You have every reason to take pride in your work and how far you've come, but you're missing the point. "Slave labor" is of course an exaggeration (and an exaggeration that shouldn't be made lightly) but the point is you didn't have as much freedom in that job as your Western colleagues.
You had to work harder than the Swedes because the alternative was worse for you. It sounds like you're happy for your time at that company, but a lot of H1B workers find themselves in unpleasant work conditions that they don't have the same freedom to leave as their American counterparts. Their employers know they can subject them to a worse environment because they have more riding on it, whereas an American worker can simply leave and find a better job.
That's the point. It's more like indentured servitude than slavery in that regard anyway. The problem isn't that it doesn't make anyone's lives better in the end, the problem is that it's of concerning ethics on the part of the employer.
>you didn't have as much freedom in that job as your Western colleagues.
Very true.
>You had to work harder than the Swedes because the alternative was worse for you.
Not very true. I never worked hard in my life. I worked productively. Yes, I've done in my first 2 years in the USA more than in my 15 years in the home country. Because in my home country you had to share a Sun workstation with 10 other teams, and X.25 card? You can order it for the next year delivery, at it may be delivered, but never on time.
Swedes were late because they didn't know that you can implement the needed subset of the ASN.1 encoding using a simple, hand-made stack machine.
>American worker can simply leave and find a better job.
In my days the H1B quota was not immediately exhausted, so there was a window of opportunity each year. Raise the H1B limit - and you'll deliver almost the same amount of freedom to H1B workers.
>That's the point. It's more like indentured servitude than slavery in that regard anyway.
My point is that it's more complicated than that. The employer - in the present situation - can 1) hire an American worker, 2) hire an H1B employer. My point is that option 2 - in the present world - is actually an increase of liberty in the world, not slavery.
>the problem is that it's of concerning ethics on the part of the employer.
The ethics of the employer do not concern me that much. I can't change them. I can hope to change your ethics, ethics of a person I am directly talking to. And my concern is that you are labeling H1B program as an "indentured servitude", while it actually increases liberty in the world. That's my concern, or at least that's a paradox I clearly see.
Yeah, people have been talking about the decreased Vitamin D levels in COVID patients and suggesting supplementation since almost the very beginning of the pandemic. Maybe they just don't want to draw attention away from the fact that vaccination and masking are still by far the best means of avoiding hospitalization.
iirc, the first mention I remember was from a Stanford, CA area Doctor who was not waiting for the CDC to make a press release before making a statement about what he saw anecdotally (~Nov 2019) given how quickly his hospital was overwhelmed. Specifically, he noted that patients with Vitamin D deficiencies were having the worst symptoms.
I think they're saying to be mad about what data is collected. For example, be mad if they're storing your IP address and location and not be mad if they're just storing a counter of how many people visited their marketing page.
A privacy first browser should be completely up front about what data is being collected. The simple fact that they did while implying something else means that they arent to be trusted to not abuse the privilege in the future.
I already said this in a different comment, but the difference is that we were not designed while a Swiss army knife was. Design implies intent— it implies that something was developed for a purpose, that it's supposed to be used in a certain way.
Whether or not I use the corkscrew on my Swiss army knife doesn't change the fact that someone built the corkscrew for the purpose of opening corked bottles.
The enzymes/features humans possess that enable us to consume meat were selected for because at some point in the history of our species they enabled our ancestors to survive while others without the related genes did not.
This can change at any point, for any species. If we are no longer in an environment where eating meat confers a significant survival advantage then the fact that we evolved to be able to eat meat has absolutely no bearing on whether or not we should.
> Design implies intent— it implies that something was developed for a purpose, that it's _supposed_ to be used in a certain way.
You could say "design" by natural selection which is MY primary intent.
What is the appropriate word if not design? Your hands have a purpose even if they were not "designed." The purpose in this case is to grasp things. The purpose of the human body is then to eat meat and vegetables.
The word design flows better than purpose. Take the two sentences:
The human body was not designed to consume arsenic.
The purpose of the human body is not to eat arsenic.
