D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

[Chaosmancer]

So nobody is special then? We all have uniqueness about us that makes us special.

So zebra are just as special as humans, after all, all zebra are unique. Uniqueness is not the same as specialness.

The deciding factor is being human.

Disagree, because if the deciding factor on personhood is "are you human" then we have already denied personhood to every non-human species that may ever exist. And they will exist. Statistics show that pretty compellingly. Sp why pre-emptively deny them personhood?

 

[Guest 85555]

And yet we have found the opposite to be true. When we allow for "debate" on things, we are telling people there is something to debate. I recently had someone comment to me in a story that they had heard all Jewish people worship Moloch and are cannibals. What is there to debate here? They were wrong. Completely, utterly, and undebatedly wrong. If I engaged with them in "good faith" I'm not going to be making it seem like they are wrong, but that they have a point worth debating.

Because this stuff continues to gain traction if you don't engage it and dispute it (and it allows them to end up having arguments that work because there aren't rebuttals to them). Look I grew up in an area where I was told the Jewish side of my family was in hell 'because they didn't believe in God'. I've even encountered more grotesque beliefs. You won't convince every one but you will weaken ignorant and hateful positions if you show why they aren't true. I am not saying everyone is obligated to engage someone saying something they find wrong or troubling (I think it is hard to do, and even potentially dangerous at times). But we should at least counter bad ideas so they aren't able to take root and so that there are counter arguments out there to help weaken them. You may always have people who will believe in flat earth no matter what, but you will also help make sure that movement doesn't grow and change some peoples minds if you at least seriously respond to whatever arguments they have. Not engaging just allows them to have the most recent and unrequited argument in the discourse.

 

[AnotherGuy]

When we allow a conversation to happen over a topic, we are acknowledging that both sides are reasonable and are due consideration. Which is a noble goal, but when we state that, we sometimes give far too much weight to ideas that do not deserve them. Some times, the conversation just ends, because there is so little value in the other side that it is not due consideration. Now, that line can be challenged, that line is going to be different for different people, but that line must exist, as the spiraling of conspiracy theories and such have shown. Misinformation doesn't need to be debated, it needs to be called false and moved on from that.

That's called censorship.
People are entering the debate all the time. It's disingeneous to shut down conversation from now on because you've settled on the matter.
Kid asks questions, you don't shut them down - you attempt to educate. It's also non scientific to not allow an idea to be challenged.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yes they only stole and never invented or improved....what was I thinking....they're exactly like the D&D orc brutes with their aqueducts, judicial processes, masonry, bound books...etc

What was I thinking...it's the 21st century ofc we have to reduce certain history into absurdist levels for that all elusive vp.

Thanks for the correction. Barbaric raiders it is.

I never said they never improved it, but they did steal it.

Aqueducts pre-date rome.
Judicial processes and law pre-date rome.
Masonry pre-dated rome
Bound books pre-date rome
Arches and domes pre-date rome
Concrete pre-dates rome

Yes, they may have made incredible versions of these things, maybe even the best versions of these things (we just recently started unlocking the secret to roman concrete longevity) but when I was growing up, I was falsely taught Rome created many of these things whole-cloth, with no other civilization contributing anything. Which is an annoying bit of erasure, because you don't need Rome to have been super-geniuses who invented half of modern architectural ideas for their work to be impressive. And it lessens the work of the those who actually DID invent these things, and leads to stupid theories about how such and such ancient structure had to be built by aliens or something because only the romans had X or Y technology and they weren't even around yet to invent it!

To lay this in some more concrete terms, I don't need to say "romans invented shields and armor" to highlight how cool and well-designed roman shields and armor were, so why do I need to say "romans invented aqueducts" to talk about how well-designed their aqueducts are?

And to tie this back to the original point, the fact that the Romans would steal and incorporate ideas, while having a massively inflated ego about their own society (not undeserved, but inflated) should give us pause when considering their definitions of what "uncivilized" people were like. Because to the Romans, all non-Romans were uncivilized. But that doesn't mean those other societies weren't, you know, societies and civilizations.

