RogueAI

What about having HS students take an "intro to maths" class, where the textbook covers "consumer math" (fraction, decimals, percents, etc.) and brief...

I teach elementary, and memorization certainly is part of math teaching, but since Common Core, there's been a shift towards conceptual understanding ...

But your position is absurd. If the Allies could end the war in one bombing raid and the collateral damage is only one innocent person, of course they...

I agree with you up to this point. I think we have to force him to play. Being forced to play a game of chess is not even close to turning over a litt...

Suppose the Allies can destroy a Nazi heavy water nuclear facility, and disable their nuclear weapons program (pretend the Nazi's have a robust progra...

I don't see this as a knock on his position. Birth control isn't natural, but it's not immoral.

I don't see how we're treating Magnus as an end by forcing him to play chess with the aliens. There is nothing at stake for him. He's not in any dange...

I agree, but let's tweak the scenario a bit. Suppose that instead of wanting a kid to torture, the aliens really really want to play Magnus Carlsen in...

What if sadistic aliens come down and offer us the following deal: if you give us a little kid so that we may torture them, we will gift you with fabu...

Should Ukraine go for that deal now?

Isn't this a non-starter from Ukraine's perspective, esp. in 2022?

Because they're awesome. In the short term.

It depends on what kind of life you expect your kid to have. If there's a 99% chance your child will die an excruciating death by the time they're ten...

There's a problem with (1). People found guilty of crimes have a lot of suffering inflicted on them without their consent, so sometimes it's OK to cau...

You might meet some intellectually stimulating/philosophical people volunteering for a (liberal) political campaign.

Would you rather live in a world run by Israel or Hamas? I think we both know the answer to that.

No, Hamas and much of the Arab world fight for a belief system that oppresses women and LGBTQ people and basically anyone who's not a Muslim male. Scr...

:up:

I probably shouldn't have said that, but deontologists annoy me. If the axe murderer comes looking for your friend, you're going to tell him the truth...

No, you wouldn't.

I don't think Israel is saying this was an accident. "The Israeli military confirmed it carried out the airstrike, which it said targeted a Hamas comp...

Well, let's take it to the most absurd level: unless you run Hitler over with a trolley, the whole world gets destroyed. What do you do?

Maybe because the real world might have a lot in common with a simulated world? It seems a bit ad hoc to me.

Yes, there's an implicit assumption in Bostrom's argument that the simulation we're in is similar to "the real world".

I wasn't sure how you were using "innocent". But let's suppose you have John Wayne Gacy tied to the tracks and a dozen preschoolers in the car. You wo...

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What if the person is not innocent? What if the person being run over is a death row inmate?

What is your age?

"It found that just one-third of all young Americans said they would back Biden if the election was held at the time the survey was conducted. The pol...

A year later, what's the status of this potential solution to the hard problem?

That's true, too.

Nobody argues that these thought experiments aren't contrived. J.J. Thomson's violinist analogy is even more implausible, and still one of the most fa...

Suppose someone walking by a lake sees a child fall, hit his head on a rock, and start floating face down in the water. They only have to get a little...

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/designing-ethical-self-driving-cars "In recent years, automated vehicle designers have also pondered how AVs facing unex...

Trolley Car is useful because it serves as a litmus test for moral theories. If a moral theory says you ought not pull the switch, that's a bit of a r...

The problem with the free market in this case is it doesn't price in the externalities associated with burning fossil fuels (global warming, increased...

OK, but let's make Trolley Car even more ridiculous by having 999 people tied on the track and 1000 in the car. If a person decides not to pull the sw...

What about triage situations and organ shortages? If you have ten people who need an organ and only one organ, who gets it? Who lives and who dies? Do...

Yes, but what about one over two. I pull the switch if it's five to one, but I'm not sure what I would do if there are only two people on the car. Or ...

You mean like life?

Do we have any inkling of how brains are conscious?

Good points.

If you were LGBTQ and you had to live in a random Muslim dominated country or random Western country, which would it be, Muslim or Western? Obviously,...

I disagree. I think Islam has been a huge drag on the development of the Arab states and a huge factor in the development of groups like Hamas and Hez...

You think we'd be dealing with the same issues if Muhammad had never been born?

Are you agnostic about Simulation Theory? Bostrom claims it's more likely than not we're in a simulation. Evolution in a simulation is, by definition,...

If god(s) did what you suggest, it might become obvious that the world is god-made. Perhaps the gods like the world to appear natural. The existence o...

How do we know that? How do we know that without divine/simulation intervention, there would be ten times as many car crashes a day, but god/simulatio...

Never happen. The federal government is too large and has its fingers in too many pies. People are not going to give up their Medicare and S.S. benefi...

There's no paradox here. Flannel is right.