Given that, why should we return to the world where the father had great influence rather than abandon all the memes and ideas that remain that rely on that power disparity?
Because this egalitarian family does not seem to be working, or, indeed, even existing. The law proclaims equality, but instead of getting equality, gets family breakdown.
Find me a family where they equally share picking up the socks, and you will find a family where they do not share the main bed.
Egalitarian families suffer absolutely total dysfunction. Georgian era right, Victoria era wrong.
Why did this get down voted? The empirical evidence seems to be on his side when looking at most indicator of egalitarian norms. Like say sharing housework equally.
Why did this get down voted? The empirical evidence seems to be on his side when looking at most indicator of egalitarian norms. Like say sharing housework equally.
(Did not vote but) I expect it is because the author has a habit of hiding his nuggets of insight in behind the tone and presentation style of an insensitive ass.
And as a less tone-related complaint, sam0345 grossly overgeneralizes. (And if he’s the J that I think he is, I suspect he’s not much interested in being more nuanced, for much the same reason he’s not interested in consensus.)
Because, as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy’s writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! I didn’t downvote him originally, but now I’m going to. I’m not some tolerant liberal guy, and I’m absolutely not going to tolerate this.
as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy’s writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! … Im absolutely not going to tolerate this.
How then could the same facts be stated in a way that has acceptable “tone”?
How could one state in a tone that meets your approval that the socially conservative family structure that was the ideal endorsed by authority from the New Testament to the Georgian era worked and was good for everyone, and the new progressive emancipated family structure started not working in the Victorian era, and has been working less and less for everyone as it has become more and more progressive?
There’s a serious cause and effect issue here: we still have a lot of memes from the men-dominant era, but formally that era is gone. What does you data show beyond a failure to relinquish all the memes?
Plus, Sam is not advocating for the next Schelling point in gender relations (relative to where we are), or even the one after that. And he denies that there are multiple Schelling points.
Why is someone who denies the coherent of moral progress defending someone who thinks moral regress has been happening for ~400 years? If moral drift is all there is, moral regress is no more coherent that moral progress.
Why is someone who denies the coherent of moral progress defending someone who thinks moral regress has been happening for ~400 years? If moral drift is all there is, moral regress is no more coherent that moral progress.
Defending someone? I don’t recalling being in combat recently. I thought I was commenting on an argument not the author.
Arguments for moral progress and moral regress aren’t symetrical. If you have moral drift then naturally you will also have moral regress from the point of view of anyone who sticks to the older values.
Defending someone? I don’t recalling being in combat recently. I thought I was commenting on an argument not the author.
Seriously, WTF? The lesson of “Arguments aren’t soldiers” is not that meta-ethical or object-level moral debates shouldn’t happen. It’s that you shouldn’t back an argument just because you agree with the results.
I don’t think that this is the norm, and such an interpretation is very silly on a site that wants to discuss moral values. But deploying any version of the norms to criticize people attacking any particular position is those norms losing purpose.
Seriously, WTF? The lesson of “Arguments aren’t soldiers” is not that meta-ethical or object-level moral debates shouldn’t happen. It’s that you shouldn’t back an argument just because you agree with the results.
In the quoted part I was objecting to your language not the content. I disliked how you used “defending someone”. The second paragraph was where I thought I engaged your argument. I notice that I am confused. Most of your comment is flying over my head right now, can you please rephrase what you wanted to say with it?
Arguments for moral progress and moral regress aren’t symetrical. If you have moral drift then naturally you will also have moral regress from the point of view of anyone who sticks to the older values.
“From the point of view” elides the central issue. Either there are moral facts or there aren’t. If there are not moral facts, moral progress and regress are not well defined concepts. If there are moral facts, the concepts are well defined—although if one believes in conflicts in moral facts, then the concepts are much less impressive.
It’s very clear that Sam is a moral realist, sub-type value monist. For purposes of this discussion, I’m an anti-realist, sub-type error theorist. I thought you were an anti-realist, but your response here suggests you are a moral realist, sub-type value pluralist. If you are a value monist, then I don’t see how you advance your object level values by defending Sam’s different values.
I’m wasn’t trying to promote any value set in this branch of the conversation. I was trying to via discussion learn more about the arguments for egalitarian vs. non-egalitarian family arrangements.
I’ve written extensively on my current position on morality elsewhere. Like I said in the other comment I think we’re having a misunderstanding but I’m not sure where. I think its most plausible I’m missing some context.
