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All of lloyd's Comments + Replies

2chaosmosis
You say that economic production and moral progress aren't the same. I have already said the same thing; I have already said that increased economic production might lead to morally wrong outcomes depending on how those products end up being used. You can assert a different definition of wealth if you want, sure. I don't understand what argument this is supposed to be responsive to. There's a common understanding of wealth and just because different people define wealth differently, that wouldn't invalidate my point. Having resources is key to investing them, investing resources is key to doing moral things. You say that quantity isn't the sole realm of value. I think that's true. But if you take the quantity of goods and multiply them by the quality of goods (that is, the utility of the goods, like I mentioned before) then that is a sufficient definition of total economic value. The mode of production that is most progressed is the one which produces the most.
Rationality Quotes September 2012
lloyd-20

You do not answer the question and conflate the questions

How is economic progress measured - if you say the aggraegate utility please explain how that is measured.?

How is moral progress measured?

My argument is simple - the measure of either of these is based on poor heuristics.

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2chaosmosis
My first reaction is to want to say that economic progress is an increase in purchasing power. However, purchasing power is measured with reference to the utility of goods. That would be fine as a solution, except that those definitions would mean that it would be literally impossible for an increase in economic progress to be bad on utilitarian grounds. That's not what "economic progress" is generally taken to mean, so I won't use that definition. Instead, I'll say that economic progress is an increase in the ability to produce goods, whether those goods are good or bad. This increase can be either numerical or qualitative, I don't care. Now, it might not be possible to quantify this precisely, but that's not necessary to determine that economic progress occurs. Clearly, we are now farther economically progressed than we were in the Dark Ages. Moral progress would be measured depending on the moral theory you're utilizing. I would use a broad sort of egoism, personally, but most people here would use utilitarianism. With an egoist framework, you could keep track of how happy or sad you were directly. You could also measure the prevalence of factors that tend to make you happy and then subtract the prevalence of factors that tend to make you sad (while weighting for relative amounts of happiness and sadness, of course), in order to get a more objective account of your own happiness. With a utilitarian framework, you would measure the prevalence of things that tend to make all people happy, and then subtract the prevalence of things that tend to make all people sad. If there was an increase in the number of happy people, then that would mean moral progress in the eyes of a utilitarian. You make no argument. You merely ask a question. If you have a general counterargument or want to refute the specifics of any of my points, feel free. So far, you haven't done anything like that. Also, although it might not be possible to quantify economic or moral progress precis
1chaosmosis
1. You're not making arguments. 2. The points you raise are not responsive to the points that either he or I made. 3. If it increases total aggregate utility. Tribes were small, there weren't very many people. I'm also not sure how happy most tribes were. Additionally, bad moral societies might be necessary to transition to awesome ones. 4. You conflate moral and economic progress in your second paragraph. 5. A financial system which collapses probably isn't too healthy. It still might have improved things overall through its pre-collapse operations though. Universal pay does not even seem possible now.
Rationality Quotes September 2012
lloyd-10

Moral progress proceeds from economic progress.<

What is progress with respect to either? Could you possibly mean that moral states - the moral conditions of a society - follow from the economic state - the condition and system of economy. I do find it hard to see a clear, unbiased definition of moral or economic progress.

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1thomblake
Moral progress is a trend or change for the better in the morality of members of a society. For example, when the United States went from widespread acceptance of slavery to widespread rejection of slavery, that was moral progress on most views of morality. Economic progress is a trend or change that results in increased wealth for a society. In general, widespread acceptance of a moral principle, like our views on slavery, animal rights, vegetable rights, and universal minimum income, only comes after we can afford it.
0chaosmosis
I think he's trying to say that having resources is a prerequisite to spending them on moral things like universal pay, so we need to pursue wealth if we want to pursue morality. Technically, economic progress is more of a prerequisite to moral progress than a sufficient cause though, as economic progress can also result in bad moral outcomes depending on what we do with our wealth.
How about testing our ideas?
lloyd00

By 'good' reason I meant one consistent with the purpose or function of schooling. It is to be taken as having a touch of humor based on people's misunderstanding of the function of school believing it to be synonymous with education.

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0Epiphany
Oh, okay. I guess I didn't know your personality well enough yet to assume the correct things. Thanks. (:
How about testing our ideas?
lloyd10

I do not know if you have read Gatto or not based on this. He points out that the system has no memory of its origin and that changes occur just like you describe with the result of deepening the problem. The last major school reform was GW Bush's No Child Left Behind....if that tells you anything about who "fixes" the system.