See? Anyway let's not get too pedantic about this. I'm sure you get my intent despite the creationist technicality that the word "design" implies... I am clearly not implying THAT.
I don't think you're a creationist - this is just a very common distinction in thinking about evolution that results in all sorts of illogical fallacies.
This is my exact point: Your hands have no purpose. They evolved in a way that aided in survival. If someone is born mutated with their fingers fused together and then suddenly the entire earth floods and they find their solid hands help them swim better - were their hands evolved for the purpose of swimming? Were they designed? Is that human then "supposed to" swim?
We're finding microorganisms that can consume plastic. Does that mean they evolved for the purpose of eating plastic, a substance not typically found in nature?
In my worldview, no, they weren't. They can consume plastic, but that has no bearing on their purpose, and they aren't leaving part of their purpose unfulfilled if they don't eat plastic and instead eat other substances they evolved to be able to eat.
Your scenario with mutated hands ignores that evolution is about selection, not just single mutations. If hands evolved over a period of millions of years to be able to push water better, you could indeed say they evolved for the purpose of swimming. This is similar to saying that an eye’s purpose is to see, or a heart’s purpose is to pump blood, which are hardly controversial statements.
A purpose doesn’t have to imply concious design, intent, or immutablity.
You're making assumptions and taking the conversation in a pedantic direction.
I am aware of the nature of natural selection and how it builds complexity over time through various selection pressures not all of which are constantly aligned with end result. And although wings were initially little nubs not "designed" for flying you could say that wings are they are now are "designed" for flying.
"Design" and "purpose" as I've said many times throughout this thread is a word that flows better. It is a linguistic choice and you are taking the argument in a direction thinking I don't understand some trivial point about natural selection.
I’m not really sure why you bothered to reply, my comment had nothing to do with you. I was just pointing out the flaws in the scenario the parent comment presented.
Thats an interesting point but I think I'd have to disagree - purpose is very much constrained to concious design. Those traits were selected not for the purpose of swimming but merely due to the pressure of selection itself. In your example of flippers, the selection pressure is likely on mobility but the purpose of a limb is not mobility in and of itself. Would that make a flipper purposeless if moving over land?
>purpose is very much constrained to concious design.
Not true. Natural selection can produce the same results as artificial selection. They are both effectively the same process where in one scenario the guiding hand is human and the other scenario nature is the guiding hand.
If both nature and artificial selection evolved a mechanism that is very specifically and efficiently able to do one thing and one thing only does it mean that the thing evolved has no purpose? No it doesn't.
Either way we're getting into a linguistic and philosophical argument on the meaning of the word "purpose." These are traps. Ultimately we begin arguing about the definition of an ambiguous word thinking that the argument is profound. It's like all those arguments about "What is life." Pointless, "life" is the word that is loaded and ambiguous; any debate of that nature is simply an argument about the intricacies of a vocabulary word.
This is pedantic. Everybody knows about evolution and natural selection and the intricacies behind the process, it's old news.
Energy flows into and out of a system in a way where the configuration of particles begins arranging itself in lower and lower entropy formulations. The net entropy of the universe remains forever increasing but within this system it begins lowering. One of these low entropy formulation begins self replication imperfectly thereby introducing memory and mutation into the system allowing complexity to build on itself thereby producing particle configurations of immense low entropy and complexity.
Is there any "intent" in the description above? No. But you must consider the factor below:
Clearly your hands weren't designed with an intelligent intent. Yet there is something different about your hand then there is a rock. What is the word used to describe this difference? "Design" flows better, that's it, no need to get into "illogical fallacies."
>We're finding microorganisms that can consume plastic. Does that mean they evolved for the purpose of eating plastic, a substance not typically found in nature?
>In my worldview, no, they weren't. They can consume plastic, but that has no bearing on their purpose,
I don't know if you can see this, but your argument here is not profound. You are making a linguistic argument. You are arguing for the definition of the word "Purpose" or "Design." We BOTH know EXACTLY what is going on with natural selection and "design" is simply an easier way to express a point that your hand is a lower entropy configuration of atoms that is clearly very efficient at grasping things. But my previous sentence is an inefficient way of saying it. I could just say your hand is designed for the purpose of grasping things and the rock is not.
