I’m worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.
I don’t know in whose name you’re speaking when you talk in first person plural. However, if I would have to point out one valuable insight from the whole of OB/LW, it’s that the kind of progress that is considered the least controversial and problematic one nowadays, and which is hailed as uniformly beneficial by a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum—namely, technological progress—in fact likely has some nasty surprises in store for us.
On the other hand, technological progress is a matter of objective and measurable accomplishment, not some grand moral narrative. For the sort of example you’re looking for, you can consider any major social change in recent centuries that is considered a matter of enlightenment and moral progress nowadays.
Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that:
The law applies equally to everyone regardless of wealth, birth, sex, sexual preference, creed, etc. etc.
You don’t get punished retroactively.
Everyone is involved to some degree in lawmaking and policy decision.
Children having rights and being granted special protection.
The diffusion of barriers between in-groups and the progressive elimination of mutual exclusivity between them.
The Scientific Method, and its continuation in Modern Rationalism
The development in gender equality when it comes to rights and powers.
And so on and so forth.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It’s also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don’t aim for a position they weren’t capable of keeping).
See, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Except for the scientific method, I could take pretty much any of these examples and show that—even assuming complete agreement on values, which by itself means almost begging the question—the contemporary narrative of progress rests on the twin pillars of ignorance (or falsification) of actual history and arbitrary assignment of weight to trends that have gone in opposite directions. (And even for the scientific method, it can be argued that the contemporary official academic science is in far worse shape than the scientific community a century or two ago.)
Now, it is true that one can criticize certain narratives of progress without raising too much controversy. For example, I could dispute your first two points by arguing that the modern Western legal systems place common people in a far worse position than what their theoretical high principles would suggest, so much that, by some reasonable measures, the system is in fact more capricious, cruel, and unjust than what existed in the past. (However, it would be more difficult to get away with saying that the attempts to enforce some of these contemporary high principles, rather than insufficient vigor and consistency in enforcing them, are in fact among the causes of these problems.) On the other hand, for many other narratives of progress, any similar argument would quickly brand the speaker as unfit for polite society.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual.
I actually think most of the items on your list are not of this kind, but rather expensive concessions to our increasingly forager mindset.
Fundamentally all the evidence I have encountered so far in favour of these being improvements in the sense you have defined (and make no mistake I have been exposed to the arguments nearly my entire life and have indeed sought out to study them and even reconstruct better arguments from their corpses) seems to boil down to looking around the world and see these sorts of things as causing prosperity and other nice things, because they tend to correlate with them. But there is nothing preventing us from saying the same of obesity and other diseases of civilization! What we are doing here is irrationally privileging such a hypothesis, engaging in wishful thinking, because we (now) like democracy or the state having more resources to manage children’s lives and don’t like obesity or substance abuse, we apply differing standards when thinking about what makes our civilization “more formidable”. Don’t get me wrong I like many of the other things on your list, but I am highly confident at least a few are liabilities rather than assets.
The scientific method seems to be the only major exception. Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history), so I can’t really say whether societies that stuck to this principle really would work better as theory predicts they should.
Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history)
You mean the Nurnberg trials?
“Our civilization this and our civilization that.”
I don’t come from “your civilization”. I come from a horrible, repressive, absolute dictatorship, that fakes the game of democracy in order to keep up appearances. I can tell the ideal from the pretense, and believe me I can spot the hypocrisies and contradictions from miles away. The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity, about which I don’t care all that much: I can get by on a minimalist, simple diet, with plain clothes, in a plain, small house, using only public transportation, etc. As long as I have health (the guarrantee that I will live long and in a comfortable body), education (free access to knowledge consumption and creation, the ability to sate my lust for intellectual growth), and a friendly, healthy environment where I feel loved and appreciated, I have everything I need.
Now, sure, “material prosperity” can be redefined to mean exactly that, rather than, say, “conspicuous consumption, shiny stores, and impressive architecture” (which seemed to be what you were hinting at with the term), or simply “high rhythm of resources ownership, exploitation, and expenditure”, or even more simply “(material) wealth” but then we’d be playing with semantics, and I’m not sure that’d be productive.
What I mean to say is that those things make the world better, with or without more wealth. The reason some of them associated with more wealth than others is that it takes more wealth to be able to pull them off. If I could formulate the justification properly, it’d probably involve the term “marginal utility” or “marginal cost”, or something like that. May I ask you to fill the blanks?
