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What kind of girl do you think I am?

manylogue.com

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Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?

#31

Post by nicolas_t »

btmorex wrote: post #29
sailormoon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aw…

Facebook and Twitter are internationally recognized brand that are blocked in China... Explaining that away is no problem for the Chinese government.

I think the difference between your point of view and my point of view is that I don't see things as completely black...

China is a repressive government and freedom of speech is not allowed there but it's certainly better than it was during the cultural revolution and I think it'll get better...

Now, as someone who lived in China before Google decided to move in the chinese market I can tell you that it was a great news to see them move... Before they were intermitently blocked by the Chinese firewall, a lot of queries were blocked so access to good search engines was not very good...

After Google moved to China, well they had to censor some of the results out but then they would point it out, and connection and access to google was much better...

So for me, it was a net benefit to see google move in China, and I hope that them moving out won't result in their being blocked again...

Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?

#33

Post by derefr »

ntoshev wrote: post #30
derefr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the mechanisms by which we play those games will be evident in the brain, and the games themselves will be evident in our expectation-program memory. (I'm assuming here that sufficiently-advanced neuropsychology will be able to analyze the "software" running on each brain, not just the firmware, but even if that field ends up with a different name, that's what I'm talking about here.)

We may be able to model some sort of "objectively-good" cooperative-evolutionary game-players using mathematics, but those models would not necessarily represent us; there's nothing that says we're even evolutionarily stable as a species over the long term ;)

Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?

#34

Post by olliesaunders »

derefr wrote: post #11
cduan wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

I came to the same conclusion a while ago. I like to phrase it as: morality is a function of evolution.

Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?

#35

Post by willz »

The guy's main point is that you should decide which girl you are: the "Consequentialist" (relativist), or the "Categoricalist" (absolutist).

He said: "... I find it helpful, before I consider a dilemma, to at least debate whether I’m in that girl’s situation, and what kind of girl I’m going to be for this particular question..."

This shows that he is the "Consequentialist" girl.

Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?

#37

Post by btmorex »

nicolas_t wrote: post #31
btmorex wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aw…

Facebook and Twitter are internationally recognized brand that are blocked in China... Explaining that away is no problem for the Chinese government. I think the difference between your point of view and my point of view is that I don't see things as completely black... China is a repressive government and freedom of speech is not allowed there but it's certainly better than it was during the cultural revolution and…

Google has ~24 billion in revenue. Twitter is harder to pinpoint but from the sources I've seen it's far less than 50 million. Facebook is somewhere around 400-550 million.

I guess my point is that they aren't even in the same stratosphere. Twitter and Facebook may be international recognized (and clearly I should have differentiated here), but they aren't in any way equivalent to a behemoth like Google.

Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?

#38

Post by lazugod »

ojbyrne wrote: post #5
philwelch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So for a trillion dollars, you wouldn't kill someone, only restrict them to living inside a stationary computer for eternity without their consent.

Given sufficient technology, what exactly is the difference?

The rest of the word might hesitate to consider the person "not dead" when their body, their instantly recognizable human feature, has been taken away from them.

Re: What kind of girl do you think I am?

#40

Post by xtho »

cduan wrote: post #6
derefr wrote: post #2

A 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…

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…

The example in the article is a good example how such thought experiments are sometimes turned into jokes for bored misanthrope/misogynist/latent homosexual men. At first, the situation could be interpreted as an exchange of a years of happy life for sleeping with somebody she considers attractive and would probably sleep with anyway. This problem then is turned into what would be her price if she slept with men for a living.

If this is your understanding of philosophy, I'd say you're misusing philosophy for dealing with personal problems.

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