[I kinda feel like I have a post in me about this, but I’ll start with a comment here first.]
Aren’t we all conflict theorists? Of course we’re also ‘mistake theorists’, i.e. we all agree that there are lots of ‘first-order mistakes’ being made.
But Robin Hanson has been beating the X is not about Y drum now for … decades?
David Chapman (of the site Meaningness) was the person I most remember at making me feel the emotional truth that conflict is inevitable. Any specific conflict may not be, and probably isn’t. But some conflict is inevitable; if for no other reason that even our one species has such a large diversity in apparent values.
I consider it to be an open question whether there is a single set of values that human beings would agree to, even among a superintelligent version of everyone alive today (let alone alive ever). Conflict just is an inextricable aspect of existence.
We (for any particular instance of ‘we’) should try to win conflicts by pointing out the mistakes being made. We should also win via other means (i.e. ‘politics’) when the cause is sufficiently important.
“Aren’t we all conflict theorists?”—We all have some element of conflict theory inside of us. And indeed we should, as sometimes we really are in a conflict. But just as some people lean towards conflict denialism, others see conflict everywhere they look. Both are harmful.
[I kinda feel like I have a post in me about this, but I’ll start with a comment here first.]
Aren’t we all conflict theorists? Of course we’re also ‘mistake theorists’, i.e. we all agree that there are lots of ‘first-order mistakes’ being made.
But Robin Hanson has been beating the X is not about Y drum now for … decades?
David Chapman (of the site Meaningness) was the person I most remember at making me feel the emotional truth that conflict is inevitable. Any specific conflict may not be, and probably isn’t. But some conflict is inevitable; if for no other reason that even our one species has such a large diversity in apparent values.
I consider it to be an open question whether there is a single set of values that human beings would agree to, even among a superintelligent version of everyone alive today (let alone alive ever). Conflict just is an inextricable aspect of existence.
We (for any particular instance of ‘we’) should try to win conflicts by pointing out the mistakes being made. We should also win via other means (i.e. ‘politics’) when the cause is sufficiently important.
“Aren’t we all conflict theorists?”—We all have some element of conflict theory inside of us. And indeed we should, as sometimes we really are in a conflict. But just as some people lean towards conflict denialism, others see conflict everywhere they look. Both are harmful.