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Tem42 comments on Stupid Questions, December 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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My possibly stupid question is: "Are some/all of LessWrong's values manufactured?"
Robin Hanson brings up the plasticity of values. Humans exposed to spicy food and social conformity pressures rewire their brain to make the pain pleasurable. The jump from plastic qualia to plastic values is a big one, but it seems plausible. It seems likely that cultural prestige causes people to rewire things like research, studying, etc. as interesting/pleasurable. Perhaps intellectual values and highbrow culture are entirely manufactured values. This seems mildly troubling to me, but it would explain why rationality and logic are so hard to come by. Perhaps the geek to nerd metamorphosis involves a more substantial utility function modification than merely acquiring a taste for something new.
I don't think that manufactured is a useful word here. If I were to try to use it, I would say that any LessWrong value that you gained from LessWrong was "manufactured in you". I would also say that any value commonly expressed on LessWrong has been shaped beyond the form in which it was originally conceived, and 'manufactured' in this sense.
There is no real sense that you can can any value you hold is not manufactured, unless you are talking about values like eating and breathing.
P.S. As far an a universal human culture goes, we can say with some certainty that religion, for example, is part of human nature -- but no specific god, church, or belief is. So any religious/spiritual views you hold are clearly manufactured; the extent to which you hold them or do not was 'shaped' (which you may call manufactured or not).