However, these benefits are not exclusive to “your prosperous civilization”. They’ve showed up in plenty of other civilizations, at different points in history, not all of them acknowledged by the standard narrativa (for example, if memory serves, it was the Persians that thought up the idea of democracy first, before the Athenians). I could speak to you at length about the merits of society, government, and welfare of some “primitive” societies.
They aren’t exclusive to “prosperity” or “civilization” either, and in fact have seemed to correlate negatively (if they correlate at all) with the wealth of nations throughout history at some points: see Imperialism, from Ancient Egypt to the USA Hegemony, including Mesopotamian civilizations, the diverse Chinese empires, the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the USSR, and so on and so forth…
Privelege,
discrimination,
arbitrary punishment,
authoritarianism,
oppression of the weak (including children and women),
sharp division between conflicting groups,
irrationality and anti-empiricism,
and so on and so forth, in some combination or another, were the bread and butter of many of these systems. Conflating social freedom and justice with overall prosperity, I think, is following a red herring.
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
I like ice cream, and I don’t admonish people who buy ice cream because they like the taste, I do admonish people who think buying ice cream will help their health or improve their chances of winning a marathon (I would have used smoking since ice cream may not be that unhealthy but I don’t like smoking).
In other words, nothing really. What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
The long run… has to stop somewhere, if you want to make an evaluation. Otherwise, like Dr. Manhattan said, there’s no such thing as “in the end”. Societies face very different challenges depending on the era they are in, and what is good at one time may not be good at another. However,
if you think in terms of humanity as a whole, rather than any group in particular, then
a state of sustainability and optimal distribution of tasks and wealth for maximal stable formidability-happiness compromise
** (being formidable is a source of happiness in itself, as well as a source of sources of happiness, but is, by itself, insufficient to achieve it: in economic terms, think of Stalin’s Quinquennial plans and the complete emphasis on developing production goods and military might over consumption products and end-user services),
would, I think, require all the things I said and more.
Of course, that entire statement depends on what we define as “happiness” and “formidability”… and how much weight you give to each aspect of it
Happiness as achievement of will-to-power: heavily dependent on the feelings of growing stronger and achieving great things and overcoming difficulties and challenges. One way of achieving this in the maximum capacity for the maximum number of people requires that the rules be as fair as possible. “Fair?” Well: feelings of being given handouts spoil one’s sense of achievement, but victories that are too easy do that too, so one may want to handicap oneself, increase the difficulty of a course and/or give unworthy adversaries a head start.
Field-leveling rules, such that, ideally, everyone starts out with the exact same chances of success save for genetic difference, would be an extension to that, as would rules that enforce that you won’t be discriminated over factors you have no control of and that do not affect your social value, such as race or sexual preference.
No-retroactivity is another aspect of “keeping things fair”, as are
clear and accessible rules,
transparent rules-making, and
not allowing the rule-making to fall in the hand of a particular set of players that would spoil the fun of the game by giving themselves too many advantages: hence: “democracy”
helping newbies out (giving rights to children), free, top-quality public education for everyone, and other forms of avoiding the Original Position Fallacy by rule-writing while wearing the Veil Of Ignorance.
Maybe what you meant by
What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
was “Happiness-as-contentment”, a numb, pleasant stupor… The happiness of a full stomach and a warm bath. If that alone is what is sought, then societies like Huxley’s Brave New World and their narcotic soma would work just fine. But the fact that people consistently find Brave New World horrifying could be seen as evidence that this type of happiness is not the one with the most weight, and/or is insufficient or even counter-productive in the absence of the other kinds. But it is necessary: humans need to rest on occasion, simmer down, regenerate. In order to properly enjoy the game, one must be able to take certain things for granted, to only need to worry about a limited amount of sources of conflict. Hence why “social welfare”, “full public health insurance”, and so-on, that protect players even after they have left the “newbie/tutorial stage” and entered the game with the only difference between them being their quality as players.
Then there’s Happiness As Sensuous Stimulation: the other side of “fun”, the easy pleasures, the instant gratification, the local maxima, the happiness that doesn’t create or achieve, conserve or rebuild, but destroys and consumes and burns. It’s the antithesis of Formidability-building (even Resting can be justified as “formidability-consolidating”). But it appears that it’s a necessary spice for the recipe of happiness...
