This one really annoys me. It’s one of the very few posts of Eliezer’s that I’ve ever downvoted, because it strikes me as both naive and foolish. And I think that’s because what Eliezer’s proposing here is to pretend that your map is the territory. To take your third-hand model of history (no doubt deeply flawed and horrendously incomplete) and treat it as if it were your actual experience. Not to mention that you just don’t have the knowledge he suggests envisioning (how do you know what it actually feels like to change your mind about slavery?) — or the sheer cognitive impossibility of actually making an imaginary runthrough of history.
It’s one thing to recommend having historical perspective, and another to pretend that that perspective is actually your own.
This one really annoys me. It’s one of the very few posts of Eliezer’s that I’ve ever downvoted, because it strikes me as both naive and foolish. And I think that’s because what Eliezer’s proposing here is to pretend that your map is the territory. To take your third-hand model of history (no doubt deeply flawed and horrendously incomplete) and treat it as if it were your actual experience. Not to mention that you just don’t have the knowledge he suggests envisioning (how do you know what it actually feels like to change your mind about slavery?) — or the sheer cognitive impossibility of actually making an imaginary runthrough of history.
It’s one thing to recommend having historical perspective, and another to pretend that that perspective is actually your own.