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I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
You folks probably know how some posters around here, specifically Vladimir_M, often make statements to the effect of:
"There's an opinion on such-and-such topic that's so against the memeplex of Western culture, we can't even discuss it in open-minded, pseudonymous forums like Less Wrong as society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark.
Meanwhile the thought patterns instilled in us by our upbringing would lead us to quickly lose all interest in the censored opinion"
Going by their definition, us blissfully ignorant masses can't even know what exactly those opinions might be, as they would look like basic human decency, the underpinnings of our ethics or some other such sacred cow to us. I might have a few guesses, though, all of them as horrible and sickening as my imagination could produce without overshooting and landing in the realm of comic-book evil:
- Dictatorial rule involving active terror and brutal suppression of deviants having great utility for a society in the long term, by providing security against some great risk or whatever.
- A need for every society to "cull the weak" every once in a while, e.g. exterminating the ~0.5% of its members that rank as weakest against some scale.
- Strict hierarchy in everyday life based on facts from the ansectral environment (men dominating women, fathers having the right of life and death over their children, etc) - Mencius argued in favor of such ruthless practices, e.g. selling children into slavery, in his post on "Pronomianism" and "Antinomianism", stating that all contracts between humans should rather be strict than moral or fair, to make the system stable and predictable; he's quite obsessed with stability and conformity.
- Some public good being created when the higher classes wilfully oppress and humiliate the lower ones in a ceremonial manner
- The bloodshed and lawlessness of periodic large-scale war as a vital "pressure valve" for releasing pent-up unacceptable emotional states and instinctive drives
- Plain ol' unfair discrimination of some group in many cruel, life-ruining ways, likewise as a pressure valve
+: some Luddite crap about dropping to a near-subsistence level in every aspect of civilization and making life a daily struggle for survival
Of course my methodology for coming up with such guesses was flawed and primitive: I simply imagined some of the things that sound the ugliest to me yet have been practiced by unpleasant cultures before in some form. Now, of course, most of us take the absense of these to be utterly crucial to our terminal values. Nevertheless, I hope I have demonstrated to whoever might really have something along these lines (if not necessarily that shocking) on their minds that I'm open to meta-discussion, and very interested how we might engage each other on finding safe yet productive avenues of contact.
Let's do the impossible and think the unthinkable! I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.
P.S. Yeah, Will, I realize that I'm acting roughly in accordance with that one trick you mentioned way back.
P.P.S. Sup Bakkot. U mad? U jelly?
CONCLUSION:
Fuck this Earth, and fuck human biology. I'm not very distressed about anything I saw ITT, but there's still a lot of unpleasant potential things that can only be resolved in one way:
I hereby pledge to get a real goddamn plastic card, not this Visa Electron bullshit the university saddled us with, and donate at least $100 to SIAI until the end of the year. This action will reduce the probability of me and mine having to live with the consequences of most such hidden horrors. Dixi.
Sometimes it's so pleasant to be impulsive.
Amusing observation: even when the comments more or less match my wild suggestions above, I'm still unnerved by them. An awful idea feels harmless if you keep telling yourself that it's just a private delusion, but the moment you know that someone else shares it, matters begin to look much more grave.
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Comments (857)
Individuals and society as a whole would be happier if everyone was drunk most of the time. However as alcoholism is low status we avoid it.
This seems clearly idiotic to me. Not only have we lived through decades where much of society was drinking alcohol at massive rates, we can also look at alcoholism rates in various countries today and they don't exactly correlate to happiness. The cultures in which alcoholism are high status (EG college students for one) don't seem to me to be particularly admirable or sustainable on a society wide level.
We are never actually convinced by the logic of an argument, its pure presentation and rhetoric. We only think we respond to well reasoned arguments because the features we associate with 'well reasoned' are ones that we have been trained to consider authoritative and persuasive.
In short, we're just signalling rationality not being rational.
Empiricism is a bias, by the same token. But it's a bias that works.
The "authoritative and persuasive" kinds of arguments are the arguments that work, that show something about the universe with slightly better accuracy than other kinds of arguments that have been posed. That's why we've adopted them.
Rationality will never be deep. All beliefs and idea procured from rationality are at best transitive.
Total government surveillance would actually increase net happiness in developed countries significantly. (So cameras on every street, and if practical every bedroom. All emails, phone calls etc are kept on record to be examined by police when necessary)
We object to it out of a primal fear of being observed, internalised guilt about our actions and a cultural backlash against authoritarian governments.
After reflection, I think this is my true rejection of total government surveillance. There are plenty of relatively unproblematic actions that are technically illegal but most people do anyway (soft drug use, copyright infringement, etc.), but right now few people are prosecuted so few people are particularly bothered by the laws. Introducing total government surveillance without repealing such laws first would essentially give arbitrary powers to law enforcement.
There's also the problem of industrial espionage. If the government is able to spy on people, then corporations will be able to get the police to spy on people from other corporations.
Funnily enough I'm writing something about the 'right' to privacy right now, and that comic is one of the best principled arguments I've come across. [This may tell you something about the field.]
The counter is that laws can be changed, and a lot of current laws are only popularly accepted because they are unevenly enforced. E.g. if the middle class were at any real risk of arrest from drug possession sentences would be nowhere near as harsh.
Yeah. I'd like to eventually go from unreasonable laws that aren't actually consistently enforced to reasonable laws that are actually consistently enforced, but unless both components switch at the same time there are going to be troubles in the process (arguably worse problems if the enforcement component switches sooner than the reasonableness component). Also, there's the problem that not everybody would agree with which laws would be reasonable, e.g. there are plenty of middle-aged and older people (in Italy at least) who seem to actually believe that marijuana had better stay banned (yes, most of those people probably have only a vague idea of what marijuana actually does, but still).
Make that "centralized governments"; there is in fact no logical contradiction between democracy and total surveillance. Generally, in every case where people consider the Hobbesian Leviathan, they forget that Hobbes himself considered a democratically shaped Leviathan to be somewhat inferior but perfectly possible.
I didn't say there was, just that there is a general societal association between surveillance and bad things. (Surveillance -> Secret Police -> Scary governments doing bad stuff).
I imagine if the dominant cultural narrative of the last century was of centralised and authoritarian but benevolent states social attitudes would be a lot different. As it is all those features are lumped together into totalitarianism in the popular consciousness.
This perception makes people unwilling to support/vote/campaign for privacy reducing options even when there is an obvious net benefit (e.g. DNA and fingerprint databases would solve a lot of crimes at minimal cost in western liberal democracies).
The Self-Righteous Hive Mind
David Brin tells another story about tribalism and expanding horizons.
On the other hand, being in favor of independence for Quebec is liberal if you're in Quebec, and conservative if you're in France.
Sometimes the only ethical course of action is to kill another human being.
I doubt a majority of people even deny this.
The so-called "some posters" were right, but neglected to account for the self-fulfilling effect of drawing attention to the phenomenon. You all are tainting anything identified with this community and preventing good from being done.
Individuals who disregard negative social weight on concepts may privately explore those concepts for overlooked value and have an opportunity to bring that value to broader populations, doing good. But to do so they must persuade populations who still attach negative weight to those things associated with those social concepts to give their idea a try, AND overcome their personal reputation as one who associates with concepts that have negative social weight.
Small groups of individuals who disregard negative social weight on concepts may quietly explore those concepts and so forth. But they have the additional challenge of overcoming the general population's bias against their group, another layer of vilification.
Large groups of individuals who similarly dismiss negative social weight and loudly, indulgently explore such concepts move beyond the label of 'heretic' and under the label 'monster.' Anything associate with them is sullied with guilt-by-association.
This thread bites the hand that feeds it and should be put down with prejudice.
I never actually read anything by Kipling before reading a certain article by Orwell that a fellow LWer mentioned. I must admit I don't consume much poetry in English, yet I was bothered that I knew nothing of the man's work and did some reading after the reference.
I have stumbled upon this poem and thought it appropriate for some of the topics discussed.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Here is the same old mistake of heartfelt but naive conservatism; assuming that the "common sense" and "old good values" of one's day, if they seem to bring such security and are so good at shooting down other naive and dangerous ideas, will be good forever. Yet Kipling's world with all its wisdom ended up impaled on barbed wire, choking on mustard gas and torn to pieces by its own Maxim gun.