As to moral regress, value drift seems to me obviously bad for any set of values that seeks to impact the world. I think we might mean different things by moral regress. It to me seemed the same thing as values changing from your own, which seemed an obviously bad thing from the perspective of nearly any set of morality because of instrumental reasons in the absence of the assumption of moral progress.
Edit: Oh now I get it!
“From the point of view” elides the central issue. Either there are moral facts or there aren’t. If there are not moral facts, moral progress and regress are not well defined concepts. If there are moral facts, the concepts are well defined—although if one believes in conflicts in moral facts, then the concepts are much less impressive.
Just had to read this with a cleared memory cache. I misused moral regress, not keeping with the terminology you established. Now for the sake of argument assuming moral realism moral regress is not surprising, since morality is complex and most possible changes in our understanding of it probably are for the worse, just like most possible changes in our map of other parts of reality would be for the worse so would most possible changes in our understanding of morality. Thus all else being equal with these assumptions I think moral regress to be more likely than moral progress.
Now for the sake of argument assuming moral realism moral regress is not surprising, since morality is complex and most possible changes in our understanding of it probably are for the worse
But if there are moral facts, there are external constraints on the viable changes to our understanding. If such external constraints don’t exist, what do the moral facts cause? And if they don’t cause anything, what does it mean to call them facts?
Here’s a discussion of a parallel issue: scientific regress. What’s interesting about the account of the loss of knowledge about how to prevent scurvy is (1) how rare these regresses are, (2) how easy it is with the benefit of hindsight to point to the scientific errors that caused the regression. In short, there’s a one-way ratchet on scientific knowledge because the external facts constrain the viability of different scientific beliefs.
If there really are moral facts, shouldn’t a similar one-way ratchet exist?
You talked about things “from the point of view” of different object-level moral theories. There’s nothing particularly wrong with relativism as a meta-ethic, but it is an anti-realist meta-ethic.
Here’s a discussion of a parallel issue: scientific regress. What’s interesting about the account of the loss of knowledge about how to prevent scurvy is (1) how rare these regresses are, (2) how easy it is with the benefit of hindsight to point to the scientific errors that caused the regression. In short, there’s a one-way ratchet on scientific knowledge because the external facts constrain the viability of different scientific beliefs.
But if you look earlier in history we see much clearer and common examples of technological and even scientific regress. See the loss of technology and science that occured with the decline of Roman civilization or the Greek dark age over a millenium earlier.
I don’t really count the fall of the Roman empire as scientific regress. And even if it does count, that’s before the scientific method was well established, so there every reason to think that institutions would fail at preserving knowledge.
Regardless, possible constraints created by “moral facts” didn’t go away just because any particular government or society fell. The sack of Rome didn’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause farmers in the middle of nowhere to change their beliefs about the moral correctness of beating their slaves in particular circumstances. Changing circumstances != changing moral beliefs.
I don’t really count the fall of the Roman empire as scientific regress.
I didn’t talk about the fall of Rome but the decline of Roman civilization for a reason, it was a process that took centuries. Before it people could build things like the Antikythera mechanism afterwards they couldn’t for what seems to be at least a thousand years. Before it literacy was more widespread than afterwards. Even if we didn’t lose any scientific knowledge in the process, something I doubt because of the large number of lost works we know existed from references in the preserved ones, it certainly was known by fewer people.
The sack of Rome didn’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause farmers in the middle of nowhere to change their beliefs about the moral correctness of beating their slaves in particular circumstances. Changing circumstances != changing moral beliefs.
Wait what?
Of course moral beliefs in humans are affected by cricumstances! We have empirical evidence of this even in lab conditions. Changed economic circumstances seem to have am obviously big impact on social standards of morality as well.
Assuming moral realism, the human mind may not be designed to discover truth about morality any more than it is to discover turth about any other aspect of nature, it is designed to be as adaptive as possible (unless we are assuing a created mind for this argument as well). Also human minds just get things plain wrong due to limtied resources too.
so there every reason to think that institutions would fail at preserving knowledge.
Why do you assume we are good at using the scientific method to discover moral truth? If moral realism was true, then looking at moral change in the past few centuries it looks much more like the changes in naturalist knowledge we saw before the scientific revolution than after it.
Remember that I’m an anti-moral realist trying to steelman the moral realist position. As an anti-realist, it is not surprising at all that moral reasoning changes. I think there’s no particular reason to think that the scientific method (or some moralistic equivalent) is available to “discover” moral truths. But the moral realist has great difficulty explaining explaining quasi-random movement in morals.
