It’s hard to find proof of what most people consider obvious, unless its part of the Canon of Great Moments in Science (tm) and the textbook industry can make a bundle off it. Tell you what—if you like, I’ll trade you a promise to look for the citation you want for a promise to look for primary science on anthropogenic global warming. I suspect we’re making the climate warmer, but I don’t know where to read a peer-reviewed article documenting the evidence that we are. I’ll spend any reasonable amount of time that you do looking -- 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 90 minutes—and if I can’t find anything, I’ll admit to being wrong.
unlike democratic rulers who have never presided over atrocities such as slavery, genocide, or more recently, say the Iraq war, Vietnam, or in an ongoing sense, the drug war or factory farming.
Slavery, genocide, and factory farming are examples of imperfect democracy—the definition of “citizen” simply isn’t extended widely enough yet. Fortunately, people (slowly) tend to notice the inconsistency in times of relative peace and prosperity, and extend additional rights. Hence the order-of-magnitude decrease in the fraction of the global population that is enslaved, and, if you believe Stephen Pinker, in the frequency of ethnic killings. As for factory farming, I sincerely hope the day when animals are treated as citizens when appropriate will come, and the quicker it comes the better I’ll be pleased. On the other hand, if you glorify dictatorship, or if you give dictatorship an opening to glorify itself, it tends to pretty effectively suppress talk about widening the circle of compassion. Better to have a hypocritical system of liberties than to let vice walk the streets without paying any tribute to virtue at all; such tributes can collect compound interest over the centuries.
The Vietnam war is generally recognized as a failure of democracy; the two most popular opponents of the war were assassinated, and the papers providing the policy rationale for the war were illegally hidden, ultimately causing the downfall of President Nixon. The drug war seems to be winding down as the high cost of prisons sinks in. The war on Iraq is probably democracy’s fault.
Human life is bloody. Power pushes the perceived responsibility for that brute fact onto the powerful.
True enough, but it also pushes some of the real responsibility onto the powerful. I would much rather kill one person than stand by and let ten die, but I would much rather let one person die than kill one person—responsibility counts for something.
it is possible that you are saved from bloody hands by an elected representative who you hired to do the job.
God forbid, if you’ll excuse the expression. I’m not paying anybody to butcher for me, although sometimes, despite my best efforts, they take my tax dollars for the purpose. So far as I can manage it without being thrown in jail, it’s not in my name; I vote against any incumbent that commits atrocities, and campaign for people who promise not to, and buy renewable energy from the power company and fair-trade imports from the third world and humanely-labeled meat from the supermarket. I’m sure that I still benefit from all kinds of bloody shenanigans, but it’s not because I want to.
Finally, are you any relation to Michael Vassar, the political philosopher and scholar of just war theory? You seem to have a mind that is open like his, and a similarly agile debating style, but you also seem considerably bitterer than his published works.
I don’t think I glorify dictatorship, but I do think that terribly dictatorships, like Stalinist Russia, have sometimes spoken of widening circles of compassion.
I do think you are glorifying democracy. Do you have examples of perfect democracy to contrast with imperfect democracy? Slaves frequently aren’t citizens, but on other occasions, such as in the immense and enslaving US prison system (with its huge rates of false conviction and of conviction for absurd crimes), or the military draft they are. The reduction in slavery may be due to philosophical progress trickling down to the masses, or it may simply be that slavery has become less economically competitive as markets have matured.
Responsibility counts for something, but for far less among the powerful. As power increases, custom weakens, and situations become more unique, acts/omissions distinctions become less useful. As a result, rapid rises in power do frequently leave people without a moral compass, leading to terrible actions.
I appreciate your efforts to avoid indirectly causing harms.
I didn’t know about the other Michael Vassar. It’s an uncommon name, so I’m surprised to hear it.
By which you mean, I suppose, that my skill as a rhetorician has exceeded my skill as a rationalist. Well, you may be right. Supposing you are, what do you suggest I do about it?
I do think you are glorifying democracy.
