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

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

#301

Post by bluefirebrand »

rithdmc wrote: post #223
soco wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And because of this, no browser of mine is allowed to send notifications, and also no app by default - they have to prove themselves useful first. Sorry fellow developers working on notifications, your work goes to the drain (mostly).

I recently unsubscribed from a grocery delivery service becuase they kept pushing adverts through their app. I gave them notification permission so I could see when my delivery is nearby, not so they could spam me. Voting with my wallet on this one. (For the curious, a subscription means free delivery. The subscription costs 10 euro a month, and if you don't have a subscription, the delivery fee is around 4 euro)

> For the curious, a subscription means free delivery

It sounds like a subscription means ad-funded delivery to me though

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

#302

Post by altmanaltman »

no-name-here wrote: post #284
altmanaltman wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Regardl…

1. Yes, fair enough.

2. Yes, this is where I would push back because one can also assume there is no "better" basis in the strict sense that you can intellectualize morality/virtue only to a certain extent. And it is possible to argue that morality/virtue is often as much a psychological process as a purely intellectual one. So the idea isn't that the golden rule doesn't make sense or that it is objectively weak, but it doesn't map to the idea of actual morality in action. For example, a person may logically believe in the golden rule but that doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that the agent is not fully logical and will not always strictly adhere to a rule just because it is aware of it and aware of it as being Good. In that sense, what use is the golden rule if we are free to ignore it at all (which we often do)? That doesn't mean I'm saying the golden rule is objectively wrong again, but in ranking morality and deciding on very abstract ideas of what Good and Bad are, we ignore the actual psychological forces that are extremely relevant when it comes to the execution of morality in action. So to answer the question, the better basis would be to understand the psychological forces behind why we feel the golden rule is objectively a good and then examine them to understand if we are following the golden rule because we actually think it is good or because we live in a society where it is good and we will be shamed if we don't believe it. One might say it doesn't matter as long as people actually follow the golden rule but another interpretation is that the golden rule by itself doesn't tell us anything (or very little) about the moral character of the person applying it. So just expecting people to follow that rule after knowing it is placing too much trust in the human animal who is often wild and not thinking logically. It is then upon the animal to tame itself and it may do so out of servitude or out of independence and both might lead to equivalent surface values and match the basis perfectly as being morally good while in reality, both have very different meanings for their morals.

2 is, of course, mainly inspired by Nietzsche. I'm working on a short story where he and Plato debate whether a painting is objectively good or bad called A Canvas Called Virtue.

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

#303

Post by bluGill »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #299
sporkland wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn't think that was about too many alarms going off and so that a real one was being ignored, and re-reading the article doesn't give that impression either. It was more to do with a bug in the user interface (it appeared that you were re-editing a field you'd just filled in but actually weren't) and a memory corruption bug, along with assuming that software always works so doesn't need any additional checks. Are…

The alarms were safety hardware interlocks. Nobody asked why and found the UI bugs that was causing this. The hardware interlocks were removed because the system had been working safely for so long. This was really feedback - nobody informed the developers that safety hardware interlocks were locking all the time.

Edit: see replies, originally I wrote fuses, but hardware interlocks is more correct.

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

#304

Post by californical »

jknoepfler wrote: post #71
californical wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything. And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises. And even in…

Honestly this isn't the right conversation to be having at all. In the United States, ~40% of the homeless are employed. A deeply non-trivial percent either are kids or have kids. Everyone should volunteer at a support center for homeless youth some time. Sure, there may be some kind of Pareto principal in play for the hardest 20% of cases to crack. Who cares? Let's eliminate 80% of the existing problem and worry abo…

To be clear, I agree with you. I was making a point to the person that I replied to who wanted zero homeless people.

My point was that there is a bottom some-percent of homeless people that can’t immediately be helped.

But yeah I think I made my point clear in the second paragraph that we need the resources to provide housing and basic necessities for the majority of homeless people who are able to receive it, though I probably should’ve clarified that those benefits should be tiered and someone who just goes through a terrible point in life and is otherwise in a reasonably healthy place should have easy access to something decent.