Anyway, we seen to be disagreeing on the meaning of the words “progress” and “regress.” To illustrate: Imagine a plantation manager, overseeing a huge plantation. Usually, the plantation grows enough food to give everyone on the plantation an adequate diet. The manager apply his moral theory and decides to actually feed everyone an adequate diet.
Now an external event causes the plantation to grow insufficient food for the people living there. The manager applies the same moral theory and decides to feed some people an adequate diet and some an inadequate diet. Under one understanding of regress (“regress1”), this change is moral regress. Under another understanding (“regress2″), the change is not moral regress, merely changed circumstances.
You seem to be talking about moral regress1 and scientific regress1, while I am talking about moral and scientific regress2. I would argue that regress2 (and its counterpart, progress2) is the concept generally meant by ordinary usage. Further, regress2 is the more useful definition in a meta-ethics conversation, because regress1 is not usually evidence for or against moral realism.
Assuming moral realism, the human mind may not be designed to discover truth about morality any more than it is to discover turth about any other aspect of nature, it is designed to be as adaptive as possible
But the central feature of most object level moral theories is that acting morally is more adaptive. For a utilitarian, acting morally generates more utility than acting immorally. Given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t we notice when our society is generating less utility than it could? And thus act to change our behavior towards generating more utility. That’s why I think that the existence of moral facts would constrain the behaviors of individuals. If we can’t detect whether more utility is generated, then there’s no reason to believe in the existence of universal and objective moral truths.
As an anti-realist, I take the position that “generating less utility than society could” is not a well formed assertion. But the moral realist does think the phrase is universally meaningful.
Remember that I’m an anti-moral realist trying to steelman the moral realist position. As an anti-realist, it is not surprising at all that moral reasoning changes.
A thought here: if you genuinely want to steel-man moral realism you need to look at various forms of “minimal” moral realism, which are consistent with moral subjectivism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism and the sub-section “Robust versus minimal moral realism”.
An example here could be a missionary confronting a New Guinea highlander just after a cannibal feast (assuming these really happened). The missionary says “Eating people in your cannibal feasts is wrong”. The highlander says “Eating people in our cannibal feasts is not wrong.” According to a minimal moral realist, one who embraces moral subjectivism, both of these may be true statements—they both correspond to moral facts—because the term “wrong” has a different meaning for the different speakers. Though their meanings clearly overlap e.g. they may both agree that eating people outside special feasts is “wrong” or that sex outside marriage is “wrong”.
Or, for an analogy, consider two normally-sighted people looking at a coloured wall. One says “The wall is orange”, the other says “The wall is not orange, it is red”. Both of these statements may be true—i.e. both correspond to colour facts—because the speakers put the boundary between orange and red in a slightly different place. They have slightly different (though overlapping) concepts of “red”.
It is very hard to refute versions of moral realism like this. You’d have to somehow show that no-one has a properly consistent concept of right and wrong, so that even within the cannibal’s own moral system he is talking self-contradictory nonsense. That’s going to be difficult.
But the moral realist has great difficulty explaining explaining quasi-random movement in morals.
Does he? We have quasi random movement in other kinds of maps of reality too. A Catholic moral realist can at the same time believe orthodox theologians have been making progress on understanding morality while the laity has on average morally regressed, just as a doctor can believe medicine is marching forward even if something like homeopathy gains popularity in the time period he lives in.
Now an external event causes the plantation to grow insufficient food for the people living there. The manager applies the same moral theory and decides to feed some people an adequate diet and some an inadequate diet. Under one understanding of regress (“regress1”), this change is moral regress. Under another understanding (“regress2″), the change is not moral regress, merely changed circumstances.
His son only ever knew the underfed plantation and then feeds them so even when there is enough for everyone. Is this regress1 or regress2 in your view?
But the central feature of most object level moral theories is that acting morally is more adaptive. For a utilitarian, acting morally generates more utility than acting immorally. Given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t we notice when our society is generating less utility than it could? And thus act to change our behavior towards generating more utility. That’s why I think that the existence of moral facts would constrain the behaviors of individuals. If we can’t detect whether more utility is generated, then there’s no reason to believe in the existence of universal and objective moral truths.
Remember a moral realist is not obliged to consider morality personally adaptive. Recall that many classical views of divine punishment or the negative consequences of immorality are not in the bad consequences for the individual but the society as a whole.
His son only ever knew the underfed plantation and then feeds them so even when there is enough for everyone. Is this regress1 or regress2 in your view?
