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Sophronius comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Am I sure that some political questions have clear cut answers? Well, yes... of course. Just because someone points at a factual question and says "that's political!" doesn't magically cause that question to fall into a special subcategory of questions that can never be answered. That just seems really obvious to me.
It's much harder to give examples that everyone here will agree on of course, and which won't cause another of those stupid block-downvoting sprees, but I can give it a try:
-My school gym teacher once tried to tell me that there is literally no difference between boys and girls except for what's between their legs. I have heard similar claims from gender studies classes. That counts as obviously false, surely?
-A guy in college tried to convince me that literally any child could be raised to be Mozart. More generally, the whole "blank slate" notion where people claim that genes don't matter at all. Can we all agree that this is false? Regardless of whether you see yourself as left or right or up or down?
-Women should be allowed to apply for the same jobs as men. Surely even people who think that women are less intelligent than men on average should agree with this? Even though in the past it was a hot-button issue?
-People should be allowed to do in their bedroom whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone. Is this contentious? It shouldn't be.
Do you agree that the above list gives some examples of political questions that every rational person should nonetheless agree with?
No, I don't. To explain why, let me point out that you list of four questions neatly divides into two halves.
Your first two questions are empirically testable questions about what reality is. As such they are answerable by the usual scienc-y means and a rational person will have to accept the answers.
Your last two questions are value-based questions about what should be. They are not answerable by science and the answers are culturally determined. It is perfectly possible to be very rational and at the same time believe that, say, homosexuality is a great evil.
Rationality does not determine values.
We seem to disagree on a fundamental level. I reject your notion of a strict fact-value distinction: I posit to you that all statements are either reducible to factual matters or else they are meaningless as a matter of logical necessity. Rationality indeed does not determine values, in the same way that rationality does not determine cheese, but questions about morality and cheese should both be answered in a rational and factual manner all the same.
If someone tells me that they grew up in a culture where they were taught that eating cheese is a sin, then I'm sorry to be so blunt about it (ok, not really) but their culture is stupid and wrong.
Interesting. That's a rather basic and low-level disagreement.
So, let's take a look at Alice and Bob. Alice says "I like the color green! We should paint all the buildings in town green!". Bob says "I like the color blue! We should paint all the buildings in town blue!". Are these statements meaningless? Or are they reducible to factual matters?
By the way, your position was quite popular historically. The Roman Catholic church was (and still is) a big proponent.
These statements are not meaningless. They are reducible to factual matters. "I like the colour blue" is a factual statement about Bob's preferences which are themselves reducible to the physical locations of atoms in the universe (specifically Bob's brain). Presumably Bob is correct in his assertion, but if I know Bob well enough I might point out that he absolutely detests everything that is the colour blue even though he honestly believes he likes the colour blue. The statement would be false in that case.
Furthermore, the statement "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!" follows logically from his previous statement about his preferences regarding blueness. Certainly, the more people are found to prefer blueness over greenness, the more evidence this provides in favour of the claim "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!" which is itself reducible to "A large number of people including myself prefer for the buildings in this town to be blue, and I therefore favour painting them in this colour!"
Contrast the above with the statement "I like blue, therefore we should all have cheese", which is also a should claim but which can be rejected as illogical. This should make it clear that should statements are not all equally valid, and that they are subject to logical rigour just like any other claim.
Let's introduce Charlie.
"I think women should be barefoot and pregnant" is a factual statement about Charlie's preferences which are themselves reducible to the physical locations of atoms in the universe (specifically Charlie's brain).
Futhermore, the statement "We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant" follows logically from Charlie's previous statement about his preferences regarding women.
I would expect you to say that Charlie is factually wrong. In which way is he factually wrong and Bob isn't?
The statement "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!" is not a claim in need of evidence. It is a command, an expression of what Bob thinks should happen. It has nothing to do with how many people think the same.