And there’s also Happiness As Social Status: feeling loved, feeling important, feeling helpful, feeling helped, feeling that you matter, feeling that you are liked, needed even.… Being these things is important for formidability, but why is it so important to most people’s happiness that they feel they are these things, even more so than being them (this is, according to recent research which I’d rather not have to look up, the main reason clients pay for prostitutes: they want to feel feminine if they are women, masculine if they are men, they want to feel loved and young and powerful and wanted, and even though they know those feelings to be based on fiction, they are still ready to expend an enormous amount of effort/resources/power to purchase that fictional ersatz).
In order to achieve all four forms of happiness (there’s probably more, but I haven’t thought of them yet :P) to the fullest combined extent for the sum of all humans, the intellectual and material output of humanity as a whole, its material enabling of the freedoms and powers to achieve these results, then human groups barriers, the very idea of Blue VS Red, Us versus Them, “looking out for our own and screw everyone else”, must go die in a fire, as a sheer matter of augmenting everyone’s labour’s marginal utility by cooperation and specialization, and of eliminating the grotesque overhead in negative-sum games such as arms-racing and crab-bucketing.
This would also apply to everyday individuals: Tall Poppy Syndrome is another error that should be confined to the vaults of history. Will-to-power isn’t just about overcoming others, it’s about overcoming oneselfandnature (one could say they are the same thing): the game need not, should not be zero-sum, and should be set up in such a way that “the best outcome for everyone on the whole” is where the Nash Equilibrium rests.
Hm. I’d think there’s material here for a top-level post, but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
Pretty rambling. But near as I can tell, mostly correct, except for the parts where you try to be “socialist”.
I don’t try to be socialist, it comes to me as naturally as breathing: it’s not just an identity, or “my favourite pick of political beliefs”: I don’t notice when I’m “being socialist” any more than a fish notices when it’s swimming, it just comes out that way by default. Anyway, which are the precise points that you see as incorrect?
The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity
I wasn’t talking about material prosperity necessarily, I was talking about prosperity, formidableness in the sense you defined:
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual.
And even said so:
improvements in the sense you have defined
You also included an economic aspect, but it seemed to me the bolded part was the key. Perhaps the word prosperity threw you off? I didn’t mean to use it in a primarily material sense, so I went and checked if I didn’t perhaps misuse it (I am not a native speaker).
Prosperity is the state of flourishing, thriving, good fortune and / or successful social status. [1] Prosperity often encompasses wealth but also includes others factors which are independent of wealth to varying degrees, such as happiness and health.
I don’t know in whose name you’re speaking when you talk in first person plural. However, if I would have to point out one valuable insight from the whole of OB/LW, it’s that the kind of progress that is considered the least controversial and problematic one nowadays, and which is hailed as uniformly beneficial by a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum—namely, technological progress—in fact likely has some nasty surprises in store for us.
On the other hand, technological progress is a matter of objective and measurable accomplishment, not some grand moral narrative. For the sort of example you’re looking for, you can consider any major social change in recent centuries that is considered a matter of enlightenment and moral progress nowadays.
Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that:
The law applies equally to everyone regardless of wealth, birth, sex, sexual preference, creed, etc. etc.
You don’t get punished retroactively.
Everyone is involved to some degree in lawmaking and policy decision.
Children having rights and being granted special protection.
The diffusion of barriers between in-groups and the progressive elimination of mutual exclusivity between them.
The Scientific Method, and its continuation in Modern Rationalism
The development in gender equality when it comes to rights and powers.
And so on and so forth.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It’s also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don’t aim for a position they weren’t capable of keeping).
See, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Except for the scientific method, I could take pretty much any of these examples and show that—even assuming complete agreement on values, which by itself means almost begging the question—the contemporary narrative of progress rests on the twin pillars of ignorance (or falsification) of actual history and arbitrary assignment of weight to trends that have gone in opposite directions. (And even for the scientific method, it can be argued that the contemporary official academic science is in far worse shape than the scientific community a century or two ago.)
Now, it is true that one can criticize certain narratives of progress without raising too much controversy. For example, I could dispute your first two points by arguing that the modern Western legal systems place common people in a far worse position than what their theoretical high principles would suggest, so much that, by some reasonable measures, the system is in fact more capricious, cruel, and unjust than what existed in the past. (However, it would be more difficult to get away with saying that the attempts to enforce some of these contemporary high principles, rather than insufficient vigor and consistency in enforcing them, are in fact among the causes of these problems.) On the other hand, for many other narratives of progress, any similar argument would quickly brand the speaker as unfit for polite society.