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

#305

Post by quietbritishjim »

bluGill wrote: post #303
quietbritishjim wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't think that was about too many alarms going off and so that a real one was being ignored, and re-reading the article doesn't give that impression either. It was more to do with a bug in the user interface (it appeared that you were re-editing a field you'd just filled in but actually weren't) and a memory corruption bug, along with assuming that software always works so doesn't need any additional checks. Are…

The alarms were safety hardware interlocks. Nobody asked why and found the UI bugs that was causing this. The hardware interlocks were removed because the system had been working safely for so long. This was really feedback - nobody informed the developers that safety hardware interlocks were locking all the time. Edit: see replies, originally I wrote fuses, but hardware interlocks is more correct.

The Wikipedia article the previous commenter linked doesn't mention this, and I've looked at a few sources linked from it and they don't mention it either.

They mention that previous Therac machines had "hardware interlocks" to prevent this sort of issue - maybe those are the safety fuses you're both talking about? - but it says they were never included in Therac-25 in the first place, because the software was assumed to be so reliable, not that they were removed because they blew.

Are you sure this is the same incident? Do you have a link to a source about it?

Edit: This article cited in Wikipedia is much more comprehensive and mentions that Therac-20 did have these fuses, in addition to hardware interlocks. But they weren't disabled because the real alarms were drowned out by false alarms - instead they all represented real instances of the issue.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041128024227/http://www.cs.umd...

(Middle column of the 12th page of PDF, numbered page 29 of the publication.)

> The Therac-20 at the University of Chicago is used to teach students in a radiation therapy school conducted by the center. The center’s physicist, Frank Borger, noticed that whenever a new class of students started using the Therac-20, fuses and breakers on the machine tripped, shutting down the unit. These failures, which had been occurring ever since the center had acquired the machine, might appear three times a week while new students operated the machine and then disappear for months. Borger determined that new students make lots of different types of mistakes and use “creative methods of editing” parameters on the console. Through experimentation, he found that certain editing sequences correlated with blown fuses and determined that the same computer bug (as in the Therac-25 soft- ware) was responsible. The physicist notified the FDA, which notified Therac-20 users.*

> The software error is just a nuisance on the Therac-20 because this machine has independent hardware protective circuits for monitoring the electron-beam scanning. The protective circuits do not allow the beam to turn on, so there is no danger of radiation exposure to a patient. While the Therac-20 relies on mechanical interlocks for monitoring the machine, the Therac-25 relies largely on software.

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

#306

Post by voidUpdate »

soco wrote: post #220
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…

And because of this, no browser of mine is allowed to send notifications, and also no app by default - they have to prove themselves useful first. Sorry fellow developers working on notifications, your work goes to the drain (mostly).

I've recently had to add a notifications system for an app I manage for a client. The client requested it, and I work as part of a larger company, so I couldn't exactly say no, but I felt pretty icky doing it

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

#307

Post by WalterBright »

sortoflog wrote: post #296
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.

That’s an ideal free market, but do you know of any large economies that actually meet this criteria? Happy customers are optional when you have regulatory capture.

The US for most of its history.

Nothing is ideal. The more free market a country is, the more prosperous it is.

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

#308

Post by bluGill »

rayiner wrote: post #272
inigyou wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't neutral, they're just Schelling points.

They don’t actually have to be neutral, people just have to accept them as neutral and elevate them above their own sense of right and wrong.

> people just have to accept them as neutral and elevate them above their own sense of right and wrong.

I would say people need to accept them as neutral and make them their own sense of right and wrong. You can have a stricter personal set of right and wrong, but it needs to be something that society recognizes as a stricter in all ways.

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

#309

Post by jcarrano »

Regarding the Egyptian messages, if you care about these things you simply avoid doing business (especially in regulated industries) in the third world. The fact is that, even before the incident with the messages, cell providers had to sit down with the "men with guns" to even be able to operate in the country.

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

#310

Post by rzk »

mofeien wrote: post #297

Possible solution/mitigation: have a mandatory "sender" field? Then every inciting message can at least be attributed to the government instead of just a disembodied voice from your phone. That my help people contextualize and reflect on the content a bit.

And then the men with guns ask you to put your name in the "sender" field.
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