No--in Islam, Jesus is still the Messiah. He just isn't the Son of God. These are two drastically different things. Just ask a Jew: they don't think the Messiah will be the son of God. That's a uniquely Christian belief.
I worked as a poll clerk in a few elections in Australia. The "spoiled votes", invalid for whatever reason, were 1 or 2%. Many of these were obviously deliberate -- no numbers or ticks at all.
Well if you're in a country that throws people into jail for not voting and you honestly don't like any of the candidates, of course you're going to submit a blank ballot. Do you at least correctly handle the ballot if someone only votes on some of the seats?
I'm not sure how you could experimentally verify how and where circular reasoning was justifiable--this is the sort of thing you need prior to science anyway.
A functionally rational ethics builds upon a set of simple tenets that are, both in principle and in practice, exceedingly easy to agree upon: minimize suffering and maximize joy in the present, optimize sustainability for the future, etc.
Believe me, it is easy to find good reasons to disagree with tenets that are "exceedingly easy to agree upon", yours in particular.
The Golden Rule does much to capture this logic, and it is a concept easily understood by a child of five.
No, your original tenets were consequentialist in nature. The golden rule isn't consequentialist at all.
Cultural relativism is an easy fallback....
Indeed but don't accuse me of making it. My argument was more akin to moral nihilism than cultural relativism.
The other issue you raise is about 'tension' between rational thinking and irrational beliefs. Your assertion that there is no tension between them is nonsense: rational and irrational thinking are conflicting and mutually exclusive modes of dealing with reality.
There is indeed a tension between reason and the practice of assuming things that are "exceedingly easy to agree upon" without a rational argument in favor of them. But it's a tension that we all live with, myself included.
It is possible to be both rational and irrational, as I mention in my previous post; but to do so you must be slightly insane.
Nearly everyone is slightly insane by that standard. If we consider reason to be a process of justification that allows us to proceed from premises to a conclusion, then there are only three ways our beliefs can be rationally arranged: either we have fundamental beliefs that themselves lack justification, we have an infinite series of beliefs, or our beliefs are justified circularly. Any one of these options poses problems to us, and at least two of them probably require that we abandon the pretense that all of our beliefs are rationally justified. (Foundationalism could be rationally justified if our foundational beliefs are self-justifying axioms, but no one has successfully constructed such a system yet. Circularism or coherentism could be rationally justified if we were able to come up with a well-defined distinction between fallacious circular reasoning and non-fallacious circular reasoning, but so far most people think all circular reasoning is fallacious. Infinite regression is the only one that's sure to work, but requires us to hold an infinite set of beliefs.)
A small correction on Kaczynski. Kaczynski was a mathematician working in complex analysis. While he was brilliant by all accounts, he was not well trained in bomb-making and his bombs were not always that well made. On the other hand, his manifesto was brilliantly written and contains some truly compelling and sound reasoning--not that I agree with it wholesale.
Eh? Having studied these issues, it's clear to me our cultural opposition (such as it is) to "violence, racism, sexism, misogeny, homophobia, murder, rape and plunder" are based on cultural norms and intuitions, not on reason. For centuries the best we've been able to do rationally is come up with some unifying principle for these intuitions and argue over which one best handles the edge cases (i.e. the study of ethics). Furthermore, there's almost no real course of academic study that would lead a person to contrary beliefs about these things. There's no tension between believing in math and physics and believing in suicide bombing.
Now, you might argue that there's tension between rationally investigating physics while accepting your metaphysics and ethics on faith, but as you may not seem to realize, pretty much everyone accepts their ethics on faith, based on social indoctrination. It's just that in your case, you've been indoctrinated with the ethical norms of Western culture, and they've been indoctrinated with the ethical norms of Islamic culture. Later on we may find that other ethical beliefs suit us better, but pure reason won't bring you any sort of ethics, much less the same ethics we have. Perhaps it would be more consistent to be an ethical nihilist, but that's not the position you're proposing either.
It's a mercantilist fallacy that your exports should balance or exceed your imports, and I'm not interested in seeing this country suffer from another Hawley-Smoot Tariff based on that fallacy. Overall, the past 50 years have been among the most successful for our economy, despite the short-term corrections we've had to deal with.
