Thanks again. I’m still not sure of the exact point you are making here, though.
Let’s take gender-based discrimination and unequal rights as a sample case. Are you arguing that someone wedded to an existing gender-biased value system would deliberately select a discriminatory society (over an equal rights one) even if they were choosing on the basis of self-interest? That they would fully understand that they have roughly 50% chance of getting the raw end of the deal, but still think that this deal would maximise their welfare overall?
I get the point that a committed ideologue could consciously decide here against self-interest. I’m less clear how someone could decide that way while still thinking it was in their self-interest. The only way I can make sense of such a decision is if were made on the basis of faulty understanding (i.e. they really can’t empathize very well, and think it would not be so bad after all to get born female in such a society).
In a separate post, I suggested a way that an AI could make the Rawlsian thought experiment real, by creating a simulated society to the deciders’ specifications, and then beaming them into roles in the simulation at random (via virtual reality/total immersion/direct neural interface or whatever). One variant to correct for faulty understanding might be to do it on an experimental basis. Once the choosers think they have made their minds up, they get beamed into a few randomly-selected folks in the sim, maybe for a few days or weeks (or years) at a time. After the experience of living in their chosen world for a while, in different places, times, roles etc. they are then asked if they want to change their mind. The AI will repeat until there is a stable preference, and then beam in permanently.
Returning to the root of the thread, the original objection to CEV was that most people alive today believe in unequal rights for women and essentially no rights for gays. The key question is therefore whether most people would really choose such a world in the Rawlsian set-up. And then, would most people continue to so-choose even after living in that world for a while in different roles?
If the answers are “no” then the Rawlsian veil of ignorance can remove this particular objection to CEV.
If they are “yes” then it cannot. Agreed?
That they would fully understand that they have roughly 50% chance of getting the raw end of the deal, but still think that this deal would maximise their welfare overall?
A lot of oppression of women seems to be justified by claims that if women aren’t second-class citizens, they won’t choose to have children, or at least not enough children for replacement. This makes women’s rights into an existential risk.
This argument also implies that societies and smaller groups where women have lower status and more children will out-breed and so eventually outcompete societies where women have equal rights. So people can also defend the lower status of women as a nationalistic or cultural self-defense impulse.
Are you arguing that someone wedded to an existing gender-biased value system would deliberately select a discriminatory society (over an equal rights one) even if they were choosing on the basis of self-interest? That they would fully understand that they have roughly 50% chance of getting the raw end of the deal, but still think that this deal would maximise their welfare overall?
Yes and no. Someone who’d internalized a discriminatory value system—who really believed in it, not just belief-in-belief, to use LW terminology—would interpret their self-interest and therefore their welfare in terms of that value system. They would be conscious of of what we would view as unequal rights, but would see these as neutral or positive on both sides, not as one “getting the raw end of the deal”—though they’d likely object to some of their operational consequences. This implies, of course, a certain essentialism, and only applies to certain forms of discrimination: recent top-down imposition of values isn’t stable in this way.
As a toy example, read 1 Corinthians 11, and try to think of the mentality implied by taking that as the literal word of God—not just advice from some vague authority, but an independent axiom of a value system backed by the most potent proofs imaginable. Applied to an egalitarian society, what would such a value system say about the (value-subjective) welfare of the women—or for that matter the men—in it?
the original objection to CEV was that most people alive today believe in unequal rights for women and essentially no rights for gays. The key question is therefore whether most people would really choose such a world in the Rawlsian set-up. And then, would most people continue to so-choose even after living in that world for a while in different roles?
This, on the other hand, is essentially an anthropology question. The answer depends on the extent of discriminatory traditional cultures, on the strength of belief in them, and on the commonalities between them: “unequal rights” isn’t a value, it’s a judgment call over a value system, and the specific unequal values that we object to may be quite different between cultures. I’m not an anthropologist, so I can’t really answer that question—but if I had to, I’d doubt that a reflectively stable consensus exists for egalitarianism or for any particular form of discrimination, with or without the Rawlsian wrinkle.
So this would be like the “separate but equal” argument? To paraphrase in a gender context: “Men and women are very different, and need to be treated differently under the law—both human and divine law. But it’s not like the female side is really worse off because of this different treatment”.
That—I think—would count as a rather basic factual misunderstanding of how discrimination really works. It ought to be correctable pretty damn fast by a trip into the simulator.
(Incidentally, I grew up in a fundamentalist church until my teens, and one of the things I remember clearly was the women and teen girls being very upset about being told that they had to shut up in church, or wear hats or long hair, or that they couldn’t be elders, or whatever. They also really hated having St Paul and the Corinthians thrown at them; the ones who believed in Bible inerrancy were sure the original Greek said something different, and that the sacred text was being misinterpreted and spun against them. Since it is an absolute precondition for an inerrantist position that correct interpretations are difficult, and up for grabs, this was no more unreasonable than the version spouted by the all-male elders.)
