“Fanatics may suppose, that dominion is founded on grace, and that saints alone inherit the earth; but the civil magistrate very justly puts these sublime theorists on the same footing with common robbers, and teaches them by the severest discipline, that a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.” —David Hume
More of an anti-fanaticism quotation, but it seems to belong.
Pain is broadly not preferred. That is to say, an absence of cognition is preferred to the cognition of pain. This makes the question easy for a preference utilitarian, who holds there is nothing impeding the value of the preferences of subjects: Badness attaches to pain when a subject would rather not be feeling it. When a subject prefers pain for whatever reason, there is nothing wrong with it. For objective moral systems outside of preference utilitarianism, the question is a little more threatening.
I have no idea what I’m wading into here, but a few things occured to me reading this:
Taking offense to something relies on status and perhaps more significantly on interpellation. Interpellation and its inherent insistence on dignity create barriers to what I’ll call effective communication and introduce a rhetoric of respect. If we wish to be rationalists, really and truly, it seems like we must have a discourse that avoids insisting on respect for anyone or anything. We must all get thick skins, be willing to hear ourselves treated as objects of outside analysis and be willing to be ignored when we have bad ideas. Unwise, “offensive” comments like the one that seemed to kick off this discussion can be assayed because they are examples of poor thinking rather than because they are causes of emotional distress. Here, when it gets down to serious business, we should each have no more merit or status than our own arguments give us.
However, I have no idea how to sum this up in a maxim or otherwise implement this. What I offer is not a solution but an objective. I hope others can flesh it out.
The Pope is a good neutral third party. He has taken the consolation prize of being the World’s Most Moral Man because he can’t be Vladimir Putin or Barack Obama, both of whom have more friends and more power.
Two corollary explanations come to mind. First, writing uses a wider variety of registers and styles than spoken language. Forms and usages that would sound exaggerated or affected in spoken language are socially appropriate in writing. Writing is constructed over time and predominately “for the record,” so it uses precise, unforgiving language that suits the specific context of the writing. This is why the first line of a Wikipedia article on some topic in math, poetry, or physics is often indecipherable to a lay reader, even an educated one, without further reading. Spoken language, on the other hand, is first and foremost a form of communication from a speaker to a listener, and is composed and interpreted in real time, even if it’s guided by notes. This makes it more fluid and colloquial, and more likely to employ a register that the speaker and listener will both understand readily. Since successful writers use the more precise, ossified language and successful speakers use the more fluid one, they diverge through memetic evolution, as suggested.
The second explanation has more to do with the way writing is taught. I don’t know how much it applies to technical writing, maybe somebody can share their experience on that point. Since the Victorian era, prose has embraced brevity. The briefest explanation that still conveys the broad meaning of an author’s idea is usually treated as the best stylistically. This sacrifices precision for a kind of clarity, but in a field like mathematics, precision is clarity. Typical admonitions about brevity of style, then, render useless attempts to explain big, scary concepts. Lecturers, however, have the opportunity to pursue digressions and explain minutiae in half-organized ways and still hold the attention of an audience because the lecturer can easily signal the importance of a difficult intermediate step to the wider narrative in a way that would be clunky and perhaps abrupt in writing.
Here is my question: Is there any payoff whatsoever for everyone drawing?
Understood. I should’ve made it clear I was responding specifically to
A large part of the satisfaction of motorcycle work that Crawford describes comes from the fact that such work requires one to confront reality, however harsh it may be. Reality cannot be placated by hand-waving, Powerpoint slides, excuses, or sweet talk. But the very harshness of the challenge means that when reality yields to the finesse of a craftsman, the reward is much greater.
Reality is not very harsh when all you’re dealing with is a broken motorcycle or a program that won’t compile. When you’re dealing with public policy, which even in its best form is usually social triage, deciding who gets what and who will be left unemployed, poor, sick, in debt, unfunded, oppressed, or dead, the facts have a much greater sting.
And, as MichaelVassar points out, political success is usually pretty clear cut, at least in the long run. Just ask Walter Mondale or John McCain.
This seems to broaden the discussion considerably from works of art with fandoms to anything with a following. I think you’ll agree that there’s a noticeable difference between the attitude of otaku toward anime and F1 followers toward F1 cars and races.
This strikes me as the right answer. Things like Star Trek and Tolkien are incredibly powerful for very small subsets of the population because their creators make risky aesthetic and narrative choices. It isn’t so much that fans feel they must come to the defense of their preferred works, but that those works speak to them in rare and intense ways that are really distasteful to most people. So fans bask in the uncommon power of their fan-objects and disregard prevailing opinion. People aren’t as fanatical about things like Indiana Jones or Animal Farm because their appeal is shallow and broad: everyone seems to agree that Indiana Jones is a sympathetic and entertaining character and Animal Farm is a clever allegory, but they only speak to one thing, and one thing that is widely understood. Star Trek, by comparison, is an immersive universe that goes down peculiar and deep paths that explore culture, power, ethics, and history among other things. It is not so much that all fan-objects possess objective awfulness, but they all do sacrifice wide appeal for a constrictive spiritual completeness.
As other commenters have suggested, what is moral is not reducible to what is natural. This assumption, which underlies the entire post, is left totally un-addressed. I understand that genetic fitness is relevant to morality because people must endure, but this doesn’t seem to demand that the extent of morals be fitness. I would love a post that explains morality as inherently and solely about fitness.
