I think this is mostly wrong in ways that make it hard to reform it. From the top:
It is experimentally verifiable that most of them are not very smart.
is a very silly thing to say! What did you mean by this: that most of the world can’t cook broccoli? It is very hard to learn to cook broccoli, but because we all know how to do this, we don’t find it impressive. This sentence boils down to “Most people are not the smartest people”, a statement that I’d argue is directionally true but largely oversells itself (if you know how to graft trees, write a database, and repair a washing machine, you’re a very unusual person! Smugly declaring that the Common Rube is obviously dumber than you elides a lot of important information about the guy who fixed your car a few years back).
Continuing, we have
You have effectively been brought up in a church that indoctrinated you to think that all surviving hominins are “equal” and that those who disagree are evil and edgy.
an attempt to insulate this post from critique (after all, anyone who disagrees is just deluded!)
Then we have an is–ought confusion:
If you feel the value of an entity is increased by having a given level of intellectual ability, you’re just, allowed to think that.
And end on one last attempt to make sure any criticism is read as an attack instead of a correction
Just don’t say it out loud or the stupid apes will eat you. (Typical.)
In general, I think a LessWrong comment should at least attempt to approach its subject matter with a truth-seeking lens, not a conspiratorial bundle of shadowy assertions. It is the case that people have different skill levels at different tasks, and it’s further the case that a lot of these different skill levels are correlated (“G factor”). These facts are not enough to compel you to change your valuation of people, and they are not something that must be darkly alluded to on this website.
(trying to gracefully ignore your several verbose misreadings of my rhetoric, and instead engage with your brief attempt at a constructive contribution to the conversation, the following flamboyantly false statement)
These facts are not enough to compel you to change your valuation of people
You don’t get to tell me about my valuation of people; I will value them however I damn well please (obviously).
(But I’m being redundant; this was what my comment already said.)
Apologies for the offense, but luckily, (perhaps reciprocally to an error I made first) the sentence I set out to write differs greatly from the sentence you read. Perhaps a reword will help:
One is not required by facts to change one’s (terminal-ish) values.
It would be absurd to have meant “you (AngryTroll)”, but the grammatical feature of English where “you” refers to a general person makes good sense
The word “compel” was important there, not flourish. Even you (AngryTroll) are not required to change your moral accounting of other people by your beliefs about their intelligence. A different way this could go would be to go thr “It All Adds Up To Normality” route and realize that your accounting of other people is not necessarily dependant on their intelligence.
Sorry, I know that’s messy in that there’s a grammatical correction and a philosophical objection, but I think it would muddy the waters to leave either out of my reply.
I was using my pronoun “I” in the same way you used “you”—“I” was the general person being preached to. You don’t get to dictate the system of evaluating humans for any evaluator (but yourself).
If one chooses to define his valuation of an individual human as being based on facts about her, then, yes he is compelled to change his estimation of her value based on facts about her (or change the system to no longer be based on facts).
For example, if I choose a system of evaluating humans based on how much I estimate a person and her offspring are expected to contribute to self-reported intellectual flourishing in the long term of mankind, then, learning that she and everyone genetically similar to her are violent morons implies an update on her value (compellingly; the logical implication doesn’t ask me permission to exist).
Determining her value as 1 or 0 based on whether your (Alex’s) sperm could turn her eggs into a baby or not (with some other weird grandfathering-in going on for genetic defects) may be your (Alex’s) method of determining her value. Her genetic predisposition to being a violent moron may not compel you (Alex) to change your (Alex’s) sperm-based valuation of her. But your personal system of human valuation, and everyone else’s, can be different things. You can’t stop them from being so; you’re not God.
Thanks for the reply. I’m going to dip out (after reading your reply, if you choose to leave one), but I will in my last reply suggest you revisit my initial and revised wording, which said that nothing “compels” or “requires” you to change in this manner, not that you are forbidden from doing so.
