I wouldn’t point to “moral progress” as such to explain CEV. Rather, I’d argue that maintaining cruel institutions like American slavery required false or anti-rationalist beliefs. This gives us a straightforward, objectively definable way to ‘extrapolate’ slavery out of existence. (Though we haven’t proven we’d recognize the result as a form of morality.)
I think pre-Christian Greek culture supplies evidence for this, eg The Trojan Women and Aristotle’s natural slave theory. The Greeks of Aristotle’s time did not, AFAICT, support slavery due to reflectively consistent principles we lack. They felt guilty and had to invent lies or appeal to wiggin theory. Again, I wouldn’t describe our change as a simple forward progress, because before changing our minds we probably used a more brutal form of slavery. But the result today seems more consistent than your history would lead us to expect.
ETA: There’s a gap between those two paragraphs, yes. But since ‘extrapolation’ represents an explicit attempt by Eliezer to find a rule or “general strategy” that would apply to Ancient Greeks, I think you can now figure out what I meant by “‘extrapolate’ slavery out of existence...evidence for this”. The point is that the rule seems to work for ancient slavery as well.
How does Aristotle’s theory that some people are naturally suited to being slaves, support the idea that American slavery required false beliefs?
I don’t really mean that all morals are arbitrary; slavery is particularly discordant with some innate human morals. But the historical trends in morals seem to move in convenient directions.
Regarding relative brutality, I recall a study of a Roman estate that showed that each year they bought half as many slaves as they already had, didn’t sell slaves, and had a roughly constant number of slaves over many years. Do the math.
Regarding relative brutality, I recall a study of a Roman estate that showed that each year they bought half as many slaves as they already had, didn’t sell slaves, and had a roughly constant number of slaves over many years. Do the math.
Wow. Was the estate training gladiators? (The only kind of roman estate I have any familiarity with and the only kind of industry in which that death rate wouldn’t be a sign of abysmal management even neglecting all ethical considerations.)
I really didn’t think I needed to defend the claim that American slavery required false beliefs. I assume you don’t dispute that it created such?
I mentioned Aristotle because the whole point of CEV, according to Eliezer, is to find a rule that would work if you applied it to Archimedes. I did not mention Roman slavery.
I really didn’t think I needed to defend the claim that American slavery required false beliefs.
Burning witches required false beliefs (belief in the existence of witches), but I don’t see how American slavery required false beliefs—except perhaps the false belief that it was a sustainable system. It just required for white people not to particularly care about black people.
Yes, not-caring can be helped along by several false beliefs (e.g. religious ideas like the curse of Ham, or Mormons thinking that black people had been unloyal angels in their pre-existence), but caring can similarly be helped along by false beliefs (e.g. “We are all children of the same God”, “we were endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights”). And ultimately neither caring, nor not-caring actually requires false beliefs, or true ones either.
It seems to me that the abolition of slavery was a moral accomplishment, not an epistemic one like e.g. the defeat of heliocentrism was, or the defeat of creationism would be. Be careful not to confuse the two in your mind, the moral and the epistemic.
As the link to Google Books in the grandparent (and the list of related books) shows, people devoted a lot of space to false and anti-rationalist claims about black people. Why?
I just edited my above comment to add the middle paragraph, before I had seen you replied to it already. I think it answers your question: not-caring can be helped along by several false beliefs, but then again caring can be helped along by several false beliefs too.
If it’s really caring as such that we care about, this seems like an easy question. People tend to care more about people when they know personal details about the person. We would therefore expect accurate knowledge to show at least some correlation with caring, unless fear or deliberately misleading knowledge came into play. (And fear should matter less under CEV, if that rule works at all.)
I really didn’t think I needed to defend the claim that American slavery required false beliefs.
I don’t see any reason to believe that claim either, unless you were specifically referring to false beliefs about morality.
