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Cake day: December 10th, 2024

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  • lukewarm_ozone@lemmy.todaytoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldoopsie
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    2 days ago

    Sort of true, but the algorithm that Reddit-like platforms use is transparent and simple (it’s just based on likes and dislikes, and I think you can even look up the source for the sorting modes) and hence doesn’t directly try to feed you content that’d enrage you. I can just not read the posts about Musk and Trump, since I find most takes on the former bad and don’t care much about the latter. Meanwhile, on platforms like Twitter or Tiktok you are directly fed content out of some recommendation ML model trained on user engagement.

    (There’s also subtler differences. For example, on Reddit/Lemmy/etc, if you hate a post you can dislike it, which will generally make it show up less to people. But on, say, Tumblr, not only are there no dislikes, but if you are really hate a post you can only respond to it by reposting it, therefore spreading it further among your followers! That’s an absolutely devious platform-design move that could have been invented directly by Satan himself.)



  • Yet, people suffering from it can lead happy and fulfilling lives.

    Sure, it’s possible for a person with a severe disability to grow up happy. But when one is making a decision in real life (like having a child), one should consider an average case, not a exceptional one. And the average case for an example like Down’s Syndrome is pretty bad. It is a bit unclear how to quantify the suffering in this particular disease’s case because the main harm to the child is lifelong mental impairment and assorted physical disabilities - but it is at least going to inflict suffering on the child’s family, since caring for a child with a severe disability for their entire life isn’t exactly fun.

    It is a slippery slope that, if not navigated carefully, has historically leaded to atrocities.

    I don’t see the relation. You’ll notice that I’m not proposing killing off disabled people for the “improvement of society” or whatever it was that nazis called it. I am not doing this because nonconsensually killing a person is a harm to them. But deciding not to have a child isn’t the same thing as murdering a person - it’s not harming anyone who exists, and hence may well be morally better than having a child.

    (Oh, I suppose you might mean that I’m arguing that there are circumstances in which it’s morally bad for a person to have a child, which is similar to nazi eugenics in that I’m deciding whether or not people should have children? In that case, my answer is that the difference is that I’m a person, not an authoritarian government, and I don’t have power (nor, indeed, the desire) to force people to obey my personal moral judgements.)





  • carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side.

    Not necessarily. Someone dying isn’t the same as someone not existing at all.* It does imply that the world would be better off if it stopped existing, and under some assumptions implies it’d be moral to, say, instantly end all of humanity. I’m not sure that these conclusions are necessarily “contrary to our instincts”.

    *one reason why this has to be true, is that if we didn’t distinguish between those, then if an average life had positive value, it’d be immoral not to have as many children as possible, until the marginal value of an extra life fell to zero once again (kind of like how Malthus thought societies worked, except as a supposedly moral thing to do). That conclusion is something I do consider very contrary to my instincts.

    I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.

    I too am an utilitarianist, sure. I’m not sure I can possibly buy “maximum suffering and no happiness” being the zero point. I very strongly feel that there are plenty of lives that would be way worse than dying (and than never having existed, too). It’s a coherent position I think, just a very alien one to me.







  • I don’t think the “scientists” circle is there in reality.

    A world in which politicians actually needed to justify their actions by scientific research would be way better than this one. Yes, I know this is unreliable and biasable in a million ways, it’d still be better - it’s harder to make stuff up via a few intermediaries than to just make stuff up directly. Modern politicians are just linked directly to the twitter circle.