Is it just me or is there someone going on a downvoting spree here? I've seen at least 8 comments at 0, and I only checked the thread twice. It's kind of weird, since there's quite a high karma threshold for downvoting.
What kind of girl do you think I am?
21–30 of 113 posts
Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
A bit out of topic, I think on the question of China many people have a black and white view of the situation... In the case of google, they came to China but actually provided a less censored service than baidu (by writing in the search pages that some results were left out because of censoring thus attracting attention to it)... So in what way was their behavior evil? Additionnaly, they never started any blogging s…
They traded freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people for a decidedly limited amount of money. To me that's a moral calculation and they chose money.
That is utter hyperbole. Google never had the "freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people" to trade. They do not and probably never will have anything like that kind of power. I am far from a Google fanboy but if you're going to criticise them, please keep it reasonable.
Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's never clear to me why people answer thought experiments like this in this manner. The point of the question "would you kill someone for a trillion dollars" is to tease out an answer to an underlying philosophical question, such as, "is the act of killing as we know it a moral absolute wrong, or is it merely an act with great negative utility that can be compensated by sufficient positive utility?" Yes, there are…
And I've always ignored that sort of question—there's no such thing as morals or utility, really, only what animals are programmed to think in their animal brains. Robotic arms don't care when other robotic arms die—and neither do we. Paperclips don't care about increasing in number, even if someone is trying to make it so. What we have to ask is not "what does the universe say about right and wrong?" (because the an…
That's not really a reason to avoid answering the question either. Regardless of the mechanism by which your mind arrives at the answer (be it animal instincts, brain chemistry, whatever), you are indeed capable of coming up with an answer, and even if you believe the answer says nothing about the universe in general, it still says something about you and your own mind. And I'm fairly interested in knowing what your mind--and the minds of other people--have to say about these sorts of questions.
To be a little more clear, your answer (yes or no) is of little value to me. What I really want to know is why you answer yes or no--is it because of some general principle you're applying, because of a gut instinct, because someone told you to say that, or something else?
EDIT: Based on the reply below, I'm not being clear. There are lots of reasons I'd like to know your reasoning process, beyond trying to generalize it to people in general. Among other things, I'd like to know whether I should be worried about going to dinner with you (particularly if your answer is "Sure, I'd kill for even just a dollar").
Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
That gets to the crux of the matter doesn't it. If your morals are based on principle, then no matter who the person was, your decision would remain the same. I believe/hope that I am the type of person who would not take anothers' life no matter what the circumstances because I want to be a person of principle. If there were some situation where I did take a life, then I am not the principled person I think I am. Ta…
Well said. I always thought it was odd that people cheered Google when they pulled out of China even though they only did that because the Chinese government was hacking them (most notably not becase the Chinese government doesn't care about freedom of speech).
the Chinese government doesn't care about freedom of speech
Oh, I think the CCP cares very deeply about freedom of speech. Just maybe not in the way that you'd like ; )
Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
A bit out of topic, I think on the question of China many people have a black and white view of the situation... In the case of google, they came to China but actually provided a less censored service than baidu (by writing in the search pages that some results were left out because of censoring thus attracting attention to it)... So in what way was their behavior evil? Additionnaly, they never started any blogging s…
They traded freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people for a decidedly limited amount of money. To me that's a moral calculation and they chose money.
In what way did they trade freedom of speech?
Did people in China have more freedom of speech before they came to China? Could they have forced the chinese government to limit censoring?
Of course not... The only thing they could do and did is give another reliable search engine that censored less than their competitors...
Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?
#26A thought: if someone offered me a trillion dollars to kill a person, I would get trillion-dollar loan, invent brain-uploading and emulation technology with it, copy the person into the machine, and then kill them. To put that more simply: past a certain point, the idea of marginal value in a cost/benefit analysis breaks down, because the benefit "changes the game." (That is, creates a discontinuity in the valuation…
If you're going to invent scenarios, you should invent realistic one's. For example, I'm fairly confident that you couldn't solve the problem of brain duplication for a trillion dollars. The NIH budget in 2010 was ~32 billion which isn't close to a trillion, but it's a lot closer to a trillion than we are to duplicating a brain. On a philosophical level though, a lot of people would probably disagree with your propos…
You could cure a lot of cancer for $1 trillion. By turning the offer down, are you sure you're not "influencing" someone else's mortality? (That's a rhetorical question, of course. I don't have an answer.)
Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I've always ignored that sort of question—there's no such thing as morals or utility, really, only what animals are programmed to think in their animal brains. Robotic arms don't care when other robotic arms die—and neither do we. Paperclips don't care about increasing in number, even if someone is trying to make it so. What we have to ask is not "what does the universe say about right and wrong?" (because the an…
That's not really a reason to avoid answering the question either. Regardless of the mechanism by which your mind arrives at the answer (be it animal instincts, brain chemistry, whatever), you are indeed capable of coming up with an answer, and even if you believe the answer says nothing about the universe in general, it still says something about you and your own mind. And I'm fairly interested in knowing what your…
But that's a question for neuropsychology, isn't it? The question of what is good for an individual person won't be solved by conversation and introspection, because people are, on average, very bad at understanding themselves and the reasons for doing the things they do (they indeed have reasons to give, but these reasons rarely stand up as falsifiable hypotheses for predicting future actions, so they're mere rationalizations and should be discarded.)
Instead, the question of what an individual cares about will be solved by coming up with a technique to look at a person's brain and tell them, definitively, what values they care about at that moment in time. Anything said about individual ethical belief until then is just sophistry.
Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're going to invent scenarios, you should invent realistic one's. For example, I'm fairly confident that you couldn't solve the problem of brain duplication for a trillion dollars. The NIH budget in 2010 was ~32 billion which isn't close to a trillion, but it's a lot closer to a trillion than we are to duplicating a brain. On a philosophical level though, a lot of people would probably disagree with your propos…
You could cure a lot of cancer for $1 trillion. By turning the offer down, are you sure you're not "influencing" someone else's mortality? (That's a rhetorical question, of course. I don't have an answer.)
So, I did say "any amount of money", not any amount of lives. I do think it's morally okay to trade one life for many (definitely ambiguous in terms of amounts because I don't feel like trying to figure that one out). In fact, I don't think you could justify war without also justifying this moral decision so I don't think it's very rare even if people don't often think about it.
Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
They traded freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people for a decidedly limited amount of money. To me that's a moral calculation and they chose money.
That is utter hyperbole. Google never had the "freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people" to trade. They do not and probably never will have anything like that kind of power. I am far from a Google fanboy but if you're going to criticise them, please keep it reasonable.
That is reasonable. I'm simply asking them to not do business with a repressive government. Maybe, you don't think freedom of speech is important, but I do.
As for what kind of effect they could have: Google is an internationally recognized brand that is most certainly known in China (even without being the dominant search engine). Refusing to do business with China would be hard for the state-run media to explain away.
Of course, I think a lot of people really, really want to believe that Google is different from every single other multinational organization that has ever existed. It's not.
Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really a reason to avoid answering the question either. Regardless of the mechanism by which your mind arrives at the answer (be it animal instincts, brain chemistry, whatever), you are indeed capable of coming up with an answer, and even if you believe the answer says nothing about the universe in general, it still says something about you and your own mind. And I'm fairly interested in knowing what your…
But that's a question for neuropsychology, isn't it? The question of what is good for an individual person won't be solved by conversation and introspection, because people are, on average, very bad at understanding themselves and the reasons for doing the things they do (they indeed have reasons to give, but these reasons rarely stand up as falsifiable hypotheses for predicting future actions, so they're mere ration…
The answer may come from other places than neuropsychology. We as carriers of values live and evolve in an ecosystem where the values of those around us and how they fit with ours matters. Maybe we can derive some evolutionary stable strategies representing moral laws from a swarm of agents constantly playing Prisoner's dillema and games with other rewards against each other.