I had a hearthy chuckle when learning about Android's Log class: the highest level of importance for a message is WTF. Documented as What a Terrible Failure.
266 karma · joined September 1, 2015
A given moral rule doesn't change because it's held by you versus someone else. Just like it makes no sense to refuse to answer the question of whether a fruit is an apple because it is in my hand instead of yours.
In other words, by having a moral rule yourself, you implicitly have a moral metarule: a rule about how to choose your moral rules.
Your refusal to answer the question doesn't make sense.
The reason I dismissed the product then was because of the aesthetics. The same reason that my parent commenter pointed to to suggest holoportation wouldn't work.
I gave the example of VR. I can also give the example of "portable" phones and "portable" computers (have you seen how fugly those things were back then?). Or bluetooth earpieces.
That being said, I'm not predicting the end of in-person meetings or anything remotely like that. I wrote too candidly when I wrote "this will take off". Let's just say that we'll see more and more of that type of technology in the future.
I expect this to reach Bluetooth earpieces level of ubiquitousness: not quite without haters and not quite everyone-has-one, but rather everyone-knows-someone-who-uses-one kind of thing.
I remember seeing the guy who invented the selfie stick present it to Canada's Dragon's Den: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7YbcoCkbs. My reaction was: this is ridiculous and stupid. Nobody will ever use that let alone buy it.
Let's just say I was slightly wrong.
Not only that, but people go crazy over VR. This will take off, I'm sure.
https://quikpod.com/quik-pod-selfie-stick-cbc-dragons-den-20...
Then again, the article notes that in a majority of cases, the OP wasn't convinced, so there's that.
It has certainly been my experience that changing important views takes time. The idea(s) have to kind of coalesce in my mind before I accept them fully. Sort of a Kübler-Ross model of view change?
In this case, I think that, to a large extent, maintenance can be side-stepped by recycling and rebuilding. A bit like how the current world works: we can fix anything, but for most things, it's simpler to throw and buy a new one because the labour is more costly than the product itself. One example is asking a computer repair shop to fix your laptop screen (particularly so if said screen is touch-sensitive).
In a world where energy is free (fully solar for example), this is awesome: oh, you just got a month old car but a better design just came out? No problem, you'll get the newest one when your turn comes.
I doubt I'll see this kind of world (if it ever comes) in my lifetime, but it doesn't seem so far-fetched, I think.
Per Wikipedia, Stallman wrote the GPLv1 in 1989. I wasn't even born then.
Moreover, I doubt this is a good argument. Would the Mill (youtube.com/watch?v=QyzlEYspqTI) be possible using Free Software (consider the GCC exceptions were pushed way too late, circa 2009 per gnu.org https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.html)?
Would Linux even exist without at least BSD having been released?
I'm more of a copyleft than a 'BSD libertarian', but I don't think we can look at RMS's contribution by comparing what was before and what is now if for no other reason because it's impossible to separate what is due to copyleft, what is due to BSD-style and what is due to a mixture of both.
> Biblical punishments on gays
Where does that come from? Was that what Eich wanted?
As far as I know, there was no advocacy for violence (something we do punish but in a due process, legal manner).
Are you arguing that you see no difference between 'death to the sinners' and whatever notion of 'sanctity of marriage' Eich might have espoused?
What do you mean by not tolerating if not stifling? If you look at the Mizzou and Yale things, stifling is exactly the right word: "we're just walking forward", "we can't hear you" and others.
> You seem to hold a revisionist historical view that the civil rights movement was entirely unproductive, even though it was unpopular at the start (again, morality doesn't depend on the majority).
My argument isn't that it didn't work, but that you fail to understand why it worked.
It worked because the arguments were convincing, not inherently because people pointed to something and said "this is stupid".
It has nothing to do with being loud (in the literal sense that I understand you to mean it).
Perhaps a better way to say what I'm trying to is: I think that the reason you arrive at the "right" conclusion is coincidental. The approach is flawed and it does and will lead to nonsense sometimes.
Another way to show what I mean is by counter-example: if someone advocated for, say, racial tolerance because they argued that we can't know who's a Christian based on race, I don't care if we agree on the conclusion, the process is a big problem.
You were, in your now flagged comment, arguing for stifling (or censoring if you prefer) people who, you believe, hold that kind of opinion.
The point I am making is that morality is only part of it. In practice, it doesn't matter that you're right if you're dead. You say that
> tolerating promotion of oppression doesn't make it go away
I'll answer that arguing with words without understanding the process that allows for people to agree to "fight" with words rather than weapons is even less likely to make bad ideas go away.
This won't convince you, I know, the tone of your replies shows an adversarial reading of my comments. But maybe one day you'll have a more skeptical approach to your own beliefs.
But it is possible to not "care" about these issues: either by working on solutions to other problems or by focusing only on making the technology better.
That is what I meant by "unrelated", maybe I should have used "independent".
> The most important criteria for what? For what conferences people should have? For establishing what a given human wants out of life? For determining whether an industry is prejudiced?
The most important criteria for technological pursuits, not social ones. People who disagree on political issues can still pursue technology progress together on issues that don't involve those political issues for example (not that this is the case here, I'm speaking generally).
