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army1987 comments on The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life - Less Wrong Discussion

67 Post author: Academian 28 December 2012 04:14AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 28 December 2012 07:33:24PM *  19 points [-]

Suppose I find a piece of strange-looking code on my computer and ask, "Does this code have a purpose?" The following seem to be reasonable possible answers:

  1. Yes, it was written to serve some useful function.
  2. No, it's a functionally null piece of code that the programmer forgot to remove.
  3. No, it seems to be the result of some kind of copying error.
  4. Yes, it's a backdoor deliberately inserted by a previous intruder.
  5. No, it's a security vulnerability that the original programmer accidentally created.

The following do not seem to be reasonable answers:

  • a) Yes, it's an accidental vulnerability whose purpose for an attacker is to use it to hack my machine.
  • b) Yes, its purpose is for me to show off my testing/debugging skills to my boss.

It seems that at least in some cases when I ask "Does this thing have a purpose?" the kind of answer I'm looking for includes "someone deliberately created it" but excludes "it's valuable for someone". If "Does life have a purpose?" is like this, whether or not other people value my life wouldn't to be relevant to answering it.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 December 2012 12:17:50PM -1 points [-]

Well, it's extremely unlikely for a piece of code (or things like that) to be there by accident and still be useful to its user. (This is more or less why [HPMOR spoiler] Uneel fcrphyngrq gung zntvp jnf vagryyvtragyl qrfvtarq ol Ngynagrnaf.) This doesn't seem to generalize. (Think of “the purpose of X” as “the reason not to get rid of X”. In realistic situations, a given piece of code either has been placed there deliberately by someone or there's no good reason to keep it. This doesn't obviously apply to most other things, including life.)

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