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3Desrtopa
No Child Left Behind was a stupid fix, but that doesn't mean it was an ill intentioned fix. I have actually just found the online text of "The Underground History of Education," and started reading it, but so far am unimpressed and unlikely to finish it. I'm noticing a lot of cherrypicking to support his position, and he doesn't give sources for his assertions at all (I went to the table of contents to look for a bibliography, and couldn't find one, so I did a further search to see if this is the case in the print version and confirmed that the book contains no citations.) I share his opinion that our current educational system is not well designed to get the best out of its students, but if I wanted to introduce someone to a writer who could effectively explain that point, I don't think I'd recommend him. I'd probably recommend some of Eliezer's essays, or maybe Paul Graham's.
How about testing our ideas?
lloyd30

Well you can make wild speculations based off of my semantics or you can read for yourself. You seem to have chosen the former. Please return and clarify if you find his research faulty after you have read his work.

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3Desrtopa
Well, the first link I get when I do the google search you suggested is this, and I've read that, but I'm not clear on what research of his you're expecting me to read. The only work of his that appears to be available online is this, which contains assertions, but does not appear to support them with research as such. It's true that I haven't read John Taylor Gatto's work beyond that essay and the page you suggested reading yourself, but I was not wildly speculating based on semantics, I was making an educated guess considering that this is how people ordinarily behave. I assign a much higher prior to someone, say, hearing that the American school system is inspired by the Prussian system, which was largely concerned with producing good citizen-soldiers, and concluding that the American system must be deliberately designed to stymy creative thought, and looking for more evidence to back up that assertion, than I do to someone deciding to find out what the intentions behind the American school system are, doing extensive research, and concluding that its programs are actually purpose-designed to dumb down the populace. What little work of his that I've found accessible online certainly doesn't shift me away from that assessment.
How about testing our ideas?
lloyd40

The US system took heavily from the Prussian school. The history is fascinating to say the least.

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How about testing our ideas?
lloyd20

The statements of intent where made in writing and in speeches. I would do it for you but linking on the droid is not fun. Google "Rockefeller mencken quotes education" and the first link should lend some insight into the intent of the designers of the compulsory public school system. Gatto did a lot of research to support the thesis that schools are designed to dumb down the populace.

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3Desrtopa
This may simply be jumping on an issue of semantics, but I'm concerned that this is really what he did, rather than doing a lot of research to find out whether the thesis was correct, or, more ideally, doing a lot of research before promoting the hypothesis to attention at all.
0[anonymous]
Sounds scary. I'll look into it and update as appropriate. You are postulating quite the conspiracy tho. Much more likely it seems that a few b'crats went bonkers, the way you sometimes get UFO nuts out of the military.
How about testing our ideas?
lloyd70

Schools do not teach any critical thinking and for good reason. Ivan Illich wrote "Deschooling Society" in the 70s and John Taylor Gatto started writing the "The Underground History of American Education" in the 90s. Either should give you insight into why teachers do what they do, but Gattos's "Weapons of Mass Instruction" is probably the best place to start. The short answer is that schools are designed from the top down to stunt the intellectual growth of children regardless of the intentions of teachers.

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0Epiphany
What is the "good" reason? Or did you not mean to agree with this practice?
-1Shmi
I suspect that free public education is on average about the same everywhere. Guessing teacher's password and rote memorization are the easiest ways to teach, and an average teacher is not very good at what she does, so this method shows up by default. The idea that the US education is built on the "Prussian school system [which] was explicitly designed to create soldiers" and that's why it is so bad seems like a conspiracy theory. I would like to know if there are examples to the contrary (i.e. countries where an average high-school graduate is adept at independent learning and critical thinking).
6[anonymous]
Maybe the result is that they stunt growth, but to infer intention from that is just an agency-fantasy. I would guess that the bereaucrats that actually think about the result have good intentions, even.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd00

The idea of 'what you want to see less of' is fairly interesting. On a site dedicated to rationality I was expecting that one would want to see:

-the discussion of rationality explicitly = the Sequences

-examples of rationality in addressing problems

-a distinction between rationality and other thinking processes and when rational thinking is appropriate (ie- the boundaries of rationality)

It would be a reasonable hypothesis - based on what I have seen - that the last point causes a negative feedback. MP demonstrated a great deal of rationality (and... (read more)

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2TheOtherDave
Different people want to see, and want to avoid seeing, different things. The net karma score of any given comment is an expression of our collective preferences, filtered extremely noisily through which subset of the site happens to read any given comment. I would prefer LW not try to impose voting standards beyond "upvote what you want, downvote what you don't want." If we want a less croudsourced value judgment, we can pay someone we trust to go through and rate all the comments, though I would not contribute to that project.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd10

So part of being new here...the karma thing. Did you just get docked karma for the assertion you are into 2012-ism? I didn't do it. Is there a list of taboos? I got docked for a comment on intuition (I speculate that is why).