I think this point is very hard to argue against. Natural selection has no intent, mutation is random and its consequences are thus flukes as to whether they work or not to support an organisms survival. Very well explained @_nothing!
They described a scenario where someone was born with mutated hands that happened to be useful for swimming after the earth floods. There’s no selection or evolution there.
I guess. But I spend most of the day sitting in a chair typing things on a keyboard. So there is a lot of flexibility.
And I believe that more or less the only thing that sets us apart from animals is that we can reflect on our own actions. We choose. And that also comes with responsibility for our choices.
To argue that something is OK just because it "is in our nature" doesn't cut it for
creatures with the ability to discuss this on HN. Is my personal belief.
>And I believe that more or less the only thing that sets us apart from animals is that we can reflect on our own actions. We choose. And that also comes with responsibility for our choices.
Many Animals can choose too.
>To argue that something is OK just because it "is in our nature" doesn't cut it for creatures with the ability to discuss this on HN. Is my personal belief.
I'm not arguing for anything to be OK. I'm saying the argument in itself is pointless. You should note that your "morality" is not a choice. It is a behavioral trait evolved through millions of years of evolution and is trait shared to varying degrees among all humans across all cultures.
Thou shall not steal, Thou shall not kill, Thou shall not lie... etc. Your moral framework is a biological module hardwired into your mind to make you think in a certain way that aids with survival. But it was made for a more prehistoric time where humans had little understanding of the physical world and lived in limited tribal bands of hunters and gatherers.
The complexity of the world today exposes the archaic aspects of the moral module in our brain. We were not designed to feel sorry for the pig as it poses no evolutionary benefit yet we do as a side effect because pig experimentation simply didn't exist in ancient times so there was no selection pressure to make our moral module evolve in a way that will logically account for the pig.
This discussion does not exist because you are "above" your base evolutionary nature. It exists for two reasons: Your moral brain is designed for a more harsher simpler environment; and resources in our society are plentiful.
Once resources become stretched and limited, your brain will begin overriding your moral module. Almost starving to death? You will kill a pig without hesitation with your bare hands if that was the case. Survival is the name of the game in the end.
Not necessarily. We have evolved features that are beneficial to us as well as those that just happened and wasn’t too detrimental nor useful. We are not the “perfect creature”.
It is no longer thought to be a rudimentary organ but let me use it as an example: our appendix could very well serve no purpose, but it was not too detrimental (we didn’t get appendicitis in great enough numbers) so it remained.
While being able to digest meat is likely beneficial (though actually it is very easy to consume meat, especially cooked one compared to raw vegetables — just look at a cow’s digestive track), it doesn’t mean that we are made for that. A horse will gladly eat a small chicken for extra protein if it wanders to it (look up on YouTube)
>Not necessarily. We have evolved features that are beneficial to us as well as those that just happened and wasn’t too detrimental nor useful. We are not the “perfect creature”.
Nobody made an argument for being the perfect creature. I made an argument for the fact we were designed to eat meat and veggies.
>While being able to digest meat is likely beneficial (though actually it is very easy to consume meat, especially cooked one compared to raw vegetables — just look at a cow’s digestive track), it doesn’t mean that we are made for that.
You have enzymes in your body or arrangement of atoms that are targeted towards specifically digesting and breaking down meat. Sure you can put ethanol in a car designed for gasoline but my point remains the same, we were designed to eat meat.
If you want to get pedantic here I can reword it into a stuffy/wordy sentence and avoid utilizing the word "design.":
We have evolved for millions of years to have bodies that happen to be extremely efficient at digesting and breaking down meat.
Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different.
Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior. We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed. We evolved the capacity to eat meat just as we evolved a capacity for sympathy/empathy. Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.
>Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior.
