Honesty in one’s dealings is always important. As a member of ROTLCON staff (brony convention in Colorado), I am often asked difficult questions about helping people through our charity auction. Lying is not an option, if one expects to donate, or to accept donations. Kindness? Given how the show seems to show it off in Fluttershy, I would guess that kindness includes one’s understanding and acceptance of other people. Saving a people by destroying something else means knowing exactly what you destroy, and seeing its value—perhaps, the destruction can be avoided. Only one example of kindness as shown in the show, of course. Loyalty—uncertain. Laughter—as a convention, the thing I’m working on is about fun. But, it is also an attempt to throw money at the problem in the best way possible (something we’re just figuring out, by the way, so we will be applying the above article and related advice to altruism). So, also uncertain, but there is a connection for me and my fellow con staff.
Osiris
Not everyone who speaks about morality automatically sinks down into nonsense and intuition, into the depths of accusations and praise for particular persons, however strange the language they use. Sometimes, speaking about morality means speaking about rationality, surviving and thriving, etc. It may be a mistake to think that Asimov was entirely ignorant of the philosophies this website promotes, given his work in science and the quotes one finds from his interviews, letters, and stories.
“Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.” —Isaac Asimov
All too often, an intuition creates mistakes which rationality must remedy, when one is presented with a complex problem in life. No fault of the intuition, of course—it is merely the product of nature.
Would it benefit the children more than being raised by the parents? Then the answer would be “yes.” Many people throughout history attempted to have their children raised by experts alone, so it is not without precedent, for all its strangeness. Nobles in particular entrusted their children to servants, tutors, and warriors, rather than seek to provide everything needed for a healthy (by their standards) childhood themselves. Caring about one’s offspring may include realizing that one needs lots of help.
By the way, I did not intend to cut off an avenue of exploration, here—merely to point out that the selection processes for business, government, and mating do not have anything to do with getting a better teacher or a person good at deciding what should be taught. If that does destroy some potential solution, I hope you forgive me, and would love to hear of that solution so I may change.
Thank you. I had no idea you posted that! Does cast some light on what was once unclear...
The issue is in HOW one does something as much as WHAT one does, it would seem—I am a personal care provider (and volunteer) as well as an organizer for conventions, so I do understand where you are going with this. I am both working to improve the world in some small way and to get money so I can later give people money when I am wealthy, and I did not even consider my own approach (personal as it is) until your comment made me realize how limited (and un-diverse) it is to exclude one method in favor of another.
Something I noticed when a friend told me about this (some terms have been altered):
Suppose there are a hundred ponds, with ten children each drowning, ALL THE TIME. Wearing a clean suit will earn you enough money to save more of them by hiring people using your large paycheck (I shall assume this suit is good enough to get you a decent job) to fish children out of ponds. In the mean time, you’d ALSO be living a comfortable life, which will further allow you to buy job-getting suits for saved children and divers, thereby increasing the number of people that will impact the situation. You would run out of drowning children pretty quick, then, and even supposing you never do, will be able to dive in to save any that DO fall in with no fears about your suit (since you can just buy another one later).
We do not live in a world of one pond and one child. I suspect we live in a world with considerably more ponds and more children than even the one above. Currently, the world we live in is full of divers (if only in potential, since people are willing to do ANYTHING for money these days), but may need some more suit-wearing investors into charity. Therefore, keep walking, get a decent job, THEN come back to the ponds with a team of divers.
PS: Would be interested to know how much money would be needed to solve the WHOLE World Hunger problem, WHOLE Poverty Problem, and so on. I suspect it will help determine just how many people are needed to fish EVERY child out of EVERY pond, and thereby show what the proportion between divers and suit-wearing investors should be. Before then, I’ll keep on working on getting that suit (or them blue suede shoes), and dive only when I can afford to.
A question: How many people are so attached to being experts at parenting that they would rather see children jobless, unhappy, or dead than educated by experts in a particular field (whether biology or social studies)? Those are the people I worry about, when I imagine a system in which parents/government could decide all the time what their children learn and from what institution. For every parent or official that changes their religion just to get children into the best schools, willing to give up every alliance just to get the tribe’s offspring a better chance at life, and happy to give up their own authority in the name of a growing child’s happiness, there are many, many more who are not so caring and fair, I fear.
Experts in a field are far more likely to want to educate children better BECAUSE the above attachment to beliefs, politics, and authority is not, in their minds, in competition with their care for the children (or, at least, shouldn’t be, if those same things depend upon their knowledge). So, rather than saying we trust business, government, or one’s genetic donors, shouldn’t we be trying to make it so that the best teachers are trusted, period? Or, am I missing the point?
Just because your enemies will not always be your friends does not mean it is useless to TRY to convert them to be one’s friends. It is, as most things, a bet. One must know, beforehand, if it is WORTH it to try.
I would say it’s a useful quote because it provides an alternative to the usual “smash them as soon as they oppose you” deal going on.