If we’re talking about beliefs about reality, how the world works etc. (excluding moral judgements), then no, I don’t think American slavery required false beliefs, though I could be convinced otherwise (I’m not very knowledgeable about the intellectual climate of that time period), though the mere presence of false beliefs doesn’t tell whether those are necessary (most people involved in the Industrial Revolution believed in God, but belief in God doesn’t seem to have been necessary).
Just for the sake of clarity: you think that if everyone in slave-era America consciously knew both the falsity of the beliefs linked in the grandparent, and the way future Americans would view them in our timeline, these people would not have ended slavery almost immediately (less than .5 probability)?
If so, what evidence would change your position? Does this count at all? (“Southerners were outraged, and declared the work to be criminal, slanderous, and utterly false...Stowe received threatening letters and a package containing the dismembered ear of a black person. Southerners also reacted by writing their own novels. These depicted the happy lives of slaves, and often contrasted them with the miserable existences of Northern white workers.”) How much evidence would you require, and how would you expect to discover it if my view holds?
What evidence do you think exists, which would lead me to change my view if I knew?
(I’m not ignoring your analogy entirely. Seems to me that the large amount of effort humans have spent on Christian verbiage does require an explanation; if we had no better theory we would need to look for a connection with industry.)
I don’t think this is a case of “which evidence would change who’s position” but more of “let’s hash out what we disagree about exactly”.
Maybe a better phrasing of my position would be: I don’t think that American-style institutional slavery requires irrational thinking (except possibly about morality, but I don’t know hot to reason clearly about morality especially in different social contexts). However, it’s quite likely that in a political context where large numbers of people with no particular stake in slavery (in this case, northern voters) have the power to end it, maintaining slavery may be easier by spreading (and believing) false beliefs about slavery and the lives of the slaves. So in that second meaning, I would agree that slavery requires false beliefs.
In any dispute that is to be settled by public opinion (which covers a lot in a democracy), both parties can be expected to resort to dark arts. That doesn’t mean that either side holds wrong beliefs—maybe both do (protestants vs. catholics in the Wars of Religion), maybe neither does and it’s just a conflict of interests (The old nobility vs. the new bourgeoisie in the French Revolution) … but in all cases the side that stops resorting to dark arts and stops being fanatically devoted to it’s cause is more likely to lose, so in a sense it “requires false beliefs”.
Just for the sake of clarity: you think that if everyone in slave-era America consciously knew both the falsity of the beliefs linked in the grandparent, and the way future Americans would view them in our timeline, these people would not have ended slavery almost immediately
You linked to a book more than 300 pages—are we supposed to read the whole thing, before we can answer which of the beliefs linked there are true, and which are false but not-required for slavery, and which were false but required for it?
Possibly amusing side-note: PBS says Southerners reacted to Uncle Tom’s depiction of violence not only with violent threats, but also with stories about happy slaves. I strongly suspect they ignored the question of what would happen if Dumbledore died and a Death Eater took his place. But hey, if enough separate events went right, maybe the system would work!
No. Pick a random page from the table of contents I linked, or from the main text (White supremacy and Negro subordination). Bet you 5 karma it contains either an objectively false belief or an anti-epistemic one (eg appeal to status in relation to “British” or “European” thought.)
I argue that the amount of effort this writer and others put into bad pro-slavery arguments requires explanation. I further argue that they made this effort to defend slavery or the slave-owning tribe; and that, had everyone consciously rejected such garbage, slavery would have ended quickly. (We can focus on the narrow interpretation of this, and ignore the effect of telling slaves the likely result of rebellion in the new timeline. But let’s include the status-altering knowledge of our time for everyone.)
I argue that the amount of effort this writer and others put into bad pro-slavery arguments requires explanation. I further argue that they made this effort to defend slavery or the slave-owning tribe; and that, had everyone consciously rejected such garbage, slavery would have ended quickly.