I actually think most of the items on your list are not of this kind, but rather expensive concessions to our increasingly forager mindset.
Fundamentally all the evidence I have encountered so far in favour of these being improvements in the sense you have defined (and make no mistake I have been exposed to the arguments nearly my entire life and have indeed sought out to study them and even reconstruct better arguments from their corpses) seems to boil down to looking around the world and see these sorts of things as causing prosperity and other nice things, because they tend to correlate with them. But there is nothing preventing us from saying the same of obesity and other diseases of civilization! What we are doing here is irrationally privileging such a hypothesis, engaging in wishful thinking, because we (now) like democracy or the state having more resources to manage children’s lives and don’t like obesity or substance abuse, we apply differing standards when thinking about what makes our civilization “more formidable”. Don’t get me wrong I like many of the other things on your list, but I am highly confident at least a few are liabilities rather than assets.
The scientific method seems to be the only major exception. Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history), so I can’t really say whether societies that stuck to this principle really would work better as theory predicts they should.
You mean the Nurnberg trials?
I don’t come from “your civilization”. I come from a horrible, repressive, absolute dictatorship, that fakes the game of democracy in order to keep up appearances. I can tell the ideal from the pretense, and believe me I can spot the hypocrisies and contradictions from miles away. The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity, about which I don’t care all that much: I can get by on a minimalist, simple diet, with plain clothes, in a plain, small house, using only public transportation, etc. As long as I have health (the guarrantee that I will live long and in a comfortable body), education (free access to knowledge consumption and creation, the ability to sate my lust for intellectual growth), and a friendly, healthy environment where I feel loved and appreciated, I have everything I need.
Now, sure, “material prosperity” can be redefined to mean exactly that, rather than, say, “conspicuous consumption, shiny stores, and impressive architecture” (which seemed to be what you were hinting at with the term), or simply “high rhythm of resources ownership, exploitation, and expenditure”, or even more simply “(material) wealth” but then we’d be playing with semantics, and I’m not sure that’d be productive.
What I mean to say is that those things make the world better, with or without more wealth. The reason some of them associated with more wealth than others is that it takes more wealth to be able to pull them off. If I could formulate the justification properly, it’d probably involve the term “marginal utility” or “marginal cost”, or something like that. May I ask you to fill the blanks?
However, these benefits are not exclusive to “your prosperous civilization”. They’ve showed up in plenty of other civilizations, at different points in history, not all of them acknowledged by the standard narrativa (for example, if memory serves, it was the Persians that thought up the idea of democracy first, before the Athenians). I could speak to you at length about the merits of society, government, and welfare of some “primitive” societies.
They aren’t exclusive to “prosperity” or “civilization” either, and in fact have seemed to correlate negatively (if they correlate at all) with the wealth of nations throughout history at some points: see Imperialism, from Ancient Egypt to the USA Hegemony, including Mesopotamian civilizations, the diverse Chinese empires, the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the USSR, and so on and so forth…
Privelege,
discrimination,
arbitrary punishment,
authoritarianism,
oppression of the weak (including children and women),
sharp division between conflicting groups,
irrationality and anti-empiricism,
and so on and so forth, in some combination or another, were the bread and butter of many of these systems. Conflating social freedom and justice with overall prosperity, I think, is following a red herring.
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
I like ice cream, and I don’t admonish people who buy ice cream because they like the taste, I do admonish people who think buying ice cream will help their health or improve their chances of winning a marathon (I would have used smoking since ice cream may not be that unhealthy but I don’t like smoking).
In other words, nothing really. What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
The long run… has to stop somewhere, if you want to make an evaluation. Otherwise, like Dr. Manhattan said, there’s no such thing as “in the end”. Societies face very different challenges depending on the era they are in, and what is good at one time may not be good at another. However,
if you think in terms of humanity as a whole, rather than any group in particular, then
a state of sustainability and optimal distribution of tasks and wealth for maximal stable formidability-happiness compromise ** (being formidable is a source of happiness in itself, as well as a source of sources of happiness, but is, by itself, insufficient to achieve it: in economic terms, think of Stalin’s Quinquennial plans and the complete emphasis on developing production goods and military might over consumption products and end-user services),
would, I think, require all the things I said and more.
