I remember hearing about people complaining that cochlear implants were damaging deaf culture, or something. A quick google turned this up as the first hit, which seems to be evidence that what I heard was somewhat real.
I’m pretty sure I have heard about people saying that technology for having unimpaired children is in some way ‘against’ the disabled.
I think it’s… more complicated than that? The issue of audio quality is present; right now, there’s no implant that can cause a Deaf person to hear things without significant distortion. It makes sense to me that some Deaf people would want a shot at communicating face-to-face with a broader spectrum of people, and others would feel that the lack of sound quality wasn’t worth an invasive, expensive surgery which is only sporadically covered by insurance. The factors of choice involved are what make doing implant surgeries on babies a bit problematic.
It’s relevant that non-disabled people rate the probable quality of life of the disabled as significantly lower than do the disabled people themselves.
You can find audio samples online that attempt to represent what speech and music sound like through a cochlear implant. It ain’t pretty.
But it’s much more than that. Here’s my understanding, based on some ASL classes and reading on the subject. If there is a Deaf person reading this, I hope you’ll correct any errors or exaggerations I’ve made:
Deaf culture is a linguistic minority group as well as a disability minority group. People involved in Deaf culture strongly value their language — sign language. There’s a solid reason for this: Many years ago, most schools for the deaf had policies of suppressing the use of sign language and instead forced deaf kids to learn as much oral language, lip-reading, and so forth, as they could. This was called “oralism”. And it turns out that oralism inhibits and slows language acquisition to the point that kids don’t become competent in any language during the critical early years when the human brain is capable of primary language acquisition.
As a result, deaf people taught through exclusive oralism have lower reading comprehension and even IQ than deaf people taught through sign language. In contrast, those who learn sign language early are subsequently able to learn to read and write at the same level as hearing people. Sign language (e.g. ASL) turns out to work as well as spoken language in developing the brain’s general language ability.
Basically, oralism causes learning disability: it literally makes people stupider. And so, failing to teach sign language to a deaf kid is basically considered a form of child abuse.
So, as a consequence, there is a very negative reaction to the idea of taking deaf kids away from the Deaf (i.e. sign-language) linguistic community; doing so is historically associated with child abuse; with ruining that child’s development; depriving him or her of a primary language, linguistic ability, and a language community in which he or she can fully participate. So, to some, cochlear implants are seen as threatening to take a person out of first-class status in a small community (Deaf culture) and instead giving them second-class status in a larger community (hearing culture).
Basically, oralism causes learning disability: it literally makes people stupider. And so, failing to teach sign language to a deaf kid is basically considered a form of child abuse.
I wonder how much that remains true with cochlear implants; I would expect that cochlear implants + oralism (lip reading, etc.) > sign language > oralism alone.
… though I’m not even sure of the last bit; from Wikipedia:
Research along those lines continued, however, and studies have helped validate the assertion that children benefit developmentally, educationally and socially from modern oralist teaching methodologies like the Auditory-Oral method.Geers and Moog (1989) found that of a test sample of 100 profoundly hearing-impaired 16- and 17-year olds enrolled in oral and mainstream programs, 88% were proficient and highly intelligible with their spoken language, and could read at much higher grade levels than the national average for deaf children.
Do you have any sources for Oralism being worse than sign language, and not merely less popular among the deaf? (the latter is evidence, but weaker than serious research)
When I first encountered this some years ago, it made my head spin.
After some thinking about it, I ultimately concluded that it’s not a completely alien idea.
I acknowledge that life is more difficult in certain readily quantifiable ways for queer people than for straight people, but it doesn’t follow that I would use a reliable therapy for making me straight if such a thing existed… and in fact I wouldn’t. Nor would I encourage the development of such a therapy, particularly, and indeed the notion of anyone designing such a therapy makes me more than faintly queasy. And if it existed, I’d be reluctant to expose my children to it. And I would be sympathetic to claims that developers and promoters of such a technology are in some way acting ‘against’ queer folk.
And that’s not because I want the difficulties themselves; I don’t. I want those differential difficulties to disappear; I just don’t like the idea of having them disappear by making everyone straight. I want them to disappear by having the culture treat queers and straights in ways that don’t create differential difficulties.
Perhaps, were I a more rational being, I would make different choices along these lines… perhaps this is a sign of non-straight thinking on my part (no pun intended). I can see a reasonable argument along those lines.
My head still spins when I try to extend that understanding to Deaf folks who say similar things about deafness. But objectively I’m not sure it’s that different.