Charlie is, presumably, factually correct in that he thinks that he holds that view. However, while preferences regarding colour are well established, I am sceptical regarding the claim that this is an actual terminal preference that Charlie holds. It is possible that he finds pregnant barefeeted women attractive, in which case his statement gives valid information regarding his preferences which might be taken into account by others: In this case it is meaningful. Alternatively, if he were raised to think that this is a belief one ought to hold then the statement is merely signalling politics and is therefore of an entirely different nature.
"I like blue and want the town to be painted blue" gives factual info regarding the universe. "Women ought to be pregnant because my church says so!" does not have the primary goal of providing info, it has the goal of pushing politics.
Imagine a person holding a gun to your head and saying "You should give me your money". Regardless of his use of the word "should", he is making an implicit logical argument:
1) Giving me your money reduces your chances of getting shot by me
2) You presumably do not want to get shot
3) Therefore, you should give me your money
If you respond to the man by saying that morality is relative, you are rather missing the point.
I think you are missing the subtle hidden meanings of everyday discourse. Imagine Bob saying that the town should be painted blue. Then, someone else comes with arguments for why the town should not be painted Blue. Bob eventually agrees. "You are right", he says, "that was a dumb suggestion". The fact that exchanges like this happen all the time shows that Bob's statement is not just a meaningless expression, but rather a proposal relying on implicit arguments and claims. Specifically, it relies on enough people in the village sharing his preference for blue houses that the notion will be taken seriously. If Bob did not think this to be the case, he probably would not have said what he did.
Given that you know absolutely nothing about Charlie, a player in a hypothetical scenario, I find your scepticism entirely unwarranted. Fighting the hypothetical won't get you very far.
So, is Charlie factually wrong? On the basis of what would you determine that Charlie's belief is wrong and Bob's isn't?
Why would I respond like that? What does the claim that morality is relative have to do with threats of bodily harm?
In this context I don't care about the subtle hidden meanings. People who believe they know the Truth and have access to the Sole Factually Correct Set of Values tend to just kill others who disagree. Or at the very least marginalize them and make them third-class citizens. All in the name of the Glorious Future, of course.
Well, given that Charlie indeed genuinely holds that preference, then no he is not wrong to hold that preference. I don't even know what it would mean for a preference to be wrong. Rather, his preferences might conflict with preferences of others, who might object to this state of reality by calling it "wrong", which seems like the mind-projection fallacy to me. There is nothing mysterious about this.
Similarly, the person in the original example of mine is not wrong to think men kissing each other is icky, but he IS wrong to conclude that there is therefore some universal moral rule that men kissing each other is bad. Again, just because rationality does not determine preferences, does not mean that logic and reason do not apply to morality!
I believe you have pegged me quite wrongly, sir! I only care about truth, not Truth. And yes, I do have access to some truths, as of course do you. Saying that logic and reason apply to morality and that therefore all moral claims are not equally valid (they can be factually wrong or entirely nonsensical) is quite a far cry from heralding in the Third Reich. The article on Less Wrong regarding the proper use of doubt seems pertinent here.
I am confused. Did I misunderstand you or did you change your mind?
Earlier you said that "should" kind of questions have single correct answers (which means that other answers are wrong). A "preference" is more or less the same thing as a "value" in this context, and you staked out a strong position:
Since statements of facts can be correct or wrong and you said there is no "fact-value distinction", then values (and preferences) can be correct or wrong as well. However in the parent post you say
If you have a coherent position in all this, I don't see it.
Okay, yeah, so belief in belief is a thing. We can profess opinions that we've been taught are virtuous to hold without deeply integrating them into our worldview; and that's probably increasingly common these days as traditional belief systems clank their way into some sort of partial conformity with mainstream secular ethics. But at the same time, we should not automatically assume that anyone professing traditional values -- or for that matter unusual nontraditional ones -- is doing so out of self-interest or a failure to integrate their ethics.
Setting aside the issues with "terminal value" in a human context, it may well be that post-Enlightenment secular ethics are closer in some absolute sense to a human optimal, and that a single optimal exists. I'm even willing to say that there's evidence for that in the form of changing rates of violent crime, etc., although I'm sure the reactionaries in the audience will be quick to remind me of the technological and demographic factors with their fingers on the scale. But I don't think we can claim to have strong evidence for this, in view of the variety of ethical systems that have come before us and the generally poor empirical grounding of ethical philosophy.
