> religion has always been the only thing the masses have
This is broadly speaking true because religion is one example of a coping mechanism at cultural scale. If you trace the genealogy of morals, these precise beliefs - humility, temperance, kindness, patience - are all survival strategies of people being oppressed. At a large enough scale, it becomes embedded in moral reality itself ie: in religion.
I can see how that's appealing. One of the most common human behaviors is creating rules or in this case moral rules, and then doing a mental switcheroo where they forget that they made the rules and attribute them to universal principles, reality, truth, etc.
In general, the process of believing concepts are real objects - simply observations of reality - is called reification. Every society does it and the result is that human constructs feel as if they are inalienable truths about how reality works. The only problem is that it's culturally specific and as we know, each culture works differently and yet feels as if they've gotten it right - their concept of how things works happens to match reality.
One of the downsides to this is that we often project our own ideas of reality onto strangers especially from other societies. "Of course they protect the weak," we tell ourselves, when in fact, they're operating on a completely different set of moral relations. When our projects override objectivity, we deny ourselves the beauty of seeing the world in a new way. We rob ourselves of appreciating the magnificence of the diversity of human experience.
Is the powerful taking advantage of the weak part of the magnificence of the diversity of human experience?
I mean, I can see the powerful claiming such a thing. To return to my original quote, which is certainly a consistent philosophy: "strong do what they like the weak suffer what they must"
There's nuance and interesting bits of history that are missing from the orthodox pov, but that get bulldozed by the absolutism of "Religion has always been a tool for the powerful to control the masses," which, while true, is as interesting as saying "stairs are often used to ascend buildings." Power does what it always does: it grabs whats lying around and sharpens it into a spear of control.
If you know a little about the history of Christianity, you see a gradual centralization over a period of hundreds of years. Christianity obviously didn't start centralized. Religious orthodoxy burned a lot of manuscripts and rewrote history to appear to be a powerful unbroken lineage in order to justify their legitimacy.
We have to remember that the concept of heresy was invented. Hellenic and pre-hellenic cultures didn't demand compliance to doctrinal orthodoxy. Instead they practiced ritual orthopraxy. Ritual orthopraxy's sphere of influence begins and ends at the ritual. The sphere of doctrinal orthodoxy on the other hand made belief itself the battleground. The Greeks didn't care if you believed Zeus was literally real or metaphorically useful, as long as you poured the libation and didn't piss off the city.
Christianity became not just "do you love God," but "is your metaphysical model of the Trinity exactly consistent with the Nicene formulation from 325 CE." Anything but that became heresy. And that rejection of the pluralistic orthopraxis and the inability to live in harmony with Hellenic culture is exactly what made Christians so unlikable at the time and incidentally created a bunch or martyrs.
What gets lost is the weirdness of those early centuries before doctrinal orthodoxy created heresy in order to monopolize plurality of belief. We can learn important lessons from this and extrapolate to how heresy and orthodoxy get used today and why matters of doctrine end up being so encompassing and totalizing. If anything it gives us an additional point of view on our own culture.
No. Similarly, God cannot make a married bachelor, because this is nonsensical. The conversation then turns to questions about how we define God’s omnipotence: Doesn’t the existence of any sort of limitation placed upon God imply he is bound by higher principles and thus not omnipotent?
Possibly; but this may just be a lack of imagination on our part. For example, can God abanlqhgfznsjks? Probably not, because that particular string was just a random assortment of keys that I pressed; it conveys nothing meaningful, so to ask if God could abanlqhgfznsjks might not really be asking anything at all.
The bible portrays God as explicitly being able to do nonsensical things, like creating a burning bush that is somehow not consumed. That it was on fire, but also not on fire, at the same time, was proof of a miracle.
And more generally, that's just the nature of the supernatural in any religion. If what was going on was entirely logical, it wouldn't be a miracle.
some people freak out about the idea of a burning bush talking at people
i freak out about what the bush said: I AM THAT I AM
the first recorded instance of recursion, spoken in a language famous for its lack of abstraction, to an uneducated goat herder, communicating an idea that even the greeks struggled with thousands of years later in a much more sophisticated and leisured culture
"I don’t know. When my bird was looking at my computer monitor I thought, ‘That bird has no idea what he’s looking at.’ And yet what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can’t really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he’s so ignorant? Well, he doesn’t really have a choice. The bird is okay even though he doesn’t understand the world. You’re that bird looking at the monitor, and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘I can figure this out.’ Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do.”
Yes, you had a deontological blindspot that prevented you from asking, "What are some of the high-risk consequences, and what responsibility do I have to these consequences of my actions?"
Deontology's failure case is this ethically naive version that doesn't include a maxim that covers the "Sometimes peoples' reliance on good intentions relieves them of exerting the mental energy of considering the consequences which ultimately cause those consequences to exist"-situation.
One of the assumptions that bears arguing against is that the choice is framed as happening once before the system is deployed. However, this oversimplification has an unfortunate side effect - that we can't know all of the consequences upfront, so sometimes we're surprised by unforeseen results and that we shouldn't hold people to the standard of needing to accurately predict the future.
