In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: [deleted] 11 November 2012 08:53:36PM 1 point [-]

I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer's behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense. (Are you thinking of anything in particular about Homer or was it an arbitrary example?)

In any case mind sharing how you implemente CEV checking on a mere human brain?

I wouldn't, but I can roughly guess what the result would be. (Likewise, I couldn't implement Solomonoff induction on any brain, but I still guess general relativity has less complexity than MOND.) If I had no way of guessing whether a given action is more likely to be good or to be bad, how should I ever decide what to do?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: sam0345 12 November 2012 12:18:44AM *  5 points [-]

I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer's behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense.

I don't think that makes sense. Also, I am pretty sure that Xenophon's behavior (massacre and pillage the bad guys and abduct their women) was a lot closer to his moral ideal than our behavior is to Xenophon's moral ideal.

Further, the behavior Xenophon describes others of the ten thousand performing is astonishingly close to his moral ideal, in that astonishing acts of heroism were routine, while the behavior I observe around me exhibits major disconnect from our purported moral ideals, for example the John Derbyshire incident, though, of course, Xenophon was doubtless selective in what incidents he though worthy to record.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: simplicio 10 November 2012 09:13:09PM *  1 point [-]

One form of moral progress that doesn't look the same as "random walk plus retrospective teleology", is the case where some inconsistency of moral views is resolved.

For example, some dudes say that it's self-evident that all men are created equal. Then somebody notices that this doesn't really jive with the whole slavery thing. So at least some of what gets called moral progress is just people learning to live up to their own stated principles.

Another way of looking at it is that there is little difference between the terminal values of me vs a mediaeval lord, but the lord is very confused about what instrumental values best achieve his terminal values (he wants the best for the peasants, but thinks that that is achieved by the application of strong discipline to prevent idleness, so values severe discipline).

Comment author: sam0345 11 November 2012 11:04:20PM *  3 points [-]

For example, some dudes say that it's self-evident that all men are created equal. Then somebody notices that this doesn't really jive with the whole slavery thing. So at least some of what gets called moral progress is just people learning to live up to their own stated principles.

By this reasoning, abolishing slavery was moral progress, but declaring that all men are equal was moral regress.

If the fallacy is slavery, then moral progress. What if the fallacy is that all men are created equal?

By your measure, hypocritical values dissonance, we morally regressed when some dudes said it was self-evident that all men are created equal, and have indeed been morally regressing ever since, since affirmative action and so forth are accompanied by ever greater levels of hypocrisy and pretense. While the abolition of slavery reduced one form of hypocritical values dissonance, other forms of hypocritical values dissonance have been increasing.

Example: Female emancipation, high accreditation rates for females. Most successful long lived marriages are quietly eighteenth century in private, and most people, whether out of sexism or realism, quietly act as if female credentials are less meaningful than equivalent male credentials. Your criterion is neutral as to whether we do this out of sexism or realism. Either way, by your criterion, it is an equally bad thing, and there is a mighty lot of it going on.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: [deleted] 11 November 2012 09:25:56AM *  4 points [-]

I would call “moral progress” the process whereby a society's behaviours and their CEV get closer to each other than they used to be. And this looks pretty much like it, to me.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: sam0345 11 November 2012 10:48:55PM *  1 point [-]

I don't think violence has declined. State violence has increased. Further, since we are imprisoning a lot more people, looks like private violence has increased, supposing, as seems likely, most of them are being reasonably imprisoned.

Genghis Khan and the African slave trade cannot remotely match the crimes of communism.

And if it has declined, Xenophon would interpret this as us becoming pussies and cowards. Was Xenophon more violent and cruel than any similarly respectable modern man? Obviously. But he was nonetheless deservedly respectable. We rightly call the ten thousand brave, not criminal.

