Comment by Dylan16807
2 years ago
> the answers we give are rounded according to our own values
I agree with this entirely.
And rounding does not change the answer in most situations.
Something that isn't well-defined can still be mostly-defined.
I have no idea what the point of that strawman is in your last paragraph. It doesn't make sense with or without rounding. Maybe if you round every single value to infinity, but that's not what "rounding" normally means...
I honestly don't know how to respond to this, it's too vague.
I can try to word it better?
You said when people look at moral situations, they use their own values to round their measurement. And I thought that was a good way to describe things.
Then for some reason you acted like "rounding" turns things into strawman-level black and white. The slightest blemish (not hiring a specific good person) qualifying as evil.
Let's say a scale of 0 to 10. If people disagree whether some issue is a 3 or 4, and a few people say 5, and that's 95% of responses, then that disagreement isn't a big deal. It doesn't matter that it's not well-defined, it's sufficiently-defined.
That would be rounding. Showing that the question is not nonsense.
If they disagree whether it's a 0 or a 10 that's a totally different thing that is not rounding.
Appreciate the explanation.
> Then for some reason you acted like "rounding" turns things into strawman-level black and white. The slightest blemish (not hiring a specific good person) qualifying as evil.
This was in direct response to the top-level comment making that very assertion (via a blog post). If I'm understanding you correctly, I think we're actually agreeing that it's absurd. The CEO of a "good" company indirectly, but unambiguously, called me a bad person for not leaving my job. I say, if it's so cut-and-dry, and I want to be a "good" person, why aren't they helping me get a better job? Of course, it's an absurd ask.
Somebody isn't only allowed to be "good" if they do every good thing possible to them. And I am sure said CEO does many acts others would consider "bad", such as eating industrial meat or flying, both of which participate in the generation of immeasurable harm.
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Also, with regard to your scale - you've given the question too much credit. The question doesn't ask "how much are you good or bad?", it asks and receives a binary answer. And the vast, vast majority of people can't be assigned one of those binary categories of "good" and "bad".
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