Interestingly, if one looks at this story in terms of “what message is this story sending”, then it feels like the explicit and implicit message are the opposites of each other.
The explicit message seems to be something like “cooperation with the other side is good, it can be the only way to survive”.
But then if we think of this representing a “pro-cooperation side”, we might notice that the story doesn’t really give any real voice to the “anti-cooperation side”—the one which would point out that actually, there are quite a few situations when you absolutely shouldn’t cooperate with monsters. The setup of the story is such that it can present a view from which the pro-cooperation side is simply correct, as opposed to looking at a situation where it’s more questionable.
In the context of a fictional story making a point about the real world, I would interpret “cooperating with the other side” to mean something like “making an honest attempt to fairly present the case for the opposite position”. Since this story doesn’t do that, it reads to me like it’s saying that we should cooperate with those who disagree with us… while at the same time not cooperating with the side that it disagrees with.
I would word the intended message as “whether or not someone shares our values is not directly relevant to whether one should cooperate with them”. Moral alignment is not directly relevant to the decision; it enters only indirectly, in reasoning about things like the need for enforcement or reputational costs. Monstrous morals should not be an immediate deal-breaker in their own right; they should weigh on the scales via trust and reputation costs, but that weight is not infinite.
I don’t really think of it as “pro-cooperation” or “anti-cooperation”; there is no “pro-cooperation” “side” which I’m trying to advocate here.
Makes one wonder what kind of story could justify the opposite moral. I do think that moral would be “All that evil needs to win is for the good people to do nothing”
It’s peace vs conflict. Peace is cooperation and conflict is anti-cooperation. Is peace always the right answer? Maybe not, but it’s the one I’m going to pick most of the time.
I think it makes a pretty good case for the anti-cooperation side: you might get to kill some of your enemies before you get killed in turn. However, the correctness of any argument can only be judged by those who remain alive.
While they are dead no. While they were alive—yes, they could. (This is interesting in that, properly performed, (a specified) computation gets the same result, whatever the circumstances. More generally, Fermat argued that: for integers a, b, c, and n, where n>2, a^n+b^n=c^N:
had no solutions
was provable
He might have been wrong about the difficulty of proving it, but he was right about the above. If perhaps for the wrong reasons. (Can we prove Fermat didn’t have a proof?))
Interestingly, if one looks at this story in terms of “what message is this story sending”, then it feels like the explicit and implicit message are the opposites of each other.
The explicit message seems to be something like “cooperation with the other side is good, it can be the only way to survive”.
But then if we think of this representing a “pro-cooperation side”, we might notice that the story doesn’t really give any real voice to the “anti-cooperation side”—the one which would point out that actually, there are quite a few situations when you absolutely shouldn’t cooperate with monsters. The setup of the story is such that it can present a view from which the pro-cooperation side is simply correct, as opposed to looking at a situation where it’s more questionable.
In the context of a fictional story making a point about the real world, I would interpret “cooperating with the other side” to mean something like “making an honest attempt to fairly present the case for the opposite position”. Since this story doesn’t do that, it reads to me like it’s saying that we should cooperate with those who disagree with us… while at the same time not cooperating with the side that it disagrees with.
I would word the intended message as “whether or not someone shares our values is not directly relevant to whether one should cooperate with them”. Moral alignment is not directly relevant to the decision; it enters only indirectly, in reasoning about things like the need for enforcement or reputational costs. Monstrous morals should not be an immediate deal-breaker in their own right; they should weigh on the scales via trust and reputation costs, but that weight is not infinite.
I don’t really think of it as “pro-cooperation” or “anti-cooperation”; there is no “pro-cooperation” “side” which I’m trying to advocate here.
Makes one wonder what kind of story could justify the opposite moral. I do think that moral would be “All that evil needs to win is for the good people to do nothing”
A story could also...give us the actual statement. I say ‘If scissor statements are real, name 3.’
It’s peace vs conflict. Peace is cooperation and conflict is anti-cooperation. Is peace always the right answer? Maybe not, but it’s the one I’m going to pick most of the time.
I think it makes a pretty good case for the anti-cooperation side: you might get to kill some of your enemies before you get killed in turn. However, the correctness of any argument can only be judged by those who remain alive.
2+2=4
It can be judged by those who are alive, those who were alive, those who will be alive...need I say more?
If you think dead people can do arithmetic, I think you need to explain how that would work.
While they are dead no. While they were alive—yes, they could. (This is interesting in that, properly performed, (a specified) computation gets the same result, whatever the circumstances. More generally, Fermat argued that: for integers a, b, c, and n, where n>2, a^n+b^n=c^N:
had no solutions
was provable
He might have been wrong about the difficulty of proving it, but he was right about the above. If perhaps for the wrong reasons. (Can we prove Fermat didn’t have a proof?))