I'm not really disagreeing with you, just pointing out that direct genetic manipulation via CRISPR or other means is not at all similar to selective breeding.
Correct; it's much more targeted, and therefore less likely to result in undesirable side effects.
Nice false dichotomy fallacy to start off your chain of irrational logic.
One certainly can be "moral" and "obedient" at the same time.
Your inability to read/comprehend simple English does not make my comment a false dichotomy. In fact, since I never said that the two are mutually exclusive, you are constructing a strawman.
Further, presuming you mean by "invisible friend" (further compounding your disingenuous philosophical incompetence by thinking negative characterization is an argument),
It's an accurate description. If you think that me describing your invisible friend by his only observable properties is a "negative characterisation" then perhaps you need to rethink your theology.
the Christian God, we neither do follow "unquestioningly" nor is that even expected or required by the theological content itself. Refer to Job, Moses, Noah, Paul, etc., etc., for extensive presentation of contention with God, which is ultimately expected and even praised as the accepted nature of introspective human response to God.
Horseshit. Wherever those characters are written as "questioning god", it's painted as a lapse in their faith and intended to demonstrate that - while your faith may falter - ultimately you will see that Magic Man is always right.
Meanwhile Abraham's story in particular is a disgusting display of the immorality of biblical dogma; the man is ordered to murder his son and then congratulated for being willing to do it. That's the biblical idea of "morality" right there; if your invisible friend orders you to kill a child, then it must be the right thing to do.
In other words, where you aren't explicitly irrational, you live in a fantasy notion of your opposition that has no correspondence to reality other than your own mind.
And yet everything you've said in response is an illustration of the opposite.
Look, you can feel free to be as wrong about the definition of the word as you like. Even if I accepted your definition, it wouldn't change the discussion; it would merely make your original comment doubly irrelevant. I stated that if you're simply following orders, that's not morality. If you want a discussion, respond to that; don't go off on a tangent about where morals come from.
No, that's ethics, the theory why morality is the way it is.
Incorrect. Ethics aren't a "theory". Ethics are external rules or reasons governing behaviour. Eg. rules at work, laws, or religious edicts. Morals are internal; your individual determination of right and wrong.
That's why morality can never be dictated by an external authority. Even if you say that your moral code comes from Magic Man, that's nonsense. Magic Man can only dictate an ethical gudeline. You must still have had some kind of moral code in the first place which lets you determine that the ethics imposed by Magic Man are moral. Either that or you're just following his rules because you're afraid of what he might do to you, in which case your behaviour is guided entirely by fear rather than a moral code.
To the best of my knowledge, the northern white rhino and southern white rhino are pretty darn similar. But if we lost both of them, the loss would be more significant. And if we lost all rhinos (might happen), well, they are one of the few remnants of the perissodactyl line of mammals, so it would be substantial loss.
Right, so we're talking about degrees of differentiation. Some losses are worse than others, but the vast majority of the information lost when any single species goes extinct is a tiny subset of the information retained in other species. This can be represented, in code terms, by "deltas". If you lose the last code update you made to a project you were working on, it's probably not a big deal. If you lose the last 50 updates, it matters significantly more. But in either case you're only losing a small portion of the total code base, and you can re-create the rest if you really have to.
The thing with the "information" argument which gets me is that, as long as we have their DNA sequenced, we're not actually losing any information anyway. It's all there, stored away on our hard drives. Bringing them back to life does not "restore" any information. So if the only argument is that we should try and limit the loss of information, then a rhino on a hard drive is just as good as a rhino in the wild. It's not an argument for either bringing specie back, or for keeping them from going extinct in the first place.
No, sweetheart, I just don't like the idea with replacing one type of mindless fanatic with another. The only difference between you and a fascist is the people and ideas which you target; your tactics and your end-goals of suppression of thought and ideological purity are otherwise identical.
Yes, there's almost a 100% certainty that we will go away in another trillion years or so. I'm not sure how the rest of your comment follows from that.
If you believed in Evolution, you would realize that bad actions (of the parts of any individual creature or group of creatures) are moving Evolution along.
If you understood evolution you would realise that it's not some guided process constantly driving species to be objectively "better", but rather a selective process which encourages the proliferation of traits which are better suited for a specific environment. There's no "moving it along"; it's always happening and nothing we do is going to stop it, slow it, or speed it up. All we can do is change the factors which encourage one trait over another.
This is a bit like recording every moment of your life. Because it's "information".
In reality, 99.99999% of all " information" being generated is going to be lost, and that's OK because most of it is incredibly repetitive. What do you figure are the odds of the northern white rhino being so different from the southern white rhino that it's actually information worth preserving? Probably about the same as the odds of there being something incredibly valuable in the turd I dropped in the toilet 5 hours ago. Would you like me to ship you every bowel movement I have from now on, or are we OK with some information being lost?
That's just moral relativism. Without some kind of predetermined moral code (generally attributed to deit(y/ies), debating morals is no better than debating which color is best.
What you call "moral relativism" is the only kind of morality there is. If your idea of morality is unquestioningly following the dictates of your invisible friend - or of anyone else, for that matter - then you're not talking about morality, you're taking about obedience. Those are two very different things.
