1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds. I agree that this is not common knowledge, and never has been. I’d like to hear more about why you think the situation is new.
(It’s plausible to me that something’s changed recently, in response to the Enlightenment, and that something changed with the initial spread of Christianity, and that something else changed with the initial growth of cities and centralized cults.)
2. I agree. I think it’s more helpful if we additionally clarify that while there’s not really a good-faith reason to stay confused about this, many people have a strong perceived motive to stay confused, so the persistence of confusion is not strong evidence that our apparently decisive arguments are missing an important technical point. (Also, it’s better if noticing this doesn’t immediately lead to self-sabotage via indignantly pretending scapegoating norms don’t exist.)
Not much to add on 3 and 4, except that my response to 2 bears on 3 as well. Strongly agree with:
In general, I have the instinct that pointing out that things *would be* technical errors if they were part of a proposed technical solution to the problem they claim to be solving, is a useful thing to do to help create common knowledge / knowledge.
I cannot speak for Zvi, but I suggest that the new thing is communication pollution.
Reality is far away and expensive. Signs are immediate and basically free. I intuitively suspect the gap is so huge that it is cheaper and easier to do a kind of sign-hopping, like frequency hopping, in lieu of working on or confronting the reality of the matter directly.
To provide more intuition about what I mean, compare communication costs to the falling costs of light over time. When our only lights were firewood it cost a significant fraction of the time of illumination in labor, for gathering and chopping wood. Now light is so ubiquitous that we turn them on with virtually no thought, and light pollution is a thing.
Interesting in this context that the Biblical version of the tower of Babel (as distinguished from e.g. the Babylonian account) was specifically constructed as a signal tower to overcome coordination difficulties due to large distances.
1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds.
One (potential?) disagreement is that I think it’s quite plausible that level-4-simulacrums are in fact the original morality, or co-evolved with level-1 morality. I think it actually took work to get morality to a point where it made any “sense” in a principled way. (At least, with principles that LWers are likely to endorse)
My current best guess is that morality is rooted in two things:
1) the need to coordinate political factions (who has enough friends that they could beat someone and take their stuff, or avoid having themselves beaten-up-and-stuff-taken). Notions of ‘fairness’ (which come from the anger module), getting filtered through “what can a group of people agree is fair?”, as a coordination mechanism.
2) something something repurposing our disgust module (from diseased individuals) to dislike people that seemed dangerous to have around. (So low status, powerless people often produce a disgust reaction. If you hang around a diseased person you might get sick. If you hang around powerless people you might get stuck with a spear).
The oldest simulacrum-level-1 morality I can imagine would have involved coordinating hunters and maybe building shelters (where it matters how skilled people are). But I’d expect the same time period to already involve maintaining your position within a political tribe, and I’d expect higher-level-simulacra morality to already be at work in that context.
(I’m not sure whether it makes sense to think of levels 1-through-4 as distinct stages)
I’d expect the explicit level 1-4 transition to become relevant after we moved to hierarchical agricultural societies, but for that to be happening alongside levels 2-4 already existing in some form.
Coevolution seems plausible to me, but preexisting doesn’t. Forager-typical fairness norms seem like a coherent shared social agenda, which is I think all that’s required to be at simulacra level 1. The anger “module” is fundamentally social and seems to be object-level. Plenty of social animals not smart enough to be Machiavellian experience anger, a sense of fairness, etc.
1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds. I agree that this is not common knowledge, and never has been. I’d like to hear more about why you think the situation is new.
(It’s plausible to me that something’s changed recently, in response to the Enlightenment, and that something changed with the initial spread of Christianity, and that something else changed with the initial growth of cities and centralized cults.)
2. I agree. I think it’s more helpful if we additionally clarify that while there’s not really a good-faith reason to stay confused about this, many people have a strong perceived motive to stay confused, so the persistence of confusion is not strong evidence that our apparently decisive arguments are missing an important technical point. (Also, it’s better if noticing this doesn’t immediately lead to self-sabotage via indignantly pretending scapegoating norms don’t exist.)
Not much to add on 3 and 4, except that my response to 2 bears on 3 as well. Strongly agree with:
I cannot speak for Zvi, but I suggest that the new thing is communication pollution.
Reality is far away and expensive. Signs are immediate and basically free. I intuitively suspect the gap is so huge that it is cheaper and easier to do a kind of sign-hopping, like frequency hopping, in lieu of working on or confronting the reality of the matter directly.
To provide more intuition about what I mean, compare communication costs to the falling costs of light over time. When our only lights were firewood it cost a significant fraction of the time of illumination in labor, for gathering and chopping wood. Now light is so ubiquitous that we turn them on with virtually no thought, and light pollution is a thing.
Interesting in this context that the Biblical version of the tower of Babel (as distinguished from e.g. the Babylonian account) was specifically constructed as a signal tower to overcome coordination difficulties due to large distances.
One (potential?) disagreement is that I think it’s quite plausible that level-4-simulacrums are in fact the original morality, or co-evolved with level-1 morality. I think it actually took work to get morality to a point where it made any “sense” in a principled way. (At least, with principles that LWers are likely to endorse)
My current best guess is that morality is rooted in two things:
1) the need to coordinate political factions (who has enough friends that they could beat someone and take their stuff, or avoid having themselves beaten-up-and-stuff-taken). Notions of ‘fairness’ (which come from the anger module), getting filtered through “what can a group of people agree is fair?”, as a coordination mechanism.
2) something something repurposing our disgust module (from diseased individuals) to dislike people that seemed dangerous to have around. (So low status, powerless people often produce a disgust reaction. If you hang around a diseased person you might get sick. If you hang around powerless people you might get stuck with a spear).
The oldest simulacrum-level-1 morality I can imagine would have involved coordinating hunters and maybe building shelters (where it matters how skilled people are). But I’d expect the same time period to already involve maintaining your position within a political tribe, and I’d expect higher-level-simulacra morality to already be at work in that context.
(I’m not sure whether it makes sense to think of levels 1-through-4 as distinct stages)
I’d expect the explicit level 1-4 transition to become relevant after we moved to hierarchical agricultural societies, but for that to be happening alongside levels 2-4 already existing in some form.
Coevolution seems plausible to me, but preexisting doesn’t. Forager-typical fairness norms seem like a coherent shared social agenda, which is I think all that’s required to be at simulacra level 1. The anger “module” is fundamentally social and seems to be object-level. Plenty of social animals not smart enough to be Machiavellian experience anger, a sense of fairness, etc.