OK, so you're a mercantilist. Mercantilism was discredited about 250 years ago, but enough about that: the fact that the US exports billions of dollars in goods every year shows that it's a matter of degree, and such matters can be changed by simply producing better goods. Furthermore, in America, we should develop a cultural bias to accept only the best. We already accept shoddy government just because it's American, I don't think expanding this reasoning to shoddy products will help matters any.
What would really help is if some American carmakers went out of business, opening the door for new ones to come in without the same chains holding them down that GM and Ford have. Hopefully Tesla will ease into this position as the technology behind electric vehicles improves.
Either your reasoning is poorly constructed and makes no sense, or your explanation of it is. Please draw this back to the fact that we stopped buying American cars. (My understanding of history is, American cars were, in fact, unable to compete with the imports in terms of quality of build or fuel efficiency, and that many Americans by and large refused to put buy inferior cars just out some jingoistic pride.)
I didn't say it was my preferred option, just that it's definitely preferable to using it for fuel. At this point in time we need to move to alternative energy as quickly as possible, and constraining the supply of oil is helping us to do that.
Similarly, we'd probably be better off in the long run using more easily-recyclable materials than plastic, which means that even if using oil for plastic is better than using it for fuel, replacing plastic is still important. But, given that plastic can be recycled back into oil (as recent discoveries indicate), that may be a plausible option.
Oil is a natural resource, nothing more, nothing less. It has a lot of vital uses but using it in certain ways causes external consequences, and those consequences are drawing dire.
Whoever makes the robots will surely put in digital signatures and kill switches so that they can reclaim control from the operators as well as prevent them from being used against themselves.
Yeah. What if those people mutiny? The dictator isn't going to build and program all the robots himself.
Meanwhile, you're probably not driving an American car. Why should they be loyal to you when you aren't loyal to them? Where was all the outrage in the 1980s when Americans abandoned GM (and as a consequence, the Union), in droves? That was when the problem started, not now.
Please, tell me how the decline of the American auto industry began the decline of civil liberties in this country. As far as I can tell, it's tied closely to the ideas of jingoism and mercantilism. Don't buy American, buy the best.
The last naval battle this country had was against Libya, if I recall correctly. They sent two planes and two boats. Soon after, one plane and one boat retreated. This is to attack ground targets, either to assist amphibious assaults or (if the range is enough) to just plain blow shit up without wasting an expensive cruise missile.
No line-of-sight required, nor is any guided projectile. If you haven't noticed the US Navy doesn't fight other navies anymore. This could replace the role of battleships in shore bombardment, or send unguided kinetic weapons ashore.
A railgun, in tactical terms, is a gun. All guided weapons do is obviate the need to either drop bombs accurately (which is difficult) or aim the missile physically (in the case of cruise missiles). There's still a large role for ballistic weapons, even in these larger applications. A large copper ball traveling at very high rates of speed will do just as much damage as a slower-traveling explosive shell, and is cheaper to manufacture than a guidance system.
Well you could magnetize the tailhook and use electrical induction to slow the aircraft. But I somehow doubt that would work very well. More likely, they just found a better material for arresting cables or something.
No way in hell that would work. The US would never sign that treaty... we'd go from being the #1 superpower, to very last place. The only way to coerce us would be all-out war. They'd send their millions of soccer players, and we'd have guns. Fun for the gun-havers, but the soccer afficianados would be very sad.
If the treaty specified women's soccer, we'd still be the #1 superpower...
Drilling it and using it for plastics is better than drilling it and using it for fuel, but so is leaving it in the ground. I'm not sure, all things considered, whether using it for plastics is better than leaving it in the ground.
Besides, I still fail to see why a country which is likely to lose in the robotic war would accept these rules, when it makes a lot more sense to attack the other country's civil population - which in turn might reconsider the whole thing.
You don't have a very good grasp of how war works. No one chivalrously agrees to attack the enemy army, human or robot. The reason armies fight each other is because, usually, the army is positioned such that you have to go through them to get anywhere you want, or that they can attack you once you move into a certain position. And the fact is, a country or faction that is likely to lose a head-on war already does attack the other country's civil population, or if they must fight an army, they use guerrilla tactics. You might notice that there's a lot of this going on these days. Furthermore, guerrilla warfare and terrorism only work as defensive tactics: if you actually want to take over a country you have to field a conventional army, and a conventional army can be attacked by other conventional armies, including robot armies.
