You originally asked for examples of grand narratives. I didn’t really provide a specific example, since if one believes in narratives of progress in one field of morality or ethicse, then he in general does believe in what I term moral progress. I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works, this means that I necessarily dispute anything objective-morality-ish being behind say a narrative on woman’s liberation or the spread of Christianity or the end of slavery or the spread of democracy.
Considering I’ve run into such opinions several times, I think many still believe in moral progress. I criticized that hypothesis here (yes I really should finish the articles on this that I promised soon, but I wanted to read as much of old LW material as possible before that, especially the cited literature on metaethics).
So when I below said “This” I was talking about the above paragraph and the post I linked to.
This isn’t a specific case of such a grand narrative but basically transforms any plausible moral narrative quite a bit.
Then I proceed to demonstrate how I think starting to take the idea of there being no such thing as moral progress seriously changes one’s opinions on observation of moral change or even orderly and predictable moral change:
It becomes less
“We are on a path towards something like objective morality for humans. Yay the future is bright and I really should learn to accept changes to values of my society that I disagree with.”
If you believe in moral progress than interestingly and quite anomalously our society claims that we have been seeing moral progress for the past 200 or 300 or X years. Basically the world is supposed to have at some period after humans evolved suddenly started to act as a sort of CEV-ish thing, the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time. Taking this as a given, one should then be pretty open to the idea that while the ethics of 2100 or 2200 might be scary or disturbing at first glance, they will be genuinely better not merely different.
“Something as uncaring as evolution may be determining future morality. Eeek! My complex values are being ground down!”
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I’m still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn’t mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer’s, I’m just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador’s arguments.
I think it is where I first came upon the random walk challenge to allegedly “observed” moral progress. I do think I upgraded the argument even in that basic post, please tell me if you disagree.
Also I think Eliezer was basically working to rescue the notion of moral progress because that is what he sees as “adding back up to normality”. I disagree, I think normality is the futility of preserving your values or their coherently extrapolated successors. Finding a way to make something like “moral progress” real or even preserve currently held values would be a massive project comparable in difficulty and perhaps even importance to developing FAI (which is one potential solution to this problem). I find it telling he dosen’t seem directly touch on the subject afterwards.
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time? Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
I would tend to agree. But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time?
Sure I directly talk about this scenario and its implications in the original post I linked to.
Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
I think patchwork is pretty appropriate before globalization (by globalization I don’t mean modern globalization but the whole era since the Age of Discovery).
But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Getting excited over possible paradigm shifts is too passée for the cool kids now? Dammit, I guess I’m a square after all.
To be serious though, what I was getting at is that there are very popular and powerful ideological groups that would work against any such interpretation.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
I highly doubt that genetic evolution has had any significant relevance to human morality since the invention of agriculture. Which really ruins the metaphor you are using.
Sorry, don’t understand. At best, morality is godshatter from genetic evolution. But that doesn’t mean genetic evolution has produce recent (within 10k years) morally relevant changes.
There are some pretty reasonable arguments against this. Honestly I would be rather surprised if the genotypic distribution of say the tendency towards empathy or different kinds of altruism or tribalism or religiosity weren’t significantly different among Sumerian farmers of 4000 BC compared to the Mongolian horsemen of 1400 AD or the petty bourgeois of England in 1850 AD.
It it is hard to argue that the distribution of such traits would not influence the fitness landscape of memeplexes claiming to systematize and correct such intuitions into a framework of “ethics”.
Not quite. The results of genetic evolution up to this point have produced ^tons of morally relevant changes. All of them, in fact. All those instincts and pulsions and capacities, all those different types of brains, all the biological current state of humanity. The input of evolution hasn’t changed much, but the output of the human kind has gone off the scales. So we are still influenced by evolution in that we’re the result of it. And we will always be, even if we halt it forever and become immortal or upload into machines or whatever.
The input of evolution changed dramatically about when humans invented agriculture. The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
For a more recent example, consider the hemophiliac monarchs of the early 1900s. Hemophilia is genetic and does not enhance reproductive fitness. But the shear wealth of the monarchs (compared to nomadic pre-agriculture humans), meant that there wasn’t a limit on the ability of those monarchs to reproduce. Hence, no selection pressure.
