GRM is Officially a Part of My PhD Thesis

My degree is philosophy and my thesis is a discussion of how Stoic and Buddhist conceptions of justice might make individuals stronger, happier and more resilient.

I was looking over the forums a few months back and found a passionate argument about the spiritual qualities of DOHC and OHV valvetrain layouts. The DOHC person was (an a-hole) who was expressing his disgust for the primitive sorts who never bathe, make love to their sisters and enjoy pushrod engines. The other people (because GRM is mostly composed of reasonable folk) mostly responded by making fun of his snobbery and/or offering engineering explanations for why you might want ohv engines in some applications and OHC engines in others. In less reasonable corners, the explanation for having a DOHC layout tends to revolve around ideas of manliness, patriotism and spiritual purity. Ie, people who like DOHC layouts are a bunch of fart-sniffing pansy communists who pretend to understand Jackson Pollock paintings. They're also gay. 

It struck me that an intelligent and potentially useful discussion - what sort of valvetrain you should use - had devolved into a completely idiotic exercise in feces throwing. Why? My answer is something like this, adding moral value judgments to a discussion, regardless of what the topic is, detracts from truth seeking. 

Do you guys think this is true? 

If you agree, why do you think this is?

Obviously I have theories of my own on these questions, but I'd love to hear what you all think. 

Because from  functional perspective anything automotive has its roots in science, and thus is something that can be analyzed and measured. Whereas morals exist to help us determine right from wrong. 

In this situation - regardless of whether the goal is performance, economy, capacity, longevity, or some combination thereof - “right” and “wrong” should be mostly obvious from the onset of the design process. Attempting to apply moral values afterward, without taking into account the original design parameters, goes against scientific and engineering principles.

Once reason and logic have been removed from a topic based almost entirely around them, the conversation will almost certainly spiral downward if allowed to continue. 

Even though we live in a world awash with facts, we're still wired to value the opinions of certain people more than others. Trust is still important. The easiest way to degrade trust in a person is to degrade the person themselves. You don't need to defeat the argument at all if you can make their words worthless. 

I watch my kids do this E36 M3 all the time. 

Neat PhD by the way.

I think it's largely due to the fact that stirring E36 M3 up is more fun than losing an argument.

Pete Gossett said:

Because from  functional perspective anything automotive has its roots in science, and thus is something that can be analyzed and measured. Whereas morals exist to help us determine right from wrong. 

In this situation - regardless of whether the goal is performance, economy, capacity, longevity, or some combination thereof - “right” and “wrong” should be mostly obvious from the onset of the design process. Attempting to apply moral values afterward, without taking into account the original design parameters, goes against scientific and engineering principles.

It would be nice if engineering and science was applied in such a correct way.  But I know it's not.  And I also know it's not unique to the place I work, as Dilbert hits home to so many other people.

Science is very often over ruled by opinion.  Or more correctly opinion that leads to power, prestige, money, etc.  

But that's not the question here.  It just happens to be related....

Opinion or as I see it, passion. The 911 has been engineered to the nth degree, yet engineering says the engine is in the wrong place. It is built that way on purpose, and it works incredibly well. It sounds like an ad, but engineering and passion together to make something memorable. 

EastCoastMojo said:

I think it's largely due to the fact that stirring E36 M3 up is more fun than losing an argument.

Or if you don't care about the argument at all and just want to stir up E36 M3.

I would argue that the environment in which the debate took place factors in quite strongly. If all members in the discussion were sitting face to face around a dinner table, the outcome would probably be a bit more civilized. Communicating in writing over a forum have the effects: 

- Anonymity. Similar to a lobotomy, it removes some peoples inhibitions. Also opinions which would be considered socially unacceptable around the dinner table are expressed. Is the outcome a more "true" discussion? Or just a less civilized?

- Power of expression. In person, you can express a strong opinion with civilized words by use of body language, emphasis and rhetoric. In writing, that is lost, which is why I think people turn up the strong language when they write on the internet. What would be "I strongly disagree" around the dinner table becomes "You blank motherblanker, I hope you and your family dies tomorrow!" on the internet.

- No consequence: If you behave like a rude and insulting idiot around that dinner table, you will probably not be invited the next time. On the internet forum... not a big deal.

TL;DR: I still haven't had coffee, so maybe not the best TL;DR, but: Does conviction perhaps create a moral judgment, regardless of the question?

It's too early in the morning, but I think there's a human tendency to assume that there are right and wrong answers for any question, and that rightness or wrongness becomes effectively a moral value judgment. I confess at this point that I consider answering the need to develop a javascript-heavy application with the Ember platform to be wrong. Not just suboptimal, or the wrong case for what we did that one time at that one place, but infuriatingly incorrect.

Although not a stellar example, I think the point my caffeineless brain is trying to make is that it hardly matters whether there's a scientifically or logically correct answer; arriving at a preferred solution creates a right answer to stand against the wrong ones, and in so doing, a technical question becomes no purer and no more resistant to emotion and poo-flinging than questions of politics, religion, or bathroom tile colors. (We're remodeling, it may be affecting my brain)

Trying to distill again, I think perhaps making a decision creates the addition of a moral judgment. Or can, at any rate. Thank heavens not all discussions go this route. Incidentally, there hasn't actually been any strife over the bathroom tile, I was just hunting for a really normal decision topic.

adding moral value judgments to a discussion, regardless of what the topic is, detracts from truth seeking. 

