Before you start talking about a system of values, try to actually understand the values of that system as believed by its practitioners.
Dubious advice. Better advice: try to actually understand the values of that system as practiced, and look at the behaviors that are rewarded or punished by practitioners.
I think Eli has the better starting point. If you want to understand a strange philosophical system you have to start by figuring out what it’s members believe, how they think about the world, what they profess that they ought to do. Once you understand that, you’ll want to go on to look at how their actual actions differ from their beliefs and how the predictions of their theories differ from reality. But if you don’t start with their beliefs, you’ll never be able to predict how an adherent would actually respond to any novel situation.
This creates some reference-class problems. You say “X is bad, look how Y is practicing it”, and then I say “what Y does is not really X; in fact nobody has tried X yet; I am the first person who will try it, so please don’t compare me with people who did something else”.
In other words, if you can successfully claim that your system is original, you automatically receive “get out of the jail, free” card. On the other hand, some systems really are original… or at least modified enough to possibly work differently from their old versions.
But it certainly is legitimate to look how the (arguably not the same) system is practiced, what are its failures, and ask proponents: “How exactly are you planning to fix this? Please be very very specific.”
EY says that real value systems “are phrased to generate warm fuzzies in their users”. If we move from phrasings to beliefs, as you and ewbrownv suggest, that’s a step in the right direction in my view. And that step requires looking at actions.
Classification is challenging, sure, especially in social matters. If you want to make predictions, you are generally well advised to do clustering and pattern matching and to pay attention to base rates. If there are many who have said A, B, C, and D, and done W, X, Y, and Z, it’s a good bet that the next ABCD advocate will do all or most of WXYZ too. And usually, what we’re most interested in predicting is actions other than utterances. For that, past data on actions constitutes the most vital information.
For that, past data on actions constitutes the most vital information.
Exactly. Which is why manipulating the past data is essential in politics. Exaggerating the differences between ABCD and A’B’C’D’; and/or claiming that WXYZ never happened and was just an enemy propaganda. You can teach people to cluster incorrectly, if you make your clustering criteria well known.
(As an example, you can teach people to classify “national socialism” as something completely opposite and unrelated to “socialism”; and you can also convince them that whatever experiences people had with “socialism” in the past, are completely unrelated to the experiences we would have with “socialism” in the future. This works even on people who had first-hand experience, and works better on people who didn’t have it.)
Dubious advice. Better advice: try to actually understand the values of that system as practiced, and look at the behaviors that are rewarded or punished by practitioners.
I think Eli has the better starting point. If you want to understand a strange philosophical system you have to start by figuring out what it’s members believe, how they think about the world, what they profess that they ought to do. Once you understand that, you’ll want to go on to look at how their actual actions differ from their beliefs and how the predictions of their theories differ from reality. But if you don’t start with their beliefs, you’ll never be able to predict how an adherent would actually respond to any novel situation.
This creates some reference-class problems. You say “X is bad, look how Y is practicing it”, and then I say “what Y does is not really X; in fact nobody has tried X yet; I am the first person who will try it, so please don’t compare me with people who did something else”.
In other words, if you can successfully claim that your system is original, you automatically receive “get out of the jail, free” card. On the other hand, some systems really are original… or at least modified enough to possibly work differently from their old versions.
But it certainly is legitimate to look how the (arguably not the same) system is practiced, what are its failures, and ask proponents: “How exactly are you planning to fix this? Please be very very specific.”
EY says that real value systems “are phrased to generate warm fuzzies in their users”. If we move from phrasings to beliefs, as you and ewbrownv suggest, that’s a step in the right direction in my view. And that step requires looking at actions.
Classification is challenging, sure, especially in social matters. If you want to make predictions, you are generally well advised to do clustering and pattern matching and to pay attention to base rates. If there are many who have said A, B, C, and D, and done W, X, Y, and Z, it’s a good bet that the next ABCD advocate will do all or most of WXYZ too. And usually, what we’re most interested in predicting is actions other than utterances. For that, past data on actions constitutes the most vital information.
Exactly. Which is why manipulating the past data is essential in politics. Exaggerating the differences between ABCD and A’B’C’D’; and/or claiming that WXYZ never happened and was just an enemy propaganda. You can teach people to cluster incorrectly, if you make your clustering criteria well known.
(As an example, you can teach people to classify “national socialism” as something completely opposite and unrelated to “socialism”; and you can also convince them that whatever experiences people had with “socialism” in the past, are completely unrelated to the experiences we would have with “socialism” in the future. This works even on people who had first-hand experience, and works better on people who didn’t have it.)