= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TimS comments on Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.] - 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 (259)
This is a fully general argument against historical analysis. I can't think of a single historian who isn't incredibly selective.
Regardless I didn't mean to invoke the entire article, merely the statement which seems obviously correct in general. The w-force is there and we're not sure what it is. It might be caused by humans moving in a forager direction because of wealth, "moral progress", the same kind of memetic selection that gave us religions... Even if I agree with everything it has done so far and is likely to do in the near future, I probably wouldn't like what it does in a few decades or centuries. As I have no reason to suspect it has conveniently weakened at the time my values are in vogue this scares me.
I fear Cthulhu as I fear Azathot for much the same reasons.
No, it really isn't. Our confidence in empirical propositions from the history / social sciences disciplines is structurally lower than our confidence in empirical propositions from hard science. But that doesn't mean that we can't point to some empirical propositions and say "Not likely enough for further consideration."
We were having a discussion elsewhere about whether "moral progress" and "moral regress" were meaningful labels. Establishing our disagreement on those points seems to be a prerequisite for figuring out what we can and can't learn from history. At the very least, agreement on terminology is necessary to shorten inferential distance enough for us to even have a conversation.