I've known the whole "Kellogg was a puritanical nutjob" origin for a long time now.

It's probably why I find the whole thing so distasteful.

Sorry, but it is intentionally cutting off part of a human for no good reason. Just because people were misinformed previously or they thought the invisible sky father said they should doesn't justify it. As far as I'm concerned, it's equivalent to bound feet (although obviously nowhere near as painful).

It is barbaric, especially the orthodox Judaic version, which adds unsanitary and frankly kinda creepy to the mix too.

Try this thought experiment.
We have discovered a new island in the middle of the pacific. Miraculously, they have had no contact with the outside world since humans arrived there. When we arrive we find all the women are missing their left nipple. It turns out this is ritualistically cut off at birth. "It's not a big deal" they say. "the baby gets over it quickly and it doesn't affect them in later life".
Ok with this?

A disturbing idea for sure.

I know it's just a very visual illustration of how history might not change for the better if key elements are changed, but just to expand on his little thought experiment...

They wouldn't have had access to the neccessary raw material, would they? Pretty much every sort of metal alloy was in short supply even during the late '30s. The occupation of Narvik brought some relief, but still, a nuclear weapons program requires some pretty exotic material that you can't get at Tesco.

I'm not defending TYT's actions here, and I don't exactly take TYT seriously. Like Chingalera said, they're tabloidistic and unprofessional.

But again, to claim that the latter part of the article was a "purely fictional account" simplifies it excessively.

What Card did in the article was essentially the same as racists tend to do when they say, "I'm not a racist, but..."

Card was essentially saying, "I'm not saying that Obama is equivalent to Stalin, but Obama is equivalent to Stalin."

Now, Card says that the events described in his thought experiment were "unlikely," but they still erred on the side of insanity, and when he puts that in an article he's going to have to expect opposition. You can't just say whatever you want and then expect it to go unopposed simply because you loosely framed it as a "silly thought experiment" beforehand.

@L0cky @bcglorf

It's disappointing that TYT didn't mention the context, but it's also facetious to claim that the article was purely a thought experiment.

Yes, he does say the following in the beginning of the article: "No, no, it's just a silly thought experiment! I'm not serious about this! Nobody can predict the future! It's just a game. The game of Unlikely Events."

...But the rest of the article is spent stating opinions and things that are just outright wrong as if they are completely factual and true.

There're no "let's just consider for a moment that..." in the article, nor are there any what-ifs. He simply goes from claiming that Iran will nuke Israel if the US doesn't step in, to claiming that Obama is, effectively, a dictator.

And all of this craziness takes part during the set-up for his "thought experiment." This is the context that Orson Scott Card himself provides us with.

It was very low for TYT to skip over the fact that this is, in part, a thought experiment. However, it is also false to claim that it was just a thought experiment, and nothing more.

Privacy and freedom are orthogonal. Privacy both grants freedom and takes it away. You're talking like there is a clear path for a centrist to take on this matter. My thought experiment was meant to expose a hypocrisy in too commonly held ideals. "Information should be free!" is often taken to mean that we should be able to access whatever information we want. On the other hand, "big brother" is a pejorative describing dystopian violations of individual privacy that reasonable people holding the former position often use.

We can't have it both ways. Either we get to know what people are up to (e.g. terrorists, banks, lobbyists, politicians, government agencies, etc) while coping with oversight of our own activities. Or we lock down all the information and cope with the inevitable cheat avoiding detection.

You can play the game of trying to break it down case by case, but the fact is surveillance can't really be implemented piecemeal. Once you decide to collect the information, you sort of get what you get.

Thought experiment: Would you prefer a world in which privacy was still paramount, or a world in which there was no privacy whatsoever? That is, either your emails aren't read, but it's very easy to cloak clandestine activity. Or would you prefer the latter, in which even your neighbor can read your emails at the click of a button, but you can read Barack Obama's. Discuss.

I had the exact reaction as you, @jonny.

To accurately consider what your natural reaction would be in this thought experiment, you have to mentally imagine yourself actually living out the situation.