I can't thank you enough for linking this.
The truth is that what is right is decided by how well the arguments for it can convince people.
If you look back far enough, the arguments were: my army is stronger than you. As you get closer to the present, we tend to like using better arguments (the veil of ignorance for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance).
It's based on notions like the veil of ignorance that we can say maybe every human should have property rights lest the group we're part of today lose it when the balance of power shifts.
That's why I believe that jews should have property rights, but don't believe that advocating against what I believe should be stifled. I am confident enough that my argument is better than theirs to not need to prevent their speech if you prefer. I also don't believe that we should stifle: climate change denial, flat earthers, religious people, pro-life people and a host of other people that I believe are wrong.
Surely, putting forth a better argument or, at least, ignoring them is a far more morally superior response than suppressing their speech?
I've recently read about Bobby Sands (who was a IRA member who starved himself to death) and am reminded of that monk who lit themself on fire in protest.
I think an interesting question about these two people is why did their action have any impact? The authorities were against them and killing themselves doesn't "oppress" those authorities.
I think the opening paragraph of this book http://www.jstor.org/stable/3750951 is an interesting angle: martyrs against a cause illegitimize a cause.
If that is true, as I think it is, then it is crucially important to not victimize people no matter how wrong they may be. I think that the way to do that is, as I said above, to tolerate wrong viewpoints but respond to them or ignore them.
The "association" that you speak of is a different concept: figurative association (how people compare or liken groups one to the other).
I do not think that it is right to conclude something about the one based on the other.
When two unrelated fields clash (say science and religion to illustrate the point with different topics), you have to "take a stand" on both even if you want to care only about one of them.
In the specific case of the previous poster, I think that what he means is that he wants the most important criteria to be about technology. Inevitably, that means that gender ratios are only secondary considerations to those.
Maybe that stance is to focus on gender issues in your view. But in that case, what would a stance that focuses only on technology?
But the core of the article is about how there is a problem about polarized opinions: the core problems with the Mizzou, Yale and al. situations are not related to the opinions expressed themselves: the initial email was that opinion (in the specific case discussed in the article) and the administrator wanted to meet with that student to discuss it.
The problem is that the conversation is not about the concerns expressed in that email anymore, but about the use of one word in the response.
Is that the more important conversion you talk about wanting to have?
Reading "If you're starting a brand-new application today, there are plenty of valid reasons to write it in 2 instead of 3. There will be for a long time." on the same day it was written is not the same as 6 months or a few years down the lines.
I don't actually know when this was written except for the copyright: 2014-2015, so it can't be more than a bit short of 2 years ago.
Now, why the heck would you (the farmer entrepreneur) care about what the government does with the taxes it generates from your revenues? The question is: is your investment profitable enough? Everything else about your scenario is politics and, in a democracy, these things are decided (or supposed to if you drink from the cynic's cup) by the population.
If the farmer (as a person) disagrees, he can just not buy or buy in another country or planet or whatever. A post-scarcity society has value enough for some of us that we'd run such an automated farm for little profit if only to selfishly sustain said society.
Now, maybe you think it'd be quite useless, so you might suggest cutting away the crap and just paying people to do nothing. Congrats, you are now a proponent of basic income!
One guy was over the mileage too (I don't remember the amount but it was absurdly high to be honest).
So maybe the limitations are different from place to place?
Maybe so, but what I mean is that I (and presumably the people she is writing this for) are not black women. They're not indians, asians and many other things too of course (which is my point).
As an opinion piece (which I suppose it is), it's something interesting to think about. Yet, doesn't it say something about everyone of us if even minorities advocating for equal rights don't see the bigger picture and advocate for more than their specific situation?
It's a self-defeating argument in a way: the author is arguing that people are caring mostly for only one type of inequality… by decrying only their specific situation while making no mention of all the other types.
I guess what I am saying is that I wish the author would have framed her case as an example tying in to the general case.
When one gets to this point in their reasoning, perhaps they'd realize that we are resource-constrained and no matter what we do, we'll be "excluding" some categories.
And yet what I just wrote is too dismissive. I don't know what the best way to go about all this is, but it sure is very upsetting to be blamed, as part of the "dominant group", for not doing enough when the very people pointing the fingers seem to have similar biases towards minority groups they are not part of.
Then again, perhaps in this case they could have just called the event "inclusion for women" since that's what it's currently focused on.
It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have X*Y dollars worth of stock. If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?
I don't understand how what you say is somehow a case for fossil fuel more so than a case for energy use. That is: why is the rise of a country's wealth metrics tied to fossil fuel? Wouldn't it be the same even if it were using say solar?
Also, I quickly browsed through your second link and I was very surprised about the figure 1.6 (which claims that there is less pollution as time goes by). I checked the source and although there isn't much context, it seems that what the EPA data is saying is that less pollutants are emitted year over year… that's a negative second order derivative of the amount of pollutant, not a negative first order derivative as the title seems to suggest (to me anyway).
It bothers me greatly that such a superficial analysis reveals bothersome details like this. I am inclined to believe that this source is not very good.