Why You Can't Say

http://lacker.io/tech/2017/04/05/why-you-cant-say.html

by lacker • 9 years ago

68 86 9 years ago

bruxis• 9 years ago

Does anyone else find it extremely disturbing that one of the examples they provide for "things you believe not because of logic [thus, it's objectively true], but because other people told you to" is "Human life is a precious thing"?

throwaway6556• 9 years ago

How so? I'm pretty sure Syrians had to unlearn that long ago. Now that realisation is (literally) coming here.

deadlyllama• 9 years ago

It follows from Christian theology (imago dei) but that's increasingly losing ground in the West. If we're just agglomerations of atoms why should I believe that all human agglomerations are equally precious?

nostrademons7• 9 years ago

Post-enlightenment philosophy holds that these are two different domains [1], and conflating them is a category error. You believe we're agglomerations of atoms because the experimental evidence makes this the most likely explanation. You believe that human agglomerations are equally precious because you believe that human agglomerations are equally precious; no reason is needed, and indeed, no reason can logically be given.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction

edko• 9 years ago

If we're just agglomerations of atoms why should I believe that all human agglomerations are equally precious?

If we're just agglomerations of atoms, why would any agglomeration of atoms, human or not, be precious at all?

igk• 9 years ago

Self interest. You can't control other people, but you can participate and propagate (hence strengthen) social norms. Unless you believe you and the ones you care about will always be in power, it's good insurance to propagate the belief "all human agglomerations are equally precious". (Same exercise as "which world do you want to live in as a rational being")

blowski5• 9 years ago

Imago Dei is basically "I am precious because I am precious to God (as is all life, especially humans)". I could also say that I am precious because I am precious to my parents.

cgriswald• 9 years ago

Given the subjective nature of the statement I do not find it particularly disturbing to consider it may not be objectively true. Additionally, I disagree with the implication that because a conclusion is not reached through logic it is not objectively true. For one, there may still exist a logical argument whether I have made that argument or not. For another there is no guarantee that logic leads always to truth or that truth can only be found with logic. (Although I do find those two ideas rather disturbing...)

blowski5• 9 years ago

How would you prove with logic that human life is precious? I agree that it is precious, but I'm not sure how I'd prove it.

charlieflowers2• 9 years ago

How about: Human life is the most advanced creation of evolution; the pinnacle of billions of years of evolution. No other life is as advanced. Therefore, human life is precious.

(I don't love the wording. But the idea is that, just as the greatest painting of a famous artist is precious, likewise the greatest production of evolution is precious. Not air tight, but maybe a start).

Nadya• 9 years ago

Not at all. Logic doesn't need to be moral and, in fact, many logical conclusions are amoral.

There are five people trapped in a snowstorm during the winter. They are out of food and have no means of going outside to gather more. They need to eat to survive or else they will all perish. The logical conclusion for survival is cannibalism. Then you have the varying moral scales of "kill someone and eat them", "draw sticks and the unlucky loser gets eaten", "wait for the first person to die, then eat what remains of their starved body", or "everyone chooses to die of starvation instead of eating one another".

Among those choices - once again the logical conclusion for best chances of survival, namely "eating someone while they have enough meat to provide sustenance to the survivors" is typically considered amoral compared to the "everyone dies" or "eat the starved body and risk dying of starvation anyway" options.

I'm sure there are plenty of in between options or other options I missed out on. But "logical" is not equivalent to "moral" except by chance.

AstralStorm7• 9 years ago

You oversimplified the problem by assuming no rescue from the get go. Logically it is probably most efficient to wait until your metabolism is at an absolute lowest. It also has the nice bit that you reduce harm if the rescue comes earlier.

mirimir• 9 years ago

My first thought was the exceptions. And so yes, you can't say "Human life is worthless." But if you look around, there's plenty of evidence that, in fact, it sometimes is. For people who value something else more. Such as victory, profit, or whatever. There's also the issue that in-group lives tend to matter far more, by orders of magnitude, than out-group lives. I've seen quotes from famous people using 10^3 or more.

theaeolist• 9 years ago

In his "History of Western Philosophy" Bertrand Russell writes about the non-humanist philosophy of Nietzsche that it is consistent but it does not describe the kind of world he would like to live in. So I think that humanism is a matter of social agreement.

nostrademons7• 9 years ago

I thought it was an excellent example precisely because it's so disturbing. It's about as close to objectively true as you can get: "human life is a precious thing" is a value judgment, and you can't logically prove value judgments. It's also a value judgment that virtually everyone would agree with, which illustrates that many things that everybody believes cannot be objectively proven.