Social acceptance of brave, honorable, and manly violence has greatly diminished, and so brave, honorable and manly violence has greatly diminished. But vicious, horrifying, evil and depraved violence, for example petty crime and the various communist mass murders, has enormously increased.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 November 2011 08:16:16AM *  3 points [-]

The canonical example is, I think, the aborigines of Tasmania after they were cut off from the mainland. Over the 8000 years of isolation, the ~10,000 Tasmanians lost most of their technology - fishing, the ability to make fire or bone tools, etc.

The story, as I read when visiting relevant sites in Tasmania (and confirmed on wikipedia) is one of "necessity is the mother of invention" in reverse - Tasmania being a veritable paradise compared to most of the mainland. Fishing traps for scaled fish were not especially important given the effort they required compared to eating shellfish and seals while environmental changes and increasing tribal territory sizes made hunting land animals even easier. They also never lost fire.

This example isn't especially strong evidence that technology loss is caused by a 10k population size.

Comment author: sam0345 11 November 2012 09:40:54PM 2 points [-]

After 1830 or so there is a PC reluctance to mention certain facts about the Tasmanian aboriginals that people previous to that time found glaringly obvious.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 November 2012 05:14:29PM *  8 points [-]

I just knew the Socialist Russian commenter was you. :)

The post came off as bitter, as someone in desperate denial of how much he started rooting for Romney ever more the more the election date approached. But I liked it because of the bolded sentences in my other comment. I liked it because of how well it shows the sheer terror of the huge check reality is going to hand back to us one day if my and his model of the government and politics is correct.

Perhaps I was biased towards it because while on the day of the election I was apathetic, since I could barely see the difference between Romney and Obama both pro-wall street moderate theist stateist democracy advocates who like to bomb other countries. My apolitical stance crumbled when I saw everyone celebrating the win. The Facebook comments. The smiles on my friend's faces. The utterly creepy unity of thought. That I couldn't share. That I could never share. And I couldn't explain to them why, there is too little time, the singaling is so wrong, it would only cost me friends. I also knew I was far away from anyone else that even empathy towards me was not possible. So alienating. So alienating to see this in what I was as a child told was supposed to be my society too. Having to be quiet about it... I hated it, I hated all of modern Western civilization and wished it to disappear ground to dust by Chinese boots or drowned in an Islamic tide or surgically cut off from mankind to ensure the latter's survival, the wound sterilized by cleansing atomic fire. It activated my tribal brain.

The next night I couldn't sleep for hours. I couldn't help but see Obama's election as a sort of symbolic thing a signal "so right wing traditionalist reform is utterly impossible via elections, we aren't going to fix this are we? We can't fix this! It won't fix itself! GOD! Democracy won't fix itself! We are fucked. Probably since 1914."

To be perfectly clear I still think there is no real difference in an Obama or Romney win. Certainly nothing to worth voting for. But I've had compartmentalized beliefs about the world for some time. And the post election glow of so many people made me feel the implications of those beliefs in my belly and heart much like I had only felt the implication of natural selection being allowed to do horrible things to creatures after reading Back to the Trees. I found myself once again staring in the face of a world beyond the reach of God and I wanted it to go away.

Comment author: sam0345 11 November 2012 09:07:31PM 2 points [-]

We are fucked. Probably since 1914.

We have been about to be fucked ever since they declared that all men are created equal with inalienable rights, which foreshadowed the collapse of all the institutional barriers that the founding fathers created to protect against democracy.

Comment author: Strange7 11 November 2012 07:32:36PM 0 points [-]

Babyeater babies don't want to be eaten, or particularly want to eat their peers, and those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time, so "eat babies" isn't the 'coherent' part of the babyeater CEV.

Comment author: sam0345 11 November 2012 08:27:09PM *  0 points [-]

Insert abortion debate: Right to choose is morally coherent, and right to life is morally coherent. It is debatable which of these would constitute moral progress.

However, what is not morally coherent, is that women have sole power over reproductive decisions, but men have an obligation to support those choices whatever they may be, that husbands don't have a say, that unmarried men can be forced to support babies, but women cannot.

This is not moral progress, but anti white male democratic coalition.

One could coherently argue that right to choose, but no right to child support is moral progress

One could coherently argue that right to life, plus right to child support is moral progress.

