Vaniver comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

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Comment author: Vaniver 02 January 2012 07:57:46PM 2 points [-]

I'm having trouble finding philosophers apart from Singer and Tooley who have written on this topic at all, and both seem to have come to roughly the same conclusions that I did.

Consider Heinlein:

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying.

Comment author: Bakkot 02 January 2012 08:18:28PM 2 points [-]

Good find.

Heinlein and I differ philosophical in a lot of very important ways. For one, the idea of basing morality on "racial survival" terrifies me. (For another, my moral reasoning hasn't lead me to conclude that having a threesome with my 11-year-old genetically modified gender-bent clones would be a fine and dandy thing to do.)

Comment author: Multiheaded 04 January 2012 03:28:23PM 0 points [-]

For one, the idea of basing morality on "racial survival" terrifies me

Eh heh heh. So you can be terrified by some kinds of utilitarian reasoning. Well, this one does terrify me too, but in the context of this conversation I'm tempted to cite my people's saying: "What's fine for a Russian would kill a German."

Comment author: Bakkot 04 January 2012 07:37:20PM 1 point [-]

So you can be terrified by some kinds of utilitarian reasoning.

Of course I can. If your core utility function is optimizing something other than mine, it's going to be scary. Mine is optimizing for something that looks roughly like fun, which I imagine is in accordance with almost all of LW. What's yours optimizing for?

Comment author: Multiheaded 04 January 2012 10:16:31PM *  0 points [-]

It feels pretty complex, and I just self-report as undecided on some preferences, but, although a part of my function seems to be optimizing for LW-"fun" too, another, smaller part is a preference for "Niceness with a capital N", or "the world feeling wholesome".

I'm not good enough at introspection and self-expression to describe this value of "Niceness", but it seems to resonate with some Christian ideals and images ("love your enemies"), the complex, indirect ethical teachings seen in classical literature (e.g. Akutagawa or Dostoevsky; I love and admire both), and even, on an aesthetic level, the modern otaku culture's concept of "moe" (see this great analysis on how that last one, although looking like a mere pop culture craze to outsiders, can tie in into a larger sensibility).

So, there's an ever-present "minority group" in my largely LW-normal values cluster. I can't quite label it with something like "conservative" or "romantic", but I recognize it when I feel it.

...shit, I feel like some kind of ethical hipster now, lol.

Tl;dr: there might be some kind of "Niceness" (permitting "fun" that's not directly fun) a level or so above "fun" for me, just as there is some kind of "fun" above pleasure for most people (permitting "pleasure" that's not directly pleasant). If people don't wirehead so they can have "fun" and not just pleasure, I'm totally able not to optimize for "fun" so I can have "Niceness" and not just "fun".

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