Although I somewhat agree with the comment about style, I feel that the point you're making could be received with some more enthusiasm. How well-recognized is this trolley problem fallacy? The way I see it, the energy spent on thinking about the trolley problem in isolation illustrates innate human short-sightedness and perhaps a clear limit of human intelligence as well. 'Correctly' solving one trolley problem does not prevent that you or someone else will be confronted with the next. My line of arguing is that the question of ethical decision making requires an agent to also have a proper 'theory of mind': if I am making this decision, what decision will a... (read more)
With this article, I intend to initiate a discussion with the community on a remarkable (thought) experiment and its implications. The experiment is to conceptualize Stuart Kauffman's NK Boolean networks as a digital social communication network, which introduces a thus far unrealized method for strategic information transmission. From this premise, I deduce that such a technology would enable people to 'swarm', i.e.: engage in self-organized collective behavior without central control. Its realization could result in a powerful tool for bringing about large-scale behavior change. The concept provides a tangible connection between network topology, common knowledge and cooperation, which can improve our understanding of the logic behind prosocial behavior and morality. It also... (read 5781 more words →)
Nice! I actually had this as a loose idea in the back of my mind for a while, to have a network of people connected like this and have them signal to each other their track of the day, which could be actual fun. It is a feasible use case as well. The underlying reasoning is also that (at least for me) I would be more open to adopt an idea from a person with whom you feel a shared sense of collectivity, instead of an algorithm that thinks it knows me. Intrinsically, I want such an algorithm to be wrong, for the sake of my own autonomy :)
The way I see... (read more)