I object to the framing of society being all-wise,
Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks “Trying heroin seems like a good idea”, and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it’s the most important thing in the universe.
Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I’d bet on “both” before either.
Consequently, I’d prefer “bunch of candy and no diabetes still” outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done.
This isn’t the eating your cake and having it too that you think it is.
Yes, computers allow us to do things we couldn’t do before, and that’s great. Before, you might have to choose between meeting with Bob in the north or Richard in the south, and technology enables you to have both. Great!
The thing is, neither meeting Bob nor Richard is a “sin”. It’s not a “thing you will be tempted to do due to shallow preferences” where society recognizes that those preferences are shallow and predictably lead to bad outcomes. Society wasn’t all up in your business decisions telling you who to meet because it didn’t trust you to make the obviously right one; that was on you.
Candy gluttony, like heroin use, is a sin. It’s something that society knows is bad news, but will feel like good news to individuals, because individuals are myopic and lack the bigger picture. If you had lived a million lifetimes, and thrown away your life to heroin thousands of times, heroin wouldn’t be so tempting because you’d know from experience that heroin ain’t great. But you haven’t, so you don’t, and society has some wisdom to offer individuals here.
Candy consumption is the same thing, scaled down a little bit. You’re not after the calories, the micronutrients, or anything real in the candy itself. You’re after how it makes you feel. You’re after the feeling of getting what you want, without thought about whether you want the right thing. In other words, you’re wire-heading.
Pills that reduce the consequences for “sins”—whether candy consumption, or heroin consumption, or nonmarital sex—can be good. If you’re going to die from syphilis because you were too dumb to listen to society, having some forgiveness can certainly be a good thing, and maybe you’ll learn your lesson instead of just dying.
But if you think “Syphilis is treatable!” justifies all nonmarital sex, then you’re gonna need a new type of pill soon.
And if you think that once you have BC then now all nonmarital sex is justified, then you’re on track for a statistically less happy marriage.
It’s not that options aren’t often good, or even that options which reduce consequence of sin aren’t good. I’m also not arguing that antibiotics and birth control don’t open up options for good nonmarital sex, or that no one is with it enough to be able to reliably find them. Some people are; maybe you’re one of them.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values. Waiting around for technology that doesn’t exist yet instead of learning more about what is good now is a mistake. You get better results by learning what is good than by relying on technological crutches, and the way that this happens will often be difficult to foresee.
As an amusing anecdote relating to this, one of the more sexually successful men I know decided that he was no longer going to have sex with anyone but his future wife—whom he had not yet met. I called bullshit, and bet him $100. Not long after he made that bet, I saw his disinterest in non-future-wife sex turn a “I like you and would have sex with you” level of attraction into a “I will do whatever it takes to marry you” level of attraction. It’s hard to even conceptualize such moves from a shallow pleasure seeking mindset, and impossible to enact them. And yet, I’m quite confident that he wouldn’t have been able to marry her otherwise, and that his alternative sex life would have been much worse even from a superficial pleasure seeking perspective. It’s hard to do justice to so briefly, but that was a very strong move that led to a great marriage which wouldn’t have worked otherwise, and no amount of technological crutches would have gotten him to where he is today.
that seems already solved with the concept of “commitment”?
You mean like… marriage? :p
In all seriousness, I’m not taking a “in marriage only!” stance here.
The success story I give above involved sex outside marriage as an active ingredient in more than one way, and could be used to argue against a strict “in marriage only!” stance. At the same time, it demonstrates value of “in marriage only” which has been lost in what the norm has become.
He was able to thread that needle and get unusually good results because he had both respect for and an understanding of traditional “in marriage only”, and a strong enough rebellious streak to not let himself be bound by forces he didn’t agree with. You can’t get those results without respect for traditional wisdom, and neither can you get it by becoming slave to some pastor’s clumsy interpretation of them.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values.
After thinking on this a bit, I’ve somewhat changed my mind.
(Epistemic status: filtered evidence.)
