Archive for the ‘afterthoughts’ tag
i hate technology
Technology failed us in class, and despite comments to the contrary, this had very little to do with poor CompSci training. Getting a damn light bulb to project an image isn’t really a computer science issue, and my minor in Projector Interoperability is 10 years out of date. More importantly, sometimes things Just Dont Work, and for no explicable purpose. Today was a pretty fine demonstration of Murphy’s law in practice. It is also a pretty good segue into a theme we will approach later in the course: that sometimes machines do things on their own, despite the best intentions of their designers or users. Conveniently, this will eventually be one of my more controversial arguments about technology, so it is good to have this early example.
I would have liked to embed the video we were supposed to watch today, but unfortunately its creator strongly enforces his copyright, and thus I have to wait to share his great animation until class on Thursday, if there is time and we can sort out these tech issues.
Until then, we can say a bit more about the discussion in class today, which I was really enjoying until our mechanical overlords so rudely interrupted. I had offerred two possible examples of “personal opinions”:
- Vanilla ice cream tastes good
- Murder is wrong
Are these both merely opinions? Notice that both of these are normative claims (remember what that means?). One question we might ask is as follows: do these claims have the same force? If not, what is the difference?
It was objected in class that a person’s taste in ice cream doesn’t matter. Who cares about your taste in ice cream? I suppose the contrast is that murder does matter, and we ought to care if murder is wrong.
Perhaps that is right. But if both these claims are merely opinions, then how do we handle disagreements between opinions on any topic? In other words, what are we allowed to say about other people’s opinions? If you don’t like vanilla ice cream, and I do, it seems like there is nothing I can do to convince you that vanilla ice cream tastes good. You just have different tastes, and your tastes aren’t based on reason, so I can’t give you an argument that will change your tastes in ice cream.
Maybe ice cream isn’t important enough to care about differences in taste, but murder is pretty important. Is the claim “murder is wrong” the same kind of claim? If you believe that murder is sometimes justified, and I give you an argument that murder is always wrong, does this give you any reasons to change your opinion? Or are our differences just like differences in taste, so that you can’t (and maybe shouldn’t) try to change my mind?
Anyway, just some thoughts. Comments are welcome (and will recieve credit!). Also, to further encourage participation, I am going to give extra credit to the first 5 people to register for this blog.
See you thursday!