= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ABrooks comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (283)
it seems I've spoken carelessly and I'd like to restate my initial point. I appreciate the clarifications as to the legal details.
I'm suggesting that piracy is immoral, and in very large part because it is illegal. I don't think moral concerns always trump instrumental value or that breaking the law is always immoral. But these will be exceptional cases. Copying a book illegaly because one doesn't want to pay for it seems like an unexceptional case of wrongdoing, and one plausably comparable (morally if not legally) to theft. It seems comparable, I mean, to any given case of breaking the law because it makes life a little easier or more pleasent.
ETA: And I don't mean to suggest I have any knock out argument myself. I really would just like to hear the argument to the contrary if anyone would be willing to take the time.
So you think that the value of the rule of law is more important than immediate personal gains? Fair enough.
You seem to think it's wrong for other reasons, tho I can't quite decipher it.
Why specifically compare to theft? Why not trespassing or something? The only similarity I can see is that infringement and theft are both crimes of an economic nature, but so is vandalism.
To clarify the situation and the relationships between the terms, would you agree that theft is approximately the intersection of vandalism and infringement? (it removes the original, and the perp gains without paying)
Come to think of it on the pure abstract level it is more closely analogous to rape.
I thot of suggesting rape, but decided against it because it seemed too far off. Explain.
Takes the valuable resource from the victim without reducing the degree to which they have that resource or provide it to others for their own benefit.
I don't support advocating equivocation between these or any other moral or ethical issues. Because they are different and degree of abstract similarity is not important.
Uh, rape often reduces the degree to which one can provide sex / fertility to others. I don't think that's the best analogy.
I originally included caveats (like gentleness and maybe birth control) but decided that wasn't really necessary. After all when we call copying movies 'stealing' we don't bother to include disclaimers about things like "while breaking into your house to steal your TV they destroyed your door and broke your arm when you tried to stop them".
It quite possibly isn't - I've hardly done an exhaustive search. I expressed only a comparison to stealing.
What disturbs me about this model is that my mind is now telling me 'yeah, sure you can consider sex as a resource', while 100 seconds ago (right after I read the comment) it was telling me, with equal certainty, 'wtf? sex isn't a resource!!'
I ... really don't think this is a useful model.
How could you not consider sex a resource? It isn't just a resource, or merely a resource but it is one of the most significant resources out there. There are entire industries out there for the buying and selling of sex. There is an industry for capturing and selling people from whom this resource can be harvested. The most rudimentary of marketing tactics is to find ways to make other resources associate with sex in the minds of the consumer.
It is one of many models useful for understanding human behavior. It need not be one that is used for describing or selecting moralities.
Just a thought that had never occurred to me. However, I'm still wary of accepting this interpretation because my mind completely bought into it after just a few seconds of thinking about it. Ergo, either it's a blindingly obvious fact, as you suggest, or my mind is overfitting the data, and....
.... Who am I kidding? I've already accepted this interpretation.
I compare it to theft because of the comparable aims of the thief and the filesharer: in most cases, I expect, and in the kind of cases Anubhav raised, something is copied in violation of IP law because it is convenient for the filesharer or saves him or her some money. That's similar to theft in a way that it's no to vandalism or tresspassing.
As to your clarificatory question, I'm not sure. So assume I agree; what are the consequences of understanding things this way?
Then you may just as well call it "insurance fraud", or "tax evasion", or "turnstile jumping".
In a universe where you didn't begin off with the assumption that copying things can be considered "theft", because the companies have a vested interested in presenting it as theft, I doubt it'd ever even cross your mind that copying something can be reasonably compared to stealing it.
E.g. did you ever ask whether JKR has the right to mention the name of "Merlin"? Or whether Disney has the right to use Hercules or Aladdin as characters? Did it occur to you to call such things theft -- merely because it was convenient and saved money for these people/companies to copy such names/stories?
It did, long before companies started trying to present it as such within my hearing.
The theft comparison isn't really my point. My point is that it's wrong to break the law for personal gain. None of these are cases of that kind of activity. It may be that the law itself is wrong, but that doesn't itself make it okay to break that law, especially when your breaking of it is aimed purely at saving you some money and not in any way at undermining the law.
Just to be clear... would you say that speeding, or consensual sodomy in Texas prior to 2003, are wrong in essentially the same way?