Depends on the robots. What about the people who build and maintain the robots? They can mutiny. Also I'd bet you need some sort of networking to coordinate the robots. Probably wireless. Sure you can set the right failure modes for jamming, but what about signal intrusion? You could make the robots mutiny for you.
Slashdot Mirror
No--in Islam, Jesus is still the Messiah. He just isn't the Son of God. These are two drastically different things. Just ask a Jew: they don't think the Messiah will be the son of God. That's a uniquely Christian belief.
Obviously, you've never kissed 100 million people all on one night every two years!
Well if you're in a country that throws people into jail for not voting and you honestly don't like any of the candidates, of course you're going to submit a blank ballot. Do you at least correctly handle the ballot if someone only votes on some of the seats?
I never said I agreed with his premises or his conclusions, but the reasoning in between is sound and compelling.
Technical people assert false control by inventing technical things.Indeed, that was a fundamental part of Kaczynski's argument.
I'm not sure how you could experimentally verify how and where circular reasoning was justifiable--this is the sort of thing you need prior to science anyway.
Believe me, it is easy to find good reasons to disagree with tenets that are "exceedingly easy to agree upon", yours in particular.
The Golden Rule does much to capture this logic, and it is a concept easily understood by a child of five.No, your original tenets were consequentialist in nature. The golden rule isn't consequentialist at all.
Cultural relativism is an easy fallback....Indeed but don't accuse me of making it. My argument was more akin to moral nihilism than cultural relativism.
The other issue you raise is about 'tension' between rational thinking and irrational beliefs. Your assertion that there is no tension between them is nonsense: rational and irrational thinking are conflicting and mutually exclusive modes of dealing with reality.There is indeed a tension between reason and the practice of assuming things that are "exceedingly easy to agree upon" without a rational argument in favor of them. But it's a tension that we all live with, myself included.
It is possible to be both rational and irrational, as I mention in my previous post; but to do so you must be slightly insane.Nearly everyone is slightly insane by that standard. If we consider reason to be a process of justification that allows us to proceed from premises to a conclusion, then there are only three ways our beliefs can be rationally arranged: either we have fundamental beliefs that themselves lack justification, we have an infinite series of beliefs, or our beliefs are justified circularly. Any one of these options poses problems to us, and at least two of them probably require that we abandon the pretense that all of our beliefs are rationally justified. (Foundationalism could be rationally justified if our foundational beliefs are self-justifying axioms, but no one has successfully constructed such a system yet. Circularism or coherentism could be rationally justified if we were able to come up with a well-defined distinction between fallacious circular reasoning and non-fallacious circular reasoning, but so far most people think all circular reasoning is fallacious. Infinite regression is the only one that's sure to work, but requires us to hold an infinite set of beliefs.)
So your objection is that some methods of killing enemy soldiers aren't sporting enough? Give me a fucking break.
A small correction on Kaczynski. Kaczynski was a mathematician working in complex analysis. While he was brilliant by all accounts, he was not well trained in bomb-making and his bombs were not always that well made. On the other hand, his manifesto was brilliantly written and contains some truly compelling and sound reasoning--not that I agree with it wholesale.
Eh? Having studied these issues, it's clear to me our cultural opposition (such as it is) to "violence, racism, sexism, misogeny, homophobia, murder, rape and plunder" are based on cultural norms and intuitions, not on reason. For centuries the best we've been able to do rationally is come up with some unifying principle for these intuitions and argue over which one best handles the edge cases (i.e. the study of ethics). Furthermore, there's almost no real course of academic study that would lead a person to contrary beliefs about these things. There's no tension between believing in math and physics and believing in suicide bombing.
Now, you might argue that there's tension between rationally investigating physics while accepting your metaphysics and ethics on faith, but as you may not seem to realize, pretty much everyone accepts their ethics on faith, based on social indoctrination. It's just that in your case, you've been indoctrinated with the ethical norms of Western culture, and they've been indoctrinated with the ethical norms of Islamic culture. Later on we may find that other ethical beliefs suit us better, but pure reason won't bring you any sort of ethics, much less the same ethics we have. Perhaps it would be more consistent to be an ethical nihilist, but that's not the position you're proposing either.