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2TheOtherDave
There's no list. In general, people downvote what they want to see less of on the site, and upvote what they want to see more of. A -1 score means one more person downvoted than upvoted; not generally worth worrying about. My guess is someone pattern-matched MP's comment to fuzzy-headed mysticism.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd00

Thanks for addressing all three of the questions. Your ability to expound on such a variety of topics is what I was hoping someone in this forum could do. Quite insightful.

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Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd00

I think you got a grip on the gist. I didn't mention boredom in my question but you went straight to where I have been in looking at the topic. But I do not think there is reason to believe boredom is a basic state of human life indicative of how it has always been. I think it may be more related to the industrial lifestyle.

Take the 2012 Mayan calendar crap. Charles Mann concludes his final appendix in "1491" with a mention of the pop-phenom, "Archaeologists of the Maya tend to be annoyed by 2012 speculation. Not only is it mistaken, th... (read more)

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-2Mitchell_Porter
Don't tell anyone, but I'm not immune to 2012-ism myself. At the very least, that old Mayan calendar is one of the more striking intrusions of astronomical facts into human culture; it seems to be built around Martian and Venusian cycles, and the precession of Earth.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd00

That is an impressive collection of links you put together. You have provided what I was looking for in a greater scope than I expected. The Star Larvae Hypothesis and Guy Murchie express the eccentricity in thought I was hoping someone would have knowledge of. I like to see the margins, you see. How did you come to all those tidbits? It took me a single question on this forum for me to get that scope and for that I owe you some thanks. I really do not have much of a hobby in pondering the intentions of stellar beings, but in coming up with queries th... (read more)

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0Mitchell_Porter
It's a bit of both.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd20

Thanks for clarifying.

I understand that categories are mental constructs which facilitate thinking , but do not themselves occur outside the mind. The question meant to find objections to the categorization of logic as a sense. Taken as a sense there is a frame, the category, which allows it to be viewed as analogous to other senses and interrelated to the thinking process as senses are. In the discussion concerning making the most favorable choice on Monty Hall the contestant who does not see the logical choice is "blind". When considering the ... (read more)

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Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd00

An amoeba acts on its environment where a rock behaves according to extrernal force. Life also has the characteristic of reproduction which is not how processes like combustion or fusion begin or continue. There are attempts to create both biological life from naught and AI research has a goal which could be characterized as making something that is alive vs a dead machine - a conscious robot not a car. I recognize that life is chemical processes, but I, and I think the sciences are divided this way, a categorical difference between chemistry and biology.... (read more)

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2Bugmaster
The rock acts on its environment as well. For example, it could hold up other rocks. Once the rock falls, it can dislodge more rocks, or strike sparks. If it falls into a river or a stream, the rock could alter its course... etc., etc. Living organisms can affect their environments in different ways, but I see this as a difference in degree, not in kind. Why is this important ? All kinds of physical processes proceed in different ways; for example, combustion can release a massive amount of heat in a short period of time, whereas life cannot. So what ? Are we talking about life, or consciousness ? Trees are alive, but they are not conscious. Of course, I personally believe that consciousness is just another physical process, so maybe it doesn't matter. Technically they do not, biology does that (by building upon the discoveries of physics and chemistry), but I'm not sure why you think this is important. I don't think that complexity of living organisms always increases. Well, you could start with those parts of the Sequences that deal with Reductionism . I don't agree with everything in the Sequences, but that still seems like a good start.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd-20

Thanks for the welcome.

