But the reasoning given doesnt apply exclusively to horses. Suppose we follow the same chain that gets us “all horses are the same color”, but replace “horses” with “colors”, we would end up with the statement that all colors are the same color. Thus, this is not a counterexample, because black and brown are the same color.

To be fair, paper does technically have some intrinsic value, it isnt free to create, nor entirely without practical uses. Its intrinsic value is just very low.

The thing about nihilism that some people dont seem to get is that if nothing matters, it matters equally as little if you do just do things and live your life as if you dont. Nihilism isnt a reason not to do anything just as much as it isnt a reason to do anything.

A hostage implies the purpose of holding that person is as leverage to extract some concession from someone, whereas a prisoner does not necessarily imply that intent and could be held for any reason?

I suspect that we might not use the term “dwarf planet”, were it not that the objects we initially created the category to describe were originally classed as planets. The category labelling is a bit arbitrary, we just discovered that what we now call dwarf planets are quite abundant and that there was a clear line that could be drawn to distinguish them from the rest of what we called planets, and so decided to draw that line between them.

I actually like the intro sequence for Enterprise. Was honestly my favorite star trek intro until I started watching ST again recently to see the newer stuff, and have liked the one for Strange New Worlds even more.

It’s mainly just that, since information can be copied without removing access to the original from the current possessor of that information, I don’t see a good justification to restrict use of it. If you steal something, the original owner loses while you benefit. Since the unexpected loss is probably felt worse, this is a net negative and therefore a bad thing. But, if you copy information (which IP by nature is), you can give it to an arbitrarily large number of people without even taking it from the original, enough benefit to in my opinion outweigh the frustration that loss of control causes. Capitalism adds another element given it also ties monopoly over a given bit of information to artist compensation, but even without capitalism, I don’t think information should be seen as property

The way I tend to feel about this is that it’s a jerk move if you’re mocking some other group, or reasonably could be seen as mocking them, or try to claim that you/your group invented the thing you’re using, but otherwise, borrowing stuff people like from other cultures is just one of the ways cultures evolve.

I can see some people objecting on the grounds that imitating something distinctive makes that thing less unique to the original group, or that an imitation by outsiders won’t include some aspect important to the original and then that people that see the imitation won’t get that aspect.

I can certainly understand why those feelings could lead to frustration, but applied strictly, the idea that certain things belong exclusively to the cultures that invented them both requires forcing people into precise boxes as to which culture they belong to, and sort of resembles a type of socially enforced intellectual property, which, being against IP as a concept, is something I feel like I’d be hypocritical agreeing with.

What if I want the reverse, shoes that have nice cushion to them but look like toe shoes?

Indeed, it’s not incoherent, at some level though I’d argue that morality is at it’s core simply a tool for deciding what actions one should take, and a system that both follows a utilitarian model and makes it extremely easy for someone’s life to be negative carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side. As this is completely contrary to our instincts about what we want morality to be, and completely impractical to act on, it is no longer a very useful tool if one assumes that.

I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.

One could make the argument that suffering is more or less the opposite of happiness, and so that if you give the kid a good enough life, that cancels out the suffering and then some, but a lot depends on how exactly you define those things I guess.

I feel like just talking about the buying power of money or even the ability to effectively duplicate stuff is missing something: assuming your time travel actually allows you to change the past, and it doesn’t just end up in a situation where you can only fulfill a timeline that always existed, you can take technology to the past too.

Go back to the beginning of civilization and give them current technology (or even the beginning of time, and found a new civilization there). Then do it again (or if you don’t, someone else will eventually) with the new tech developed off the existing stuff over time. Repeated ad nauseum, you end up with a situation where civilization has and since the beginning has always had, every single technology it is physically possible to create.

You get the same kind of issues as “the singularity” (the concept where a super intelligent AI improves itself exponentially until it is as powerful as is possible to be). As such, our entire concept of markets and money and economy are likely completely obsolete, because find yourself in a universe populated by something as close as is physically possible to become to gods.

Dont I wish, but no, don’t even get scales…

The Lemmy three day challenge

I’m no AI bro, but I do think this concern is a bit overblown. The monetary value in art is not in simply having a picture of something, a whole infamous subset of “modern art” commands high prices despite being simple enough that virtually anybody could recreate it. A lot is simply in that people desire art created by a specific person, be it a painting that they made, or commissioning a still active artist to create something, or someone buying a band’s merch to support their work. AI simply does not have the same parasocial association to it. And of course, it doesn’t at all replicate the non-monetary value that creating something can give to someone.

I can, at most, imagine it getting integrated into things like advertising where one really doesn’t care who created the work; but even then there’s probably still value in having a human artist review the result to be sure of it’s quality, and that kind of art tends to add the least cultural value anyway.

That isn’t zero impact obviously, that kind of advertisement or corporate clip art or such does still pay people, but it’s a far cry from the end of creative human endeavor, or even people getting paid to be creative.

Im not sure Id consider that long enough to qualify as a wall of text, but Ive been accused of such before, so maybe my notion of what qualifies is different.

I see this sentiment a lot, but honestly I think it would actually do the reverse of what people suggest. “Common sense” isnt really some inherit knowledge that everyone not stupid knows, its actually just stuff that we expect everyone to have learned at some point, presumably in fairly early childhood. But learning stuff requires being taught, and its easy enough for something to just have never come up for someone when they were a kid, because there are so many things to know. Having an explicit warning somewhere is both another source of information in case someone just never got the memo and a prompt for someone unfamiliar with the danger, be it a kid or some ignorant adult, to potentially ask someone why that thing is dangerous. Obviously this is a bit of an extreme example since drinking unknown things is a foolish thing to do in general, but it makes more sense to just apply the labels when in doubt than spend effort making a judgement for every dangerous thing and potentially missing something. I’d bet that having warning labels on stuff actually slightly increases the amount of common sense in society.

Maybe the previous generation of manual writers didn’t have the common sense to realize that a certain subset of people out there are stupid enough to drink the battery juice if you don’t warn them not to.

Not necessarily, there can never be a last time if there is never a first time after all…

I was taking it to refer to just some amount of possessed cake regardless of its subdivisions, It doesnt strike me as odd to refer to food that way (same as how, if I made you a bunch of french fries, it wouldn’t be terribly unusual for me to ask “do you like it?” while referring to the meal, despite it being made up of many individual units).