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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 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)