You are fighting against a position I do not hold, and so cannot offer you the satisfaction of convincing me to abandon it. You made a claim which I interpreted as “You MUST follow this procedure”. I replied that nothing “MUST” be done, and now you are, if I’m reading you correctly, explaining that you MAY. I agree! You MAY! You also MAY NOT, so I think MUST is overblown.
I think this is mostly wrong in ways that make it hard to reform it. From the top:
is a very silly thing to say! What did you mean by this: that most of the world can’t cook broccoli? It is very hard to learn to cook broccoli, but because we all know how to do this, we don’t find it impressive. This sentence boils down to “Most people are not the smartest people”, a statement that I’d argue is directionally true but largely oversells itself (if you know how to graft trees, write a database, and repair a washing machine, you’re a very unusual person! Smugly declaring that the Common Rube is obviously dumber than you elides a lot of important information about the guy who fixed your car a few years back).
Continuing, we have
an attempt to insulate this post from critique (after all, anyone who disagrees is just deluded!)
Then we have an is–ought confusion:
And end on one last attempt to make sure any criticism is read as an attack instead of a correction
In general, I think a LessWrong comment should at least attempt to approach its subject matter with a truth-seeking lens, not a conspiratorial bundle of shadowy assertions. It is the case that people have different skill levels at different tasks, and it’s further the case that a lot of these different skill levels are correlated (“G factor”). These facts are not enough to compel you to change your valuation of people, and they are not something that must be darkly alluded to on this website.
(trying to gracefully ignore your several verbose misreadings of my rhetoric, and instead engage with your brief attempt at a constructive contribution to the conversation, the following flamboyantly false statement)
You don’t get to tell me about my valuation of people; I will value them however I damn well please (obviously).
(But I’m being redundant; this was what my comment already said.)
Apologies for the offense, but luckily, (perhaps reciprocally to an error I made first) the sentence I set out to write differs greatly from the sentence you read. Perhaps a reword will help:
It would be absurd to have meant “you (AngryTroll)”, but the grammatical feature of English where “you” refers to a general person makes good sense
The word “compel” was important there, not flourish. Even you (AngryTroll) are not required to change your moral accounting of other people by your beliefs about their intelligence. A different way this could go would be to go thr “It All Adds Up To Normality” route and realize that your accounting of other people is not necessarily dependant on their intelligence.
Sorry, I know that’s messy in that there’s a grammatical correction and a philosophical objection, but I think it would muddy the waters to leave either out of my reply.
I was using my pronoun “I” in the same way you used “you”—“I” was the general person being preached to. You don’t get to dictate the system of evaluating humans for any evaluator (but yourself).
If one chooses to define his valuation of an individual human as being based on facts about her, then, yes he is compelled to change his estimation of her value based on facts about her (or change the system to no longer be based on facts).
For example, if I choose a system of evaluating humans based on how much I estimate a person and her offspring are expected to contribute to self-reported intellectual flourishing in the long term of mankind, then, learning that she and everyone genetically similar to her are violent morons implies an update on her value (compellingly; the logical implication doesn’t ask me permission to exist).
Determining her value as 1 or 0 based on whether your (Alex’s) sperm could turn her eggs into a baby or not (with some other weird grandfathering-in going on for genetic defects) may be your (Alex’s) method of determining her value. Her genetic predisposition to being a violent moron may not compel you (Alex) to change your (Alex’s) sperm-based valuation of her. But your personal system of human valuation, and everyone else’s, can be different things. You can’t stop them from being so; you’re not God.
Thanks for the reply. I’m going to dip out (after reading your reply, if you choose to leave one), but I will in my last reply suggest you revisit my initial and revised wording, which said that nothing “compels” or “requires” you to change in this manner, not that you are forbidden from doing so.
You are fighting against a position I do not hold, and so cannot offer you the satisfaction of convincing me to abandon it. You made a claim which I interpreted as “You MUST follow this procedure”. I replied that nothing “MUST” be done, and now you are, if I’m reading you correctly, explaining that you MAY. I agree! You MAY! You also MAY NOT, so I think MUST is overblown.