It happens to be a whole lot easier to trick machines than people.
Millions of magicians and scam artists would beg to differ. Hell, there's a reason why the biggest weakness in computer security has always been the lump of meat sitting in front of the keyboard (aka "social engineering").
I'm honestly curious as to how these self driving or driverless cars handle traffic light outages or intersections that just have blinking yellow lights in small towns like where i live.
Same way as human drivers. Road rules are a pretty simple system; do you honestly imagine that the engineers behind the technology managed to "teach" the car to recognise traffic lights, but somehow forgot to include programming on what to do if they're out?
If you talked to 10,000 consumers who own Chromebooks, I doubt even 1% of them would be able to tell you they own a device running Linux.
If you talked to 10,000 consumers using Bing, I doubt even 1% of them would be able to tell you they're accessing servers running on Linux. So fucking what?
FOSS got tossed out the fucking window.
In what universe is FOSS running on millions of devices equivalent to being "tossed out the window"?
The infamous Year of the Linux Desktop ended up being nothing more than a bastardized commercially-branded closed ecosystem running on a personal tracking device that the masses happily sold their digital soul to get.
Ah, I see the problem here. You're a card carrying ANTIFA member which means you meet all of the requirements for membership... the first of which a room temperature IQ.
I can't afford a friends and family account for all the rats around my neighborhood
They should qualify for the federal broadband subsidy program, so that should being the price down to a manageable level. Just make sure to get them to sign the petition against having the FCC revoke the subsidy.
In fact I am assured that my comment, that a superset beyond already-proven carcinogens in our scientific knowledge base will in fact be proven harmful to human life in my lifetime, is true. I only need one.
Well, yes, you only need one, because you're not saying anything of value. Your claim is "there's something dangerous out there", and the response to that is "yeah, no shit". Come back when you figure out which things are dangerous and can prove it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really disagreeing with you, just pointing out that direct genetic manipulation via CRISPR or other means is not at all similar to selective breeding.
Correct; it's much more targeted, and therefore less likely to result in undesirable side effects.
Nice false dichotomy fallacy to start off your chain of irrational logic.
One certainly can be "moral" and "obedient" at the same time.
Your inability to read/comprehend simple English does not make my comment a false dichotomy. In fact, since I never said that the two are mutually exclusive, you are constructing a strawman.
Further, presuming you mean by "invisible friend" (further compounding your disingenuous philosophical incompetence by thinking negative characterization is an argument),
It's an accurate description. If you think that me describing your invisible friend by his only observable properties is a "negative characterisation" then perhaps you need to rethink your theology.
the Christian God, we neither do follow "unquestioningly" nor is that even expected or required by the theological content itself. Refer to Job, Moses, Noah, Paul, etc., etc., for extensive presentation of contention with God, which is ultimately expected and even praised as the accepted nature of introspective human response to God.
Horseshit. Wherever those characters are written as "questioning god", it's painted as a lapse in their faith and intended to demonstrate that - while your faith may falter - ultimately you will see that Magic Man is always right.
Meanwhile Abraham's story in particular is a disgusting display of the immorality of biblical dogma; the man is ordered to murder his son and then congratulated for being willing to do it. That's the biblical idea of "morality" right there; if your invisible friend orders you to kill a child, then it must be the right thing to do.
In other words, where you aren't explicitly irrational, you live in a fantasy notion of your opposition that has no correspondence to reality other than your own mind.
And yet everything you've said in response is an illustration of the opposite.
Look, you can feel free to be as wrong about the definition of the word as you like. Even if I accepted your definition, it wouldn't change the discussion; it would merely make your original comment doubly irrelevant. I stated that if you're simply following orders, that's not morality. If you want a discussion, respond to that; don't go off on a tangent about where morals come from.
ACLU? Sounds more like ICLU. Maybe they should ask to be a UN body.
If you were designing a system to deal with unserviceable or intermittent traffic lights, what would you do?
Are you saying you can't think of a way too deal with it?
Or are you saying that you can, but you're so stuck up that you think none of the people working on this stuff are as smart as you?
No, that's ethics, the theory why morality is the way it is.
Incorrect. Ethics aren't a "theory". Ethics are external rules or reasons governing behaviour. Eg. rules at work, laws, or religious edicts. Morals are internal; your individual determination of right and wrong.
That's why morality can never be dictated by an external authority. Even if you say that your moral code comes from Magic Man, that's nonsense. Magic Man can only dictate an ethical gudeline. You must still have had some kind of moral code in the first place which lets you determine that the ethics imposed by Magic Man are moral. Either that or you're just following his rules because you're afraid of what he might do to you, in which case your behaviour is guided entirely by fear rather than a moral code.
To the best of my knowledge, the northern white rhino and southern white rhino are pretty darn similar. But if we lost both of them, the loss would be more significant. And if we lost all rhinos (might happen), well, they are one of the few remnants of the perissodactyl line of mammals, so it would be substantial loss.
