If reason told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?
In reply to Eliezer's Contrarian Status Catch 22 & Sufficiently Advanced Sanity. I accuse Eliezer of encountering a piece of Advanced Wisdom.
Unreason is something that we should fight against. Witch burnings, creationism & homeopathy are all things which should rightly be defended against for society to advance. But, more subtly, I think reason is in some ways, is also a dangerous phenomena that should be guarded against. I am arguing not against the specific process of reasoning itself, it is the attitude which instinctually reaches for reason as the first tool of choice when confronting a problem. Scott Aaronson called this approach bullet swallowing when he tried to explain why he was so uncomfortable with it. Jane Galt also rails against reason when explaining why she does not support gay marriage.
Any sufficiently advanced wisdom is indistinguishable from bullshit
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.
Rebasing Ethics
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.
Man-with-a-hammer syndrome
What gummed up Skinner’s reputation is that he developed a case of what I always call man-with-a-hammer syndrome: to the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail.
The Psychology of Human Misjudgment is an brilliant talk given by Charlie Munger that I still return to and read every year to gain a fresh perspective. There’s a lot of wisdom to be distilled from that piece but the one thing I want to talk about today is the man-with-a-hammer syndrome.
Man-with-a-hammer syndrome is pretty simple: you think of an idea and then, pretty soon, it becomes THE idea. You start seeing how THE idea can apply to anything and everything, it’s the universal explanation for how the universe works. Suddenly, everything you’ve ever thought of before must be reinterpreted through the lens of THE idea and you’re on an intellectual high. Utilitarianism is a good example of this. Once you independently discover Utilitarianism you start to believe that an entire moral framework can be constructed around a system of pleasures and pains and, what’s more, that this moral system is both objective and platonic.
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