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RE: The golden rule is a flawed heuristic (bad moral rule)
Rarely that I had to read such a nonsense from you.
Obviously in times of low steem value every, even minimal content is right to get upvotes from your autovoters who anyway don´t read posts, right?
Back to the sandwich example. The golden rule says that you should treat others as you would wish to be treated. So to make them a tuna sandwich if you know they don´t eat tuna but just because you like tuna, is just stupid. From such a moronic example to conclude that the rule is flawed is, well, not logical.
Happy to get new insights about a flaw in this rule. But you need to come up with a better example.
Autovoters? I didn't receive much upvotes from this if you didn't look.
The Platinum Rule is more practical heuristic than the Golden Rule. Example:
Represents the Platinum Rule. The difference is the Platinum Rule is a data driven decision making paradigm while the Golden Rule is not. The Platinum Rule takes preference data as input in the algorithm while the Golden Rule has no input. The Golden Rule is based on assumptions and guessing. The Golden Rule is about what you would want and how you would think and for this reason it cannot be considered utilitarian because it's not about creating happiness for anyone but yourself.
How you would want to be treated isn't how everyone would want to be treated. Your favorite sandwich isn't everyone's favorite sandwich. What you think is completely irrelevant to satisfying the customer.
You provide the service to the person you create the sandwich for. You go with the Golden Rule and you are serving your own preferences. You go with the Platinum Rule and you are serving their preferences. The customer knows what the customer likes better than you know what they like. You know what you like but you don't know what they like. Please work out the logic.
Golden Rule
The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one's self would wish to be treated. It is a maxim that is found in many religions and cultures.The Golden Rule can be considered an ethic of reciprocity in some religions, although other religions treat it differently. The maxim may appear as either a positive or negative injunction governing conduct:
One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself (positive or directive form).
One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated (negative or prohibitive form).
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).