I don’t understand. How are they not different? EY’s post said that the time since leaving the ancestral environment is too short to allow significant divergence, including for psyche-related genes (except across genders). This book says that certain selective pressures do permit variation to happen much faster, and there is evidence that this effects the psyche. This contradicts the basis for EY’s claiming that there can’t have been much divergence.
Also, regarding your 1), humans can go feral if they they go into the wild before significant assimilation into their birth culture.
This contradicts the basis for EY’s claiming that there can’t have been much divergence.
I think all this talk is rather non-rigorous as of now. How much exactly is “much” divergence and how great part of the disagreements here is semantic ambiguity and smuggled-in meanings and how great part is different beliefs on matters of fact? I for one agree with JanetK that basically both the OP and Eliezer’s notion of psychological unity hold water. SilasBarta, you think that OP contradicts psychic unity, so you have to mean a different thing by unity than what I mean.
When I think about psychic unity I visualize a cosmopolitan scale that includes rocks, lizards and humans. The perceived degree of cross-cultural and individual differences should be weighed together by our being adapted to notice very fine differences between humans, I think (and that implies that one’s assessment of divergence and unity is definitely not binary but is on a continuum).
Also, as it has been said many times, current science on human genetic variance is muddled and politically charged. This situation will hopefully be improved with mass gene sequencing, but I think that as of now many of our beliefs (mine for sure) rely greatly on personal impressions and musings, especially when it’s about variance’s implications on moral philosophy.
I don’t understand. How are they not different? EY’s post said that the time since leaving the ancestral environment is too short to allow significant divergence, including for psyche-related genes (except across genders). This book says that certain selective pressures do permit variation to happen much faster, and there is evidence that this effects the psyche. This contradicts the basis for EY’s claiming that there can’t have been much divergence.
Also, regarding your 1), humans can go feral if they they go into the wild before significant assimilation into their birth culture.
I think all this talk is rather non-rigorous as of now. How much exactly is “much” divergence and how great part of the disagreements here is semantic ambiguity and smuggled-in meanings and how great part is different beliefs on matters of fact? I for one agree with JanetK that basically both the OP and Eliezer’s notion of psychological unity hold water. SilasBarta, you think that OP contradicts psychic unity, so you have to mean a different thing by unity than what I mean.
When I think about psychic unity I visualize a cosmopolitan scale that includes rocks, lizards and humans. The perceived degree of cross-cultural and individual differences should be weighed together by our being adapted to notice very fine differences between humans, I think (and that implies that one’s assessment of divergence and unity is definitely not binary but is on a continuum).
Also, as it has been said many times, current science on human genetic variance is muddled and politically charged. This situation will hopefully be improved with mass gene sequencing, but I think that as of now many of our beliefs (mine for sure) rely greatly on personal impressions and musings, especially when it’s about variance’s implications on moral philosophy.