Click ‘active last month’, either for the whole Fediverse or after selecting a platform from the list.
You are absolutely right… I posted a while ago about a solid-state lab project I was working on. I made pretty large steps towards that, but I eventually realized that it would only make a difference if I could leverage the latest technology. So I’ve spent the last months working on a smaller-scale project (a very low-cost ultrasound imaging machine) and finally I’m starting to see some tangible results; I will build and present the final prototype in collaboration with my university, but the important thing here is that I’m getting both experience and reputation, plus I’m convincing a friend (an engineering lab researcher) to join an eventual, larger-scale, solid-state lab project. The idea is not to get “something that works and is open source”, as it was before, but to research cutting-edge technology.
Hi, sorry for not responding earlier. You seem to be very knowledgeable. I was trained in ethics as part of my medical training, so the extent of my knowledge may not be as great as yours. Anyway, these are the specific pieces of knowledge I was invoking:
- Ethics only applies to entities with free will. I don’t believe countries have free will since they act in a deterministic fashion.
- Ethics deals with principles that must be upheld. These principles include not causing harm, acting for the benefit of others, etc. I understand that these principles are the main mechanism for making choices.
- In the paradigm I was trained on, ethics only states what one should do, and doesn’t deal with punishment.
- A nexus of causality transfers responsibility. I believe there is a nexus of causality when any deterministic process is involved.
So, my point is that this specific situation must not be resolved by you stated means since:
- Here, punishment is incompatible with seeking the good of others.
- Since countries are deterministic, ethics doesn’t apply to them.
- Since countries are deterministic, even if ethics were to apply, responsibility is transferred (e.g., since I know 100% sure how a country will respond to my actions, I am triggering their response as much as them).
Maybe. But my point was that
- Countries aren’t subject to any actual laws enforced by an authority beyond themselves or more powerful countries.
- The behavior of a country approaches an ideal, homogeneous benefit-seeking entity better than a person.
So the legal dynamics between countries are very different from those between people.
Thanks, comrade, I didn’t know about the 16 Days of Activism. There were massive protests on the 25th, I even attended one. The good news is, our current government has responded to public outcry by pushing forward laws to protect women. The bad news is, sexism and anti-feminism is growing at an alarming rate here, so the next government will probably reverse everything… I hate this place.
So, let me summarize…
- China has strict anti-terrorism laws that deal with e.g. radicalization. They imprison anyone that breaks those laws in specialized prisons.
- People that happen to live in the same areas make a living by manufacturing and exporting goods, including polysilicon cells.
- Cutting imports from those areas would increase poverty and thus increase dissent in an already conflicting area; US government obviously decides to do it.
- Somehow they want me to believe that making those people poorer will change Chinese laws? Or something like that?
- Now they manage to somehow link it with renewables too, and propose measures that would increase their price. So guess we should rely as much as possible on oil, which benefits the US’ petrodollar system?
- And yet the article tries to make it sound like those panels are being manufactured by forced labor, by not giving much of an explanation, plus mashing it together with actual forced labor manufacture.
Yeah, we’ve all studied ethics. Ethics (no matter if you believe it’s inherent to reality or a useful construct) acts in two scenarios:
- If the individual follows it, it makes them act in a way that serves society.
- It allows to create laws that apply to all individuals for everyone’s good.
Ethics doesn’t state that “you should punish others when they act contrarily to ethics”. That’s law. And the reason it punishes people is because that discourages them from acting in that way again. Free will, if you wish.
Now, at the international scale there are no real laws. Implementation of laws depends on the ability of individual countries to enforce them, for their own interests. If we could create laws that affected every country, then yes, we could simply model these laws after ethics. But we can’t.
So, in the example I gave you, suppose you are a citizen of country #2. I already stated that the best course of action for your country would be to side with country #5. But then, since you believe you should punish that country because it acted unethically, you will push your government to side with #1 instead. You tried to enforce laws that didn’t exist, and now you’ve acted against your best interests.
The mistake here is that ethics doesn’t deal with punishment. Punishment is specified by laws, seeking the best interest of society. But the best course of action here was not to punish, yet your instinct led you the wrong way.
I’ll clarify then. You’re assuming individual ethics apply to large groups of people, which disregards the reason why those ethics exist in the first place. They exist at the individual level as an “acceptable” set of behaviors to discourage behaviors outside it. There are two important differences between individuals and countries:
- Individuals differ in their willingness to do harm or good, while for very large groups these differences simply disappear in every case. As I mentioned, every country acts for their own good, and if they do good it’s simply because that’s what it’s most useful to them at the moment. I.e. ethics do not offer meaningful judgements at that scale.