And who led it to that hell? Socialists? Unscrupulous wheelers and dealers? Naive young men who wanted to throw out musty old books and change everything for the better? Why, none of the public Kipling used to deride had much to do with it; the gunpowder was lit by those wise old men who carried sacred traditions and led empires. I'm sure that it never even occured to Kipling that, say, Marshal Haig was far more debased, murderous and evil than any of those he railed against.
I was interpreting the poem sub specie aeternitatis rather than in the specific context it was made. To borrow from Robin Hanson, looking at history farmers embracing forager values tend to die out. The Gods of the Copybook Headings do seem to come back.
Now obviously modern technologically progressing industrial civilization seems a sui generis transition, and there are all sorts of good reasons why this time it will be different, but the outside view is Kipling's view in this case.
And don't think we can in principle rule out a farmer future. The often discussed Malthusian em scenario is a future where the Gods of the Market-Place finally abandon their folly and tightly embrace the teachings of the Gods of the Copybook Heading.
But this is a rather over-specific interpretation of the emotional and I would argue even rationalist core of the poem. Namely that being bored with "water will wet us" and "fire will burn" causes major problems since wishful thinking quickly works to disconnects us from viable strategies in reality.
Wait, wait, wait. You are wired as a forager; the farmer culture is a fluke amidst a roaring background of change - just as Lovecraft pointed out. Don't you want to fight? Don't your deepest instincts say that a stagnant, limited order - even a great and proud one - is much less appealing than a chance to end evil or perish, such as trying to build a FAI? Even if we had a recipe to make a stable and conservative society with "farmer" values, would the intellectual elites of our world want such a future? That's like leaving the Babyeaters alone to save your own colony in 3WC. Yes, mercy can kill. But I will embrace it anyway.
There is always a dialectic between "farmer" and "forager" values, but it leads in one direction only. Our common dream will either reign or destroy us.
And what about being bored with "burying the brain once the body is dead", eh? Maybe some fundamentals do brook change, eh? Maybe we should work against them? What does your morality say - not calculation, but intuition?
To clarify when I said abandon their folly, I mean abandon their in the long term (possibly) doomed endeavour. I did not say I would approve of the total victory of farmer values.
I will however say that I have no interest at all in shifting my own values more towards farmer or forager values. So if the current of history is towards one direction I will probably work towards the other.
I have just pointed out that historically this isn't true. Else there would have never been something to call "farmer values" in the first place. I have also given you a scenario that suggest in the future it might not be so.
And in very specific kinds of ways we have, even in modern times, been becoming more and more farmer rather than more and more forager. When it comes to violence we are still pretty clearly moving towards the domesticated farming human rather the violent wild forager (Check out this paper and Pinker's book Better angels of our nature ). To cite another example, when it comes to our workplace we are hyper-farmer in our behaviour compared to say people from the 18th century.
Also it stands to reason that natural selection has significantly and perhaps rapidly shifted humans towards farmer values compared to humans before farming in the last 10 000 years.
Perhaps LessWrong posters basically do. But Humans do not have a common dream. Values differ.
My moral intuitions are frustrated by the mere addition paradox. They are fundamentally broken. Robin Hanson is I think right that a Malthusian em world would be glorious. It is not the best of worlds by a long shot, yet neither is it the worst of worlds, it is a possible outcome and it is a better outcome than most uFAIs.
What if we just shut up and calculate?
EY and RH claim to have done this, but differ in their result. To RH this is a possible future we should be pretty much ok with, while EY thinks he should invest superhuman effort to avoid it. I think we would all be better off if more people on LW thought long and hard about this.
Thanks for the answer. You're certainly wiser than me. Damn, I have so many posts in the pipeline right now; the one with the Warhammer 40k communist eutopia; the one about how "democracy" as in "the rule of the People" is, while being quite real and attainable, a primarily economical and partly cultural matter and has nothing to do with surface ideology and political window-dressing; the one about how I'll likely end up choosing partial wireheading as an answer to whatever tomorrow throws at me... unfortunately, there are real life concerns in the way, but I promise I'll deliver someday.
Of course they do. But again:
We are significantly and systematically biased in how we evaluate if the fundamentals have changed.
This is the point of the poem as I read it.
Kipling's son died in the war. And he wrote a multi-volume history "The Irish Guards in The Great War". I think he had ample opportunity to reflect on Haig as a human being. My impression, from Kipling's postwar writing, is that he thought that the war was necessary to restrain the Germans.
And I wouldn't be quite so quick to talk about "Kipling's world...being torn to pieces." It's easy, in retrospect, to see the War as a sharp cataclysm. But it might not have looked quite so drastic at the time. The empire didn't start shedding territory for another twenty or thirty years -- and not until after another world war.
I think it's a mistake to cast Kipling as a stuffy Colonel Blimp. He was quite interested in technology and progress. He was aware that there were other societies, that disagreed with Victorian England about many things. He wasn't particularly a believer in the Church. He had enough detachment from his surroundings to make his perspective distinctive and interesting.
It was an enormous, game-changing shock to European mentality; the events of the 30s and 40s would've hardly been possible without it - in any form, Fascism or no Fascism. See e.g. The First World War by Martin Gilbert, a popular history I, personally speaking, liked a huge lot.
As for Britain, it partly wrecked and partly transformed a generation of young men, and dealt a massive psychological blow, from which stemmed the motive for Appearsement twenty years later, and the general slow acceptance that maybe the days of the globe painted red were over. It was time to hunker down, step off the stage, and with good reason; over the next few years, all of Europe began to realize that God would not stop anything man does, or anything that could be done to man.
That latter fact is exactly what Orwell writes about in the essay too, at the point where he quotes "Recessional" to illustrate how Kipling was behind the times in not learning the new age's awful lessons.
Actually, technically yes.
The only trustworthy, effective sort of chief executive - whether for a small business or a major government - is a sociopath who considers the whole enterprise his (or her, although it's a statistical inevitability that there will be more qualified men) personal property, including the lesser employees or citizens. Anyone capable of genuine compassion is proportionately incapable of unbiased strategic thought. Ideally the sadistic god-kings would also be biologically immortal, but for practical purposes a delusion supported by superstitious anagathic practices would be sufficient; the real societal cost of, say, ritually eating a young child's heart every three months would be trifling compared to the benefits of binding decisions being made by someone who genuinely and incorruptibly wants to maximize the long-term productivity of society as a whole, if only for his own amusement.
Orwell predicted that in such a situation the god-kings would be so corrupted by power that they'd stop caring about efficiency and personal wealth at all, and instead would turn to deriving pleasure from sadism alone. I don't know whether that's right, but history seems to suggest that power indeed drives men from mere cruelty to insanity.
That's what happens with someone who's obsessed with domination and control, yes. I'm talking about someone who is completely confident in their mastery of the situation, regardless of whether that mastery is acknowledged. Someone who doesn't care whether the minions call themselves "friend" or "enemy," whether they're loyal or rebellious, just pushes the right buttons to maximize productivity.
I don't think that any actual sociopaths, as observed in society, ever want to maximise efficiency as an end in itself, when it doesn't coincide with their other personal goals. This would absolutely require not selfish whim, but a complex commitment, both an intellectual and emotional one, which is usually labeled as "obsession" - not a generally approved trait - yet is mostly found in extraordinarily mentally developed people, not deficient ones.
Consider Albert Speer; he was thought an administrative and organisational prodigy by many, and even his detractors admit his intelligence and talent (and yes, no opinion of his subordinates would've likely bothered him) - and yet, despite his limited and naively technocratic outlook at first, when he became Armament Minister, he clearly struggled with his conscience to ignore the criminality of Nazi regime, tried to improve conditions for the slave workers that he employed, and even overturned Hitler's orders to destroy German infrastructure near the end of the war. Do you think that a human being could be found who would optimize arms production better than Speer, yet remained more loyal than him to a cause neither logical, nor moral (for any definition of "moral" quickly available to us), nor feasible?
In short, I think that what you demand is a greater contradiction in traits and behavior than Speer or other technocrats of his caliber displayed - almost certainly greater than what humanity's historically observed diversity permits.
-- H.P. Lovecraft
The same would apply to cuckoldry.
New topics:
We know so little about our minds that conscious efforts to improve them are likely to do damage. Actually, I consider that an exaggeration, but I do think that ill effects of following socially supported advice are likely to be kept private and/or ignored for a very long time.
We know almost nothing about the effects of sex for children and teenagers.