Let me get one thing straight. I am not justifying anything. My angle is, what's the point? Don't justify anything at all. We're evil for killing, so be it. I am looking at it from a completely dispassionate angle. I do not need to somehow merge and mutate my moral framework to make it work with the existing reality.
>We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed.
Ok we were "designed" by natural selection to eat meat. I am not making a theological argument.
> Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different.
In the wild, carnivores devour the flesh of their prey while it is alive and awake. Possibly more significant if not equal in being morally questionable.
>Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.
No it is not. But what is surprising is that this empathy is the dominant behavior to our own evolutionary detriment (however mild). Empathy evolved to aid in survival of our genome, but when empathy evolves to the point where we are unable experiment on animals to assist in helping our own species... that is something unnatural.
I think we're on the same page in believing that there's not an inherent morality to these behaviors. I'm not accusing of you to try to justify some morally evil act.
The comment you originally replied to said this:
> Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature
To which you replied:
> It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat.
> The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things.
What I was responding to was the claim that because we evolved the capacity to eat meat, we should naturally be dispassionate to the killing of animals. What I'm saying is that since we evolved both the capacity for carnivory and sympathy, that our capacity for eating animals does not make our sympathy for animals at all unnatural.
It's not unnatural for us to want to kill animals for our survival. But it's also not unnatural for us to care about and feel sympathy towards animals. I feel that you've been using our capacity for meat-eating to deem vegetarianism, sympathy towards animals, etc. as against our nature.
With that, the point of my differentiating between the act of hunting and eating animals versus experimenting with them and their dead bodies is comparable to the difference in severity of humans fighting each other versus torturing each other. Humans clearly have the capacity for both, and yet one typically elicits a higher negative reaction in people than the other. Our ability to empathize with all sorts of pain falls along such an axis.
Edit:
To your last point, if people naturally develop an empathy towards animals so strong that it overrides their own sense of self-preservation, why is that unnatural? Is a human giving their life to save other humans unnatural? That's exactly why I keep repeating that there is no "design" - or if you'd prefer, "intent". There is no rule in nature that says species are supposed to prioritize the survival of their own, and so deviating from that nonexistent rule is not unnatural. If experimenting on animals is absolutely necessary to humanity's survival and humanity one day refuses, it will simply die out like millions of species before it. Going extinct isn't unnatural either.
I've never talked about "rules" or "intent" the way you put it.
I am simply saying how else do you describe the hand. The hand is for grasping things the rock is not. How to I ascribe this difference without using the word design or purpose because clearly the hand is much much more efficient at grasping things.
Sure you can use the hand for things it was not "designed" for like hand stands and walking while hand standing and if there was selection pressure your hands can evolve to be less hand like. But in doing such things you are departing from a "design."
Let me put it in a way that won't distract you. Your hand is efficient at grasping things by doing hand stands you are using it in ways that are not efficient. You are departing from the efficiency zone. There is merit in ONLY using the hammer on a nail rather than a screw driver even when the hammer was evolved with Zero actual "design" or "intent" and can one day evolve into something different.
Get it? So the same thing applies to not eating meat. By not doing so, someone is departing from the "efficiency zone." See how awkward it is to use "efficiency zone" in place of "design"?
I'd rather operate in my efficiency zone rather than push the boundaries of it just so that my progeny 1 million years later can walk on their hands. But that's just my personal take. My argument itself has no agenda other than to say that by not eating meat you are willfully departing from the efficiency zone. By being compassionate about the pig you are doing the same. And using the word "design" is just an EASIER way to express this departure from the "efficiency zone".
I appreciate that explanation. While awkward, I believe "efficiency zone" is a much clearer term to use, or at least it was worthwhile clarifying that that's what you meant.
While I understand what you're saying, I still don't think that ultimately matters when talking about what humans should or shouldn't be doing, what we're supposed to or not supposed to be doing, considering:
1. Human nature is not particularly efficient, and neither is evolution, at least on the surface. Peacocks' feathers are not particularly efficient features for them to develop. Yes, avoiding meat may seem harder than not avoiding meat, but the same could be said for following a religion, or organizing into a governing body, or adhering to some social norm, and yet humans have naturally done those for probably their entire existence. They do so because they at least perceive a benefit for them even if some might disagree on that benefit.
