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No Harm Done: The Question of Morality in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Monday, October 16 2006 07:44 Profile Homepage #69
The majority can ignore the lunatic fringe offended by names. There's a solid majority in many places offended by profanity, though, so as SoT it's a good idea to avoid it unless you know who's around you. If nearly everyone swore, or more precisely if nearly everyone thought it's okay to swear in a public setting, you could get away with it everywhere.

ADoS, you're still missing a key point of relativism. Almost nobody does things that are harmful without believing in a benefit. Female circumcision is considered right, good, necessary, and so on by the practitioners. It's the same as religion: what right do you have as a non-member to judge the members? You are, after all, no more objective than they are since you're just as partisan to your "rational" view.

—Alorael, who would really like to know how Aran and his arachnophobia ended up playing games by Spiderweb Software. More importantly, Aran, do you identify strongly with Crisper? Are the GIFTS truly terrifying?
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Mac Users: Post Your Dashboard in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Monday, October 16 2006 07:33 Profile Homepage #18
Discovering iClip Lite made this topic worthwhile. Thanks, SoT.

—Alorael, whose PowerBook runs continuously except for system updates. He occasionally experiences memory leaks, but using du in the terminal fixes that. Why du should change and not just display file space usage is entirely unclear to him, but his RAM voodoo works.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
No Harm Done: The Question of Morality in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Sunday, October 15 2006 20:11 Profile Homepage #59
Profanity isn't harmful. Neither are nails on chalkboards. They're matters of politeness.

Yes, I was exaggerating about random harm, but you seem to take a very bleak, might makes right view. It's a small leap from there to a state of nature.

—Alorael, who already mentioned that logic can't output values without an a priori value input. Defining "harmful" as "wrong" is acceptable to most people.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
No Harm Done: The Question of Morality in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Sunday, October 15 2006 18:03 Profile Homepage #55
quote:
Originally written by The Almighty Do-er of Stuff:

Can you give me a rational argument as to why completely harmless behavior is wrong, then? Religious explanations by their very nature are irrational. Logic and emotion are what apply to the here and now, not the random whims of a god that may not even exist. Unless, of course, you can cite an example of something observably in this world that is clearly, unambiguously caused by a god.
You're skipping a step in religion. If you follow the religion, then its requirements are logical. God says so and God knows best. Religion itself is not rational, which is why you aren't religious anymore, but irrationality doesn't make a moral code inherently wrong or internally inconsistent.

My argument for harmless behavior being wrong is SoT's. Suppose you are giving a speech and you sprinkle it with profanity. Suppose the audience of thousands (you're a popular speaker) does not like to hear profanity. You can convey the same information and emotions without resorting to profanity. Rationally, making thousands of people happier by not letting the speaker use profanity is better than making one person happier by allowing him to exercise his filthy vocabulary. It's optimization of happiness.

—Alorael, who can make the same argument for even more neutral situations. If you have the choice between making someone unhappy or not and there is no real cost to you either way, don't make them unhappy. That's called being polite and it greases the rough bits of society.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Mac Users: Post Your Dashboard in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Sunday, October 15 2006 17:52 Profile Homepage #1
I've got the weather, the dictionary, and a whole lot of stickies. My widgets are not creative.

—Alorael, who is too lazy to take a screenshot of boring widgets. He doesn't even use the dictionary, so all he has is weather and notes to himself. Fascinating!
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
No Harm Done: The Question of Morality in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Sunday, October 15 2006 14:48 Profile Homepage #49
I object to the misapplication of logic and the idea that rational morality can only be predicated on harm. The whole religious argument at the beginning holds no water. God doesn't need to make rules that are fair or sensible. If you're culpable for your thoughts, you deal with it or suffer divine punishment. Not liking it doesn't make it less true. You can stop believing or you can believe something else, but you can't rationally reject the tenets of faith.

The rest just seems like a gross simplification. A great deal of right and wrong is less flashy than murder and paraphilia. Is politeness a useless social construct? I would say not, but one can argue otherwise. Nobody really has but Tullegolar, and his morals make random acts of violence perfectly acceptable.

—Alorael, who thinks ADoS's views are interesting and perfectly valid. The justification is the problem. Throwing around words like logic and rationality is in fact an emotional appeal.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
No Harm Done: The Question of Morality in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Sunday, October 15 2006 12:45 Profile Homepage #45
No, see, there's where I don't follow you. You are no more harmed by not being able to curse than they are by having to listen to you curse.

—Alorael, who thinks it comes down to moderate distaste and inconvenience. The inconvenience of the minority loses out. That's rational.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
No Harm Done: The Question of Morality in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Sunday, October 15 2006 12:27 Profile Homepage #43
quote:
Originally written by ADoS:

My overall rule is, as I stated in the essay, that morals should make logical sense, and more specifically, that morals stating that completely harmless things are wrong make no sense.

As for nature and offense, you seem to have it somewhat backwards. While I don't think going with nature is always right (i.e. rape, which is perfectly natural, yet goes against my morals for the reasons I stated in the essay), I was actually arguing that the vague, inconsistent notion of "naturalness" is a bad qualifier for morality, not that nature is bad. Also, I argued that offense as a reaction to some words to the exclusion of their synonyms is the fault of the offended, not that it's "bad" to offend people.
The problem is that you can't get a value judgment from strict logic. Somewhere you need to introduce a premise of value, and that's something that people can and will disagree about. You can demand internally consistent morals, but you can't demand objective morals.

I'm still not convinced by any of the arguments against, say, profanity. When there's really no harm being done either by allowing or preventing profanity, why does allowing win? Tullegolar is still working with the assumption that people are harmed by profanity. I think most people who are offended wouldn't claim that they are "damaged" by language. They just would rather not hear it. It's also considered not nice to scratch a chalkboard in front of people constantly for much the same reasons. Again, why does the ability to be rude trump the desire of the majority not to have to deal with rudeness?

Actually, Tullegolar, you seem to believe that proper morality should be in a Hobbesian state of nature. The problem is that we do have societies, and they exist to prevent that. If most people prefer to avoid profanity, they are collectively the strong and the ones who would like to curse are weak. They don't have the right to do it because they don't have the strength to do it and get away with it. Grammar has the same problem. Once there's more collective strength on the side of freedom, it becomes permissible. But "might makes right" isn't morality, it's practicality.

—Alorael, who is feeling slow and incoherent today. Maybe he'll be able to make sense later.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
No Harm Done: The Question of Morality in General
Or else o'erleap.
Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Sunday, October 15 2006 09:31 Profile Homepage #35
Asking for logic from religion misses the point. Religion doesn't have to be reasonable. You can choose not to follow it or you can choose to accept the things that don't make sense to your rational mind.

ADoS, your counterexamples to SoT's yellow argument are on a completely different scale. Profanity (or wearing/waving the color yellow) is not going to make a huge difference in a life the way the right to marriage or legal inferiority can. What you have is a conflict of preferences. If I want to curse and everyone else does not want me to curse, I am not in fact prevented from expressing anything.

Questions of practical ethics and morality rarely have pat answers to all possible questions. I think the limit has to be wherever people get the most freedom with the least offense. Good luck finding that point.

People who dislike profanity may or may not get anger, but the anger is the result of distaste and not vice versa. It's just as easy to say that the one using the profanity should get over it and find a more polite means of expression just like someone can get over wanting to wear yellow. Why is it more logical for one person to have the right to offend many than for many to minimally restrict the one to acceptable behavior?

—Alorael, who from a communicative point of view laments the overuse of profanity. If it's supposed to convey strong emotion, usually anger, outrage, or something of the sort, how are those going to be expressed when everyone is spouting @#%$ at the slightest provocation?
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
A1: Movement Speed in The Avernum Trilogy
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Sunday, October 15 2006 09:19 Profile Homepage #8
Maybe it's a Mac/PC thing?

—Alorael, who thinks that despite minor differences it's more accurate to say that Avernum was the second game to use the Nethergate engine.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Physics conundrums in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Saturday, October 14 2006 08:41 Profile Homepage #46
I am absolutely serious when I say that introductory physics may have saved my life. I was standing on a roof painting when wasps atacked me, and I was able to quickly calculate roughly how fast I'd be going if I jumped off the roof and whether I would be in more pain than if I let the wasps get me. I jumped and suffered nothing more than wounded dignity.

Also, physics can explain why you don't spontaneously disassemble into your component molecules. That's pretty neat.

