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What a foolish concept. The article is basically made of non-sequiters. The central issue is that a telescope can show you what is. It can never tell you how p

What a foolish concept. The article is basically made of non-sequiters. The central issue is that a telescope can show you what is. It can never tell you how people ought to live. The is-ought distinction is the boundary of science into philosophy, ethics, religion and politics. The article is a transparent attempt hand-wave away this distinction.

msla 4y ago
Given the number of people who try to derive Is from Ought, maybe giving more people a better view of what is will keep them from listening to the ones attempting to make a new reality.
- realjhol 4y ago
  Why? The same people who support the idea behind this article, support the idea that men and women are equal, for example, because they think it ought to be so. And there's a lot more things they say ought to be true that I won't enumerate here because my account will be banned
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    Using your example, the way in which men and women are meant to be equal has no basis in objective reality, just as much the claim that men and women are not equal has no such basis either. Regarding the realm of “is”, we can plainly see men and women are biologically different. But that’s not the argument. The argument is over the question: “should men and women be allowed to share equivalent roles in society, if they desire?” The language can get murky. When someone says, “men and women are equal” I highly doubt they mean that they are equal in the biological or any empirical sense. What they probably mean is, “men and women ought to be equals in society.” On the contrary, some think that “men and women ought not to be equals in society.” I would wager that those many other examples that you think would get you banned from HN fall safely in the camp of “how ought we treat people?” So I’m the end I doing think the JWST is going to change anything here.
    - havblue 4y ago
      >The argument is over the question: “should men and women be allowed to share equivalent roles in society, if they desire?” I think that question is settled, more or less. People usually aren't debating whether a certain person occupying a certain role should be permitted or not. The real question that seems to be asked now is more along the lines of: "is the fact that we don't pursue certain roles in society equally a sign of our own inherent wickedness?"
      - nuancebydefault 4y ago
        It doesn't need to be wickedness. It's group thinking. In general, people want to belong to a group or groups. Then it is easy to fall into the trap of us-vs-them thinking. Also animals show this behavior. Also, people want to find meaning, and they use their pattern matching instincts to accomplish that. This explains why people tend to see meaning in for example pictures captured by giant telescopes, or shooting stars for that matter. It's the reason why they built it in the first place. Right, wrong, ought, shall,... all invented by people. The universe only has 'is' and 'was', no 'ought'.
drewcoo 4y ago
Telescopes can only show us what was, not what is. I had expected the article to be about overturning Lemaitre's Big Bang Theory, both because Lemaitre was a Catholic priest and his theory is very neatly Catholic and because Kant's sense of moral law is something at the core of the way everything works. The article did not talk about that. It talked around it, but not about it.
foysauce 4y ago
Have been reading "What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies" by Tim Urban? I've been loving it, and he talks about the importance of 2 counterparties identifying what _is_, before distinguishing what _should be_.
- jschveibinz 4y ago
  I think I’d like a broader sampling than just two, please, even if they are counterparts. I’m with the skeptics.
javajosh 4y ago
David Hume identified the useful distinction between is and ought. For most of my life I've adhered to this idea - however I've come to believe, against my own protests, that the universe does, in fact, embed something like a moral code. Or more like a challenge. When we look upon it, we see a vast, empty thing, devoid of any evidence of life. The biosphere of Earth is the most precious "substance" that exists because it is the most unique. It is also the only place where this discussion can take place, since the rest of the universe is (apparently) rather dead. So, I don't think the universe has anything to say about hat sizes or personal sexual proclivities (and indeed wrt sex the universe seems to wear its freak flag proudly given that the life-cycles of many critters involves...questionable activity). But it does say that surviving is very hard - It is quite difficult to escape a gravity well, and many OOM harder to get to another system fast enough that your craft and crew doesn't die of old age. (I've come to believe too that there is a positive side to this setup: if it were easier to move around, there would be horrible chaos as so cheerily depicted in assorted space opera novels. It would be colonialism writ large, victimizing trillions instead of millions. And most likely humans would be the exploited and not the exploiters, not that it matters.) What's interesting though is that the problem of spreading life beyond earth seems extremely hard-- but its not theoretically impossible. It's going to take time, which means humans need to find a stable space in which to dwell for a long time while we build planet-spanning particle colliders, or whatever else we need to do to figure out how to send vehicles to other stars. Creativity exists in tension with stability, which is an interesting place to end a conversation about how to pass The Great Filter.
- mrangle 4y ago
  The theory of spreading Life Beyond Earth has obstacles that I've never seen it adequately approach. It suffers from worldwide popularized optimism to which it early succumbs without a proper fight. That it doesn't have to, much like other nationalistic fictions, indicates its low possibility. It is a theory that claims legitimacy without ever stepping into the ring. Which is the proper positioning for meatbags that can't take the pummeling of the infinite gorilla of space. Or more precisely, who can't physically survive the trauma of being separated from their Mother(Earth). People get all of the space travel that they require from the next Chris Pine Star Trek film. That's psychologically enough for the world. The gap between now and survivable manned travel to Mars is so large that no one can see the opposite shore. An educated wager might be that this is because it doesn't exist. But again, one has to abandon addiction to popular optimism to start down the road of analyzing why. Start with the simple factor of our circadian rhythm that is inseparably tied to the Earth's clock that is uniquely a product of the relationship of this specific Earth to our specific Sun. Don't include how the Earth's gravity or magnetic field may play parts, as that's too advanced as of yet. Before we would get to lethal space radiation, we have to figure out how to survive even in otherwise perfectly safe synthetic conditions. It's unclear to the point that we haven't started the discussion. I want to meet the man who is going to have the vaccine, ahead of time and before a truly apocalyptic pandemic, for space infections picked up from space-victims of space-colonialism by the eternal oppressors of Earth (hard to accomplish that much oppression in infinite space but ok) . The Universe has plenty to say about both hat sizes and sex.
barrysteve 4y ago
They're often the same thing. How people ought to live, is commonly built up from principles and axioms inspired by natural law. How you ought to live depends heavily upon the axioms you choose, and the axioms that do not coincide with nature and physics are often foolish.
- realjhol 4y ago
  > How people ought to live, is commonly built up from principles and axioms inspired by natural law. You have it backwards. Belief in natural laws is an axiom. Hardly anyone actually chooses their axioms. They're either handed to us, or expressions of innate personality in most cases. People generally decide what they think feels right, then reason backwards from there to conjure up a set of principles that they claim to live by.
- maroonblazer 4y ago
  >How you ought to live depends heavily upon the axioms you choose, and the axioms that do not coincide with nature and physics are often foolish. How are you defining "natural"? We treated each other, and animals, pretty horribly for centuries. This was 'natural'. Then we reasoned about what makes for the kinds of societies where the most number of people can flourish. Certainly not natural, nor foolish.
- nuancebydefault 4y ago
  We all live by definition following physics laws. There's no 'ought' in physics, only is, was and statistics.

