Day: November 15, 2018, 4:57 PM

When First

Chill Regular-ass Post

When I first started helping people with computer problems, when I was six or seven years old, I thought that in the future — maybe by the year 2000 — everyone would know enough about computers that I wouldn’t have to help anyone anymore.

Obviously, I was very wrong about that. I think what I missed is that even though most computer interactions are very simple, they are more complex than about 60% of the population can really handle. Thus, as long as there are computers there will be ridiculous tech support requests and such (“I can’t find my Start menu.” Well, it’s in the same place it was for the last 10,000 days you’ve been using Windows….)

In other words, tech support is never going away, unless we raise the IQ of a lot of people all at once. Damn.

Human Morality

Chill Uncategorized

“A further logical flaw arises in connection with the widely held conviction that humans are morally superior beings because they possess, while others lack, the capacities of a moral agent (free will, accountability, deliberation, judgment, practical reason). This view rests on a conceptual confusion. As far as moral standards are concerned, only beings that have the capacities of a moral agent can properly be judged to be either moral (morally good) or immoral (morally deficient). Moral standards are simply not applicable to beings that lack such capacities. Animals and plants cannot therefore be said to be morally inferior in merit to humans. Since the only beings that can have moral merits or be deficient in such merits are moral agents, it is conceptually incoherent to judge humans as superior to nonhumans on the ground that humans have moral capacities while nonhumans don’t.”

– Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics