Any sufficiently advanced wisdom is indistinguishable from bullshit

7 Shalmanese 20 December 2009 10:09AM

In the grand tradition of sequences, I'm going to jot this down real quick because it's required for the next argument I'm going to make.

Shalmanese's 3rd law is "Any sufficiently advanced wisdom is indistinguishable from bullshit". Shalmanese's first law is "As the length of any discussion involving the metric system approaches infinity, the likelihood approaches 1 of there being a reference to The Simpsons episode about 40 rods to the hogshead" so judge it by the company it keeps.

Imagine you got to travel back in time to meet yourself from 10 years ago and impart as much wisdom as possible on your past-self in 6 hours. You're bound by the Time Enforcement Committee not to reveal that you are the future-self of your past-self and it never occurs to your past-self that this ugly thing in front of them could ever be you. As far as the past-self is concerned, it's just a moderately interesting person they're having a conversation with.

There would be 3 broad sets that your discussions would fall in: Beliefs that you both mutually agree on, Beliefs that you are able to convince your past-self through reason and Beliefs which make the past-self regard your future-self as being actively stupid for holding. It's this third category which I'm going to term Advanced Wisdom.

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Comment author: Shalmanese 20 December 2009 09:23:04AM 2 points [-]

Huh? That is not at all what I read from Scott Aaronson on this and I don't see how your interpretation can be supported upon a close reading.

My interpretation about this is that people who are smugly contrarion suffer from their own rationality bias that leads them to a higher likelihood of truth but at the cost of a much, much higher variance.

Sure, the smug contrarians taught to wash our hands between surgery & discovered America, but they were also the ones who ushered in the French Revolution, the Cambodian Genocide & the Zimbabwe Land Reforms.

In response to comment by Shalmanese on Rebasing Ethics
Comment author: RichardKennaway 15 December 2009 06:39:45PM 1 point [-]

Better minds that I have talked about the quest for purpose in the absense of faith and I choose deliberately not to endorse any particular moral goal in this piece.

But you did. You said that people should fight against the moral impulse to do good to strangers at their own expense, and strive to ignore their moral revulsion at ill-treating strangers.

selfish utilitarianism (is this really any different from hedonism?) is a good a goal as any although it's not one I personally choose as a moral end goal.

You are advocating it, but not choosing to follow it yourself?

Comment author: Shalmanese 15 December 2009 07:20:06PM 1 point [-]

The first person who understood nutrition didn't start on a perfect diet from day 1. Dieting is hard and we're still not very much closer to figuring out effective strategies of subverting our harmful evolutionary preferences. Rebasing ethics is at least as difficult so have some patience while it gets figured out.

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Comment author: wedrifid 15 December 2009 04:18:44PM 2 points [-]

Perhaps they said something else similar and you oversimplified their meaning?

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Comment author: Shalmanese 15 December 2009 04:21:19PM 0 points [-]

Perhaps. Could you unsimplify it for me? I don't really see where they are being less than clear in their descriptions.

In response to comment by Shalmanese on Rebasing Ethics
Comment author: wedrifid 15 December 2009 03:31:43PM 0 points [-]

That may or may not be so but I'm going by what leading atheists claim.

I don't believe you. Leading atheists don't say that. Perhaps they said something else similar and you oversimplified their meaning?

In response to comment by wedrifid on Rebasing Ethics
Comment author: Shalmanese 15 December 2009 04:10:53PM *  1 point [-]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCL63d66frs

"I do not lie, I do not cheat and believe it or not, all because that is what I CHOOSE. I know right from wrong. It is in the best interests of Humankind to 'get along'. If we all killed each other off then we wouldn't be able to carry on generation after generation. Killing each other and doing harm goes against all of Evolution!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx1yXvcT2kw

As an aside, it's much harder to find text references to this than video links.

In response to Rebasing Ethics
Comment author: RichardKennaway 15 December 2009 03:22:18PM *  3 points [-]

If there are no moral facts, why are you telling us what we should and should not do?

Overindulging in fatty, sweet, salty foods appears to be harmful; this is why one may do well to limit it. What corresponding harm do you see done by tipping waitresses that one will never see again, that would be prevented by the moral code that you advocate?

You're not explicit about it, but you appear to be advocating "selfish utilitarianism": the principle that one's personal utility is the only proper moral value, and should consider other people only as a means to one's own benefit. But as I said, having thrown out shoulds at the start, I don't see how you get them back in.

