wsy

Also not a lawyer. To be covered by Germany's consumer protection law, you need show that you are end consumer of a commercial product or service. I don't see how that would apply to YC/HN.

If you could pull that part off, I think you could take YC to court in Germany, and even achieve a favorable judgement. However, I don't see any way how you could enforce the outcome, except if YC has assets in Germany.

The situation becomes clearer if you take a look at the traffic today with a human operator in each car. Also in this model, engineering and human failures happen. Engines break, tires get punctured, brakes fail, and humans make errors. We still accept the deaths and injuries caused by car traffic, and don't prohibit cars.

So it is more than sufficient if you can show that AVs - on average - cause less harm than human-operated vehicles.

To your specific question: when the AV loses connection, it would do the same as a human driver when a tire is punctured: turn on warning lights, slow down, and stop at the roadside. Like in other car failure situations, that might cause an accident in some cases. However, that is fine, as long as it is rare enough.

(disclaimer: I'm not working in AV tech, I don't know if current AV technology handles this case as imagined)

So which of those approaches is the one all rational humans would agree on, so that we can base the notion of truth on it from now on?

It seems that falsifying would provide an escape route. Unfortunately it doesn't, because you would first have to establish - without a doubt - the truth of the contradicting statement. That works ok-ish for collapsing bridges, but it breaks down for less direct observations, e.g., when reading experimental data from a computer screen, collected to refute a Physics theory.

After the postmodernist wave, analytic philosophers have attempted to rescue the notion of truth. All those attempts, including the ones you listed, change the meaning of 'truth' significantly, compared to how non-philosophers use that term.

None of the listed options is so convincing that everybody using their rationality would immediately agree with the proposed model of truth. That seems to indicate that also for these options, rationality alone is insufficient to establish truth, and a belief/irrational/social factor still would be at play.

I'm not implying that the mentioned approaches developed by analytic philosophers are useless. They do deepen our understanding how reasoning and fact establishing works. But in my opinion they are still very far away of solving the Münchhausen Trilemma.

There is no dilemma. We agree that people can be manipulated to some degree. We also agree that - if they don't suffer from an illness - that manipulation only goes so far. Finally, we agree that we shouldn't force a lifestyle on anybody.

So now you can manipulate (or nudge) people either towards behavior which is considered as beneficial (regular exercise, healthy food, etc.), or you can manipulate them towards unhealthy habits (e.g., smoking).

It is a good idea to limit the ability of actors to nudge people towards unhealthy habits. That will help everybody except a few people who will earn less money. It is also a good idea to foster nudging good behaviors, even if there is no commercial value behind it.

The dilemma only starts to occur if we try to put all things into either the good or the bad box. Probably most ads are in the large grey area in between these extremes. However, ads fostering smoking addiction or obesity should be called out as bad for all of us. There is no downside of this call-out.

Now, by moving the goalposts, you lost your initial argument. Sure it might be the case that Swedish companies, at some stage of their growth, tend to incorporate in another country.

Still the benefits Swedish employees experience don't seem to be in the way of getting a startup successfully up and running in Sweden.

Of course, everybody can interpret history as they like. The fine handed out by EU to Microsoft was of course also a deterrent against further similar attempts, and Microsoft afterwards changed their tactics not only in EU, but world-wide. Or did you not get the Windows browser choice menu in US?

Even without psychedelics, persons suffering from psychological issues can have breakdowns in therapeutic sessions. Professional therapists are very careful to not unlock 'dangerous' memories and insights prematurely, they wait until they consider the patient ready to deal with it. They also have emergency plans in place, reaching so far as taking care that an overwhelmed patient is afterwards treated in a hospital for a while to safely recover. Do you have such emergency plans in place?

While I trust that you can give psychologically healthy people a good experience, I have a hard time imagining how you could give the necessary support to people with larger issues. And because those issues are often deeply hidden, it is hard even for professionals to detect that in advance.

> We have neural circuits that receive sense data, place attention, and record attentional memories.

From there, you can either go into the direction where we are just machines, and everything we do is predicted by how we are programmed. Then, free will, ethics, etc. are out of the window. There is then also just a machine named trevyn posting bit patterns on HN. In such a world, consciousness and free will don't actually exist, or only do exist as some kind of illusion/imagination. While this world view is somewhat consistent, it seems very hard to reconcile it with your own self-image. Why would you continue to strive for anything if you really believe in this 'clockwork' model? It sounds like a sad life, somewhat like taking the red pill and finding out you have no control whatsoever over your own life and can't leave your lifelong coffin.

The alternative would be a real explanation, i.e., assume that consciousness and free will exist as you experience them, and explain how neural circuits generate these effects. With this assumption, you so far only stated that neural circuits cause consciousness. But that is not an explanation yet. You need to explain how it happens. And that means, you need to connect the tangible, physical world with an intangible, non-physical phenomenon such as consciousness. I'm looking forward to see how you cross that bridge.

Windows was lock-in in late 90s and early 2000s. That was not only a fear. EU forced Microsoft to open Windows during that time. And that was a good thing. I don't want to wait decades until that stuff is sorted out by obsolescence.

Where is the advantage in waiting for the market?

However, no one forces you to live in the EU. Even countries can exit it. Let us do our thing, and you can do your thing. The market will sort it out :-)

I think we have to agree to disagree. I assume that you are not living in the EU. Our experiences here with governmental regulation are not so bad. Companies are complaining, but consumers are not.

Making things a little more convenient for everybody is super-compelling if there is no downside. Freedom for humans is an extremely high value. However, companies are not humans, there is no inherent benefit in giving them as much freedom as possible. And I know economics well enough to confidently state that freedom for companies does not naturally cause well-being and freedom for humans.

And definitely: Every country regulated power outlets. Every country regulated landline phone connections. Every country regulated mobile phone transmission. EU even regulated mobile phone roaming prices. Now they are regulating chargers. And I hope they won't stop, but do everything to keep modern technology open. Industry loves to lock consumers into separate, proprietary, walled gardens. There is no viable strategy for individual consumers to escape. The only viable strategy to escape is by regulation.

I have a hard time understanding the question. If something is overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone, I don't mind at all if market or government make it happen. I just want it to happen.

Again, to not be misunderstood, I'm not sure if charger standardization is indeed overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone. That is what I believe we should discuss here.

Again, you need to show specifically that a uniform charger is less beneficial to consumers than letting Apple keep their proprietary patent-protected charger.

I want my iPhone and my Android phone and my tablet and my notebook to share the same charging port. I would definitely buy an iPhone with USB-C if the market would offer one to me. However, the market won't give that to me. Even if 90% of iPhone buyers would prefer USB-C over Lightning, Apple would not give it to us, because it is beneficial for their business to build their own walled garden.

I don't know if forcing Apple to agree with other vendors is a net benefit for all consumers or not. However, as you seem to have a very strong opinion on why that would be detrimental to consumers, you need to show where consumers would be negatively affected, specifically for charging ports.

This has nothing to do with what one thinks about governments in general.

Everything where high interoperability is more beneficial for consumers than proprietary solutions by individual companies. As a rule of thumb, everything where standardization brings more benefits to consumers than innovation.

Note that as consumer, I can't vote with my money for standardization. I can only vote for one of the proprietary solutions. So if 70% of consumers stick to one option, and 30% stick to the other option (because of other product features), standardization will never happen through market forces, even if 100% of the consumers would want it.

It gets even worse when more than 2 options are on the market, and vendors gain an advantage by locking customers in to their proprietary option.