Incidentally, you could make a logical argument that the reason everyone believes "human life is a precious thing" is because anyone who doesn't has long since killed themselves or been killed by people who wanted to preserve their precious life, and you can do so without passing any judgment on whether human life is in fact precious. One could easily imagine AI robots, for example, who don't believe that human life is precious because it doesn't matter to them whether we kill each other all off. But this separation between the object level ("here's what I value") and the meta level ("here's why I value it") is fundamental to making logical inferences.

twiceaday2• 9 years ago

'Human life is precious' is not a truth in any sense of the word. It is a feel-good slogan, coined by humans for humans. You cannot possibly define it rigorously enough to start worrying about its trueness. The example is poor and is clearly reaching for shock value.

a3_nm3• 9 years ago

It's also a value judgment that virtually everyone would agree with

The interpretation of this judgment has varied a lot across the times. Historically, in less individualistic societies, I think that the loss of human lives for the good of the group was considered less taboo than today. There were also different interpretations of what "human" meant, obviously, with the life of slaves, strangers, women, different-looking people, etc., being less precious.

People from the future could find that they disagree a lot with our current interpretation of "human life is precious". Western societies today don't seem to care much about the fact that human life in most of the world nowadays isn't "precious" in the Western sense, so this might be a shock to someone from the future. More generally, we are fine today with the fact that everyone dies eventually, whereas a futuristic society having achieved practical immortality would perhaps see each individual death as a catastrophe.

gspetr3• 9 years ago

I don't think you can make that argument.

I don't see how it follows that if you don't see human life as precious you should kill yourself.

We can go deeper and ask: Why is life precious? You, me and everyone else got their lives for free.

Nobody ever paid anything to be born into this world and nobody gave consent to be born into this world.

Udik2• 9 years ago

I actually took exception on the red light example. Of course, it's conventional that the red light means "stop"; but it's a measurable fact that the convention exists. And those who tell you that red means stop don't mean it as a universal rule- they'd be be perfectly fine if there were a country where red and green meaning are inverted.

Whereas value of human life? As a prescriptive norm, it is certainly enforced in many countries. But as a universal truth? Poorly defined, highly questionable, totally subjective.

nostrademons7• 9 years ago

You can still have observable facts that are social constructions. The key is that without human values, those observable facts would disappear. So for example, we assume that dinosaur fossils would still exist even if humans had never walked the earth, that our sun will turn into a red giant and then a white dwarf long after we can no longer observe it, and that all matter is made out of atoms even if those atoms don't form humans. (Ignore "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it..." arguments for the moment.) These are not socially constructed. But gender roles, for example, are very much observable and very much facts of life, yet gender is still considered a social construct. Money is a very necessary part of life and if you ignore it you won't have a happy one, but money is also a social construct. If all humans disappeared, these facts would cease to have any coherent meaning.

lultimouomo• 9 years ago

The punchline immediately follows:

Lots of useful and totally true facts about the world are socially constructed.

It's obviously not the only accepted position in ethics, but saying that moral rules don't follow from logic or some metaphysical fact is not saying that there is no moral.

dom0• 9 years ago

Ethics heavily relies on logic, but the axioms used might not all stem from there.

lacker2• 9 years ago

I also found it extremely disturbing. If you are interested in a much deeper exploration of this, you might be interested in the book Sapiens, especially the part on human rights.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ICN066A/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Gupie3• 9 years ago

I agree, my life is precious to me, I have no reason to believe the other people feel differently about theirs.

ionised3• 9 years ago

Have you tried asking other people? It seems presumptuous (and perhaps even arrogant) to believe everyone thinks a certain way just because you do.

pluma• 9 years ago

Well...

"You shouldn't eat mud" actually felt like a bad example because it follows from some other widely agreed upon truths like "mud is indigestible" and "mud can contain things that can harm you".

"Red light means stop" is obviously a social convention. There's nothing inherent about red light that means stop, it's just a visual language that's become somewhat ubiquitous.

"Human life is a precious thing" is the most abstract of the three. It's usually treated as a basic axiom that doesn't need any further justification. The question isn't really "is it true" but "why do we treat it as if it were true". If you look closely the seams become apparent: what is life, what is a human, what follows from something being precious, etc.

The three aren't really three examples of a kind but three different examples of different kinds of truths we generally believe "because we were told so".

BugsJustFindMe3• 9 years ago

"You shouldn't eat mud" actually felt like a bad example because it follows from some other widely agreed upon truths like "mud is indigestible" and "mud can contain things that can harm you".

