graphpapa

Hegemony shapes discourse in its image. I believe the issue is not which ideology ‘truly’ affirms some self evident notion of self interest, but which ideology can successfully assert its own notion of self interest as self evident.

This is wonderfully perfectly provocative. A clever button pushing projectile innocently lobbed into the everyday pitter patter. An imposter post meant to deviously short circuit the HN tropes' internal logic.

Plenary Talk by Michael Levin on "Non-neural, developmental bioelectricity as a precursor for cognition: Evolution, synthetic organisms, and biomedicine" at the Virtual Miniature Brain Machinery Retreat, September 16, 2021. Introduction by William Baker.

I want better systems and I am cynical about pursuing other ends in this willfully politics-blind isolated manner, impressiveness of their achievements having a slightly tragic quality under that light.

I am not from the US but I think the US is a great case study in the disconnect between technological progress and improved general conditions (in particular for but not exclusively relating to healthcare). I think cynicism is the correct response to this trend.

Competitions are defined by their constraints. You are arguing for the doped olympics. A defensible stance but not self evident as default.

Since wealth is concentrated more and more into a minority, redistributing wealth is surely aligned with increasing the quality of life for a majority of people. Why do you say it would be worse for everyone?

I think the big problems the OP alluded to are more about politics and cohesion than these neat science puzzles. Medical innovation does not inspire me when the medical system which administers these innovations remains so dysfunctional.

Conversation & social matters are so variable and vibe based that I think trying to get grip on something like 'likability' via a metric like 'contributions ratio' seems absurd.

Everyone vaguely informed about this story knows it was a scam. Reporting anything else is untruthful. Why do you defend reporting you know to be untruthful?

The key topic discussed in the OP, which I engaged with in my comment, is the extent to which 'simple logic' fails to map to complex problems. Naturally, sometimes it is appropriate to describe a problem in a simple way, sometimes it has shortcomings yet remains a useful compromise, and sometimes it is completely inappropriate and misleading. The problem at hand is, in the broadest sense, how to try improve conditions of (human) life throughout the world.

Your take seems to be that there is no complexity, no square to be circled in trying to apply vague principles like "do maximum good" to a discussion of how to tackle all of the worlds problems. To me that seems like a very unserious take.

To me what it means to properly engage with this question is to discuss what we mean by good, to discuss the notion of quantifiability, etc.. I think avoiding these discussions is just a game of whackamole - as best you try to stamp it out you never escape the thorny issue that so much complexity hides in our silly contradictory human language notions of things.

Our vague human language notions serve a purpose but to be uncritical of them or even deny their importance when they are doing the heavy lifting of your argument seems strange to me. Notions like 'do more good' are very vague loose suggestions and so their value is only realised if also applied in a loose human common sense manner. Utilitarianism is the opposite of this loose human common sense approach, it demands your loose notions removed of their blurry edges and inherent contradictions and if you succeed in this unnatural transfiguration you will unhappily discover later on that the contradictions just pop up in your new solution because when you force natural language into an unnatural rigid form like that you find that you are no longer saying that which you thought.

I would love to know what in particular about my perspective you find interesting / flawed. I have tried to make arguments that aren't too flowery but if you find my chains of logic unsatisfactory please let me know where, although don't expect to find any very very clean lines of formal reasoning because I am writing in a conversational style.

This is just bait you didn’t make an attempt to engage with my angle. I write earnestly I’m interested in what you disagree with