Stupid Questions, December 2015

polymathwannabe

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

My possibly stupid question is: "Are some/all of LessWrong's values manufactured?"

Robin Hanson brings up the plasticity of values. Humans exposed to spicy food and social conformity pressures rewire their brain to make the pain pleasurable. The jump from plastic qualia to plastic values is a big one, but it seems plausible. It seems likely that cultural prestige causes people to rewire things like research, studying, etc. as interesting/pleasurable. Perhaps intellectual values and highbrow culture are entirely manufactured values. This seems mildly troubling to me, but it would explain why rationality and logic are so hard to come by. Perhaps the geek to nerd metamorphosis involves a more substantial utility function modification than merely acquiring a taste for something new.

I don't think that manufactured is a useful word here. If I were to try to use it, I would say that any LessWrong value that you gained from LessWrong was "manufactured in you". I would also say that any value commonly expressed on LessWrong has been shaped beyond the form in which it was originally conceived, and 'manufactured' in this sense.

There is no real sense that you can can any value you hold is not manufactured, unless you are talking about values like eating and breathing.

P.S. As far an a universal human culture goes, we can say with ... (read more)

1mwengler10y

I think many of LW values are manufactured. I think you detect which are most manufactured by looking at the ones not widely held by other humans. Values like "you should get your head frozen when you die" are probably at the most manufactured end as they are nearly unique to LW and fellow travelers. Values like polyamory are pretty manufactured by do show up in a larger minority of non-LW types than head freezing. Values like a world with 3**3 created AIs in it that are a little happy is better than a world with 1 billion humans in it who are all living quite well are manufactured. Certainly held beyond LW but plenty of people hold the opposite value, that a better world would have a sustainable biologically human population. In my opinion, the human values that are not manufactured are the ones you are born with. They feel more like moral sentiments than coherently stated values, because, I think, you aren't born with ideas, you are born with tendencies to feel certain ways. From your moral sentiments, and discussions with other people, you build ideas that, in my opinion, you think help you explain why you have your moral sentiments. In my opinion you have your moral sentiments, and thinking your value ideas account for them is like being attracted to another person and "thinking" that means they are attracted to you: it is a form of projection, a human bias, very helpful in propagating the species but not particularly well suited to accurately explaining how the world works. It isn't just LW values that are manufactured, in my opinion, all values expressed as ideas are manufactured. This is why they have to be taught to be propagated, no particular set of values expressed as ideas arise spontaneously in a large number of humans.

6Kaj_Sotala10y

Define manufactured? There isn't really any "default" culture to compare current human values to, for which you could say that "these values are manufactured because they don't manifest in the default culture".

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Stupid Questions, December 2015

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Stupid Questions, December 2015

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