One cannot argue that right to choose plus right to child support is moral progress. It is morally right that he who pays the piper, calls the tune, and that she who calls the tune, gets stuck with the piper's bill.

Comment author: wedrifid 11 November 2012 08:32:24AM 1 point [-]

If consent to sex is given moment to moment, rather than once and forever, then marriage cannot be a durable contract

Not technically true. Since you have already said marriage is being redefined it just means that the redefinition must be to something which does not necessarily include sex---that is, a contract that allows enforced abstinence. A logically coherent concept even though I find the notion repugnant.

Comment author: sam0345 11 November 2012 08:08:20PM *  0 points [-]

But as Saint Paul rather delicately said, and people in the eighteenth century rather more plainly said, enforced abstinence is not going to fly.

So, if "rape" in marriage is a concept, marriage is not a concept. If marriage is not a concept, massive drop in female fertility and male investment in offspring, decrease in total children, increase in fatherless children.

Which is not moral progress.

Comment author: mwengler 11 November 2012 01:39:37PM 1 point [-]

There are cryptographic solutions to this problem: Suppose the stock/money of the corporation consists of crypto signatures. You can use threshold signatures to make heavy weapons only work for the leader most recently authorized by a majority of the board most recently authorized by majority of shareholders.

I don't see how any amount of crypto can keep the management+board from favoring themselves in how they account the wealth. We have ALWAYS had good crypto available for money: gold is a sort-of atomic crypto. But gold does not stop the treasurer from embezzling, and if you control the accounting rules, embezzelment per se becomes unnecessary, you just write those expenses off mendaciously as some sorts of necessary expenses.

A sovcorp is just a business operation that operates outside of the law of secondary property rights corporations. We have plenty of natural experiments in this. Organized crime is a sovcorp. Fighting it out with other sovcorps associated with competiting criminal organizations, but also fighting it out with sovcorps we associate with gov't: police, da's, fbi, dea, etc.

If the mafia promised to pay you a "dividend" on its operations, you could expect to receive that dividend until they decided it was cheaper to NOT pay you. Crypto guarantees I am not buying counterfeit shares in your mafia, your sovcorp. Counterfeiting is not the problem if the sovcorp decides what property rights it owes to its non-controlling shareholders in real time, and by definition of a sovcorp, unconstrained by any outside rules of interaction.

My objection is that Moldbug's solution ignores the dynamics of ruling elites - but then so does democracy.

Democracy as implemented in the US republic certainly doesn't ignore this. We have FOIA laws, a gigantic structure of oathes of offices and internal controls on the enhanced powers sovcorp agents have. We have a system of "checks and balances" built in from the ground level, and enhanced much since it started.

What our republic does not manage is to make the dynamics of ruling elites disappear. What it does manage is to keep the ruling elites from running away with control over the whole system with no oversight and no transparency.

Constantly dealing with a real issue in human nature is the OPPOSITE of ignoring it.

Comment author: sam0345 11 November 2012 07:37:58PM 4 points [-]

I don't see how any amount of crypto can keep the management+board from favoring themselves in how they account the wealth.

The board contains major shareholders, who would mostly be in favor of honest accounting. It seems more likely to work, than that a democratic government would be in favor of honest vote counting.

Comment author: shokwave 15 September 2011 01:09:11PM *  2 points [-]

I can't put it into words, but I feel like not having slaves and not allowing rape within marriage are both good things that are morally superior for reasons beyond simply "I believe this and people long-ago didn't".

The process whereby things like this occur are what I'd call "human moral development".

Comment author: sam0345 11 November 2012 07:23:48AM *  2 points [-]

On "rape in marriage" you are clearly wrong. Freedom of contract is morally superior, the traditional contract for the past two thousand years being that a man and a woman each gave their consent to sex once and forever:

The concept of "rape" in marriage defines marriage, as it was originally understood out of existence, marriage as it was originally understood being the power to bind our future selves to stick it out

According to the New Testament:

let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.

Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.

The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.

Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time,

If consent to sex is given moment to moment, rather than once and forever, then marriage cannot be a durable contract: Consent to marriage then has to be moment to moment, which is to say routine hooking up, rather than marriage, thus producing the present situation where men are reluctant to invest in children and posterity, and where eighty percent of fertile age women have sex with twenty percent of men.

The concept of "rape" in marriage defines women as incapable of contract. Like so much of feminism, it infantilizes women in the guise of empowering them.

Saint Paul phrased it more delicately than I phrase it, or people in the eighteenth century phrased it, but what he meant, and what he rather delicately implied, and what people in the eighteenth century said plainly enough, is that if a fertile age wife is not getting done by her husband, she will be getting done by someone else pretty soon, and if a fertile age wife knocks her husband back, she is probably thinking about getting done by someone higher status than her husband, and pretty soon will be so. If she violates the marital contract by not servicing her husband, she is about to violate the marital contract a lot more drastically.

Comment author: mwengler 09 November 2012 11:56:17PM 2 points [-]

The post you referenced didn't really talk much about neocameralism's structure. If indeed we do sell stock in the state, and the state then operates to maximize it's stock price, that sure strikes me as way worse than a republic.

First off, I'm not even sure what it means to own stock in the gov't. To own stock in a company is a highly complex thing whos meaning is spelled out in exquisite detail both in legislation and in the recorded court cases which have interpreted that legislation. As a result, we know there are real rights associated with the ownership that will be enforced by a very powerful government in an extremely predictable way.

If I buy stock in the sovcorp, who protects my property rights? The sovcorp? The sovcorp is run by executives. Why would they not simply, essentially, steal the corporation? It wouldn't be illegal for them to do so because being the sovcorp, they write AND interpret AND enforce the laws. Even for regular corps, we find the executives giving themselves large stacks of equity in the company every year. What is even the feedback mechanism to keep a board of directors and an executive management team from awarding themselves a majority of the voting power of the sovcorp? Of diluting the ownership outside the board and the executives until they get all the return?

How does the sovcorp prevent its own collapse in to a kleptocratic dictatorship?

In the case of a republican democracy, there is a kernel in place called a constitution. In some important sense, everyone with the franchise has one and only one non-transferrable share in the control of the sovcorp. These shares are just one form of control over one part of the structure, turns out money also gives people avenues of control, and money is not distributed even close to evenly. But having at least one portion of the control based, by kernel or constitution, on inalienable limited control rights prevents a small minority, even a tiny minority, from capturing the returns from the entire sovcorp by accruing all the control.

Of course a democracy as could a neocameral with transferrable stock, can still have coalitions form within it to the benefit of the coalesced at the expense of those outside the coalition. But with inalienable voting shares, an upper limit of inequality is essentially in place: the coalitions must be quite gigantic, requiring more than half of the enfranchised to consent, whereas in the transferrable stock case the coalitions could be quite small.

If I have missed the real point of the neocamera, please do tell.

Comment author: sam0345 10 November 2012 10:30:05AM *  6 points [-]

If I buy stock in the sovcorp, who protects my property rights? The sovcorp? The sovcorp is run by executives. Why would they not simply, essentially, steal the corporation?

There are cryptographic solutions to this problem: Suppose the stock/money of the corporation consists of crypto signatures. You can use threshold signatures to make heavy weapons only work for the leader most recently authorized by a majority of the board most recently authorized by majority of shareholders.

Of course the leaders could furtively @#$%^ the crypto in the heavy weapons but then democratic leaders can, and regularly do, furtively @#$%^ the vote.

Indeed, it is probably easier to @#$%^ the vote than the crypto, since most voters are idiots, and any one vote is not worth much, but most shareholders are smart, and the votes of the most important (and powerful) shareholders are worth quite a lot, so there are more concentrated interests upholding the integrity of the crypto, than the integrity of the democratic vote.

My objection is that Moldbug's solution ignores the dynamics of ruling elites - but then so does democracy.

View more: Prev | Next