But times change and the cost of free tier users surpasses that of paying users. Should the company continue providing the same level of service for free tier users?

“Times changing” here seems to be the central trick to the argument.

What’s interesting about enshittification is that as the company gets more and more profitable there seems to be more and more excuses as to why these free features are so costly.

It’s very easy for a company to put out a statement that times are changing and that the free tier is unaffordable. Is that always true? Who’s to say?

I’m sure sometimes it is true but the doubt is why arguments like this will never go away.

Also, what other term than entitlement would you use for somebody gets something for free, is not promised that it will stay free forever, the free offering is cancelled or limited, and the user starts complaining?

What other term than incompetent would you use for a company that puts out a free product, attracts a bunch of free users, abruptly cuts access for those features and puts it behind a paywall, and then acts surprised when those same users complain about it.

If you want to make a business move go ahead, it’s your right, but accept the complaints from your user base you predictably pissed off.

A lot of what you said here is an implication of subjectivism, but not an argument for it.

Of course? We’re trying to understand why these students in a classroom are so strongly subjective, not convert each other.

They were confused what their students meant by subjectivism and that they don’t think the students understand what they mean.

I’m putting into context why subjectivism is the defacto moral standard in an empirical society.

Subjectivism is like the null hypothesis, it’s the default. If you want to claim objectivism, you have to prove this objective realm exists… but it’s an unfalsifiable thing?

Subjectivism about morality is no more an implication of an empiricist worldview than subjectivism about the shape of the Earth.

I’m not sure what point you’re making. What implies what doesn’t really matter for truth.

I was making a point that since a lot of people are empiricists by default that implies they’d be subjectivists. That doesn’t mean I was saying they’re right.

What you’re suggesting here sounds a lot like the logical positivists’ position on ethics. The descriptive is falsifiable, the normative is not, so it must be subjective.

This isn’t what I’m suggesting, it’s what I’m observing. This is my theory for why society is so strongly subjectivist.

We both already agreed this isn’t an argument for or against, I’m putting in context why society thinks why it does.

I’ve made a few personal arguments below but this was more a starting point, there’s just too much criticism to preempt its better to wait and have that conversation and address it as its brought up.

The problem with that view is that we can’t draw neat lines between the normative and the descriptive. If I’m attempting to model the world descriptively, I’m still going to be guided by normative considerations about what constitutes a good model. Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative. Philosophy in general is not a discrete subject, separate from science. The two are continuous.

Can you elaborate on “Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative.”

I bring up the is-ought problem in an argument below as evidence of subjectivist. The “is” lives in the external world we collect empirical data on, the “ought” is unique to our brains and subject to our own experiences

I would like to understand what you mean before I disagree (I might not but I think i do)

and you base that expectation on what?

hopes and dreams?

I’m sorry, what?

this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know ants and humans experience different subjective experiences, you just strongly suspect it.

Sure, in the same way I have no knowledge of anything except “I think therefore I am”.

If you apply this level of skepticism it’s impossible to move beyind solipsism.

You’re free to apply that standard, I wouldn’t be able to prove knowledge beyond it and then all conversation stops here.

If you’ll at least grant me a mutual belief in the external world so we can probe it and collect empirical data we can “pretend” is knowledge then we can build up a more interesting philosophy beyond “I don’t believe anything exists at all but me”.

knowing =/= suspecting. which is why you follow this illogic down to an incorrect conclusion of your “expectation.”

No, I follow it because out of utility I’d like a more useful philosophy than solipsism.

the greatest challenge of our age is dispelling the victorian myth that knowledge of the real world is untouchable to us.

What? That’s literally what you just argued? Now you’re trying to dispel it?

the distinction between you and other does exist, but we are not locked out of the world. we can deduce real facts about things outside our perception.

Why should I not respond “this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know real facts outside your perception you just strongly suspect it.”?

You just flipped your argument around 180 degrees?

the regress problem states that all human knowledge is axiomatic.

it is true for literally every single possible proposition.

Okay so it’s clear you understand why I brought it up and that it’s true.

I don’t know why the rest of the comment is phrased so angrily but if you’re just saying I’m right I don’t know how to respond to it lol.

asking him to overcome this problem is so fucking far outside the scope of what you’re arguing about as to be ridiculous, you look silly.

I wasn’t asking him to overcome it, I was astonished he would claim he could overcome it because it’s as obviously true as we both claim.

Not sure why I look silly if you keep telling me how absolutely right I am in all contexts lol

Just because its easy to get a bunch of humans to agree say murder is wrong, doesn’t mean you can call that objective.

The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.

If morality is subjective, you’d expect creatures with similar subjective experiences to agree with each other.

You’d expect one subjective blob of rules to conform to human biology/sociology and a separate blob of subjective rules to apply to antkind with no real way to interface between the two.

Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.

Can you elaborate?

I don’t believe that’s possible unless you take an axiomatic approach which would obviously be a moral relativist approach since we can just disagree on the choice of axioms themselves and prevent any deduction.

How do you overcome the is-ought problem?

Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors.

Just human? I mean, sure do, but we’re leaving out a huge array of animals who also engage in rudimentary moral behavior.

You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you.

Of course, we evolved to be social animals did we not? What else would you expect but inate instinctual “rules” when they’d lead to a clearly fitter society.

The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.

Right, and just like the variation in genetic material this variation in inputs and outputs that we all have which are wholly unique to us as individuals and while remarkably similar to others raised in similar environments, also remarkably unique in subtle ways.

I agree this is the entire conversation. And the obviousness of this fact, that moral expression is subtly unique to each individual, is the ultimate answer to the question.

If you are raised in a subjectively different environment, then the rules you learn to behave by will be subjective to that environment.

“Morality is subjective” is the inevitable conclusion of a secular, empiricalistic worldview.

Essentially, now that we are in a scientific world disagreement is resolved through experiment.

Disagreement not resolvable through experiment is removed from the realm of science, and is called falsifiable and is seen as subjective.

If you and I disagree, there are no scientific tests we can run to resolve moral issues.

And since we can’t point to a God or objective moral laws, it doesn’t even matter if one theoretically exists because it’s inaccessible and infalsifiable. Effectively it doesn’t exist for us.

Both of us are following different moral standards, the “rules” in your head are not the same rules that I’m subjective to.

You’re morals are subjective to your experience, it simply is a fact.

Then again, isn’t that what people used to do with StackOverflow?

Yes, one of the major issues with StackOverflow that answerers complained about a lot was the “XY problem.”.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem

Where you’re trying to do X, but because you’re inexperienced you erroneously decide Y must be the solution even though it is a dead end, and then ask people how to do Y instead of X.

ChatGPT drives that problem up to 11 because it has no problems enabling you to focusing on Y far longer than you should be.