I’m saying that most of the relevant wealth increase that removed biological selection pressure (on morally relevant traits) was the agricultural revolution (~8000 B.C.E.)
The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
Why would you think that? If anything this should make evolution more powerful in shaping us.
Humans are not just a species or a family of them, they where also an ecological neiche. A type of animal is stable or slowly changing in its form over millions or tens of millions of years (like say the crocodile), not because evolution can’t cook up massive changes in a much shorter time span but because over those eons the sweet spot of the various trade offs for the animal living in that part of the ecosystem don’t much change.
Let us in this light review Fischer’s fundamental theorem of natural selection:
“The rate of increase in the mean fitness of any organism at any time ascribable to natural selection acting through changes in gene frequencies is exactly equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time”
In other words crocodiles also didn’t have much variance after being pushed for so long towards that sweet spot. The advent of both agriculture and modern medicine have massively changed the evolutionary trade offs. In other words it has moved the sweet spot from under our feet or at least moved it from where we used to be moving towards to a completely different place in the fitness landscape. Thus theoretically one should see massive differentials between the fitness of various populations of humans and between individuals in those populations.
Tell that to Charles II of Spain, there was still the pressure of not being infertile. Also the spread of hempohilia was a rapid change caused by a change in selection pressures on several families. Isn’t this basically the same kind of change we see with vestigial organs? If for some reason flight wasn’t as useful fitness wise for a type of bird living on an island and its wings started to deteriorate to the point of being useless, wouldn’t we say flightless birds evolved on that island. Or say people on an island lost the ability to produce anti-bodies to a type of disease that wasn’t present there. Isn’t that evolution?
The perfect monarch in a secure kingdom where revolutions are impossible is from evolutions point of view a bag of meat that can cry particularly convincingly for food and reproduces until it eats up as much as its competent ministers can provide it via the states taxes.
Yes, so the pressure of biological evolution isn’t shaping our morality genetically, but the adaptations that our brain wants to execute are its direct and inescapable heritage.
I fear we may have been talking past another for the last few posts, haven’t we Tim?
You originally asked for examples of grand narratives. I didn’t really provide a specific example, since if one believes in narratives of progress in one field of morality or ethicse, then he in general does believe in what I term moral progress. I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works, this means that I necessarily dispute anything objective-morality-ish being behind say a narrative on woman’s liberation or the spread of Christianity or the end of slavery or the spread of democracy.
So when I below said “This” I was talking about the above paragraph and the post I linked to.
Then I proceed to demonstrate how I think starting to take the idea of there being no such thing as moral progress seriously changes one’s opinions on observation of moral change or even orderly and predictable moral change:
If you believe in moral progress than interestingly and quite anomalously our society claims that we have been seeing moral progress for the past 200 or 300 or X years. Basically the world is supposed to have at some period after humans evolved suddenly started to act as a sort of CEV-ish thing, the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time. Taking this as a given, one should then be pretty open to the idea that while the ethics of 2100 or 2200 might be scary or disturbing at first glance, they will be genuinely better not merely different.
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
I would like to use this opportunity to remind you that you owe us a post about this :-)
ETA: Sorry, I should have read the grandgrandparent first. Anyway, I’m eagerly awaiting your post!
Have you seen this post by Eliezer?
Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I’m still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn’t mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer’s, I’m just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador’s arguments.
I’m not really convinced by it either.
I think it is where I first came upon the random walk challenge to allegedly “observed” moral progress. I do think I upgraded the argument even in that basic post, please tell me if you disagree.
Also I think Eliezer was basically working to rescue the notion of moral progress because that is what he sees as “adding back up to normality”. I disagree, I think normality is the futility of preserving your values or their coherently extrapolated successors. Finding a way to make something like “moral progress” real or even preserve currently held values would be a massive project comparable in difficulty and perhaps even importance to developing FAI (which is one potential solution to this problem). I find it telling he dosen’t seem directly touch on the subject afterwards.