Black people are actually genetically superior in important ways-- they've had such bad luck from geography and racism that their advantages don't show up as superior results.
Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.
Following up on the "CEV is impossible" part of the discussion: The only thing an FAI can do is protect us from UFAI and possibly other gross existential threats.
I agree the majority of the damage caused by cuckolding/cheating is self created (though the pain is still real). However I do think there is a rational albeit selfish reason to be opposed to partner's cheating. If your partner cheats on you she/he may find out she/he prefers the other person to you. Or at the very least your inadaquaces may become clearer if your partner gets involved with somoene else.
The polyamory community suggests that these issues can be manged. But there is a plausible rational argument that outside relationships reduce stability, at least for some people.
Also I agree that black people are obviously superior in several ways. Black men seem clearly the most athletic overall. Subjectively they are also the hottest imo :)
Another risk of polyamory is increasing the odds of getting involved with someone who is very bad news.
On the other hand, if you choose to be monogamous, then the consequences of a bad partner are more serious.
Sharp. I've seen this especially in dieting/weightlifting communities.
I picked it up from fat acceptance.
The Science of Yoga (which generally supports yoga as valuable) has a chapter about the risks of yoga-- which are much higher than a lot of people in yoga knew. These days, at least some yoga teachers are working on making it safer.
Men probably have systematic preferences for how to treat their children according to traits the children do or do not posses and a variety of cues that have evolved to ensure they invest in genetically related children.
But this may have little to do with conscious awareness of such information or emotional distress caused by it.
"Teenagers" doesn't really describe anything in the real world except perhaps a subculture.
Well we already have data about the social status of people who propose such theories.
Clearly Jared Diamond is a shunned outcast and publicly apologized for his inappropriate speculation.
"Underdog is actually better but has just had bad luck" or "overdog is only winning because he is evil" is a narrative humans love and are significantly biased towards. Unless overdogs actually consider it plausible that they will be threatened even they derive status from claiming they where just lucky. Or that most (but clearly not them personally) overdogs are unethical.
Metternich would approve!
Maybe not everywhere in the real world; but in most industrialized countries, a looooong time does elapse from puberty until independence from parents.
But this period doesn't usually end in teen years.
Interestingly, that Diamond quote comes shortly after his dismissal of previous attempts at "big history" for being "racist".
Which the New Guinea quote is a sarcastic parody of. It's a "one could just as easily say" gambit. I don't have much time for GG&S, but you have to be willfully misreading that passage- or deaf to tone and context- to interpret it as a paen to the New Guinean master race.
I am a fan of Diamond's work in general and GG&S in particular. It sure doesn't feel like like I am "willfully misreading" him. I would lean more towards being "deaf to tone and context" (although it seems unlikely that I don't understand the context, since I have read the entire book and watched the documentary based on it). On the other hand, I have been accused of being too literal in the past, so I can't merely dismiss your criticism.
On a related note, I must admit that I was rather disappointed with Diamond for dismissing previous attempts to answer the "cargo question" for being racist rather than being false (which is question-begging).
Upvoted for saying the only thing in this whole thread that makes my inner animal go "aaaaugh I must fight against people who say that". I didn't know I had it in me.
Have heard it claimed that that is partly true of statutory rape.
Did that for me too.
Hot damn!
Thanks for letting me know.
The funny thing is, I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption-- that people shouldn't use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they're raising. See also the fairly successful efforts to reduce the stigma of bastardy.
To extend the idea, we could say that just about all the pain people feel about status-lowering events is self-fulfilling prophecy, but this version less likely to sting because it isn't about something specific.
Just for fun, flip it over. People aren't nearly sensitive enough about their status. If people cared more about their rankings, they'd do a lot more, and enough of it would be worthwhile (by those entirely rational geek standards which are opposed to the bad mainstream standards) that there'd be a net gain.
One more: You can't tell anything important about a person by their taste in art, fiction, music, etc.
Well, one of the main emotional objections to cuckoldry is feeling betrayed and lied to, which isn't the case in adoption. I don't think being lied to is only an issue due to unclear thought, even without the status issue.
Why stop at cuckoldry, where the child is still genetically half one's spouse's? Outright cuckcooing! Swap everybody's kids around in the hospital!
(If I lived in a world where that was regularly done and I knew it, I would not have a bio-kid; I'd adopt a five-year-old and exercise some control over what sort of person I'm inviting into my home that way.)
Why not take it another step further? Why have random non-licensed people raise children? We usually don't let just anyone adopt kids, in my country one needs to go through a lot of hoops and be financially capable of supporting a child before getting on the list. In practice one demonstrates conscientiousness, a strong desire to have children and financial independence. If all children are adopted children, why not do this? Surely this should only be done by teams of qualified experts in tandem with carefully chosen adoptive parents?
Eugenics FTW.
Terrible idea to try actually implement in a multicultural society, since for visible minorities it amounts to cultural genocide. What are the odds the child they get actually assimilate to their culture if he can easily pass in greater society as a member of the privileged one?
Unless one factors in ethnicity in who gets who... which is just a horrible can of worms.
It sounds very much like you're saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren't forced into it by non-acceptance. If that is what you meant, wouldn't that imply that destroying that minority culture is better than forcing people to continue being part of it?
Stolen generation isn't relevant here since it wasn't reciprocal - the children were taken, not replaced by white children who were then raised in Aboriginal commmunities.
Not really, just that for some minorities implementation of such a policy would produce non-acceptance rates would result in genocidal (by the UN definition of the legal terms rather than colloquial use) levels of assimilation. It does a community little good if only 0.5 or 1 or 1.5 child per generation would choose to remain part of it.
Good point, but what if the minority culture's values differ on this? Much like I prefer to exist than my carbon being used for the construction of a perfect orgasmium human. Members of minority cultures might prefer to put costs on each other to prevent them from leaving the community.
Also it would really upset groups like say Haredim Jews.
A sufficiently dedicated group could just keep childbirthing in-house rather than trusting hospitals.
It seems very likley that that would be illegal in such a society.
I'm with Alicorn on this one: if your members don't want to be in your community, sucks to be your community.
Maybe they should make more of an effort to convince their members that their community is worth being a part of rather than using mechanisms like shunning and mainstream stigmatism to enforce membership.
Somehow I can't bring myself to be bothered by this
Haredim can be a real pain in the ass when they decide they want to be.
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine. "Genocide" has really strong negative moral valence in most people's minds because the last time somebody tried it, it involved killing millions of people. Throwing it around in situations that don't involve death seems... not inaccurate per se, but still disingenuous.
I use it in the technical legal sense and made that explicit too.
People are really inconsistent however in colloquial usage and moral reasoning. I partially agree with your objection. Communist crimes are basically whitewashed because "Mao killed Chinese and he was Chinese so it wasn't genocide so Hitler is still worse". Isn't a life a life? Shouldn't whatever the term one uses, the negative feeling be the same?
For some reason my brain decided to recast this question as though the minority culture were a corporation selling a product at a price (non-full-inclusion in majority culture translated into money). If people don't want to buy it, sucks to be you! I don't care if your values say they ought to or if it will make you sad. Change product or market product but do not force its purchase on anyone.
You do realize we are talking about retention of children raised in a culture right? Orgasmium cults and brainwashing indoctrinators would tend to out compete most others by such measures. A cult worshipping a baslisk that hacks your brain into absolute loyalty would also win out.
Optimizing for allure will not optimize for welfare. At least not under these mechanisms of "choice". It also means our value sets can be out competed by really convincing paperclippers.
From the perspective of many traditional cultures Westerners may as well be Supper Happy people.
The problem with 'orgasmium cults' is, they have a hard time producing anything valuable enough to outsiders to be able to maintain economic power proportionate to their nominal population. Eventually it's just a heap of functionally insensate larvae starving themselves into irrelevance.
I thought we'd drifted away from that particular spin on the scenario as of erratio's comment.
From what kind of a position are people choosing to buy? The veil of ignorance? Lol.
You can't choose to buy or not buy a spot somewhere in mind-space without already being somewhere in mind-space.
I think folk morality only says that if you adopt kids, you should treat them equally to your biological kids. It doesn't say that people who have biological kids instead of adopting are bad people.
Why do you single out status-lowering events? You could go further and say that anything that doesn't cause physical pain is okay, e.g. stealing someone's car is okay because the victim theoretically could brainwash themselves to not care about material belongings.
My first thought was that people are pushed to take status-raising events more seriously than they naturally would.