I think it’s reasonable to argue that deafness (just for example) is more fundamentally limiting than having a “nonstandard” sexuality. It’s not just a matter of social norms. Choosing to be deaf is one thing, but intentionally having deaf children is problematic. (I can understand the attitude that current medical techniques are a calculated risk, of course.)
There’s also the issue that not everyone is comfortable with the way their mind or body happens to be put together (on every side of things). Telling those people that they can’t change themselves because somebody thinks that they’re “betraying their heritage” or whatever else strikes me as rather the opposite of what transhumanism is all about.
So, I definitely sympathize with the sentiment in your first paragraph, but I am not sure how much weight to actually grant that sympathy. There are plenty of situations where I am far more disturbed by the notion of people choosing X for their children than I am by people choosing X for themselves, but… well… so, yes, OK, I’m disturbed. So what?
So, if I try to strip my sense of the situation of all those implicit appeals to my emotional intuitions and see what’s left, what I’m left with is a tentative sense that the gay/straight difference is more of a social construct than the deaf/hearing thing. That does seems relevant, but I have a very hard time articulating precisely what’s relevant about it and what follows from that.
Unrelatedly: I agree with your second paragraph… but then again, telling people that they have to change themselves because somebody thinks that they “aren’t living up to their potential” or whatever also seems to be not quite right.
Mostly, I feel like transhumanism is implicitly built on top of an idea that we can/will/should eliminate scarcity and externally imposed limits, and that so many of the dichotomies that feel emotionally important to me are based on scarcity and limits that real transhumanism would not select one side or the other of those dichotomies so much as cause the dichotomy itself to disappear into absurdity: they will just come to feel like silly questions.
I definitely agree that a mature transhuman society would probably regard these sort of issues as non-problems. That’s certainly where I want to end up, if I end up anywhere at all. But such a society might have its own equivalent problems: What do you think of genetically propagated religion?
My real concern, though, is with the transition period: How do you legislate, say, a medical procedure that can only be applied to young children? How to you handle people who adamantly want to pass on their “unique” genetics to their children? Do you get the same answer for autism as for blindness? What about for being really short? What about for a genetic disorder that might kill you? For that matter, how do you handle people who want to indoctrinate their children into Scientology? Christianity? Islam? Do you think that no possible biological state can have so much influence?
That does seems relevant, but I have a very hard time articulating precisely what’s relevant about it and what follows from that.
At some point it becomes a form of abuse, I think. Being gay doesn’t really involve losing something internally, relative to being straight. Even the possible losses due to social norms strike me as involving relatively little utility, unless your identity happens to strongly involve being gay. But I don’t have a fully specified theory, or any good way of avoiding all the usual failure modes for social intervention. At the same time, I’m not willing to say “oh well” and let people destroy themselves (or others) if I can help it.
My answers in the short-to-mid term mostly center around rethinking how we relate to children and families. A lot of these specific questions become much simpler if I sidestep our cultural incoherence around that.
Personally I’m fond of the general principle that accountability goes hand-in-hand with power… if my debts ultimately get paid to some degree from your account, then you’ve some say in when and how I can risk indebtedness. If how I raise my children affects your quality of life, then you’re entitled to some say in how I raise my children. (And vice versa.) If I don’t want to grant you that power, I ought to “buy out your share” in some fashion or another.
That’s easier to state as a principle than to actually work out a coherent implementation of, of course, but it suggests that for each question you raise I should be trying to approximate the difference in expected value to person X of how I’m raising my children compared to some cultural norm, aggregated across all Xes affected and weighted by the severity of the effect on X.
Even more simply, though, it suggests that if someone takes a devil’s offer in a way that doesn’t affect me at all (say, they kill themselves while arranging to have themselves replaced by something else that provides me with the same EV that they do), I am not entitled to prevent them from doing so in any way. If they take a devil’s offer that affects nobody except themselves, then nobody is so entitled.
I’m not comfortable with that, but it seems easier to defend than anything else I can think of.
Your inference only follows if you insert a “and only if” into the sentence you quote. Just like “if you do work for me then you’re entitled to compensation” doesn’t imply that you aren’t also entitled to compensation under other circumstances, “if how I raise my kids affects you then you’re entitled to a say in how I do it” doesn’t imply that you aren’t also entitled to a say under other circumstances as well. Your willingness to jump so quickly to an unjustified inference suggests to me that you’re projecting a context onto my post that I didn’t put there. That sort of thing can cause a lot of misunderstandings; I encourage you to slow down a little accordingly.
I have lots of problems with you subjecting your kids to horrible agonizing torture.
