I would change your "but" to "and"? But maybe my comment wasn't very clear. The dangers of phone typing.
I meant that one should acquaint oneself with the criticisms of utilitarianism, if one wants to understand what it is people react to in rationalism and related communities.
> We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.
Wait... Are you suggesting that "exploring the stars" is less of an endless and futile journey than dealing with poverty and inequality?
Solving poverty and inequality is for the short term - they'll come back and need solving again no matter how many times you already solved them. But once the stars are explored, they stay explored forever. So yea, that's moving forwards and the other isn't.
The closest stars are way too far to reach on any reasonable timescale. That's not even mentioning the fact that moving forwards is a vague goal. Moving forwards towards what exactly? And if the US government got off of it's ass to... Oh I don't know, maybe fix the bullshit healthcare system we have and help people with tax money instead of bombing people for Israel things would improve quite a bit in a very short time. That's assuming we don't bomb each other over terroritorial squabbles first. In any case I don't really understand your defeatism when it comes to inequality but when it's something as difficult as interstellar space travel you seem to be optimistic.
I am saying that there we never be a world in which poverty and inequality do not exist, unless we are all dead. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but this perspective that grand adventure and exploration is pointless or not worth it is totally foreign to me.
Kind of a false dichotomy. How about medical care as a right for a big abstract concept? He's not anti-science here, he's against the inequality of its distribution.
The poem itself seems to mix several things (It is a poem, and can say whatever it wants of course). What parent said doesn't preclude medical care as a right for a concept, though.
Also, a cursory search says around 2 trillion are spent on healthcare (effectively or not is irrelevant in this context) and NASA moon exploration costs $90B. Doesn't feel like these are all mutually exclusive.
That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.
> The man just upped my rent last night
> cause Whitey’s on the moon
> Was all that money I made last year
> For Whitey on the moon?
And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.
There is an opportunity cost to everything. Moving money from energy research to food programs may mean not having an energy breakthrough that could potentially cut down food costs (and a lot of other things) dramatically in the long run.
Because they think this is good writing. You can’t correct what you don’t have taste for. Most software engineers think that reading books means reading NYT non-fiction bestsellers.
> Because they think this is good writing. You can’t correct what you don’t have taste for.
I have to disagree about:
> Most software engineers think that reading books means reading NYT non-fiction bestsellers.
There's a lot of scifi and fantasy in nerd circles, too. Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, Iain M Banks, Arthur C Clarke, and so on.
But simply enjoying good writing is not enough to fully get what makes writing good. Even writing is not itself enough to get such a taste: thinking of Arthur C Clarke, I've just finished 3001, and at the end Clarke gives thanks to his editors, noting his own experience as an editor meant he held a higher regard for editors than many writers seemed to. Stross has, likewise, blogged about how writing a manuscript is only the first half of writing a book, because then you need to edit the thing.
Predictive processing is absolutely not garbage. The dish of neurons that was trained to play Pong was trained using a method that was directly based on the principles of predictive processing. Also I don't think there's really any competitor for the niche predictive processing is filling, and for closing the gap between neuroscience and psychology.
reply