First off: I absolutely love Plato
at the Googleplex. It’s delightfully written, informative, and
thought-provoking. The chapter we were assigned for this class meeting really
struck me as a great dialogue. The discussion was a great examination of ideas,
and it was cleverly written, funny and with characters provoking each other,
helping it feel real and keeping it interesting. I’ve found that nothing opens
a person up to thought or emotion better than laughter.
I think the
idea of EASE (Ethical Answer Search Engine) brought up a rather unconscious
idea of today, that the answer of the many is better than the answer of the
few. The best part of their discussion of that idea was when Plato made them
realize the fatal flaw; that even the formation of the algorithm for EASE would
have “ethical presuppositions built into it” (108). The ideas of the moral
expert and the crowd-sourcing are two extreme ends of their discussion, and at
the end Cheryl seems to favor a sort of compromise; a group of people she calls
“super-arguers” (115), who are experts who argue and put forward ideas, examine
each others, and repeat. Basically, except with different words, she seems to
be calling for philosophers, the likes of which we’ve been studying in this
class.
Another big
point of this chapter, which was already touched upon in the first chapter, is
the fact that philosophic ideas become part of our understanding of the world.
Because we have absorbed their thinking, we don’t even notice that we’ve done
so. Cheryl used the example of the concept of slavery. Can any of you tell me
when you devided, after logical thought and consideration, that slavery is
wrong? Or have you simply always understood that? One of the points of this
chapter is that philosophy effects your life in ways we don’t even understand
yet. Cheryl mentioned her fear of what the failure of our time will be, some
fact that we don’t think about or notice, and yet people of the future will
look back upon our actions with censure and dislike.
I have almost always found myself agreeing with compromises between to extremes. That is why I am Libertarian, not liberal or conservative. I also do not identify fully with any political party. None of them can seem to find the less extreme solutions that seem inherently obvious to me.
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