- Individuals are overseen by governments, while countries are not. This means it’s impossible to reward or punish actors from outside the system, and any rules are created and enforced by the actors themselves. I.e. ethics do not offer any utility at that scale.
For these two reasons, ethics do not make sense at an international scale. I’ll illustrate with an example:
There are 5 people. 4 of them make an agreement to beat up the 5th. This person learns of the plot against them and decides to attack each of the others separately, one by one, by just waiting outside their homes.
In this case, the 5th person should have simply called the police. What they did was unacceptable, since they attacked first, thus escalating the conflict.
However, at an international scale, things change dramatically. There is no police, so there’s just country #5, presented with a choice: either do nothing and get beaten up, or attack first. Did they act right or wrong? Well, it doesn’t matter, since there’s no way to change the result. The country will always choose the second option, and, furthermore, the other 4 countries will know damn well what #5 will do. In fact, they will not plot against it unless they think they are going to win in every scenario.
Now, imagine this happens, and country #5 has already attacked country #4. Now, the remaining 3 would be able to beat up #5. But let’s say #2 and #3 decide to side with #5 and beat #1; maybe in that situation they would suffer less losses, get better profits, etc. But in this case it’s in the best interest of #1 to oppose #5, and thus to keep #2 and #3 on its side, so it decides to convince the people on those two countries to hate on #5. Now they can’t side with it, since they would face backlash, so they need to co-operate with #1.
While a purely ethical analysis only concludes that ‘#5 attacked #4’ (which doesn’t provide any useful course of action), the more useful benefit analysis affords that #1 has managed to obtain the highest benefit, by manipulating #2 and #3 and capitalizing on conflict between #4 and #5. The useful course of action would have been for #2 and #3 to side with #5.
This isn’t about ethics. Countries are not people, they only act in their own interest with exactly zero regard for anything else. Russia attacked Ukraine because it was the least bad option for them (Ukraine joining NATO would be very bad for them), and the US imposes sanctions because it is also the best possible move, and now they can do it without facing backlash. And that includes propaganda if necessary, on both sides.
The point I’m trying to defend is that manipulating the public’s opinion is part of the global dynamic, and everyone should be aware of, and oppose it, to get what THEY want, rather than what the large-scale political chaos imposes on them. You seem to agree on that, so that’s great, I don’t see the need for further debate.
Here, if you look for the word ‘Russia’ it appears in 5 out of 8 episodes. They literally infiltrate a Russian facility, where the Russians appear as the antagonists, plus Russian characters act in other vile ways in the plot.
Euthanasia, much like psychiatry, is a tool available for those that are suffering. But in those cases wherein you could avoid that suffering by other means, when the suffering is caused by the all-withering hand of capitalism… Well, sometimes you gotta amputate an arm, that’s undeniable, but you should try curing the infection first if you can.
You could think that, just as easily as you could NOT think that. In fact, there’s no reason to discard either option, or any other. For all you know, you could be a tomato that some scientist tricked into believing it exists.
Thus, one doesn’t choose to believe something because it’s possible, but because it’s useful to do so. So we choose to believe the simplest possible hypothesis that explains all the phenomena we care about. “We live in a simulation” is just as plausible as any other idea, but it adds exactly nothing to our understanding of the world around us.
Thanks for the sources, I find this one particularly interesting. I’ll need to look into it more carefully, since we already know there’s a great deal of manipulation around this issue.
Edit: tl;dr: “we have extremely hard evidence that the Chinese authorities are putting people in prison for breaking the law”.
Well, I read this by IBM, it’s mostly aimed at learning how to use their products, but I think it does a really good job at that.
Well, it occurred to me that I could try to make an ultrasound machine for the lowest possible cost and present it at the end of my medical degree as an investigative work. So far I’ve managed to get an unfocused ultrasound signal by means of a cheap piezo element, using an Arduino board and some electronic components. Right now I’m trying to replace this setup with a custom PCB, ESP32 MCU and wire up an FPGA module to eventually synthesize a phased array signal and get an actual image. The idea is that the device will be quite small and one will be able to simply connect it to a laptop, start the client software (which I’m writing in Rust) and work with it.
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