Oh, I understood that. Except that your explanation of what happened at the end of Permutation City made sense whereas how that story actually ended did not. Hence I prefer your explanation of the ending of Permutation City to the one provided in the book.
swestrup
Karma: 372
I really enjoyed the story, and I have to say that I prefer your ending to Permutation City than the one that Egan wrote.
I agree, which is why I tend to shy away from performing a moral analysis of Fantasy stories in the first place. That way lies a bottomless morass.
Interesting. Is hard to reconstruct my reasoning exactly, but I think that I assumed that things I didn’t know were simply things I didn’t know, and based my answer on the range of possibilities—good and bad.
It would say that the likelihood is overwhelming that BOTH choices will lead to bad ends. The only question is: which is worse. That’s why I was saying it was between two evils.
Besides, its hard to reconcile the concept of ‘Good’ with a single flawed individual deciding the fate of the world, possibly for an infinite duration. The entire situation is inherently evil.
My first impression of this story was very positive, but as it asks us to ask moral questions about the situation, I find myself doing so and having serious doubts about the moral choices offered.
First of all, it appears to be a choice between two evils, not evil and good. On one hand is a repressive king-based classist society that is undeniably based on socially evil underpinnings. On the other hand we have an absolute unquestionably tyranny that plans to do good. Does no one else have trouble deciding which is the lesser problem?
Secondly, we know for a fact that, in our world, kingdoms and repressive regimes sometimes give way to more enlightened states, and we don’t know enough about the world to even know how many different kingdoms there are or what states of enlightenment exist elsewhere. For all we know things are on the verge of a (natural) revolution. We can’t say much about rule by an infinite power, having no examples to hand, but there is the statement that “power corrupts”. Now, I’m not going to say that this is inevitable, but I have at least to wonder if an integration over total sentient happiness going forward is higher in the old regime and its successors, or in the Infinite Doom regime.
Finally, the hero is big into democracy. Where in either of these choices does the will of the peasants fit in anywhere?
EDIT: One more point I wanted to add, since its clearly not a Choice Between Good and Evil as the prophesy states, why assume there is a choice, or that there are only two options. Would not a truly moral person look for a third alternative?
I rather enjoy the taste of a Brown Cow, which is Creme de Cacoa in Milk. Then again, I’m sure I’d prefer a proper milkshake. Generally, if I drink an alcoholic beverage its for the side effects.
Granted, the title was probably too flip, but I think yours is a little wordy. I’m not sure I can do better at the moment other than maybe something like “Self-Publication as a Truth Filter”.
Reading this, I suddenly had an A-Ha! and checked my post from last month that had, mysteriously, never garnered a single comment or vote and discovered that it was in the drafts area. I could swear that I double checked it at the time to make sure it had been published, but in any case, I’ve now made sure its published. Thanks!
Harnessing Your Biases
To echo scientists who say that something is “Not Even Wrong” if its untestable and/or non-scientific to the point of being incomprehensible, my position on the whole religion question is one that I tend to call Ignosticism in which I say that religions definitions of God are so self-contradictory that I don’t even know what they mean by God.
Generally, when some asks if I believe in God, I tell them to define it. When they ask me why, I ask them if they believe in Frub. If so, why? If not, why? Without me giving them a definition, how can they possibly give a rational answer.
The above is a great list. Here are a couple more to add:
Vision can also be divided into a modelling sense (what’s out there) and a targetting sense (where is something). There are known cases of someone losing one of these without the other. (ie a totally ‘blind’ man being able to perfectly track a moving target with his pointing finger by ‘guessing’.)
As well, we have something called the ‘General Chemical Sense’ that alerts us to damage to mucus membranes, and is the thing that is complaining when you have the sensation of burning during excretion after you’ve had a spicy meal.
I think this post made some very good points and I’ve voted it up, but I want to pick a nit with the mention of “your five senses”. Thats Aristotelean mythology. We have many more than five, and so could you please edit this to just read “your senses”?
(Actually, since I’m posting this, I should mention I don’t believe in qualia either, but that is a debate of an entirely different order).
I think it will be very necessary to carefully frame what it would be that we might wish to accomplish as a group, and what not. I say this because I’m one of those who thinks that humanity has less than a 50% chance of surviving the next 100 years, but I have no interest in trying to avert this. I am very much in favour of humanity evolving into something a lot more rational than what it is now, and I don’t really see how one can justify saying that such a race would still be ‘humanity’. On the other hand, if the worry is the extinction of all rational thought, or the extinction of certain, carefully chosen, memes, I might very well wish to help out.
The main problem, as I see it, is in being clear on what we want to have happen (and what not) and what we can do to make the preferred outcomes more likely. The more I examine the entire issues, the harder it appears to define how to distinguish between the good and the bad outcomes.
Okay, then I shall attempt to come up with a post that doesn’t re-cover too much of what yours says. I shall have to rethink my approach somewhat to do that though.
I find it interesting that some folks have mental imagery and others don’t, because this possibility had never occurred to me despite having varying ability with this at different times. My mental imagery is far more vivid and detailed when I’m asleep than when I’m awake, which I’ve often wondered about.
This post completely takes the wind out of the sails of a post I was planning to make on ‘Self-Induced Biases’ where one mistakes the environment one has chosen for themselves as being, in some sense, ‘typical’ and then derives lots of bad mental statistics from this. Thus, chess fanatics will tend to think that chess is much more popular than it is, since all their friends like chess, disregarding the fact that they chose those friends (at least partly) based on a commonality of interests.
A worse case is when the police start to think that everyone is a criminal because that’s all they ever seem to meet.
But what does that have to do with the adjectives of ‘near’ and ‘far’?
Lurkers and Involvement.
I’ve been thinking that one might want to make a post, or post a survey, that attempts to determine how much folks engage with the contents on less wrong.
I’m going to assume that there are far more lurkers than commenters, and far more commenters than posters, but I’m curious as to how many minutes, per day, folks spend on this site.
For myself, I’d estimate no more than 10 or 15 minutes but it might be much less than that. I generally only read the posts from the RSS feed, and only bother to check the comments on one in 5. Even then, if there’s a lot of comments, I don’t bother reading most of them.
One of the reasons I don’t post is that I often find it takes me 20-30 minutes to put my words into a shape that I feel is up to the rather high standard of posting quality here, and I’m generally not willing to commit that much of my time to this site.
I think the question of how much of their time an average person thinks a site is worth to them is an important metric, and one we may wish to try to measure with an eye to increasing the average for this site.
Heck, that might even get me posting more often.
Montreal, Quebec, Canada