Considering that there's some variation in how people react to physical pain, I don't know why that (at least below some threshold) should be off-limits.
Taboo "naturally".
Huh... I felt it (with considerable force) about some other items ITT, but not even a twitch here. I hate to ask, but you probably saw it coming anyway... any personal things in your background that might have triggered that?
No, I think I always felt that way.
I agree. Why would there be a switch in the brain "in case genetic tests prove/shaman says child isn't yours go into depression!"? Other cues like smell or facial similarity are already factored into the fathers feelings before he consciously knows about the child's genetics.
I don't think that's true for teenagers, their sexuality is heavily studied. I don't have very high confidence in academia but they must have produced something useful on the subject. Right? In any case I agree that children's sexuality is a pretty strong mind-killer and that our knowledge about it is woefully inadequate or just plain wrong.
Possible. But I don't see why this would be controversial.
Come now. White people would be all ecstatic that they now have proof they are to blame for all the problems they've been blaming themselves this entire time (and even more since the opportunity cost of squandered superiority is greater than squandered equality). Who dosen't like being proven right? This also fulfils their deeply ingrained pseudo-Christian guilt complex and desire for original sin. White people love feeling guilty and signalling moral superiority to other white people. I think that's partially genetic btw. Most other people on the planet are not such annoying moral poseurs. I don't have any real data to back me on this last claim but anecdotal evidence is pretty consistent on it.
East Asians and Arabs may react unfavourably though. Also the future would be very bright for mankind since Africa is likley to stay in population explosion mode for most of this century, while say Latin America and the Middle East are showing signs of incredibly rapid drops in birthrates (and the developed world is showing no real signs of recuperation).
Also its pretty obvious that black people are superior in certain aspects to most other races. Besides the obvious stuff like say West Africans being good sprinters and East Africans excelling at marathons, greater resistance to tropical diseases, greater diversity helping the evolve more rapidly to deal with new pathogens, lower rates of skin cancer, ect. humans in Sub-Saharan africa share some nearly continent wide adaptations to their environment that are very desirable. I'm pretty sure African males have an edge when it comes to attractiveness and no I'm not talking about the penis myth (which may not be a myth, it is hard to tell since measurements are ambiguous and conflicting). First off there is the purely physical advantage of darker skin since it is associated with masculinity, then there is the well documented "winning personality" when one controls for other factors. That last one is related to the fact that people of African descent generally have far fewer mental health problems (Europeans be they gentiles or Askenazi Jews and East Asians are really the neurotic freaks of the human race), better self-image, greater self-confidence and are much less prone to suicide than most.
It's pre-controversial. I say it now and then, but people just ignore it.
There's a contingent of atheists who are seriously pissed off at people having religions, but I haven't seen anything comparable against nationalism, even though these days, wars are apt to be more about nationalism than religion.
Mostly because highly educated people on LessWrong don't know many nationalists personally. They do know many religious people.
In any case classical pacifist movements where basically about this. Getting upset about nationalism seems a 19th or 20th century thing to do. Its not that the arguments against it are new and haven't sunk in because of future shock level, its just that elite respectable opinion in the Western world has long ago shifted closer towards that position and most people living in the West suffer very little if any harm from the residual traces of nationalism. And the residual traces aren't that notable, most people in say Western Europe are because of the well known traumas of wars in that time period not very nationalistic.
It is hard to say something like the Iraq war was caused by nationalism, though obviously "spreading democracy" is pretty much not only part of an ideology but is also a key part of America's civic nationalism.
With most wars in the rest of the world that don't directly involve Western states (obviously many of these are proxy wars). Ie. The ones that actually should matter to utilitarian since they consume far more lives, do indeed often seem to revolve around ethnic clashes. But this is where it gets tricky.
How do you classify the conflict in Sudan a few years back? One can claim that civil war was a religious one since Muslims where attacking animists and Christian villages and the latter where retaliating. How do you measure how much of it was because of nationalism. Is destructive Muslim or Irish Catholic nationalism a bigger blemish on religion or nationalism? What is the better approach to attacking it if you feel that the phenomena is not conductive to how you want to order the world?
Also nationalism evokes images of people being proud of the state or considering themselves a part of a people that numbers in the tens of millions and has supposedly some common past and a common destiny before it. Most of humanity has no idea of anything like that (outside of religion). It is basically a Western thing with very similar phenomena in East Asia and to a lesser extent the Indian subcontinent and Latin America. Most of humanity is much more tribal than it is nationalistic in the classic sense. And the types of bloody civil wars and revolutions one sees in Africa and the Middle East are I think evidence in favour of this.
This almost reads like you are trying to hint at something but for the life of me I can't figure out what. Nope. No idea.
Could someone make explicit what is being hinted at? I fear that I am missing the signal.
Didn't catch that implication before.
Edit: Just wanted to make clear that I'm not endorsing it.
Anarcho-capitalists are right.
Most upper class and wealthy jobs are actually rent seeking activities as argued in this video by fellow LessWrong user Aurini.
I may not necessarily agree with that particular video but Aurini's channel is pure contrarian & rationalist goodness. Its very depressing he only has a few hundred views per video. These two videos seems somewhat relevant:
Edit: Added a few more sort of relevant videos.
He's interesting, but awfully repetitious-- a trait which is worse for videos than writing.
Also, in his argument against regulation (built around a homeless man who had to save for months to be able to afford a business license), he doesn't address the most common argument for regulation which is that sometimes businesses are extremely dangerous to customers and employees.
Thanks for the attention! I thought my channel might be too political for this forum, so I never linked it.
In reply: I am for voluntary regulation. Rather than a centralized regulatory agency, I'd like to see free-market approaches, so that big agri-business (for instance) can't slip through dishonest loop-holes. Multiple standard systems, much like you have with motorcycle helmets.
In fact, that's a great place to start; there's a lot of debate on what sort of tests and technology make the safest motorcycle helmet, and the two different standards are moving in different directions. Now I - as a non-fabricator - don't really know enough to take a stance on either, but I'm confident that the competition between the two has improved both styles.
Vendors would display the label of whatever regulatory agency had certified them, and the agency would be less susceptible to manipulation or bribery, because they'd be selling their image.
I might be a statist, but I agree with that. When it works as intended, competition between producers/vendors of anything is a great social good for individuals, as it raises them to a position of power (see Mises et al).
However, I wonder if such agencies can't be made semi-public, or if they couldn't work like an advanced and well-directed banking system; there's a central government agency, which licenses and watches over municipal and private ones; its direct regulatory services would be very conservative, to create a stable "fallback point" for customers.
Could be interesting for things that are hard to quantify such as 'natural' foods or whatever.
I think the implicit argument is that the risk is worth it, because the costs of regulations are so high elsewhere.
Humans supposedly love regulation because we are generally irrationally risk averse and can signal good stuff about ourselves by proposing legislation that sounds good to our brains which interpret it as guidelines for a small stone age tribe of a few dozen people rather than setting guidelines and rules that will live a life of their own in institutions that govern millions of people.
Since we are on the subject of video blogs, I feel I should also put a link here for the measureofdoubt channel done by Julia Galef, who is just great at popularizing some basic rationalist material. I'm sure there has been a thread specifically about videoblogging and youtube channels with rationalist content so sorry if I'm duplicating stuff. Can someone please share a link to any additional recommendations?
These are pretty good introduction videos to perhaps share with non-rationalists, just so they know what the heck you are talking about. :)
Does he, by any chance, write? I hate learning from videos.
Yes he does. I think most of it is available on his website.
He's certainly smarter than the videos' previews are making him look, and sounds like an okay, responsible dude to be around in person... but eh. I get the picture, I'm just not too interested.
Also, what a cute website he's got contributions on... have a laugh, if you don't mind getting drool on your metaphorical clothes. - Note: I'm not saying Aurini isn't facepalming about this kind of shit, or doesn't recognize that being unjustly surrounded by complete dumbfucks is part of a contrarian's plight.
(make sure to check out the quite splendid comments if you're at it)
EDIT: I got fucktons of downvotes the last time I posted links to ugly stuff, and I'm getting them this time, so you're all welcome to also downvote me in advance for when I'll decide to do this next, nya!
[if you didn't know, a "Nya" at the end of every sentence is supposed to make one sound extra unserious and annoying, and is widely used on both English and Russian interwebs]
Help! Someone is making fun of nerds on the internet! And this guy you talked about occasionally writes on the same site!