That's a good question. I guess I would say the same thing about speeding, but not about consensual sodomy. In the latter case, I think it's still immoral to break the law so as to engage in sodomy, but that this is just outweighed by the importance of being able to freely engage in a sex life of one's choosing and with consenting adult partners. With speeding and with filesharing, the immorality of breaking the law is weighed against in the first case convenience (unless it's an emergency) and in the latter case saving one's money. Neither of these seem to me to overcome the moral problem of breaking the law.
ETA: The point about speeding is a good one. We generally understand people to be responsible for bad but unintended outcomes only so long as what they're doing is bad in the first place. So while we think speeding is commonplace and no great evil, we do get quite worked up when someone speeds and kills someone else as a result. The killing, wholly unintended, is their fault. I think this is a sign that we do consider speeding to be a bit immoral. If the same thing happened to someone who was driving in a perfectly legal way, we wouldn't ascribe to them any responsibility for the deaths.
I'm not sure I can come up with any similar accidental consequence of filesharing. Maybe the collapse of a publishing company? But this couldn't be the result of any one person's activity.
Mm. OK.
So, if someone were to say they endorsed some instances of illegal filesharing because, while they agreed that it was immoral to break the law, they believed that this immorality was outweighed by the importance of being able to freely distribute and obtain information of one's choosing, your conclusion would be that their reasoning was sound as far as it went, but that they were not correctly estimating the relative importance of those two things.
Yes?
I do think that would be a reasonable tack, and it wouldn't be hard to convince me that the relative importance of free access to information outweighs the legal violation. Two things give me pause though: first the information one wishes to access is, in the cases Anubhav is describing, simply those books about which one is curious. Nothing life and death there. I can see why one has a right to, say, some of the information Wikileaks might distribute, but I don't see why one has a right (or whatever) to any information one wants. Certainly not the intellectual products of other people.
Second, one already has access to that information. It just costs money. The point isn't that one is gaining access to information one otherwise couldn't get, but rather that one is saving money in doing so.
I know people over the internet who fileshare philosophy books because they live in poverty, or in countries without academic institutions or libraries, or because they live in countries with oppressive governments. Filesharing in these cases doesn't strike me as particularly immoral, or rather, its immorality seems to be outweighed.
But in the case of someone who fileshares a book when they could (even with some hardship) pay for it and has (politically) free access to it, this is immoral.
OK.
So, if someone countered your defense of sodomy in Texas pre-2003 by arguing that, first, there is nothing life or death about the desire to have particular kinds of sex and they don't see why one has a right (or whatever) to any kind of sex one wants, and, second, that one already has access to sodomy, one merely has to move to a state where it's legal, and that therefore committing sodomy in Texas pre-2003 was in fact net immoral, what would be your response?
BTW, at about this point I feel somewhat obligated to state my own position on these sorts of issues, which is roughly speaking that violating the law is not in and of itself immoral, but neither is enforcing it. Which is to say, when I violate the law, I move myself into a position where it is potentially moral to imprison me, confiscate my property, reduce my future potential for valuable years, or even kill me. (There are other considerations that affect whether that potential is actualized.)
That said, I'm not trying to argue in favor of that position here, and you can feel free to ignore it if you wish. I just feel socially obligated to get my own cards out on the table.
I should perhaps also say that I was routinely violating U.S. anti-sodomy laws prior to 2003 and would continue to be doing so if those laws were still in place in my state of residence. Not that those things are actually relevant at all, but they seemed worth saying anyway.
Good point.
Haha. So cautious. I know that feel.
I don't know the consequences. It just seemed reasonable, and clarifying things like that usually clears things up a bit.
And what of it? You're pointing to a general category with the implicit assumption that everything it contains is wrong. Which, as you know, isn't true. Perhaps most of the members of this set can be classified as wrong, but as long as wrongness isn't a general feature of this set, membership of this set isn't a sufficient condition to classify anything as wrong. Ergo, the members of this set that are wrong, aren't wrong because they belong to this set, but are wrong because they meet some other criteria of wrongness. You should think about what those criteria are, and then we can debate whether this particular issue meets those criteria.
As I and other people have pointed out, it's not even morally comparable to theft. You haven't addressed any of those comments as far as I can tell. I'll go with the charitable interpretation and assume what you mean by 'comparable' is what you're saying in the next sentence (the part I responded to in the first part of this comment).
