Interesting reflection. This is just an anecdotal aside with no major link to the moral discussion, but having been a Parisian for most of my life, my first intuition for a meeting point wasn’t the Eiffel Tower, but the square in front of Notre-Dame (le parvis).
Indeed, several cultural elements converge toward this solution for a true-blue Parisian : it’s the historic heart of Paris, a highly symbolic spot, and by convention, ‘Point Zero’ for all roads in France (there’s even a well-known ground marker there). It is also very close to Châtelet-Les Halles, the main transport hub (which doesn’t have a good meeting point itself).
But reading your post, I thought to myself : of course, for most people, and particularly from a tourist’s perspective, the Eiffel Tower is the obvious choice.
What’s amusing is that I tested this with Gemini Pro 3.1 (asking the question as neutrally as possible). When asked in English, it points to the Eiffel Tower, but if the same prompt is translated into French, it suggests the square of Notre-Dame (or, as a second choice, under the big clock at Gare de Lyon, which looks a bit like Big Ben).
All of this makes perfect sense and shows that the result naturally depends on the composition of the group of agents and the corpus of their knowledge. And that’s the rub : how do we convert this theoretical model into a reliable result regarding morality? I don’t know, but I like the formal idea. This cosmic viewpoint is reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative or even Leibniz’s God’s eye view. It is, however, difficult to achieve in practice.
Thanks for bringing up this example! Comparing S(P,Q) and S(P’,Q) — i.e., the Schelling versions of question Q for populations P and P’ — is particularly interesting and important when one is a member of both P and P’. Real-world decision-making, to the extent Schelling dynamics matter, involves balancing the important of these Schelling answers across different scales of organization. Figuring out that balance is where a lot of the hard work of moral reasoning comes from, I think.
(That’s also the main reason I defined C(Q) via a more general population-dependent operator S(P,Q), so future conversations about this stuff can more easily talk about multiple populations at once.)
It is similar for NY, where if you are trying to meet with arbitrary-humans, you might want to pick top of the Empire State Building even though it’s actually much more annoying to get to than Grand Central at the Info Booth (because tourists know about the Empire State Building and don’t know about Grand Central).
Interesting reflection. This is just an anecdotal aside with no major link to the moral discussion, but having been a Parisian for most of my life, my first intuition for a meeting point wasn’t the Eiffel Tower, but the square in front of Notre-Dame (le parvis).
Indeed, several cultural elements converge toward this solution for a true-blue Parisian : it’s the historic heart of Paris, a highly symbolic spot, and by convention, ‘Point Zero’ for all roads in France (there’s even a well-known ground marker there). It is also very close to Châtelet-Les Halles, the main transport hub (which doesn’t have a good meeting point itself).
But reading your post, I thought to myself : of course, for most people, and particularly from a tourist’s perspective, the Eiffel Tower is the obvious choice.
What’s amusing is that I tested this with Gemini Pro 3.1 (asking the question as neutrally as possible). When asked in English, it points to the Eiffel Tower, but if the same prompt is translated into French, it suggests the square of Notre-Dame (or, as a second choice, under the big clock at Gare de Lyon, which looks a bit like Big Ben).
All of this makes perfect sense and shows that the result naturally depends on the composition of the group of agents and the corpus of their knowledge. And that’s the rub : how do we convert this theoretical model into a reliable result regarding morality? I don’t know, but I like the formal idea. This cosmic viewpoint is reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative or even Leibniz’s God’s eye view. It is, however, difficult to achieve in practice.
Thanks for bringing up this example! Comparing S(P,Q) and S(P’,Q) — i.e., the Schelling versions of question Q for populations P and P’ — is particularly interesting and important when one is a member of both P and P’. Real-world decision-making, to the extent Schelling dynamics matter, involves balancing the important of these Schelling answers across different scales of organization. Figuring out that balance is where a lot of the hard work of moral reasoning comes from, I think.
(That’s also the main reason I defined C(Q) via a more general population-dependent operator S(P,Q), so future conversations about this stuff can more easily talk about multiple populations at once.)
It is similar for NY, where if you are trying to meet with arbitrary-humans, you might want to pick top of the Empire State Building even though it’s actually much more annoying to get to than Grand Central at the Info Booth (because tourists know about the Empire State Building and don’t know about Grand Central).