In Mala Fide has all sorts of contrarian people. Some are silly, some are insightful. Sure many are mean but that's more or less the point of the site -- may as well complain that 4chan is mean.
I don't think these are quite in the original spirit of the thread but seem related to several of the discussions that developed. I would like to have discussions about all of these points merely in the hope that I can be convinced to update away from them.
Things I REALLY hope aren't true and suspect might be. Honestly don't read this if you're already depressed right now.
Human beings WANT maximally brutal leaders up to the limit of being able to plausibly signal that they don't want maximally brutal leaders.
People can be tortured to create a lower set point on the hedonic treadmill. This allows for far more overall utility.
Male/female sexual relationships are fundamentally adversarial due to the differences in dominant mating strategies.
There is a large class of violent people for whom no current treatment is available who simply need to be put down.
Humans don't care about torture.
We could create a virtual utopia fairly trivially by investing in lucid dream research but nobody actually cares because:
Anyone with the ability to make the world better almost by definition has a vested stake in the current fucked up one.
P.S. throium reactors. God damn it humans.
I wonder if this reasoning might be related to the longevity of the boarding school institution as implemented by early 20th century Britain, or of other similarly unpleasant forms of institutionalized child... I'm not sure I want to call it "abuse", but at least systematic deprivation.
Or of hazing or initiation ordeals in general, really.
AFAIK there's a sizable portion of feminists who believe this statement (or at least the first half of it) is true, and thus the statement is not as terribly controversial as your other ones.
when i say fundamental I include CEV.
Who said that this isn't being done to us right now, from the inside as well as the outside of our mind? (Consequently, I'm not scared but neither do I approve of this.)
How large? Executing / permanently imprisoning serial killers e.g. is fairly mainstream, though certainly controversial.
What makes you suspect something like that? Pretty much any tribe gets pissed off when <out-group> starts torturing members of <in-group>. Maybe you mean torture as established part of the justice system, as was common throughout much of history? Even then I'd suspect there are plenty of people who have no problem as long as it only affects <out-group> or <criminal>.
I'm talking about putting certain people diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder down before they do anything.
Our medical/legal establishment routinely tortures people so that everyone else can feel slightly better about certain aspects of mortality.
It's probably stupid to reply to comment from more than three years ago, but Antisocial personality disorder does not imply violence. There are examples of psychopaths who were raised in good homes that grew up to become successful assholes.
Concerning what everyone on the right around here says the voluntary doublethink of the Left:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag
This is really quite complicated, though. Especially if one also asks which reader would've been better informed about the realities of capitalist democracy (neither would be well off in that regard, but still).
Isn't this an invalid comparison? If The Nation were writing for an audience of reader which only read The Nation, wouldn't it change what it prints? The point is these publications are fundamentally part of a discussion.
Imagine if I thought there were fewer insects on earth then you did, and we had a discussion. If you compare the naive person who reads only my lines vs the naive person who reads only your lines, your person ends up better off, because on the whole, there are indeed a very large number of insects on earth This will be the case regardless of who actually has the accurate estimate of number of insect species. The point is that my lines will all present evidence that insects are less numerous, in an attempt to get you to adjust your estimate downward, and your lines will be the exact opposite. However, that says nothing about who has a better model of the situation.
Here's a critique of democracy that could be taken as either a loosely conservative-left one (mildly Stalinist, that is... Euro-Stalinist?), or a variation of the libertarian argument. Naive in places, but still an okay read.
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/democracy.html
Heh. Here's the modus tollens to the democratic alt-right's modus ponens.
The LW version:
Friendliness of AGI is impossible; this is because Coherent Extrapolated Volition is impossible; our volitions are in part determined by opposing others' so any extrapolation will produce a contradiction (a la once disease is gone, food is plentiful, hangovers don't exist, and you can have sex with anyone you like, the only thing that Palestinians and Israelis care about is denying the others' desires). Any optimisation process applied to human desires will necessarily make things subjectively and objectively worse. We are, in effect, falling down stairs at the speed of our optimising, and more optimisation of any kind will only make us fall faster and deadlier. There was no guarantee that the blind process of evolution would produce agents that form a consistent or positive-sum system, and indeed, it did not produce such agents. The future is unchangeably bleak and necessarily bad.
The Western memeplex version:
Humans are not essentially good-natured beings. The so-called moral progress of the recent era is no such thing - severe oppression of the minority has been swapped for a larger amount of minor oppression of the majority, abject slavery of some has been swapped for an equivalent amount of wage slavery for many, rape and physical coercion of sex has been reduced with a much larger increase in use of non-physical coercion with alcohol or money, and so on. We might alter the concentrations of suffering, spreading it out over many, but we can only increase the total levels of suffering because a large part of how we actually feel content or happy is based on relatives - that is, the pursuit of happiness ruins the world.
The seeds of our own hellish existences are planted within us from birth, they are irrevocable, and the only thing we can do about it is miserably fail to realise their deadly potential. Any kind of hopeful attitude, any kind of optimisation, any attempt to improve the world, is a guaranteed net negative because that is just how humans are.
Self-reported happiness data seems to not agree with this, unless Swedes are keeping some tortured children in the basement.
The capital of Sweden is Omelas? Hmm...
If you took areas of low happiness and made them happy, Swedish self-reporting of happiness would go down, is the gist of this idea.
But if this is innate, how do you recognize it as "bad"?
What is it in you that makes you feel sad at this? And can't we just plug that thing into the utility function?
By deliberately holding those innate parts separate from the recognising modules.
Nothing, actually, I don't think it's true. But it's definitely a possibility, and one that our culture would simply not be able to discuss or entertain.
This all seems overtly contradicted by the decline of violence (including homicide, rape, torture, war deaths as a fraction of the population) and the increase in healthy lifespan over historical time.
Surely some other bad thing has increased in proportion; I could make an attempt but I don't really feel like defending the idea.
You mean an an increase in the amount of time we spend living a net negative existence, necessitating the suffering of others? That sounds like a bad thing to me, not a good thing.
Why "surely"?
Colonialism was a good system with significant beneficial impact for colonized countries, which are now failing mostly due to native incompetence rather than colonial trauma. It would be a win-win position to reinstitute it competently.
Important disclaimer: "competently" means NOT the bull** the USA is doing.
I find it amusing that this was posted on India's Republic Day.
110% agreed. Hell, I often argue that in real life; there's no stigma attached to colonialism in Russia these days, probably in part because any serious attack on it sounds too much like a tired Soviet cliche.
I must admit as much as I disagree with some components of the cultural and ideological influence of the British Empire, it is hard to argue with its results. The British Empire seems to have generally produced superior outcomes in terms of quality of life for inhabitants and general development than nearly any other government be it native or colonial. Considering the gains created by this I can't help but wonder if Cecile Rhodes had a point when he said:
Indeed if I found myself magically transported to 19th century Europe with considerable wealth and influence I may yet decide that there is no nobler and benevolent enterprise than to support the expansion and growth of the British Empire. In this light the success of the American revolution may actually plausibly be one of the great tragedies of human history.
Now that I've dumped all these warm fuzzies we may as well enjoy a happy death spiral around it.
Rule, Britannia!
While one can applaud the cultural influence of the British empire on its colonial holdings, allow me to disagree with "it is hard to argue with its results".
Timeline of major famines in India during British rule
Note that Britain was forcibly exporting Indian grain for its own benefit during some of these famines.
I fail to see why this is somehow horrible or surprising by historical standards. I can hardly think of an empire that would do otherwise. One might quickly argue that native government unlike an empire would have not done this, but seriously, does anyone expect economic growth and development of infrastructure to have grown at a comparable rate? Even rapid population growth that was sometimes the cause of such famines, is in itself an indicator that deaths from disease and violence have likley fallen.
Big sad events like famines grab more attention than say a faster than otherwise increases in GDP growth by 2% or 1% or 0.5%. But the latter sort amounts to far more over the years. Inclusion in the British Empire in itself lifted millions worldwide from the Malthusian margin.
The salt tax (imposed by Britain, eliminated with independence) contributed to the death rate.
This being said, I agree that ex-British colonies have generally done better than places that were colonized by other countries.
All the places Britain has owned, even briefly. I may have been suffering from availability bias. The US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and India are doing better than a lot of other places, but what about Afghanistan? Nigeria? Syria?