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time? Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
I would tend to agree. But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Sure I directly talk about this scenario and its implications in the original post I linked to.
I think patchwork is pretty appropriate before globalization (by globalization I don’t mean modern globalization but the whole era since the Age of Discovery).
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Getting excited over possible paradigm shifts is too passée for the cool kids now? Dammit, I guess I’m a square after all.
To be serious though, what I was getting at is that there are very popular and powerful ideological groups that would work against any such interpretation.
Like these guys?
I highly doubt that genetic evolution has had any significant relevance to human morality since the invention of agriculture. Which really ruins the metaphor you are using.
Eee-nope. Adaptation executers not fitness maximizers.
Sorry, don’t understand. At best, morality is godshatter from genetic evolution. But that doesn’t mean genetic evolution has produce recent (within 10k years) morally relevant changes.
There are some pretty reasonable arguments against this. Honestly I would be rather surprised if the genotypic distribution of say the tendency towards empathy or different kinds of altruism or tribalism or religiosity weren’t significantly different among Sumerian farmers of 4000 BC compared to the Mongolian horsemen of 1400 AD or the petty bourgeois of England in 1850 AD.
It it is hard to argue that the distribution of such traits would not influence the fitness landscape of memeplexes claiming to systematize and correct such intuitions into a framework of “ethics”.
Not quite. The results of genetic evolution up to this point have produced ^tons of morally relevant changes. All of them, in fact. All those instincts and pulsions and capacities, all those different types of brains, all the biological current state of humanity. The input of evolution hasn’t changed much, but the output of the human kind has gone off the scales. So we are still influenced by evolution in that we’re the result of it. And we will always be, even if we halt it forever and become immortal or upload into machines or whatever.
The input of evolution changed dramatically about when humans invented agriculture. The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
For a more recent example, consider the hemophiliac monarchs of the early 1900s. Hemophilia is genetic and does not enhance reproductive fitness. But the shear wealth of the monarchs (compared to nomadic pre-agriculture humans), meant that there wasn’t a limit on the ability of those monarchs to reproduce. Hence, no selection pressure.
I’m saying that most of the relevant wealth increase that removed biological selection pressure (on morally relevant traits) was the agricultural revolution (~8000 B.C.E.)
Why would you think that? If anything this should make evolution more powerful in shaping us.
Humans are not just a species or a family of them, they where also an ecological neiche. A type of animal is stable or slowly changing in its form over millions or tens of millions of years (like say the crocodile), not because evolution can’t cook up massive changes in a much shorter time span but because over those eons the sweet spot of the various trade offs for the animal living in that part of the ecosystem don’t much change.
Let us in this light review Fischer’s fundamental theorem of natural selection:
In other words crocodiles also didn’t have much variance after being pushed for so long towards that sweet spot. The advent of both agriculture and modern medicine have massively changed the evolutionary trade offs. In other words it has moved the sweet spot from under our feet or at least moved it from where we used to be moving towards to a completely different place in the fitness landscape. Thus theoretically one should see massive differentials between the fitness of various populations of humans and between individuals in those populations.
And this precisely what we observe.
Tell that to Charles II of Spain, there was still the pressure of not being infertile. Also the spread of hempohilia was a rapid change caused by a change in selection pressures on several families. Isn’t this basically the same kind of change we see with vestigial organs? If for some reason flight wasn’t as useful fitness wise for a type of bird living on an island and its wings started to deteriorate to the point of being useless, wouldn’t we say flightless birds evolved on that island. Or say people on an island lost the ability to produce anti-bodies to a type of disease that wasn’t present there. Isn’t that evolution?
The perfect monarch in a secure kingdom where revolutions are impossible is from evolutions point of view a bag of meat that can cry particularly convincingly for food and reproduces until it eats up as much as its competent ministers can provide it via the states taxes.
Incidentally this is the perfect voter too.
Yes, so the pressure of biological evolution isn’t shaping our morality genetically, but the adaptations that our brain wants to execute are its direct and inescapable heritage.
I fear we may have been talking past another for the last few posts, haven’t we Tim?