Even when people talk as if “growing the circle” is a good thing, I have the impression that they really mean “drawing the boundary correctly is a good thing, and the correct place to draw the boundary happens to be bigger than people drew it in the past”.
If someone said we should extend rights to rocks and sand, and we need to stop using beaches recreationally because it’s unfairly exploiting the sand...I think you’d probably think that was a bad idea, even if it “grows the circle”.
If you think that growing the circle to include foreigners, animals, and AI is good, but that growing the circle to include rocks and sand is bad, that sounds to me like your personal circle already includes foreigners, animals, and AI but not rocks and sand, and you’re wishing everyone else would change their circle to match yours.
Not saying you’d be wrong to want that. But I think it requires a more sophisticated justification than “because bigger circles are better”.
Yes, I wasn’t at all saying bigger circles are generically better. (I realize this can be a bit tricky since this post involves some songs/poetry, and is in mid-confused-existential-crisis where a bunch of different pieces of my worldview get briefly namedropped without being spelled out. But I deliberately left this post non-frontpaged because I wanted the discussion of it to center on people who’ve read the sequences and have a bunch of similar philosophical background as me)
(b) The reason I found this post is that your coordination frontier intro got me interested enough that I looked for a way to be notified of future posts in that sequence, and the best option I could find was subscribing to all your posts
Nod. Apologies for the somewhat curt/patronizing tone in the previous comment. I think your point here is a fine point but is not really what I wanted the discussion on this particular post to be about. (It feels like it’s arguing against a position I don’t expect anyone here to actually hold)
But, I do appreciate you following my posts generally and look forward to other discussion on this post and others.
It appeared to me that your post was at least partially motivated by questioning the philosophical robustness of the first song, and that the song could plausibly be criticized for implying that bigger circles are inherently better, even if the people singing it don’t reflectively endorse that position.
(I admit that songs need to choose a trade-off between brevity and nuance that is further towards the “brevity” side than most philosophy, but I don’t feel like “bigger is better” is much good even as an approximation.)
Even when people talk as if “growing the circle” is a good thing, I have the impression that they really mean “drawing the boundary correctly is a good thing, and the correct place to draw the boundary happens to be bigger than people drew it in the past”.
If someone said we should extend rights to rocks and sand, and we need to stop using beaches recreationally because it’s unfairly exploiting the sand...I think you’d probably think that was a bad idea, even if it “grows the circle”.
If you think that growing the circle to include foreigners, animals, and AI is good, but that growing the circle to include rocks and sand is bad, that sounds to me like your personal circle already includes foreigners, animals, and AI but not rocks and sand, and you’re wishing everyone else would change their circle to match yours.
Not saying you’d be wrong to want that. But I think it requires a more sophisticated justification than “because bigger circles are better”.
Yes, I wasn’t at all saying bigger circles are generically better. (I realize this can be a bit tricky since this post involves some songs/poetry, and is in mid-confused-existential-crisis where a bunch of different pieces of my worldview get briefly namedropped without being spelled out. But I deliberately left this post non-frontpaged because I wanted the discussion of it to center on people who’ve read the sequences and have a bunch of similar philosophical background as me)
For context,
(a) I have read the sequences
(b) The reason I found this post is that your coordination frontier intro got me interested enough that I looked for a way to be notified of future posts in that sequence, and the best option I could find was subscribing to all your posts
Nod. Apologies for the somewhat curt/patronizing tone in the previous comment. I think your point here is a fine point but is not really what I wanted the discussion on this particular post to be about. (It feels like it’s arguing against a position I don’t expect anyone here to actually hold)
But, I do appreciate you following my posts generally and look forward to other discussion on this post and others.
No offense taken.
It appeared to me that your post was at least partially motivated by questioning the philosophical robustness of the first song, and that the song could plausibly be criticized for implying that bigger circles are inherently better, even if the people singing it don’t reflectively endorse that position.
(I admit that songs need to choose a trade-off between brevity and nuance that is further towards the “brevity” side than most philosophy, but I don’t feel like “bigger is better” is much good even as an approximation.)