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army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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Hmm... Well, the definition of a CEV is something like a point attractor in the space of a society's moral attitudes. So it's not too surprising if there is convergence of the society towards that CEV ie "moral progress" as you define it is to be expected. Though whether there is a point attractor as opposed to an attractor cycle (or chaotic attractor) seems to be an open question of course.
However, I'm struck by the thought that a Spartan society becoming "more perfectly Spartan" or a Taliban society becoming "more purely Islamic" over time would count as moral progress by the same token. So that the more thoroughly the slaves, women etc. are indoctrinated to accept the prevailing Spartan or Taliban norms, the "better" the society becomes. Does that also match your concept of moral progress?
Well, is the indoctrination reversible? i.e., could those people to reject Spartan or Taliban norms if they heard the right arguments, as happened to Lukeprog? (Which suggests to me a heuristic to tell which of two memeplexes is closer to the CEV of humanity: is the fraction of adult A-ists who convert to B-ism per year larger or smaller than the fraction of adult B-ists who convert to A-ism?)
If you're curious, you could try doing this heuristic on the Pew American religion survey which includes rich conversion data: http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf (The results may surprise you!)
Thank you, I'll take a look at that.
Perhaps a superintelligent mind could create an argument that would convince any human of any belief. Why should such an ability have moral implications?
Well, such an ability would just as easily persuade you that the sky is green, so I'm guessing no.
That's my point.
I know, I was agreeing with you. Persuasiveness is not the same as accuracy.
That seems like a good heuristic for telling who has the best missionaries, writes the cleverest arguments, or best engineers society to reward their believers. I'm not sure it's a good heuristic for actually extrapolating volition.
Yes, it probably is reversible. It seems quite plausible to me that for most pairs of human ideological systems A, B, there is some combination of arguments, evidences, life-experiences etc. that would cause a randomly-selected adherent of A to switch to B. (The random selection would tend to avoid the most fanatical and committed adherents, but I'd guess even most of them could probably be "deprogrammed" by the right combination of stimuli.)
However, if you want to count the actual numbers of conversions happening right now, the statistics are messy: apparently just about every religious group (including the group of non-religious) claims they are the "fastest growing", all with some empirical justification. I found this Wikipedia article highly amusing in that context.
But what's the point here? If we are talking about humanity as a whole, then this may just show that there is no single CEV for all human societies everywhere. Instead, there are a huge number of attractor points in the moral attitudes space, and any given society tends to converge to the nearest attractor point... unless and until a major shock throws it out again (or breaks up the society).
Global humanity as a whole may perhaps now constitute a single society, and be moving towards the "liberal democracy" attractor point, which therefore defines a local CEV... but only because it's already in that basin of attraction. And even that's empirically more dubious than it was twenty years ago (I don't see China, Russia, or most of the Islamic world still moving that way, and a lot of Western countries have themselves become distinctly less liberal / democratic in recent years.)
Note that if at the beginning of the year A had one billion adult adherents and B had one hundred, and since then 160 of the former have converted to B and 60 of the latter have converted to A, my heuristic would still point towards B being wronger than A even though B has doubled in size and A has stayed pretty much the same. (And anyway, I was thinking more of memeplexes who have existed for at least a couple of generations -- with new ones it would be much more noisy.)