2. The human digestive system is not mono-faceted. It evolved to be multi-use and flexible. You are not using a hammer incorrectly by refraining from using the claw side because you've decided your problem can be solved perfectly fine with the hammer face. You are not using a TV incorrectly if you never visit channel 19 because you don't want to watch whatever is on channel 19.
I stand by my point. The fact that you can efficiently do something doesn't mean you're "supposed to" do that thing. It just gives you the option.
"suppose to" is another loaded and ambiguous word. You can smoke and inject your self with heroin everyday. It's not efficient and it doesn't mean you're not "suppose to" do it.
But there is something off with doing these things and I don't want to get into the pedantics of it all. Not eating meat is in the same general area without the social stigma of being a drug abuser.
> Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.
This part is actually true. Some animals do befriend, cooperate with or grieve over animals of different species. Not all animals are bugs and spiders.
> Empathy evolved to aid in survival of our genome, but when empathy evolves to the point where we are unable experiment on animals to assist in helping our own species... that is something unnatural.
Evolution is not a god. Things evolve because it happens, not for fixed purpose. If we genetically evolve to be "unable experiment on animals to assist in helping our own species", then that evolution is as natural as anything else.
Yep, I've seen a few people chucking around phrases like "designed by nature" which are both wrong and confusing. "Design" implies intent before the fact, which is not the case.
We, as a species, are not "finished" in any way or "more evolved" than other species. There is no destination evolution as such.
We have plenty of traits that are not useful but also not a hindrance and so they remain.
On the subject of cooperation between species I'm always fascinated by inter-tree species communication. You might think that trees in a forest are all individually fighting each other for resources but it's more complex than that.
>Yep, I've seen a few people chucking around phrases like "designed by nature" which are both wrong and confusing.
That's me chucking that phrase and I am telling you there's good reasoning for it. Think about it. How do I differentiate between the human hand and a rock? Do I say:
The human hand is a low entropy configuration of atoms that is very efficient at grasping things while the rock is a high entropy configuration of atoms that is not efficient at grasping things.
OR do I say...
The human hand is designed to grasp things the rock is not.
See. One sentence just rolls off the tongue better but I guess I have to get into the technicalities otherwise people are confused.
Either way, People like to get into linguistic debates on the definition of a word without realizing that it's a trap. Nothing profound is actually being discussed when we're just talking about how to properly use the word "design." Think about it... you're just debating about the proper definition of a vocabulary word.
Granted I'll tell you it's an effective trap. People get into these debates without realizing how pointless it all is. The famous debate is "What is life?" Well if you want to argue about that you have to realize that the word "life" is loaded and ambiguously defined. Attempting this argument is simply trying to demarcate the complex boundaries of the word. It's simply an attempt to add more bullet points and rules to an overly complex vocabulary word.
How about we stop arguing about vocabulary.
>We, as a species, are not "finished" in any way or "more evolved" than other species. There is no destination evolution as such.
Where did this come from? I don't see anyone making that argument. Sure we can as a species can start ingesting gasoline and likely with enough time and natural selection we could involve into a gasoline eating species.
This does not change the fact that there is meaning to the sentence: "Humans are not designed to eat gasoline." Guess the intent of my usage of that sentence without getting pedantic and try to express and convey the same intent without the use of the word "design" or "purpose."
Never said such a thing. However we can influence macro features through something called artificial selection. In this sense we design something through the same mechanism used as natural selection. The difference is, the hand that guides is artificial rather then natural but the outcome is the same: a design, a machine with a specific purpose. Man... this is just pedantry. I'm not here to discuss the definition of a unimportant word.
The word is important, because you use it to cast judgement on one kind of evolutionary path. In your comment, it is wrong, because it is not "as originally designed".
You would say that a species advanced enough to throw quantum computing at theoretical math problems would be able to develop and act in ways that are not dictated by the laws of evolution.
