= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shminux comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (296)
I distrust any long list of plausible-sounding but arbitrary entries (7 habits of..., 8 simple rules...)
Haidt doesn't have a fixed number in mind. He started with Richard Shweder's list of three moral foundations which seem to have a firm grounding in psychology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology, and then went looking for more. At one point he even offered prize money to people who suggested a promising new foundation. The sixth foundation that he added, liberty/oppression, was based on the suggestion of a prize winner (the psychologist John Jost, who has his own theory of political psychology and has been one of Haidt's harsher critics).
9 Peano axioms, 3 types of radioactive decay, 8 planets (are dwarf planets "arbitrary"?)...
I have an a priori distrust for social science theories, but only because of the heuristic, "there are far more ways to be incorrect than correct", not because "ways to be correct don't come in list form".
In particular, prepending the list cardinality with "at least" shows at least a bit of self-awareness.
Yes, you lost me at planets. I don't know which group of people it was that collected enough status to declare that Pluto is not a planet (or more precisely to alter the rules by which planets are defined) but the list is arbitrary on approximately the same level as the categories of moral values---based on something that does exists in the world but sliced into fuzzy categories based on convention or authority.
Stipulating agreement: aren't fuzzy categories better than no categories at all? Who was the first ape classifiable as homo erectus, and how distinguishable was he from his homo habilis parents?
Oh, I agree with your conclusion---arbitrary categories are great. I'd go as far as to say indefensible (for us, at least).
Spoken like a true physicist!