Well, I don’t believe in purgatory, so that part was an (apparently ill-fated) attempt at deadpan humor. The question was sincere, though: if we’re confident that we’ll probably be scorned by future generations for something we’re doing now, then the obvious response to that is to try to find out what it is, so we can do something about it now.
The closed-borders thing definitely has the features of a great candidate: closed borders are generally considered necessary, and you can make a reasonable case for them being evil.
How can you tell what our descendents are going to think?
If Pinker’s right, the world tends towards increasing kindness, but we’re kinder to homosexuals and less kind to smokers than we were, so it’s still something of a gamble.
Do you expect all the future generations to agree with each other?
Well, I don’t believe in purgatory, so that part was an (apparently ill-fated) attempt at deadpan humor. The question was sincere, though: if we’re confident that we’ll probably be scorned by future generations for something we’re doing now, then the obvious response to that is to try to find out what it is, so we can do something about it now.
The closed-borders thing definitely has the features of a great candidate: closed borders are generally considered necessary, and you can make a reasonable case for them being evil.
How can you tell what our descendents are going to think?
If Pinker’s right, the world tends towards increasing kindness, but we’re kinder to homosexuals and less kind to smokers than we were, so it’s still something of a gamble.
Do you expect all the future generations to agree with each other?
One good place to start is to think about Paul Graham’s essay What you can’t say.