After all we manage successfully to abstain from actual reproduction in much of the developed world to a degree that makes our societies shrink. Not exactly fit, from an evolutionary point of view.
I think a more accurate phrasing is that we're "designed" by natural section to _optionally_ eat meat. Large numbers of people like many Hindus, Mahayana Buddhists, and now vegans don't eat meat and can live healthily. By the way, most meat-eaters utilise fire when processing the meat - something that was invented - rather similarly to how Vitamin B12 supplements have been invented and now help vegans.
Re. empathy - I very much doubt it's to our detriment when one of the main threats to our survival is lack of empathy leading to extinction-causing wars - something that may have already destroyed previous intelligent civilisations around the universe. Even with medical experiments on animals - if they were much reduced I think this would likely lead to more effort & subsequent innovations in replacement technologies like cell cultures & simulations - which could lead to faster medical breakthroughs than if we continue on the current animal-testing business-as-usual trajectory.
What do you mean "which personality I want to get"? You don't choose between five personalities, you find where you are on the scale of different personality traits that are present to some extent in everyone.
And yes, you can affect the outcome if you want. You can affect the results of any test if you want. I can make my IQ test look like I'm very stupid. I can cram for some certification exam and forget all the material the next day. The idea is that if people actually want an accurate reading then they will answer truthfully.
I feel like you're conflating two arguments that are unrelated. The fact that the results of psychometric tests can be misused and manipulated by bad actors is a separate issue to whether or not they are scientifically valid when administered properly and taken in good faith. You've admitting that various tests can provide useful --though not 100% accurate-- information. That's the whole point: To provide useful information, which can be further explored.
Psychologists creating and using a test to evaluate five personality traits does is not them saying that there are only five personality traits or that everyone with a given result is the same. The tests are basic, they are primitive in our understanding of how the mind and personalities work, and they have just been shown to be statistically valid enough to be useful in informing other things.
On that note, I completely agree that psych tests shouldn't be used to determine anything of importance outside of clinical settings. As I said, none of this is anything but a primitive understanding and shouldn't be used to determine career tracks or anything about our place in society. I hear about companies using the MBTI (which I personally loathe) to place people and I cringe so bad.
> If it were such a lousy deal for content creators, wouldn't they choose other work instead?
I don't disagree with you overall, but by the sheer number of people I know who hate their jobs yet feel like they can't leave, I can tell you it often doesn't work this way. Not saying you're doing this, but people have used "well if it's such a bad job then they should just find a different one" to justify everything from bad warehouse work conditions to underpaid fast food positions to sweat shops elsewhere. I think it's been well demonstrated that it is not always so simple for people to leave lousy jobs.
> We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video – still, we believe this is the right thing to do for our platform
So basically, "We understand that this feature is useful in helping you determine where to spend your time and attention, but we're going to do it anyway because it benefits us."
> and to help create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.
"Because we need our creators to get views and keep making content regardless of whether or not our users think it's worth watching."
ding ding ding. this is the correct lens through which to view this situation. for anyone who honestly doesn’t understand how straightforward and devastating this argument is, read it again and learn something.
I once had a coworker message me out of the blue asking if I'd be available to chat later that day. I said sure, thinking he'd follow up with the topic of the chat, but he just sent me a non-descriptive calendar invite. I didn't want to sound paranoid so I didn't ask (I should have), but in my head I was racking my brain for any possible reason he could want to talk to me one-on-one. I was pretty new to the company at the time so I was worried I'd done something wrong, but I couldn't think of anything so serious that he would need to schedule a chat about it and also he wasn't really my superior so that would have been really strange. I decided to just try not to worry about it.
In the end, it turned out he was leaving the company and wanted to tell his fellow engineers one by one. It was sweet and the secretiveness made sense in that context, but it did leave me a bit spooked.
Conversely, during a one-on-one my supervisor ended our small talk with, "So I have something a bit more serious that I want to talk about..." immediately followed by, "--it's nothing bad!" So luckily he was a bit better about not being spooky. Turned out they were promoting me.