 

[Guest 85555]

Okay, but even if you propose that right now we see human life as the most special thing in all of existence... we still are harming humans for the betterment of society, because human society is made up of more humans than a single human. Society already does this, not because humans are worth the same as an ant, but because "the good of the many outweigh the good of the few" and unless you, individual human, are so special and so worthy that you outweigh multiple other humans, the same argument will always apply.

It is a bad argument, but that's because all humans are equally balanced against all other humans (barring actions that make them actively harmful to society, like serial killers) not because human life is somehow special and unique beyond all other life.

But that is why humans are equally balanced against one another. There have been paradigms in the past that don't see humans as equally valuable (white supremacy being one of them but there are plenty of others). And yes sometimes individuals are hurt in the balancing (and I think frankly too often that occurs) but we are at least making efforts to balance. When you don't have a sense that every human being is a person and special, then it is very easy to say "This person is a drain on society because they are disabled" or "this person is bad for our gene pool because they have a bad inheritable trait" or "this person poses a threat because they are mentally ill so lets remove them". This is a simplistic example but if you have ever seen the movie swing kids one of the interesting things it does is highlight the Nazi attitude on the ground towards the disabled through the struggles of a musician character (it is actually very moving and they tie his story in a neat way to Django Reinhardt because, if I remember correctly, some of his fingers get permanently damaged when an angry crowd attacks him so he starts idolizing the jazz musician as he recovers and tries to work out an approach to play with his impaired hand). This is the attitude I worry about when we don't treat human life as inherently special. To be clear here, Swing Kids isn't a beloved film, but I found that part of the story very interesting when I saw it (only saw the movie once when it came out so it has been a super long time, but that character always stuck with me).

 

[Guest 85555]

Or, to use another example that greatly worries me at times working in education, Evolution. The scientific theory of evolution being true is not debatable. We have more evidence for it being true than one person could reasonably read in an entire lifetime. Yet, under this idea that we must give equal weight and debate to ideas, that we must engage with challenges lest we be seen as there being some truth we are unwilling to acknowledge, we have people who debate that evolution is false. And they have gone so far as to make it illegal to teach evolution in some places, unless you ALSO teach the things they want to have taught. To present it as a debate, with good ideas and strong evidence on both sides. When it isn't.

This is a valid concern. The same place I told you about before where I grew up for a time, our school board was taken over by very religious people in the area (I spent five years in a place in Southern California as a kid where there was a massive born again movement and most of the people I knew were extremely religious). They stopped teaching evolution, if I recall it even made it into news week. I think this is pretty serious business, but I don't think you just shrug and say 'no point debating'. You have to keep debating. Presenting it as a debate doesn't mean you concede their position is valid, it just means you aren't letting people have the final say and you are taking each point in stride and responding with counter information so that others can see why that side is wrong (because there is always an audience in these discussions who you aren't aware of, and when we step away from the discussion, it can create the optics that they have the better argument, even if they are insanely wrong, because we have refused to offer up a counter point).

This is also how these ideas spread. I've had people knock on my door trying to convince me to join different religions, and among their key ideas were that evolution is false. My whole life i have let such people into my house, got to know them, never been persuaded by their ideas, but seen my own understanding of things like evolution grow stronger because I was able to hear their arguments, think about them and find the counter arguments to theirs (and it is very easy to think people who don't believe in evolution don't have good or persuasive arguments, but they do and so it is especially important in this case to be able to see, for example, their argument about the complexity of the eye as an organ, learn what you can about that aspect of biology and refute the position). It has been a while so I wouldn't be able to rephrase the argument or its rebuttal for you know but I remember having this conversation with a couple of people who came to my door over the course of two weeks when I was young. They were also lovely people and even though their aim was to persuade me, I felt it was an opportunity to let them see another point of view (even if I didn't change their mind, I felt showing them empathy, taking their ideas seriously, etc would soften their views to people who disagreed with them). I am not saying you have to answer the door when people come to sell you a religion, but I am saying it is easy to think "I am right so I have the good arguments and their arguments are terrible". Their arguments may be flawed, they may have logical fallacies in them, but that doesn't mean others won't find them clever or persuasive.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I never said they never improved it, but they did steal it.