I’m not a very well educated person in this field, but if I may:
I see my various squishy feelings (desires and what-is-right intuitions are in this list) as loyal pets. Sometimes, they must be disciplined and treated with suspicion, but for the most part, they are there to please you in their own dumb way. They’re no more enemies than one’s preference for foods. In my care for them, I train and reward them, not try to destroy or ignore them. Without them, I have no need to DO better among other people, because I would not be human—that is, some things are important only because I’m a barely intelligent ape-man, and they should STAY important as long as I remain a barely intelligent ape-man. Ignoring something going on in one’s mind, even when one KNOWS it is wrong, can be a source of pain, I’ve found—hypocrisy and indecision are not my friends.
Hope I didn’t make a mess of things with this comment.
I predict a big drop in price soon after vat meat becomes sufficiently popular due to money saved on dealing with useless organs and suffering, as well as a great big leap in profit for any farm that sells “natural cow meat.” One is inherently efficient due to it simplfying farming. The other is pretty, however ugly it is for the animals. I do worry about the numbers New Harvest gives, but in the long run, there is hope for this regardless of what the price is initially—the potential for success in feeding humanity cheaply and well is just too great, in my opinion. Seems like I will be pushing “meat in a bucket” whenever possible, and I am not even that into making animals happy.
I was under the impression you wanted to improve things significantly. Hence why I mentioned that issue—and it IS an issue.
That could work! On the other hand, it may set up a situation where a person who is only guilty of being raised in the wrong place may never get a decent job. Wonder what can be done to prevent that as much as possible?
Hopefully, the positive values are greater in number than the negative ones, if one is not certain which ones are which—and I see quite a few positive values in recent superhero movies.
“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” —Lord Byron.
All too often those who are least rational in their best moments are the greatest supporters of using one’s head, if only to avoid too early a demise. I wonder how many years Lord Byron gained from rational thought, and which of the risks he took did he take because he was good at betting...
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” —Jules Verne.
The fellow had a brilliant grasp of how to make scientific discovery interesting, and I think people could learn a thing or two from reading his stuff, still.
It is not healthy to believe that every curtain hides an Evil Genius (I speak here as a person who lived in the USSR). Given the high failure rate of EVERY human work, I’d say that most secrets in the movie industry have to do with saving bad writing and poor execution with clever marketing and setting up other conflicts people could watch besides the pretty explosions. It’s not about selling Imperialism and Decadance to a country that’s been accused of both practically since its formation(sorry if you’re American and noticed these accusations exist only now in the 21st century), or trying to force people into some new world order-style government where a dictator takes care of every need. Though, I must admit that I wonder about Michael Bay’s agenda sometimes...
Tony Stark isn’t JUST a rich guy with a WMD. He messes up. He fails his friends and loved ones. He is in some way the lowest point in each of our lives, given some nobility. In spite of all those troubles, the fellow stands up and goes on with his life, gets better and tries to improve the world. David Wong seems to have missed the POINT of a couple of movies (how about the message of empowerment-through-determination in Captain America? The fellow must still earn his power as a “runt”), and even worse tries to raise conspiracy theory thinking up as rationality.
So, maybe, the knee-jerk reaction is wise, because overanalizing something made to entertain tends to be somewhat similar to seeing shapes in the clouds. Sometimes, Iron Man is just Iron Man.
Very well said! I would say it’s a better example than the one listed in the above post...
This is yet another reason why a God that answers prayers is far, far crueler than an indifferent Azathoth. Imagine the weight of guilt that must settle on a person if they prayed for the wrong thing and God answered!
On another note, that girl must not be very picky, if God has to destroy a whole city to keep her a virgin...(please don’t blast me for this!)
I am reminded of Asimov’s “positronic brain” and how he came up with it. Perhaps the new goal of research in artificial intelligence should be coming up with new magical terms and explaining as little as possible. It could earn enough money and public interest to create an artificial person...
The forms of intelligence I am familiar with (really only one kind, from a materials points of view) are not enough to discuss what is truly necessary for successful AI.
There are as many ways to run a one-world government as there are countries on this Earth today, and possibly more. No single democracy is the same as all the others, and then you get the various dictatorships and plutocracies that hide behind the name… Even now, a global government is forming from international treaties, fear of nuclear death and terrorism, as well as from trade—it would seem the trend cannot be stopped just by saying one does not want a global government. So, what am I worried about? That the global government that evolves will make my birthplace, the USSR, look like a utopia. The sheer number of USEFUL solutions needed to PERFECT a global government (that is, to create one that we would all agree is competent and beneficial) requires, I think, that we fix up the governments doing the negotiating for a world government FIRST. A good tree is much less likely to produce a bad fruit, to use a Biblical reference. I am not arguing for ignoring world government development, but I would like to point out that scaling up would work a lot better by concentrating on removing issues we see in our governments today...