Apologies for triple-posting, but something quite relevant also occurred to me:
I know of no other way to even locate “true values” other than “the values that sit within the broad basin of attraction when we attempt moral reflection in the way we’d most endorse.” So, unless there is such a basin, our “true values” remain under-defined.
In other words, I’m skeptical that the concept “true values” would remain meaningful if we couldn’t point it out via “what reflection (somewhat) robustly converges to.”
Absent the technology to create copies of oneself/one’s reasoning, it seems tricky to study the degree of convergence across different runs of reflection of a single person. But it’s not impossible to get a better sense of things. One could study how people form convictions and design their reflection strategies, stating hypotheses in advance. (E.g., conduct “moral reflection retreats” within EA [or outside of it!], do in-advance surveys to get a lot of baseline data, then run another retreat and see if there are correlations between clusters in the baseline data and the post-retreat reflection outcomes.)
Apologies for triple-posting, but something quite relevant also occurred to me:
I know of no other way to even locate “true values” other than “the values that sit within the broad basin of attraction when we attempt moral reflection in the way we’d most endorse.” So, unless there is such a basin, our “true values” remain under-defined.
In other words, I’m skeptical that the concept “true values” would remain meaningful if we couldn’t point it out via “what reflection (somewhat) robustly converges to.”
Absent the technology to create copies of oneself/one’s reasoning, it seems tricky to study the degree of convergence across different runs of reflection of a single person. But it’s not impossible to get a better sense of things. One could study how people form convictions and design their reflection strategies, stating hypotheses in advance. (E.g., conduct “moral reflection retreats” within EA [or outside of it!], do in-advance surveys to get a lot of baseline data, then run another retreat and see if there are correlations between clusters in the baseline data and the post-retreat reflection outcomes.)