's not about switching to a new source; it's about operating outside of the stupid-box.

Personally I'd rather be riding the nuclear train than the fossil fuel train. While both have long lasting impacts in their waste products, the nuclear option at least has the unicorn dream of cold fusion maybe being somewhere down the road. Fossil fuel doesn't. Obviously if we could get to some sort of sustainability level with solar, WI d, and wave energy production then we might be in a better position then, but until that day co.es, I wish the US hadn't stopped building g nuclear power plants almost 50 years ago.

Nuclear energy is safe. It's just people being stupid and lazy that cause problems.

Can you link part 1?

Timely. As an IR Scholar, I'll be using this. Thanks!

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Unselfish concerns for offspring? They can barely think, let alone be concerned with anything other than crying. Birds are quite savage too. This is probably the worst abstract I've read in a while...

Humans need to stick together to survive which is why there is a moral construct that exists. It appears rooted in biology only because you are raised by a family but if you look at history, you can clearly see that morality isn't programmed by virtue of biology. Obviously, because you have a brain you can comprehend social norms and be "moral".

These ideas have been already been (more or less) systematized by western thinkers like Heidegger, Lacan, and Deleuze. Subjectivity is pushed to the margins.

I would simply not let anything Graham Harman says reinforce any beliefs you have about the wider field

Still, if you haven't passively heard of Latour by the time you got to your masters and then is prepared to say that he is a nobody which should not contend with what has already been discussed a thousand years ago, I feel that you don't really have the credentials to claim whether or not he is a serious contender, or what it is that has already been discussed in philsophy for a thousands years. Latour is very much a part of an important discussion in philosophy. Just look at his contributions to the philosophy of science for one.

That’s incredible, any resources that you know of that discuss the topic?

I’m not letting /r/philosophy stand in for the field…more like letting it reinforce beliefs that I already held due to other reasons.

For the last two years of my study I was reading primarily Heidegger, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and before that I was into social and political ethics. So no, I’ve never heard of him.

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>The problem is not that longtermists go around saying "We really ought to do more genociding," it's that longtermists go around arguing that essentially any present-day sacrifice short of human extinction is trivially easy to justify according to their deeply wonky assumptions about the future.

I don't think they do this either.

Like, if I go to the EA forum (probably the online community with the biggest longtermist population) and look for highly-upvoted posts about longtermism and ethics, I find things like this and this and this and this. There is a lot of skepticism about naive utilitarianism, and an abundance of people saying things like "being a hardcore utilitarian can lead you to weird places, therefore we should find a theory of ethics that avoids doing that while keeping the good parts of longtermism and utilitarianism intact". Conversely, there's a total lack of posts or responses that take the opposite stance and say, actually, we should accept literally every crazy consequence of naive longtermism, and it's completely morally okay to sacrifice millions of people if it reduces the odds of humanity's extinction by 0.01%. Seriously, I swear I'm not cherrypicking examples, this is what the average post about longtermist ethics looks like.

You insist that longtermism is intrinsically built around exotic hypotheticals and a willingness to make horrible sacrifices--but if that's true, then why do they spend even more time picking those claims apart than their biggest critics do?

I think you could reasonably argue that longtermists need to spend more time working on the philosophical foundations of their movement, to find a way to reconcile the good parts of utilitarianism with the bad parts (and I bet most longtermists would agree!). I think you can't argue that the core of longtermism--"the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time"--is a stance that can only be justified by the bad parts.

You got into a masters and never heard of Latour?

Letting /r/philosophy and in particular Graham Harman stand in for the field is egregiously unwise

Buddhist philosophy should really be required material for philosophy students. This would never have been an assumption.

I think that a "paradox" is how we describe the impossibility of two contradictory, albeit unassailably true (whether in reality or arguendo), facts. Oftentimes, a paradox describes an inconsistency between logical and experiential truth. Those are my favorite kinds because it pits sensory experience against logic.

Good point

As far as I know this is the first article I’ve read by him, but he strikes me as one of those cheerleaders who give obscurantist philosophers all their heft by proclaiming them to be geniuses without ever really elucidating their (ineffable) philosophies. I feel like I learned nothing significant about the actual meaning of Latour’s work from this article, except that maybe he’s another of those continental philosophers who I’m definitely serious you guys has for real this time finally blown the lid off what’s wrong with all previous philosophy.

Irrelevant, but I think Rene Descartes proposed something like this. Though not a razor, but still. Or maybe not? Well, tell me your thoughts. Still I think your razor is certainly interesting but I believe it is flawed.

Not Zen specifically tbh.