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Well connected - and I think this comparison is becoming more apt each passing day. These statements and policies are just so… egotistical… for lack of a bette

• anon291 4y ago
  Exactly, the process of applying scientific results to human society falls well within the realm of politics. We should not allow scientific bureaucrats to have a say in the kinds of policies implemented, but rather limit their contribution to answering empirical questions based on inquiries presented by actual politicians.
  • thrown_22 4y ago
    Which minority making up 13% of the population ... One can lie with facts quite easily. It used to be that liberals could explain this. Somehow in the last 10 years the current crop of policy leaders decided this is too hard to explain so instead we would ban wrong think and everything will be hunky dory. This has lead to such hilarious things as people publicly saying how thankful they are to have 4 jabs and getting covid: https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1559145992594784256 https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1559145992594784256 after saying the vaccines are 100% effective: https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377618480527257606 https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377618480527257606
• blueflow 4y ago
  > What happens when we stop agreeing on what the “good” is? Did we ever agree? I always felt like Democracy is some kind of status quo between the incompatible.
  • brightball 4y ago
    In the 90s before mass internet adoption, it sure felt like it. We had disagreements, but nothing compared to what we see today.
    • forbiddenvoid 4y ago
      I don't think this is true. I think a lot of people were insulated from information that created a perception for them that those disagreements didn't exist. A lot of people are surprised to find out that people who don't live near them don't share their values.
      • brightball 4y ago
        Oh, that was always true. It just wasn’t possible for those people to spend all day yelling at each other for it. The context of the disagreements was largely limited to newspapers and politicians. Some assumption of professionalism, editing and journalistic integrity was included with nationwide dialogues. The internet, Twitter, political amplification, bot amplification, media consolidation, etc have made it 1000x worse. Before, you could disagree on a topic and go about your day. Now you are beaten over the head with every topic constantly to remind you how much you disagree with it.
        • forbiddenvoid 4y ago
          Some people could disagree on a topic and go about their day. That isn't true for everyone. One person's disagreement is another person's human rights. A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge.
          • brightball 4y ago
            And other people prefer to incite people to better control them via polarization.
          • throwawayacc2 4y ago
            And other people just pretend and seek attention, taking the tiniest discomfort and screeching “human rights! human rights!” left right and centre. All while every government institution and corporation bends over backwards to please them. A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge and even more prefer the comfort of their self made moral high horse from which they chastise everyone they deem unfit.
  • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    No, I don’t think we did. I was thinking about this when I wrote it, too. That’s been the case in the past, present, and future. Glad someone picked that out.
  • klyrs 4y ago
    No, there is no universal "good" otherwise wars would not occur. The American Civil War and WW2 are pretty classical examples of massive disagreements over the legitimacy of certain classes of humans. Had those wars not ended the way they did, black people would still be property, and Jews, Romani, and LGBT people would have been exterminated. There are still people who wish that we lived in that alternative history. Democracy is always a compromise, and when that breaks down, you get wars.
    • EarlKing 4y ago
      You are conflating object and subject... the thing and its perception. Good can exist even as we disagree over its definition. Some people are simply right, and some are simply wrong. We are not gods.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      > black people would still be property Not likely. Slavery had already disappeared in the Northern states due to its inefficiency and internal contradictions. Secession was an attempt to prop up slavery by isolating it economically. It was never going to work. Slavery as an institution disappeared in other countries around the same time. It was free markets that destroyed slavery, as slavery simply could not compete with free labor, and slavery was incompatible with industrialization. In the South, by 1860, the only industry where slavery was still profitable was cotton, and that was coming unglued.
      • MichaelCollins 4y ago
        > slavery was incompatible with industrialization. From what I understand, early industrialization gave a temporary boost to slavery. The cotton gin and textile factories greatly increased demand for cotton at a time when industrialization had not yet addressed the harvesting of cotton in the fields.
        • WalterBright 4y ago
          The cotton gin did indeed revive slave produced cotton when it came out. But it was hardly industrialization. It was a hand cranked box. But that was not enough by mid century, and the slave economy was foundering again.
• mgoldstein5 4y ago
• silicon2401 4y ago
  > What happens when we stop agreeing on what the “good” is? "We" always agree on what the good is. If YOU don't agree, well, we'll have to sort that out, won't we?
  • 0xChain 4y ago
• fatherzine 4y ago
  Q: What happens when we stop agreeing on what the “good” is? A. I am right and you are evil. Age old conflict resolution method.
  • thrown_22 4y ago
    He with the biggest gun wins. Now I'm not exactly sure why the side which is currently stoking the culture war is also the one that's disarmed itself, but here we are.
    • landryraccoon 4y ago
      I’m curious, I genuinely dont know what sides you’re talking about. Who do you think is stoking the culture war?
      • worthless-trash 4y ago
        Those repeating the mantra.
        • pc86 4y ago
          I see folks across the political spectrum all repeating different mantras. Who are you referring to?
          • worthless-trash 4y ago
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • thrown_22 4y ago
        Which side is currently trying to make science fit their world view?
• hilbert42 4y ago
  In philosophy good is known as a simple notion, that is it cannot be reduced further. We cannot define its length, breadth etc., even adding very or little to it doesn't put a measure on it. Saying '0.5' or '10%' of good is essentially meaningless. Good and bad, etc. are metaphysical constructs and thus we have a fundamental problem when using these terms in connection with Science which intrinsically and inextricability measurement-driven. We need to be very careful using these terms when we're referring to or discussing Science and scientific research or conflict will be inevitable.