The first rule of rebasing your entire ethics system is that you never tell anyone you've rebased your entire ethics system.

For much the same reasons that you should never tell anyone you're a serial killer.

I second Yvain's recommendation for further reading.

Comment author: Shalmanese 15 December 2009 04:03:31PM -2 points [-]

It's easy: not tipping gives you an extra 18% of your dining out budget that you can spend on hookers & blow.

Better minds that I have talked about the quest for purpose in the absense of faith and I choose deliberately not to endorse any particular moral goal in this piece. selfish utilitarianism (is this really any different from hedonism?) is a good a goal as any although it's not one I personally choose as a moral end goal.

The crux of the argument is not about how you should act but you how you should fight your own moral revulsion when deciding how you should act.

In response to Rebasing Ethics
Comment author: Yvain 15 December 2009 02:42:24PM *  11 points [-]

Altruism is no longer valuable in evolutionary terms, but who cares?.

What's important to us as people isn't evolutionary value, it's satisfying personal preferences derived causally but not normatively from evolutionary value. Having money is one of those preferences. Being a nice person is another one of those preferences. If you deliberately make a choice that satisfies weaker preferences than the alternative, you're just throwing away utility for no reason.

If you haven't already, I suggest reading the Evolution Sequence, especially Alien God, Adaption-Executors, and Evolutionary Psychology, and the Metaethics Sequence

Now, if you want to make this into a reaaaallly repulsive ethical dilemma, add that true utilitarians should refuse to tip so they can donate that money to a charity that produces greater utility than the tip does.

In response to comment by Yvain on Rebasing Ethics
Comment author: Shalmanese 15 December 2009 03:56:27PM 1 point [-]

I deliberately chose an innocuous example so as to not overly trip the discussion into the specifics of the example itself. I'm not going to talk about some of the more extreme examples of what this would imply until other people do.

You're correct in that modifying tipping behavior by itself would probably not be worth being a dick about in the same way that just switching to low fat milk is probably not worth absorbing all of our science of nutrition & dieting about. You have to be able to see the cumulative effects of a complete rebasing before you can judge it's ultimate utility.

As for whether it's worth it, I think you need to look at where a person wants to be vs where they actually are. Looking out in the world, I don't see a lot of rationalists of the type who inhabit this board who are rich, powerful, admired, have happy marriages or have fulfilled the potential they believe they have. I'm not promising that you'll have all of that if you just rebase your ethics but If you happy not to try just so you can keep your warm fuzzy moral feelings, that's, of course, your own choice.

In response to Rebasing Ethics
Comment author: grouchymusicologist 15 December 2009 02:41:08PM 1 point [-]

Of the current figures who accept these premises, most espouse some form of secular humanism which argues that humans are genetically programed not to lie, murder or steal, therefore this is both the right morality & the one they practice.

This sounds wrong to me. It seems rather that humans are genetically programmed to lie, murder, and steal, and that, insofar as ethics help society function smoothly, they do so by constructing a system in which people feel inhibited about doing the "bad" things they are genetically programmed to do.

Comment author: Shalmanese 15 December 2009 03:25:10PM -2 points [-]

That may or may not be so but I'm going by what leading atheists claim. The only reason I finally wrote this was because I just got back from a screening of Collapse where Hitchens was espousing some Brotherhood of Man nonsense while weaseling out of directly confronting the issue of why secular morality looks suspiciously like christian morality warmed over.

In response to Rebasing Ethics
Comment author: Morendil 15 December 2009 03:06:16PM *  3 points [-]

Move to France for a while. You will learn not to tip, and you won't feel bad about it.

If this fills you with immediate moral revulsion

This assumes a culturally narrow "you".

In response to comment by Morendil on Rebasing Ethics
Comment author: Shalmanese 15 December 2009 03:22:46PM 0 points [-]

Not tipping when the social expectation is not to tip is no big deal. But not tipping when it's culturally expected of you is being a dick and that's what I'm talking about.

Rebasing Ethics

-9 Shalmanese 15 December 2009 01:56PM

Lets start with the following accepted as a given:

  • There exists no supernatural forces in the world and there is no objective morality imposed from above.
  • Our current moral codes are currently based on some mix of sociobiological influences & cultural forces

Of the current figures who accept these premises, most espouse some form of secular humanism which argues that humans are genetically programed not to lie, murder or steal, therefore this is both the right morality & the one they practice. This, to my mind, is committing the naturalistic fallacy.

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