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brin_bellway[fairly strong cw: death]
oh my *god*, you are going to fucking *traumatise* some poor kid by giving them "Somebody Will", what the fuck is *wrong* with you
(A few years back I came so close to actually listening to "Somebody Will", but fortunately I happened to see the lyrics first, at which point I realised what an *incredibly fucking depressing* song it is and noped out of there.)
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Also, while I love "I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)", a large part of what makes it good is *the circumstances under which it was recorded*. You cannot make an earthbound cover: to be done right it *has* to be sung, absolute minimum, by someone who *has been* in space, and if at all possible by someone who *is currently* in space.
(otherwise it's just more fucking ~aspirational~ shit same as "Somebody Will": your life and everything in it contains nothing of terminal value, you're just an instrumental good, even the *foundations* of what is Right will swallow you up with barely a trace
No. I build *loads* of foundations, but I do it for *myself*. *Future generations* are an instrumental good, and to the extent that they do not make a good instrument--the extent to which even a vast and thriving near-future society will not figure out how to keep me alive, the chance that even a vast and thriving far-future society will never figure out how to revive me--they are a tiebreaker, something you might as well want all else equal because it is ever-so-abstractly better than nothing.
(In practice, other people--those who currently exist and those who do not yet--are so instrumentally valuable that barring weird edge cases one never really needs to *decide* whether or not one terminally values them, so it is very hard to be *sure* that the above paragraph captures my full feelings on the matter. But when I query my justifications, that's what I get.))
oh my *god*, you are going to fucking *traumatise* some poor kid by giving them "Somebody Will", what the fuck is *wrong* with you
(A few years back I came so close to actually listening to "Somebody Will", but fortunately I happened to see the lyrics first, at which point I realised what an *incredibly fucking depressing* song it is and noped out of there.)
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Also, while I love "I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)", a large part of what makes it good is *the circumstances under which it was recorded*. You cannot make an earthbound cover: to be done right it *has* to be sung, absolute minimum, by someone who *has been* in space, and if at all possible by someone who *is currently* in space.
(otherwise it's just more fucking ~aspirational~ shit same as "Somebody Will": your life and everything in it contains nothing of terminal value, you're just an instrumental good, even the *foundations* of what is Right will swallow you up with barely a trace
No. I build *loads* of foundations, but I do it for *myself*. *Future generations* are an instrumental good, and to the extent that they do not make a good instrument--the extent to which even a vast and thriving near-future society will not figure out how to keep me alive, the chance that even a vast and thriving far-future society will never figure out how to revive me--they are a tiebreaker, something you might as well want all else equal because it is ever-so-abstractly better than nothing.
(In practice, other people--those who currently exist and those who do not yet--are so instrumentally valuable that barring weird edge cases one never really needs to *decide* whether or not one terminally values them, so it is very hard to be *sure* that the above paragraph captures my full feelings on the matter. But when I query my justifications, that's what I get.))
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 01:09 pm (UTC)Somebody Will (This is the Ada Palmer one, right?) was written to counteract a very specific kind of despair in a very specific kind of nerd for whom cool space travel *is* a terminal value. It does a so-so job of this even in the ideal case, but it isn't lying to you, at least.
(And yeah, there's a very fundamental level on which the world is so large that any kind of fundamental good which isn't centered on you and yours will swallow you alive. That's just what living in a world with so much in it means)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 03:03 pm (UTC)*Most* of her songs are original, but yeah the marking is not always great, and she seems to cover her own stuff a lot? Which is a big part of why I'd been putting this off, that it's annoying to even figure out which songs she's done without getting a bunch of duplicates or near-duplicates. (Hence my "current location".) I think I've figured it out now, though.
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>>Somebody Will (This is the Ada Palmer one, right?)<<
Yeah, I checked Dale's lyrics page for it and it looks right.
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>>a very specific kind of despair in a very specific kind of nerd for whom cool space travel *is* a terminal value. It does a so-so job of this even in the ideal case, but it isn't lying to you, at least.<<
Yeah, I expect there are people who manage to find this song uplifting, but in general I struggle to express in words how strongly I disapprove of giving children media about the inevitability of death. And if I could *telepathically* express the amount of suffering I've experienced from such things, it would probably be immoral to do so.
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>>And yeah, there's a very fundamental level on which the world is so large that any kind of fundamental good which isn't centered on you and yours will swallow you alive.<<
I remember Ozy complaining about how annoying it is when people respond to someone struggling with metaethics with "have you considered becoming a Slytherin?", but honestly I've kind of been feeling that these past few years? I don't know if I'm *more* Slytherin-y than I was before or just not lying to myself about it as much, but either way would recommend.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-26 12:22 am (UTC)That makes it even worse. Her cover of Dawson's Christian is good enough that I'm non-trivially interested in her as a musician but also just urgh. (Also enough of the filk is lost or lostish that I wouldn't *trust* that any given song is original)
>> I struggle to express in words how strongly I disapprove of giving children media about the inevitability of death.
Fair enough.
>>people respond to someone struggling with metaethics with "have you considered becoming a Slytherin?"
I wouldn't say I'm struggling with it exactly - that just seems fundamentally obvious?
(Also I'm not 100% sure I like that model because it's annoying to try and fit myself into it? The houses all seem to loop around as special cases of each other. I guess I'm somewhere on the Ravenclaw/Gryffindor zone. Being Slytherin does seem ... uh. Virtuous-not-virtuous. bleh. My mental definition of virtue breaks down here.)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-26 01:07 am (UTC)I don't see that one anywhere, even if I specifically google it.
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>>Also I'm not 100% sure I like that model because it's annoying to try and fit myself into it?<<
The model's an interesting way of gesturing at things, but I'm never quite sure how much I like it either. I phrased it as "have you considered becoming a Slytherin" because that's the phrasing Ozy used. One could just as well call it "ethical egoism", IIRC.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-26 01:14 am (UTC)Ah, you wouldn't, I got some wires crossed. The video's you posted are sufficient substitute though
>>One could just as well call it "ethical egoism"
Fair enough (I do end up doing something in this space as a solution to this problem but I don't have to like it)