  • skissane 4y ago
    > In philosophy good is known as a simple notion, that is it cannot be reduced further That is the position of some philosophers – it is G. E. Moore's famous doctrine that the good is simple, undefinable, irreducible to anything non-ethical – which Moore defended through his "open question argument", a staple of undergraduate introductory courses on the philosophy of ethics. However, it is worth pointing out that far from all philosophers agree with that position–indeed, my armchair impression is that, in contemporary academic philosophy, objectors to Moore's position outnumber his supporters. > Saying '0.5' or '10%' of good is essentially meaningless. That's another topic of philosophical dispute. Many classical utilitarians were quite convinced it was meaningful to speak in that way – hence Jeremy Bentham's felicific calculus. I believe that approach has few supporters in contemporary philosophy – but, while there is widespread agreement it is a failure, there is far less agreement on exactly why. And, Bentham's felicific calculus is not entirely dead – outside of philosophy, it is the direct intellectual ancestor of the economist's utility function.
    • hilbert42 4y ago
      Having been brought up on G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica not to mention the work of Russell and Whitehead I'd have to say what I said as a first-pass comment. However I agree with you, things are never quite as simple as they seem when one grinds them fine, also time and ideas move on. In discussions such as this I like to use the analogy of Newton's Laws of Motion which after hundreds of years still work well for 'everyday' use but they're all but useless in other endeavors such as our phones' GPS - to get there we had to progress through Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics to Relativity over several hundred years. The same applies to philosophy and philosophical argument and it's why I find it so interesting. As you're aware, like other disciplines, philosophy is built on earlier work - from the Ancient Greeks through Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and so on, so it's not unreasonable to expect philosophy to have moved on from G.E. Moore's time. Nevertheless, I had to start somewhere and Moore's points are reasonably relevant. In the light of modern-day thinking it's not unreasonable to examine Bentham's and Mills' ideas and philosophers should continue to do this no matter the era they're working in. That said, it's not a matter of discarding old ideas but that of refinement. we cannot deprecate utilitarianism ideas without taking into account what they have contributed to both philosophy and to the world in a practical sense - as clearly all modern cities incorporate utilitarian principles to varying degrees. If we are to deprecate them then we must give explicit arguments for doing so. As you correctly point out we should question Bentham's felicific calculus and similarly I'd add to that the then notion of measuring 'happiness' in units of utiles and 'unhappiness' in even less familiar disutiles. It made sense to use these calculi in Bentham's time. Then the conceptual framework encapsulating the notion of utility would have been better understood and appeared more useful if there were ways to measure the effectiveness of its outcomes. Nowadays we've moved on for reasons too complex to discuss here and I won't mention them as they will be familiar to you. Anyone who would insist in trying to do quantitative measurements in this now-simplistic and anachronistic framework would seen a little daft. So quo vadis? Let's look at a parallel: physics has moved on from the Newton's comparatively simple notion of force to the more sophisticated useful concepts of energy and momentum, similarly so too has philosophy but unlike physics, it has yet to come to any widely accepted conclusions in this particular matter. I believe Bentham and Mills were on the right track however, they were bedeviled in their efforts (as we still are) to 'quantify' abstract notions - those that we're taking about here. Putting a 'measure' on abstract notions is needed if we're to put them to practical use in the real world. (Perhaps we should wheel in A.J. Ayer or his modern cohorts here for we've a language/nomenclature problem: people need to have a comprehensive understanding of any new language - i.e.: the meaning of any new definitions.) Thus, for this purpose, it seems logical to me to separate the 'theoretical' approach of Moore, Russell, Whitehead et al from this new thought, and it needs to be a radical break. Berkeley's questioning the existence of the quad's tree or Russell's questioning the reality of the table at which he's sitting through doubts about the viability of his sense datum have no place here. (Physicists didn't make progress in QFT (part of Quantum Mechanics) until they learned to solve seemingly intractable math issues such as 'infinites' (akin to dividing by zero). This was a damned hard effort and took many years but it only came about after they recognized the need for a solution was essential if they were to make further progress. It's clear to me philosophy has problems of this nature and magnitude and the subject we're discussing here is one of the most significant of them.) Why is this important you may well ask. Because the world's in a mess and that's because society's also in a horrible mess - the Nature article which we're responding to here illustrates the point. Our ethics are all over the place, values and value systems are no longer consistent as they were once were when the Church ruled our lives, and so on. And we desperately need a coherent, realistic and practical responses from philosophy/philosophers. Simply, the profession isn't leading the way as it ought to be, it should have been much more proactive decades ago and taken the leadership after the churches vacated their traditional role. What worries me about the second part of your response isn't that philosophers are questioning the empiricist reasoning of the likes of Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, etc. or Moore's Principia Ethica for that's what philosophers do, rather it's the milieu in which they're now operating which is seemingly putting strictures on what they do. Like fashion, a set of cultural boundary conditions is determining what they actually do in practice. (BTW, I accept with Academia in the horrible state it's currently in at present that challenge is more than unusually difficult.) There's more than a hint of postmodernism in your response. That's not a criticism of you the messenger but rather it's echoing my concern that we no longer have time to luxuriate in many of postmodernism's excesses. Simply, time is desperately short, philosophers must be proactive now. You only have to read the posts to this story on HN to realize the diversity of opinion and the lack of agreement and cohestion in respect of core values amongst this group. Outside this community views will be even more diverse.