Facts are facts, period. Morals, and morality, are completely relative. Once morality, and to a further degree emotions, enter into a factual argument, all bets are off. Just look at the propaganda rags these days for a stunning example of emotional morality being used in place of facts. Everyone would rather have the moral high ground for some artificial feeling of superiority than bother finding out facts that might not line up with their opinions or even their own sense of morals. 

"Truth" is an interesting concept in itself. It should be based on fact, but now a days seems to be entirely up to the writer and receiver of facts. That is NOT how truth should work. It's not an opinion, while it may be debatable, there are some pretty concrete limits to what should be considered truth that seem to have just gone away, like the ability to prove an accusation, or take an accurate measurement of something. 

Example: Jay says the sky is blue, Tom says it is aquamarine, while Bill says it's purple or else he'll stick his hand in the toaster. Which one is true? Are people more likely to agree with Bill over how he stresses his opinion, despite the sky not actually being purple? Or will people argue with Bill just to watch him stick his hand in the toaster?

I'd actually be interested in reading your thesis when you're done, this is an interesting concept that I feel could warrant more investigation. 

In reply to DaewooOfDeath :

I think it's also confirmation bias.

You see that phenomenon in all corners of the internet, even with the most idiotic things.

Eg:

• SNES vs Genesis
• Bilstein vs Koni.
• John Deer vs New Holland
• Cloth diapers vs Disposables (Seriously don't wade into that argument. Mommy groups will cut you and leave you)
• iOS vs Android

Everyone wants to feel like they made the "right" choice, but the decision making process isn't generally a straight line recyclable for every situation. So people continue to justify their choice with their confluence of circumstances and opinions. The internet just amplifies the phenomenons prevalence since sharing your opinion is low effort.

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent", Isaac Asimov

That violence can be physical, or in the case of internet forums, the conversation devolves into "feces throwing". 

There are often too much emotions when people get into arguments. Loosing an argument is seen as an attack on their self-worth by some people. 

arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in the mud...  after a while you realize the pig just likes it.

Cool guys, thanks. 
I'm going to go through here point by point.

Theoretical-

Confirmation bias is absolutely part of what's happening and I'm not at all surprised to hear that the advocates of disposable diapers would happily knife me in a back alley.  However, I think it goes a step deeper than mere confirmation bias. It seems to me there's an identity element. Our passionate advocate for overhead camshafts, for example, wasn't really as interested in being right as he was in showing off how his preference for OHC engines just sort of automatically made him a sophisticated, worldly gentleman. I'd assume diaper wars are similar and I'm certain the iOS/Android thing is, too.

"To like such and such completely trivial thing makes me a morally superior being."  

This is a more traditionally philosophical topic, and one that is very much in my thesis as well, but we can see a similar pattern playing out in Hannah Arendt's book "Eichmann in Jerusalem." (The book is excellent and I recommend it, btw) It's about the trial of a Nazi war criminal who'd been kidnaped in South America and then secretly shipped back to Israel. Anyway, almost everyone involved wanted Eichmann to be this diabolical genius who ate babies and controlled volcanoes with his brain.  Instead, they got a transparently shallow and vaguely stupid man with a runny nose, bad posture and a tendency to go off on poorly informed theological tangents to his interrogators. His path to Nazi infamy had been one of brainless conformity and automatic reverence for authority. Arendt reported the trial as such, explaining that evil requires nothing special at all and is often, and most devastatingly, produced by a simple lack of thought. 

Upon publication, the public went absolutely ape-E36 M3 condemning Arendt. Eichmann had to be a monster. How could you dare to portray him as a human? Don't you know that we normal people are incapable of doing bad things? How dare you draw comparisons between us inevitably good people and inevitably evil people like the Nazis?

In short, people seem much more interested in being "automatically" good/smart/civilized/superior/whatever than actually performing the actions need to become good/smart/civilized/superior/whatever. I think our DOHC snob was manifesting that a little bit. 

RevRico,

This might be a little farther out into the weeds than you want to go, and generally speaking I agree with you, BUT ... 

When was the last time you had a non-subjective experience of anything? In other words, I'm not so sure truth can ever be as independent of people with toasters as you seem to think. 

(Also, thanks for the offer. I'm honored. :) )

Ransom,

That's a really interesting point I hadn't thought of. There doesn't really seem to be a clear division between "simply mistaken" things like me accidentally spelling potato as potatoe and "moral judgment wrong" things like kicking old ladies. I think, provisionally, that it might be because our categories of moral wrongness and simply mistaken are both composed of stuff that threatens our groups in some way. The only difference being magnitude. Crappy spelling is a tiny, almost trivial way to lower social standards of behavior in one small area. Kicking old ladies is a threat to major rules of behavior, the lives of old ladies, the structures of the families of those affected etc. Ie, the magnitude is much higher in the secon, but the wrongness is in principle similar. 