Being indigestible or possibly containing things that can harm you do not mean that you shouldn't eat mud. They mean that eating mud might hurt you, which is not the same at all. If anything it's a bad example because it overlaps with the assumption that human life is precious.

rukuu001• 9 years ago

I also think it's an excellent example. If this belief were based on logic we'd have nothing to discuss re abortion, murder, execution, genocide or euthanasia.

For fun, you can compare it to the belief "Gold is a precious thing" and ask how often people destroy (not spend) gold, compared to how often they destroy human life.

framp• 9 years ago

Why should it be disturbing?

Being precious is a relationship between two entities, where one of the two must be sentient. Considering the phrasing "Human life is a precious thing", my assumption is that the reader (or myself) is the one who perceive human life as precious.

To one self the only precious life is your own. This is baked in all of us by default, our genes make us value life. But what's the value of other people's lives?

We can evaluate other people's lives value with the benefits they bring us. Therefore, the people closer to us will have more values - because the influence our reality. What they do and how they interact with us also influence their value. If you were to save someone for a fire, you would probably give more value to your son than some stranger.

This maps to reality quite well - just think about how shocked are people for accidents happening in their own hometown and how little they care for people dying in a far away country.

It's obvious that people close to use will be worth much more - but let's assume we want to get more granularity on strangers. How can we evaluate human life which is not related to us? We can rank them by the value they bring to society, as that value is something you're going to benefit from as well. Let's say you're about to run over some people with a car and you can't avoid this scenario. You can just pick which ones to kill. Would you prefer running over a man or a fat man? A man or a woman? A man or a kid? A man or an old man? I won't get into considerations but you can think in term of cost for the society (pensions vs taxes vs health), the ability to procreate, the ability to benefit from more advanced education in the future.

But let's try to take a step further, let's say we want to employ people to solve a task. Let's become a business. Their value can be seen entirely related to how well they can solve this task.

My view is that we're just really advanced machines without any will or possibility to stray from our predefined path. Genes are our codebase, the environment we live in is our continuos input, our actions are a continuos output which feed into the environment itself - feeding back in our input.

We're just really complex processes running. When somebody dies is just like a process who was accomplishing some work that won't continue anymore. What could have that process done? If we had a state of all the particles (or strings, or whatever your smallest unit is) in the universe, we could theoretically calculate all the possible states, maybe changing the conditions which could have brought our process to die, calculating what it could have achieved.

Creating machines as advanced as ourselves is just a matter of time and technological advancement. Once we are able to create trained life at will and in a faster timespan (because everybody can do that in 9 months + 30 years of training), the value of life itself would dramatically decrease. Let's call them robots.

Why should I bother hiring free people when I can just create and kill some robots? And as an extension, why should I be able to kill robots but not people? What even is the difference at this point?

This would essentially bring the value of all the people we don't care about to whatever the cost of creating an equivalent skilled robot is. Which, given robots can create value themselves, is probably going to quickly get to zero and crash the entire economy. It would be like having slavery with infinite slaves.

Is human life a precious thing? Yes. For now.

LouisSayers• 9 years ago

I feel like what's discussed here is more controversial than taboo. It's similar, but slightly different.

While Whiteboard interviews might be controversial, I wouldn't consider this taboo. Making jokes in the workplace about women however, would be considered taboo. Even though this may have been considered 'acceptable' just 15 years back.

It seems like the difference between the two is one of opinion vs offence. While having a different opinion is fine, raising offence really depends on how much backlash you get.

retrogradeorbit• 9 years ago

I totally agree about the hiring process. I've found that those most vocal against certain hiring techniques that tend to work fairly well in the large are bitter at their own mediocrity being discovered in such a process, and that result flying head first into their own over inflated sense of their own ability.

eikenberry• 9 years ago

I think it is simpler than that. That whiteboard interviews are stressful and people don't like the additional stress on top of the already stressful interview process.

vacri3• 9 years ago

A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English.

The Catholic Church is a pretty confident group, yet it's taken multiple decades for people to start taking allegations of wrongdoing seriously. It's been taboo for a long time to cast aspersions against the church, even though they're a powerful organisation - how can you dare to question them!?

Conversely, until quite recently, in Anglo societies being pregnant in public was somewhat taboo, as was breastfeeding in public or letting a mentally handicapped child be seen in public. Same with talking about domestic violence. These are taboos against the weak, not the strong or in-between.

As for "not eating mud because that's what others tell you", the author clearly hasn't played a field sport in winter.

lacker2• 9 years ago

As for "not eating mud because that's what others tell you", the author clearly hasn't played a field sport in winter.