Right, so we're talking about degrees of differentiation. Some losses are worse than others, but the vast majority of the information lost when any single species goes extinct is a tiny subset of the information retained in other species. This can be represented, in code terms, by "deltas". If you lose the last code update you made to a project you were working on, it's probably not a big deal. If you lose the last 50 updates, it matters significantly more. But in either case you're only losing a small portion of the total code base, and you can re-create the rest if you really have to.
The thing with the "information" argument which gets me is that, as long as we have their DNA sequenced, we're not actually losing any information anyway. It's all there, stored away on our hard drives. Bringing them back to life does not "restore" any information. So if the only argument is that we should try and limit the loss of information, then a rhino on a hard drive is just as good as a rhino in the wild. It's not an argument for either bringing specie back, or for keeping them from going extinct in the first place.
Or am I missing something?
No, sweetheart, I just don't like the idea with replacing one type of mindless fanatic with another. The only difference between you and a fascist is the people and ideas which you target; your tactics and your end-goals of suppression of thought and ideological purity are otherwise identical.
Honestly, humanity is probably going to go away.
Yes, there's almost a 100% certainty that we will go away in another trillion years or so. I'm not sure how the rest of your comment follows from that.
If cows ever go extinct it'll be because humans have gone extinct.
Qualifier: maybe if they taste good, we should consider it seriously...mammoth steak, mmmmmm....
Agreed. By all accounts the Dodo was both delicious and stupid. I could definitely make room for that on my menu.
If you believed in Evolution, you would realize that bad actions (of the parts of any individual creature or group of creatures) are moving Evolution along.
If you understood evolution you would realise that it's not some guided process constantly driving species to be objectively "better", but rather a selective process which encourages the proliferation of traits which are better suited for a specific environment. There's no "moving it along"; it's always happening and nothing we do is going to stop it, slow it, or speed it up. All we can do is change the factors which encourage one trait over another.
This is a bit like recording every moment of your life. Because it's "information".
In reality, 99.99999% of all " information" being generated is going to be lost, and that's OK because most of it is incredibly repetitive. What do you figure are the odds of the northern white rhino being so different from the southern white rhino that it's actually information worth preserving? Probably about the same as the odds of there being something incredibly valuable in the turd I dropped in the toilet 5 hours ago. Would you like me to ship you every bowel movement I have from now on, or are we OK with some information being lost?
That's just moral relativism. Without some kind of predetermined moral code (generally attributed to deit(y/ies), debating morals is no better than debating which color is best.
What you call "moral relativism" is the only kind of morality there is. If your idea of morality is unquestioningly following the dictates of your invisible friend - or of anyone else, for that matter - then you're not talking about morality, you're taking about obedience. Those are two very different things.
6. Enjoy a free anal cavity search after the authorities check the footage from the dozens of cameras festooned all over the truck.
It happens to be a whole lot easier to trick machines than people.
Millions of magicians and scam artists would beg to differ. Hell, there's a reason why the biggest weakness in computer security has always been the lump of meat sitting in front of the keyboard (aka "social engineering").
I'm honestly curious as to how these self driving or driverless cars handle traffic light outages or intersections that just have blinking yellow lights in small towns like where i live.
Same way as human drivers. Road rules are a pretty simple system; do you honestly imagine that the engineers behind the technology managed to "teach" the car to recognise traffic lights, but somehow forgot to include programming on what to do if they're out?
I'm more amused by his insistence that a computer can commit murder. Love to see that one get laughed out of court.
If you talked to 10,000 consumers who own Chromebooks, I doubt even 1% of them would be able to tell you they own a device running Linux.
If you talked to 10,000 consumers using Bing, I doubt even 1% of them would be able to tell you they're accessing servers running on Linux. So fucking what?
FOSS got tossed out the fucking window.
In what universe is FOSS running on millions of devices equivalent to being "tossed out the window"?
The infamous Year of the Linux Desktop ended up being nothing more than a bastardized commercially-branded closed ecosystem running on a personal tracking device that the masses happily sold their digital soul to get.
Ah yes, zealous hyperbole FTW.
Ah, I see the problem here. You're a card carrying ANTIFA member which means you meet all of the requirements for membership ... the first of which a room temperature IQ.
Carry on, then.
Oh yeah. Nothing says open source "for the win" like a Closed Ecosystem.
If you see some sort of contradiction there then I don't think you understand either of those phrases.
Poor vitiums. How many humans, though?
I can't afford a friends and family account for all the rats around my neighborhood
They should qualify for the federal broadband subsidy program, so that should being the price down to a manageable level. Just make sure to get them to sign the petition against having the FCC revoke the subsidy.
I dunno about you, but photons do not go through my body, as my body is not made of air, nor of clear glass
All electromagnetic energy is composed of photons. You didn't tell is what your body IS made of but it doesn't really matter much.
In fact I am assured that my comment, that a superset beyond already-proven carcinogens in our scientific knowledge base will in fact be proven harmful to human life in my lifetime, is true. I only need one.
Well, yes, you only need one, because you're not saying anything of value. Your claim is "there's something dangerous out there", and the response to that is "yeah, no shit". Come back when you figure out which things are dangerous and can prove it.