That—I think—would count as a rarher basic factual misunderstanding of how discrimination really works. It ought to be correctable pretty damn fast by a trip into the simulator.
Well, I won’t rule it out. But if you grow up in the West—even in one of its more traditionalist enclaves—that means you’ve grown up surrounded by some of the most fantastically egalitarian rhetoric the world’s ever generated, and I think one consequence of that is the adoption of a rather totalizing attitude toward any form of discrimination. Not that that’s a bad thing; discrimination’s bad news. But it does make it kind of hard to grok stratified social organization in any kind of unbiased way.
I grew up secular, albeit in one of the more conservative parts of my home state. But I have read a lot of social commentary from the Middle Ages and the Classical period, and I’ve visited a couple of highly traditionalist non-Western countries. Both seem to exhibit an attitude towards what we’d call unequal rights that’s pretty damned strange for those of us who were raised on Max Weber and Malcolm X, and I wouldn’t put the differences down to ignorance.
But I have read a lot of social commentary from the Middle Ages and the Classical period, and I’ve visited a couple of highly traditionalist non-Western countries.
Of course there is an enormous selection bias here. You’re reading the opinions of the tiny minority who were a) literate, b) had time to write social commentary, c) didn’t have their writings burned or otherwise censored and d) were preserved for later generations by copyists. It’s very difficult to tell whether they represented the CEV of their time (or anything like it). And on visiting other cultures, even in the present, I can only reflect that if you’d visited the fundie church of my childhood you’d have seen an overt culture of traditionalist paternalism/sexism, but wouldn’t have seen the genuine hurt and pain of the 50% or so who really wished it wasn’t like that. Being denied a public voice, you couldn’t have heard them. That’s kind of the point.
I’ve also visited a few non-Western countries in the world (on business) and to the extent the people there have voiced opinions about their situation versus ours (which was not very often), they’ve been rather keen to make their countries more like ours in terms of liberty, equality and the pursuit of shed loads of money.. Or leave for the West if they can. Sheer poverty sucks too.
The obvious (paternalistic) answer is that they believe that, conditioned on them being born female, their self-interest is improved by paternalistic treatment of all women vs equality.
In order to convince them otherwise, you would (at a minimum) have to run multiple world sims, not just multiple placements in one world. You would also have to forcibly give them sufficiently rational thought processes that they could interpret the evidence you forced upon them. I’m not sure that forcibly messing with people’s thought processes is ethical, or that you could really claim it was a coherent extrapolation after you had performed that much involuntary mind surgery on them.
In order to convince them otherwise, you would (at a minimum) have to run multiple world sims, not just multiple placements in one world. You would also have to forcibly give them sufficiently rational thought processes that they could interpret the evidence you forced upon them
Disagree. A simple classroom lesson is often sufficient to get the point across:
Thanks again. I’m still not sure of the exact point you are making here, though.
Let’s take gender-based discrimination and unequal rights as a sample case. Are you arguing that someone wedded to an existing gender-biased value system would deliberately select a discriminatory society (over an equal rights one) even if they were choosing on the basis of self-interest? That they would fully understand that they have roughly 50% chance of getting the raw end of the deal, but still think that this deal would maximise their welfare overall?
I get the point that a committed ideologue could consciously decide here against self-interest. I’m less clear how someone could decide that way while still thinking it was in their self-interest. The only way I can make sense of such a decision is if were made on the basis of faulty understanding (i.e. they really can’t empathize very well, and think it would not be so bad after all to get born female in such a society).
In a separate post, I suggested a way that an AI could make the Rawlsian thought experiment real, by creating a simulated society to the deciders’ specifications, and then beaming them into roles in the simulation at random (via virtual reality/total immersion/direct neural interface or whatever). One variant to correct for faulty understanding might be to do it on an experimental basis. Once the choosers think they have made their minds up, they get beamed into a few randomly-selected folks in the sim, maybe for a few days or weeks (or years) at a time. After the experience of living in their chosen world for a while, in different places, times, roles etc. they are then asked if they want to change their mind. The AI will repeat until there is a stable preference, and then beam in permanently.
Returning to the root of the thread, the original objection to CEV was that most people alive today believe in unequal rights for women and essentially no rights for gays. The key question is therefore whether most people would really choose such a world in the Rawlsian set-up. And then, would most people continue to so-choose even after living in that world for a while in different roles?
If the answers are “no” then the Rawlsian veil of ignorance can remove this particular objection to CEV. If they are “yes” then it cannot. Agreed?
A lot of oppression of women seems to be justified by claims that if women aren’t second-class citizens, they won’t choose to have children, or at least not enough children for replacement. This makes women’s rights into an existential risk.
