How is it not obvious that rape is something on which people are INSUFFICIENTLY CLEAR about its badness. I mean you’ve personally written about not adopting evolution’s alien values, do you think humans are going to get that wrong when the time comes, or do you not see how “legalised rape” is just hopping on board the hooray for monkey brains and negative sum subgoal stomp train? Then having the superhappies, seemingly in most other respects humanities superiors, contrasted to abhorrent aliens, also converging on drastically increased sexuality as a natural convergence point for drastic intervention in people’s natures.
If the story didn’t seem otherwise so idealistic, it might just slip in as part of the background. But it doesn’t seem like an an attempt at a realistic extrapolation of what humans would actually end up as: the characters are all rational and well intentioned and smart and appealing, and there’s lighthearted popculture references as well as dramatic appeals to your own memes (good memes they are but still). And then throwing in rape, RAPE for fuck’s sake, in as legalised in an otherwise fairly shiny future (and if you dispute shiny, at least sensible or sane) really seems like at best a reckless and self indulgent whim.
Do you think people have too much trouble entertaining thoughts of adjusting their values in ways that allow them to exploit others, and benefit from a privileged (unfortunately, this privileged does seem to be the literally correct word for something I want to say) position? Are most people too pure and nice, and just need to get in touch with their inner tribal and/or feral animal? That’s the only direction this is going to open anyone’s eyes. “Open mindedness” is not a quality to encourage in directions people are already severely tempted to be immoral. You should not have appealing opportunities for people to repudiate their better natures slipped into work that is otherwise so brilliant they will be tempted to believe anything it seems to imply, and clearly enough backed by an intellect at least a level up from most readers that they may be tempted, legitimately even, to just take on trust what you seem to be implying. How often do you read, on this site, comments like, “I wonder if humans don’t inherently need other people to suffer for them to be happy?” and elsewhere morons basically literally believing “fucking bitches” is the meaning of life because evolution/the life made famous by the phrase “that’s life”, says so, and the almost complete lack of resistance or rebuttals to such ideas as normative or as remotely reasoned.
look at the arguments he’s making, and how people are responding to them. Something about our sick environment makes people really tempted by naturalistic fallacies especially ones that lead into proposing we forget that whole thinking thing and give over our identities to evolution’s eldritch values.
I’m not sure if reddit should be expected to be below or above average on this but just look at the shit people are thinking, that it’s socially respectable to think.
Believing in your shitty local equilibrium and that the compromises people make to fit into/survive in/thrive in it are moral and neccessary (in order to better signal and fit into it) is pretty much the main moral failure mode of humans in general. Exploitative strictly hierarchical environments, (aka the specific people they’re made of) destroy people’s investment in altruism and reciprocal cooperation. If everyone stops jumping in bed with every piece of rhetoric that represents an appealing alliance, rhetoric will no longer decide “social reality.” The more people stand against coercion and domination and abuse, and every aspect of the race to the bottom, and the more people quit with the whole domination and compromise ideology thing the less there’ll be people feeling rape is part of the “natural order”, and that natural orders are more important than principles and decency. That’s an extremely hard coordination problem but it really, really needs to be solved. It’s non solvedness is what we regretfully refer to as the human condition, or the absurdity of life, or the “real world.” If your CEV doesn’t include doing something about this you’re a baby eater.
Speaking of which actual humans are effectively baby eaters, we eat animals which are apparently roughly as sapient, that’s another one of those really fucking important coordination problems, luckily it seems to have an engineering solution. Come to think of it you must have thought of that which makes me question if there’s some higher level reason for this for half a second but NOPE, throwing in a “rape, why not?” from the collective decision of an otherwise (comparitively) highly awesome alt/future humanity on reflection, with the understanding that you’re smarter than me and I clearly don’t understand what’s going on, still seems like a really fucking bad idea.
I think that it is intended as an exercise. Put yourself in the mindset of an average 18th or 19th-century individual, and imagine the 21st century as an idealized future. Things seem pretty wonderful; machines do most of the work, medicines cure disease, air travel lets you get anywhere on the planet in a single day.
But then, what?! Women can vote, and run businesses? And legalized gay marriage?!! How shocking and disturbing.
It’s almost a given that the future’s values will drift apart from ours, although we can’t be sure how and in which direction they will go. So something about this idealized future would be likely to seem abhorrent to us, even if normal and natural to the people of that time.
I think—and this seems to be the part that people don’t understand at first—EY is not suggesting that rape should be legalized, or painting this as his ideal values of the future. EY is saying something about the way that values change over time; the future is bound to embrace some values we find abhorrent, and the way that he can convey that feeling to us is by picking some abhorrent thing that pretty much everybody would agree is bad, and depicting it being normal and acceptable in a future society.
That’s the only way that we can experience the feeling of how someone from the past would feel about modern culture.
That’s the only way that we can experience the feeling of how someone from the past would feel about modern culture.
The easiest way to experience something close to what someone from the past would think of modern culture, is to imagine how you would feel about their culture. “There are no nuclear weapons, Al Qaeda is a nonentity, the NSA can’t spy and taxes are very low. On the other hand medicine is in a horrible state, there’s no gay marriage, religion is everywhere, and women can’t vote.”
although we can’t be sure how and in which direction they will go
Sure. They will continue to drift in the direction of the values of descendants of New England Puritans, as they’ve been doing for the last few centuries.
