I agree that “paying attention to the whole system” isn’t literally a thing that can be done, and I should have been clearer about what I actually meant. It’s more like “making an earnest attempt to pay attention to the whole system (while truncating attention at a reasonable point)”. It’s not that you literally get to attend to everything, it’s that you haven’t excluded some important domain from things you care about. I think habryka (quoting and expanding on Ben Pace’s thoughts) has a reasonable description of this in a comment.
I definitely don’t think this is just making an arbitrary choice of what things to value, or that it’s especially anchored in traditional values (though I do think it’s correlated with traditional values).
I discuss a bit about making the tradeoffs of when to stop giving things attention in the section “wholesomeness vs expedience” in the second essay.
I interpreted this concept of wholesomeness to be a least somewhat objective, but perhaps that’s not the intention.
Could you clarify how much wholesomeness is a subjective property relative to one’s values, vs being a more objective property that would hold constant under different values?
For example, say I lay out a business plan use X natural resources to build Y buildings, that will be used for Z purpose. Would you expect to be able to rate my wholesomeness without knowing how much I value things like nature, humanity, industrial progress, rural/urban lifestyle, etc? (assuming this business plan only covers some of these things, because considering all things isn’t possible)
Good question, my answer on this is nuanced (and I’m kind of thinking it through in response to your question).
I think that what feels to you to be wholesome will depend on your values. And I’m generally in favour of people acting according to their own feeling of what is wholesome.
On the other hand I also think there would be some choices of values that I would describe as “not wholesome”. These are the ones which ignore something of what’s important about some dimension (perhaps justifying ignoring it by saying “I just don’t value this”), at least as felt-to-be-important by a good number of other people in society.
But although “avoiding unwholesomeness” provides some constraints on values, it’s not specifying exactly what values or tradeoffs are good to have. And then for any among the range of possible wholesome values, when you come to make decisions acting wholesomely will depend on your personal values. (Or, depending on the situation, perhaps not; in the case of the business plan, if it’s supposed to be for the sake of the local community then what is wholesome could depend a lot more on the community’s values than on your own.)
So there is an element of “paying at least some attention to traditional values” (at least while fair numbers of people care about them), but it’s definitely not trying to say “optimize for them”.
So I’ve been trying to get a clearer picture of what you mean by wholesomeness. So far I have: * Make an attempt to pay attention to the whole system, but stop at whatever point feels reasonable. * Don’t exclude any important domains from things you care about. * Make these judgements based on your own values, and also the values that are felt-to-be-important by a good number of other people. * Wholesomeness is subjective to individual interpretation, so there aren’t definitive right answers. * Certain tradeoffs of values are objectively unwholesome. There are definitive wrong answers.
I don’t think this is a useful model. The devil of all of this is in the interpretations of “reasonable” and “important” and “good.”
You say it’s unwholesome when someone ignores what you think is important by saying “I don’t value this”. But this is exactly what your model is encouraging: consider everything, but stop whenever you personally feel like you’ve considered everything you value. The only safeguard against this is just biasing the status quo by labeling things unwholesome if enough people disagree.
I definitely agree that this fails as a complete formula for assessing what’s good or bad. My feeling is that it offers an orientation that can be helpful for people aggregating stuff they think into all-things-considered judgements (and e.g. I would in retrospect have preferred to have had more of this orientation in the past).
If someone were using this framework to stop thinking about things that I thought they ought to consider, I couldn’t be confident that they weren’t making a good faith effort to act wholesomely, but I at least would think that their actions weren’t wholesome by my lights.
I agree that “paying attention to the whole system” isn’t literally a thing that can be done, and I should have been clearer about what I actually meant. It’s more like “making an earnest attempt to pay attention to the whole system (while truncating attention at a reasonable point)”. It’s not that you literally get to attend to everything, it’s that you haven’t excluded some important domain from things you care about. I think habryka (quoting and expanding on Ben Pace’s thoughts) has a reasonable description of this in a comment.
I definitely don’t think this is just making an arbitrary choice of what things to value, or that it’s especially anchored in traditional values (though I do think it’s correlated with traditional values).
I discuss a bit about making the tradeoffs of when to stop giving things attention in the section “wholesomeness vs expedience” in the second essay.
I interpreted this concept of wholesomeness to be a least somewhat objective, but perhaps that’s not the intention.
Could you clarify how much wholesomeness is a subjective property relative to one’s values, vs being a more objective property that would hold constant under different values?
For example, say I lay out a business plan use X natural resources to build Y buildings, that will be used for Z purpose. Would you expect to be able to rate my wholesomeness without knowing how much I value things like nature, humanity, industrial progress, rural/urban lifestyle, etc?
(assuming this business plan only covers some of these things, because considering all things isn’t possible)
Good question, my answer on this is nuanced (and I’m kind of thinking it through in response to your question).
I think that what feels to you to be wholesome will depend on your values. And I’m generally in favour of people acting according to their own feeling of what is wholesome.
On the other hand I also think there would be some choices of values that I would describe as “not wholesome”. These are the ones which ignore something of what’s important about some dimension (perhaps justifying ignoring it by saying “I just don’t value this”), at least as felt-to-be-important by a good number of other people in society.
But although “avoiding unwholesomeness” provides some constraints on values, it’s not specifying exactly what values or tradeoffs are good to have. And then for any among the range of possible wholesome values, when you come to make decisions acting wholesomely will depend on your personal values. (Or, depending on the situation, perhaps not; in the case of the business plan, if it’s supposed to be for the sake of the local community then what is wholesome could depend a lot more on the community’s values than on your own.)
So there is an element of “paying at least some attention to traditional values” (at least while fair numbers of people care about them), but it’s definitely not trying to say “optimize for them”.
So I’ve been trying to get a clearer picture of what you mean by wholesomeness. So far I have:
* Make an attempt to pay attention to the whole system, but stop at whatever point feels reasonable.
* Don’t exclude any important domains from things you care about.
* Make these judgements based on your own values, and also the values that are felt-to-be-important by a good number of other people.
* Wholesomeness is subjective to individual interpretation, so there aren’t definitive right answers.
* Certain tradeoffs of values are objectively unwholesome. There are definitive wrong answers.
I don’t think this is a useful model. The devil of all of this is in the interpretations of “reasonable” and “important” and “good.”
You say it’s unwholesome when someone ignores what you think is important by saying “I don’t value this”. But this is exactly what your model is encouraging: consider everything, but stop whenever you personally feel like you’ve considered everything you value. The only safeguard against this is just biasing the status quo by labeling things unwholesome if enough people disagree.
I definitely agree that this fails as a complete formula for assessing what’s good or bad. My feeling is that it offers an orientation that can be helpful for people aggregating stuff they think into all-things-considered judgements (and e.g. I would in retrospect have preferred to have had more of this orientation in the past).
If someone were using this framework to stop thinking about things that I thought they ought to consider, I couldn’t be confident that they weren’t making a good faith effort to act wholesomely, but I at least would think that their actions weren’t wholesome by my lights.