Because children are not fully capable of taking care of themselves, and so there is a norm that all adults (and older children) have a duty of helping and protecting them (even against themselves).
And also because if an adult harms a child, it is much more likely that the victim is innocent and didn’t “deserve” that harm than if the victim is an adult.
(and I don’t think “greater moral value” accurately describes the situation)
The Spring and Autumn period definitely seems relevant, and I think someone could get a lot of interesting posts out of it.
Yep, I’ve been reading a fair amount about it recently; I had considering first making a “prequel” post talking about that period and about how studying ancient China can be fairly interesting, in that it shows us a pretty alien society that still had similar debates.
I had heard from various sources how Confucius said it was normal to care more about some than others, and it took me a bit of work to dig up what that notion was called exactly.
What if, for example, the institution of family is crucial for the well-being of humans, and not putting your close ones first in the short run would undermine that institution?
If that was the real reason you would treat your brother better than one kid in Africa, than you would be willing to sacrifice a good relationship with your brother in exchange for saving two good brother-relationships between poor kids in Africa.
I agree you could evaluate impersonally how much good the institution of the family (and other similar things, like marriages, promises, friendship, nation-states, etc.) creates; and thus how “good” are natural inclinations to help our family are (on the plus side; sustains the family, an efficient form of organization and child-rearing; on the down side: can cause nepotism). But we humans aren’t moved by that kind of abstract considerations nearly as much as we are by a desire to care for our family.
Suppose I get my weights from inside me, and you get yours from inside you; then we might not be able to coordinate, instead wrestling each other over the ability to flip the switch.
In practice people with different values manage to coordinate perfectly fine via trade; I agree an external source of morality would be sufficient for cooperation, but it’s not necessary (also having all humans really take an external source as the real basis for all their choices would require some pretty heavy rewriting of human nature).
Yeah, that was my thought too—after an accident, everyone is more careful and diligent, because there will be a search for someone to blame, and that’s really not a good time to be asleep at the wheel, whatever your level of responsibility.
Maybe practice editing more? If you suck at it, rewriting /editing your posts will only make you better at it. It might be a bit of work, it might take a bit of time, but it’s nice to take ten minutes of your time to save thirty seconds to a hundred readers (and more importantly to save all the time wasted by comments who misunderstood part of what you said and the ensuing back-and-forth).
(I personally don’t have much time to spend reading long preachy walls of texts telling me about my supposed self-hatred; I didn’t downvote your post but skipped to the discussion because the post itself wasn’t very engaging and seemed to get things wrong fairly quickly)
I suspect most people here find this post very confusing as they don’t know who you are (I don’t recognize your username), and it’s not really clear what you’re getting at or why we would want to ask you anything.
A bit of a nitpick (which could explain some of the reception you’re getting here): I don’t think the term “Pragmatarianism” is a good description for your proposal, it’s just an unrelated name that sounds good. Might as well say ‘I’m calling this proposal “Sensible Tax Policy”’ or ‘My idea, called “Reasonablism”, is that...’, etc.
A more modest and descriptive name would probably be better received, especially in places who dislike marketing.
Okay, though we’re still far from a true robot butler. I don’t know if we’re ten years away though, especially if you’re tolerant in what you expect a butler to be able to do (welcome guests, take their names, point them in the right direction, answer basic questions? We can already do it. Go up a flight of stairs? Not yet.)
There are already quite a few of them deployed in stores in Japan, interacting with customers, so for now it’s going okay :)
It’s debatable how much a “remote controlled helicopters with a camera” should fall under “robotics”; progress in that area seems pretty orthogonal to issues like manipulation and autonomy.
(Though on the other hand modern drones are better at mechanical control “just” remote control: good drones have a feedback loop so that they correct their position)
We won’t have robot butlers or maids in the next ten years.
(for what it’s worth, I work on this robot for a living)
I think my chain falls of on the idea that we can assign reliable probabilities to various hypotheses, prior to our own thorough investigation of the available scientific material.
Yep! We do it all the time! How likely do you think it is that the city of New York has just been destroyed by a nuclear blast? That your parents are actually undercover agents sent by Thailand? That there is a scorpion in the sandwich you’re about to eat? Most people would consider those extremely unlikely without a second thought, and would not feel any need for a “thorough investigation of the available scientific material”. And that’s a perfectly sensible thing to do!
I guess we can agree that the most rational response would be to enter a state of aporia until sufficient evidence is at hand.
Not really; consider how much effort is worth investigating the question of whether Barack Obama is actually secretly Transgender, in different scenarios:
You just thought about it, but don’t have any special reason to privilege that hypothesis
Someone mentioned the idea a a thought experiment on LessWrong.com, but doesn’t seem to think it’s even remotely likely
Someone on the internet seems to honestly believe it (but may be a troll or time cube guy-level crazy)
A vocal group on the internet seems to believe it
Several people you know in real-life seem to believe it
If you think that even in the first case you should investigate, then you’re going to spend your life running over every hypothesis that catches your fancy, regardless of how likely or useful it is. If you believe that in some cases it deserves a bit of investigation, but not others, you’re going to need a few extra rules of thumbs, even before looking as the evidence.
I’ve used The bootstrap framework to make web apps that don’t look horribly ugly. Learning all the things you’d need to make apps that use that (so a bit of JS, CSS, HTML, etc. as sixes_and_seven says) would probably be a good start. (It would be probably easier than trying to make good-looking CSS from scratch, which is more of a pain).
Side note: I keep seeing a bizarre assumption (which I can only assume is a Hollywood trope) from a lot of people here that even a merely human-level AI would automatically be awesome at dealing with software just because they’re made of software. (like how humans are automatically experts in advanced genetic engineering just because we’re made of DNA)
Not “just because they’re made of software”—but because there are many useful things that a computer is already better than a human at (notably, vastly greater “working memory”), so a human-level AI can be expected to have those and whatever humans can do now. And a programmer who could easily do things like “check all lines of code to see if they seem like they can be used”, or systematically checking from where a function could be called, or “annotating” each variable, function or class by why it exists … all things that a human programmer could do, but that either require a lot of working memory, or are mind-numblingly boring.
I should be there.
But is caring for yourself and your friends and family an instrumental value that helps you stay sane so that you can help others more efficiently, or is it a terminal value? It sure feels like a terminal value, and your “morality of self-care” sounds like a roundabout way of explaining why people care so much about it by making it instrumental.