Elon Musk: Let's build a real spacecraft where humans could live and play cards. Mark Zuckerberg: Let's render a fake spacecraft with avatars playing cards that people watch while remaining in their living room. Also the bug where the fish appear to be floating is now a feature.
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Replying to @cmuratori
Said another way: if you are not one of the greatest minds of our time, don't do the things I consider to be worthy, I'll ridicule you. It's like the far left rhetoric of moral superiority, but this time engineering superiority.
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Replying to @MidnightSun_55
Engineering superiority actually exists, and is important. You should allocate your resources to superior engineering. I would have thought this would be obvious. Moral superiority does not exist, and is a tool used to gain and hold power. Conflating the two is a serious mistake.
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Replying to @cmuratori
Moral superiority is as real as engineering superiority, you can find the Taliban at the deep end, more on this by Sam Harris moral landscape. If you measure tech as (individual well being increase) * (nº of people affected), then a real rocket is not that far from a fake one.
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Replying to @MidnightSun_55
Because Sam Harris is a particularly good authority on human accomplishment? Engineering superiority is real. You can objectively measure things like whether or not a bridge falls over or not. Unless you want to define the "We ask Sam Harris" SI unit, then this is nonsense.
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Replying to @cmuratori
I mean I agree with Sam's philosophical view. I can twist your meaning of "superior" and say that for me, it means bridges that fall, which is what people do when they say there is no moral superiority and provide ridicules examples of liking torture.
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Replying to @MidnightSun_55
No, you cannot twist my meaning, that is what objective means. All bridges fall by default. Engineering is the objective goal of not doing the thing that would automatically happen otherwise. It is not subjective.
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Replying to @cmuratori @MidnightSun_55
If you wished to define "morality" as the set of systems by which humans do things they would not otherwise do, then perhaps you could eventually define some kind of objective morality, but... I mean, good luck with that?
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Replying to @cmuratori @MidnightSun_55
Engineering on the other hand is very clear, and very objective. If I give you a list of specifications, two people's engineering can be measured by how they meet those specifications. It does not depend on _what_ the specifications were, which is what you claim.
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Replying to @cmuratori @MidnightSun_55
If I say "I need this bridge to support 1000 pounds with the least amount of material you can manage", we do not first have to have a discussion about whether that was a _good_ idea to specify. The engineering to meet it can be objectively judged. That is the difference.
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So I do not think there is actually any subjectivity at all in saying that the engineering behind Space-X is far superior to the engineering behind anything Facebook has ever done, because it has nothing to do with whether it was _worth_ doing, it's whether it was _hard_.
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Replying to @cmuratori @MidnightSun_55
Casey, your patience is truly admirable. I take you as an example to improve my very low tolerance to social media obtuseness.
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Replying to @Ivan_Braidi @MidnightSun_55
My tolerance is dropping rapidly, it's not particularly admirable.
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