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Deaths counts have killed 20 million people.

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by papercuts alone!

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Papercuts are worse than torture, if there are enough of them. https://benthams.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-wins-outright-part-336?s=w

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oh god no, not this lesswrong dispute

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Do you disagree? If so, then I think your ideology has a hypothetical death count equivalent of infinity--because for any number of deaths, there is an equally bad event comprised entirely of dust specks!

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I'm close to a utilitarian, I am a speck hater

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Jan 30, 2023Liked by SocDoneLeft

Do you have any good examples of deathcounts that include counterfactuals?

IIRC, the Stalins death count post you made on Twitter (that I quite like) doesn't include counterfactuals

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The Stalin deathcount post I made attempts to implicitly consider counterfactuals by subtracting civilian death rates from ITL/ITK/prison/SpP death rates (but not executions); the only counterfactual it's asking is "what if everything else was the same, but the people weren't imprisoned". (I think that's the appropriate counterfactual for type #2 and #3 deaths.)

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Jan 28, 2023Liked by SocDoneLeft

Thanks for helping me articulate why Im always annoyed by those death count posts. This was a good read

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thank you! do you have any suggestions/improvements? :)

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Jan 26, 2023Liked by SocDoneLeft

Ok post. I think the "deaths from capitalism" infographics are useful as a response to BBOC or VOC estimates of "deaths from communism" but not on their own. They're also (both the examples you showed) clearly meant as a response to those specific things.

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Thank you. I have to slightly disagree: The 1.6 billion infographic is, frankly, completely absurd.

The BBOC, for all its faults, only includes mass famine deaths (which it categorizes as #3) and and fairly-reasonable type #1 and #2 deaths. (I'm writing a post on this subject. ~90m of the BBOC deaths are Chinese famine of 1958-1960 ~60m, Soviet famine of 1932-33 ~6m, Soviet famine of 1921-22 ~5m, various Mao-era repressions ~10m, and various Stalin-era repressions ~4m.) It does use high estimates and the introduction does seem to (non-explicitly) include 5 million POW deaths. (If you've ever seen the "Nazi Victims of Communism", it's because the introduction total is 20m but the Soviet section total is 15m, so Courtois must've added *something*.)

But: The BBOC doesn't include deaths from bad public health (like 306 million cigarette deaths), or wars (like 85 million WW1 and WW2 deaths), on and on. (It also double-counts many events and uses absurdly high estimates for others -- for example, it attributes 7 million deaths to "Kulak policy and weather", which is 1 million more than 6 million attributed to the 1932-33 famine in the BBOC!) This infographic is just... really bad.

I'm not trying to spawn another argument -- glad you liked the post!

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