The British may have had more successful ex-colonies than other empires, but this doesn't mean all, or even a majority of their ex-colonies were successful.
There's a selection effect, too. If Britain holds places that are geographically valuable (harbors in trade lanes, natural resources, etc), and geographically valuable places tend to do better, then Britain can wind up having their former colonies do better without causing it. In other words, what caused the former colony to do well made Britain colonize them, and not vice versa.
By analogy, Harvard graduates better students without providing a commensurate level of education by the simple application of strict entry requirements.
Not to mention Zimbabwe.
They are better, did they do better? You need to control for the empire's choice of targets! India accounted for a quarter of world GDP at the time of conquest- by independence it was barely one percent.
Yes, missing out on the industrial revolution does that to you.
Although the industrial revolution was happening in Britain while India was under their rule and, as I understand it, cotton was being exported from colonies including India, processed in British factories, and shipped back to India as clothes to fuel it. All the way around the Cape of Good Hope. British rule may have had something to do with missing out on the Industrial Revolution.
On the other hand, China stayed independent and didn't industrialize, and the Muslim states in the Middle East didn't either (also Africa before colonial rule, but they were already far behind Eurasia and so it's hard to compare them to India), so it'd be pretty silly to claim that former colonies would be on the First World level if not for colonialism.
An idea that might be more reasonable (although that's not entirely the point of the thread) would be to recognize that historical colonialism was almost entirely guided by the selfish interests of the colonial powers, and to implement a new system of patronage by the first world on underdeveloped countries, designed from the ground up to try to prevent them from exploiting the lesser partners. If the system is based on the idea of actually giving first worlders control over decisions, I'm not sure how you could set it up to totally prevent exploitation, but you could definitely improve it over colonialism.
I hate this kind of argument.
The Muslim states in the Middle East were not independent. They were just subject to Ottoman, rather than European, imperialism. Similarly, much of Africa "before colonial rule" was subject to colonial rule by non-European powers, such as Oman, Songhai, etc. And Imperial China was, you know, an empire. The notion that imperialism/colonialism somehow only counts as such when it's done by Europeans is incredibly objectionable, and causes people to completely misunderstand history. It's the worst kind of Orientalism.
The Raj was not about "Britain" exploiting "India," or even "selfish interests of the colonial powers" - it doesn't make sense to assign mass interests like that, particularly when India wasn't even a united polity at the time. It was about individuals and groups within both countries. For example, the East India Company was at least as much an exploiter of Britain as it was of India.
Do we, by any chance, have a timeline of major famines in India during non-British rule?
Why yes, we do.
I attribute it to increased food production.
A quick look at the wikipedia page says that only has explanatory power for less famine after ~1970 - not after 1943.
Quantity of experience: brain-duplication and degrees of consciousness
Think about it.
Beware, for here there lie basilisks.
I think what lies here is that LW finally has to admit that Buddhists were right: there is no such thing as selfhood, it is illusionary, it is just a convenient way to give a name to what amounts of a sack full of diverse and ever-changing parts. Selfs exist only in the sense of how shaving kits exist. A convenient name for a group, a set.
If someone would make a million copies of my brain and torture them, it would not be a bad thing for "me", or not worse for "me" than doing it with the brain of others. There is no good reason to feel otherwise. Even "this me" is only a poor, oversimplified term for the combined experience of the awareness of various phenomena inside one head, even to call this one here a "me" is already wildly inaccurate, exact copies of this set of personality bits are not "me" by any stretch of imagination. They are separate sacks of personality bits that happen to exactly resemble this sack here.
The closest things we have to selfhood -and they do not actually consitute a full selfhood - are volition for the future and memories of the past, so because we remember things, and want future things to turn out differently or similarly, and this creates some sort of a process. Copies of a brain have memories, but they break at the volition for the future part. If whatever sorry excuse we have for a "future me" is "that which will remember the results of the decisions I make now", the copies stop being a "future me" a second after they are copied, as they won't remember anything I do after the copy.
Please elaborate
Dear people who post things like "Incest is neat" and "Whites are smarter than blacks": those things are currently controversial. Therefore, they don't come close to being unthinkable or impossible to talk about.
Nitpick: men dominating women and fathers (not mothers) deciding infanticide are not features of the ancestral environment, they come from the invention of agriculture, moving out of the ancestral environment.
Now, "agriculture was a mistake, let's go back to hunting, gathering, and killing babies born during famines", that's more of a sacred cow^W wild aurochs.
Other not-easily-thinkable positions (I don't believe any of these, but believe they're not utterly ridiculous):
Yuh. On LessWrong, scientific racism is a standard permitted scientific heresy for signaling nonconformity. It's the nonconformist in black, not the one in a clown suit. (And this is a stupidity that is extremely offputting.)
Easy for you to say.
HBD is firmly in clown suit territory in real life, people lose jobs over it, are physically assaulted or ostracised. If you want to see what LW's wearing black to school thing is check out the Moldbug references people love making.
It's not "racism" if you feel sympathetic and heartbroken for all the people and cultures clearly, unknowingly fucked over by mere biology, and would work hard on something in that direction - a global uplift project, donating to avenues which could eventually provide opportunity for massive genetic surgery (a class of charity currently consisting of SIAI, SIAI and SIAI), developing a political and cultural framework for something like "compassionate eugenics" (using as little coercion and stirring up as little drama as viable) - yes, I'd commit to any of that, if I wasn't confident that simply trying to cut all the Gordian knots in our vicinity with superhuman intelligence wasn't a better idea. (As it stands, I sort of desire to fight my akrasia to a standstill and find a good optimized way to help with the latter; however, it's not just akrasia, it's all sorts of problems I have with getting in productive work on anything.)
However, if I was, for some defensible reason, unwilling to relegate the entire mess to superintelligence, wouldn't trying what I described be noble instead of "racist"?
(Uh-huh, my signaling is about as subtle as a troll with a sledgehammer here. A troll of the fantasy non-network variety, that is. Well, whatever, I'm certain I've got a valid and coherent sentiment.)
People competent enough about intelligence enhancement tech to understand what you said are usually too incompetent about racism to start implementing anything like this without it blowing up in our faces. Remember that video where Razib Khan (?) asked Eliezer which groups were most interested in race-IQ research results, and it went like "I don't know, Ashkenazi Jews?" "White supremacists." "Oh."? That's how ridiculously ignorant we are. The common wisdom is here for a reason.
Remember reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Yeah. Lots of people mention the finding that white people are smarter in average than black people, but few of them mention that East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are even smarter.
(And if I was asked about that, I'd answer “Yes, it has been found that white people have a higher average IQ than black people, but then again, Asians and Jews have an even higher one", so that I don't lie but still get to piss extreme-right-wingers off.)
The same. Hell, I remember reading the comments on such some alt-right blog - maybe UR, maybe some other one - and seeing a bunch of "white nationalists" who frequent those first imply that intelligence is the only measure of a person that matters, then trying to wriggle out of proclaiming the Jews to be the world's only rightful aristocracy and bowing down before them; that "argument" basically went like "We embrace Nature's truth if it makes us smarter than someone, but we aren't obliged to shit if someone ends up smarter than us." Equating "smarter" with "superior", of course.
Referring to this (video here)?
Aaaaaaaa. This is such a bad idea that I don't even know where to start.
Racism as it's presently conceptualized isn't a simple matter of fear or hatred of ethnic others, unfortunately. That would be comparatively easy to deal with. It's an enormously messy tangle of signaling and countersignaling and I really can't do it justice without reading a few books for background and then devoting a sequence to it (which I'm not going to do for reasons that should be obvious), but as an oversimplification you can probably sum up most of the Western world's high-status thinking regarding race as follows:
Everything even tangentially related to race is ineradicably tainted by ingroup/outgroup biases.
Because of this, attitudes and social prescriptions appearing to differentiate in any way by ethic background, or by any factor that can plausibly be linked to ethic background, are automatically suspect and should be compensated for as soon as discovered.
That includes these rules.
Now, that's a fairly cynical way of putting it (I'm optimizing for brevity), but to a first approximation I don't think it's even wrong.
So yes, conceptually your project should be seen as noble, if you accept all its prerequisites. But no one's going to try to evaluate those prerequisites on their merits. Instead you won't make it five steps before someone links to "The White Man's Burden" and things get nasty.
Of course not. That would subject accusations of racism to falsifiability.
