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timtyler comments on Dissenting Views - Less Wrong
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Um, the referenced The Psychological Unity of Humankind article isn't right. Humans vary considerably - from total vegetables up to Einstein. There are many ways for the human brain to malfunction as a result of developmental problems or pathologies.
Similarly, humans have many different goals - from catholic priests to suicide bombers. That is partly as a result of the influence of memetic brain infections. Humans may share similar genes, but their memes vary considerably - and both contribute a lot to the adult phenotype.
That brings me to a LessWrong problem. Sure, this is Eliezer's blog - but there seems to be much more uncritical parroting of his views among the commentators than is healthy.
And also many ways for human brains to develop differently, says the autistic woman who seems to be doing about as well at handling life as most people do.
Didn't we even have a post about this recently? Really, once you get past "maintain homeostasis", I'm pretty sure there's not a lot that can be said to be universal among all humans, if we each did what we personally most wanted to do. It just looks like there's more agreement than there is because of societal pressure on a large scale, and selection bias on an individual scale.
AdeleneDawner, I'm being off-topic for this thread, but have you posted on the intro thread?
I have now...
You don't take into account that people can be wrong about their own values, with randomness in their activities not reflecting the unity of their real values.
Yes, but why expect unity? Clearly there is psychological variation amongst humans, and I should think it a vastly improbable coincidence that none of it has anything to do with real values.
Well, of course I don't mean literal unity, but the examples that immediately jump to mind of different things about which people care (what Tim said) are not representative of their real values.
As for the thesis above, its motivation can be stated thusly: If you can't be wrong, you can never get better.
How do you know what their real values are? Even after everyone's professed values get destroyed by the truth, it's not at all clear to me that we end up in roughly the same place. Intellectuals like you or I might aspire to growing up to be a superintelligence, while others seem to care more about pleasure. By what standard are we right and they wrong? Configuration space is vast: however much humans might agree with each other on questions of value compared to an arbitrary mind (clustered as we are into a tiny dot of the space of all possible minds), we still disagree widely on all sorts of narrower questions (if you zoom in on the tiny dot, it becomes a vast globe, throughout which we are widely dispersed). And this applies on multiple scales: I might agree with you or Eliezer far more than I would with an arbitrary human (clustered as we are into a tiny dot of the space of human beliefs and values), but ask a still yet narrower question, and you'll see disagreement again. I just don't see how the granting of veridical knowledge is going to wipe away all this difference into triviality. Some might argue that while we can want all sorts of different things for ourselves, we might be able to agree on some meta-level principles on what we want to do: we could agree to have a diverse society. But this doesn't seem likely to me either; that kind of type distinction doesn't seem to be built into human values. What could possibly force that kind of convergence?
Okay, I'm writing this one down.
Your conclusion may be right, but the HedWeb isn't strong evidence -- as far as I recall David Pearce holds a philosophically flawed belief called "psychological hedonism" that says all humans are motivated by is pleasure and pain and therefore nothing else matters, or some such. So I would say that his moral system has not yet had to withstand a razing attempt from all the truth hordes that are out there roaming the Steppes of Fact.
If "the thesis above" is the unity of values, this is not an argument. (I agree with ZM.)
It's an argument for it's being possible that behavior isn't representative of the actual values. That actual values are more united than the behaviors is a separate issue.
It seems to me that it's an appeal to the good consequences of believing that you can be wrong.
Well, obviously. So I'm now curious about what do you read in the discussion, so that you see this remark as worth making?
That the discussion was originally about whether the unity of values is true; that you moved from this to whether we should believe in it without clearly marking the change; that this is very surprising to me, since you seem elsewhere to favor epistemic over instrumental rationality.
I'm uncertain as to how to parse this, a little redundancy please! My best guess is that you are saying that I moved the discussion from the question of the fact of ethical unity of humankind, to the question of whether we should adopt a belief in the ethical unity of humankind.
Let's review the structure of the argument. First, there is psychological unity of humankind, in-born similarity of preferences. Second, there is behavioral diversity, with people apparently caring about very different things. I state that the ethical diversity is less than the currently observed behavioral diversity. Next, I anticipate the common belief of people not trusting in the possibility of being morally wrong; simplifying:
To this I reply with "If you can't be wrong, you can never get better." This is not an endorsement to self-deceivingly "believe" that you can be wrong, but an argument for it being a mistake to believe that you can never be morally wrong, if it's possible to get better.
Human values are frequently in conflict with each other - which is the main explanation for all the fighting and wars in human history.
The explanation for this is pretty obvious: humans are close relatives of animals whose main role in life has typically been ensuring the survival and reproducion of their genes.
Unfortunately, everyone behaves as though they want to maximise the representation of their own genome - and such values conflict with the values of practically every other human on the planet, except perhaps for a few close relatives - which explains cooperation within families.
This doesn't seem particularly complicated to me. What exactly is the problem?
Are you suggesting that you still think that the cited material is correct?!?
The supporting genetic argument is wrong as well. I explain in more detail here:
http://alife.co.uk/essays/species_unity/
As far as I can tell, it is based on a whole bunch of wishful thinking intended to make the idea of Extrapolated Volition seem more plausible, by minimising claims that there will be goal conflicts between living humans. With a healthy dose of "everyone's equal" political-corectness mixed in for the associated warm fuzzy feelings.
All fun stuff - but marketing, not science.
I recommend making this a top level post, but expand a little more on this implications of your view versus Eliezer's and C&T's. This could be done in a follow-up post.
It would be great if you could expand on this.
Some people tend to value things that people happen to have in common, others are more likely to value things which people have less in common.
You may be right. If so, fixing it requires greater specificity. If you have time to write top-level posts that would be great. Regardless, I value the contributions you make in the comments.