Wouldn't a line off the surface of a flat table sitting on a sphere be a tangent?

The only ethics classes I've ever seen were in the philosophy department.

*smirks* I pwn'ed my ethics prof.

No - this is *exactly* what I mean when I say programmers (and everyone, really) should study ethics. *Precisely* this.

Out of college I was pointed in the direction of 'professional engineering exam' (or something like that). In my field it wasn't really a critical thing for getting a job, but I took a look. What passed for 'ethics' at the time seemed to be: don't undercut others in your profession, or otherwise interfere with them doing the job the way they see fit.

I didn't bother to even study (any further) for the test.

Much more recently I was studying for a cyber security certification, and was glad to see that they emphasized safety of people over watching out for you colleagues and bosses.

I get emails like this occasionally and then I don't respond and then I feel guilty for not responding.....

He did seem more on it than me, though.

I looked up his publication record yesterday and he has some paper from 50 years ago about 'how the earth is flat' which is blowing my mind a bit. Like when we use a spirit level to ensure a table or whatever is flat, if we extended the flat table infinitely to the left, it would eventually circumnavigate the earth and join itself on the right. And if its level - that is, flat - is is actually followers the curvature of the earth. This is also (theoretically) true for much smaller tables. Everything we think of as flat isn't. The paper is slightly silly but he males a good point about how language is sloppy and how we actually experience the earth as having flat places.

Ughghjhhh

From a professor: absolutely

It's crazy how effective altruism gave us groups teaching doctors in remote communities how to fix cleft pallets instead of funding foreign doctors in traveling all over. (Actually a good thing.) To it morphing into the bull crap of not investing in saving the planet (because in their mind it's doomed) and pouring money into what they believe will help humanity after the downfall, such as AI.

Crazy thinking.

Comrade, you could, and you should email him.

Imagine being him, and being remembered by a student who only took one class from you and still remembers you decades later.

That would make a person's heart sing.

@jlink

No, it's been quite some time. I tried to see if the course page was captured by archive.org, but I think the prof retired before it became normal to post reading lists this way.

I tried searching for him and found a news article that indicates he's 94 now: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Professor-attacked-by-bear-on-Muir-trail-3104504.php

Since I can't find an obituary, he's probably still alive. Since I only took the one class from him, I think I should probably not try emailing him.

Yea, I also think there are things like this in high context cultures. Where everyone expects you to know this already. Where willingly choosing to violate the norm communicates something.

When I was visiting the uni as a highschool student, I sat in on the class for one lecture, which he gave entirely without lecture notes.

That day, he was talking about whether normative systems are a good basis for ethics and he gave the example of wearing a green hat. We can imagine a society where nobody would wear a green hat as it's not normative, but _obviously_ wearing a green hat isn't unethical.

One of the students raised her hand and said in her culture, wearing a green hat signified that your wife was cheating on you. Her boyfriend was a fan of the Oakland As and when her parents came to visit, they were concerned about his ball cap!

So I signed up for the class the next year as a student and we got to that day of the course and he gave _exactly_ the same lecture, but instead of talking about green hats, talked about using a salad fork for the main course. Etiquette is not ethics, but both are normative.

Which I think about occasionally, especially as I was learning about Jewish ethics, which are in many ways based on normativity. Etiquette mostly doesn't have material impacts, but rudeness motivated by bigotry does, so maybe there's not a huge bright line between the two. And while we can imagine a society with signifiers that are solely custom, we live in a society full of signifiers. If we sometimes confuse custom and ethics, maybe that's just an unavoidable given.

And is it ethical to wear a red baseball cap? I'd say no.

Highly relateable. I took a linguistics class like 25 years ago. All I remember was the last lecture where he said this is all antiquated BS that no working linguist believes anymore. Then he wished us a happy summer and walked out

I took the class 31 years ago, so I remember a few points with great clarity, but many of the details are lost in the midst of time.