Well, yes, I am. Not our democracy, not any narrow technique for promoting democracy, but democracy as the broad principle that people should have a decisive say in the decisions that affect them strikes me as pretty awesome. I guess I might be claiming benefits for democracy in excess of what I have evidence to support, and that if I were an excellent rationalist, I would simply say, “I do not know what the effects of attempting democracy are.”
I am not an excellent rationalist. What I do is to look hard for the answers to important questions, and then, if after long searching I cannot find the answers and I have no hope of finding the answers, but the questions still seem important, I choose an answer that appeals to my intuition.
I spent the better part of my undergraduate years trying to understand what democracy is, what violence is, and whether the two have any systematic relation to each other. Scientifically speaking, my answer is that we do not know, and will not know, in all likelihood, for quite some time. Violence happens in places where researchers find it difficult or impossible to record it; death tolls are so biased by partisans of various stripes, by the credulity of an entertainment-based media, and by the fog of war that one can almost never tell which of two similarly-sized conflicts was more violent. Democracy is, at best, a correlation among several variables, each of which can only be specified with 2 or 3 bits of meaningful information, and each of which might have different effects on violence. Given the confusion, to scientifically state a relationship between democracy and violence would be ridiculous.
And, yet, I find that I very much want to know what the relationship is between democracy and violence. I can oppose all offensive wars designed to change another country’s regime type on the grounds that science supports no prediction that the certain deaths from war will be outweighed by bloodiness removed in an allegedly safer regime. What about defensive wars? I find that I cannot bring myself to say, “I would not fight to preserve my region’s measure of democracy against an outside autocratic invader, because I do not know, scientifically, that such a fight would reduce total bloodiness.” I would fight, believing without scientific evidence that such a war would be better than surrender.
Am I simply deluding myself? Most people on Less Wrong will think so. I do not particularly care. I am far more concerned about the danger of reasoning myself into a narcissistic, quiet-ist corner where I never take political action than I am about the danger of backing an ideal that turns out to be empty.
Using the Hansonian “far-view reference class,” the odds that an ideal chosen based on “things I believe in because I was taught to believe in them” is worth killing for are near zero. Using the same method, the odds that an ideal chosen based on “things that I believe in after carefully examining all available evidence and finding that I cannot think of a good reason to overturn my culture’s traditions, despite having actively questioned them” is worth killing for are high enough that I can sleep at night. If you believe I should be awake, I look forward to your reply.
Not at all. Rhetorical skill IS a good thing, and properly contributes to logic. Your argument seems rational to me, in the non-Spock sense that we generally encourage here. What to do? Keep on thinking AND caring!
If the search you use is as fair and unbiased as you can make it, this looking hard for answers is the core of what being a good rationalist is. Possibly, you should look harder for the causes of systematic differences between people’s intuitions, to see whether those causes are entangled with truth, but analysis has to stop at some point.
In practice, rationalists may back themselves into permanent inaction due to uncertainty, but the theory of rationality we endorse here says we should be doing what you claim to be doing. I find it extremely disturbing that we aren’t communicating this effectively, though its clearly our fault since we aren’t communicating it effectively enough to ourselves for it to motivate us to be more dynamic either.
When you say you glorify Democracy though, I think you mean something much closer to what I would call Coherent Extrapolated Volition than it is to what I would call Democracy. Something radically novel that hasn’t ever been tried, or even specified in enough detail to call it a proposal without some charity.
As a factual matter, I would suggest that the systems of government that we call Democracies in the US may typically be a bit further in the CEV direction than those we typically call dictatorships, but if they are, its a weak tendency, like the tendency of good painters to be good at basketball or something. You might detect it statistically, if you had properly operationalized it first, or vaguely suspect its there based on intuitive perception, but you couldn’t ever be very confident it was there.
It’s obviously wrong to overturn cultural traditions which have been questioned but not refuted. Such traditions have some information value, if only for anthropic reasons, and more importantly, they are somewhat correlated with your values. In this particular case, if you limit your options under consideration to ‘fight against invaders or do nothing’ I have no objections. Real life situations usually present more options, but those weren’t specified.
