timtyler comments on By Which It May Be Judged - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 04:26AM

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Comment author: timtyler 30 December 2012 08:00:52PM *  -2 points [-]

Group selection

You're kidding, right? That page is a joke - and not in a good way.

And showing that there are a wide variety of different hypotheses only proves my point: we do not know what caused morality.

Not really. It is often true that if there are multiple explanations on the table, only one is right - or one is heavily dominant. Cooperation isn't really like that. There really are many different reasons why advanced organisms cooperate and are nice to each other under different circumstances. You could group most of them together by saying that niceness often pays, either directly or to kin - but that explanation is vague and kind-of obvious: we know a lot of details beyond that.

We surely have "sufficient evidence". We have all of recorded history. This isn't like the quest for an elusive high-energy particle - much of the relevant evidence is staring us in the face every day.