Until we do have that sort of evidence, I view the normative component of our ethics as fallible, and certainly not a good litmus test for general rationality.
On the contrary, I think it's quite reasonable to assume that somebody who bases their morality on religious background has not integrated these preferences and is simply confused. My objection here is mainly in case somebody brings up a more extreme example. In these ethical debates, somebody always (me this time, I guess) brings up the example of Islamic sub-groups who throw acid in the faces of their daughters. Somebody always ends up claiming that "well that's their culture, you know, you can't criticize that. Who are you to say that they are wrong to do so?". In that case, my reply would be that those people do not actually have a preference for disfigured daughters, they merely hold the belief that this is right as a result of their religion. This can be seen from the fact that the only people who do this hold more or less the same set of religious beliefs. And given that the only ones who hold that 'preference' do so as a result of a belief which is factually false, I think it's again reasonable to say: No, I do not respect their beliefs and their culture is wrong and stupid.
The point is not so much whether there is one optimum, but rather that some cultures are better than others and that progress is in fact possible. If you agree with that, we have already closed most of the inferential distance between us. :)
There's some subtlety here. I believe that ethical propositions are ultimately reducible to physical facts (involving idealized preference satisfaction, although I don't think it'd be productive to dive into the metaethical rabbit hole here), and that cultures' moral systems can in principle be evaluated in those terms. So no, culture isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card. But that works both ways, and I think it's very likely that many of the products of modern secular ethics are as firmly tied to the culture they come from as would be, say, an injunction to stone people who wear robes woven from two fibers. We don't magically divorce ourselves from cultural influence when we stop paying attention to the alleged pronouncements of the big beardy dude in the sky. For these reasons I try to be cautious about -- though I wouldn't go so far as to say "skeptical of" -- claims of ethical progress in any particular domain.
The other fork of this is stability of preference across individuals. I know I've been beating this drum pretty hard, but preference is complicated; among other things, preferences are nodes in a deeply nested system that includes a number of cultural feedback loops. We don't have any general way of looking at a preference and saying whether or not it's "true". We do have some good heuristics -- if a particular preference appears only in adherents of a certain religion, and their justification for it is "the Triple Goddess revealed it to us", it's probably fairly shallow -- but they're nowhere near good enough to evaluate every ethical proposition, especially if it's close to something generally thought of as a cultural universal.
The Wikipedia page on acid throwing describes it as endemic to a number of African and Central and South Asian countries, along with a few outside those regions, with religious cultures ranging from Islam through Hinduism and Buddhism. You may be referring to some subset of acid attacks (the word "daughter" doesn't appear in the article), but if there is one, I can't see it from here.
Even if people don't have fully integrated beliefs in destructive policies, their beliefs can be integrated enough to lead to destructive behavior.
The Muslims who throw acid in their daughters' faces may not have an absolute preference for disfigured daughters, but they may prefer disfigured daughters over being attacked by their neighbors for permitting their daughters more freedom than is locally acceptable-- or prefer to not be attacked by the imagined opinions (of other Muslims and/or of Allah) which they're carrying in their minds.
Also, even though it may not be a terminal value, I'd say there are plenty of people who take pleasure in hurting people, and more who take pleasure in seeing other people hurt.
Assuming "should" is meant in a moral sense, we can say that "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!" is in fact a claim in need of evidence. Specifically, it says (to 2 decimal places) that we would all be better off / happier / flourish more if the buildings are painted blue. This is certainly true if it turns out the majority of the town really likes blue, so that they would be happier, but it does not entirely follow from Bob's claim that he likes blue—if the rest of the town really hated blue, then it would be reasonable to say that their discomfort outweighed his happiness. In this case he would be factually incorrect to say "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!".
In contrast, you can treat "We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant" as a claim in need of evidence, and in this case we can establish it as false. Most obviously because the proposed situation would not be very good for women, and we shouldn't do something that harms half the human race unnecessarily.