Even though the experiment says "If you push the fat man, you will save five lives," my only human reaction is that it doesn't make any sense, and there can not possibly be such a guarantee.

Perhaps that's an answer that speaks to your personality right there. Maybe a psychopath wouldn't care that the scenario might not make sense and they would just push the person anyway.

I like the psychopath test (that, as it turns out, actually isn't real, but I like it anyway) that goes something like this:

A girl was at her mother's funeral. She spoke with a man whose name she did not get and she'd never met before. She immediately liked him a lot and felt he may be the man of her dreams.

A week later she killed her own sister. Why did she do that?

Maybe you should think about what is written before throwing out disparaging remarks. My comment isn't about refusing to accept the premise of the thought experiment, it's about the premise of the thought experiment unintentionally influencing responses. Humans respond to what they know, even to the point of forcing specific questions into different meanings because one interpretation fits better with real world experiences/expectations.

The one useful aspect of the question I did point out - despite the physical anomalies - most (all?) respondents will filter the question through the moral "hardware" in the brain, making it useful for identifying the neurological basis of morality. It's an entirely other question what the usefulness of that knowledge is.

Glad to see this is mistitled, because this question has nothing to do with diagnosing ASPD. More like "Are you a Utilitarian?" Or, in the case of some of our commenters, "Are you an asshole who refuses to accept the premise of a thought experiment?"

Freud was more of a lunatic than most of his patients...very little of what he claimed has panned out, and even less offered any value. I'm not sure how his evidence-free thought experiments bring any benefit to this subject. Maybe his opinion on the relative recreational value of various doses of cocaine would have some merit, but not much else.

Ah...hes explaining it by saying .99 recurring = 1. Thats fair enough I guess, but the paradox is purely a thought experiment. It doesnt hold up in real world.

Before finishing the video...its simple.
You are not describing an infinite process when your hands are ACTUALLY clapping. The thought-experiment describes an asymptote, in real world when you clap its dead clear that its not asymptotic, so they are not the same thing.

....lets see how I did

It comes back to the question of who gets to choose? In your opinion Falun Gong is harmless but that is clearly not the opinion of the Chinese Government. So should it be you who chooses whether an organisation should be outlawed? How about me?

As a thought experiment, suppose we say that the U.S. government should request their diplomats to tell China to lay off the Falun Gong dudes because they're OK really... what do you think they will be told when they say this?

I completely agree that comparing Falun Gong to rape or theft is ridiculous, but comparing it to, say, running an on-line poker operation, some drug offenses, public nudity, or similar activities is a fair comparison. In each case the activity has no violence, no victim, and is against the law... but who chose which activities were legislated against and which were permitted?

Schrodinger probably didn't even have a cat, and didn't actually perform the experiment. Poor fellow gets a bad rep because people dont get the "thought" part of "thought experiment". But god DAMN that was a nice Half-Life reference with the crowbar and pickup sound!

@Boise_Lib

My first answer is definitely wrong because it assumes that the increased displacement of the boat due to the anchor's mass is equal to the displacement by the anchor's volume when it enters the water. This is demonstrably false, as a 5kg lead anchor would cause a boat to displace as much water as a 5kg iridium anchor in the same boat, but the lead anchor would displace about twice as much water as the iridium anchor when thrown in the water.

Let's say my anchor is iridium, and is massive enough it almost sinks the boat. The boat is now displacing much more water than the anchor will when I throw it overboard, so the answer is the water will fall. In my thought experiment, I now decrease the density of my imaginary anchor and increase its size such that the boat is always just barely afloat. When I toss the anchor overboard, the water will fall less and less, but as long as the boat is floating (not much of a boat if it doesn't float) and the anchor alone is denser than water (not much of an anchor if it's not denser than water, I believe the anchor will always cause the boat to displace more water in the boat than outside the boat. I'm sure I could use limits to prove this, but I'm just going to assume I'm right without doing the calculus. So my new answer is: the water will always fall.

Thanks for the mental exercise.

(How did I do?)