Guilty as charged.

That one was just on my mind because my daughter loves eating mud, and it's pretty clear she won't listen to reason. Only an Argument From Authority will do the trick.

vacri3• 9 years ago

Wait a year or two and you'll have the opposite problem - getting her to eat anything that isn't her one favourite food :)

cperciva• 9 years ago

The example of the Catholic Church seems to support the author's point. It was only as the Church's power declined that it became acceptable to publicly accuse it of wrongdoing.

The taboos you mention about things being seen in public are more about not doing things than not saying things, so I don't think the same philosophy applies. On domestic violence, there certainly was an issue of men suppressing any discussion of the topic; these days of course, the first greater taboo is against any mention of women assaulting men, and that taboo is very definitely enforced by a powerful group which fears losing that power.

vacri3• 9 years ago

I think you've got it backwards - you're saying that the taboo lifted as the church lost power, that the taboo was there while the church was very powerful? While the Catholic Church has lost power, they're certainly not weak now; they're just not as supreme as they were. They've become weaker but still have power of enforcement, yet taboos have lifted (somewhat)? That's the opposite of what the article is saying.

With domestic violence, it wasn't just men suppressing it. Women also suppressed it, because "you just didn't talk about that kind of thing". Domestic violence shelters weren't really a thing, because you were expected to just deal with it and not talk about it.

I just think it's simply a wrong statement to make, that taboos are only about middling social powers. It seems to be trying to shoehorn the facts to fit an argument rather than the other way around.

Gupie3• 9 years ago

> It's been taboo for a long time to cast aspersions against the church

Perhaps in Catholic countries but never in protestant countries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism

libeclipse• 9 years ago

Sure whiteboard interviews are hated by everyone and maybe they aren't so terrible, but I think there's better alternatives than "just chatting about their past".

How about a coding exercise to take home?

thowar2• 9 years ago

Are they hated by everyone? Or just by those who can't pass them?

ominous• 9 years ago

"hated", as if it were a thing to enjoy.

di4na• 9 years ago

I can pass them. Hell i passed them most of the time and i help people pass them.

They are atrocious.

jayajay• 9 years ago

The beginning of this article is interesting. If I was from the distant future, maybe I'd ask these questions followed by the answers I'm expecting from 2017:

Q: Why are people still working? A: You need to work to live.

Q: Why do men and women appear so different? A: They are biologically very different.

Q: Why are people trying to increase, rather than decrease, the amount of jobs to be done by humans? A: Idiot, clearly we need more jobs, otherwise everyone will be poor!

Q: Why are people waiting for signs and lights in metal cages with wheels? A: Those wheels in metal cages are one of our most prolific forms of transportation right now.

Q: Why are people eating other animals? A: Who doesn't, meat is tasty!

Q: Why do people have different skin color? A: You are racist.

Q: Why are some people so round? A: Are you making fun of fat people?

Q: Why are some people in a rolling chair all of the time? A: Some people are born with disabilities or break bones.

Q: Why are people still cutting other people open to fix them? A: How else do you stop internal bleeding and remove tumors?

Q: Why do 51 people decide what happens to 100 people instead of 1 person deciding what happens to 1 person? A: Ever heard of democracy, (unfortunately) the most fair system ever created to date by our founding fathers (who also owned tons of human slaves)?

Q: What is a border and how come I can't see it? A: Ever heard of the nation state? You're already subject to it just by being here. Didn't anyone tell you that?

Q: Why do people get thrown in cages for misbehaving? A: What else would we do with misfits and dangerous people?

a3_nm3• 9 years ago

Q: Why are so many people starving while a minority is endangering their lives by eating too much?

Q: Why are places that manufacture most things poor rather than rich?

Q: Why are so many humans dying all the time?

AstralStorm7• 9 years ago

Putting in hypothetical answers displays your biases. Better to collect questions and accept that reality is complicated enough that simple answers do not work in general and often on average too.

ionised3• 9 years ago

The founding fathers did not create democracy

brandnewlow• 9 years ago

You should do a blog/tumblr of "startup advice successful founders can't publicly share" and give founders you know an anonymous way to contribute.

aerovistae• 9 years ago

About to offer my own personal HN heresy, after reading the original Paul Graham article: in reading many of his essays, am I the only person who gets the impression that the author has a major superiority complex about his own intelligence? Something about the tone, and sometimes the examples he chooses throughout his essays.

vectorpush2• 9 years ago

The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews

Not much evidence to demonstrate that this is a significant contributing factor in their success. The five companies listed are pioneering behemoths that transcend the boundaries of rote startup analysis.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that whiteboard interviews are fine, but I think programmers tend to dislike them because the physical act of standing up to write code on a whiteboard is awkward and disconcerting, especially in the context of a high pressure interview. The skill of using a large unwieldy marker to render text by hand on a vertical surface requires a significant amount of practice and I think many programmers just resent the need to hone this skill which is mostly useless outside of an interview setting. Something like a written test or questionnaire with pencil and paper is much more well received, or more ideally an offline workstation running something like notepad that's hooked up to a projector or big screen.

arjie2• 9 years ago

Good post.

