Pragmatic choices one can forgive, but that doesn't make it right to pretend that a thing is something it isn't. Ultimately, it seems someone there is simply lying to people.

And you may think it's trivial, but it's exactly how - step by step, creative decision by creative decision - we turn each other into idiots with little clue about how reality works. Something that was discussed at length just few hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013

See also: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect.

I strongly second the quote that I once found on the Internet: "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires".

(I'm not a lawyer, only a layman.)

> "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires"

Regardless of whether the first sentence is accurate (and indeed it certainly seems accurate), I believe the prescription given in the second sentence is not entirely accurate.

Slashing someone's tires is absolutely/always illegal (property damage, or whatever the term is for causing it) ... whereas sabotaging someone's beliefs is illegal iff the "someone" is a court of law or government official, or if the belief-being-sabotaged is about a living person such that a falsehood constitutes slander.

As such, sabotage of beliefs is possible in some cases where tire-slashing is not.

When did "legally can" and "should" become equivalent? I don't mean to focus on this particular instance of using them interchangeably; I feel like Reagan gave an executive order that I missed.

> When did "legally can" and "should" become equivalent?

They didn't; e.g. playing the lottery as an adult is both legal and insanely idiotic. (Don't misunderstand me; I do like it that the insanely idiotic are able to self-select themselves away from their money with such ease.)

But on the other hand, "legally can and causes more utility gain per unit time than any other course of action" ... does indeed imply "should".

(And unless you're really silly, "utility gain" simplifies to "monetary gain".)

Of course, I'm not trying to imply that sabotage-of-beliefs is that powerful an action; indeed, my ultimate conclusion is that neither tire-slashing nor sabotage-of-beliefs present a compelling benefit-per-cost.

> And unless you're really silly, "utility gain" simplifies to "monetary gain".

Yeah, that's why I always turn down my friends when they ask if I want to go see a movie. Monetarily, it's nothing but a loss, and I would have to be "really silly" to value an entertaining experience.

>Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires.

I really do not understand the reasoning behind this statement.

Sabotage of the belief system and slashing tires are very different. Fundamentally different I would say.

Slashing tires leads to an outcome that becomes very quickly obvious to the victim and is easily repairable.

Sabotage of the belief system goes very likely unnoticed to a person and can last for hundreds generations and is very difficult to repair.

All the more convenient, then, that sabotage-of-beliefs is not per se a crime.

I would word it more carefully.

Sabotage of beliefs is not understood to be a crime.

If people understood how much damage it could cause then they perhaps would reconsider it.

> sabotaging someone's beliefs is illegal iff the "someone" is a court of law or government official, or if the belief-being-sabotaged is about a living person such that a falsehood constitutes slander.

Or if you're doing it for personal gain, in which case it may be fraud.

The point here is intent. Don't promote less than maximally accurate beliefs unless you hate someone so much you'd be willing to go and slash their tires.

Also, in terms of real-world consequences, sabotaging someone's thinking can be very, very much worse than just breaking their car.

> The point here is intent.

I see.

> Don't promote less than maximally accurate beliefs unless you hate someone so much you'd be willing to go and slash their tires.

Yet is it not conceivable to hate someone thoroughly, but not enough to be willing to sacrifice one's entire career/reputation/criminal-record by committing any kind of actual crime?

Of course it is. The quote is just pointing out that promoting inaccurate belief is doing actual harm to others.

Ok but anyway, either they were ignorant or they simply lied in the press release. Choose freely what shows the project members in a better light! (Neither? ;)

My initial quotation was this from the press release:

The architects said the aluminium design is derived from John Conway's Game of Life 'cellular automaton',

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/could-ca...

You can't protect this with some kind of "we all come from gogol's overcoat", mentality. If it is true then they should have put a Gogol image there! ;)

The architects probably don't have much control over the marketing. They're each doing their jobs.

If they have a sign somewhere in the train station explaining the panels and how they "celebrate GoL" with an explanation of that algorithm then I would have an issue. But I agree that a static image of, ie a 77P6H1V1 wouldn't be a good representation of how it looks when flying.

Static: http://www.conwaylife.com/w/images/8/89/77p6h1v1.png

Animated: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/77P6H1V1

>> if you picked ideological purity over pragmatism you wouldn't be a great engineer.

OOoh, disagree. What yields purity is the clash of a pure vision with the constraints of reality. You can't be really "pragmatic" until you've tried really hard to "do the right thing" and failed and looked for alternatives. If you don't even try, you're not being "pragmatic"; just lazy and boring.