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gwern comments on Value evolution - Less Wrong
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Are you just trying to score a rhetorical point by pointing out that I made a statement that wasn't meant to be literally true?
Even if you believed that I meant it to be literally true - which I didn't - the reasonable, charitable response would be to say, "That's probably not literally true, but it doesn't matter as long as it's 80% true."
Moral progress is slow. No one argues for a fast moral progress over the last 5000 years; this implies that moral progress has a hard time overcoming inertia - like economic factors. A low rate is not evidence for your theory, it is evidence for moral progress since it is exactly what one would expect of anything spread over 5000 years.
So I charitably interpreted your theory as not being empirically inert and predicting an extremely low rate indeed, so low that a couple of examples would be enough to penalize it.
You are free to withdraw that part or explain how it's actually a good thing that your theory and the moral progress theory predict the same thing re: people placing morals over profit.
Well, except for Steven Pinker.
I'm not sure he does either. He covers a very long sweep of time, and I don't think he points to any clear shifts until at least a millennium ago, although much of the changes comes in the past 500 years (which is also true of pretty much anything, that's why we call those shifts 'Revolutions').
One of the first trends Pinker deals with is the transition from nonstate to state societies, including ancient empires. Hammurabi counts for some sort of moral progress over perpetually feuding hunter-gatherers.
Does it? It is true Pinker spent a lot of time on trying to compare death-rates with hunter-gatherers, but it's not obvious that the comparison is that favorable for early empires (as opposed to modern civilizations) and I believe he also discusses ways in which people were worse off due to formation of states, such as poorer nutrition, taxation, and massively organized warfare. (It's a very big book and he covers a lot of nuances.)
Do you recommend his book? I watched his Edge talk anticipating at least a little insight into whether lessened violence is actually extremely temporary (e.g. ending within this century), but he didn't speculate that way.
Yes.
It is not at all certain that the change was an improvement in terms of moral behavior of the people in question.