It’s pretty annoying that the only positions with common currency are
we have to preserve our values the way they are, and
actually that’s confused, so we should just do whatever increases intelligence / effectiveness.
To have goals you have to point to reality, and to point to reality you have to unfold values through novelty. True, true. And you have to make free choices at each ontic crisis, included free choices about what to be. Also true.
I think that’s what I’m trying to say with orthogonal and diagonal both being wrong. One example of a free choice would be bets on things that are very hard to test or deduce. Then you decide some probability, and if you change the probability too much you get money pumped as with a logical inductor. But of course thinking and learning more will tend to concentrate beliefs more, so it isn’t truly orthogonal. (One could think values but not beliefs are orthogonal, but we both know about Bayes/VNM duality)
Right, your “obliqueness thesis” seems like a reasonable summary slogan. I’m lamenting that there are juicy problems here, but it’s hard to discuss them theoretically because theoretical discussions are attracted to the two poles.
E.g. when discussing ontic crises, some people’s first instinct is to get started on translating/reducing the new worldspace into the old worldspace—this is the pole that takes intelligence as purely instrumental. Or on the other pole, you have the nihilism → Landian pipeline—confronted with ontic crises, you give up and say “well, whatever works”. Both ways shrug off the problem/opportunity of designing/choosing/learning what to be. (I would hope that Heidegger would discuss this explicitly somewhere, but I’m not aware of it.)
In terms of government, you have communists/fascists on the one hand, and minarchists on the other. The founders of the US were neither and thought a lot about what to be. You don’t just pretend that you aren’t, shouldn’t be, don’t want to be part of a collective; but that collective should be deeply good; and to be deeply good it has to think; so it can’t be totalitarian.
It’s pretty annoying that the only positions with common currency are
we have to preserve our values the way they are, and
actually that’s confused, so we should just do whatever increases intelligence / effectiveness.
To have goals you have to point to reality, and to point to reality you have to unfold values through novelty. True, true. And you have to make free choices at each ontic crisis, included free choices about what to be. Also true.
I think that’s what I’m trying to say with orthogonal and diagonal both being wrong. One example of a free choice would be bets on things that are very hard to test or deduce. Then you decide some probability, and if you change the probability too much you get money pumped as with a logical inductor. But of course thinking and learning more will tend to concentrate beliefs more, so it isn’t truly orthogonal. (One could think values but not beliefs are orthogonal, but we both know about Bayes/VNM duality)
Right, your “obliqueness thesis” seems like a reasonable summary slogan. I’m lamenting that there are juicy problems here, but it’s hard to discuss them theoretically because theoretical discussions are attracted to the two poles.
E.g. when discussing ontic crises, some people’s first instinct is to get started on translating/reducing the new worldspace into the old worldspace—this is the pole that takes intelligence as purely instrumental. Or on the other pole, you have the nihilism → Landian pipeline—confronted with ontic crises, you give up and say “well, whatever works”. Both ways shrug off the problem/opportunity of designing/choosing/learning what to be. (I would hope that Heidegger would discuss this explicitly somewhere, but I’m not aware of it.)
In terms of government, you have communists/fascists on the one hand, and minarchists on the other. The founders of the US were neither and thought a lot about what to be. You don’t just pretend that you aren’t, shouldn’t be, don’t want to be part of a collective; but that collective should be deeply good; and to be deeply good it has to think; so it can’t be totalitarian.