It's a mercantilist fallacy that your exports should balance or exceed your imports, and I'm not interested in seeing this country suffer from another Hawley-Smoot Tariff based on that fallacy. Overall, the past 50 years have been among the most successful for our economy, despite the short-term corrections we've had to deal with.
Yes but something tells me pointing the railgun upwards is going to be difficult.
OK, so you're a mercantilist. Mercantilism was discredited about 250 years ago, but enough about that: the fact that the US exports billions of dollars in goods every year shows that it's a matter of degree, and such matters can be changed by simply producing better goods. Furthermore, in America, we should develop a cultural bias to accept only the best. We already accept shoddy government just because it's American, I don't think expanding this reasoning to shoddy products will help matters any.
What would really help is if some American carmakers went out of business, opening the door for new ones to come in without the same chains holding them down that GM and Ford have. Hopefully Tesla will ease into this position as the technology behind electric vehicles improves.
Either your reasoning is poorly constructed and makes no sense, or your explanation of it is. Please draw this back to the fact that we stopped buying American cars. (My understanding of history is, American cars were, in fact, unable to compete with the imports in terms of quality of build or fuel efficiency, and that many Americans by and large refused to put buy inferior cars just out some jingoistic pride.)
I didn't say it was my preferred option, just that it's definitely preferable to using it for fuel. At this point in time we need to move to alternative energy as quickly as possible, and constraining the supply of oil is helping us to do that.
Similarly, we'd probably be better off in the long run using more easily-recyclable materials than plastic, which means that even if using oil for plastic is better than using it for fuel, replacing plastic is still important. But, given that plastic can be recycled back into oil (as recent discoveries indicate), that may be a plausible option.
Oil is a natural resource, nothing more, nothing less. It has a lot of vital uses but using it in certain ways causes external consequences, and those consequences are drawing dire.
As bad as things are today, we are far from using killer robots to massacre our own people. I hope people would be less apathetic about that.
Yeah. What if those people mutiny? The dictator isn't going to build and program all the robots himself.
Please, tell me how the decline of the American auto industry began the decline of civil liberties in this country. As far as I can tell, it's tied closely to the ideas of jingoism and mercantilism. Don't buy American, buy the best.
Technically, a railgun round wouldn't even go boom. Who needs explosives when you have that much kinetic energy?
The last naval battle this country had was against Libya, if I recall correctly. They sent two planes and two boats. Soon after, one plane and one boat retreated. This is to attack ground targets, either to assist amphibious assaults or (if the range is enough) to just plain blow shit up without wasting an expensive cruise missile.
No line-of-sight required, nor is any guided projectile. If you haven't noticed the US Navy doesn't fight other navies anymore. This could replace the role of battleships in shore bombardment, or send unguided kinetic weapons ashore.
A railgun, in tactical terms, is a gun. All guided weapons do is obviate the need to either drop bombs accurately (which is difficult) or aim the missile physically (in the case of cruise missiles). There's still a large role for ballistic weapons, even in these larger applications. A large copper ball traveling at very high rates of speed will do just as much damage as a slower-traveling explosive shell, and is cheaper to manufacture than a guidance system.
Well you could magnetize the tailhook and use electrical induction to slow the aircraft. But I somehow doubt that would work very well. More likely, they just found a better material for arresting cables or something.
If the treaty specified women's soccer, we'd still be the #1 superpower...
Drilling it and using it for plastics is better than drilling it and using it for fuel, but so is leaving it in the ground. I'm not sure, all things considered, whether using it for plastics is better than leaving it in the ground.
You don't have a very good grasp of how war works. No one chivalrously agrees to attack the enemy army, human or robot. The reason armies fight each other is because, usually, the army is positioned such that you have to go through them to get anywhere you want, or that they can attack you once you move into a certain position. And the fact is, a country or faction that is likely to lose a head-on war already does attack the other country's civil population, or if they must fight an army, they use guerrilla tactics. You might notice that there's a lot of this going on these days. Furthermore, guerrilla warfare and terrorism only work as defensive tactics: if you actually want to take over a country you have to field a conventional army, and a conventional army can be attacked by other conventional armies, including robot armies.
Depends on the robots. What about the people who build and maintain the robots? They can mutiny. Also I'd bet you need some sort of networking to coordinate the robots. Probably wireless. Sure you can set the right failure modes for jamming, but what about signal intrusion? You could make the robots mutiny for you.