In real life, though, the choices are rarely final. Even this one, deploying the genocide-promoting LLM is reversible. If you didn't predict that the LLM promotes genocide, and then you find out it does in fact promote genocide, you don't throw up your hands and says, "I hadn't thought of this, but my decision is final." No, armed with the information, you feel a sense of duty to minimize the consequences by shutting it down and fixing it before deploying it again.
Further more, you take a systems level approach and ask, "How could we prevent this type of error in the future?" Which ends with "We will consider the consequences of our actions to a greater degree in the future," or perhaps even, "We don't have enough foresight to be making these decisions and we will stop making medical devices."
The point is that distilling the essence of the situation down to "good intentions absolve responsibility," or "one drop of involvement implies total responsibility," isn't really how people think about these things in real life. It's the spherical cow of ethics - it says more about spheres than it does about cows.
I'm a big fan of killing time on long drives with friendly word games. One of my favorites is a mix between rhyming and square theory. Here's how it works: one player picks two words that rhyme perfectly. Then, for each of those words, they choose a clue word, usually a synonym, but any kind of related word is fair game. They say those two clue words out loud, and the other players have to guess the original rhyming pair.
What makes it fun is trying to reverse-engineer the original rhyme from the clues. It's like solving a little logic puzzle. It's easy to come up with new puzzles, but cracking them can be surprisingly tricky. Still, the structure gives just enough to keep it solvable most of the time.
Our family plays "Match Three" during long drives where one person comes up with three words and whoever correctly answers with a word that can complete or precede any of them becomes "it" and chooses the next set.
Homophones and proper nouns are considered acceptable.
So for example: (Fox, Lone, Crossed)
The answer would be: Star
Star Fox - a well known rail shooter originally on the SNES
Lone Starr - the only man who would dare give a raspberry to Dark Helmet
Star Crossed - a Shakespearean reference to two people whose relationship is doomed
Thanks yeah it's a very fun game! When you're creating a new "match three" on the fly, I find it's easiest to start with a common word and work your way backwards until you've got three that fit.
There have been occasions where the answer was not the intended one, but it still fits all three and that's considered fair game!
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang: “The construction of rhyming slang involves replacing a common word with a phrase of two or more words, the last of which rhymes with the original word; then, in almost all cases, omitting, from the end of the phrase, the secondary rhyming word (which is thereafter implied)”
My personal recommendation is this game1. Not for travel, but a very good in forcing interesting associations and making you mad at your partner, which is a certified sign of a good game.
If you like codenames, you might also enjoy decrypto [1], it scratches a very similar part of my brain. There's a set of secret words, and the codemaster needs to give clues that are specific enough that if you know the secret words, you can make the connection, but vague enough that you can't guess the secret words.
for the record, i can't find any combination of those words in my transcriptions of loveline shows, although i don't have them all, and it is possible there are up to 50% transcription errors. there is 1 reference to "Stinky Linky" but it appears unrelated, "what's the linky?" "freckles" - i got excited that i found it but looking at the context it was in vain.
i have five clean references to "as a mason jar" so my collection is fairly complete ;-)
Oh, then i concur with your prior statement that it "continues [...] today"; i define "LoveLine" differently. Someday i'll find the time to get "fills" - i only have 5.5 years fully transcribed.
Is the example meant to rhyme, or is it an example of a subtle category of "words that only rhyme in some English accents"? "Offle Woffle" is somewhat standard American English, while "Orful Warful" would be British English.
You could add the additional constraint that the words have to insult the guesser based on their unique psychological vulnerabilities. Hope that helps!
I think it's important to mention the two main underlying streams of thought in functional that contribute to minimalism: Louis Henry Sullivan's maxim "form follows function," and Adolph Loo's Ornament and Crime[1]. Both of these made ornamentation unjustifiable, either that ornamentation doesn't have a function, or that it is a product of uncivilized impulses.
What's left is that every design choice must be functional leaving minimalism as the bleached bones of design - the only thing left after everything has been stripped away. I want to be clear that functionalism and minimalism are not synonymous, but one's impact on the other is rarely overstated.
40% of kids can't read at a basic level[1]. Kids reading these novels is much less of an issue than we think it is. They likely wouldn't even make it into a bookstore in the first place.
i dont think its an issue at all. even if kids could read perfectly they would never pick up any kind of book because they simply arent interested books these days. im just pointing out that its creepy and inappropriate
I read it. I just don't believe that companies, morally, should exist. Like, categorically. Sure, they have their upsides, there are positive consequences, but that's arguing that the ends justify the means.
Then I suppose you either believe that advanced technology falls out of the sky or should be created by government agencies. Both of those are harder to make accountable than companies.
The ends do sometimes justify the means. That's why we can require people to get vaccinated or be licensed to drive. It's insane to think otherwise; OBVIOUSLY we act this way and it's not controversial.
> Why would anyone want to give themselves motion sickness for a VR game?
Cybersickness endurance games. The person who can make themself the most cybersick wins. Ranked competitive matches with loot box mechanics. People will do pretty much anything when competition is involved.
This is broadly speaking true because religion is one example of a coping mechanism at cultural scale. If you trace the genealogy of morals, these precise beliefs - humility, temperance, kindness, patience - are all survival strategies of people being oppressed. At a large enough scale, it becomes embedded in moral reality itself ie: in religion.
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