wallowinmaya comments on George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer - Less Wrong
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You originally asked for examples of grand narratives. I didn't really provide a specific example, since if one believes in narratives of progress in one field of morality or ethicse, then he in general does believe in what I term moral progress. I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works, this means that I necessarily dispute anything objective-morality-ish being behind say a narrative on woman's liberation or the spread of Christianity or the end of slavery or the spread of democracy.
So when I below said "This" I was talking about the above paragraph and the post I linked to.
Then I proceed to demonstrate how I think starting to take the idea of there being no such thing as moral progress seriously changes one's opinions on observation of moral change or even orderly and predictable moral change:
If you believe in moral progress than interestingly and quite anomalously our society claims that we have been seeing moral progress for the past 200 or 300 or X years. Basically the world is supposed to have at some period after humans evolved suddenly started to act as a sort of CEV-ish thing, the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time. Taking this as a given, one should then be pretty open to the idea that while the ethics of 2100 or 2200 might be scary or disturbing at first glance, they will be genuinely better not merely different.
Most humans who really understand it don't feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
I would like to use this opportunity to remind you that you owe us a post about this :-)
ETA: Sorry, I should have read the grandgrandparent first. Anyway, I'm eagerly awaiting your post!
Have you seen this post by Eliezer?
I think it is where I first came upon the random walk challenge to allegedly "observed" moral progress. I do think I upgraded the argument even in that basic post, please tell me if you disagree.
Also I think Eliezer was basically working to rescue the notion of moral progress because that is what he sees as "adding back up to normality". I disagree, I think normality is the futility of preserving your values or their coherently extrapolated successors. Finding a way to make something like "moral progress" real or even preserve currently held values would be a massive project comparable in difficulty and perhaps even importance to developing FAI (which is one potential solution to this problem). I find it telling he dosen't seem directly touch on the subject afterwards.
Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I'm still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn't mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer's, I'm just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador's arguments.
I'm not really convinced by it either.