This stinks of classical (non-bayesian) rationality. Membership in a set that is mostly wrong does not "prove" anything, but it sure is evidence. (more evidence is obviously required, in this case). Keep your bayes hat on.
EDIT: What happened to my edit! Your point still stands: we have reason to believe copying does not quite fit in that set, so we should be looking closer at the mechanisms of wrongness. /EDIT
Actually, ve just brought up that the intent and thought process is very similar. Seems like a good enough reason to compare them.
That said, I think the comparison is way overused, and even if it contains a grain of truth, it's a good idea to avoid it because it is such a politicized comparison.
Agreed, but it's noisy evidence. Which is why I recommended looking for better evidence. I used the set theory terminology instead of the Bayesian one because ABrooks seems to have a philosophy background; I thought this'd make more sense for him/her.
...... And yes, I got carried away by the force of my own rhetoric. Must work on avoiding that.
That wasn't at all clear to me.
See my edit, I agree with what you said, but the non-bayesian thing was an itch that had to be scratched.
That's because it was in a different post. By "just" I meant "seconds ago, after this post". I could have made that clearer.
Well, I agree that not every case of breaking the law is immoral, but I think I'd be happy to defend the claim that moral wrongness is a characteristic of the subset of legal violations undertaken for the sake of one's personal convenience. And your point about set membership doesn't seem right: it is in virtue of membership in 'elephants' that an animal has a trunk, even if its true of some elephants that they do not have trunks (wounded elephants say).
If I've failed to respond to any questions regarding my comparison of filesharing to theft, then this is purely because of my lack of understanding. Could you clarify for me the challange to this comparison, if you have the time and inclination? Or would you prefer that I made my own case more pointed first?
I thought I'd already done that. In this thread, for instance.
We seem to be using the word 'characteristic' in different senses.
Anyway, from a Bayesian perspective, as the proportion of elephants without trunks is small, I can be reasonably sure that any given elephant will have a trunk. However, if someone tells me, 'hey, that elephant there doesn't have a trunk', I reason that it's unlikely (but not impossible) that someone would tell me that if the elephant did, in fact, have a trunk. If I want more information about whether the elephant has a trunk, I'd go look at the elephant myself.
More or less the same reasoning applies in this case, except that instead of one person, you've got a large proportion of the people on the internet telling you that copyright is immoral and its infringement is not comparable to theft. Therefore, you should debate these issues on their merits, instead of relying on what group they belong to with regard to legality.
I remember when I was in college and Napster first came out. In a dorm hall, we didn't really have TV's, nor did we read a lot of news, and at least I wasn't researching the subject of file sharing. No publishing company would have had an opportunity to talk to me about it, and I don't remember ever being told that filesharing was stealing.
Except that I immediately recognized it as such. It was something you did when you wanted something that cost money, but you didn't want to pay for it. So you just went and did something illegal so as to get it for free. That struck me as stealing (though I did it anyway, of course). It also struck everyone else as stealing. No one was confused by anyone else's calling it that, and no one, so far as I remember, brought up any objections to the idea. And there's a reason why the companies that now do try to villify the act choose to call it stealing instead of trespassing, or infringement, or whatever. Stealing seems to intuitively capture the nature of it, and the (mild) immorality of it. I think plagerism is called stealing for very similar reasons, even though like CR infringement, it doesn't result in anyone losing what's stolen.
You're right, a large number of people ('large proportion' seems adventurous) are telling me that it's not at all like stealing. They also tell me that copyright law is immoral. They also tend to have substantial economic interests in believing these things. This at least makes me suspicious. But ultimately, nothing really hangs on the comparison to theft. It just seems apt. To me, and in my experience to most everyone who isn't defending their own practice of it.
Breaking the law isn't always immoral. In cases where the law itself is immoral and breaking it can serve to undermine the law, it's even a good thing. But is this one of those cases? An act of filesharing doesn't accomplish anything by way of undermining the law. An act of filesharing accomplishes only this: there's something you want which by law costs money. But you don't want to pay for it, so you find a way to get it for free by infringing upon that law. That's all we're talking about here: a practice of infringing upon a law for your personal gain. Even if copyright is immoral, breaking the law for your personal gain isn't thereby perfectly permissible.