This argument also implies that societies and smaller groups where women have lower status and more children will out-breed and so eventually outcompete societies where women have equal rights. So people can also defend the lower status of women as a nationalistic or cultural self-defense impulse.
Yes and no. Someone who’d internalized a discriminatory value system—who really believed in it, not just belief-in-belief, to use LW terminology—would interpret their self-interest and therefore their welfare in terms of that value system. They would be conscious of of what we would view as unequal rights, but would see these as neutral or positive on both sides, not as one “getting the raw end of the deal”—though they’d likely object to some of their operational consequences. This implies, of course, a certain essentialism, and only applies to certain forms of discrimination: recent top-down imposition of values isn’t stable in this way.
As a toy example, read 1 Corinthians 11, and try to think of the mentality implied by taking that as the literal word of God—not just advice from some vague authority, but an independent axiom of a value system backed by the most potent proofs imaginable. Applied to an egalitarian society, what would such a value system say about the (value-subjective) welfare of the women—or for that matter the men—in it?
This, on the other hand, is essentially an anthropology question. The answer depends on the extent of discriminatory traditional cultures, on the strength of belief in them, and on the commonalities between them: “unequal rights” isn’t a value, it’s a judgment call over a value system, and the specific unequal values that we object to may be quite different between cultures. I’m not an anthropologist, so I can’t really answer that question—but if I had to, I’d doubt that a reflectively stable consensus exists for egalitarianism or for any particular form of discrimination, with or without the Rawlsian wrinkle.
So this would be like the “separate but equal” argument? To paraphrase in a gender context: “Men and women are very different, and need to be treated differently under the law—both human and divine law. But it’s not like the female side is really worse off because of this different treatment”.
That—I think—would count as a rather basic factual misunderstanding of how discrimination really works. It ought to be correctable pretty damn fast by a trip into the simulator.
(Incidentally, I grew up in a fundamentalist church until my teens, and one of the things I remember clearly was the women and teen girls being very upset about being told that they had to shut up in church, or wear hats or long hair, or that they couldn’t be elders, or whatever. They also really hated having St Paul and the Corinthians thrown at them; the ones who believed in Bible inerrancy were sure the original Greek said something different, and that the sacred text was being misinterpreted and spun against them. Since it is an absolute precondition for an inerrantist position that correct interpretations are difficult, and up for grabs, this was no more unreasonable than the version spouted by the all-male elders.)
Well, I won’t rule it out. But if you grow up in the West—even in one of its more traditionalist enclaves—that means you’ve grown up surrounded by some of the most fantastically egalitarian rhetoric the world’s ever generated, and I think one consequence of that is the adoption of a rather totalizing attitude toward any form of discrimination. Not that that’s a bad thing; discrimination’s bad news. But it does make it kind of hard to grok stratified social organization in any kind of unbiased way.
I grew up secular, albeit in one of the more conservative parts of my home state. But I have read a lot of social commentary from the Middle Ages and the Classical period, and I’ve visited a couple of highly traditionalist non-Western countries. Both seem to exhibit an attitude towards what we’d call unequal rights that’s pretty damned strange for those of us who were raised on Max Weber and Malcolm X, and I wouldn’t put the differences down to ignorance.
Of course there is an enormous selection bias here. You’re reading the opinions of the tiny minority who were a) literate, b) had time to write social commentary, c) didn’t have their writings burned or otherwise censored and d) were preserved for later generations by copyists. It’s very difficult to tell whether they represented the CEV of their time (or anything like it). And on visiting other cultures, even in the present, I can only reflect that if you’d visited the fundie church of my childhood you’d have seen an overt culture of traditionalist paternalism/sexism, but wouldn’t have seen the genuine hurt and pain of the 50% or so who really wished it wasn’t like that. Being denied a public voice, you couldn’t have heard them. That’s kind of the point.
I’ve also visited a few non-Western countries in the world (on business) and to the extent the people there have voiced opinions about their situation versus ours (which was not very often), they’ve been rather keen to make their countries more like ours in terms of liberty, equality and the pursuit of shed loads of money.. Or leave for the West if they can. Sheer poverty sucks too.
The obvious (paternalistic) answer is that they believe that, conditioned on them being born female, their self-interest is improved by paternalistic treatment of all women vs equality.
In order to convince them otherwise, you would (at a minimum) have to run multiple world sims, not just multiple placements in one world. You would also have to forcibly give them sufficiently rational thought processes that they could interpret the evidence you forced upon them. I’m not sure that forcibly messing with people’s thought processes is ethical, or that you could really claim it was a coherent extrapolation after you had performed that much involuntary mind surgery on them.
Disagree. A simple classroom lesson is often sufficient to get the point across:
http://www.uen.org/Lessonplan/preview.cgi?LPid=536
Discrimination REALLY sucks.