Jai

> The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time – until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it. > The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

> This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and/or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn't exist. The problem is that once you close the business and fire the underpaid employees, they don't disappear. Now they're unemployed and make $0/hour. This blind spot fascinates me. The best explanation I've seen is "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics". It says that "when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it". So in this scenario, once you've fired your employees, you are no longer connected to them, and their further destiny is not your fault. I suspect this is a deep part of our moral instincts, and we have to be aware of it to get to a more rational approach. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

Why are there so many armchair quarterbacks in this thread spouting dismissive criticism? Paul already acknowledges that "success is far from guaranteed." If this works, great! If it doesn't, I don't think any of us are worse off... This seems like a heavy application of The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

One factor I think is "the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics" which means if you point out that there are people starving on the planet, and you don't immediately give up your entire wealth to do something about it then you are judged as worse than people doing their best to not focus on bad stuff outside of their immediate vision. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ Tesla/Musk obviously fall into this trap with climate change. Also the parallels in some attacks with what gets used for people like Al Gore makes me think that pointing out a problem that people have staked their political capital on being a hoax, provokes a certain reaction too.

This seems disingenuous at best. Why are you commenting on HN when you could be out helping these homeless anyway? Is your time, happiness, etc, really worth more than their lives? https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

> but since he's not directly saying it needs to go away he's going to catch hell for it That's, unfortunately, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics[0] at play. "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular." [0] - https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

Considering that age-related illnesses are responsible for 100,000 of the 150,000 deaths each day[1], I think working on aging is a very effective way to reduce suffering. Also, I hope readers notice that nobody makes this criticism when someone works on a new mobile app, another static site generator, or My Little Pony fanfiction. It's an excellent example of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics.[2] 1. http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/ENHANCE-PP.pdf 2. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

It's sad that humans choose other humans as their worst enemies. Mosquitoes are a much worse foe. We should be allying against mosquitoes, not allying with mosquitoes against each other! This is explored in greater detail in this wonderful essay, Foes Without Faces: https://blog.jaibot.com/foes-without-faces/

Immanuel Kant came up with an idea that's known as the categorical imperative. It is best known under the formulation: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." Have you heard of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics? I found it interesting to read about: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

More people ought to read this: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/. Google is already providing a free service to homeless people. It's not empathy to tell someone else to solve a problem that you care about. That's virtue signaling. If he cares, he should take matters into his own hands. Is it too much to ask a single person to build a free email service for all homeless people? Perhaps, but the good news is that he doesn't have to. Google already allows you to disable 2FA [1]. He could have started a campaign to disable 2FA on homeless people's phones, but instead he uses this as an opportunity to shame Google to boost his own Twitter follower count. I think that empathy is highly overrated. I doubt anyone notorious for flashing their big Johnson is particularly empathetic, yet LBJ expanded social services more than any other President. The problem isn't that people have too little empathy these days. It's that people are too easily impressed by broadcasting their intentions rather than actually trying to solve a problem. [1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1064203

> ...the deeper explanation, still taboo, is the perception that the Obama administration’s handling of the 2008 crash was both corrupt and profoundly disillusioning. Is this true? At least partially true? As in "also true". My impression of today's average voter is a general purpose anger towards power and institutions. Are "low information" voters specifically blaming Obama, or Bush, or whomever? -- I haven't read Taibbi for a long time. It just becomes too much. Ditto Chris Hayes, Ralph Nader, Mike Malice, Mark Crispin Miller, Greg Palast, Bill Maher, and so many others. Ya, ya, ya, we know everything's fscked. Now please skip to the money shot: How do we fix things? I'm fine with criticizing Obama, DC, Wall St, whomever. Power corrupts, establishment hierarchy sucks, humans are fallible. But at some point, it'd be helpful to make suggestions, convert some of that outrage into (constructive) action. -- But two omissions continue to bug me with all these "enlightened centrist" criticisms. First: you know, everyone else has agency too. Obama and the Clintons and the Democrats aren't operating in a vacuum. Second: per the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, why blame the people who are trying to do some good more than the people who are actively making things worse? Few people go to work every day to do a bad job. Obama Admin made plenty of mistakes. But they also prevented a complete collapse. Overcoming a great deal of opposition to make it happen. "The…

… And now I realise why people don't like SlateStarCodex. (I still like it.) I'm no historian, but the stuff he wrote about Catholicism doesn't actually seem right. Argued better than I can in [0]. And some of the comments are not just atrocious, but are not argued against[1]: > I think there are commonly-known models in all four quadrants. For example: > a. Widely accepted and good fit for reality: (Law of supply and demand) • “Supply and demand” is a good first-order model for certain market dynamics, but it only explains… at a guess, ⅓ of the economics I personally interact with. > b. Socially unacceptable and good fit for reality: (IQ tests as a good proxy for mental ability) • IQ tests are a reasonable proxy for certain, specific axes of mental ability within a subpopulation; the general “IQ tests are a good proxy for mental ability” claim is blatantly absurd. > c. Widely accepted and bad fit for reality: (Sexism as main cause of gender wage gap) • “Sexism is not the main cause of the gender wage gap”… I'm less certain that this is wrong, but I have actually done quite a bit of research on it (including reading what Scott Alexander wrote on the topic!) and this is splitting hairs, to be charitable; I think labelling it “rhetoric” is more accurate. No, several of the systemic injustices aren't due to individual people going “aha! I know what I'm going to do today: not pay my female underlings!”, you're right! But everybody already knows this,[2] and that's not…

