I’m not sure about the rest of it, but this caught my eye:
if moral realism was true, and one of the key roles of religion was to free people from trapped priors so they could recognize these universal moral truths, then at least during the founding of religions, we should see some evidence of higher moral standards before they invariably mutate into institutions devoid of moral truths.
I had a similar thought, and was trying to figure out if I could find a single good person to formally and efficiently coordinate with in a non-trivial pre-existing institution full of “safely good and sane people”.
I’m still searching. If anyone has a solid lead on this, please DM me, maybe?
Something you might expect is that many such “hypothetically existing hypothetically good people” would be willing to die slightly earlier for a good enough cause (especially late in life when their life expectancy is low, and especially for very high stakes issues where a lot of leverage is possible) but they wouldn’t waste lives, because waste is ceteris paribus bad, and so… so… what about martyrs who are also leaders?
This line of thinking is how I learned about Martin The Confessor, the last Pope to ever die for his beliefs.
Since 655 AD is much much earlier than 2024 AD, it would seem that Catholicism no longer “has the sauce” so to speak?
Also, slightly relatedly, I’m more glad that I otherwise might be that in this timeline the bullet missed Trump. In other very nearby timelines I’m pretty sure the whole idea of using physical courage to detect morally good leadership in a morally good group would be much more controversial than the principle is here, now, in this timeline, where no one has trapped priors about it that are being actively pumped full of energy by the media, with the creation of new social traumas, and so on...
...not that elected secular leaders of mere nation states would have any obvious formal duties to specifically be the person to benevolently serve literally all good beings as a focal point.
To get that formula to basically work, in a way that it kinda seems to work with US elections, since many US Presidents are assassinated in ways they could probably predict were possible (modulo this currently only working within the intrinsically “partial” nature of US elections, since these are merely elections for the leader of a single nation state that faces many other hostile nation states in a hobbesian world of eternal war (at least eternal war… so far!) ) I think one might need to hold global elections?
And… But… And this… this seems sorta do-able?!? Weirdly so!
We have the internet now. We have translation software to translate all the political statements into all the languages. We have internet money that could be used to donate to something that was worth donating to.
Why not create a “United Persons Alliance” (to play the “House of Representatives” to the UN’s “Senate”?) and find out what the UPA’s “Donation Weighted Condorcet Prime Minister” has to say?
I kinda can’t figure out why no one has tried it yet.
Maybe it is because, logically speaking, moral realism MIGHT be true and also maybe all humans are objectively bad?
If a lot of people knew for sure that “moral realism is true but humans are universally fallen” then it might explain why we almost never “produce and maintain legibly just institutions”.
Under the premises entertained here so far, IF such institutions were attempted anyway, and the attempt had security holes, THEN those security holes would be predictably abused and it would be predictably regretted by anyone who spent money setting it up, or trusted such a thing.
So maybe it is just that “moral realism is true, humans are bad, and designing secure systems is hard and humans are also smart enough to never try to summon a real justice system”?
I’m not sure about the rest of it, but this caught my eye:
I had a similar thought, and was trying to figure out if I could find a single good person to formally and efficiently coordinate with in a non-trivial pre-existing institution full of “safely good and sane people”.
I’m still searching. If anyone has a solid lead on this, please DM me, maybe?
Something you might expect is that many such “hypothetically existing hypothetically good people” would be willing to die slightly earlier for a good enough cause (especially late in life when their life expectancy is low, and especially for very high stakes issues where a lot of leverage is possible) but they wouldn’t waste lives, because waste is ceteris paribus bad, and so… so… what about martyrs who are also leaders?
This line of thinking is how I learned about Martin The Confessor, the last Pope to ever die for his beliefs.
Since 655 AD is much much earlier than 2024 AD, it would seem that Catholicism no longer “has the sauce” so to speak?
Also, slightly relatedly, I’m more glad that I otherwise might be that in this timeline the bullet missed Trump. In other very nearby timelines I’m pretty sure the whole idea of using physical courage to detect morally good leadership in a morally good group would be much more controversial than the principle is here, now, in this timeline, where no one has trapped priors about it that are being actively pumped full of energy by the media, with the creation of new social traumas, and so on...
...not that elected secular leaders of mere nation states would have any obvious formal duties to specifically be the person to benevolently serve literally all good beings as a focal point.
To get that formula to basically work, in a way that it kinda seems to work with US elections, since many US Presidents are assassinated in ways they could probably predict were possible (modulo this currently only working within the intrinsically “partial” nature of US elections, since these are merely elections for the leader of a single nation state that faces many other hostile nation states in a hobbesian world of eternal war (at least eternal war… so far!) ) I think one might need to hold global elections?
And… But… And this… this seems sorta do-able?!? Weirdly so!
We have the internet now. We have translation software to translate all the political statements into all the languages. We have internet money that could be used to donate to something that was worth donating to.
Why not create a “United Persons Alliance” (to play the “House of Representatives” to the UN’s “Senate”?) and find out what the UPA’s “Donation Weighted Condorcet Prime Minister” has to say?
I kinda can’t figure out why no one has tried it yet.
Maybe it is because, logically speaking, moral realism MIGHT be true and also maybe all humans are objectively bad?
If a lot of people knew for sure that “moral realism is true but humans are universally fallen” then it might explain why we almost never “produce and maintain legibly just institutions”.
Under the premises entertained here so far, IF such institutions were attempted anyway, and the attempt had security holes, THEN those security holes would be predictably abused and it would be predictably regretted by anyone who spent money setting it up, or trusted such a thing.
So maybe it is just that “moral realism is true, humans are bad, and designing secure systems is hard and humans are also smart enough to never try to summon a real justice system”?
Maybe.