That's just looking at one of the direct consequences, accepting for the sake of argument that most women would prefer not to be "barefoot and pregnant". The problem is that, for these kinds of major social changes, the direct effects tend to be dominated by indirect effects and your argument makes no attempt to analyze the indirect effects.
Technically you are correct, so you can read my above argument as figuratively "accurate to one decimal place". The important thing is that there's nothing mysterious going on here in a linguistic or metaethical sense.
But in a practical sense these things can't be computed from first principals, so it is necessary to rely on tradition at least to some extent.
<not totally serious>Revealed preferences of women buying shoes and contraception?</not totally serious>
Depends on the context :-D In China a few centuries ago a woman quite reasonably might prefer to be barefoot (as opposed to have her feet tightly bound to disfigure them) and pregnant (as opposed to barren which made her socially worthless).
Not at all and I don't see why would you assume a specific morality.
Bob says "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!" to mean that it would make him happier and he doesn't care at all about what other people around think about the idea.
Bob is not a utilitarian :-)
Exactly the same thing -- Charlie is not a utilitarian either. He thinks he will be better off in the world where women are barefoot and pregnant.
I think we're pretty close to someone declaring that egoism isn't a valid moral position, again.
I wonder if that someone will make the logical step to insisting that moral egoists should be reeducated to make them change to a "valid" moral position :-/
But he says "We should" not "I want" because there is the implication that I should also paint the buildings blue. But if the only reason I should do so is because he wants me to, it raises the question of why I should do what he wants. And if he answers "You should do what I want because it's what I want", it's a tautology.
Imagine Vladimir Putin visiting a Russian village and declaring "We should paint all the buildings blue!"
Suddenly "You should do what I want because it's what I want" is not a tautology any more but an excellent reason to get out your paint brush :-/
I cannot speak for Sophronius of course, but here is one possible answer. It may be that morality is "objective" in the sense that Eliezer tried to defend in the metaethics sequence. Roughly, when someone says X is good they mean that X is part of of a loosely defined set of things that make humans flourish, and by virtue of the psychological unity of mankind we can be reasonably confident that this is a more-or-less well-defined set and that if humans were perfectly informed and rational they would end up agreeing about which things are in it, as the CEV proposal assumes.
Then we can confidently say that both Alice and Bob in your example are objectively mistaken (it is completely implausible that CEV is achieved by painting all buildings the color that Alice or Bob happens to like subjectively the most, as opposed to leaving the decision to the free market, or perhaps careful science-based urban planning done by a FAI). We can also confidently say that some real-world expressions of values (e.g. "Heretics should be burned at the stake", which was popular a few hundred years ago) are false. Others are more debatable. In particular, the last two examples in Sophronius' list are cases where I am reasonably confident that his answers are the correct ones, but not as close to 100%-epsilon probability as I am on the examples I gave above.
Well, I can't speak for other people but when I say "X is good" I mean nothing of that sort. I am pretty sure the majority of people on this planet don't think of "good" this way either.
Nope, you can say. If your "we" includes me then no, "we" can't say that.
By "Then we can confidently say" I just meant "Assuming we accept the above analysis of morality, then we can confidently say…". I am not sure I accept it myself; I proposed it as a way one could believe that normative questions have objective answers without straying as far form the general LW worldview as being a Roman Catholic.
By the way, the metaethical analysis I outlined does not require that people think consciously of something like CEV whenever they use the word "good". It is a proposed explication in the Carnapian sense of the folk concept of "good" in the same way that, say, VNM utility theory is an explication of "rational".
If "should" has a meaning, then those two questions can be correctly and incorrectly answered with respect to the particular sense of "should" employed by Sophronius in the text. It would be more accurate to say that you can be very rational and still disapprove of homosexuality (as disapproval is an attitude, as opposed to a propositional statement).
Maybe. But that's a personal "should", specific to a particular individual and not binding on anyone else.
Sophronius asserts that values (and so "should"s) can be right or wrong without specifying a referent, just unconditionally right or wrong the way physics laws work.