—Alorael, whose calculations while pursued by wasps used a great deal of approximation, including the perhaps worrisome ad hoc creation of an upper bound on speed at which humans want to hit the ground in free-fall.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Countering bulk in Avernum 4
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Saturday, October 14 2006 08:38 Profile Homepage #1
That depends on the penalty you're talking about. If you are losing AP, add more strength until you're not encumbered by the gear being carried. If the problem is having a lowered chance to hit, add more strenght, dexterity, or melee weapons. (I'm not sure if both of the first two help.) If you want to cast mage spells in heavy armor, the only thing that helps is the Natural Mage trait. Unlike A1-3, you can't cast spells while dressed in a tank.

—Alorael, who actually never dressed his mages in tanks. There were too many wonderful non-tank mage armors.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
A1: Movement Speed in The Avernum Trilogy
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Saturday, October 14 2006 08:34 Profile Homepage #1
Try using the numeric keypad or the arrow keys instead of the mouse. That's a little inconvenient on a laptop keyboard because you can't move diagonally with the arrows, but with numbers it's fine.

—Alorael, who doesn't think there's any one-click look trick. He's a poet and while he did know it, this one was entirely unintentional.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Another death topic... in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Friday, October 13 2006 10:49 Profile Homepage #7
At least we know that Homeland Security can protect us from dangerous aircraft.

—Alorael, who suspects an attempted building theft. It's a good thing that 50-story building was solidly anchored.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Pan lever in Richard White Games
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Thursday, October 12 2006 17:02 Profile Homepage #1
That's not the question at all.

Blue?

—Alorael, who will have you know that your answer to this poll makes no real difference in the end.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
God, I am so mad! in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Thursday, October 12 2006 08:31 Profile Homepage #39
Plus there's the fact that people will always complain. Always. Any fix is going to make some people who were happy unhappy and some people who were originally unsatisfied still won't be.

—Alorael, who should clarify that he mostly wishes he had a Mac capable of running Windows XP. Whether or not he'd actually buy Windows is a bridge he'll cross or burn (or both) when he comes to it. He may have to turn to Q and outrageous difficulty just to refrain from touching the spawn of Microsoft.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Physics conundrums in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Thursday, October 12 2006 08:26 Profile Homepage #29
And my favorite example of one of Latour's "black boxes" that caused a fuss was Einstein's physics disagreeing with Newton's. The point is that a conclusion drawn from the double helix of DNA or one that can be explained by the double helix structure is not immediately subjected to queries of O RLY? The double helix is not a question.

Now I may be getting my history wrong, but when someone first proposed ssDNA, assuming it was after Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin, the first reaction was probably not "sure." It was probably "go back and justify how you can possbily imagine a single, non-helical strand of DNA."

—Alorael, who considers the first chapter of Science in Action by Latour mandatory reading for anyone writing with citations. It's a how-to guide for disagreeing with people and making people agree with you whether they want to or not. On further thought, maybe it's actually mandatory reading for politicians. No, that's really the third chapter on how to get people to pay for you to break their knees so you can sell them wheelchairs.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
high arts in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Wednesday, October 11 2006 20:06 Profile Homepage #7
He said denegrating and meant denigrating. That's really a spelling you want to get right.

—Alorael, who considered a pun and then decided that he'd better refrain. It's enough to get one ejected from positions of very minor political power.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
high arts in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Wednesday, October 11 2006 16:42 Profile Homepage #2
Because religion is a serious topic, worthy of treatment in art, and it's pretty much impossible to bring up religion without getting some hate from someone?

—Alorael, who admits that severed heads go beyond the usual level of hate-engendering. The principle stands anyway.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
God, I am so mad! in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Wednesday, October 11 2006 14:09 Profile Homepage #33
Turn-based MMORPGs have problems, and Fallout humor is largely dependent on not encountering the kinds of mouth-breathers who somehow seem to outnumber everyone online. Well, okay, Fallout could work with that, I guess, but somehow it wouldn't be the same if everyone were like that.