Aqueducts pre-date rome.
Judicial processes and law pre-date rome.
Masonry pre-dated rome
Bound books pre-date rome
Arches and domes pre-date rome
Concrete pre-dates rome

Yes, they may have made incredible versions of these things, maybe even the best versions of these things (we just recently started unlocking the secret to roman concrete longevity) but when I was growing up, I was falsely taught Rome created many of these things whole-cloth, with no other civilization contributing anything. Which is an annoying bit of erasure, because you don't need Rome to have been super-geniuses who invented half of modern architectural ideas for their work to be impressive. And it lessens the work of the those who actually DID invent these things, and leads to stupid theories about how such and such ancient structure had to be built by aliens or something because only the romans had X or Y technology and they weren't even around yet to invent it!

To lay this in some more concrete terms, I don't need to say "romans invented shields and armor" to highlight how cool and well-designed roman shields and armor were, so why do I need to say "romans invented aqueducts" to talk about how well-designed their aqueducts are?

And to tie this back to the original point, the fact that the Romans would steal and incorporate ideas, while having a massively inflated ego about their own society (not undeserved, but inflated) should give us pause when considering their definitions of what "uncivilized" people were like. Because to the Romans, all non-Romans were uncivilized. But that doesn't mean those other societies weren't, you know, societies and civilizations.

Bru I'm not going to debate this. If you feel that barbaric raiders is an apt description for the Roman Empire, have at it.

 

[Chaosmancer]

How do you arrive at 'harming humans is bad' though?

Because I am human, I am capable of empathy, and I understand harm. Humans are social animals, we work best in social groups, and therefore we innately understand that harming other humans is bad for the cohesion of the social group. It is entirely selfish, and that's fine.

And how do you avoid arriving at "harming some humans is more bad than harming others"?

I don't avoid it. Harming annoying children (who are human) is more bad than harming hostile soldiers (other humans). It is all about context and what contexts are acceptable. Yes, this means we have to actively strive harder to avoid "us vs them" mentalities, we have to strive for an ideal that acknowledges a global community of humans who can all be part of the same social group, with smaller groups within, but it is certainly possible.

I would argue if you think all human life deserves protection, no matter what color, what religion, what nationality, what degree of intelligence or ability, health or infirmity, then you are effectively saying all human life shares a fundamental specialness. There have been periods where people made arguments for eugenics for example and one of the strongest ways to contend with eugenics is a sense of specialness to humanity that grants us personhood. Otherwise human life can easily be considered very cheap, or worse, costly

And one of the strongest ways to argue against genetic medicine is to claim Human DNA is special and should not be tampered with. That blade cuts both ways. And I don't think I need to argue that humans are special to argue that we should not cause harm to other humans. Arguing that infirm humans should be harmed goes against our natural predilections for social cohesion. There are good reasons we don't harm the elderly, and they don't rely on "because humans are special".

It almost seems like you only think you can empathize with someone if you think that person is special, from how you frame "specialness" as the ingredient needed for empathy towards others.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I don't know if D&D is that kind of game. I've always considered it a rather simplistic game revolving around good guys clobbering bad guys. It's one of the things I think makes the game so successful.

I don't see how seriously world-building with other species of intelligent beings prevents good guys clobbering bad guys from being the central premise of the game.

I mean, the game has a massively complex cosmology, complete with multiple soap operas worth of interpersonal conflict, and yet it can still be a simple game of good guys versus bad guys. So I don't see making the material world complex changing that.

 

[Guest 85555]

It almost seems like you only think you can empathize with someone if you think that person is special, from how you frame "specialness" as the ingredient needed for empathy towards others.

please don’t put words or thoughts in my mouth.