There’s not a different outcome / decision. Without change, how can we say that there is progress or regress of any kind?
Recall that many classical views of divine punishment or the negative consequences of immorality are not in the bad consequences for the individual but the society as a whole.
Whatever. For the moral realist, the point is that there are real consequences—reduced wealth or lifespan or whatever—caused by immoral behavior. That feedback from objective reality creates strong pressure against moral regress2 - in the same way that failed predictions create strong pressure against scientific regress2.
Your discussion about elite knowledge vs. mass implementation is interesting, but is probably independent of whether moral facts are objective and universal. For purposes of this discussion, it’s probably easier to ignore the issue for the moment. Like ignoring the knock-on effects when discussing torture vs. dust-speck.
What does you data show beyond a failure to relinquish all the memes?
This is naturally the default explanation that our society uses for such results, it seems plausible but why are we so quick and so confident to jump to it as the explanation? Do I even need to point out that other explanations seem just as plausible?
For example the model of attraction build by the PUA community predicts this result. Also basic economics suggests that if the partners specialize in task they are more productive, maybe we aren’t seeing traditional marriage roles validated as much as economics. And why don’t more traditional couples suffer more from residual patriarchal memes? Shouldn’t the people in those relationship have even more of them than the society at large? Based on the evidence we are just as justified saying that they are happier because they have more patriarchal memes than the norm.
Wait am I just getting down voted for arguing for patriarchy as plausibly not evil? People not wearing their rationalist hats and voting based on the bottom line they wrote before thinking about the arguments they are evaluating is lame. Really lame.
I find it hilarious I didn’t have this problem when doing devil’s advocacy for infanticide or slavery.. but traditional marriage roles? Wowjustwowhowcanheargueforthat! Ewww! That’s like something an inbred redneck would say. Onward social justice, lets end the war on women!
I strongly disagree with a lot of your argument, but the level of downvoting here is still interesting. I suspect that this is happening for three reasons: 1) The belief in question is as you correctly note associated with some people who still exist and are pretty low status. 2) Unlike something like infanticide or slavery, there’s a perceived chance that this sort of thing might actually go back to being this way (see the existence of people mentioned in 1) and thus this feels to people like it is much closer to an actual political mindkilling issue. (Robin Hanson might say that infanticide is far but patriarchy is near.) 3) There’s been some problems in the past with a perception that there’s a cadre on LW of people who have essentially implied that women are of less moral worth than men (I can point to multiple threads where this occurred) and so people are downvoting either due to the association with those threads, or due to a perceived need to protect LW’s reputation.
It is possible that the arguments being made are simply weaker than those favoring infanticde and slavery, and they do seem to be somwhat weaker, but not so so much weaker as to explain by themselves the size of the downvotes.
Yes, everyone is downvoting you for stupid, non-rational reasons that you fully understand, and so you don’t need to consider the implicit rebuke or indeed think about this any further at all.
I think about this stuff quit a lot and generally seek out strong counterarguments. I dislike people down voting a comment I’m certain stands up to the level of discourse here while not exposing their own reasoning on the matter.
If you think I don’t have a good idea about the level of discourse here, well then people should have been down voting me much more aggressively over the past few years I’ve spent in this community, people seem to have generally liked my contributions.
My comment complaining over this might was in hindsight perhaps inappropriate and I’ve retracted it, however the reason I’m not as phased as I once was by down votes is because I think the quality of the LessWrong community is slowly degrading and only aggressive counter measures can stop it.
There’s a crowd that is mind-killed, disagrees with your general philosophy, and down-votes you basically at random when you articulate it—without regard for quality of a particular post or even if you are really trying to make controversial assertions?
Hey, metoo! :) But my crowd and your crowd don’t seem to agree very much. :( Maybe both sides should stop trying to silently suppress contrary views? Nah, that would never work.
Right, I didn’t mean to imply my situation was unique. I see exactly what you mean and I think we used to have less of that. It is one of the indicators of the lower quality of discussion I think I’m seeing.
1) My sense was that my side was more the victim of this than your side—in this community. (Insert obvious caveats about self-mindkilledness).
2) More importantly, I think the particular tactics you used in this thread were unlikely to be effective. The meta-level concerns about this community don’t fit in an object-level discussion of a particular topic. I forget if you are on the LW-more-inclusive or LW-more-exclusive camp, but I think this is a good analysis of the issue.
Why? There are mutually contradictory philosophical positions at play. Should Eliezer refuse to think of his anti-philosophical zombies position as a “side”?