Many of those problems are emotional and visceral. I don’t think you have any obligation to take my emotional reactions to your child-raising practices into account. (Well, except in the very tenuous sense that those reactions do incur some very marginal costs on my part, but in practice that’s lost in the noise.)
If I disregard my emotional problems, and I disregard all cases where there is an effect on me, and I ask what’s left over, I conclude that the value of the world (using my valuation, ’cuz who else’s would I use?) with more tortured people in it is lower than with fewer. There is something to be said here about how that gives me a basis for action, but that’s rather beside my original point.
It also suggests that I have a basis for action to prevent you from torturing yourself when your doing so doesn’t affect me at all, which is relevant to (and runs counter to) my original point. That’s basically why I say I’m not comfortable with my original point. But I’m also not comfortable with saying you’re entitled to forcibly keep me alive just because you think I’m better off alive than dead (or entitled to kill me if you think I’m better off dead than alive), so I don’t think that situation is particularly simple or easy to defend.
As it turns out, I care about the world directly, and that’s the meaning of “affect” here—affecting my utility, not affecting my perception of my utility.
As it turns out, I care about the world directly, and that’s the meaning of “affect” here—affecting my utility, not affecting my perception of my utility.
In that case TheOtherDave’s statement is completely vacuous.
The trick is that the principle is sound, but those implications don’t follow, because if I mind if someone does something, it thereby affects me.
That goes too far, though. There are plenty of people in the world who would think that all of us should be executed for the doctrines we accept as a common background here. How much say do you think they are entitled to have in LessWrong?
If it’s not what they want, that they’re not getting it is negative, but it doesn’t mean anything here is a net negative.
Regarding “How much say...they are entitled to have”, even if they are affected it isn’t necessarily good to grant them anything. A loose analogy: in a psychology experiment where one makes even bets on card color from a deck of blue and red cards, if one determines ~75% are red, one should bet red every time. Likewise, those who would execute LWers for common doctrines here should have zero sway despite having an interest greater than zero.
I acknowledge that life is more difficult in certain readily quantifiable ways for queer people than for straight people, but it doesn’t follow that I would use a reliable therapy for making me straight if such a thing existed… and in fact I wouldn’t. Nor would I encourage the development of such a therapy, particularly, and indeed the notion of anyone designing such a therapy makes me more than faintly queasy. And if it existed, I’d be reluctant to expose my children to it. And I would be sympathetic to claims that developers and promoters of such a technology are in some way acting ‘against’ queer folk.
I think there is a fundamental difference between being queer and being deaf. Being queer means you have different values from other people. You are attracted to different types of people than is typical. Being deaf means you have different abilities from other people. You can’t hear things a typical person can. If you are struck deaf your fundamental values haven’t changed. If your sexual orientation has changed, they have.
And that’s not because I want the difficulties themselves; I don’t. I want those differential difficulties to disappear; I just don’t like the idea of having them disappear by making everyone straight. I want them to disappear by having the culture treat queers and straights in ways that don’t create differential difficulties.
If you weren’t queer you would have more difficulties fulfilling your values, not less. If your value is to find a mate of Type A, and you modify yourself to like Type B instead, you will be even less likely to find a mate of Type A than you were before, since your new self will be pursuing Type B people. In other words, if you weren’t queer you wouldn’t be better off because you wouldn’t be you, you’d be somebody else.
Now, you might argue that the fact that the new you can fulfill his values more easily can compensate for this. I would disagree. I am not a negative utilitarian, but I do believe there are many circumstances where creating and fulfilling new values/people cannot fully compensate for the destruction of old values/people, even if the new values are easier to fulfill than the old ones. And I believe that changing one’s sexual orientation is usually one of those circumstances.
So, I agree that there’s a difference between being queer and being deaf along the lines of what you describe.
It’s not clear to me how this difference justifies the distinction in my thinking I was describing.
If your value is to find a mate of Type A, and you modify yourself to like Type B instead, you will be even less likely to find a mate of Type A than you were before, since your new self will be pursuing Type B people.
How do we tell whether what I value is to find a mate of Type A, or to find a mate I find attractive?
In other words, if you weren’t queer [...] you wouldn’t be you, you’d be somebody else.
I’m pretty sure I disagree with this completely.
If I woke up tomorrow morning and I was no longer sexually attracted to men, that would be startling, and it would be decidedly inconvenient in terms of my existing marriage, but I wouldn’t be someone else, any more than if I stopped being sexually attracted to anyone, or stopped liking the taste of beef, or lost my arm.