> As I understand it, the basic income idea is based on that realistically almost everyone at some point uses government aid or finances (directly or indirectly). basic income is just making sure that when you need to make use of that aid, you don't have to jump through hoops, requirements and paperwork. That points at an alternative way to conceptualize a basic income: at the end of the day, it's the net transfer that matters. Ie all the money and welfare services you get from the government minus all the taxes you pay. On average over all of society that net transfer has to be zero. (Modulo complications to do with souvereign wealth funds and government debt.) Now, most people around the world want rich people to pay and poorer people to receive on net. The usual way to achieve that is via means testing in both the welfare and the tax system. Basic income can be seen as a way to simplify government bureaucracies by shifting all the means testing out of the welfare system and into the tax system. > By giving everyone enough to live and not starve, you can do that. Without needing bureaucracy. It goes together with other great ideas like a minimum livable wage[0], pensions, public education and public healthcare. These other things don't sound like good ideas to me. Especially outlawing poor people's jobs seems cruel and a bad case of 'Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics' to me. See https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

A related blog post calls this the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics (your ethical burden increases by interacting with the problem in any way, even positively): https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ There are also other analogies: At work, if you touch something, you are now eternally responsible for maintaining it. Be it code or process or equipment. Changed the toner in the printer? Great, you can now do it all the time. "But you already know how to do it, it will just take a minute for you". The best tactic at work is to be really competent in the main job and push all energy into furthering the skills and experience and recognition in that and dodging all the crap work by appearing badly suited to them. You want your colleagues to say "ah he's a good guy, really competent, but this type of work is really not his kind, he'd forget it, mess it up or something". Basically the goofy distracted professor meme. Great at focusing on his specialty we pay him for but cannot be tasked with these everyday mundane shit tasks. On a larger scale, big tribal feuds are often among groups with small differences, like Christian denominations and wars over dogmatic debates on the details.

Your fallacy is: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ Meanwhile, people with more than one bit in their worldview RAM can fall back to validation when it's the only option that makes sense for their domain, and use parsing when it's appropriate, which is, notwithstanding your handful of frankly niche examples compared to the vast bulk of CRUD code, most of the time in practice.

People are mad because of Copenhagen ethics https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

>I believe the logic is that the upperclassmen have more knowledge of the subject and therefor have more power to help others do well in the class. They have that power regardless of whether they audit the course. See https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ By your logic, you are more evil because you pay Kenyans $0.

For those after more, https://blog.jaibot.com/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-more/ is another piece I find deeply moving on the subject of dragon-slaying.

See also "The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics": https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

Agreed on all counts. This is a textbook example of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/). Musk and SpaceX have done a huge amount for Ukraine, but they could possibly be doing even more and that somehow makes them worse than others who haven't done anything.

I'm not that badly off and have never watched a Mr. Beast video prior to this. I would gladly stay within a 300ft circle for 100 days while some dude blasted clown noises at me in return for $500k. There's a library, a garden, some exercise bands, stationery, and 3000cal/day of food. I did 21 days isolation in an apartment at the start of the pandemic, which is 20% of the way there except with less floorspace. There's a really good essay titled The Copenhagen Interpretations of Ethics[0], which makes an argument that the moment you interact with a problem you become responsible for it in the eyes of the world, even if you strictly improved it in a utilitarian sense, and even if the people judging you have done exactly nothing to fix the problem. Reminds me a bit of this. [0] https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics: you're automatically morally neutral if you don't take action. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

> I've never understood this assumption that focusing on one thing must necessarily always be to the detriment of another. Probably mostly because popular news / media has endeavoured to simplify things way beyond the point they should have been simplified -- nuance, rationality, critical thinking, are under-promoted. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

In case anyone misses the comment by "MicaiahC" at the bottom of the page (not mine, but I clicked their link and found it very interesting), the ethics interpretation that is referenced in footnote 4 is the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, with a really interesting explanation here [1]. It seems to primarily have arisen as a parable of the observer effect in quantum physics, where interacting with a particle (or a problem) changes it, and therefore makes the observer partially responsible for the nature of thing past that point. [1] https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

One can do some good (even for selfish reasons) and it can be commendable. One isn’t obliged to solve the entire problem. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

Kudos to Google's contractor for offering this opportunity to the people who need it most. I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I would even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. This article also mentions that the contractor may have lied to or misled the homeless, which is deplorable. But the behavior described by the title itself is nothing objectionable. The fact that many will object is a phenomenon I've seen called "Copenhagen Ethics": https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

In the field of ethics, this is known as the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics [0]. In short: "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more." [0] - https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

The article is another iteration of https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ . OP is unable to find any evidence that Amazon makes the problems worse, aside from innuendo, but since Amazon is there, now it's their fault.