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Eugine_Nier comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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I think you may be underestimating how hard it is to do better than tradition.
When invoking that advice, check whether something really is a tradition!
This may be a good response to Zack's general approach, but if you apply it to Yvain's question, the conclusion is that Zack is not going far enough. Marriage is a very old and widespread tradition, while the imperative that everyone should graduate high school is extremely young, and schools themselves fairly young. Thus you should be much more willing to make marriage an imperative than school.
I'm inclined to agree.
(I don't know; my own life has gotten a lot better (not monotonically, but the trendline is clear) over the last five years as I've learned to think for myself more and more, and trust my unreflective moral instincts and the local authorities less and less. Moreover, this process seems likely to continue as long as I make sure to abandon contrarian strategies when it looks like they're not working. But your mileage may vary.)
Implicit in Szabo's argument is that you may be doing the equivalent of picking up pennies on railroad tracks.
I like that metaphor, but, you know, decision under uncertainty: we're on the railroad tracks already, and I'm going to pick up as much free money as I think I can get away with, because I no longer trust the schoolteachers and cops who taught me to sit still and wait for the train.
Inter-subjective truths need not be Schelling points. And even if they are, that doesn't make them actually true in an empirical sense. The fact that everyone does it, but no one can verify it (due to computational limits) might be meaningful, as long as one doesn't use that to justify ignoring later evidence.
In short, what is the difference between firm commitment to inter-subjective truths notwithstanding evidence and moral relativism?
There are ways to judge inter-subjective truths, e.g., look at how successful societies holding them have been over various time scales.
Isn't the way to properly judge a civilization exactly what is under dispute in this discussion?
Measured by time, the Roman Republic lasted longer than the modern version of the United States government - dating from ~1865 or ~1936 depending on how one wants to count.
Measured by per-capita wealth, modern day Sweden might do better than the US in the 1950s.
I'm not opposed to measuring according to moral correctness, but first we need to agree on what actually is morally correct.
The US government (and many others) have lasted as long as they're had a chance to last, so it seems unfair to judge by duration.
I didn't mean how long the societies lasted, that raises issues about what constitutes the "same" society. I meant what happened to societies X years after they adopted various moral positions. Also, I agree that we can learn a lot from the Roman Republic.
Do you have a specific example in mind? For X<20, no obvious examples leap to my mind.
And in the modern era, X>5 means that any consequences could be so overdetermined that pointing to particular moral changes is hindsight basis at best - particularly because moral changes tend to be gradual rather than sudden. For example, Brown v. Bd. of Edu didn't come out of nowhere, legally speaking.
I had in mind X on the order of 100.
Also, I don't just mean the modern era.
I'm a big believer in the power of examining history to understand current society. For example, Gordon Craig makes an interesting case that the particular results of the Revolution of 1848 in Prussia were a substantial cause of the rise of the Nazis.
But it is important to recognize the limits of historical analysis across long periods of time. First, multiple causes blend together, making it very difficult to disentangle causation. More importantly for this conversation, moral changes are not discrete events.
Thus, trying to figure out the moral changes from the 1670s and 1680s that causes the French Revolution to have a Reign of Terror while the America Revolution did not seems to be asking too much of historical analysis. Looking before 1650 seems even worse.