= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jayson_Virissimo comments on Wanting to Want - 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 (185)
I think the metaphor misses something important here, because the number of pebbles seems completely arbitrary. What, if anything, would change if in the pebble-sorters' ancestral environment, preferring 13-pebble heaps was adaptive, but preferring 11-pebble heaps (or spending resources on that that do) was not?
Preferring other people like Larry to be homosexual is adaptive for me. And it is the judgement by others (and the implicit avoidance of that through shame) that we are considering here. That said:
Absolutely, and the entire line of reasoning relies on conveying the speaker's own morality ("it is second-order 'right' to be homosexual") on others without making it explicit.
The same reason sorting pebbles into correct heaps was adaptive in the first place.
EDIT: Wait, does it matter that homosexuality is probably not adaptive?
That was the point of my comment. There is a large disanalogy between heterosexuality and 13-pebble heap preference (namely, the first highly adaptive, but the second has no apparent reason to be). Although, I'm not sure if that is enough to break the metaphor.
There are many properties homosexuality has but 11-pebble heap preference don't, and vice versa. Why is evolutionary maladaptiveness worth pointing out, is my question.
Well, if moral norms are the Nash equilibria that result from actual historical bargaining situations (that are determined largely by human nature and the ancestral environment), then it seems somewhat relevant. If moral norms are actually imperative sentences uttered by God, then it seems completely irrelevant. Etc...
I suppose whether or not the pebble-sorting metaphor is good depends on which meta-ethical theory is true. In other words, I'm agreeing with PhilGoetz; Example 2 and Example 3 are only in separate classes of meta-wants assuming a (far from universally shared) moral system.
I would regard moral norms as useful heuristics for achieving morally good results, not as morality in and of itself.
I think that some sort of ethical naturalism (or "moral cognitivism" as Eliezer calls it) is correct, where "morally good" is somewhat synonymous with "helps people live lives full of positive values like love, joy, freedom, fairness, high challenge, etc." There is still much I'm not sure of, but I think, that is probably pretty close to the meaning of right. In Larry's case I would argue that homosexual relationships usually do help people live such lives.
Oh, you mean that humans might genuinely dislike homosexuality as a terminal value, because evo-psych.
... huh.
Incidentally, it's easier to sort pebbles into heaps of 11. The original pebblesorters valued larger heaps, but had a harder time determining their correctness.
That's why I was careful to refer to them as 11-Pebble and 13-Pebble Favorers. They do value other sizes of pebble heaps, 11 and 13 are just the numbers they do most frequently. Or perhaps 11 and 13 are the heaps they like making in their personal time, but they like larger prime numbers for social pebble-sorting endeavors. The point is, I said they "favored" that size because I wanted to make sure that the ease of sorting the piles didn't seem too relevant, since that would distract away from the central metaphor.
Oops.