Might be. Might be. Yet can't you envision e.g. transhumanism being tabooed like that if found to be "ineradicably tainted" by the human lust for power and an insidiously corrupting desire for a "legitimate" reason to feel superior to the people you currently associate yourself with?
If the so-called "HBD-sphere" or "Reactosphere" in general, for all its flaws (and I see some pretty fucking horrific flaws in it) can get away with a lot more, so can the LW Discussion section, or that semi-private enclosure being proposed around here.
That's a common argument against it, actually, although it's usually framed in class terms. Maybe the most common once you filter out all the various manifestations of "ew, that's gross".
Not one that I accept myself, but like I said I only buy an approximation of the thinking above. There's plenty of places it'll steer you wrong at the margins.
Also, I'm indeed feeling a significant pressure to agree wholeheartedly with this comment and retract everything, because you and the high-status mainstream thinkers would be for me retracting it, and people like the HBD Bi- sorry, HBD Chick would be derisive of such "self-censorship". Now I can feel for myself just how insidious the Blue vs Green pattern in your head can get when it's really trying to override you.
Not to argue about definitions, but this seems well within the original definition of 'racism' as I understand it ("...claim that some races are superior to other races"). And society has good historical reasons to look askance at it -- for example, the outside view says nobody should trust your motives. (In particular, you shouldn't trust yourself.) It also says we shouldn't trust your factual beliefs without extremely strong evidence.
ADBOC and that's somewhat beside the point, because it seems to me that things are necessarily somewhat controversial to be taboo. As Paul Graham said:
Now, James Watson and Stephanie Grace might want a word with you. (Larry Summers could file an amicus brief.) Chanting "Racist, racist, cow porn, racist, racist, cow porn" seems to fairly closely match Multiheaded's description that "society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark" for at least some parts of society. This is moral panic and ridicule despite the speaker barely tiptoeing near controversy and hedging everywhere with statements such as:
Whether I like it or not, people tend to overfit the curves associated with past trauma to available data.
If I want to avoid being pattern-matched to someone's trauma, I have to take extreme measures.
Hedge phrases pretty reliably don't cut it... they're like making incremental improvements to my bird-feeder to keep squirrels away: I just end up training the squirrels.
Yeah, but why bother Less Wrong for suggestions where YouTube comments would serve?
Upvoted for showing a good alternative to my primitive heuristic of "Cruel as fuck". Unsettling and hard to propagate through one's belief net, but few would call those evil.
The heuristic I used seems to be "take a position that's controversial, and assume the arguments for it are superpowered". E.g. animal rights become animal equality.
Why limit yourself to starting with controversial positions?
A position that's uncontroversial because universally rejected makes a poor starting point; if I'm able to think of it at all, I probably won't find very good arguments to superpower. At most, they'll be isolated argument, not a big philosophical toolbox like "consent" or "personhood as pattern".
A position that's uncontroversial because universally accepted tends to have superpowered arguments in the first place, and to get controversial where their arguments start losing power. For example, "racism is bad" is generalized to "beings should be equal", which gives controversial positions about moral status of AI, fetuses, and animals. The only uncontroversial positions I see that aren't at the center of an ideology with controversial fringes are extremely narrow questions, like the color of the sky.
Note that there is a subtler mechanism than brute suppression that puts strict limits on our effective thoughtspace: the culture systematically distracts us from thinking about the deep, important questions by loudly and constantly debating superficial ones. Here are some examples:
Notice how the sequence of psychological subterfuge works. First, the culture throws in front of you a gaudy, morally charged question. Then various pundits present their views, using all the manipulative tactics they have developed in a career of professional opinion-swaying. You look around yourself and find all the other primates engaged in a heated debate about the question. Being a social animal, you are inclined to imitate them: you are likely to develop your own position, argue about it publicly, take various stands, etc. Since we reason to argue, you will spend a lot of time thinking about this question. Now you are committed, firstly to your stand on the explicit question, but also to your implicit position that the question itself is well-formulated.
Behold, I come from the distant future year of 2013!
I don't know if this was true in early 2012, but I regularly see this point brought up during discussions of same-sex marriage, often by people who seem to think this is a revolutionary insight which no-one in the discussion has seen a thousand times before. So this may not be an example of this, at least not anymore.
Everyone's favorite effigy Moldbug calls this "defining the null hypothesis."
fair disclosure: I don't think Moldbug is good for much more than clever turns of phrase.
There is no way to coherently hold utilitarianism without it leading to "the repugnant conclusion" that we should maximise reproduction.
Everyone who thinks they're utilitarian is engaging in signalling behaviour by claiming to value the happiness of other agents, but always rationalizes a utility argument for the self serving position they had anyway.
People realize "the repugnant conclusion" is just the other side of the Torture/Dust-specs coin, right?
How did I not see that before? Wow.
There's an unfortunate trick of naming here: some LWers use "utilitarian" to describe "valuing different outcomes by real numbers and acting to maximize expected value according to some decision theory", and would thus describe a paperclip maximizer as utilitarian. I can easily accept that traditional Benthamite utilitarianism has no answer to the repugnant conclusion, though.
I mostly agree with this point, but the dust-speck/torture debate showed me that believing certain things about the additive properties of virtue/pleasure/suchlike commits me to choosing torture over dust specks. That is, unless your moral theory prohibits certain trade-offs, dust specks worse.
Further, utilitarian theories are all committed to believing the additive property. Is it unfair to say that any theory that believes the additive property (and is trying to maximize human virtue/pleasure/suchlike) is utilitarian?
Not all utilitarian theories are committed to believing the additive property-- "average utilitarianism" most famously. Trying to maximize human "virtue" strikes me as quite a different thing than maximizing pleasure/utility and not something I would call utilitarianism. But in general yes, total, act utilitarianism is belief in maximizing additive property x where x is something like pleasure, desires, preferences etc.
this is stupid. Utilitarianism does not decide what you value, only what you should do once you know your values. If you don't care about the absolute total amount of utility, there's no reason to maximize reproduction.
If you don't care about the absolute total amount of utility then you are not a total utilitarian.
(Which is fine, and I'd agree with you but if you really mean average utilitarianism or some kind of Millsian or Rawlsian variation you should specify since people here usually mean total when they use the word.)
Technically it limits it. If you allow any value system, you get Consequentialism.
I don't know what the limits are, but apparently ethical egoism and ethical altruism don't count.
Some possibilities on dorky LW topics (as opposed to the topics I assume Vladimir et al. are referring to):
Not only are anti-natalist arguments correct, they are correct in such a way that we should be attempting to maximize x-risks.
Wireheading is necessary and sufficient for the fulfillment of true human CEV; people only claim to care about other values for signalling purposes.
A very strong form of error theory is correct; what people actually care about is qualia, even though there is no such thing. It doesn't all add up to normality; just as bad metaphysics may lead people to think there's a relevant difference between praying to God and attempting to summon demons, bad metaphysics makes people think there's a relevant difference between donating a million dollars to Against Malaria Foundation and kidnapping and torturing a small child.
It would be very fun to have a thread where we attempted to come up with seductive, harmful ideas, and the chance of actually happening upon a very infectious and very harmful one would be very low.
What's wrong with the metaphysics? I figured that one of the most powerful magicks developed by the Christians is a system for addressing only the demons who are actually God (using relatively rigid designators like the Word, the Form of the Good, &c.). The biggest reason I'm suspicious of the other Indo-European religions is that they don't advertise that they've developed any such system.
Alternative which I view as being more frightening:
For any given human, its CEV involves that human winning at zero-sum, possibly even negative-sum, games (status would be one of these). As such, the best way to maximize the current collection of humanity's CEV would be to create new agents to which current humans defeat in zero-sum games.
That is, for every current human, create a host of new agents (all of whom are quite human for all intents and purposes) of whom the current human is emperor.
Note: if this is the case, I doubt pseudo-agents will suffice. Just as humans do not wish to love pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really love), humans do not wish to win zero-sum games against pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really lose zero-sum games, with all that losing these games entails).
Some portrayals of heaven involve each person having dominion over a host of angels. One can only hope this allows for live action real-time strategy.
So basically, what you're saying is that CEV might work out to everyone getting their own secret volcano lair filled with harems of catpersons? Now where have I heard this idea before...
Do we have to win at the same game to be happy? It looks like for different people different games matter and if you mostly beat scarcity you reduce the factor of pragmatically useful prizes.
I have no idea. However, 'yes' is the more cynical answer, to let us assume it is the case for this particular purpose.
