True, but are such models really ->more<- useful - especially in the long run?
Of course they are more useful. You have only finite computational power, and often any models that are tractable must be simplified at the expense of capturing fundamental reality. Even if that's not an issue, insisting on a more exact model beyond what's good enough in practice only introduces additional cost and error-proneness.
Now, you are of course right that problems that may await us in the future, such as e.g. the moral status of artificial minds, are hopelessly beyond the scope of any traditional moral/ethical intuitions and models, and require getting down to the fundamentals if we are to get any sensible answers at all. However, in this discussion, I have in mind much more mundane everyday practical questions of how to live your life and deal with people. When it comes to these, traditional models and intuitions that have evolved naturally (in both the biological and cultural sense) normally beat any attempts at second-guessing them. That’s at least from my experience and observations.
Also I'm not sure how human rights are any more a metaphysical fiction than say... tax law is.
Fundamentally, they aren’t. The normal human modus operandi for resolving disputes is to postulate some metaphysical entities about whose nature everyone largely agrees, and use the recognized characteristics of these metaphysical entities as Schelling points for agreement. This gives a great practical flexibility to norms, since a disagreement about them can be (hopefully) channeled into a metaphysical debate about these entities, and the outcome of this debate is then used as the conclusive Schelling point, avoiding violent conflict.
From this perspective, there is no essential difference between ancient religious debates over what God’s will is in some dispute and the modern debates over what is compatible with “human rights” -- or any legal procedure beyond fact-finding, for that matter. All of these can be seen as rhetorical contests in metaphysical debates aimed at establishing and stabilizing more concrete Schelling points within some existing general metaphysical framework. (As for utilitarianism, here we get to another important criticism of it: conclusions of utilitarian arguments typically make for very poor Schelling points in practice, for all sorts of reasons.)
Of course, these systems can work better or worse in practice, and they can break down in all sorts of nasty ways. The important point is that human disputes will be resolved either violently or by such metaphysical debates, and the existing frameworks for these debates should be judged on the practical quality of the network of Schelling points they provide -- not on how convincingly they obfuscate the unavoidable metaphysical nature of the entities they postulate. From this perspective, you might well prefer God-talk in some situations for purely practical reasons.
When I found Less Wrong and started reading, when I made my first post, when I went to my first meetup….
It was a little like coming home.
And mostly it wasn’t. Mostly I felt a lot more out of place than I have in, say, church youth groups. It was hard to pinpoint the difference, but as far as I can tell, it comes down to this: a significant proportion of the LW posters are contrarians in some sense. And I’m a conformist, even if I would prefer not to be, even if that’s a part of my personality that I’m working hard to change. I’m much more comfortable as a follower than as a leader. I like pre-existing tradition, the reassuring structure of it. I like situations that allow me to be helpful and generous and hardworking, so that I can feel like a good person. Emotionally, I don’t like disagreeing with others, and the last thing I have to work hard to do is tolerate others' tolerance.
And, as evidenced by the fact that I attend church youth groups, I don’t have the strong allergy that many of the community seem to have against religion. This is possibly because I have easily triggered mystical experiences when, for example, I sing in a group, especially when we are singing traditional ‘sacred’ music. In a previous century, I would probably have been an extremely happy nun.
Someone once expressed surprise that I was able to become a rationalist in spite of this neurological quirk. I’ve asked myself this a few times. My answer is that I don’t think I deserve the credit. If anything, I ended up on the circuitous path towards reading LessWrong because I love science, and I love science because, as a child, reading about something as beautiful as general relativity gave me the same kind of euphoric experience as singing about Jesus does now. My inability to actual believe in any religion comes from a time before I was making my own decisions about that kind of thing.
I was raised by atheist parents, not anti-theist so much as indifferent. We attended a Unitarian Universalist church for a while, which meant I was learning about Jesus and Buddha and Native American spirituality all mixed together, all the memes watered down to the point that they lost their power. I was fourteen when I really encountered Christianity, still in the mild form of the Anglican Church of Canada. I was eighteen when I first encountered the ‘Jesus myth’ in its full, meme-honed-to-maximum-virulence form, and the story arc captivated me for a full six months. I still cry during every Good Friday service. But I must have missed some critical threshold, because I can’t actually believe in that story. I’m not even sure what it would mean to believe in a story. What does that feel like?
I was raised by scientists. My father did his PhD in physical chemistry, my mother in plant biology. I grew up reading SF and pop science, and occasionally my mother or my father’s old textbooks. I remember my mother’s awe at the beautiful electron-microscope images in my high school textbooks, and how she sat patiently while I fumblingly talked about quantum mechanics, having read the entire tiny physics section of our high school library. My parents responded to my interest in science with pride and enthusiasm, and to my interest in religion with indulgent condescension. That was my structure, my tradition. And yes, that has everything to do with why I call myself an atheist. I wouldn’t have had the willpower to disagree with my parents in the long run.
Ultimately, I have an awfully long way to go if I want to be rational, as opposed to being someone who’s just interested in reading about math and science. Way too much of my motivation for ‘having true beliefs’ breaks down to ‘maybe then they’ll like me.’ This is one of the annoying things about my personality, just as annoying as my sensitivity to religious memes and my inability to say no to anyone. Luckily, my personality also comes with the ability to get along with just about anyone, and in a forum of mature adults, no one is going to make fun of me because I’m wearing tie-dye overalls. No one here has yet made fun of me for my interest in religion, even though I expect most people disagree with it.
And there’s one last conclusion I can draw, albeit from a sample size of one. Not everyone can be a contrarian rationalist. Not everyone can rebel against their parents’ religion. Not everyone can disagree with their friends and family and not feel guilty. But everyone can be rational if they are raised that way.