Yes. Thanks. Good explanation.
SpectrumDT
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which sucks incredibly and is bad.
Your wording here makes me curious: Are you saying the same thing twice here, or are you saying two different things? Does the phrase “X sucks” mean the same thing to you as “X is bad”, or is there a distinction?
Realizing that your preferences can and do develop obviously opens the Pandora’s box of actions which do change preferences.[1] The ability to do that breaks orthogonality.
Could you please elaborate on how this “breaks orthogonality”? It is unclear to me what you think the ramifications of this are.
And sometimes communities do in fact have explicit “preferences” that will cost people status just by having different ones. It might even be costly to find out what those diffuse preferences are, and especially daunting for people new to a community.
Could you please give some examples of this? It is unclear to me what kind of things you are talking about here.
or you don’t really know yourself well
Why do you think that?
What I mean is that the distribution has a crazy variance (possibly no finite variance); take two “opportunities to do good” and compare them to each other, and an orders-of-magnitude difference is not rare.
Do you mean the differences between the expected utility upfront? Or do you mean the differences between the actual utility in the end (which the actor might have no way to accurately predict in advance)?
I also think that in any kind of complex system, monocultures are fragile.
This is a valid point. But the world is far from a monoculture. Even if all currently endangered languages die out, we will have plenty of cultures left.
If the world ends up with less than, say, 100 languages, then I agree it starts to make sense to preserve them. As it stands now, I think we have more than enough cultural diversity, and keeping tiny minority languages and cultures alive is not worth the opportunity cost.
It can be too slow to catch up to rapid change, but then in that case one of the things you want is a diversity of cultures for selection to act on.
Is this the problem that you are trying to solve by preserving cultures? Make the human race as a whole more resilient in the face of rapid change?
Is this really the reason why you think culture is important? Or is it a rationalization?
I am skeptical for two reasons:
Your argument about rapid change seems extremely different from your argument in the grandparent post where you talked about literature and philosophy, Aristotle and Chaucer.
Do you think that preserving a bunch of tiny cultures of a few hundred people (many of whom probably live in poverty) is really going to help make the human race more resilient in the face of rapid change?
In those words it sounds like a bad thing, but look past the words and is it, really?
In my opinion, yes. That is why I posted the question.
Why is culture so important, again?
I agree that the utility of preserving endangered languages is greater than zero. But how much greater.
These alternative ways of conceptualizing… how useful are they? What can we achieve with them? As far as I can tell, they are fun and interesting, but insignificant compared to other problems we can help solve.
Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language...
Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language.
If the minority cultures can fix the problem themselves by teaching their children, great! Far be it from me to stop them from that. And of course the dominant cultures should not actively oppress minority languages.
But when outsiders are expected to put in extra effort to preserve minority languages—that is when I balk.
Imagine if english went extinct. In a sense, we’d lose Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Steinbeck. … These “endangered” languages had culture too—songs and stories, maybe books and plays. That’s important.
Important, sure. But other things are much more important, such as eradicating diseases and getting people basic education and preserving the environment.
If I had the choice between saving just one (decent quality) human life and keeping an endangered language alive for another generation, I would sacrifice the language to save the human.
I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn’t require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it’s just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up.
It maybe easy for the child, but it can take a lot of effort and energy from the parents.
I am the father of a sort-of bilingual child. I am Danish and we live in Denmark, but my wife is Chinese. Our 4-year-old son speaks good Danish, but his Chinese is very weak. My wife tries on-and-off to insist on speaking Chinese to him, but it is a struggle because he does not like it. So it is hard work for her, and she often does not have the energy and falls back to speaking Danish to him.
I speak nary a word Chinese. I could of course study Chinese so I could contribute, but that would be a huge effort.
To me this sound suspiciously like the “Fallacy of Grey”.
The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray
Is there any place in your sequence where you define what you mean by God? I have tried to read closely every time you mention the term, and I still do not understand what the term is supposed to refer to.
But my vague sense is that people mostly want frisbee and tea. I guess this isn’t that surprising either, there’s some kind of horror that’s related to a nerd staring at the media that is actually popular and realizing “it’s not bad [by nerd standards] by mistake. The people really did want Transformers 3.”
I did not understand this. Could I get you to please explain it again?
(It is worth noting that I am a nerd who enjoyed Transformers 3...)
the amount of awe I feel going into European churches feels like some evidence against this.
This sounds to me like selection bias. Most people did not build churches. And I suspect you do not feel awestruck in every church. I suspect that you remember the new most awesome ones, built by exceptional people who felt exceptionally religious.
It really seems like these rituals, the architecture, all of it, was built to instill the sort of existential intensity that taking God seriously requires, and I have to imagine that this was at least somewhat real for most people?
It may have been built for that purpose. This does not mean that most people felt the existential intensity. It is conceivable that many people felt “wow, the church sure is rich and powerful; I’d better obey” whereas many others felt nothing and stayed quiet about it.
Contemplation of the vastness of everything we know about, of the tremendous unplumbed chasm of the unknown, of the vertigo-inducing forever of infinity, of the mystery of why there is anything at all or any subjectivity with which to try to confront it… any of these things can induce a shudder of humble awe in the most dyed-in-the-wool atheist.
Not me. At least, not reliably. When I contemplate the vastness of the universe I feel at most a very mild curiosity. When I contemplate philosophical problems such as “why there is anything at all” I mostly feel a mild frustration. Definitely not a shudder of awe.
I would think that some kind of “yay field” plays a part in addiction. Even very mild addictions. I feel a “yay field” each time I go to eat a cookie or a bowl of ice cream or the like.
May I ask you two questions?
Can you please list several things that you consider luxuries and which you believe these “poor” people spend a lot of money on?
What evidence (and how much) do you base this on?