That argument is about as valid as Aristotle's argument that heavier objects must fall faster. Your intuitions are not magic, when challenged you can't just point to your intuitions and say "Objections? What objections? Can't hear any." You still haven't addressed any of the arguments for why it's a bad comparison.
And the fact that those who push the "infringement is theft!!" agenda most forcefully have substantial economic interests in blocking the distribution of works through non-traditional channels is not suspicious at all. Neither does the fact that, historically, a technological advance comparable to the internet (the printing press) was fought tooth and nail by an entity comparable to today's Big Media (the Catholic Church) on the pretext of blocking the distribution of unauthorised works (non-Latin versions of the Bible), ring any alarm bells, even though non-Latin Bibles are seen as perfectly ordinary things now. No sir, nothing suspicious here, just a bunch of filthy Pirates making a ruckus.
Ergo, setting up the Pirate Bay is a moral act, but downloading something off it is not?
Hmm, have you read Aristotle? So far as I can tell, his most extended argument on the matter is Physics IV.8, where he argues that in an atmosphere, heavier things fall faster because they are better able to divide the medium owing to greater downward force. He then argues that in a void, heavier and lighter things would fall with the same speed. Since this is not what we observe (we do in fact often observe heavier things falling faster for the reason Aristotle cites) there cannot be any void.
Aristotle is complicated and surprising, and rarely does any common knowledge capture his views well.
My intuitions aren't magic. Though my having an ethical opinion is some evidence that this opinion is true or in the region of the truth. As I said my argument doesn't hang on the comparison with theft. If the activity strikes me as theft, and most people as theft, then this is pretty good evidence that it's like theft. It's not conclusive or anything, but still good evidence.
I couldn't follow your printing press argument, I think largely because it involved some complicated sarcasm. If you like, ignore my point about economic interest. It's not very important.
Did I say setting up the Pirate Bay is a moral act? I take it you wish to argue that CR law is immoral or impracticable? And how your filesharing a book helps to undermine that law? Could you explain this?
If slavery strikes a slave-owner as right to property, and most people in the slave-owner's society as right to property, is that also pretty good evidence that slavery is right to property?
If homosexuality strikes a person as unnatural, and most of the people in his society as unnatural, is that pretty good evidence that homosexuality is unnatural?
The beliefs of a particular society at a particular time provide pretty weak evidence, at best.
In that case, we shall leave that aside for now.
Behold the wrath of Lob's theorem. (Short version: I believe yo momma is fat. Since I'm a rational agent, my belief is evidence for it. Thus I can assert with high certainty that yo momma is fat.)
I note that the sentence was 4 lines long. Not exactly optimal for comprehension, I guess... I'll come back to the Catholic Church later. For now...
I take it that this is you major point?
Fine, but before we discuss the morality of copyright... I'd ask if you still maintain (1) the following
And also if you maintain that (2) the Pirate Bay serves to undermine copyright.
Given (1) and (2), I take it you also maintain that (3) if copyright were immoral, setting up the Pirate Bay would be moral?
In addition, do you also maintain that (4) even if copyright were immoral, downloading something from the Pirate Bay would still be an immoral act?
Sure.
It just turns out to be overwhelmed by other evidence that points to these assertions being either false or meaningless. Lots of things are evidence -- sometimes even strong evidence -- for all kinds of claims, including false claims.
Once we're talking about probabilistic arguments that affect confidence levels, it's entirely possible to have legitimate arguments that favor a false conclusion. That's why cherry-picking evidence is such an effective rhetorical technique, and why continuing to look for and evaluate new evidence is important.
Just sayin'.
The argument I had in mind was that the beliefs of a particular society are inherently weak evidence for whether something is ethical, and reasonably strong evidence of this can only be gained by looking at the trends of such beliefs in different societies over time.
Of course, I didn't actually make a case for any of that, but instead went with "This 'evidence' gave us absurd results on these few occasions, therefore it must be invalid!!" which is obviously not a valid argument.
It's clear I'm getting carried away by my own rhetoric here. I'll try to cut down on the rhetoric and focus on what I actually want to say.
Taboo right to property.
Taboo unnatural.
I don't see what the point of that would be. What I was saying was 'a behaviour was/is classified by most people as X', where X generally has the connotation of perfectly OK/utterly wrong. I doubt unpacking X would offer any insight. (Except for the obvious one that X is a group of things that do not belong together; but isn't that obvious just from what I said?)