msla 4y ago

Given the number of people who try to derive Is from Ought, maybe giving more people a better view of what is will keep them from listening to the ones attempting to make a new reality.

realjhol 4y ago
Why? The same people who support the idea behind this article, support the idea that men and women are equal, for example, because they think it ought to be so. And there's a lot more things they say ought to be true that I won't enumerate here because my account will be banned
- nkrisc 4y ago
  Using your example, the way in which men and women are meant to be equal has no basis in objective reality, just as much the claim that men and women are not equal has no such basis either. Regarding the realm of “is”, we can plainly see men and women are biologically different. But that’s not the argument. The argument is over the question: “should men and women be allowed to share equivalent roles in society, if they desire?” The language can get murky. When someone says, “men and women are equal” I highly doubt they mean that they are equal in the biological or any empirical sense. What they probably mean is, “men and women ought to be equals in society.” On the contrary, some think that “men and women ought not to be equals in society.” I would wager that those many other examples that you think would get you banned from HN fall safely in the camp of “how ought we treat people?” So I’m the end I doing think the JWST is going to change anything here.
  - havblue 4y ago
    >The argument is over the question: “should men and women be allowed to share equivalent roles in society, if they desire?” I think that question is settled, more or less. People usually aren't debating whether a certain person occupying a certain role should be permitted or not. The real question that seems to be asked now is more along the lines of: "is the fact that we don't pursue certain roles in society equally a sign of our own inherent wickedness?"
    - nuancebydefault 4y ago
      It doesn't need to be wickedness. It's group thinking. In general, people want to belong to a group or groups. Then it is easy to fall into the trap of us-vs-them thinking. Also animals show this behavior. Also, people want to find meaning, and they use their pattern matching instincts to accomplish that. This explains why people tend to see meaning in for example pictures captured by giant telescopes, or shooting stars for that matter. It's the reason why they built it in the first place. Right, wrong, ought, shall,... all invented by people. The universe only has 'is' and 'was', no 'ought'.