—Alorael, who thinks part of Blizzard's skill is in not churning out sequels when they can't improve. If they had a bigger, better, second Starcraft to be made, they'd make it. The fact that they aren't (as far as we know) probably means they don't have the ideas yet. The fact that the FPS adaptation was canned suggests that it wasn't such a great idea in the first place.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Physics conundrums in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Wednesday, October 11 2006 12:52 Profile Homepage #18
[Edit: That's an interesting idea. What's the coefficient of static friction between water and air? I don't think that there's no mass-volume ratio that allows water to levitate, but it's actually quite possible.]

I'd be surprised if Latour has any real scientific background. I also bastardized his point, but you didn't disagree with it. Enjoying the exercise of understanding doesn't make understanding scientifically necessary. Either way, that's not what Latour talks about. He's more concerned with sociology of science, really.

In a bad nutshell, building a new theory out of old theories is perfectly acceptable and necessary, because the it's harder for people to dismantle your theory if they have to dismantle the universally accepted theories to do it. Or, more charitably, building new knowledge out of old knowledge is more scientifically reliable than inventing it whole cloth, which tends to be a mark of junk science and crackpots.

Latour picks some good examples, among them the structure of DNA. There's really no need to worry about the structure of DNA anymore. It's so proven that trying to re-evaluate makes everyone think you're a lunatic. Working with that as a solid building block gives your own research a very solid foundation and makes your work harder to undermine.

—Alorael, who just got into unfortunate construction metaphors/puns and still didn't explain it very well. He doesn't agree completely with Latour, particularly in some of his wilder conclusions (politicians are not scientists!), but his explanation of scientific literature seems spot-on and highly amusing. Making science deliberately full of jargon to keep the rubes out is only the beginning.

[ Wednesday, October 11, 2006 12:54: Message edited by: Victim Rich Environment ]
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
God, I am so mad! in General
Or else o'erleap.
Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Wednesday, October 11 2006 12:31 Profile Homepage #29
Actually, although it's been a while since anyone checked, Macs and PCs are about even on these boards. What with some PCs probably being a little too old and some Macs being new enough to run Windows XP, there's probably a fair audience for that plug.

—Alorael, who can only wish that he could run Windows XP. That's something he really, really never thought he'd say.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Physics conundrums in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Wednesday, October 11 2006 10:28 Profile Homepage #11
I think that's more or less the key to 2. There's a lot of air and not that much water. As long as the air is not really having any net change in location, the water will just be bashed around in place. Suction might be the answer to why we have cohesive clouds and not just hazes of water in the sky, but that also might have more complicated answers involving atomspheric science and heat transfer.

If it's philosophy of science you're after, try Bruno Latour. He makes a solid argument for scientific ready-made widgets. Angular momentum isn't fundamental, but it's as close to true as one needs to get with physics. Physicists therefore take it as a tool and don't bother tinkering with it because it's been done for them already. Understanding mechanics through angular momentum and torque is no less valid even if it's difficult to tie it back into fundamental principles as long as it necessarily can be so tied.

—Alorael, who thinks that lift is exactly like kites, except that aeronautical engineers have to make the most efficient kites possible. He'd go into more detail about the guts of super-kites if he were an aeronautical engineer, but he's no rocket scientist.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Physics conundrums in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Wednesday, October 11 2006 07:48 Profile Homepage #9
Trying to answer physics questions to a physicist makes me a little nervous, but why not?

1. My very rough understanding is that it's a matter of Newton's third law/conservation of momentum. Air hits the wing and is deflected downward, so the wing and the plane are deflected upward. It's a lot more complicated than that, which is why we have aeronautical engineers. I think.

2. Hot air rises and cold air sinks for reasons that I think I'll leave alone for now. Hot air rises and hits bits of water in the sky. If the force of air going up is enough to oppose gravity, you get clouds that stay more or less stationary. If there's no hot air, you get suddenly falling clouds that we call rain.

3-5. A wizard did it.

—Alorael, who thinks he could probably work through Newton's cradle eventually. Ah, hubris! He'll leave it as an exercise for the reader instead, though, because it builds character.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
What have you been reading lately? in General
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
 written Wednesday, October 11 2006 07:31 Profile Homepage #164
American Gods is really nothing at all like Good Omens. It's still great and still funny in places, but it's much less light-hearted and much less obviously explained, quite possibly because of the lack of Pratchetesque footnotes.

—Alorael, who learned everything he knows about the old British currency system from a Good Omens footnote. He also learned most of what he knows about cloistered orders from the same.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00

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