As an off-the-cuff example, I think its obvious that a person who fought against the NAZIs in WWII was doing something better than they would by staying home even though the NAZIs didn’t invade the US and even valuing their lives moderately more highly than those of others. OTOH, the marginal expected impact of a soldier on the expected outcome of the war was surely SO MUCH less than the marginal expected impact of an independent person who put in serious effort to be an assassin, while the risk was probably not an order of magnitude smaller, so I think its fair to say that they were still being irrational, judged as altruists, and were in most cases, well, only following orders. If they valued victory enough to be a soldier they should have done something more effective instead. (have I just refuted Yossarian or confirmed him?)
I think that they should definitely sleep at night. Should feel happy and proud even… but in their shoes I wouldn’t.
Finally, are you any relation to Michael Vassar, the political philosopher and scholar of just war theory? You seem to have a mind that is open like his, and a similarly agile debating style, but you also seem considerably bitterer than his published works.
Tell you what—if you like, I’ll trade you a promise to look for the citation you want for a promise to look for primary science on anthropogenic global warming. I suspect we’re making the climate warmer, but I don’t know where to read a peer-reviewed article documenting the evidence that we are.
I don’t know if you’re still looking for this, and if this would be an appropriate place to post links. But:
Primary Evidence:
temperatures increase over the last 2000 years as estimated by tree ring, marine/lake/cave proxy, ice isotopes, glacier length/mass, and borehole data.
figures S-1, O-4, 2-3, 2-5, 5-3, 6-3, 7-1, 10-4, and 11-2 are probably the most useful to you. Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years. Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council
ISBN: 0-309-66144-7, 160 pages, 7 x 10, (2006)
earlier flowering times in recent 25 years, with data taken over the past 250 years. Amano, et. al [A 250-year index of first flowering dates and its response to temperature changes] (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1693/2451.full). Proc. R. Soc. B 22 August 2010 vol. 277 no. 1693 2451-2457
Contradicting evidence:
extremes of monthly average temperatures in Central England do not appear to match either a “high extremes after 1780s/1850s only” or “low extremes before 1780s/1850s only” hypothesis. Manley. [Central England temperatures: Monthly means 1659 to 1973] (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.49710042511/abstract). Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. Volume 100, Issue 425, pages 389–405, July 1974
It’s hard to find proof of what most people consider obvious, unless its part of the Canon of Great Moments in Science (tm) and the textbook industry can make a bundle off it. Tell you what—if you like, I’ll trade you a promise to look for the citation you want for a promise to look for primary science on anthropogenic global warming. I suspect we’re making the climate warmer, but I don’t know where to read a peer-reviewed article documenting the evidence that we are. I’ll spend any reasonable amount of time that you do looking -- 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 90 minutes—and if I can’t find anything, I’ll admit to being wrong.
Slavery, genocide, and factory farming are examples of imperfect democracy—the definition of “citizen” simply isn’t extended widely enough yet. Fortunately, people (slowly) tend to notice the inconsistency in times of relative peace and prosperity, and extend additional rights. Hence the order-of-magnitude decrease in the fraction of the global population that is enslaved, and, if you believe Stephen Pinker, in the frequency of ethnic killings. As for factory farming, I sincerely hope the day when animals are treated as citizens when appropriate will come, and the quicker it comes the better I’ll be pleased. On the other hand, if you glorify dictatorship, or if you give dictatorship an opening to glorify itself, it tends to pretty effectively suppress talk about widening the circle of compassion. Better to have a hypocritical system of liberties than to let vice walk the streets without paying any tribute to virtue at all; such tributes can collect compound interest over the centuries.
The Vietnam war is generally recognized as a failure of democracy; the two most popular opponents of the war were assassinated, and the papers providing the policy rationale for the war were illegally hidden, ultimately causing the downfall of President Nixon. The drug war seems to be winding down as the high cost of prisons sinks in. The war on Iraq is probably democracy’s fault.
True enough, but it also pushes some of the real responsibility onto the powerful. I would much rather kill one person than stand by and let ten die, but I would much rather let one person die than kill one person—responsibility counts for something.
