Eliezer: “The basic ev-bio necessity behind the psychological unity of human brains is not widely understood.”
I agree. And I think you’ve over-emphasized the unity and ignored evidence of diversity, explaining it away as defects.
Eliezer: “And even more importantly, the portion of our values that we regard as transpersonal, the portion we would intervene to enforce against others, is not all of our values; it’s not going to include a taste for pepperoni pizza, or in my case, it’s not going to include a notion of heterosexuality or homosexuality.”
I think I failed to make my point clearly on the idea of a sexual orientation pill. I didn’t want to present homosexuality as a moral issue for your judgment, but as an example of the psychological non-unity of human brains. Many people have made the mistake of assuming that heterosexuality is “normal” and that homosexuals need re-education or “fixing” (defect removal). I hold that sexuality is distributed over a spectrum. The modes of that distribution represent heterosexual males and females—an evolutionary stable pattern. The other regions of that distribution remain non-zero despite selection pressure.
Clearly we do not have a psychological unity of human sexual preference. People with various levels of homosexual preference are not merely defective or badly educated/informed.
Sexuality is a complex feature arising in a complex brain. Because of the required mutual compatability of brain-construction genetics, we can be sure that we all have extremely similar machinery, but our sexual dimorphism requires that a single set of genes can code flexibly for either male or female. Since that flexibility doesn’t implement a pure binary male/female switch, we find various in-between states in both physical and mental machinery. The selection pressure from sexual dimorphism means we should expect far more non-unity of sexual preference than in other areas of our psychology.
But the fact that our genes can code for that level of flexibility, yet still remain biologically compatible, tells us that there are likely to be many other computations that could exhibit a superficial unity, but with a broad spread. The spread of propensities to submit to authority and override empathy observed in the Stanford Prison experiment gives good reason to question the supposed unity. (Yes I know you could shoehorn that diversity into your model as a effect of lack of moral training.)
Now let’s reconsider psychopathy or the broader diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. What should we do with those humans whose combination of narcissism and poor social cognition is beyond some particular limit? Lock them up, or elect them to govern? From my limited understanding of the subject, it seems that the “condition” is considered untreatable.
It’s an easy path to stick to the psychological unity of humans and declare those in the tails of the distribution to be defective. But is it statistically justified? Does your unity model actually fit the data or just give a better model than the tabula rasa model that Tooby and Cosmides reacted against?
That’s why the idea of some idealised human moral computation, that everyone would agree to if they knew enough and weren’t defective, seems like question begging. That’s why I was asking for the empirical data that have led you to update your beliefs. Then I could update mine from them and maybe we’d be in agreement.
I’m open to the idea that we can identify some best-fit human morality—a compromise that minimizes the distance/disagreement to our population of (veridically informed) humans. That seems to me to be the best we can do.
Eliezer: “The basic ev-bio necessity behind the psychological unity of human brains is not widely understood.”
I agree. And I think you’ve over-emphasized the unity and ignored evidence of diversity, explaining it away as defects.
Eliezer: “And even more importantly, the portion of our values that we regard as transpersonal, the portion we would intervene to enforce against others, is not all of our values; it’s not going to include a taste for pepperoni pizza, or in my case, it’s not going to include a notion of heterosexuality or homosexuality.”
I think I failed to make my point clearly on the idea of a sexual orientation pill. I didn’t want to present homosexuality as a moral issue for your judgment, but as an example of the psychological non-unity of human brains. Many people have made the mistake of assuming that heterosexuality is “normal” and that homosexuals need re-education or “fixing” (defect removal). I hold that sexuality is distributed over a spectrum. The modes of that distribution represent heterosexual males and females—an evolutionary stable pattern. The other regions of that distribution remain non-zero despite selection pressure.
Clearly we do not have a psychological unity of human sexual preference. People with various levels of homosexual preference are not merely defective or badly educated/informed.
Sexuality is a complex feature arising in a complex brain. Because of the required mutual compatability of brain-construction genetics, we can be sure that we all have extremely similar machinery, but our sexual dimorphism requires that a single set of genes can code flexibly for either male or female. Since that flexibility doesn’t implement a pure binary male/female switch, we find various in-between states in both physical and mental machinery. The selection pressure from sexual dimorphism means we should expect far more non-unity of sexual preference than in other areas of our psychology.
But the fact that our genes can code for that level of flexibility, yet still remain biologically compatible, tells us that there are likely to be many other computations that could exhibit a superficial unity, but with a broad spread. The spread of propensities to submit to authority and override empathy observed in the Stanford Prison experiment gives good reason to question the supposed unity. (Yes I know you could shoehorn that diversity into your model as a effect of lack of moral training.)
Now let’s reconsider psychopathy or the broader diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. What should we do with those humans whose combination of narcissism and poor social cognition is beyond some particular limit? Lock them up, or elect them to govern? From my limited understanding of the subject, it seems that the “condition” is considered untreatable.
It’s an easy path to stick to the psychological unity of humans and declare those in the tails of the distribution to be defective. But is it statistically justified? Does your unity model actually fit the data or just give a better model than the tabula rasa model that Tooby and Cosmides reacted against?
That’s why the idea of some idealised human moral computation, that everyone would agree to if they knew enough and weren’t defective, seems like question begging. That’s why I was asking for the empirical data that have led you to update your beliefs. Then I could update mine from them and maybe we’d be in agreement.
I’m open to the idea that we can identify some best-fit human morality—a compromise that minimizes the distance/disagreement to our population of (veridically informed) humans. That seems to me to be the best we can do.