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DSimon comments on Rationality Quotes October 2011 - Less Wrong
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T-Rex: If I lived in the past I'd have different beliefs, because I'd have nobody modern around to teach me anything else!
FACT.
And I find it really unlikely that I would come up with all our modern good stuff on my own, running around saying "You guys! Democracy is pretty okay. Also, women are equal to men, and racism? Kind of a dick move." If I was raised by racist and sexist parents in the middle of a racist and sexist society, I'm pretty certain I'd be racist and sexist! I'm only as enlightened as I am today because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.
Right. So that raises the question: Is everyone from that period in Hell, or is Heaven overwhelmingly populated by racists?
-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics
I believe this was the point EY was trying to make in Archimedes's Chronophone. In short, it's a lot harder to send advice to the past when you can only transmit your justification for believing the advice. If your true reason for holding your "enlightened" views is because they're popular, then the recipients on the other side will only hear that they should do whatever practice was popular for them.
I think the obvious answer would be that Heaven is overwhelmingly populated by ex-racists. Once they get there, they'd have people around to teach them better stuff.
Who would teach them? The more severe racists from periods even further back?
Maybe the dead of other races, provably ensouled and with barriers to communication magically removed.
I think the assumption is that divine beings would be there.
Are you assuming people from the past are always more racist for any given time period?
That's a good point, there would be many many exceptions to such a prediction.
So at most, all I can say is that the racists in heaven are unlikely to find much in the way of 20th century ideals until people from the 20th century start dying and showing up there.
Why do they need to be taught? Isn't prejudice one of those human frailties that gets magically cleansed when you go to heaven? I mean, if you believe in that stuff. :)
Above the comic:
All that's needed is a belief in purgatory.
We'd probably all end up there too, based on the near certainty that we're doing things that people in the future will correctly consider as obviously immoral.
Obligatory SMBC
I intend to anticipate as many of those harsh-judgement-of-future-generations things as possible, do the right thing now, and breeze through purgatory so much faster than the rest of those chumps. Bwahaha.
On that note, does anybody want to speculate about what people in the future will correctly regard as immoral that we're doing now? The time to think about this is before we get to the future and/or purgatory.
Some low-hanging fruit, for example, would be the widespread mistreatment of people with gender identity disorder, or squandering money on forms of charity that are actually harmful, e.g. destroying poor countries' textile industries by flooding the market with cheap donated clothes.
I can't tell whether this is deadpan humor or not.
I think closed borders will be considered a great evil in the future, but that's probably another way of saying that not enough people are agreeing with me now.
Well, I don't believe in purgatory, so that part was an (apparently ill-fated) attempt at deadpan humor. The question was sincere, though: if we're confident that we'll probably be scorned by future generations for something we're doing now, then the obvious response to that is to try to find out what it is, so we can do something about it now.
The closed-borders thing definitely has the features of a great candidate: closed borders are generally considered necessary, and you can make a reasonable case for them being evil.
How can you tell what our descendents are going to think?
If Pinker's right, the world tends towards increasing kindness, but we're kinder to homosexuals and less kind to smokers than we were, so it's still something of a gamble.
Do you expect all the future generations to agree with each other?
One good place to start is to think about Paul Graham's essay What you can't say.
That's an interesting interpretation of "we". Unless you do those things...?
I meant "we" as in "we, as a society", or more specifically "we, the society that I happen to find myself in." Please pardon the ambiguity.
I was being facetious. Please pardon the ambiguity.
Seems to imply, at least to me, a function of "we" that includes "I". Plus, it seems a more interesting question to ask what you're doing that might come to be considered immoral - it's rather unlikely that you're really perfect, isn't it?
It's easy to say "that thing that all those other people are doing, and which I already think is immoral, will come to be considered immoral by our descendants." That's just saying "I'm better than you, neener neener."
Ah, I misread DSimon's use of "we", and the misunderstandings cascaded from there. My mistake. To clarify, I would like to hear things that I may be doing that future generations may be justified in disapproving of. It's an interesting and relevant question. Gloating about my own supposed superiority (neener neener) hadn't even crossed my mind.
Like the vast majority here, I aim to improve myself.
Looking back, my last post came out rather more accusatory than I intended, for which I apologize.
To get back on topic, how about "not cryonically preserving people against their will"?
Agreed, and it's why I'm vegan.