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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

shkspr.mobi

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#281

Post by eloisant »

sylware wrote: post #242
boomlinde wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue…

In France, we have a bed story for children related to exactly that: "Pierre et le loup" (aka your "crying wolf"). It may be a EU wide tale.

You're thinking about The Boy who Cried Wolf, Pierre et le Loup is a different story.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#282

Post by WalterBright »

scns wrote: post #224
WalterBright wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> selfish ambitions for power or money Free markets are designed around a selfish ambition for making money. You can only make money by pleasing your customers. And hence free markets are the greatest mechanism for prosperity. There's nothing wrong with making money that way.

> You can only make money by pleasing your customers. Are you sure?

Theft is not allowed in a free market.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#283

Post by Otterly99 »

Gareth321 wrote: post #235
cobbzilla wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you were not lied to. and thank you for heeding the good advice to not be a jerk. Whether you see it or not, the vast majority of people /are/ generally good, and more importantly they want to be around other people who value being good, not being a jerk. Folks who are all about money and power hang in different circles; I can’t speak to their happiness levels, but regular folks steer clear of them and warn others…

> Whether you see it or not, the vast majority of people /are/ generally good I've always found this sentiment to exist exclusively in privileged and overly educated, left wing, Western circles. It is an extension of the philosophy built around tabula rasa, and posits that individuals are not to blame for their actions, but rather society. When someone harms another, it wasn't because they wanted to harm another, but…

> Back here in the real world, with zero exceptions, we know that power inevitably corrupts even the most chaste and moral of people. Humans are both a product of their environment and possess free will. Both. At the same time

Isn't it a bit contradictory? If corruption really is an inevitable consequence of power, then there is not much free will involved.

It's easy to think that some people choose to harm other as a result of free will, but even something minor like bullying usually hides some personnal struggle (like home problems, revenge from previous bullying). Even if you take the extreme cases of psychopaths like serial killers, they all have a troubled past and lack of guidance.

Note that I am not excusing their behavior, nor do I claim that all troubled people become psychopaths, but I think in general we should accept that we have much less free will that we would like to admit, and that a lot of our behavior can be traced to a wide range of elements out of our control such as: genetics, epigenetics, culture, immediate family, random events.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#284

Post by no-name-here »

altmanaltman wrote: post #269
femto wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule": "Treat others as you would like them to treat you." It has a long history, both secular and religious. Pretty well everything flows from it, and if someone is doing "the wrong thing" whilst claiming to obey it then they are probably deluding themself. The rule is suited to enforcement, since if someone does something "wrong", rather than immediately attack…

What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It's okay for me to treat others that way? Just because something has a long history (secular or otherwise) doesn't give it any merit by itself. If we need some standard to judge against what is morally acceptable in the case I presented (no this doesn't apply if you like to hurt yourself and others) then you are back to defining a standard which canno…

1. I believe GP was suggesting "golden rule" as the basis for governmental-wide rules to be enacted, not that each person should use unique rules based on their own "do unto me" preferences. (If actually applied, "What if this were done to me" also helps to get around the issue of people enacting rules only on other groups, as they wouldn't actually want to be personally treated the way they're proposing.)

2. Regardless, if basing rules on whether someone would want those rules to apply to them does not have merit, is there some better basis you'd recommend?

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#285

Post by no-name-here »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #186
femto wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule": "Treat others as you would like them to treat you." It has a long history, both secular and religious. Pretty well everything flows from it, and if someone is doing "the wrong thing" whilst claiming to obey it then they are probably deluding themself. The rule is suited to enforcement, since if someone does something "wrong", rather than immediately attack…

And lex talionis as a byproduct.

Eye for an eye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_for_an_eye

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#286

Post by WalterBright »

nrr wrote: post #227
WalterBright wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free markets do not resolve the tragedy of the commons. The fix is to not have commons. For example, we are running out of fish in the ocean from overfishing. But there's no shortage of cows and chickens, despite massive consumption of them. The former is the commons, the latter is private property.

I fear that this conflates open and closed access with exclusive property rights. It isn't untrue that asserting exclusive property rights on something makes it closed access[0], but there are other mechanisms for achieving closed access of a resource, like enforced regulation. Slightly more formally, an assertion of exclusive property rights is a sufficient condition for something to be closed access, but it isn't n…

> that does depend on what one's definition of a free market is

Sigh. No need to make up one's own definition. Googling "free market":

"A free market is an economic system where prices, wages, and the flow of goods are determined by supply and demand. There is no government control or central planning telling people what to buy, sell, or make. Instead, private choices and voluntary trades drive the economy."

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#287

Post by travisjungroth »

t-3 wrote: post #239
rgblambda wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Korean Intelligence and it's allies presumably have agents in the NK military who would give them advance notice.

NK can just set up their own cell phone receiving SK alerts and know that they know and cancel the strike, making it into a boy that called wolf situation and possibly exposing agents.

Seems like a better way outcome than getting hit by artillery right now.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#288

Post by Otterly99 »

inigyou wrote: post #273
Otterly99 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you supposed to help a person like that thought? I understand that you cannot reason too well with an addict, so it might be surprising to some that somebody would refuse shelter if it meant being clean. Still, what should be the approach then? Unconditional help?

Are you saying that drug users deserve to be homeless?

That's not really what I am saying.

I think it's a tough problem to solve: how far should we help drug addict in their addiction? Is the goal to help them survive, help them stop using drugs, help them find a job?

Depending on the metrics you will find that unconditional housing is more effective (ex: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/housing-first-more-effective-tr...) or offering incentives to stop is more effective (ex: https://www.chcs.org/resource/contingency-management-for-adu...)

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#289

Post by CatMustard »

nerdsniper wrote: post #155
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are: Extreme Threats Severe Threats AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts) Public Safety Messages State and Local Tests

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

Completely unrelated to the actual content of your post, but:

> megameter

Completely valid SI way to represent distance, but I have never seen anyone use this in my entire life! Out of curiosity, do you live in some location or work in some industry where this is used? If so, where?

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#290

Post by sporkland »

boomlinde wrote: post #210
decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue…

In college they made us study the case of therac-25 so we understood the dangers of creating too many errors in our software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

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