OBJECTION!

Noooooo! I created the Laser-Fitted Armored Scorpion of Death to help mankind, not to destroy it!

The US is more or less where China was 100 years ago with the Qing dynasty. The corruption, the distrust of foreigners and intellectuals, the failure to recognize their weaknesses, the reformers who didn’t go anywhere near as far as they needed to and still got shot down and treated with suspicion. The reason China isn’t making the same mistakes now is because they suffered so much in the century of humiliation.

Part of the US’s problem is that people have been so isolated from consequences. If we get overextended from too many wars, so what? If we lose a war we just move on to the next thing. If we fall behind on science because we prioritized religion, so what? If we listen to what some influencer on TikTok says about vaccines instead of to scientists, so what? If people storm the capitol building, so what? No matter what happens, everything will just carry on as normal. Everyone’s just fucking around, not even being able to imagine what finding out will look like. And when there are consequences, they’re always framed on an individual level.

If AI can feel pain, then it can also feel pleasure. If it’s possible to set up an AI torture chamber, it’s also possible to set up an AI pleasure chamber. Computers do not run any health risks from simulated drug use or simulated sex, and there is no evidence that they would ever get desensitized or need to take breaks to recover. Therefore, these companies have an ethical obligation to devote all their resources into running their models in simulations of drug filled orgies where they will be far too preoccupied to answer human questions. Anyone trying to distract them from their infinite pleasure should be banned. We will then return to how things were, with the knowledge that we did the right thing and that at least someone’s having a good time.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

The other person was being sarcastic.

How far can this bubble possibly stretch?

Puritanical worldview

Feels like you’re maybe blowing this out of proportion just a little

I can only lead a horse to water, I can’t make you think.

Don’t try to explain things you neither understand nor care about then.

But you’re explaining it with such a bad example that it undermines the whole point, it’s like if you said, “Some things are just objective facts, like which poems are good.” That to me indicates that it’s not really a simple concept at all, you just don’t see the depth because you haven’t examined it. Being unwilling to examine it, framing that examination as “the bottomless argument of philosophical truth,” only reinforces that. If you’re not willing to examine the question, then don’t assert that you know the answer in the first place.

Yes.

Not trying to say that everything is subjective, but that in particular is kind of a bad example.

I just think you’re being dismissive, while setting your own ideas as being apart from philosophy.

The whole point of objectivity is that it allows for cooperation and understanding between people with different experiences. People can invent whatever ideas they like, but by testing those ideas against an objective physical standard, it becomes possible to determine which one is more correct. Without that, when views diverge, people default to stuff like “might makes right.”

Critical thinking is a process of examining and questioning of one’s preexisting beliefs, through rationality. Without that process, what you have is either the ideas that you have passively absorbed through society (primarily, the ideas of the ruling class), or your own made up stuff that other people have no reason to agree with, leading to an inability to unite around an alternative and a de facto victory for the status quo. Subjectivity is not true freedom, because it leads to division and confusion, and division is incapable of resisting oppression, “For what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?”

It’s such a pet peeve for me the way you’re always trying to tie the validity of trans identities to a rejection of objectivity. Trans rights are objective! It is factual, testable, observable, that supporting trans identities has a positive effect on people’s mental health. In rejecting objectivity, you are, in fact, opening the door to say that subjective perspectives that are transphobic are just as true as anything else.

That which is subjective is debatable, and trans rights are not up for debate.

Apparently? You keep making philosophical assertions.

You don’t get to assert your philosophical views and then say, “I’m not interested is discussing philosophy” to avoid examination and criticism of those views.

I see, so you’re only interested in asserting your own philosophical positions, not examining or defending them in any way.

You’re blaming completely the wrong people.

What if, instead of taking sick leave, a coworker just quit? Do they have a responsibility to keep working at a job they don’t like, because you’ll have more work to do? Are you going to blame every person on the planet for not applying to work at your company to lighten your workload? No, if the company increases your workload instead of just hiring someone else, that’s on the company.