I readily acknowledge the significant risk of identity entanglement (aka mind-killed). But other than that, what harm is there is acknowledging that certain positions are mutually exclusive?
SIAI needed to improve as an organization, so they brought in people who they thought could run a successful non-profit. What they got was a better non-profit plus the whole accompanying spectrum of philanthropy status divas, professional beggars and related hangers-on.
Most of the original thinkers have left, replaced by those who believe in thinking, but only for fashionable thoughts.
philanthropy status divas, professional beggars and related hangers-on
those who believe in thinking, but only for fashionable thoughts
Okay, so would you kindly point to some awful, worthless posts/comments by those awful, worthless people? And explain what makes them so awful and worthless? So that the right-thinking users can learn to avoid them?
Or, if you don’t have anything specific in mind, would you at least cease insulting the community?
Have not downvoted you (or anyone else) yet in this thread, but am downvoting this comment of yours now. Feel free to project whatever reasons you want onto me. They’ll probably be wrong.
Have not downvoted you (or anyone else) yet in this thread, but am downvoting this comment of yours now. Feel free to project whatever reasons you want onto me. They’ll probably be wrong.
I expect Konkvistador to be able to speculate a list of reasons that quickly exhausts all the acceptable reasons to make a publicly announced downvote. Indeed, he has already listed the most notable one. That being the case your prediction must imply either inaccurate insult of Konkvistador or that you are publicly announcing an undesirable motivation for your downvoting.
Because this egalitarian family does not seem to be working, or, indeed, even existing. The law proclaims equality, but instead of getting equality, gets family breakdown.
Find me a family where they equally share picking up the socks, and you will find a family where they do not share the main bed.
Egalitarian families suffer absolutely total dysfunction. Georgian era right, Victoria era wrong.
Why did this get down voted? The empirical evidence seems to be on his side when looking at most indicator of egalitarian norms. Like say sharing housework equally.
(Did not vote but) I expect it is because the author has a habit of hiding his nuggets of insight in behind the tone and presentation style of an insensitive ass.
And as a less tone-related complaint, sam0345 grossly overgeneralizes. (And if he’s the J that I think he is, I suspect he’s not much interested in being more nuanced, for much the same reason he’s not interested in consensus.)
Because, as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy’s writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! I didn’t downvote him originally, but now I’m going to. I’m not some tolerant liberal guy, and I’m absolutely not going to tolerate this.
I don’t think the tone of the particular comment is out of the normal LW range on other subjects but naturally its your call as much as mine.
How then could the same facts be stated in a way that has acceptable “tone”?
How could one state in a tone that meets your approval that the socially conservative family structure that was the ideal endorsed by authority from the New Testament to the Georgian era worked and was good for everyone, and the new progressive emancipated family structure started not working in the Victorian era, and has been working less and less for everyone as it has become more and more progressive?
There’s a serious cause and effect issue here: we still have a lot of memes from the men-dominant era, but formally that era is gone. What does you data show beyond a failure to relinquish all the memes?
Plus, Sam is not advocating for the next Schelling point in gender relations (relative to where we are), or even the one after that. And he denies that there are multiple Schelling points.
Why is someone who denies the coherent of moral progress defending someone who thinks moral regress has been happening for ~400 years? If moral drift is all there is, moral regress is no more coherent that moral progress.
Defending someone? I don’t recalling being in combat recently. I thought I was commenting on an argument not the author.
Arguments for moral progress and moral regress aren’t symetrical. If you have moral drift then naturally you will also have moral regress from the point of view of anyone who sticks to the older values.
Seriously, WTF? The lesson of “Arguments aren’t soldiers” is not that meta-ethical or object-level moral debates shouldn’t happen. It’s that you shouldn’t back an argument just because you agree with the results.
If politics is the mindkiller means what you say, then you are a significant and substantial violator.
I don’t think that this is the norm, and such an interpretation is very silly on a site that wants to discuss moral values. But deploying any version of the norms to criticize people attacking any particular position is those norms losing purpose.
In the quoted part I was objecting to your language not the content. I disliked how you used “defending someone”. The second paragraph was where I thought I engaged your argument. I notice that I am confused. Most of your comment is flying over my head right now, can you please rephrase what you wanted to say with it?
“From the point of view” elides the central issue. Either there are moral facts or there aren’t. If there are not moral facts, moral progress and regress are not well defined concepts. If there are moral facts, the concepts are well defined—although if one believes in conflicts in moral facts, then the concepts are much less impressive.
