[ExI] The American Doorway

[Max More]

Interesting that you brought up "the utilitarian view", although I'm not sure you meant it in terms of the metaethical view rather than the everyday view. In reading Rafal's response, it occurred to me to think about this from a virtue ethics approach -- that being my preference over consequentialism and deontology.

Holding the door open reflexively can be a good habit to have cultivated. It's not something you want to calculate utility for each time. Nor would that be practical in any accurate way. However, the expression of virtues should be tempered by consequences and those change with other people's expectations (will she be angry at me for such an old-fashioned practice?) with environmental changes -- such as crash bars. In some cases, unless I'm truly in a rush where seconds matter, I will always hold a non-crash bar door open for someone whose arms are full. It seems to be a winning move ethically -- it expresses a virtue of consideration, it has good overall consequences, and it's something I would appreciate being done for me.

--Max
________________________________
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> on behalf of spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2023 6:53 AM
To: 'ExI chat list' <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] The American Doorway


...> On Behalf Of MB via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] The American Doorway

>...I was taught to hold the door for old people or people who would have
trouble with the door (crippled or carrying things).  It seemed like a
reasonable thing to do.

>...Now that I *am* an old person, I appreciate it when people hold a door
for me - especially if it is one of those difficult doors - which we seem to
have many of where I live.  Our local PO got new doors a year or so ago, and
now they are "pull" to enter, not push, so Rafal, you'd bust your hand on
the darn things.  Very annoying when trying to mail packages and the door is
pull. :(  Cheaper that way, they said.  It works with "push" just great when
one has mailed the packages and is leaving the PO with empty hands.
Pffffft.  Government... ?  (Yes, it should be push to exit, for fire
safety.)

Regards,
MB




Ah, the utilitarian view, of course.

Regarding doors opening out, from a utilitarian point of view, this has new
significance in our times of flash mobs.  Do let us set aside the post
office for this discussion as a special case: we have packages going in, but
usually none going out.  Retail stores are the opposite.  In our fortunate
times, fire safety has become mercifully irrelevant: we build from materials
which don't readily burn now.

We now could do the sensible thing: make the post office with open-in doors
and everywhere else with open out, possibly with sensible crash-bars.  Then
an interior door with the usual open-out configuration at the PO could be
propped open during business hours.

All of this reminds me of a marvelous book from a few years ago, the Mating
Mind, by Geoffrey Miller, along with the surrounding commentary at the time.
Miller explains the successive evolution of the human brain, the reptilian
cortex, which controls bodily functions and instinctive survival emotions
such as rage and fear, the mammalian, which is considered the seat of sexual
desire, and up front, the primate cortices which is where our uniquely human
thought and reason takes place.  This is most poetically observed by the
mathematician Pascal, who opined: the heart knows reason that reason knows
not.

I am extrapolating way beyond or perhaps orthogonal to Miller and Pascal
when I go off on notions such as holding a door for a possibly attractive
person in order to perform the social equivalent of a fighter-plane doing a
cobra maneuver to get from her attacker's 12 to his 6 (as Maverick did in
the original Top Gun.)  But stuff like that is way down in the mammalian
cortices where we cannot control it, or even influence it much: our sexual
desires are just what they are, our brain's configuration.  We really are
born with the orientation we have, no matter how much we reason around it or
try to defeat it with the frontal lobes.  Result: we do stuff like holding a
door for a potentially attractive person.

spike





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