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average. However, now it came to mind that it’s possible for someone to 1) get two dates to accidentally overlap (or before confirming with partners-to-be that poly is OK), 2) lose an arbitrarily large bunch of money on gambling just online, 3) take revenge on a past offender with a firearm (or more destructive ways, as it happens), and I’m not sure the failure margins have widened over time at all.
By the way, if technology effects aren’t really on topic, I’m open to move that discussion to shortform/dialogue.
---
(Epistemic status: obtained with introspection.)
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both “not be ill e.g. with diabetes” and “eat tasty things”. Given tech level and my current lifestyle, there isn’t instrumental goal “eat more sweets” nor “eat less sweets”; I think I’m somewhere near the balance, and I wouldn’t want society to pass any judgement.
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both “not be ill e.g. with diabetes” and “eat tasty things”.
That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I’m pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like “liver treats”.
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average.
I think that’s right, but also “more distance to failure” doesn’t help so much if you use your newfangled automobile to cover that distance more quickly. It’s easier to avoid failure, but also easier to fail. A gun makes it easier to defend yourself, and also requires you to grow up until you can make those calls correctly one hundred percent of the time. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
I’ll take the car, and the gun, and the society that trusts people with cars and guns and other technologically enabled freedoms. But only because I think we can aspire to such responsibilities, and notice when they’re not met. All the enabling with none of the sobering fear of recklessness isn’t a combination I’m a fan of.
With respect to the “why do you believe this” question on my previous comment about promiscuity being statistically linked with marital dissatisfaction, I’m not very good at keeping citations on hand so I can’t tell you which studies I’ve seen, but here’s what chatgpt found for me when I asked for studies on the correlation.
I don’t actually lean that hard on the empirical regularity though, because such things are complicated and messy (e.g. the example I gave of a man with a relatively high partner count succeeding because he took an anti-promiscuous stance). The main reason I believe that pills don’t remove all the costs of promiscuity is that I can see some of the causal factors at work and have experience actually working with them to help women land happy stable relationships.
Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks “Trying heroin seems like a good idea”, and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it’s the most important thing in the universe.
Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I’d bet on “both” before either.
This isn’t the eating your cake and having it too that you think it is.
Yes, computers allow us to do things we couldn’t do before, and that’s great. Before, you might have to choose between meeting with Bob in the north or Richard in the south, and technology enables you to have both. Great!
The thing is, neither meeting Bob nor Richard is a “sin”. It’s not a “thing you will be tempted to do due to shallow preferences” where society recognizes that those preferences are shallow and predictably lead to bad outcomes. Society wasn’t all up in your business decisions telling you who to meet because it didn’t trust you to make the obviously right one; that was on you.
Candy gluttony, like heroin use, is a sin. It’s something that society knows is bad news, but will feel like good news to individuals, because individuals are myopic and lack the bigger picture. If you had lived a million lifetimes, and thrown away your life to heroin thousands of times, heroin wouldn’t be so tempting because you’d know from experience that heroin ain’t great. But you haven’t, so you don’t, and society has some wisdom to offer individuals here.
Candy consumption is the same thing, scaled down a little bit. You’re not after the calories, the micronutrients, or anything real in the candy itself. You’re after how it makes you feel. You’re after the feeling of getting what you want, without thought about whether you want the right thing. In other words, you’re wire-heading.
Pills that reduce the consequences for “sins”—whether candy consumption, or heroin consumption, or nonmarital sex—can be good. If you’re going to die from syphilis because you were too dumb to listen to society, having some forgiveness can certainly be a good thing, and maybe you’ll learn your lesson instead of just dying.
But if you think “Syphilis is treatable!” justifies all nonmarital sex, then you’re gonna need a new type of pill soon.
And if you think that once you have BC then now all nonmarital sex is justified, then you’re on track for a statistically less happy marriage.