It’s very clear that Sam is a moral realist, sub-type value monist. For purposes of this discussion, I’m an anti-realist, sub-type error theorist. I thought you were an anti-realist, but your response here suggests you are a moral realist, sub-type value pluralist. If you are a value monist, then I don’t see how you advance your object level values by defending Sam’s different values.
I’m wasn’t trying to promote any value set in this branch of the conversation. I was trying to via discussion learn more about the arguments for egalitarian vs. non-egalitarian family arrangements.
I’ve written extensively on my current position on morality elsewhere. Like I said in the other comment I think we’re having a misunderstanding but I’m not sure where. I think its most plausible I’m missing some context.
As to moral regress, value drift seems to me obviously bad for any set of values that seeks to impact the world. I think we might mean different things by moral regress. It to me seemed the same thing as values changing from your own, which seemed an obviously bad thing from the perspective of nearly any set of morality because of instrumental reasons in the absence of the assumption of moral progress.
Edit: Oh now I get it!
Just had to read this with a cleared memory cache. I misused moral regress, not keeping with the terminology you established. Now for the sake of argument assuming moral realism moral regress is not surprising, since morality is complex and most possible changes in our understanding of it probably are for the worse, just like most possible changes in our map of other parts of reality would be for the worse so would most possible changes in our understanding of morality. Thus all else being equal with these assumptions I think moral regress to be more likely than moral progress.
But if there are moral facts, there are external constraints on the viable changes to our understanding. If such external constraints don’t exist, what do the moral facts cause? And if they don’t cause anything, what does it mean to call them facts?
Here’s a discussion of a parallel issue: scientific regress. What’s interesting about the account of the loss of knowledge about how to prevent scurvy is (1) how rare these regresses are, (2) how easy it is with the benefit of hindsight to point to the scientific errors that caused the regression. In short, there’s a one-way ratchet on scientific knowledge because the external facts constrain the viability of different scientific beliefs.
If there really are moral facts, shouldn’t a similar one-way ratchet exist?
You talked about things “from the point of view” of different object-level moral theories. There’s nothing particularly wrong with relativism as a meta-ethic, but it is an anti-realist meta-ethic.
But if you look earlier in history we see much clearer and common examples of technological and even scientific regress. See the loss of technology and science that occured with the decline of Roman civilization or the Greek dark age over a millenium earlier.
I don’t really count the fall of the Roman empire as scientific regress. And even if it does count, that’s before the scientific method was well established, so there every reason to think that institutions would fail at preserving knowledge.
Regardless, possible constraints created by “moral facts” didn’t go away just because any particular government or society fell. The sack of Rome didn’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause farmers in the middle of nowhere to change their beliefs about the moral correctness of beating their slaves in particular circumstances. Changing circumstances != changing moral beliefs.
I didn’t talk about the fall of Rome but the decline of Roman civilization for a reason, it was a process that took centuries. Before it people could build things like the Antikythera mechanism afterwards they couldn’t for what seems to be at least a thousand years. Before it literacy was more widespread than afterwards. Even if we didn’t lose any scientific knowledge in the process, something I doubt because of the large number of lost works we know existed from references in the preserved ones, it certainly was known by fewer people.
Wait what?
Of course moral beliefs in humans are affected by cricumstances! We have empirical evidence of this even in lab conditions. Changed economic circumstances seem to have am obviously big impact on social standards of morality as well.
Assuming moral realism, the human mind may not be designed to discover truth about morality any more than it is to discover turth about any other aspect of nature, it is designed to be as adaptive as possible (unless we are assuing a created mind for this argument as well). Also human minds just get things plain wrong due to limtied resources too.
Why do you assume we are good at using the scientific method to discover moral truth? If moral realism was true, then looking at moral change in the past few centuries it looks much more like the changes in naturalist knowledge we saw before the scientific revolution than after it.
Remember that I’m an anti-moral realist trying to steelman the moral realist position. As an anti-realist, it is not surprising at all that moral reasoning changes. I think there’s no particular reason to think that the scientific method (or some moralistic equivalent) is available to “discover” moral truths. But the moral realist has great difficulty explaining explaining quasi-random movement in morals.
Anyway, we seen to be disagreeing on the meaning of the words “progress” and “regress.” To illustrate: Imagine a plantation manager, overseeing a huge plantation. Usually, the plantation grows enough food to give everyone on the plantation an adequate diet. The manager apply his moral theory and decides to actually feed everyone an adequate diet.
