Isn’t “progress” a bit of an over-ambitious notion?
Blogs aren’t generally a method of doing science (with the exception of a few collaborative projects in math that are ruthlessly on-topic and appeal to a tiny community.) Blogs and forums are great for keeping current with science, for speculating, and for letting off steam and having fun. Those are legitimate functions—why do you want to make this loftier than it is?
“Human understanding progresses through small problems solved conclusively, once and forever.” I don’t know about anyone else, but I find this gravely unsettling applied to politics and social issues. People have different values. Treating these things as problems to be “solved conclusively” is incompatible with pluralism. Politics is meant to be a lot of arguing and conflicts between different interests; I’m scared of anyone who wants it to be anything else. Talking politics on the internet is best done tipsy and in aggressive good humor. If we could do that here, I wouldn’t mind—but somehow I think we’d wind up taking it too seriously.
Our header image says “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality”. I spend a lot of effort trying to improve our shared understanding and don’t consider it over-ambitious at all.
If you know for certain that most disagreements in politics are genuinely about terminal values of different people, rather than about factual questions (what measures would lead to what consequences), then you know more than I do, and I’d be very interested to hear how you established that conclusion. In fact this would be just the kind of progress I wish to see!
Isn’t it enough to show that there are at least some incompatible terminal values? If this is the case, then there can be no overall lasting agreement on politics without resorting to force (avoiding the naked use of which could be seen as the main point of politics in the first place).
Thanks for twisting my mind in the right direction. Phil Goetz described how values can be incompatible if they’re positional. Robin Hanson gave real-world data about positionality of different goods. This doesn’t seem to deal with terminality/instrumentality of values yet...
Isn’t “progress” a bit of an over-ambitious notion?
Blogs aren’t generally a method of doing science (with the exception of a few collaborative projects in math that are ruthlessly on-topic and appeal to a tiny community.) Blogs and forums are great for keeping current with science, for speculating, and for letting off steam and having fun. Those are legitimate functions—why do you want to make this loftier than it is?
“Human understanding progresses through small problems solved conclusively, once and forever.” I don’t know about anyone else, but I find this gravely unsettling applied to politics and social issues. People have different values. Treating these things as problems to be “solved conclusively” is incompatible with pluralism. Politics is meant to be a lot of arguing and conflicts between different interests; I’m scared of anyone who wants it to be anything else. Talking politics on the internet is best done tipsy and in aggressive good humor. If we could do that here, I wouldn’t mind—but somehow I think we’d wind up taking it too seriously.
Our header image says “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality”. I spend a lot of effort trying to improve our shared understanding and don’t consider it over-ambitious at all.
If you know for certain that most disagreements in politics are genuinely about terminal values of different people, rather than about factual questions (what measures would lead to what consequences), then you know more than I do, and I’d be very interested to hear how you established that conclusion. In fact this would be just the kind of progress I wish to see!
Isn’t it enough to show that there are at least some incompatible terminal values? If this is the case, then there can be no overall lasting agreement on politics without resorting to force (avoiding the naked use of which could be seen as the main point of politics in the first place).
Thanks for twisting my mind in the right direction. Phil Goetz described how values can be incompatible if they’re positional. Robin Hanson gave real-world data about positionality of different goods. This doesn’t seem to deal with terminality/instrumentality of values yet...