The honest answer to your question is “Beats the !@#!$ out of me.”
But if abdicating to someone smarter isn’t an option, I need to do something. And starting from my values is asking for trouble: if they are temporally embedded the chronophone won’t transmit them; if they aren’t Archimedes has just as much access to them as I do.
So I have to start from the other side: model Archimedes, decide what modifications I want to introduce to that model, work out what aspects of his own mind will induce those modifications if excited/inhibited sufficiently, work out what aspects of my mind are most analogous to those, identify ideas that excite/inhibit my corresponding cognitive structures, and communicate those ideas.
So far, so good… this is essentially the same way I influence anyone in the real world who doesn’t already happen to agree with me. It’s also more or less how I train my dog. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
(Were this a real situation, I’d start by doing a lot of research on Archimedes and his milieu, about which I’m pretty ignorant. I’m not going to do that here, so my suggestions will be pretty bogus.)
Suppose I decide to influence Archimedes towards social equality (e.g., eliminate slavery, wider voting rights, that sort of thing).
Let’s assume his current opposition to this idea is in part going along with social norms, in part the notion that there really are fundamental differences between people that map to their social roles, and in part the practical acknowledgment that restricting power to his own class makes his life better.
I can’t do much about the first or the third. He could teach me a thing or two about being willing to stick your neck out, and I agree that there are practical benefits to preserving privilege; I could hardly convince him otherwise given the rhetoric-flattening nature of the chronophone. But the second seems like a potential lever.
There’s no way to convey my own belief that the differences aren’t as fundamental as all that, nor any reason Archimedes would be convinced by it. So I guess I’d start by thinking about experiments that have led me to reject intuitively obvious beliefs I’ve had about cognition. Demonstrations of confirmation bias, of conformity effects, of the use of availability heuristics in decision-making, that sort of thing.
The specifics don’t matter much; what I’d want to get across is the idea that people, and how people interact, and what people are capable of, is just as subject to careful investigation without distortion by prior expectation as, say, machinery or the density of crowns.
If I could do that, and thereby encourage him to begin empirically exploring cognition… that’d be cool. A 2000-year headstart on that could really change the world.
I don’t think much of my chances, though. I’ve tried to do this too many times across a much smaller gulf with better tools and failed miserably.
The honest answer to your question is “Beats the !@#!$ out of me.”
But if abdicating to someone smarter isn’t an option, I need to do something. And starting from my values is asking for trouble: if they are temporally embedded the chronophone won’t transmit them; if they aren’t Archimedes has just as much access to them as I do.
So I have to start from the other side: model Archimedes, decide what modifications I want to introduce to that model, work out what aspects of his own mind will induce those modifications if excited/inhibited sufficiently, work out what aspects of my mind are most analogous to those, identify ideas that excite/inhibit my corresponding cognitive structures, and communicate those ideas.
So far, so good… this is essentially the same way I influence anyone in the real world who doesn’t already happen to agree with me. It’s also more or less how I train my dog. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
(Were this a real situation, I’d start by doing a lot of research on Archimedes and his milieu, about which I’m pretty ignorant. I’m not going to do that here, so my suggestions will be pretty bogus.)
Suppose I decide to influence Archimedes towards social equality (e.g., eliminate slavery, wider voting rights, that sort of thing).
Let’s assume his current opposition to this idea is in part going along with social norms, in part the notion that there really are fundamental differences between people that map to their social roles, and in part the practical acknowledgment that restricting power to his own class makes his life better.
I can’t do much about the first or the third. He could teach me a thing or two about being willing to stick your neck out, and I agree that there are practical benefits to preserving privilege; I could hardly convince him otherwise given the rhetoric-flattening nature of the chronophone. But the second seems like a potential lever.
There’s no way to convey my own belief that the differences aren’t as fundamental as all that, nor any reason Archimedes would be convinced by it. So I guess I’d start by thinking about experiments that have led me to reject intuitively obvious beliefs I’ve had about cognition. Demonstrations of confirmation bias, of conformity effects, of the use of availability heuristics in decision-making, that sort of thing.
The specifics don’t matter much; what I’d want to get across is the idea that people, and how people interact, and what people are capable of, is just as subject to careful investigation without distortion by prior expectation as, say, machinery or the density of crowns.
If I could do that, and thereby encourage him to begin empirically exploring cognition… that’d be cool. A 2000-year headstart on that could really change the world.
I don’t think much of my chances, though. I’ve tried to do this too many times across a much smaller gulf with better tools and failed miserably.