Now an external event causes the plantation to grow insufficient food for the people living there. The manager applies the same moral theory and decides to feed some people an adequate diet and some an inadequate diet. Under one understanding of regress (“regress1”), this change is moral regress. Under another understanding (“regress2″), the change is not moral regress, merely changed circumstances.
You seem to be talking about moral regress1 and scientific regress1, while I am talking about moral and scientific regress2. I would argue that regress2 (and its counterpart, progress2) is the concept generally meant by ordinary usage. Further, regress2 is the more useful definition in a meta-ethics conversation, because regress1 is not usually evidence for or against moral realism.
But the central feature of most object level moral theories is that acting morally is more adaptive. For a utilitarian, acting morally generates more utility than acting immorally. Given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t we notice when our society is generating less utility than it could? And thus act to change our behavior towards generating more utility. That’s why I think that the existence of moral facts would constrain the behaviors of individuals. If we can’t detect whether more utility is generated, then there’s no reason to believe in the existence of universal and objective moral truths.
As an anti-realist, I take the position that “generating less utility than society could” is not a well formed assertion. But the moral realist does think the phrase is universally meaningful.
A thought here: if you genuinely want to steel-man moral realism you need to look at various forms of “minimal” moral realism, which are consistent with moral subjectivism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism and the sub-section “Robust versus minimal moral realism”.
An example here could be a missionary confronting a New Guinea highlander just after a cannibal feast (assuming these really happened). The missionary says “Eating people in your cannibal feasts is wrong”. The highlander says “Eating people in our cannibal feasts is not wrong.” According to a minimal moral realist, one who embraces moral subjectivism, both of these may be true statements—they both correspond to moral facts—because the term “wrong” has a different meaning for the different speakers. Though their meanings clearly overlap e.g. they may both agree that eating people outside special feasts is “wrong” or that sex outside marriage is “wrong”.
Or, for an analogy, consider two normally-sighted people looking at a coloured wall. One says “The wall is orange”, the other says “The wall is not orange, it is red”. Both of these statements may be true—i.e. both correspond to colour facts—because the speakers put the boundary between orange and red in a slightly different place. They have slightly different (though overlapping) concepts of “red”.
It is very hard to refute versions of moral realism like this. You’d have to somehow show that no-one has a properly consistent concept of right and wrong, so that even within the cannibal’s own moral system he is talking self-contradictory nonsense. That’s going to be difficult.
Does he? We have quasi random movement in other kinds of maps of reality too. A Catholic moral realist can at the same time believe orthodox theologians have been making progress on understanding morality while the laity has on average morally regressed, just as a doctor can believe medicine is marching forward even if something like homeopathy gains popularity in the time period he lives in.
His son only ever knew the underfed plantation and then feeds them so even when there is enough for everyone. Is this regress1 or regress2 in your view?
Remember a moral realist is not obliged to consider morality personally adaptive. Recall that many classical views of divine punishment or the negative consequences of immorality are not in the bad consequences for the individual but the society as a whole.
There’s not a different outcome / decision. Without change, how can we say that there is progress or regress of any kind?
Whatever. For the moral realist, the point is that there are real consequences—reduced wealth or lifespan or whatever—caused by immoral behavior. That feedback from objective reality creates strong pressure against moral regress2 - in the same way that failed predictions create strong pressure against scientific regress2.
Your discussion about elite knowledge vs. mass implementation is interesting, but is probably independent of whether moral facts are objective and universal. For purposes of this discussion, it’s probably easier to ignore the issue for the moment. Like ignoring the knock-on effects when discussing torture vs. dust-speck.
This is naturally the default explanation that our society uses for such results, it seems plausible but why are we so quick and so confident to jump to it as the explanation? Do I even need to point out that other explanations seem just as plausible?
For example the model of attraction build by the PUA community predicts this result. Also basic economics suggests that if the partners specialize in task they are more productive, maybe we aren’t seeing traditional marriage roles validated as much as economics. And why don’t more traditional couples suffer more from residual patriarchal memes? Shouldn’t the people in those relationship have even more of them than the society at large? Based on the evidence we are just as justified saying that they are happier because they have more patriarchal memes than the norm.
Why are we quick to blame the predecessor? Trick question?
Wait am I just getting down voted for arguing for patriarchy as plausibly not evil? People not wearing their rationalist hats and voting based on the bottom line they wrote before thinking about the arguments they are evaluating is lame. Really lame.
