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In this video I show you how I made an ant think it was dead by putting a specific chemical on it that ants use to signal when they have died. This is how ants know to put the ants that have passed away into the ant graveyard.
The environmental movement has helped shape awareness and change in some hugely important issues, from food contamination to lead poisoning to climate change. But sometimes passion and energy override pragmatism and common sense. Here are a couple of examples, and appeal to follow the science, not the heart.This video is OPINION. Since so many people misunderstand the difference, an opinion should be based on facts, but it is not itself a fact. You can disagree with an opinion (and please feel free to do so) but you cannot claim that an opinion in right or wrong, correct or incorrect. You cannot overturn a fact with persuasive arguments, but you can overturn an opinion with persuasive arguments -- so I look forward to that.
Ant's behavior is largely determined by chemical signalling. It's like rules of thumbs. It's simple and easy to follow, works well in many ordinary situations, but sometimes it can misfire, or deliberately misled by someone else who understand that.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 21/08/2023 23:23:30Ant's behavior is largely determined by chemical signalling. It's like rules of thumbs. It's simple and easy to follow, works well in many ordinary situations, but sometimes it can misfire, or deliberately misled by someone else who understand that.Quite a few humans have been buried alive by mistake. Many more have been buried alive deliberately. Which makes humans morally worse than ants.
Evaluation of morality is often easier to make in hindsight, when all relevant consequences can be determined. Sometimes, what's thought to be morally good in a period of time will be found out as morally bad instead later on. And usually, the later evaluations are considered more valid.
The problem is that the value of morality and ethics is to evaluate the desirability of an action a priori.
Quote from: alancalverd on 03/08/2023 09:37:06"Wasting resources" is a value judgement with no logical evidence. Every living thing consumes part of its environment and excretes toxins. You might as well accuse trees of "wasting" carbon dioxide and poisoning the environment with oxygen - which is exactly what happened before animals evolved to complete the cycle. Waste or not depends on the judgment of conscious entities. If some resources are lost or destroyed without giving expected results, then at least some of those resources have been wasted. Lean management system identifies and classifies those wastes, so we can manage them to increase effectiveness and efficiency of our systems. If evolutionary process on earth lasting for billions of years cannot produce conscious entities capable of building a multiplanetary civilization, then sooner or later the process will be reset, and whatever had been done would be wasted.
"Wasting resources" is a value judgement with no logical evidence. Every living thing consumes part of its environment and excretes toxins. You might as well accuse trees of "wasting" carbon dioxide and poisoning the environment with oxygen - which is exactly what happened before animals evolved to complete the cycle.
It talks about the ethical use of nuclear weapon.
The winner in an asymmetric nuclear war is the side that strikes the first blow, so its use is post-hoc ethical.
Quote from: alancalverd on 31/08/2023 08:07:13The problem is that the value of morality and ethics is to evaluate the desirability of an action a priori.That's called deontology. You should be aware that other types of morality exist, such as consequentialism and virtue ethics.
The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few").[1] Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.
Edge cases would require more refined rules. The balance would depend on cost of computations and risk of consequences to the system for adopting wrong rules.
Deontology can be derived as a combination of consequentialism and probability.