I raised this pov of logic (reason or rationality when applied) because I saw a piece that correlates training reason with muscle training. If logic is categorical similar to a sense then treat it metaphorically as such, I think. Improving one's senses is a little different than training a muscle and is a more direct simile. Then there is the question of what is logic sensing? Sight perceives what we call light, so logic is perceiving 'the order' of things? The eventual line of thinking starts questioning the relationship of log... (read more)

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1Bugmaster
I'm not sure what you mean by "self-directing". As I see it, "life" is yet another physical process, like "combustion" or "crystallization" or "nuclear fusion". Life is probably a more complex process than these other ones, but it's not categorically different from them. An amoeba's motion is directed, to be sure, but so is the motion of a falling rock.
0chaosmosis
I don't believe that even biological life is self-directing. Additionally, I don't understand how extending one's understanding of biological life to everything can even happen. If you expand the concept of life to include everything then the concept of life becomes meaningless. Personally, whether the universe is alive, or not, it's all the same to me. When you say that this behavior is "constrained in the imagination", you're not trying to imply that we're controlling or maintaining those constraints with our thoughts in any way, are you? That doesn't make sense because I am not telekinetic. How would you know that what you're saying is even true, as opposed to some neat sounding thing that you made up with no evidence? What shows that your claims are true? If this is just an abstract metaphor, I've been confused. If so, I would have liked you to label it differently. I don't understand why vitalism would make the universe seem like a better place to live. I'm also reluctant to label anything true for purposes other than its truth. Even if vitalism would make the universe seem like a better place to live, if our universe is not alive, then it doesn't make sense to believe in it. Belief is not a choice. If you acknowledge that the universe isn't alive then you lose the ability to believe that the universe is alive, unless you're okay with just blatantly contradicting yourself. I don't understand why you think determinism is bad. I like it. It's useful, and seems true. You say that your view says that life is the source of the way things behave. Other than the label and the mysteriousness of its connotations, what distinguishes this from determinism? If it's not determinism, then aren't you just contending that randomness is the cause of all events? That seems unlikely to me, but even if it is the case, why would viewing people as controlled by "life" and mysterious randomness be a better worldview than determinism? I prefer predictability, as it's a prerequisi
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd10

I will tend to violate mores, but I do not wish to seem disrespectful of the culture here. In the future I will more strictly limit the scope of the topic, but considering it was an introduction...I just wished to spread out questions from myself rather than trivia about myself.

I don't think I am asking the wrong question. Such is the best reply I can formulate against the charge. As for my understanding of the established science, I thought I was reasonably versed, but in such a forum as this I am highly skeptical of my own consumption of available kno... (read more)

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0DaFranker
Alright, let's start at the easy part concerning those questions: Yes. In a large set of possible categorical distinctions, they are in different categories. The true, most accurate answer is that they are not exactly the same. This was obvious to you before you even formulated the question, I suspect. They are at slightly different points in the large space of possible neural patterns. Whether they are "in the same category" or not depends on the purposes of the category. This question needs to be reduced, and can be reduced in hundreds of ways from what I see, depending on whether you want to know about the source of the information, the source of our cognitive identification of the information/stimuli, etc. "Sight" is a large mental paintbrush handle for a large process of input and data transfer that gets turned into stimuli that gets interpreted that gets perceived and identified by other parts of the brain and so on. It is a true, real physical process of quarks moving about in certain identifiable (though difficultly so) patterns in response to an interaction of light with (some stuff, "magic", I don't know enough about eye microbiology to say how exactly this works). Each step of the process has material reality. If you are referring to the "experience"-ness, that magical something of the sense that cannot possibly exist in machines which grants color-ness to colors and image-ness to vision and cold-ness and so forth, you are asking a question about qualia, and that question is very different and very hard to answer, if it does really need an answer at all. By contrast, it is experimentally verifiable - there is an external referent within reality - that two "objects" put with two "objects" will have the same spacetime configuration as four "objects". There is a true, real physical process by which light reflected on something your mind counts as "four objects" is the exact same light that would be reflected if your mind counted the same objects as "two
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
lloyd40

It took me a few hours to find this thread like a kid rummaging through a closet not knowing what he is looking for.

As my handle indicates, I am Lloyd. Not much I think is worth saying about myself but I would like to ask a few questions to see what interests readers here, if anyone reads this, and present a sample of where my thinking may come from.

