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RE: The golden rule is a flawed heuristic (bad moral rule)
I was not aware about a platinum rule. I think this differenciation between golden and platinum is kind of artificial and far from daily life experience. Just that some people defined the platinum rule as a contrast to the golden rule, does not make the golden rule "bad", because in reality many people who think they use the golden rule, use - unintentionally - a half platinum as well, as they do take into consideration what the others want.
The definition of golden doesn´t forbid to reflect about what the others want, right?
I explained the differences between them in the next blogpost. The Platinum rule scales with technology while the Golden rule is ancient and wasn't designed for big data. The Platinum rule is a data driven algorithm which gains power as more data is input while the Golden rule is designed to be used when you have almost no data about a complete stranger.
1000 years ago people had far more privacy and far less knowledge about each other compared to today. Today with big data, with so many preferences known, with profiles on Google with all kinds of intimate private details which can be searched through, there now is the ability to begin applying all that data to morality.
So how do I know how to treat Sarah from New York? If I can run a bot which collects all her social media public preference data then an algorithm could tell me right away how she prefers to be treated, what her favorite movies are, favorite foods and so on and so forth. 1000 years ago there was no way to do this so people really had to guess about complete strangers what the complete stranger might prefer because the preference data wasn't collected or stored.
But language was there already, a simple question may have helped. And there were no movies, so no preferences there :) And no data privacy rules as well. I don´t think that in the past it was more complicated to get specifics. And with complete strangers people had anyway not to bother.
Quite in contrary. Today even with applying big data (which is not legal always as we know), you know the public profile, but not what a person real likes. E.g. in countries with no true freedom of speech like North Korea or even Germany, people can´t express their political opinion in open or in social media (if existing, for N.Korea I am not sure).