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OC does not misrepresent the point, he does not engage it, (those are distinct). In not engaging it, he provided tremendous value for everyone ITT. [Thanks, Patrick] However, if you want someone to bite - I will. Why bother engaging in moralizing if you don't care enough about your values to pay for them? Better yet, how much is your morality worth to you? "I know that this engine is driven by the money, and the money is in luring people into Google's social thingamajiggy instead of trying to sell someone a book or a course or even a BBC/Discover/National Geographic edutainment special on dinosaurs or natural history. But you know, the whole point of having values is that sometimes you don't do the most expedient thing or the most profitable thing or the easy thing. That’s what makes them values, you value them more then pecuniarum." Well, if Raganwald wishes to educate children, why not create a service that serves educational ads instead of selling add slots to the highest bidder? Because it wouldn't be able to compete with Google outside of some tiny niche. Clearly, society as a whole is not willing to pay for this moral value, namely educating children. It might be tempting to trivialize this by the way of "heartless businessmen" argument, but that would be misrepresenting the point. The point is - in a society where the only over-arching value is money, morality becomes a liability. One could argue that this is an inevitable state of human affairs due to $characteristic_of_human_nature. However, to me this seems to be more of an inevitable consequence of implementation of a universal means of exchange. Not everything boils down to money - true. But most things do. And most things will always be enough for some people. And the rest will ultimately have to follow. That, or find a clever way to monetize their "moral liabilities". |
Disagree.
Anytime humans get ahold of a metric, they fuck it up and make it mean something it never did intend to mean. But, hey, animals did it, so we don't need to rise above that.