God forbid, if you’ll excuse the expression. I’m not paying anybody to butcher for me, although sometimes, despite my best efforts, they take my tax dollars for the purpose. So far as I can manage it without being thrown in jail, it’s not in my name; I vote against any incumbent that commits atrocities, and campaign for people who promise not to, and buy renewable energy from the power company and fair-trade imports from the third world and humanely-labeled meat from the supermarket. I’m sure that I still benefit from all kinds of bloody shenanigans, but it’s not because I want to.
Finally, are you any relation to Michael Vassar, the political philosopher and scholar of just war theory? You seem to have a mind that is open like his, and a similarly agile debating style, but you also seem considerably bitterer than his published works.
Good writing style!
I don’t think I glorify dictatorship, but I do think that terribly dictatorships, like Stalinist Russia, have sometimes spoken of widening circles of compassion.
I do think you are glorifying democracy. Do you have examples of perfect democracy to contrast with imperfect democracy? Slaves frequently aren’t citizens, but on other occasions, such as in the immense and enslaving US prison system (with its huge rates of false conviction and of conviction for absurd crimes), or the military draft they are. The reduction in slavery may be due to philosophical progress trickling down to the masses, or it may simply be that slavery has become less economically competitive as markets have matured.
Responsibility counts for something, but for far less among the powerful. As power increases, custom weakens, and situations become more unique, acts/omissions distinctions become less useful. As a result, rapid rises in power do frequently leave people without a moral compass, leading to terrible actions.
I appreciate your efforts to avoid indirectly causing harms.
I didn’t know about the other Michael Vassar. It’s an uncommon name, so I’m surprised to hear it.
By which you mean, I suppose, that my skill as a rhetorician has exceeded my skill as a rationalist. Well, you may be right. Supposing you are, what do you suggest I do about it?
Well, yes, I am. Not our democracy, not any narrow technique for promoting democracy, but democracy as the broad principle that people should have a decisive say in the decisions that affect them strikes me as pretty awesome. I guess I might be claiming benefits for democracy in excess of what I have evidence to support, and that if I were an excellent rationalist, I would simply say, “I do not know what the effects of attempting democracy are.”
I am not an excellent rationalist. What I do is to look hard for the answers to important questions, and then, if after long searching I cannot find the answers and I have no hope of finding the answers, but the questions still seem important, I choose an answer that appeals to my intuition.
I spent the better part of my undergraduate years trying to understand what democracy is, what violence is, and whether the two have any systematic relation to each other. Scientifically speaking, my answer is that we do not know, and will not know, in all likelihood, for quite some time. Violence happens in places where researchers find it difficult or impossible to record it; death tolls are so biased by partisans of various stripes, by the credulity of an entertainment-based media, and by the fog of war that one can almost never tell which of two similarly-sized conflicts was more violent. Democracy is, at best, a correlation among several variables, each of which can only be specified with 2 or 3 bits of meaningful information, and each of which might have different effects on violence. Given the confusion, to scientifically state a relationship between democracy and violence would be ridiculous.
And, yet, I find that I very much want to know what the relationship is between democracy and violence. I can oppose all offensive wars designed to change another country’s regime type on the grounds that science supports no prediction that the certain deaths from war will be outweighed by bloodiness removed in an allegedly safer regime. What about defensive wars? I find that I cannot bring myself to say, “I would not fight to preserve my region’s measure of democracy against an outside autocratic invader, because I do not know, scientifically, that such a fight would reduce total bloodiness.” I would fight, believing without scientific evidence that such a war would be better than surrender.
Am I simply deluding myself? Most people on Less Wrong will think so. I do not particularly care. I am far more concerned about the danger of reasoning myself into a narcissistic, quiet-ist corner where I never take political action than I am about the danger of backing an ideal that turns out to be empty.
Using the Hansonian “far-view reference class,” the odds that an ideal chosen based on “things I believe in because I was taught to believe in them” is worth killing for are near zero. Using the same method, the odds that an ideal chosen based on “things that I believe in after carefully examining all available evidence and finding that I cannot think of a good reason to overturn my culture’s traditions, despite having actively questioned them” is worth killing for are high enough that I can sleep at night. If you believe I should be awake, I look forward to your reply.