Of course, that entire statement depends on what we define as “happiness” and “formidability”… and how much weight you give to each aspect of it
Happiness as achievement of will-to-power: heavily dependent on the feelings of growing stronger and achieving great things and overcoming difficulties and challenges. One way of achieving this in the maximum capacity for the maximum number of people requires that the rules be as fair as possible. “Fair?” Well: feelings of being given handouts spoil one’s sense of achievement, but victories that are too easy do that too, so one may want to handicap oneself, increase the difficulty of a course and/or give unworthy adversaries a head start.
Field-leveling rules, such that, ideally, everyone starts out with the exact same chances of success save for genetic difference, would be an extension to that, as would rules that enforce that you won’t be discriminated over factors you have no control of and that do not affect your social value, such as race or sexual preference.
No-retroactivity is another aspect of “keeping things fair”, as are
clear and accessible rules,
transparent rules-making, and
not allowing the rule-making to fall in the hand of a particular set of players that would spoil the fun of the game by giving themselves too many advantages: hence: “democracy”
helping newbies out (giving rights to children), free, top-quality public education for everyone, and other forms of avoiding the Original Position Fallacy by rule-writing while wearing the Veil Of Ignorance.
Maybe what you meant by
was “Happiness-as-contentment”, a numb, pleasant stupor… The happiness of a full stomach and a warm bath. If that alone is what is sought, then societies like Huxley’s Brave New World and their narcotic soma would work just fine. But the fact that people consistently find Brave New World horrifying could be seen as evidence that this type of happiness is not the one with the most weight, and/or is insufficient or even counter-productive in the absence of the other kinds. But it is necessary: humans need to rest on occasion, simmer down, regenerate. In order to properly enjoy the game, one must be able to take certain things for granted, to only need to worry about a limited amount of sources of conflict. Hence why “social welfare”, “full public health insurance”, and so-on, that protect players even after they have left the “newbie/tutorial stage” and entered the game with the only difference between them being their quality as players.
Then there’s Happiness As Sensuous Stimulation: the other side of “fun”, the easy pleasures, the instant gratification, the local maxima, the happiness that doesn’t create or achieve, conserve or rebuild, but destroys and consumes and burns. It’s the antithesis of Formidability-building (even Resting can be justified as “formidability-consolidating”). But it appears that it’s a necessary spice for the recipe of happiness...
And there’s also Happiness As Social Status: feeling loved, feeling important, feeling helpful, feeling helped, feeling that you matter, feeling that you are liked, needed even.… Being these things is important for formidability, but why is it so important to most people’s happiness that they feel they are these things, even more so than being them (this is, according to recent research which I’d rather not have to look up, the main reason clients pay for prostitutes: they want to feel feminine if they are women, masculine if they are men, they want to feel loved and young and powerful and wanted, and even though they know those feelings to be based on fiction, they are still ready to expend an enormous amount of effort/resources/power to purchase that fictional ersatz).
In order to achieve all four forms of happiness (there’s probably more, but I haven’t thought of them yet :P) to the fullest combined extent for the sum of all humans, the intellectual and material output of humanity as a whole, its material enabling of the freedoms and powers to achieve these results, then human groups barriers, the very idea of Blue VS Red, Us versus Them, “looking out for our own and screw everyone else”, must go die in a fire, as a sheer matter of augmenting everyone’s labour’s marginal utility by cooperation and specialization, and of eliminating the grotesque overhead in negative-sum games such as arms-racing and crab-bucketing.
This would also apply to everyday individuals: Tall Poppy Syndrome is another error that should be confined to the vaults of history. Will-to-power isn’t just about overcoming others, it’s about overcoming oneself and nature (one could say they are the same thing): the game need not, should not be zero-sum, and should be set up in such a way that “the best outcome for everyone on the whole” is where the Nash Equilibrium rests.
Hm. I’d think there’s material here for a top-level post, but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
Pretty rambling. But near as I can tell, mostly correct, except for the parts where you try to be “socialist”.
I don’t try to be socialist, it comes to me as naturally as breathing: it’s not just an identity, or “my favourite pick of political beliefs”: I don’t notice when I’m “being socialist” any more than a fish notices when it’s swimming, it just comes out that way by default. Anyway, which are the precise points that you see as incorrect?
One blatant example, yes.
I wasn’t talking about material prosperity necessarily, I was talking about prosperity, formidableness in the sense you defined:
And even said so:
You also included an economic aspect, but it seemed to me the bolded part was the key. Perhaps the word prosperity threw you off? I didn’t mean to use it in a primarily material sense, so I went and checked if I didn’t perhaps misuse it (I am not a native speaker).