It’s not that options aren’t often good, or even that options which reduce consequence of sin aren’t good. I’m also not arguing that antibiotics and birth control don’t open up options for good nonmarital sex, or that no one is with it enough to be able to reliably find them. Some people are; maybe you’re one of them.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values. Waiting around for technology that doesn’t exist yet instead of learning more about what is good now is a mistake. You get better results by learning what is good than by relying on technological crutches, and the way that this happens will often be difficult to foresee.
As an amusing anecdote relating to this, one of the more sexually successful men I know decided that he was no longer going to have sex with anyone but his future wife—whom he had not yet met. I called bullshit, and bet him $100. Not long after he made that bet, I saw his disinterest in non-future-wife sex turn a “I like you and would have sex with you” level of attraction into a “I will do whatever it takes to marry you” level of attraction. It’s hard to even conceptualize such moves from a shallow pleasure seeking mindset, and impossible to enact them. And yet, I’m quite confident that he wouldn’t have been able to marry her otherwise, and that his alternative sex life would have been much worse even from a superficial pleasure seeking perspective. It’s hard to do justice to so briefly, but that was a very strong move that led to a great marriage which wouldn’t have worked otherwise, and no amount of technological crutches would have gotten him to where he is today.
You mean like… marriage? :p
In all seriousness, I’m not taking a “in marriage only!” stance here.
The success story I give above involved sex outside marriage as an active ingredient in more than one way, and could be used to argue against a strict “in marriage only!” stance. At the same time, it demonstrates value of “in marriage only” which has been lost in what the norm has become.
He was able to thread that needle and get unusually good results because he had both respect for and an understanding of traditional “in marriage only”, and a strong enough rebellious streak to not let himself be bound by forces he didn’t agree with. You can’t get those results without respect for traditional wisdom, and neither can you get it by becoming slave to some pastor’s clumsy interpretation of them.
After thinking on this a bit, I’ve somewhat changed my mind.
(Epistemic status: filtered evidence.)
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average. However, now it came to mind that it’s possible for someone to
1) get two dates to accidentally overlap (or before confirming with partners-to-be that poly is OK),
2) lose an arbitrarily large bunch of money on gambling just online,
3) take revenge on a past offender with a firearm (or more destructive ways, as it happens),
and I’m not sure the failure margins have widened over time at all.
By the way, if technology effects aren’t really on topic, I’m open to move that discussion to shortform/dialogue.
---
(Epistemic status: obtained with introspection.)
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both “not be ill e.g. with diabetes” and “eat tasty things”. Given tech level and my current lifestyle, there isn’t instrumental goal “eat more sweets” nor “eat less sweets”; I think I’m somewhere near the balance, and I wouldn’t want society to pass any judgement.
That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I’m pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like “liver treats”.
I think that’s right, but also “more distance to failure” doesn’t help so much if you use your newfangled automobile to cover that distance more quickly. It’s easier to avoid failure, but also easier to fail. A gun makes it easier to defend yourself, and also requires you to grow up until you can make those calls correctly one hundred percent of the time. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
I’ll take the car, and the gun, and the society that trusts people with cars and guns and other technologically enabled freedoms. But only because I think we can aspire to such responsibilities, and notice when they’re not met. All the enabling with none of the sobering fear of recklessness isn’t a combination I’m a fan of.
With respect to the “why do you believe this” question on my previous comment about promiscuity being statistically linked with marital dissatisfaction, I’m not very good at keeping citations on hand so I can’t tell you which studies I’ve seen, but here’s what chatgpt found for me when I asked for studies on the correlation.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600089
https://unews.utah.edu/u-researcher-more-sex-partners-before-marriage-doesnt-necessarily-lead-to-divorce/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/testing-common-theories-on-the-relationship-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability
https://www.proquest.com/openview/46b66af73b830380aca0e6fbc3b597e3/1
I don’t actually lean that hard on the empirical regularity though, because such things are complicated and messy (e.g. the example I gave of a man with a relatively high partner count succeeding because he took an anti-promiscuous stance). The main reason I believe that pills don’t remove all the costs of promiscuity is that I can see some of the causal factors at work and have experience actually working with them to help women land happy stable relationships.