How is it not obvious that rape is something on which people are INSUFFICIENTLY CLEAR about its badness. I mean you’ve personally written about not adopting evolution’s alien values, do you think humans are going to get that wrong when the time comes, or do you not see how “legalised rape” is just hopping on board the hooray for monkey brains and negative sum subgoal stomp train? Then having the superhappies, seemingly in most other respects humanities superiors, contrasted to abhorrent aliens, also converging on drastically increased sexuality as a natural convergence point for drastic intervention in people’s natures.
If the story didn’t seem otherwise so idealistic, it might just slip in as part of the background. But it doesn’t seem like an an attempt at a realistic extrapolation of what humans would actually end up as: the characters are all rational and well intentioned and smart and appealing, and there’s lighthearted popculture references as well as dramatic appeals to your own memes (good memes they are but still). And then throwing in rape, RAPE for fuck’s sake, in as legalised in an otherwise fairly shiny future (and if you dispute shiny, at least sensible or sane) really seems like at best a reckless and self indulgent whim.
Do you think people have too much trouble entertaining thoughts of adjusting their values in ways that allow them to exploit others, and benefit from a privileged (unfortunately, this privileged does seem to be the literally correct word for something I want to say) position? Are most people too pure and nice, and just need to get in touch with their inner tribal and/or feral animal? That’s the only direction this is going to open anyone’s eyes. “Open mindedness” is not a quality to encourage in directions people are already severely tempted to be immoral. You should not have appealing opportunities for people to repudiate their better natures slipped into work that is otherwise so brilliant they will be tempted to believe anything it seems to imply, and clearly enough backed by an intellect at least a level up from most readers that they may be tempted, legitimately even, to just take on trust what you seem to be implying. How often do you read, on this site, comments like, “I wonder if humans don’t inherently need other people to suffer for them to be happy?” and elsewhere morons basically literally believing “fucking bitches” is the meaning of life because evolution/the life made famous by the phrase “that’s life”, says so, and the almost complete lack of resistance or rebuttals to such ideas as normative or as remotely reasoned.
Hold on here’s a concrete example:
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/29uo38/serious_redditors_against_gay_marriage_what_is/cioolzf
look at the arguments he’s making, and how people are responding to them. Something about our sick environment makes people really tempted by naturalistic fallacies especially ones that lead into proposing we forget that whole thinking thing and give over our identities to evolution’s eldritch values.
I’m not sure if reddit should be expected to be below or above average on this but just look at the shit people are thinking, that it’s socially respectable to think.
Believing in your shitty local equilibrium and that the compromises people make to fit into/survive in/thrive in it are moral and neccessary (in order to better signal and fit into it) is pretty much the main moral failure mode of humans in general. Exploitative strictly hierarchical environments, (aka the specific people they’re made of) destroy people’s investment in altruism and reciprocal cooperation. If everyone stops jumping in bed with every piece of rhetoric that represents an appealing alliance, rhetoric will no longer decide “social reality.” The more people stand against coercion and domination and abuse, and every aspect of the race to the bottom, and the more people quit with the whole domination and compromise ideology thing the less there’ll be people feeling rape is part of the “natural order”, and that natural orders are more important than principles and decency. That’s an extremely hard coordination problem but it really, really needs to be solved. It’s non solvedness is what we regretfully refer to as the human condition, or the absurdity of life, or the “real world.” If your CEV doesn’t include doing something about this you’re a baby eater.
Speaking of which actual humans are effectively baby eaters, we eat animals which are apparently roughly as sapient, that’s another one of those really fucking important coordination problems, luckily it seems to have an engineering solution. Come to think of it you must have thought of that which makes me question if there’s some higher level reason for this for half a second but NOPE, throwing in a “rape, why not?” from the collective decision of an otherwise (comparitively) highly awesome alt/future humanity on reflection, with the understanding that you’re smarter than me and I clearly don’t understand what’s going on, still seems like a really fucking bad idea.
I admit that I found this really disturbing too.
I think that it is intended as an exercise. Put yourself in the mindset of an average 18th or 19th-century individual, and imagine the 21st century as an idealized future. Things seem pretty wonderful; machines do most of the work, medicines cure disease, air travel lets you get anywhere on the planet in a single day.
But then, what?! Women can vote, and run businesses? And legalized gay marriage?!! How shocking and disturbing.
It’s almost a given that the future’s values will drift apart from ours, although we can’t be sure how and in which direction they will go. So something about this idealized future would be likely to seem abhorrent to us, even if normal and natural to the people of that time.
I think—and this seems to be the part that people don’t understand at first—EY is not suggesting that rape should be legalized, or painting this as his ideal values of the future. EY is saying something about the way that values change over time; the future is bound to embrace some values we find abhorrent, and the way that he can convey that feeling to us is by picking some abhorrent thing that pretty much everybody would agree is bad, and depicting it being normal and acceptable in a future society.
That’s the only way that we can experience the feeling of how someone from the past would feel about modern culture.
The easiest way to experience something close to what someone from the past would think of modern culture, is to imagine how you would feel about their culture. “There are no nuclear weapons, Al Qaeda is a nonentity, the NSA can’t spy and taxes are very low. On the other hand medicine is in a horrible state, there’s no gay marriage, religion is everywhere, and women can’t vote.”