This post is a follow-up to my previous post, Video Games Encourage Concern For Your Character in which I challenge Don Gotterbarn’s Ethicomp 2008 abstract. As I noted before, this isn’t exactly fair, as abstracts are often written without much of an editorial process, and (Don has since confirmed) the paper was not yet written at that time. So I endeavor here to provide a more thorough appraisal of the full paper, conveniently available in the proceedings of Ethicomp(1).

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The public debate over abortion rights has a long history, with seemingly intractable differences. Some of the most common arguments on both sides have obvious flaws that I won’t belabor here. However, once we get past the bad arguments, there are still two points of view that deserve defending, and there are good arguments for both points of view:

1. Abortion is bad (wrong / immoral), therefore one shouldn’t have an abortion.

2. Abortion is permissible (my choice / none of your business), therefore abortion should be legal.

From the form of this, it should be apparent that there is no contradiction here. Consider:

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It is about this time of year that I traditionally start to reflect on my life and where it’s going. It’s the beginning of July, and today is the holiday of “Birthday”, the time of year that we celebrate our coming into the world. The date for the holiday was chosen to logically break up the year, so that gift-giving holidays occur in the Winter and Summer, and consumption holidays occur in the Spring and Fall. This holiday was proposed some years ago by Isaac Schlueter, who coincidentally has his own birthday on the same day.

Isaac recently wrote a post reflecting on his experience as a programmer and the difficulty of becoming an expert. Apparently, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master anything.

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The following is a web adaptation of a paper I wrote for a seminar on epistemology. I think this idea has the potential to revolutionize epistemology in the 21st century - maybe I’ll write a better paper about it later.

The discipline of cybernetics, created in the 1940’s by Norbert Wiener, is the science of information processing systems. Recent developments in cybernetic technology have given us reason to re-evaluate the way we think about knowledge. This is because knowledge is certainly related in some way to information. However, I do not think it has been made clear in exactly what way they are related. When I sit down at a computer with access to the internet, I feel smarter; I am able to answer questions that I would never be able to otherwise, with very little effort on my part. One likely explanation of this phenomenon is that I am somehow more knowledgeable when I am sitting at a computer. But this does not fit into the usual conception of knowledge; I doubt that sitting down at a computer automatically changes any beliefs of mine, nor does it justify them. This leads me to think that there should be a theory of knowledge that allows for this kind of thing to be called knowledge. Generally, I believe that a claim to knowledge is a claim to a certain competence; it is commonly said that knowledge is power, and “power” is often used analogously with other types of competence. I intend to show that a claim to knowledge (in the sense of knowledge about the world) is a claim to have access to information.

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I had started to write this as an academic paper several years ago. It never got finished, so I’ve slightly rewritten it for the web. Enjoy.

The issue of same-sex marriage oft gets bandied about in the public forum. People are essentially arguing over whether marriage is a legal right, and whether marriage should be defined as a union between one man and one woman. The issues involving “gay marriage” are addressed fairly well (in a rather one-sided fashion) by Scott Bidstrup in Gay Marriage: The Arguments and the Motives. But the question that has not been sufficiently addressed is why marriage is a legal institution, and more importantly whether it should continue to be. I intend to demonstrate that marriage should not be an institution of the state, specifically in the US.

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I just spent a weekend in Cape Cod, and had some time to think while I was relatively unplugged. Since coming back, I’ve seen a lot of comments out there claiming that people are making too big a deal out of NetFlix removing profiles. I disagree - NetFlix has repeatedly shown themselves to be a bad company, and boycott may be the only rational response. At the very least, after observing the complete lack of professional ethics in those at NetFlix, I regret having given them my personal and financial information. And so I decided that here I should outline a little more thoroughly what’s wrong with what NetFlix has done.

UPDATE: NetFlix is now not getting rid of profiles. But they’re still evil.

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At ETHICOMP2008, Don Gotterbarn will be presenting a paper entitled, “The Ethics of Video Games: Mayhem, Death, and the Training of the next generation”. The abstract is currently available on the ETHICOMP2008 website. Having read the abstract, I feel I must respond to some of the points made there. I hope I am not doing Don too much of a disservice by responding before having read the entire paper.

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By way of Tim O’Reilly, I came across some interesting articles:

This one, by Nicholas Carr, asks, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

And a response by John Battelle:
http://battellemedia.com/archives/004494.php

I think this is pretty clearly a cultural conflict between written culture and internet culture. It should not surprise us that this would happen - a similar thing happened in Plato’s time, as part of the transition from a pre-literate culture based on oral traditions to a literate culture - this was addressed by Eric Havelock and Marshall McLuhan.

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