If you’ve ever taken a mathematics course in school, you yourself may have been introduced to a situation where it was believed that there were right and wrong ways to factor a number into primes. Unless you were an exceptionally good student, you may have disagreed with your teacher over the details of which way was right, and been punished for doing it wrong.
My experience with math classes was much different from yours. When we had a disagreement, the teacher said, “How would we tell who’s right? Do you have a proof? Do you have a counter-example?”. And if somebody had a proof we’d listen to it. And if I jumped up and said “Wait, this proof is wrong!” then the teacher would say, “First you have to explain what he said up to the point you disagree, and see if he agrees that’s what he means. Then you can tell us why it’s wrong.”
I never got punished for being wrong. If I didn’t do homework correctly then I didn’t get credit for it, but there was no punishment involved.
But Eliezer described people who disagreed about how many stones to put in a pile and who had something that looked very much like wars about it. That isn’t like the math I experienced. But it’s very much like the morality I’ve experienced.
If you’ve ever taken a mathematics course in school, you yourself may have been introduced to a situation where it was believed that there were right and wrong ways to factor a number into primes. Unless you were an exceptionally good student, you may have disagreed with your teacher over the details of which way was right, and been punished for doing it wrong.
My experience with math classes was much different from yours. When we had a disagreement, the teacher said, “How would we tell who’s right? Do you have a proof? Do you have a counter-example?”. And if somebody had a proof we’d listen to it. And if I jumped up and said “Wait, this proof is wrong!” then the teacher would say, “First you have to explain what he said up to the point you disagree, and see if he agrees that’s what he means. Then you can tell us why it’s wrong.”
I never got punished for being wrong. If I didn’t do homework correctly then I didn’t get credit for it, but there was no punishment involved.
But Eliezer described people who disagreed about how many stones to put in a pile and who had something that looked very much like wars about it. That isn’t like the math I experienced. But it’s very much like the morality I’ve experienced.