Rationality Quotes April 2014

elharo

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

And one new rule:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

And one new rule:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

You have to compare it to the alternatives.

Sure. Let's compare it to the alternative the morality is partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined. By comparison the idea that "history decides what's morally right" is silly.

Marx basically had the idea that you don't need God for an absolute moral system when you can pin it all on history

Yep, he had this idea. That doesn't make it a right idea. Marx had lots of ideas which didn't turn out well.

You observe how history moves. Then you extrapolate. You look at the limit of that function and that limit is the perfect morality.

Oh, so -- keeping in mind we're on LW -- the universe tiled with paperclips might turn out to be the perfect morality? X-D

And remind me, how well does extrapolation of history work?

In the US where Marx didn't have much influence as in Europe there are still a bunch of people who believe in young earth creationism.

Do you, by any chance, believe there is a causal connection between these two observations that you jammed into a single sentence?

Since culture evolves with history there is a lot of overlap between culture determining moralty and history determining morality.

2ChristianKl12y

We didn't talk about right or wrong but silly. [...] Let's do what partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined is not exactly the battle cry under which you can unite people and get them to adopt a new moral framework. It also has the problem of not telling people who want to know what they should do what they should do. [...] Yes, I do think that Marxism and Socialism has a lot to do with spreading atheism in Europe. Socialist governments did make a greater effort to push back religion and make people atheists than democratic governments did. If I hear Dawkins talk how it's important that atheists self identify as being atheists to show the rest of America that one can be an atheist and still a morally good person, than that does indicate to me a problem of American culture that's largely solved in Europe. Socialist activism has a lot to do with why that's the case.

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Rationality Quotes April 2014

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