That follows from what I said, and I think it true. But Dave said what I would say, so I'll leave it at that. I think that in general people's ethical opinions are substantial, though certainly not conclusive, evidence for the truth of those opinions. Just as the opinions of a doctor are strong evidence for the truth of a medical opinion, so to with this. Only, in the case of ethics, we are all experts if anyone is.
None of this seems to have anything to do with Lob's theorem, which is about formal proofs and self reference within logical systems. If I'm mistaken, please correct me. As it stands, reference to it seems like a very abstract and pretty unhelpful metaphor.
I'd like some help with (2), as I'm not very familiar with how PB does this. Does PB make it less likely that CR law to exist in the future? If CR law is immoral (which isn't implausible to me) and PB does this, then the conclusion that setting up and supporting PB would itself be plausible.
I would maintain this in the face of (3) if filesharing in infringement of CR law was done with the aim of self-interest and if it had no plausible connection to making CR laws less likely in the future.
I disagree with that, but arguing it in the general case would take us on a long-winded tangent. As long as we agree that the majority ethical opinion is found to be wrong rather frequently (with sufficient frequency to suspect that we might have discovered another flaw recently), the exact degree to which different kinds of evidence are reliable are irrelevant.
The relevant explanation is in the post that the word 'before' links to. Basically, if you consider your own belief as evidence for something, you can believe anything and have evidence for it. (The evidence being your own belief in it.)
Is that what you mean by 'undermine'? It may or may not affect the probability of CR laws existing in the future, but what it does is enable large-scale violations of CR law and thus make it very difficult to enforce. That is what I mean by 'undermine'.
I really don't get what you're getting at here. Violations of the law are only moral if they help in the repeal of the law, but not in and of themselves? But... why say the law is immoral, unless it prevents moral acts or rewards immoral acts?
Ah, I guess the answer to that is in the question itself. A law can be immoral, yet some parts of it can be perfectly moral.
So let me add to my original conditions: (2.5) That if free sharing of copyrighted materials were moral, copyright law would be immoral?
And (4.5) Even if free sharing of copyrighted materials were moral, downloading something off the Pirate Bay would still be immoral, as it must, by your definition of 'personal gain', lead to personal gain for the downloader?
To add to TheOtherDave's reply, note policy debates should not appear one-sided.
Do you mean Physics IV.8 ? There he asserts that velocity = (weight / density). The argument that there cannot be any void is that you cannot divide by zero - in modern terms, the velocity of the falling objects would approach infinity as density approaches zero.
Galileo established that this equation greatly overestimates the density of water when compared to experimental results. Also, Aristotle's equation would suggest that a brick would fall twice as fast as half of a brick, which would have been easy to test; sadly, while Aristotle was one of the best empiricists of his time, he still didn't think of actually looking.
I did, I edited it but not in time. Thanks for the catch.
Your description of Aristotle's argument proceeding the one I cited seems accurate to me, though it doesn't seem to me that Aristotle took the correctness of his ratio to be important: he doesn't bring it up again, and a different ratio would have produced the same result so far as his argument went. So...
Why look? His point is that the difference in fall-rates of heaver and lighter objects is due to a ratio of downward force against atmospheric resistance. That's roughly right. The ratio itself doesn't matter, if the point is just to argue against motion in a void. As a matter of understanding Aristotle's physics, it's important to understand that he didn't really care about mechanics. His physics is about a different subject matter.
The argument I described to Anubhav follows the one you cite. I'll quote it here:
The point here isn't that Aristotle was right. We can just point to any aspect of astrophysics to see that he wasn't. The point is just that we tend to attribute to Aristotle a lot of views that he didn't hold, and about matters that weren't important to his overall project.
Meh. I don't think many people would expect an open umbrella to fall through air faster than a pen cap does, even though everybody knows the former is heavier.
I'm reminded of a mechanics exam in college that involved calculating the trajectory and location/velocity at impact of a parachutist jumping from an airplane. ("... Ignore air resistance.")
I had a similar one, too. (After noticing people laughing, the professor did say something like “that only applies to the time before the parachute is opened”, IIRC.)
-Aristotle, On the Heavens, IV.6
No one is arguing that Aristotle is right about science, mind you. He was obviously not. I'm just saying his views aren't often well represented by common opinion. This isn't terribly important, since Aristotle isn't terribly important, but I thought it was worth pointing out.