jackson1372

> If you have powerful computer from 2010, it'll happily run Windows 10 and almost any application, including almost any game in medium (or even high) mode. I wonder, whether this race on mobile platform will continue or iPhone 6S will be able to run iOS 15 without any lags?

I'm not sure the comparison to PCs is fair. Smartphones are still pretty young, and both the OS and chipsets make large leaps every year. If the pace of progress were as fast in the PC industry, you'd also expect a 5-year-old laptop to be unable to keep up.

I expect the pace of progress will slow down for smartphones. Consequently, the iPhone 6S will be usable for longer than the iPhone 4S.

A really fascinating personal story. One thing that bothered me though:

The author's wife quit her job to become a full-time mom. I would guess that the author was only able to have so much professional success because of this. Perhaps you can't get tenure/be really successful while also taking care of a child with disabilities. It just happens to be the case that the author didn't have to take care of a child with disabilities (his wife did), and so his professional career was unaffected.

While we can distinguish between first-order moral relativism and metaethical relativism, it's widely accepted that the former implies the latter.

So it's not uncontroversial to say that you can be an objectivist moral relativist. In any case, this discussion has been about metaethical relativism.

Under moral relativism, you can accept that other people have different moral tastes, just as you can accept that other people have different tastes for food. But you cannot accept that such tastes are subject to normative assessment, making them 'right' or 'wrong' in any meaningful way.

So a moral relativist can say something like "I dislike your approval of female genital mutilation", but this is not a claim about the rightness or wrongness of the approval of female genital mutilation. It is instead a claim about their own sentiments. This is just like saying "Well I don't like sushi" in response to a friend saying that they like sushi. You'r not saying that them liking sushi is wrong.

> "I agree that people don't actually think like that, but that doesn't prove that moral facts exists, just that many people think they do."

I think this is all the author wants to prove. We, as a society, seem to be of two minds about this. He's not trying to prove that moral facts exist.

> "My only claim extends as far as I can act or influence others to act to serve my own needs and wants."

That egoism, not moral relativism.

I took it that the author was making the following point about our society: we teach them in school that things like "cheating is wrong" is mere opinion, and yet similar judgments like "tax-evasion is wrong" aren't treated as mere opinions when they grow up.

Moral relativism is incompatible with judgements that other's moral judgements are wrong. You can judge someone else's views as wrong while still tolerating them.

One other things:

> "You don't need to believe that your system is "correct" in some sort of universal way. You merely need to believe that your system will be best for your personal interests."

Relativism is not egoism.

I use taste just because it's the most widely-accepted instance where subjectivism applies. But, certainly, a substantial minority will hold that for certain kinds of tastes, objectivism holds. If you think there are meaningful disagreements about taste, that makes you an objectivist. In which case, you already agree that there are facts about these kinds of things.

But the point is that, as a society, we don't treat moral sentiment as taste. For instance, when someone murders another person, we don't say: "Well, that person just likes murdering people. Who are we to disagree?!" Instead, we say they did something wrong, and we punish them.

If you're not prepared to give up all claims on how others should act, then you're not really a moral relativist. And the point of the author is that, as a society, we seem to have an inconsistent position.

Contemporary academic philosophy is full of rigorous logic. Either you're ignorant of what actual academic philosophers do, or you can't recognize rigorous logic when you see it.

The point of the article is not to prove that values are objective. Rather, the point is to undermine the fact/opinion distinction.

If moral sentiments were mere opinion, then there'd be no point to arguing over whether some action is right or wrong. When you tell me that you really like the taste of sushi, I don't argue with you - I just accept that that's your taste. But that we don't simply accept as 'taste' other's moral sentiments suggests that our own understanding of what is at stake is different.

1. To save money and to eat more healthily. Also, my girlfriend realy appreciates home/cooked meals.

2. We plan out 4 dinners per week. I'm responsible for two of them. I get her two preferences, make a shopping list, and go grocery shopping every Sunday or Monday. We now have a fairly well established list of recipes, and I use Anylist to construct my shopping list easily.

3. I prefer to cook meals where I can easily make big portions for leftovers. My favorites are: pad thai, tempeh + veggie stir fry over rice, black beans + veggies + guac over rice, african vegetable curry.

4. Vegetarian.

5. Buy pre-peeled garliC. You only beed one actually good chef's knife: buy a Dexter. Buy a rice cooker. Wok's are awesome - you can cook more food than in a standard pan, and you can cook it better. An actual cooking tip: when cooking with veggies, sear them to make them crunchy and not soggy. Too often people stir fry them in oil, and they get gross.

The author makes a number of logical errors. For example:

> To...generate a perfect facsimile of reality down to the last atom would take more energy than the universe has.

Right. But the problem is that the only universe we know about is the one that we live in. So if we were we living in a computer simulation, we would have no knowledge of the 'real' universe. Therefore, we could never say with any confidence that there's not enough energy in the 'real' universe to simulate the 'fake' universe.

"he's caught red-handed violating the civil and constitutional rights of his employees"

Dean Hammonds is a woman.

(As a current Philosophy PhD Student...)

PG's essays are consistently great. Although in this case, I disagree with the central thesis that the history of philosophy is merely a history of confused talk. Certainly, a lot of philosophizing (especially OLD philosophy) commits just this sin. But that's not to say that philosophy as a methodology is inherently broken, that one has to be caught up in the muddle of confused language. In fact, my own study of philosophy has taught me that philosophy, at its best, clearly lays bear the ways in which language confuses us. Philosophy, then, allows us to transcend the little confusions that pervade our everyday language.

And what PG comes to saying, that philosophy should change people the way we go about doing things, is essentially a reworded statement of the Pragmatist's ideal. Peirce, James, and Dewey said the same thing a hundred years ago. PG is right to stress this idea, but if his claim is that philosophy is not sensitive to it, he's just wrong.