I don’t disagree with that, but I think that a lot of political advocacy on all kinds of topics requires bad arguments on both sides, so I don’t find the mere existence of bad arguments very heavy evidence (all that requires is a stupid audience, and God knows those haven’t been rare through history). I don’t have any reason to believe that pro-slavery arguments have been extraordinarily bad beyond the standard of political advocacy, since I except that it’s easier to find the best abolitionist arguments, and the worst pro-slavery ones.
There are very likely pro-slavery works that are much more solid than the one you linked, and possibly some that are more solid than Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which wasn’t the most solid abolitionist work, merely the most popular one). I haven’t read this book, but someone said about it:
I have read the Adams “southside view of slavery”, but a small part of me wishes I hadn’t. That along with Cannibals All and Carlyle are books you really can’t unread. It’s one thing to be able to make legalistic arguments for the south or to point out northern perfidiousness; it’s quite another to have a fairly sound defense of slavery (both theoretical and actual) in your head.
Ah good, I wondered if selection bias led me to miss evidence. But a quick look at this text makes it look pretty bad.
The author says near the start of Chapter IV:
Apart from the question of slavery, it was easy to see that to keep such a part of the population out of the streets after a reasonable hour at night, preventing their unrestrained, promiscuous roving, is a great protection to them, as well as to the public peace.
while death rates fell for those who survived their first year, it remained about twice the white rate. As a result of high infant and child mortality, the average life expectancy of a slave at birth was just 21 or 22 years, compared to 40 to 43 years for whites.
It appears that the high infant and child death rate was at least partly a result of a diet lacking sufficient protein, thiamine, niacin, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D. As a result, slave children often suffered from night blindness, abdominal swellings, swollen muscles, bowed legs, skin lesions, and convulsions.
Wikipedia tells us that in 2003:
the gap in life expectancy between American whites (78.0) and blacks (72.8) had decreased to 5.2 years, reflecting a long term trend of this phenomenon.
And I don’t see a lot of free black people, in any time, volunteering for the restrictions on movement which that guy praises. (ETA: I was going to qualify that, but apparently the media sees an active-duty military curfew as unusual.) His account of happy slaves, especially in church, likewise seems dubious—we know that slaves often interpreted Christianity as a promise of freedom.
Can you point to some specific part of the Adams book which doesn’t suck?
Nope, I haven’t read it—I just skimmed it a bit after my last post.
I don’t really see the logical relationship between the quote you give from the book (an argument about the benefits of keeping those scary black people locked up) and the historian’s note, beyond the fact that one is an argument in favor of slavery, and one is an argument against.
I don’t think a detailed judgement of that book is the best use of either of us’s time, I’m just giving the reasons for my position (slavery probably isn’t just a question of false beliefs), I don’t expect much utility from having a clear picture of American slavery (cf value of information and all that).
I don’t really mean that all morals are arbitrary; slavery is particularly discordant with some innate human morals.
Then where do we disagree?
More specifically: you open your post with the words “coherent extrapolated volition”, and I believed you wanted to say something on that topic. In light of my edited comment and this whole exchange, what do you want people to conclude about CEV from your post?
I wouldn’t point to “moral progress” as such to explain CEV. Rather, I’d argue that maintaining cruel institutions like American slavery required false or anti-rationalist beliefs. This gives us a straightforward, objectively definable way to ‘extrapolate’ slavery out of existence. (Though we haven’t proven we’d recognize the result as a form of morality.)
I think pre-Christian Greek culture supplies evidence for this, eg The Trojan Women and Aristotle’s natural slave theory. The Greeks of Aristotle’s time did not, AFAICT, support slavery due to reflectively consistent principles we lack. They felt guilty and had to invent lies or appeal to wiggin theory. Again, I wouldn’t describe our change as a simple forward progress, because before changing our minds we probably used a more brutal form of slavery. But the result today seems more consistent than your history would lead us to expect.
ETA: There’s a gap between those two paragraphs, yes. But since ‘extrapolation’ represents an explicit attempt by Eliezer to find a rule or “general strategy” that would apply to Ancient Greeks, I think you can now figure out what I meant by “‘extrapolate’ slavery out of existence...evidence for this”. The point is that the rule seems to work for ancient slavery as well.
