> The somewhat religious belief in progress is non-representative of the human experience.
It seems the other way around. You'd have to be willfully blind to ignore that the human experience consists of technological progress.
> The function of the human race isn't to secure commercial services of convenience at any cost.
Who can say what the function of the human race is? I worry that we in software are becoming detached from reality in a strange way. I suspect your sentiment is common among the tech industry, and yet it seems the opposite of empirical observation -- the basis of science.
> It is possible that your beliefs don't correspond to the goals of local or global communities.
Sodomy, for example. To ram the point home, suppose you were born a few hundred years prior. Are you sure it would be unethical to engage in buttsex in the privacy of your own home with a consenting adult? Everyone's fine with that now, but it would quite literally get you executed not so long ago:
> This meant that a convicted sodomite’s possessions could be confiscated by the government, rather than going to their next of kin, and that even priests and monks could be executed for the offence—even though they could not be executed for murder. In moving what had previously been an offence tried by ecclesiastical courts into the secular ones, Henry may have intended it as a simple expression of political power along with other contemporary acts such as Submission of the Clergy Act 1533 and one year before the Act of Supremacy 1534. However Henry later used the law to execute monks and nuns (thanks to information his spies had gathered) and take their monastery lands—the same tactics had been used 200 years before by Philip IV of France against the Knights Templar.
The Knights Templar were a powerful organization, yet many of them were sentenced to death on the basis of buttsex being unjust.
I fear we live in an era where, metaphorically speaking, the buttsex corporations engage in is being framed as unjust, even though it seems pretty fair to me. Coinbase, Uber, Airbnb... It's hard to find anyone here that actually thinks startups are a good idea anymore. Or at least, if people speak up and say that they're fine, they tend to be shouted down.
> In summary, we have laws because other people exist and we live in a modern economy.
Our views don't seem so modern. I think history may look back on us the way we look at the people in the 1500s.
It seems the other way around. You'd have to be willfully blind to ignore that the human experience consists of technological progress.
> The function of the human race isn't to secure commercial services of convenience at any cost.
Who can say what the function of the human race is? I worry that we in software are becoming detached from reality in a strange way. I suspect your sentiment is common among the tech industry, and yet it seems the opposite of empirical observation -- the basis of science.
> It is possible that your beliefs don't correspond to the goals of local or global communities.
Sodomy, for example. To ram the point home, suppose you were born a few hundred years prior. Are you sure it would be unethical to engage in buttsex in the privacy of your own home with a consenting adult? Everyone's fine with that now, but it would quite literally get you executed not so long ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggery_Act_1533
> This meant that a convicted sodomite’s possessions could be confiscated by the government, rather than going to their next of kin, and that even priests and monks could be executed for the offence—even though they could not be executed for murder. In moving what had previously been an offence tried by ecclesiastical courts into the secular ones, Henry may have intended it as a simple expression of political power along with other contemporary acts such as Submission of the Clergy Act 1533 and one year before the Act of Supremacy 1534. However Henry later used the law to execute monks and nuns (thanks to information his spies had gathered) and take their monastery lands—the same tactics had been used 200 years before by Philip IV of France against the Knights Templar.
The Knights Templar were a powerful organization, yet many of them were sentenced to death on the basis of buttsex being unjust.
I fear we live in an era where, metaphorically speaking, the buttsex corporations engage in is being framed as unjust, even though it seems pretty fair to me. Coinbase, Uber, Airbnb... It's hard to find anyone here that actually thinks startups are a good idea anymore. Or at least, if people speak up and say that they're fine, they tend to be shouted down.
> In summary, we have laws because other people exist and we live in a modern economy.
Our views don't seem so modern. I think history may look back on us the way we look at the people in the 1500s.