Considering the psychological model of five senses we are taught since grade school is there a categorical difference in our ability to logically perceive that 2+2=4 vs perceiving the temperature is decreasi... (read more)

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4Mitchell_Porter
This was the hardest of your questions to get a grip on. :-) You mention disaster fiction, Star Trek, 1984, and Brave New World, and you categorize the first two as post-industrial and the second two as bad-industrial perpetuated. If I look for the intent behind your question... the idea seems to be that visions of the future are limited to destruction, salvation from outside, and dystopia. Missing from your list of future scenarios is the anodyne dystopia of boredom, which doesn't show up in literature about the future because it's what people are already living in the present, and that's not what they look for in futurology, unless they are perverse enough to want true realism even in their escapism, and experienced enough to know that real life is mostly about boredom and disappointment. The TV series "The Office" comes to mind as a representation of what I'm talking about, though I've never seen it; I just know it's a sitcom about people doing very mundane things every day (like every other sitcom) - and that is reality. If you're worried that reality might somehow just not contain elements that transcend human routine, don't worry, they are there, they pervade even the everyday world, and human routine is something that must end one day. Human society is an anthill, and anthills are finite entities, they are built, they last, they are eventually destroyed. But an anthill can outlive an individual ant, and in that sense the ant's reality can be nothing but the routine of the anthill. Humans are more complex than ants and their relation to routine is more complex. The human anthill requires division of labor, and humans prepared to devote themselves to the diverse functional roles implied, in order to exist at all. So the experience of young humans is typically that they first encounter the boredom of human routine as this thing that they never wanted, that existed before them, and which it will be demanded that they accept. They may have their own ideas about
3Mitchell_Porter
Since life is considered a solved problem by science, any remaining problem of "aliveness" is treated as just a perspective on or metaphor for the problem of consciousness. But talking about aliveness has one virtue; it militates against the tendency among intellectuals to identify consciousness with intellectualizing, as if all that is to be explained in consciousness is "thinking" and passive "experiencing". The usual corrective to this is to talk about "embodiment". And it's certainly a good corrective; being reminded of the body reintroduces the holism of experience, as well as activity, the will, and the nonverbal as elements of experience. Still, I wouldn't want to say that talking about bodies as well as about consciousness is enough to make up for the move from aliveness to consciousness as the discursively central concept. There's an inner "life" which is also obscured by the easily available ways of talking about "states of mind"; and at the other extreme, being alive is also suggestive of the world that you're alive in, the greater reality which is the context to all the acting and willing and living. This "world" is also a part of cognition and phenomenology that is easily overlooked if one sticks to the conventional tropes of consciousness. So when we talk about a living universe, we might want to keep all of that in mind, as well as more strictly biological or psychological ideas, such as whether it's like something to be a star, or whether the states and actions of stars are expressive of a stellar intentionality, or whether the stars are intelligences that plan, process information, make choices, and control their physical environment. People do exist who have explored these ways of thought, but they tend to be found in marginal places like science fiction, crackpot science, and weird speculation. Then, beyond a specific idea like living stars, there are whole genres of what might be called philosophical animism and spiritual animism. I think pon
1Mitchell_Porter
Whether there is a "logic-sense" is a question about consciousness so fundamental and yet so hard that it's scarcely even recognized by science-friendly philosophy of mind. Phenomenologists have something to say about it because they are just trying to characterize experience, without concern for whether or how their descriptions are compatible with a particular scientific theory of nature. But if you look at "naturalist" philosophers (naturalism = physicalism = materialism = an intent that one's philosophy should be consistent with natural science), the discussion scarcely gets beyond the existence of colors and other "five-sense" qualities. The usual approach is to talk as if a conscious state is a heap of elementary sense-qualia, somehow in the same way that a physical object could be a pile of atoms. But experience is about the perception of form as well, and this is related to the idea of a logic-sense, because logic is about concepts and abstract properties, and the properties of a "form" have an abstractness about them, compared to the "stuff" that the form is made from. In the centuries before Kant and Husserl, there was a long-running philosophical "problem of universals", which is just this question of how substance and property are related. How is the greenness in one blade of grass, related to the greenness in another blade of grass? Suppose it were the exact same shade of green. Is it the same thing, mysteriously "exemplified" in two different places? If you say yes, then what is "exemplification" or "instantiation"? Is it a new primitive ontological relation? If you say no, and say that these are separate "color-instances", you still need to explain their sameness or similarity. With the rise of consciousness itself as a theme of human thought, the problem has assumed a new character, because now the greenness is in the observer rather than in the blade of grass. We can still raise the classic questions, about the greenness in one experience and the
0DaFranker
Hello! Welcome to LessWrong! This post reads very much like a stream-of-consciousness dump (the act of writing everything that crosses your mind as soon as you become aware that you're thinking it, and then just writing more and more as more and more thoughts come up), which I've noticed is sometimes one of those non-rules that some members of the community look upon unfavorably. Regarding your questions, it seems like many of them are the wrong question or simply come from a lack of understanding in the relevant established science. There may also be some confusion regarding words that have no clear referent, like your usage of "realness". Have you tried replacing "realness" with some concrete description of what you mean, in your own mind, before formulating that question? If you haven't, then maybe it's only a mysterious word that feels like it probably means something, but turns out to be just a word that can confuse you into thinking of separate things as if they were the same, and make it appear as if there is a paradox or a grand mysterious scientific question to answer. Overall, it seems to me like you would greatly benefit from learning the cognitive science taught/discussed in the Core Sequences, particularly the Reductionism and Mysteriousness ones, and the extremely useful Human's Guide to Words (see this post for a hybrid summary / table of contents). Using the techniques taught in Reductionism and the Guide to Words is often considered essential to formulating good articles on LessWrong, and unfortunately some users will disregard comments from users that don't appear to have read those sequences. I'd be happy to help you a bit with those questions, but I won't try to do so immediately in case you'd prefer to find the solutions on your own (be it answers or simply dissolving the questions into smaller parts, or even noticing that the question simply goes away once the word problems are taken away).
-2chaosmosis
Hiya! I don't think there's a difference between the human sense of logic and the other senses, I agree with you there. Just as it's impossible to tell whether or not you're a brain in a vat, it's also impossible to tell whether or not you're insane. Every argument you use to disprove the statement will depend on the idea that your observations or thought processes are valid, which is exactly what you're trying to prove, and circular arguments are flawed. This doesn't mean that logic isn't real, it just means that we can't interpret the world in any terms except logical ones. The logical ones might still be right, it's just that we can never know that. You might enjoy reading David Hume, he writes about similar sorts of puzzles. It doesn't matter whether or not logic works, or whether reality is really "real". Regardless of whether I'm a brain in a vat, a computer simulation, or just another one of Chuang Tzu's dreams, I am what I am. Why should anyone worry about abstract sophistries, when they have an actual life to live? There are things in the world that are enjoyable, I think, and the world seems to work in certain ways that correspond to logic, I think, and that's perfectly acceptable to me. The "truth" of existence, external to the truth of my everyday life, is not something that I'm interested in at all. The people I love and the experiences I've had matter to me, regardless of what's going on in the realm of metaphysics. I don't quite understand what you're saying about vitalism. I don't know what the word "life" means if it starts to refer to everything, which makes the idea of a universe where everything is alive seem silly. There's not really any test we could do to tell whether or not the universe is alive, a dead universe and an alive one would look and act exactly the same, so there's no reason to think about it. Using metaphors to explain the universe is nice for simplifying new concepts, but we shouldn't confuse the metaphor for the universe itse
Why Don't People Help Others More?
lloyd00