Not at all. Rhetorical skill IS a good thing, and properly contributes to logic. Your argument seems rational to me, in the non-Spock sense that we generally encourage here. What to do? Keep on thinking AND caring!
If the search you use is as fair and unbiased as you can make it, this looking hard for answers is the core of what being a good rationalist is. Possibly, you should look harder for the causes of systematic differences between people’s intuitions, to see whether those causes are entangled with truth, but analysis has to stop at some point.
In practice, rationalists may back themselves into permanent inaction due to uncertainty, but the theory of rationality we endorse here says we should be doing what you claim to be doing. I find it extremely disturbing that we aren’t communicating this effectively, though its clearly our fault since we aren’t communicating it effectively enough to ourselves for it to motivate us to be more dynamic either.
When you say you glorify Democracy though, I think you mean something much closer to what I would call Coherent Extrapolated Volition than it is to what I would call Democracy. Something radically novel that hasn’t ever been tried, or even specified in enough detail to call it a proposal without some charity.
As a factual matter, I would suggest that the systems of government that we call Democracies in the US may typically be a bit further in the CEV direction than those we typically call dictatorships, but if they are, its a weak tendency, like the tendency of good painters to be good at basketball or something. You might detect it statistically, if you had properly operationalized it first, or vaguely suspect its there based on intuitive perception, but you couldn’t ever be very confident it was there.
It’s obviously wrong to overturn cultural traditions which have been questioned but not refuted. Such traditions have some information value, if only for anthropic reasons, and more importantly, they are somewhat correlated with your values. In this particular case, if you limit your options under consideration to ‘fight against invaders or do nothing’ I have no objections. Real life situations usually present more options, but those weren’t specified.
As an off-the-cuff example, I think its obvious that a person who fought against the NAZIs in WWII was doing something better than they would by staying home even though the NAZIs didn’t invade the US and even valuing their lives moderately more highly than those of others. OTOH, the marginal expected impact of a soldier on the expected outcome of the war was surely SO MUCH less than the marginal expected impact of an independent person who put in serious effort to be an assassin, while the risk was probably not an order of magnitude smaller, so I think its fair to say that they were still being irrational, judged as altruists, and were in most cases, well, only following orders. If they valued victory enough to be a soldier they should have done something more effective instead. (have I just refuted Yossarian or confirmed him?)
I think that they should definitely sleep at night. Should feel happy and proud even… but in their shoes I wouldn’t.
Whole thread voted up BTW.
Thanks! Wholeheartedly agree, btw.
I think you’re referring to Michael Walzer.
Right! Thank you.
I don’t know if you’re still looking for this, and if this would be an appropriate place to post links. But:
Primary Evidence:
temperatures increase over the last 2000 years as estimated by tree ring, marine/lake/cave proxy, ice isotopes, glacier length/mass, and borehole data. figures S-1, O-4, 2-3, 2-5, 5-3, 6-3, 7-1, 10-4, and 11-2 are probably the most useful to you. Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years. Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council ISBN: 0-309-66144-7, 160 pages, 7 x 10, (2006)
anomalies in combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature increase significantly 1880-2009. Global-mean monthly, seasonal, and annual means, 1880-present, updated through most recent month. NASA Goddard. [GISS Surface Temperature Analysis][http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/)
Other Supporting evidence:
earlier flowering times in recent 25 years, with data taken over the past 250 years. Amano, et. al [A 250-year index of first flowering dates and its response to temperature changes] (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1693/2451.full). Proc. R. Soc. B 22 August 2010 vol. 277 no. 1693 2451-2457
Contradicting evidence:
extremes of monthly average temperatures in Central England do not appear to match either a “high extremes after 1780s/1850s only” or “low extremes before 1780s/1850s only” hypothesis. Manley. [Central England temperatures: Monthly means 1659 to 1973] (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.49710042511/abstract). Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. Volume 100, Issue 425, pages 389–405, July 1974
Hope that’s helpful.