drewcoo 4y ago

Telescopes can only show us what was, not what is. I had expected the article to be about overturning Lemaitre's Big Bang Theory, both because Lemaitre was a Catholic priest and his theory is very neatly Catholic and because Kant's sense of moral law is something at the core of the way everything works. The article did not talk about that. It talked around it, but not about it.

foysauce 4y ago

Have been reading "What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies" by Tim Urban? I've been loving it, and he talks about the importance of 2 counterparties identifying what _is_, before distinguishing what _should be_.

jschveibinz 4y ago
I think I’d like a broader sampling than just two, please, even if they are counterparts. I’m with the skeptics.

javajosh 4y ago

David Hume identified the useful distinction between is and ought. For most of my life I've adhered to this idea - however I've come to believe, against my own protests, that the universe does, in fact, embed something like a moral code. Or more like a challenge. When we look upon it, we see a vast, empty thing, devoid of any evidence of life. The biosphere of Earth is the most precious "substance" that exists because it is the most unique. It is also the only place where this discussion can take place, since the rest of the universe is (apparently) rather dead. So, I don't think the universe has anything to say about hat sizes or personal sexual proclivities (and indeed wrt sex the universe seems to wear its freak flag proudly given that the life-cycles of many critters involves...questionable activity). But it does say that surviving is very hard - It is quite difficult to escape a gravity well, and many OOM harder to get to another system fast enough that your craft and crew doesn't die of old age. (I've come to believe too that there is a positive side to this setup: if it were easier to move around, there would be horrible chaos as so cheerily depicted in assorted space opera novels. It would be colonialism writ large, victimizing trillions instead of millions. And most likely humans would be the exploited and not the exploiters, not that it matters.) What's interesting though is that the problem of spreading life beyond earth seems extremely hard-- but its not theoretically impossible. It's going to take time, which means humans need to find a stable space in which to dwell for a long time while we build planet-spanning particle colliders, or whatever else we need to do to figure out how to send vehicles to other stars. Creativity exists in tension with stability, which is an interesting place to end a conversation about how to pass The Great Filter.

mrangle 4y ago
The theory of spreading Life Beyond Earth has obstacles that I've never seen it adequately approach. It suffers from worldwide popularized optimism to which it early succumbs without a proper fight. That it doesn't have to, much like other nationalistic fictions, indicates its low possibility. It is a theory that claims legitimacy without ever stepping into the ring. Which is the proper positioning for meatbags that can't take the pummeling of the infinite gorilla of space. Or more precisely, who can't physically survive the trauma of being separated from their Mother(Earth). People get all of the space travel that they require from the next Chris Pine Star Trek film. That's psychologically enough for the world. The gap between now and survivable manned travel to Mars is so large that no one can see the opposite shore. An educated wager might be that this is because it doesn't exist. But again, one has to abandon addiction to popular optimism to start down the road of analyzing why. Start with the simple factor of our circadian rhythm that is inseparably tied to the Earth's clock that is uniquely a product of the relationship of this specific Earth to our specific Sun. Don't include how the Earth's gravity or magnetic field may play parts, as that's too advanced as of yet. Before we would get to lethal space radiation, we have to figure out how to survive even in otherwise perfectly safe synthetic conditions. It's unclear to the point that we haven't started the discussion. I want to meet the man who is going to have the vaccine, ahead of time and before a truly apocalyptic pandemic, for space infections picked up from space-victims of space-colonialism by the eternal oppressors of Earth (hard to accomplish that much oppression in infinite space but ok) . The Universe has plenty to say about both hat sizes and sex.

barrysteve 4y ago

They're often the same thing. How people ought to live, is commonly built up from principles and axioms inspired by natural law. How you ought to live depends heavily upon the axioms you choose, and the axioms that do not coincide with nature and physics are often foolish.

realjhol 4y ago
> How people ought to live, is commonly built up from principles and axioms inspired by natural law. You have it backwards. Belief in natural laws is an axiom. Hardly anyone actually chooses their axioms. They're either handed to us, or expressions of innate personality in most cases. People generally decide what they think feels right, then reason backwards from there to conjure up a set of principles that they claim to live by.
maroonblazer 4y ago
>How you ought to live depends heavily upon the axioms you choose, and the axioms that do not coincide with nature and physics are often foolish. How are you defining "natural"? We treated each other, and animals, pretty horribly for centuries. This was 'natural'. Then we reasoned about what makes for the kinds of societies where the most number of people can flourish. Certainly not natural, nor foolish.
nuancebydefault 4y ago
We all live by definition following physics laws. There's no 'ought' in physics, only is, was and statistics.