LESSWRONG
LW

All of NicksName's Comments + Replies

The Modern Problems with Conformity
NicksName20

Not disagreeing with anything there, perhaps I should have added a bit more to the 'cannot rely on this' part. It will only be after the fact, from the perspective of a being in some present looking at the past, that they can say this or that did or didn't work in a pretty abstract sense, its the fundamental fallacy of conservatism or traditionalism to assume that we just have to repeat or go back to what worked in retrospective. It's a tempting illusion of any perspective looking at the past, that has a tendency to overlook all the beings that didn't make... (read more)

Reply
The Modern Problems with Conformity
NicksName20

On net, conformity worked 'for us' in the past, because we are here, our ancestors made it. This is just the anthropomorphic principle - those who were too maladapted to conformity got weeded out and can't voice their grievances about it today. It's important to recognize how anyone in the present cannot rely on this, many will fall prey to bad memes like always, all the way back to the beginning of our big brains.

Reply
2Dagon
You need to be careful to define "us" in these discussions.  The people for whom it worked in the past are not the people making behavioral choices now.  They are the ancestors of today's people.  You also have to be more specific about what "worked" means - they were able to reproduce and create the current people.  That is very different from what most people mean by "it works" when evaluating how to behave today. It's also impossible to distinguish what parts of historical behavior "worked" in this way.  Perhaps it was conformity per se, perhaps it was the specific conformist behaviors that previous eras preferred, perhaps it was other parts of the environment that made it work, which no longer does.
The Case Against Moral Realism
NicksName*-1-2

The whole field of meta-ethics is bogus and produces verbiage that isn't helpful. The last paragraph here hits the nail on the head, an interlocutor can grant basically anything about morality, as long as there isn't an enforcement mechanism it's simply irrelevant. Any non supernatural enforcement mechanism just turns compliance/non-compliance into a game theoretic problem. Even if there was a supernatural enforcement mechanism - people would just cooperate out of calculation, in which case morality and altruism get divorced and morality loses it's emotional appeal and just reduces to individual selfishness, if you think long enough about it, which chokes the motivation to care about morality in the first place.

Reply
2AnthonyC
If I'm understanding you correctly, then I strongly disagree about what ethics and meta-ethics are for, as well as what "individual selfishness" means. The questions I care about flow from "What do I care about, and why?" and "How much do I think others should or will care about these things, and why?" Moral realism and amoral nihilism are far from the only options, and neither are ones I'm interested in accepting.
Goodhart's Law and Emotions
NicksName*21

Your points 1, 2 and 4 rely on the assumption of hedonism, points 2, 3 and 4 rely on the assumption of altruism, the author rejects both: 

https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2024/06/hedonic-utilitarianism.html

3. Not gaming nature’s system – what would that mean? Could it be to try to have as many children or something like that? After that this is what nature wanted to ensure when it endowed us with our proxy emotions. I’m not sure it’s better.

Right, having as many children as possible is exactly what it means, now you can reject your natural "purp... (read more)

Reply