This post flies from one topic to another very quickly, and I can’t understand all the connections between topics. Why is the human designer of transhumanity suddenly free to choose a new moral chassis for his creation, and why should he care about the moral success of the transhumans? Shouldn’t he create a transhumanity that maximizes his own fitness?
More broadly, are we talking about real transhumans or a human-designed strong AI?
Also, organisms are always adaptation-executors rather than direct fitness-maximizers.
On first glance, the answer that came to mind was accidental death or serious injury due to sheer incompetence, like walking off a cliff. Something that has a massive survival cost and only communicates failure seems like it couldn’t be signaling. Mistakes are revealing, after all. But this kind of signaling happens all the time, mostly as a flawed means of signaling courage or simply drawing attention.
It struck me then that the question of what is “least signaling” may not be useful for determining states of mind, that every behavior can be an attempt at signaling. All that changes is the size of the audience and the success of the signaling. Conversely, a behavior that is usually associated with signaling can occur for perfectly honest or private reasons. (This is the pretense of polite society, that someone “meant nothing by it” even when “it” is dressing in a frock coat and top hat or, alternatively, stripping half naked. But that is for another thread.) The point is we are not bound to always think in a signaling way when we’re involved in behavior that readily signals.
Colonel F suggests the worst kind of compromise between the optimal and the real. Political actors must not overlook reality, as many of the great revolutionaries of history did, but neither should they bend their agendas to it, as Chamberlain, Kerensky, and so many tepid liberals and social democrats did. To do so is to surrender without even fighting. This is especially true for political actors with a true upper hand, like Eisenhower or MacArthur after World War II. They must control the conversation, they must push the Overton window away from competing ideologies and towards their own, because all advantages are tentative. There is no sense compromising with a broken enemy.
That said, it is clearly unwise to be overtly punitive after a victory because punishment suggests weakness on the part of the victor, it suggests an order that can only be maintained by retaliation and fear. This is why the Emperor remained on the throne in Japan and initiatives like the Morgenthau Plan were discarded. The Emperor was not the enemy, Germany was not the enemy: the ideologies of militant nationalism were the enemy.
To me, Colonel Y is obviously correct. I guess this is because I don’t buy the analogy. Religion is emergent, pervasive, and broadly well-intentioned. Nobody ever defeated it in the field of battle, because it never waged open war against civilization. On the contrary, it has cemented itself as part of civilization. Nazism, however, was transient, antagonistic to civilization, and destructive. Even if it were rendered metaphorical, it would make more problems than it would ever solve. There was a German identity before the Nazis and, as we’ve seen, there is one afterward.
The thing is, I think Wikipedia beat you to the punch on this one. They may not be Yudkowskian, big-R Rationalists, but they are, broadly-speaking, rational. And they do an incredibly effective job of pooling, assessing, summarizing, and distributing the best available version of the truth already. Even people of marginal source-diligence can get a clear view of things from Wikipedia, because extensive arguments have already distilled what is clearly true, what is accepted, what is speculation, and what is on the fringe.
I encourage you to bring the clarity of thought taught in the Less Wrong community to Wikipedia by contributing.
That said, it would be pretty cool if they’d implement a karma-like system for Wikipedia contributors. It would make vandals, fools, trolls, noobs, editors in good standing, and heroic contributors easily recognizable.
NPOV does not stand for “No point of view.” Nor does it mean “balance between competing points of view.” Check out this and this. NPOV requires that Wikipedia take the view of an uninvolved observer, and it is supplemented by verifiability, which requires that Wikipedia take an empirical, secondary point of view that credits established academia.
So content disputes are usually settled by evaluating claims as true or false through verification. Those who continue to object to a claim once it has been established do not have to be included in a consensus. That is why Wikipedia is able to assert the truth of the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and the moon landings.
So what lesson does a rationalist draw from this? What is best for the Bayesian mathematical model is not best in practice? Conserving information is not always “good”?
Also,
I will simply rationalize some other explanation for the destruction of my apartment.
This seems distinctly contrary to what an instrumental rationalist would do. It seems more likely he’d say “I was wrong, there was actually an infinitesimal probability of a meteorite strike that I previously ignored because of incomplete information/negligence/a rounding error.”
On the whole, we’re agreed, but I still don’t know how I’m supposed to choose values.
This fact is often obscured by the tendency for political disputes to impute ‘bad’ values to opponents rather than to recognize the actual disagreement, a tactic that ironically only works because of the wide agreement over the set of core values, if not the priority ordering.
I think this tactic works best when you’re dealing with a particular constituency that agrees on some creed that they hold to be objective. Usually, when you call your opponent a bad person, you’re playing to your base, not trying to grab the center.
I think we are close. Do you think enjoyment and pain can be reduced to or defined in terms of preference? We have an explanation of preference in evolutionary psychology, but to my mind, a justification of its significance is necessary also. Clearly, we have evolved certain intuitive goals, but our consciousness requires us to take responsibility for them and modulate them through moral reasoning to accept realities beyond what our evolutionary sense of purpose is equipped for.
To me, preference is significant because it usually underlies the start of desirable cognitions or the end of undesirable ones, in me and other conscious things. The desirable cognitions should be maximized in the aggregate and the undesirable ones minimized. That is the whole hand-off from evolution to “objective” morality, from there, the faculties of rational discipline and the minimal framework of society take over. Is it too much?
″...natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment.” —E. O. Wilson