All of fourier's Comments + Replies

Why are you personally attacking me for discussing the topic at hand? I'm discussing human nature and giving myself as a counter-example, but I clearly meant that it applies to everyone in different ways. I will avoid personal examples since some people have a hard time understanding. I believe you are ironically proving my point by signaling against me based on my beliefs which you dislike.

Attacking you? I said I don't want to be around you and don't want to invest in you. I said it with a touch of snark ("remind me").

> I clearly meant that it applies to everyone in different ways

Not clear to me. I don't think everyone "would sacrifice a lot" to "see the people [they] hate being harmed". I wouldn't. I think behaving that way is inadvisable for you and harmful to others, and will tend to make you a bad investment opportunity.

It entails that behavior that people consider moral, tends towards having the property that if everyone behaved like that, things would be good

This is just circular.  What is "good"?

Rule of law, equality before the law, Rawlsian veil of ignorance, stare decisis, equality of opportunity, the golden rule, liberty, etc. Generally, norms that are symmetric across space, time, context, and person. (Not saying we actually have these things, or that "most people" explicitly think these things are good, just that people tend to update in favor of these things

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2TekhneMakre
>Evidence that "most people" update in favor of these things? It seems like a very current western morality centric view, Yeah, I think you're right that it's biased towards Western. I think you can generate the obvious examples (e.g. law systems developing; e.g. various revolutions in the name of liberty and equality and against tyranny), and I'm not interested enough right now to come up with more comprehensive treatment of the evidence, and I'm not super confident. It could be interesting to see how this plays out in places where these tendencies seem least present. Is China such a place? (What do most people living in China really think of non-liberty, non-Rawlsianism, etc.?)
fourier*-20

> and this sounds silly to us, because we know that "kicking the sunrise" is impossible, because sun is a planet, it is far away, and your kicking has no impact on it.

 

No, the reason it sounds silly to you is not because it's not true, but because it's not part of your own sacred beliefs. There is no fundamental reason for people to support things you are taking for granted as moral facts, like women's right or racial rights.

In fact, given an accurate model of the world, a lot of things that make the most sense you may find distasteful based on you... (read more)

2Viliam
A concept is "totally meaningless" just because it does not match some evolutionary strategies? First, concepts are concepts, regardless of what is their relation to evolution. Second, there are many strategies in evolution, including things like cooperation or commitments, which intuitively seem more aligned with morality. Humans are a social species, where the most aggresive one with most muscles is not necessarily a winner. Sometimes it is actually a loser, who gets beaten by the cops and thrown in jail. Another example: Some homeless people are quite scary and they can survive things that I probably cannot imagine; yet, from the evolutionary perspective, they are usually less successful than me. Even if a group wants to exterminate another group, it is usually easier if they befriend a different group first, and then attack together. But you usually don't make friends by being a backstabbing asshole. And "not being a backstabbing asshole" is kinda what morality is about. Here we need to decouple moral principles from factual beliefs. On the level of moral principles, many people accept "if some individual is similar to me, they should be treated with some basic respect" as a moral rule. Not all of them, of course. If someone does not accept this moral rule, then... de gustibus non est disputandum, I guess. (I suspect that ethics is somehow downstream of aesthetics, but I may be confused about this.) But even if someone accepts this rule, the actual application will depend on their factual beliefs about who is "similar to me". I believe it is a statement about the world (not just some kind of sacred belief) that approval of women's rights is positively correlated with the belief that (mentally) women are similar to men. Similarly, the approval of racial rights is positively correlated with the belief that people of different races are (mentally) similar to each other. This statement should be something that both people who approve and who disapprove of the af
fourier0-2

Like, okay, if I say "one element of moral progress is increasing universalizability", and you say "that's just the thing your status cohort assigns high status", I'm like, well, sure, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also have other interesting properties, like being a tendency across many different peoples; like being correlated with the extent to which they're reflecting, sharing information, and building understanding; like resulting in reductionist-materialist local outcomes that have more of material local things that people otherwise generally seem

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6TekhneMakre
Are you pursuing this to any great extent? If so, remind me to stay away from you and avoid investing in you.
3TekhneMakre
By that description, mathematics is fairly unlike mathematics. It entails that behavior that people consider moral, tends towards having the property that if everyone behaved like that, things would be good. Rule of law, equality before the law, Rawlsian veil of ignorance, stare decisis, equality of opportunity, the golden rule, liberty, etc. Generally, norms that are symmetric across space, time, context, and person. (Not saying we actually have these things, or that "most people" explicitly think these things are good, just that people tend to update in favor of these things.)
fourier120

Your analogy breaks down because the Bell Curve is extremely reasonable, not some forged junk like "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion".

If a book mentioned here mentioned evolution and that offended some traditional religious people, would we need to give a disclaimer and potentially leave it off the site? What if some conservative religious people believe belief in evolution directly harms them? They would be regarded as insane, and so are people offended by TBC.

That's all this is by the way, left-wing evolution denial. How likely is it that people separated for tens of thousands of years with different founder populations will have equal levels of cognitive ability. It's impossible.

fourier-30

People on this site should stop pretending to be rational and calling themselves "rationalists" if they're not willing to seek truth just because some people find it offensive.  And it should change its name from "lesswrong".