I will take "yes" as an answer designed to maximize scare-factor.
But frankly, do you have any evidence for this?
Maybe I am too far atypical in that I have experienced feeling of negative utility because of a victory (and it was a consequence-free and non-cheating victory, so it is a direct thing).
But look at scientists, businessmen and writers. Looks like many people in these three groups manage to look down at the two other groups. Some X try to do Y, fail, and do not care about that failure because X is what matters.
Given enough collective resources, it seems logical to invest them into designating more distinct games and ensuring that every field is filled with people who are most suitable for it. Wait, did I just repeat what Adam Smith said about separation of labour? Maybe it is not too bad, though.
As near as I can tell I'm -want/+like/-approve on both wireheading and emperor-like superiority.
I am willing to admit to having a desire to feel superior to other people.
Same here, but I'm willing to settle for "equal"
you're such a good person for that.
CEV will probably have many contributions from people who don't want the AI to create almost-human slaves. Do you think such desires will lose out in reflective equiibrium?
LWers are largely too confident in the conclusiveness of the research they cite for some of their beliefs.
Source?
I would also like to endorse GLaDOS's excellent list.
As a former Evangelical Polyamorist, now a born-again Monogamist, I enthusiastically endorse items 1 & 2 in this comment.
It can be thought of as the cultural equivalent of Algernon's Law - any small cultural change is a net evolutionary disadvantage. I might add "previously accessible to our ancestors", since the same principle doesn't apply to newly accessible changes, which weren't previously available for cultural optimism. This applies to organizing via websites. It does not apply to polyamory (except inasmuch as birth control, std prevention, and paternity testings may have affected the relevant tradeoffs, though limited to the degree that our reactions are hardwired and relevant).
Pff, this one is so normal it has an obligatory link :D
Another relevant link.
It seems dictatorships work better (actually I can't think of an example off hand) AND wildly worse. Dictatorships compared to republic is like male compared to female: the main difference is just a much wider spread. So you wind up rolling a much bigger set of dice with dictatorships and then survivorship bias and human bias towards picking off the high spots makes the result look good.
Further, would a dicatatorship work well for long in the absence of republics from which it could steal ideas? I don't think there is a dicatatorship with a good record of innovation and technological development. (Hitler's Germany SPENT technical capital it had accumulated before, Hitler didn't last long enough to see if Germany would have been the exception).
North Korea, ceteris paribus, does not seem to have been helped by dictatorship.
On the other hand, South Korea was a dictatorship until 1987 and did extremely well during those years.
While I agree, I disapprove because my impression is that this is not an opinion suppressed much in the outside culture. I can well imagine it being an unpopular one here at Less Wrong, but in the world at large I see widespread support for similar opinions, such as among "conservatives" (in a loose sense) complaining about how "intellectuals" (ditto) were and are overly supportive of Communism, and complaints against "technocrats" and "ivory towers" in general. I also see disagreement with this, but not tabooing of it.
My agreement is based on the opinion appearing to be congruent with the quip "Evolution is smarter than you are", or the similar principle of "Chesterton's Fence".
I also get the impression that this is often because smart people don't see the value of the institutions to smart people. (This may be because it doesn't have such value.) For instance:
I'm fairly confident LessWrongers could engage in polyamory this without significant social dysfunction or suffering, let alone death on a massive scale. (BTW: I couldn't find any articles here by that title. Are you referring to a general tendency, or did I fail at searching?)
Using Chesterton's Fence here is a little misleading.
The whole rationale behind Chesterton's Fence is that clearly someone put the fence there, and it seems pretty likely that whoever that was was just as capable as I am of concluding (given what I know) that putting a fence here is absurd, and it seems pretty likely that they know everything I know, and therefore I can conclude with reasonable confidence that they knew relevant things I don't know that made them conclude that putting a fence here is worth doing, and therefore I should significantly reduce my confidence that putting a fence here is absurd.
Using the same rationale for natural phenomena doesn't really work... there's a reason it isn;t Chesterton's Fallen Tree.
You can, of course, put natural selection in the role of fence-builder, which seems to be what you're doing. But actually there's lots of areas where humans are smarter than evolution. At the very least, humans respond to novel situations a whole lot faster.
Isn't this one of the arguments sometimes invoked in favour of environmentalism?
Hm, this sucks, a bunch of birds are eating part of our harvest each year. Lets get rid of them!. Changing some things in your natural envrionment that you aren't quite sure of what they do or why they are there, might be a very bad idea.
Also it as argument that can be used in medicine. It can be a bad idea to take something to artificiality reduce your fever for example. Changing some things in your own body that you aren't quite sure of what they do or why they are there, is probably a very bad idea.
I would say that for societal adaptations that have come into being without design the case is stronger than with the natural environment but weaker than with your own body. Maybe there should be a thing like Chesterton's Fallen Tree.
Sure, changing some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea.
Failing to change some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea too.
And, yes, human history is a long series of decisions along these lines: do we build habitations, or keep living in caves? Do we build roads, cities, power grids, airplanes, trains? Do we mine the earth for fuel, for building materials, for useful chemicals? Do we burn fuel on a large scale? Do we develop medicines and tools that interfere with the natural course of biological development when that course is uncomfortable? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Mostly, humanity's answer is "Yes." If we can do it, we typically do, just 'cuz.
Have we thereby caused bad consequences? Sure.
Have we thereby caused net bad consequences? Well, I suppose that depends on what you value, and on what you consider the likeliest counterfactual states, but if you think we have I'd love to hear your reasons.
Me, I think we're unambiguously better off for having chopped Chesterton's Fallen Tree into firewood and burned it to keep warm through Chesterton's Deadly Winter. And in practice, when I see a fallen tree in my yard, I don't devote a noticeable amount of time to evaluating the possible important-but-nonobvious benefits it is providing by lying there before I deal with it.
I'd actually extend that from natural phenomena to any sufficiently complex system. I spend a lot of my time working with a codebase that dates back to about 1993 and has been accumulating tweaks and refactors ever since; there's enough obscure side-effects that it's often a good idea to make a good-faith search for unusual consequences of seemingly vestigial code, but more often than not I don't turn up anything. I can be fairly confident that any particular code segment was originally put in place for a reason, if not necessarily a very good reason, but if I understand the rest of the local architecture well and I can't figure out why something's there, it's more than likely that all the original reasons for it have succumbed to bit rot.
Societies are one of the better examples of Katamari Damacy architecture that I can think of outside computer science, so it seems to me that a similar approach might be warranted. Which isn't to say that you can get away with not doing your homework, nor that most aspiring social architects have done so to any reasonable standard.
Gall's law:
This might lead us to contemplate the most terrifying and unthinkable proposition yet, not named anywhere else on this thread -- that, perhaps, Stephen Wolfram was right!
I am surprised and confused. I would have thought that the analogy to evolution would be the one objected to first, as I think of social institutions first as things instituted by someone and second as things subject to vaguely evolution-like processes. (They are modified over time, imperfectly replicated across countries, and a lot more fail than survive.)
Interesting. I haven't given this a lot of thought, but my intuition is the opposite of yours... I think of most social constructs as evolved over time rather than intentionally constructed for a purpose.
Zoophilia is perfectly fine.
The prevailing arguments against it are incoherent for non-vegans anyhow. Nonhuman animals can't consent? How can it possibly make sense to claim the relevance of consent for (non-painful) sexual activity for a class of animals which can be legally killed more or less on demand for its meat or skin, or if it becomes inconvenient to keep? The consent argument is bogus; the popular moral beliefs against zoophilia are actually not based on a legalistic rights framework, but on a purity/corruption/ickiness framework.
I've tried that exact argument in the past with non-LW-inclined friends. From what I remember the main reactions were either (paraphrased) "I'm too squicked out to engage with your argument" or "you're probably right but it's still gross".
EDIT: there was context involved. Damned if I remember what it was but even with my closest friends I wouldn't defend zoophilia just for fun.
I tried it once on a different forum. I was immediately called a troll and run out of town.
...Which is sort of fair enough.
I've seen someone mention that they're a zoophile on a utilitarianism forum. The reaction was limited to one person asking if there's a difference between zoophilia and bestiality.
Now I'm interested. Is there?
I know way too much about this stuff.
Bestiality is simply having sex with animals. Zoophilia is having romantic, sexual relationships with animals.
I fail to see a problem with either.