ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
No bio...
User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
5d ago
I didn't specify, because almost any deliberate purpose is better than the hedonistic pursuit of subjective experience. I'll give some examples:
- Living a life of virtue
- Discovering or creating something of lasting importance to humanity
- Living a life devoted to God
- Giving life to your children and descendants
- Planting lupines in your neighborhood
In some sense pursuing a life of purpose is just subjective experience. But I don't think this is what people mean when they talk about 'subjective life' as in the essay. One quote that rubbed me the wrong way was
Most directly, we should not waste children’s time. The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.
This suggests that the feeling of boredom is bad in itself. But that's not right. Boredom is a useful feeling, in the same way that hunger or anger are useful for motivating useful behavior (not starving, and protecting one's place in the social hierarchy, respectively). Boredom is useful to motivate one to learn new things. But these feelings are only useful on average; there are circumstances where indulging one's boredom or hunger or anger would be counterproductive. Treating the feeling as bad or good in itself, and the cessation or increase in the feeling as one's goal, in the extreme means a life of hedonism. It doesn't matter whether one is focused on one's children or oneself; the hedonism is what's mistaken.
I'm not saying anything new here that philosophers haven't been talking about for hundreds of years, but this is bound to be a common objection to the essay.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
6d ago
Not at all.
This is a beautiful essay. But ultimately consciousness and subjective experience don't matter. Outcomes matter. If your life was pure suffering but you achieved a great purpose, then that's a better life than one full of subjective joy. Giving children a great childhood can be good, but only insofar as it causes them to live a purposeful life.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
20d ago
An engineering organization doesn't have to accept the default compiler behavior for a language. They can use linters and other tools to restrict (or expand!) the kind of code that's acceptable. And they can have a culture that values thoroughness or that values moving fast and breaking things.
I think the best argument for something like Rust is that it makes it easier to guarantee quality where it matters to the organization. If quality doesn't matter to the organization, whether explicitly through tooling and coding standards or implicitly through seeing what gets people promoted or fired, then people will circumvent safeguards whatever language it is.
The whole point of prediction markets as a concept is to aggregate information for the benefit of non-participants. All the participants are playing by the same rules (which don't prohibit insider trading) so I have no sympathy for anyone on the losing end of those bets.
More options
Context Copy link