I wouldn't make such a broad prediction, but it is easy to see schooling decreases personal authority, without which the individual cannot act altruistically or selfishly (I argue both are the same, but depend on what one considers self - John Livingston's 'Rogue Primate' expounds on this concept). I would suggest looking at the Amish culture as a case study. Historically, you can contrast early America (that of Franklin, Jefferson, Edison and the other American pioneers) and Hitler's Germany ( the Nazi system was adopted from the new American schools and... (read more)

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Why Don't People Help Others More?
lloyd00

I think there should be some use of the "moral sphere" model in understanding the dilemma presented. The moral sphere is conceptually easy to understand - each person extends moral consideration varying from the center, oneself, outward into society(or world in whole) until a boundary of moral exclusion is reached, and beyond this boundary exist 'them'. The model would thus have Buddha being an idealized moral example having no boundary of exclusion and no decrease in moral consideration from self to the rest of the world.

The next considerati... (read more)

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0TheOtherDave
Would you predict that students raised outside of the school system are, as a group, more altruistic than those raised within it?
Degrees of Radical Honesty
lloyd20

The basis for honesty are arguments for development of a an egalatarian relationship. If the relationship is not based on equality then dishonesty is an inevitable result in resolving moral dilemmas. In the example case there is no reason to consider whether or not deception in words should mirror the deception of hiding filthy Jews. To split hairs further the ability to convey the truth is absolutely impossible in language. The allusion of of the 1st quote is towards this understanding: anything contained in language is only an approximation of the truth. So how honest can we really be?

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