Upvoted in disagreement. The trend to moral progress has been one of less accepting of violence, less acceptance of nonconsensual interaction, less victim blaming, and less standing by while terrible things happen to others (or at least looking indignant at past instances of this).
This leads to a falsifiable prediction. In the next one to four centuries, vegetarianism will increase to a majority, jails will be seen as unnecessarily, brutally, unjustifiably harsh, “the poor” will be less of an Acceptable Target (c.f. delusions that they are “just lazy” and so on), and a condemnation of the present generation for being so terrible at donating in general and at donating to the right causes. If all of those things happen, moral progress will have been flat-out confirmed.
I don’t think I should be a vegetarian. Thus at best I feel uneasy that people in four centuries thinking vegetarianism should be compulsory and at worst I’ll be dismayed them spending time on activities related to that instead of things i value. If I thought that was great I’d already be vegetarian, duh.
Also I think I like some violence to be ok. Completely non-violent minds would be rather inhuman, and violence has some neat properties if viewed from the perspective of fun theory. In any case I strongly suspect the general non-violence trend (document by Pinker) in the past few thousand years was due to biological changes in humans because of our self-domestication. Your point on consent is questionable. Victim blaming as well since especially in the 20th century I would think all we saw was one set of scapegoats being swapped for another one.
This leads me to suspect Homer’s FAI is probably different from my own FAI, is different from the FAI of 2400 AD values. If FAI2400 gets to play with the universe around forever, instead of FAI2012 I’d be rather pissed. Just because you see a trend line in moral change dosen’t mean there is any reason to outsource your future value edits to. Isn’t this the classical mistake of confusing is for should?
But if it was as you say then all our worries about CEV and FAI would be silly, since our society apparently already automagically is something very similar to what we want, we just need to figure out how to design it so that we can include emulated human minds into it while it continues working its thing.
In any case I strongly suspect the general non-violence trend (document by Pinker) in the past few thousand years was due to biological changes in humans because of our self-domestication.
They cite evidence of “moderate to strong heritability” of male aggressiveness. Shouldn’t strong selection pressures use up variance and thus lower heritability?
Upvoted in disagreement. The trend to moral progress has been one of less accepting of violence, less acceptance of nonconsensual interaction, less victim blaming, and less standing by while terrible things happen to others (or at least looking indignant at past instances of this).
This leads to a falsifiable prediction. In the next one to four centuries, vegetarianism will increase to a majority, jails will be seen as unnecessarily, brutally, unjustifiably harsh, “the poor” will be less of an Acceptable Target (c.f. delusions that they are “just lazy” and so on), and a condemnation of the present generation for being so terrible at donating in general and at donating to the right causes. If all of those things happen, moral progress will have been flat-out confirmed.
I don’t think I should be a vegetarian. Thus at best I feel uneasy that people in four centuries thinking vegetarianism should be compulsory and at worst I’ll be dismayed them spending time on activities related to that instead of things i value. If I thought that was great I’d already be vegetarian, duh.
Also I think I like some violence to be ok. Completely non-violent minds would be rather inhuman, and violence has some neat properties if viewed from the perspective of fun theory. In any case I strongly suspect the general non-violence trend (document by Pinker) in the past few thousand years was due to biological changes in humans because of our self-domestication. Your point on consent is questionable. Victim blaming as well since especially in the 20th century I would think all we saw was one set of scapegoats being swapped for another one.
This leads me to suspect Homer’s FAI is probably different from my own FAI, is different from the FAI of 2400 AD values. If FAI2400 gets to play with the universe around forever, instead of FAI2012 I’d be rather pissed. Just because you see a trend line in moral change dosen’t mean there is any reason to outsource your future value edits to. Isn’t this the classical mistake of confusing is for should?
But if it was as you say then all our worries about CEV and FAI would be silly, since our society apparently already automagically is something very similar to what we want, we just need to figure out how to design it so that we can include emulated human minds into it while it continues working its thing.
Yay positive singularity problem solved!
They cite evidence of “moderate to strong heritability” of male aggressiveness. Shouldn’t strong selection pressures use up variance and thus lower heritability?
Not in this case. At least not if Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending are right and we have more new mutations tested due to a large population than we would otherwise.