How does Aristotle’s theory that some people are naturally suited to being slaves, support the idea that American slavery required false beliefs?
I don’t really mean that all morals are arbitrary; slavery is particularly discordant with some innate human morals. But the historical trends in morals seem to move in convenient directions.
Regarding relative brutality, I recall a study of a Roman estate that showed that each year they bought half as many slaves as they already had, didn’t sell slaves, and had a roughly constant number of slaves over many years. Do the math.
Wow. Was the estate training gladiators? (The only kind of roman estate I have any familiarity with and the only kind of industry in which that death rate wouldn’t be a sign of abysmal management even neglecting all ethical considerations.)
Possibly mining.
I really didn’t think I needed to defend the claim that American slavery required false beliefs. I assume you don’t dispute that it created such?
I mentioned Aristotle because the whole point of CEV, according to Eliezer, is to find a rule that would work if you applied it to Archimedes. I did not mention Roman slavery.
Burning witches required false beliefs (belief in the existence of witches), but I don’t see how American slavery required false beliefs—except perhaps the false belief that it was a sustainable system. It just required for white people not to particularly care about black people.
Yes, not-caring can be helped along by several false beliefs (e.g. religious ideas like the curse of Ham, or Mormons thinking that black people had been unloyal angels in their pre-existence), but caring can similarly be helped along by false beliefs (e.g. “We are all children of the same God”, “we were endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights”). And ultimately neither caring, nor not-caring actually requires false beliefs, or true ones either.
It seems to me that the abolition of slavery was a moral accomplishment, not an epistemic one like e.g. the defeat of heliocentrism was, or the defeat of creationism would be. Be careful not to confuse the two in your mind, the moral and the epistemic.
As the link to Google Books in the grandparent (and the list of related books) shows, people devoted a lot of space to false and anti-rationalist claims about black people. Why?
I just edited my above comment to add the middle paragraph, before I had seen you replied to it already. I think it answers your question: not-caring can be helped along by several false beliefs, but then again caring can be helped along by several false beliefs too.
So we should ask about the correlation?
If it’s really caring as such that we care about, this seems like an easy question. People tend to care more about people when they know personal details about the person. We would therefore expect accurate knowledge to show at least some correlation with caring, unless fear or deliberately misleading knowledge came into play. (And fear should matter less under CEV, if that rule works at all.)
I don’t see any reason to believe that claim either, unless you were specifically referring to false beliefs about morality.
If we’re talking about beliefs about reality, how the world works etc. (excluding moral judgements), then no, I don’t think American slavery required false beliefs, though I could be convinced otherwise (I’m not very knowledgeable about the intellectual climate of that time period), though the mere presence of false beliefs doesn’t tell whether those are necessary (most people involved in the Industrial Revolution believed in God, but belief in God doesn’t seem to have been necessary).
Just for the sake of clarity: you think that if everyone in slave-era America consciously knew both the falsity of the beliefs linked in the grandparent, and the way future Americans would view them in our timeline, these people would not have ended slavery almost immediately (less than .5 probability)?
If so, what evidence would change your position? Does this count at all? (“Southerners were outraged, and declared the work to be criminal, slanderous, and utterly false...Stowe received threatening letters and a package containing the dismembered ear of a black person. Southerners also reacted by writing their own novels. These depicted the happy lives of slaves, and often contrasted them with the miserable existences of Northern white workers.”) How much evidence would you require, and how would you expect to discover it if my view holds?
What evidence do you think exists, which would lead me to change my view if I knew?
(I’m not ignoring your analogy entirely. Seems to me that the large amount of effort humans have spent on Christian verbiage does require an explanation; if we had no better theory we would need to look for a connection with industry.)
I don’t think this is a case of “which evidence would change who’s position” but more of “let’s hash out what we disagree about exactly”.