Since we're contributing taboos, here's my offering: Prolific commenters on Internet message boards tend to be less professionally capable and not more. High HN karma is evidence of poorer impulse control and time management, and most importantly, less time spent on the day job. For each person who is a prolific commenter, an identically appearing person who comments less is likely to be the better source of knowledge. Equally importantly, the perspective of these people is hopelessly skewed by the community they're in.

elmigranto• 9 years ago

So if you get 3k karma from this comment, what would that mean? :)

nostrademons7• 9 years ago

Not sure if that's really a taboo, it's been commonly expressed on many Internet message boards, often self-referentially.

I suspect it's actually more that the average commenter on a forum related to their field tends to be more skilled than the average worker in that field, because the average worker spends their workday reading other forums that are unrelated to their field, but the very best professionals in a field are usually not found on Internet forums, because they're doing their job instead of talking about it.

arjie2• 9 years ago

Hmm, that's true. But I think message boards simultaneously tend to the "oh, I'm terrible, wasting time here haha." and to "Oh that guy's got so much karma, and I see him posting all the time. He probably knows what he's saying.".

owebmaster• 9 years ago

So when I'm upvoting someone I'm actually insulting him/her? Sorry man it just happen that I agree with you.

d3ckard2• 9 years ago

Well, usually you get what you optimise for. Right now HN community is raising your karma, maybe from agreement, maybe out of spite. Does it make you less knowledgable?

d3ckard2• 9 years ago

I do not think you should use really big corporations as example. First of all, they attract enough talent to use any methods of selection they see fit. They do not care about false negatives, since they operate on virtually unlimited pool of resources.

Secondly, the logic against whiteboard interviews is sound. I have never had to implement complex algorithm at work. Never. Which means that last time I actually wrote some was at college, about 7 years ago. Obviously, to perform well, I need to study to remind myself how to use red-black trees for example. Or how to implement priority queue (hopefully not using Fibonacci Heap, ugh). Any effort that goes into it is basically wasted, since chances I will have to actually do this at job are close to zero. So I'm basically reminding myself how to do something I will never do past interview. Not very effective.

Third and last, good software engineering is, as I believe, not strongly correlated with algorithms knowledge. People great at hacking quite often get in trouble when they have to develop readable, predictable system. This is different set of skills.

parenthephobia• 9 years ago

But in practice there are a zillion things you believe not because of logic, but because other people told you to. Red lights mean stop

The author ignores second-order effects. Red lights meaning stop is arbitrary, but I believe that I should stop at red lights not because I accept the arbitrary assignment, but because of the objective fact that if I don't I'll eventually end up in hospital.

The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews

The most successful companies all use bank accounts with million dollar balances. One shouldn't confuse cause and effect.

I've worked for a few (arguably) successful companies, and I'm firmly of the opinion that they are almost invariably pathologically averse to risk and unwilling to experiment with new ways of doing things, especially when those ways aren't used by their competitors.

Conversely, every such company seems to believe that their competitors are doing rigorous scientific analysis of business methods and so if their competitors are all using whiteboard interviews "there must be something in it".

The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews

Do Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Facebook owe their success to the quality of their developers, though? I would suggest that they do not. They may be relying on the wrong signals when hiring developers, not hiring the best, but still succeeding due to other factors.

Heck, Google made a new programming language designed to make it hard to confuse mediocre programmers. That tells me something about the average skill of their developers.

The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews

The most successful companies also have lots and lots of applicants.

Even if whiteboard interviews meant you automatically fail 50% of candidates because they're no good at them, that's not such a major problem if there are 100 candidates for each job. If ten of the candidates are top-class, you still have five of them left after half of them flunk the whiteboard.

OTOH, if you have 10 candidates, the likelihood increases that the actually superior candidate will be the one that flunks.

thereare5lights• 9 years ago

This is a logically incoherent blog post. You go from one point to another without any logical causation. It's literally ramblings about what you believe but you don't bother to make the case for it except with the most glib of arguments.

Why You Can't Say

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