I find it hilarious I didn’t have this problem when doing devil’s advocacy for infanticide or slavery.. but traditional marriage roles? Wowjustwowhowcanheargueforthat! Ewww! That’s like something an inbred redneck would say. Onward social justice, lets end the war on women!
I strongly disagree with a lot of your argument, but the level of downvoting here is still interesting. I suspect that this is happening for three reasons: 1) The belief in question is as you correctly note associated with some people who still exist and are pretty low status. 2) Unlike something like infanticide or slavery, there’s a perceived chance that this sort of thing might actually go back to being this way (see the existence of people mentioned in 1) and thus this feels to people like it is much closer to an actual political mindkilling issue. (Robin Hanson might say that infanticide is far but patriarchy is near.) 3) There’s been some problems in the past with a perception that there’s a cadre on LW of people who have essentially implied that women are of less moral worth than men (I can point to multiple threads where this occurred) and so people are downvoting either due to the association with those threads, or due to a perceived need to protect LW’s reputation.
It is possible that the arguments being made are simply weaker than those favoring infanticde and slavery, and they do seem to be somwhat weaker, but not so so much weaker as to explain by themselves the size of the downvotes.
Yes, everyone is downvoting you for stupid, non-rational reasons that you fully understand, and so you don’t need to consider the implicit rebuke or indeed think about this any further at all.
I think about this stuff quit a lot and generally seek out strong counterarguments. I dislike people down voting a comment I’m certain stands up to the level of discourse here while not exposing their own reasoning on the matter.
If you think I don’t have a good idea about the level of discourse here, well then people should have been down voting me much more aggressively over the past few years I’ve spent in this community, people seem to have generally liked my contributions.
My comment complaining over this might was in hindsight perhaps inappropriate and I’ve retracted it, however the reason I’m not as phased as I once was by down votes is because I think the quality of the LessWrong community is slowly degrading and only aggressive counter measures can stop it.
There’s a crowd that is mind-killed, disagrees with your general philosophy, and down-votes you basically at random when you articulate it—without regard for quality of a particular post or even if you are really trying to make controversial assertions?
Hey, me too! :)
But my crowd and your crowd don’t seem to agree very much. :(
Maybe both sides should stop trying to silently suppress contrary views?
Nah, that would never work.
Right, I didn’t mean to imply my situation was unique. I see exactly what you mean and I think we used to have less of that. It is one of the indicators of the lower quality of discussion I think I’m seeing.
Two points:
1) My sense was that my side was more the victim of this than your side—in this community. (Insert obvious caveats about self-mindkilledness).
2) More importantly, I think the particular tactics you used in this thread were unlikely to be effective. The meta-level concerns about this community don’t fit in an object-level discussion of a particular topic. I forget if you are on the LW-more-inclusive or LW-more-exclusive camp, but I think this is a good analysis of the issue.
My sense is the opposite.
I prefer not to think of “sides” in this context.
Why? There are mutually contradictory philosophical positions at play. Should Eliezer refuse to think of his anti-philosophical zombies position as a “side”?
I readily acknowledge the significant risk of identity entanglement (aka mind-killed). But other than that, what harm is there is acknowledging that certain positions are mutually exclusive?
SIAI needed to improve as an organization, so they brought in people who they thought could run a successful non-profit. What they got was a better non-profit plus the whole accompanying spectrum of philanthropy status divas, professional beggars and related hangers-on.
Most of the original thinkers have left, replaced by those who believe in thinking, but only for fashionable thoughts.
Okay, so would you kindly point to some awful, worthless posts/comments by those awful, worthless people? And explain what makes them so awful and worthless? So that the right-thinking users can learn to avoid them?
Or, if you don’t have anything specific in mind, would you at least cease insulting the community?
No
Now you feel the feels that I feel all the time when I’m ideological on LW!
Have not downvoted you (or anyone else) yet in this thread, but am downvoting this comment of yours now. Feel free to project whatever reasons you want onto me. They’ll probably be wrong.
Disincentivize whining about down votes?
I expect Konkvistador to be able to speculate a list of reasons that quickly exhausts all the acceptable reasons to make a publicly announced downvote. Indeed, he has already listed the most notable one. That being the case your prediction must imply either inaccurate insult of Konkvistador or that you are publicly announcing an undesirable motivation for your downvoting.
(ie. Downvoted for poorly calibrated snark!)
Yeah, that last sentence was not appropriate, so your downvote is. Lest I leave you all people in suspense my complete list of reasons was:
Disincentivize whining about downvotes
Disincentivize sarcasm
Disincentivize uncharitably interpreting the actions of other people.