Maybe a better phrasing of my position would be: I don’t think that American-style institutional slavery requires irrational thinking (except possibly about morality, but I don’t know hot to reason clearly about morality especially in different social contexts). However, it’s quite likely that in a political context where large numbers of people with no particular stake in slavery (in this case, northern voters) have the power to end it, maintaining slavery may be easier by spreading (and believing) false beliefs about slavery and the lives of the slaves. So in that second meaning, I would agree that slavery requires false beliefs.
In any dispute that is to be settled by public opinion (which covers a lot in a democracy), both parties can be expected to resort to dark arts. That doesn’t mean that either side holds wrong beliefs—maybe both do (protestants vs. catholics in the Wars of Religion), maybe neither does and it’s just a conflict of interests (The old nobility vs. the new bourgeoisie in the French Revolution) … but in all cases the side that stops resorting to dark arts and stops being fanatically devoted to it’s cause is more likely to lose, so in a sense it “requires false beliefs”.
You linked to a book more than 300 pages—are we supposed to read the whole thing, before we can answer which of the beliefs linked there are true, and which are false but not-required for slavery, and which were false but required for it?
Possibly amusing side-note: PBS says Southerners reacted to Uncle Tom’s depiction of violence not only with violent threats, but also with stories about happy slaves. I strongly suspect they ignored the question of what would happen if Dumbledore died and a Death Eater took his place. But hey, if enough separate events went right, maybe the system would work!
No. Pick a random page from the table of contents I linked, or from the main text (White supremacy and Negro subordination). Bet you 5 karma it contains either an objectively false belief or an anti-epistemic one (eg appeal to status in relation to “British” or “European” thought.)
I argue that the amount of effort this writer and others put into bad pro-slavery arguments requires explanation. I further argue that they made this effort to defend slavery or the slave-owning tribe; and that, had everyone consciously rejected such garbage, slavery would have ended quickly. (We can focus on the narrow interpretation of this, and ignore the effect of telling slaves the likely result of rebellion in the new timeline. But let’s include the status-altering knowledge of our time for everyone.)
I don’t disagree with that, but I think that a lot of political advocacy on all kinds of topics requires bad arguments on both sides, so I don’t find the mere existence of bad arguments very heavy evidence (all that requires is a stupid audience, and God knows those haven’t been rare through history). I don’t have any reason to believe that pro-slavery arguments have been extraordinarily bad beyond the standard of political advocacy, since I except that it’s easier to find the best abolitionist arguments, and the worst pro-slavery ones.
There are very likely pro-slavery works that are much more solid than the one you linked, and possibly some that are more solid than Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which wasn’t the most solid abolitionist work, merely the most popular one). I haven’t read this book, but someone said about it:
Ah good, I wondered if selection bias led me to miss evidence. But a quick look at this text makes it look pretty bad.
The author says near the start of Chapter IV:
As written this seems hard to disprove. But this historian’s note tells us:
Wikipedia tells us that in 2003:
And I don’t see a lot of free black people, in any time, volunteering for the restrictions on movement which that guy praises. (ETA: I was going to qualify that, but apparently the media sees an active-duty military curfew as unusual.) His account of happy slaves, especially in church, likewise seems dubious—we know that slaves often interpreted Christianity as a promise of freedom.
Can you point to some specific part of the Adams book which doesn’t suck?
Nope, I haven’t read it—I just skimmed it a bit after my last post.
I don’t really see the logical relationship between the quote you give from the book (an argument about the benefits of keeping those scary black people locked up) and the historian’s note, beyond the fact that one is an argument in favor of slavery, and one is an argument against.
I don’t think a detailed judgement of that book is the best use of either of us’s time, I’m just giving the reasons for my position (slavery probably isn’t just a question of false beliefs), I don’t expect much utility from having a clear picture of American slavery (cf value of information and all that).
Then where do we disagree?
More specifically: you open your post with the words “coherent extrapolated volition”, and I believed you wanted to say something on that topic. In light of my edited comment and this whole exchange, what do you want people to conclude about CEV from your post?