Yes, it probably is reversible. It seems quite plausible to me that for most pairs of human ideological systems A, B, there is some combination of arguments, evidences, life-experiences etc. that would cause a randomly-selected adherent of A to switch to B. (The random selection would tend to avoid the most fanatical and committed adherents, but I’d guess even most of them could probably be “deprogrammed” by the right combination of stimuli.)
However, if you want to count the actual numbers of conversions happening right now, the statistics are messy: apparently just about every religious group (including the group of non-religious) claims they are the “fastest growing”, all with some empirical justification. I found this Wikipedia article highly amusing in that context.
But what’s the point here? If we are talking about humanity as a whole, then this may just show that there is no single CEV for all human societies everywhere. Instead, there are a huge number of attractor points in the moral attitudes space, and any given society tends to converge to the nearest attractor point… unless and until a major shock throws it out again (or breaks up the society).
Global humanity as a whole may perhaps now constitute a single society, and be moving towards the “liberal democracy” attractor point, which therefore defines a local CEV… but only because it’s already in that basin of attraction. And even that’s empirically more dubious than it was twenty years ago (I don’t see China, Russia, or most of the Islamic world still moving that way, and a lot of Western countries have themselves become distinctly less liberal / democratic in recent years.)
However, if you want to count the actual numbers of conversions happening right now, the statistics are messy: apparently just about every religious group (including the group of non-religious) claims they are the “fastest growing”, all with some empirical justification. I found this Wikipedia article highly amusing in that context.
Note that if at the beginning of the year A had one billion adult adherents and B had one hundred, and since then 160 of the former have converted to B and 60 of the latter have converted to A, my heuristic would still point towards B being wronger than A even though B has doubled in size and A has stayed pretty much the same. (And anyway, I was thinking more of memeplexes who have existed for at least a couple of generations—with new ones it would be much more noisy.)
Yes, it probably is reversible. It seems quite plausible to me that for most pairs of human ideological systems A, B, there is some combination of arguments, evidences, life-experiences etc. that would cause a randomly-selected adherent of A to switch to B. (The random selection would tend to avoid the most fanatical and committed adherents, but I’d guess even most of them could probably be “deprogrammed” by the right combination of stimuli.)
However, if you want to count the actual numbers of conversions happening right now, the statistics are messy: apparently just about every religious group (including the group of non-religious) claims they are the “fastest growing”, all with some empirical justification. I found this Wikipedia article highly amusing in that context.
But what’s the point here? If we are talking about humanity as a whole, then this may just show that there is no single CEV for all human societies everywhere. Instead, there are a huge number of attractor points in the moral attitudes space, and any given society tends to converge to the nearest attractor point… unless and until a major shock throws it out again (or breaks up the society).
Global humanity as a whole may perhaps now constitute a single society, and be moving towards the “liberal democracy” attractor point, which therefore defines a local CEV… but only because it’s already in that basin of attraction. And even that’s empirically more dubious than it was twenty years ago (I don’t see China, Russia, or most of the Islamic world still moving that way, and a lot of Western countries have themselves become distinctly less liberal / democratic in recent years.)
Note that if at the beginning of the year A had one billion adult adherents and B had one hundred, and since then 160 of the former have converted to B and 60 of the latter have converted to A, my heuristic would still point towards B being wronger than A even though B has doubled in size and A has stayed pretty much the same. (And anyway, I was thinking more of memeplexes who have existed for at least a couple of generations—with new ones it would be much more noisy.)