Researchers Ask: Does Enforcing Civility Stifle Online Debate?

The christian view of morality is that the devil exists and he tempts us to do sinful things. People make the choice to do sinful things all the time. You've listed some examples of sins (and crimes) that people commit. I listed some examples of some sins that have been committed, like bill clinton et al, and then then in the world (earthly non-heaven place we live in) you can see these acts of sin lead to negative repercussions for the people involved.

You can see bill clinton, weintsein, ect suffer jail, career demotion, prosecution for various crimes, financial losses and relationships destroyed, ect. There's a long list of negative repercussions for committing sinful acts.

Now the larger point I am trying to make is that everybody is subject - by choice or not - to the fact that breaking these instinctual, moral, or explicitly faithful/religious rules has negative outcomes for their lives. Some political groups may see this choice or fateful reality as something that can be blamed on others, governed away or otherwise solved somehow, but it never works. They act or speak as if they want a free lunch, to act immorally, to sin and get away with it with no repercussions. At the end of the day, at the end of all their sinning, people have to face up to the negative things they've done and eat the consequences. The comment I made about "utopian and perfect enforcement of morality being unrealistic" was to suggest that immorality is resolved across time and not as soon as the immorality is exposed.

> Large segment of the population look at the same thing and reach vastly different conclusions.

The point I was trying to rummage towards earlier in short form, was that people sin and it catches up to them. The group of people who "reach vastly different conclusions" are often times, sinners sinning. The sinful action or evil in some cases should be turned away from. Studying sin and examining evil in detail often breeds more of it and it is better to turn away from it.

There's a second point to make here, which is that there are many many different branches of christianity, different views on islam and judiasm. In Christianity in particular there are many many denominations that share varied niche views. I was trying to make the point that since we left the christian era of 0ad-2000ad there has been an explosion of interpretations of moral theology and people have found many different ways to split the hair on how morality should be conveyed. This can account for some of the "disagreement about morality" and "disunity" you are seeing.

The example of 4Chan though sharing some distasteful social norms, still has an interpretation of morality that refuses horrific kinds of pornography and still has social norms about how people treat telling the truth and a rejection of bot-spam fakery and a whole bunch of other moral norms imported from society at large. The moral rules on 4chan can be seen as an offshoot of this conscious explosion of moral interpretation going on. Not my favourite example of a moral website or community. Though it does have moral rule at it's base.

The thing is, that most religions and faiths, if not all of them, share basic theology similarities. They share the idea that rape, murder, theft, ect are wrong. There is a unified core about peacefully loving one another. This concept has once been described as: everyone is worshipping the same God, like it were an elephant. One faith can see the trunk and tusks of the elephant, the other faith can see the tail and legs, and they all see different parts of the same elephant and no one faith sees the whole thing. That is a useful metaphor for the idea and truth that there is a core similarity and unity in the moral truth we all live in.

>Think of machine learning. To me it seems there’s two ( or maybe more ) version of a classifier running, producing different labels for the same input. Not all of the time obviously but sufficiently to be a problem. If there was a website where you could upload an image and the server replied with what it sees in the image, but the answer would be different depending on what machine in the cluster the image detection takes place on, would you call that a functional system?

What a lefty zoomer says is morally allowable has little impact on the reality of moral rules. A lefty zoomer could see adultery as A-Okay, perfectly correct. I wouldn't want to be around when that man or woman discovers what the outcome of adultery is. Which is a sad reality, you can tell people all day what the easy way to live is, and some will try it the hard way anyway. Morality isn't defined by a view, it happens anyway.

It's difficult in a sense to answer the question as if morality were a system, particularly a computer system. Morality has an in-built reality that it has to discuss the way people work, not computers.

The easiest answer is to point out that you want your machines to differ from the central authority, because you want more world views, not less. You already have your own and having perfect replicas of it isn't useful. There are many arguments along the line of 'the value in differing from the singular authority'.

The underlying argument of a basic unified morality, which I want to wrap up and move on, is that a "moral machine learning system" (not that you can fit morality inside mathematics), for the purposes of this conversation would only need to validate that each client machine sees that rape, murder, theft, ect is wrong. The machine learning system would not need the whole morality picture to perfectly match, to have a unified moral base.

>> I don't really care how politics defines morality. Morality is not decided by politics in the end, you eventually cash out your chips in the faithful rules, no matter your politics. Your description is of somebody getting their morality from politics. It's not gonna end well, cause politics not the start or the end of morality, it's just commentary in the middle somewhere.

>I really didn’t understand this part but I agree morally and politics are different.

Your faith, nature and what morals you'll die for are where you can find definition of morality. What political groups like "lefty zoomers" and 4chan's /pol/ thinks is almost zero impact on the fixed reality of morals as a whole. A "lefty zoomer", as an individual secularized person who knew nothing at birth and was raised on the internet, doesn't know what he or she, does not know. Studying and knowing something about morality, faith, religion or whatever else is a whole field of study you don't get on 4chan, reddit or HN.

Describing society as not having a unified morality, when you can see it every single day in the functioning of hundreds-of-millions of American's lives is a bit silly. When a business deal falls through, you can sue and tell the truth to get your money back. When someone is raped, the cops show up and a legal process is started and negative outcomes happen for the rapist. When you organize your life morally things go well. When you see people go to school, get married, have kids, tell the truth, repent of sins (in that language or not), grow into better lives, is all evidence of morality working or not working.

You know this in a sense. You came to post about how it's a problem there is no unified morality. You spoke your truth, you showed a care for immorality, you implied a desire to see immorality removed and a desire for a better, more moral society. Would you do that in a society that didn't value morality? You're part of the water.

It's not a perfect "utopia" where people are instantly punished for sin, nor are we likely to be perfectly moral. The society does run on unified morals though. It's the nature of the society, the glue that holds us together, the outcomes for our actions. It's what it means to be American.