Torkel,

I couldn't agree more. The internet is seemingly designed to encourage a-hole behavior. 

Appleseed/Alfadriver/PeteGosset,

I agree that the movement of the discussion from something that is mostly science (ohv/dohc) to something is moralizing and aesthetic is highly questionable and more or less bound to get stupid. However, I wonder if we might not be overestimating the capabilities of science. 

To take the Porsche 911 example, science "tells us" it's designed wrong but only if we non-scientifically decide that we prioritize going fast around a racetrack. If we tell science that we love the feeling of a pendulum effect, mid engines are "scientifically wrong." If we tell science that we want a car that handles almost as well as a mid engined car and puts down power better than a front engined car, but that we also want a lot of interior space relative to the size of the car overall - that is we want four seats and decent storage in our otherwise tiny sports car - I'm not sure you can do better than a rear engined layout with a boxer configuration. If we tell science that we want to make our car out of discarded textiles and chicken wire, on the other hand, a Trabant is a scientifically wonderful car. 

This gets to Alfa's problem with power and politics. Science is amoral, possesses no inherent direction and has no values. Yes, we can use science to preserve rainforests, feed the orphans and extend lifespans but we can just as easily use it to cover the earth in machines, eliminate undesirable populations and procure sacrifices for the dread gods of the Aztec. Science is, in other words, strictly a tool. Your frustration, I assume, is that people are saying that they are interested in using science for goal X (a better SUV or whatever) and they are actually using science to make an SUV that will result in their getting more political influence. I totally sympathize with your frustrations, but the person's decision to prioritize political influence with the design is no less "scientific" than your decision to prioritize safety/reliability/whatever else. That said, lying about your goals is generally crappy leadership and a great way to destroy morale so yeah, I'm taking your side in this conflict. ;)

This connects with Pete's point. I don't think science is actually the only way we can use moral judgments to go from useful to stupid discussions. For example, I assume we can all agree that liking or disliking Shakespeare is a non-scientific thing. People can and do have useful intelligent discussions about Othello and King Leer all the time. However, the instant I explain that liking King Leer betrays a scandalous personality or that enjoying Othello makes you a paragon of virtue, we're deep into idiot territory. 

Wow, that's long. :P

 

In reply to DaewooOfDeath :

You touched on one of my favorite aggravations: Science (biology, economics, whatever) is generally a good tool for giving us what we ask for. But it's very much like programming a computer, or asking a genie for something: It doesn't get the gist, it doesn't distill what you meant, and it doesn't automatically take into account and prioritize all the things that should be inputs. It just answers the question as posed; no more, no less.

Being less than cautious, let alone dishonest, with the parameters or the goal means we get a very different result. And that result may be anywhere from suboptimal to catastrophic. Or occasionally better, I suppose, though an occasional lucky mistake is not an argument for bad science.

Oh yes, very much so. For God-knows-why, one of my required classes is about big data.  I was not hugely interested in the subject but the more I get into it, the more I realize how useless/misleading/dangerous it would be to leave big data in the hands of people who only study statistics. Discerning signal from noise is at least as much, and in my opinion much more so, a matter of intellectual honesty, hermeneutics and contextual analysis than it is about crunching numbers. 

This is kind of a fun example of what I mean. 

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/

Fascinating discussion, with one of the best titles ever.

mostly-dead thread, revived by canoe.  canoe deleted

continue about your internetting

In reply to RevRico :

"Facts are facts, period. Morals, and morality, are completely relative. "

Even that statement is arguable.  Both in what constitutes "fact" and how "relative" certain morals are.  

I know this is an older thread- but it only dates back to last fall, so I wouldn't exactly call it a "zombie".  The premise behind the paper sounds interesting.

I was discussing with a co-worker the other day about "in-crowds" and certain things that are said, particularly in forums, that you need to be "in" on to get.  It's more than just along the lines of "inside jokes".  For example, if someone here were to write "Camero", in referring to a Chevrolet Camaro, there is a whole history and culture behind that misspelling that, if one were to have just started reading automotive forums, would be completely lost on them.

I thought that would be an interesting idea for a thesis, too.  

EastCoastMojo said:

I think it's largely due to the fact that stirring E36 M3 up is more fun than losing an argument.

Not only that. If you look at the Christian Faith, Pride is one of "Seven Deadly Sins" and rightfully so. Pride makes people do stupid things, from typing in all caps on the internet to starting wars were millions die. In this case, admitting fault wounds a person's pride, so they lash out and dig in deeper on their responses.

How did the PHD go?

RevRico said:
Facts are facts, period. Morals, and morality, are completely relative. Once morality, and to a further degree emotions, enter into a factual argument, all bets are off. Just look at the propaganda rags these days for a stunning example of emotional morality being used in place of facts. Everyone would rather have the moral high ground for some artificial feeling of superiority than bother finding out facts that might not line up with their opinions or even their own sense of morals.

I've recently had an online lecture with my students on moral relativism philosophy and its [canoeing] origins. It is sometimes called [paddling] relativism. We also discussed the lack of understanding of [spammer] relativism in the modern society and how it influences the conception of [boating] in general.