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aelephant comments on Article about LW: Faith, Hope, and Singularity: Entering the Matrix with New York’s Futurist Set - Less Wrong Discussion

31 Post author: malo 25 July 2012 07:28PM

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Comment author: scientism 28 July 2012 02:17:00AM 6 points [-]

I guess what I want to emphasise is that I don't think the reaction is illicit or even particularly subjective. One of the ways a system of ethics can fail is that it's impoverished. It doesn't capture everything we want to say about the subject. When you encounter a person or group who are living their life according to a particular ethical system and you have the sense of things spiralling away from normalcy, that's a legitimate cause for concern. It's a sense that something might be missing here. That's why I said it could almost serve as a reductio. It's similar to performing a long calculation and being left with the sense that the answer is an order of magnitude out.

Comment author: aelephant 28 July 2012 05:26:27AM 10 points [-]

To me, what society considers "normal" is terribly unethical, so "spiraling away from normalcy" isn't a cause for concern, but perks my curiosity.

"Maybe he's on to something..."