However, for the sake of experiment, imagine that Omega comes and tells you that if you will work like a slave for the next 20 or 50 years, the future paradise will happen with probability almost 1. You don’t have to worry about mistakes in your plans, because either Omega verified their correctness, or is going to provide you corrections when needed and predicts that you will be able to follow those corrections successfully. Omega also predicts that it you commit to the task, you will have enough willpower, health, and other necessary resources to complete it successfully. In this scenario, is committing for the slave work a bad decision?
For the sake of experiment, imagine that air has zero viscosity. In this scenario, would a feather and a cannon ball fall in the same time?
For the sake of experiment, imagine that air has zero viscosity. In this scenario, would a feather and a cannon ball fall in the same time?
I believe the answer is “yes”, but I had to think about that for a moment. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the current discussion, though.
I think your real point might be closer to something like, “thought experiments are useless at best, and should thus be avoided”, but I don’t want to put words into anyone’s mouth.
My point was something like, “of course if you assume away all the things that cause slave labour to be bad then slave labour is no longer bad, but that observation doesn’t yield much of an insight about the real world”.
That makes sense, but I don’t think it’s what Viliam_Bur was talking about. His point, as far as I could tell, was that the problem with slave labor is the coercion, not the labor itself.
For the sake of experiment, imagine that air has zero viscosity. In this scenario, would a feather and a cannon ball fall in the same time?
I believe the answer is “yes”, but I had to think about that for a moment. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the current discussion, though.
I think your real point might be closer to something like, “thought experiments are useless at best, and should thus be avoided”, but I don’t want to put words into anyone’s mouth.
My point was something like, “of course if you assume away all the things that cause slave labour to be bad then slave labour is no longer bad, but that observation doesn’t yield much of an insight about the real world”.
That makes sense, but I don’t think it’s what Viliam_Bur was talking about. His point, as far as I could tell, was that the problem with slave labor is the coercion, not the labor itself.