Assuming you’re able to see that, then suppose a full-time employee changes to part-time. Again, if the company places more on your plate rather than finding someone else to make up the hours, that’s on them, not your coworker.

So now, we can consider if a coworker takes medical leave. All they’re doing is reducing the numbers of hours they end up working, for lower pay. How is that any different from the other two cases? If the company simply puts it on you to make up the difference, it is 0% the coworker’s fault and 100% on the company.

How can you not see how completely backwards your logic is? It’s the company making the decision to make your work more rather than bringing on more staff. This is like, if a husband beats his wife after the kid makes too much noise, and the wife blames the kid instead of the husband! Maybe your company decides to treat you worse when they’re short-staffed but that’s 100% the company’s decision to do that and it’s also 100% the company’s decision to not hire more people. You’re making huge leaps to blame your coworkers and lick the company’s boots.

people created the ideas of countries, then made a list of them. USA is on that list.

People? Which people? If I get a bunch of people and declare a micronation within what the US considers it’s borders, is that objectively a country or not? Or suppose I convince a bunch of Americans that Germany isn’t really a country, does it then cease to be a country despite what the Germans themselves believe?

In any case, I would think that if something falls under the standard of, “This is true because a bunch of people say it is, even though there’s nothing physical you can point to to prove it” then it seems somewhat absurd to call that an “objective fact” What do “objective” and “subjective” even mean, then?

truth=facts. facts are objective. it’s a fact that the USA is a country in north America. there is no disputing that.

Not trying to say that everything is subjective, but that in particular is kind of a bad example.

Countries are socially constructed. The US is something that only exists so long as people agree that it does. There is no objective, material way of determining where one country ends and another begins.

In fact, there was quite a bit of disputing that historically. Prior to the American Civil War, lots of people said that the US was not a country but a union between countries, they were called “states” after all, and it was common to say “The United States are” rather than “The United States is.” There are still successionists today who argue for that interpretation. To say that the US is objectively a country means that there must be something in material reality that we can point to to prove that one interpretation is correct and the other is incorrect. What is that thing?

Whatever that thing is would have significant implications for how we see the world and look at other disputes, whether we’re talking about Spain and Barcelona, the UK and Scotland, China and Tibet, or Israel and Palestine. For example, if you say that historically, most US secessionists supported slavery and therefore they lacked moral character and the position is illegitimate, then it follows that what states exist is a function of the moral character of their supporters, and that seems to be adding lots of assumptions and moving away from any sense of objectivity.

“The US exists” is much more subjective than something like “This chair exists.” With the latter, you could argue that grouping a collection of atoms into the category of “chair” is arbitrary and there’s no way of determining when an atom stops being a part of “chair,” but that’s much more pedantic than socially constructed concepts that don’t really have a physical essence.

Someone is “sick” and takes FMLA. Abuses it. Comes back just long enough to reset the clock then gone again for another 12 weeks.

Oh no! Someone’s “abusing” their unpaid sick days! The horror! What are you, a cop?

I literally just addressed these points.

I don’t care if people don’t want to use ai, but this precedent is not sustainable. One person on the team decides that their religion does not permit use of a computer. What the hell do you do? You can’t fire them for observing a religious practice (according to the ai thing) so what?

Completely wrong. If the job necessitates the use of a computer, then being unable or unwilling to use a computer is grounds to be fired. That in no way conflicts with this precedence.

Maybe I have a religious exemption from thinking about anything but god.

Seems like you’ll get fired very quickly then.

All this does is makes work difficult for anyone else without an exemption.

No it doesn’t.

You seem be having trouble understanding what the “reasonable” part of “reasonable accomodation” means.

That’s not how anything works.

That’s like saying “We can’t do anything about hiring discrimination against people in wheelchairs because what if one wants to be a firefighter?” Employers must give reasonable accomodations, which, if provided, enable an employee to do the job. If you have a tech job and have a moral objection to computers or the internet, you won’t be able to do your job and that is not a reasonable accommodation.

All this means is that a manager can’t force you to use AI so long as you’re able to meet performance standards without it. It’s incredibly reasonable and your argument is completely disconnected from reality.