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TheOtherDave comments on Thwarting a Catholic conversion? - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: Jay_Schweikert 18 June 2012 04:26PM

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Comment author: dymphna 24 June 2012 07:09:17PM *  0 points [-]

This is a position of profound submission to the universe. When we say "rationalist" here, we primarily don't mean someone who has a commitment to a particular set of beliefs. We mean someone who wants their beliefs to be caused by the facts of the universe, whatever those might turn out to be.

Thank you for re-clarifying this (yes, I was aware that this was the LW position). But, do most LW'ers think that it should be everyone's position?

Medieval Catholics (and some contemporary ones) wanted to make the whole world Catholic. Stalinists wanted to make the whole world Stalinist. In either case, I think the world would have turned out a much worse place had either one succeeded. To you, rationalism, empiricism and positivism might seem to exist in a different category, but to me any ideology or thought system that gets universalized will probably turn into More's Utopia or Plato's Republic. And, while interesting for a while, such places hardly seem very habitable in the long term.

One might then ask, what sort of world is most likely to cultivate and promote the kind of diversity you're advocating here?

Heh, now there's a question! I personally don't believe in utopias, but I do believe in making the world better. The difficulty is that "better" means different things to different people, and this is something we can't ever forget. To answer your question, I think that a society based on moderation and mutual respect/ tolerance for different beliefs is the best one. Canada's multiculturalism policy comes to mind. There are many flaws with multiculturalism, as it certainly doesn't guarantee that all social groups are treated fairly by those in power. However, having lived in Canada for some years, I find that this attempt at creating a multicultural society (where people are encouraged to maintain their cultural heritage and language) leads to a more diverse and interesting society than does the assimilationist attitude of the US (my home country) where there is greater pressure to give up old identities/values in order to fit in.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 24 June 2012 08:06:47PM 1 point [-]

But, do most LW'ers think that it should be everyone's position?

I won't presume to speak for most LWers.
Speaking for myself, I think we would all be better off if more people's beliefs were more contingent on mutually observable events. So, yeah.
I could be wrong, but I'd love to see the experiment done.

Comment author: dymphna 25 June 2012 12:36:01AM 0 points [-]

I don't really think it would be possible to do an experiment here because the very definition of "better" is a question of values, and different people have different values.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 25 June 2012 12:55:47AM 1 point [-]

And yet, there are many situations in which an observer does in fact look at two groups of people and claim that group A is better off than group B. On your view, are all such observers unjustified in all such claims, or are some of them sometimes justified? (And, if the latter, is there any reason we can't affect the world so as to create such a situation, wherein we are justified in claiming that people are better off after our intervention than they were before?)

Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 June 2012 03:37:24AM -1 points [-]

Well, there's the anthropological concept of the psychic unity of humankind — we may have different values, but our ways of thinking (including our values) are not wholly alien from one another, but have a lot in common.

And there are also things we can say about human values that descend from cultural evolution: we would not expect, for instance, that any culture would exist that did not value its own replication into the next generation. So we would expect that people would want to teach their ideas to their children (or converts), merely because societies that don't do that would tend to die out and we wouldn't get to observe them.

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