What does this mean, "not binding"? What is a personal "should"? Is that the same as a personal "blue"?
A personal "should" is "I should" -- as opposed to "everyone should". If I think I should, say, drink more, that "should" is not binding on anyone else.
Well, if you should drink more because you're dehydrated, then you're right to say that not everyone is bound by that, but people in similar circumstances are (i.e. dehydrated, with no other reason not to drink). Or are you saying that there are ultimately personal shoulds?
Yes, of course there are.
'Of course' nothing, I find that answer totally shocking. Can you think of an example? Or can you explain how such shoulds are supposed to work?
So far as I understand it, for every 'should' there is some list of reasons why. If two people have the same lists of reasons, then whatever binds one binds them both. So there's nothing personal about shoulds, except insofar as we rarely have all the same reasons to do or not do something.
Doesn't take much to shock you :-)
Sure. Let's say there is a particular physical place (say, a specific big boulder on the shore of a lake) where I, for some reason, feel unusually calm, serene, and happy. It probably triggers some childhood memories and associations. I like this place. I should spend more time there.
No two people are the same. Besides, the importance different people attach to the same reasons varies greatly.
And, of course, to bind another with your "should" requires you to know this other very very well. To the degree I would argue is unattainable.
But the original context was "we should". Sophronius obviously intended the sentence to refer to everyone. I don't see anything relative about his use of words.
<sorry, mixed up two sub-threads>
Correct, and that's why I said
I'm struggling to figure out how to communicate the issue here.
If you agree that what Sophronius intended to say was "everyone should" why would you describe it as a personal "should"? (And what does "binding on someone" even mean, anyway?)
Well, perhaps you should just express your point, provided you have one? Going in circles around the word "should" doesn't seem terribly useful.
The question “should people be allowed to do in their bedroom whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm [directly] anyone [else]?” (extra words added to address Vaniver's point) can be split into two: “which states of the world would allowing people to do in their bedroom etc. result in?”, and “which states of the world are good?”
Now, it's been claimed that most disagreements about policies are about the former and all neurologically healthy people would agree about the latter if they thought about it clearly enough -- which would make Sophronius's claim below kind-of sort-of correct -- but I'm no longer sure of that.
First, I don't think this claim is true. Second, I'm not sure what "neurologically healthy" means. I know a lot of people I would call NOT neurotypical. And, of course, labeling people mentally sick for disagreeing with the society's prevailing mores was not rare in history.
This is what you are missing. The simple fact that someone disagrees does not mean they are mentally sick or have fundamentally different value systems. It could equally well mean that either they or the "prevailing social mores" are simply mistaken. People have been known to claim that 51 is a prime number, and not because they actually disagree about what makes a number prime, but just because they were confused at the time.
It's not reasonable to take people's claims that "by 'should' I mean that X maximises utility for everyone" or "by 'should' I mean that I want X" at face value, because people don't have access to or actually use logical definitions of the everyday words they use, they "know it when they see it" instead.
No, I don't think I'm missing this piece. The claim is very general: ALL "neurologically healthy people".
People can certainly be mistaken about matters of fact. So what?
Of course not, the great majority of people are not utilitarians and have no interest in maximizing utility for everyone. In normal speech "should" doesn't mean anything like that.
In all of these cases, the people breaking with the conclusion you presumably believe to be obvious often do so because they believe the existing research to be hopelessly corrupt. This is of course a rather extraordinary statement, and I'm pretty sure they'd be wrong about it (that is, as sure as I can be with a casual knowledge of each field and a decent grasp of statistics), but bad science isn't exactly unheard of. Given the right set of priors, I can see a rational person holding each of these opinions at least for a time.
In the latter two, they might additionally have different standards for "should" than you're used to.
The standard reply to this is that many people hurt themselves by their choices, and that justifies intervention. (Even if we hastily add an "else" after "anyone," note that hurting yourself hurts anyone who cares about you, and thus the set of acts which harm no one is potentially empty.)
Including as basso singers? ;-)
(As you worded your sentence, I would agree with it, but I would also add "But employers should be allowed to not hire them.")
I would have gone for "slavery is bad"
It's wrong on a biological level. From my physiology lecture: Woman blink twice as much as men. The have less water in their bodies.
So you are claiming either: "Children are no people" or "Pedophilia should be legal". I don't think any of those claims has societal approval let alone is a clear-cut issue.
But even if you switch the statement to the standard: "Consenting adults should be allowed to do in their bedroom whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone" The phrases consenting (can someone with >1.0 promille alcohol consent?) and harm (emotional harm exists and not going tested for STD's and having unprotected sex has the potential to harm) are open to debate.
The maximal effect of a strong cognitive intervention might very will bring the average person to Mozart levels. We know relatively little about doing strong intervention to improve human mental performance.
But genes to matter.
It depends on what roles. If a movie producer casts actors for a specific role, gender usually matters a big deal.
A bit more controversial but I think there are cases where it's useful for men to come together in an environment where they don't have to signal stuff to females.
Well, I suppose Sophronius could argue that pedophilia should be legal, after all many things (especially related to sex) that were once socially unacceptable are now considered normal.
Even if he thinks that it should be legal, it's no position where it's likely that everyone will agree. Sophronius wanted to find examples where everyone can agree.
No, he was listing political, i.e., controversial, questions with clear cut answers. I don't know what Sophronius considers clear cut.
Really? Gives his history I think the answer is pretty clear that he's not the kind of person who's out to argue that legalizing pedophila is a clear cut issue.
He also said something about wanting to avoid the kind of controversy that causes downvoting.
I'd expect them to assert that paedophilia does harm. That's the obvious resolution.
Court are not supposed to investigate whether the child is emotionally harmed by the experience but whether he or she is under a certain age threshold. You could certainly imagine a legal system where psychologists are always asked whether a given child is harmed by having sex instead of a legal system that makes the decision through an age criteria.
I think a more reasonable argument for the age boundary isn't that every child gets harmed but that most get harmed and that having a law that forbids that behavior is preventing a lot of children from getting harmed.
I don't think you are a bad person to arguing that we should have a system that focuses on the amount of harm done instead of focusing on an arbitrary age boundary but that's not the system we have that's backed by societal consensus.
We also don't put anybody in prison for having sex with a 19-year old breaking her heart and watching as they commit suicide. We would judge a case like that as a tragedy but we wouldn't legally charge the responsible person with anything.
The concept of consent is pretty important for our present system. Even in cases where no harm is done we take a breach of consent seriously.
Actually I'm under the impression that the ‘standard’ resolution is not about the “harm” part but about the “want” part: it's assumed that people below a certain age can't want sex, to the point that said age is called the age of consent and sex with people younger than that is called a term which suggests it's considered a subset of sex with people who don't want it.
(I'm neither endorsing nor mocking this, just describing it.)
I think your impression is mistaken.
Nope. It is assumed that people below a certain age cannot give informed consent. In other words, they are assumed to be not capable of good decisions and to be not responsible for the consequences. What they want is irrelevant. If you're below the appropriate age of consent, you cannot sign a valid contract, for example.
Below the age of consent you basically lack the legal capacity to agree to something.
I assumed “want” to mean ‘consent’ in that sentence.
That's not what these words mean, not even close.
I think it's more likely he was misusing the word “literally”/wearing belief as attire (in technical terms, bullshitting) than he actually really believed that. After all I guess he could tell boys and girl apart without looking between their legs, couldn't he?
But you can always find harm if you allow for feelings of disgust, or take into account competition in sexual markets (i.e. if having sex with X is a substitute for having sex with Y then Y might be harmed if someone is allowed to have sex with X.)
Ok, that's a fair enough point. Sure, feelings do matter. However, I generally distinguish between genuine terminal preferences and mere surface emotions. The reason for this is that often it is easier/better to change your feelings than for other people to change their behaviour. For example, if I strongly dislike the name James Miller, you probably won't change your name to take my feelings into account.
(At the risk of saying something political: This is the same reason I don't like political correctness very much. I feel that it allows people to frame political discourse purely by being offended.)