Is this simply a semantic disagreement—that is, do we just have different understandings of what the phrase “who I am” refers to? Or is there something we’d expect to observe differently in the world were you correct and I mistaken about this?
It’s not clear to me how this difference justifies the distinction in my thinking I was describing.
I believe the difference is that in the case of deaf people, you are improving their lives by giving them more abilities to achieve the values they have (in this case, an extra sense). By contrast, with queerness you are erasing a value a person has and replacing it with a different value that is easier to achieve. I believe that helping a person achieve their existing values is a laudable goal, but that changing a person’s values is usually morally problematic, even if their new values are easier to achieve than their old ones.
Now, keep in mind that I am speaking in principle, not in practice. In the real-life case of deafness this issue is more complicated than the way I just described it. There are other issues, for instance, the value of an extra sense is to some extent tied to the support mechanisms society has developed for it. I think that the deaf community may be voicing a valid concern that society has good set of support mechanism for people who are fully deaf and fully hearing, but not as good mechanisms for people with the kind of mid-range hearing that cochlear implants provide.
But those are concerns of practice, not principle. In principle having extra senses should make it easier to achieve your values. I mean, wouldn’t you want super-hearing, microscopic vision, etc if you could get them without any side-effects.
How do we tell whether what I value is to find a mate of Type A, or to find a mate I find attractive?
I think the fact that you are unwilling to have your criteria for attractiveness be modified is good evidence that it is the former and not the latter.
Is this simply a semantic disagreement—that is, do we just have different understandings of what the phrase “who I am” refers to? Or is there something we’d expect to observe differently in the world were you correct and I mistaken about this?
I think there are two issues, one is semantic, the other is that I did completely understand what you meant by being changed into someone who isn’t queer.
First, the semantic issue. I have been trying to approach the issue of Personal Identity by righting a wrong question. Instead of asking “Am I the same person as him?” I instead ask “How desirable would it be for me to change into that person?” I find that this approache generates the same intuitive results as traditional approaches to personal identity (for instance both approaches identify being killed and being wireheaded as very undesirable outcomes) but doesn’t get bogged down by the issues of what exactly it means to be “the same.”
Saying that you literally wouldn’t be the same person was hyperbolic of me. I was trying to draw attention to the fact that our values are an important part of who we are, and that changing our values can change our identity. It would be more accurate to say something like “the new you is only 90% the same person as the previous you.”
The other issue is that I don’t think I quite understood what you meant when you talked about being changed. To give a framework to what I mean, I call your attention to Yvain’s famous post on Wanting, Liking, and Approving. When you talked about being changed to not be queer, I assumed you meant that your Wanting, Liking, and Approving stats had all been changed. You had been changed so that you wanted to not be queer, liked it, and deeply approved of this fact.
However, this does not match your description of what you imagine the subjective experience of being modified to not be attracted to men would be like. You say:
If I woke up tomorrow morning and I was no longer sexually attracted to men, that would be startling, and it would be decidedly inconvenient in terms of my existing marriage, but I wouldn’t be someone else, any more than if I stopped being sexually attracted to anyone, or stopped liking the taste of beef, or lost my arm.
That sounds to me like your Wanting and Liking stats have been modified, but your Approving stat has stayed the same.
I consider the “Approving” portion of your personality to be a much bigger part of your personal identity than “Wanting” and “Liking.” So if the change left the “Approving” portion of your personality intact, I would completely agree with you that you are still the same person that you were before, regardless of what personal-identity framework I am using.
I have been trying to approach the issue of Personal Identity by righting a wrong question. Instead of asking “Am I the same person as him?” I instead ask “How desirable would it be for me to change into that person?”
Interesting.
So, speaking personally, I approve of people seeking same-sex mates, I approve of us seeking opposite-sex mates, I approve of us seeking no mates at all, I approve of various other possibilities and none of this seems especially relevant to what I’m talking about when I describe myself as queer. People just as queer as I am could have completely different approval patterns.
So, yes, as you say, I’m not envisioning having what I approve of modified when I talk about not being queer, merely what I “want” and “like”. Straight-Dave approves of all the same things that queer-Dave does, he just desires/prefers different mates.
Rereading your original comment keeping in mind that you’re talking mostly about approval rather than desire or preference… so, would you say that Deaf people necessarily disapprove of deafness? It sounds that way from the way you talk about it, but I want to confirm that.
Rereading your original comment keeping in mind that you’re talking mostly about approval rather than desire or preference… so, would you say that Deaf people necessarily disapprove of deafness?
I’d say that a good portion of them do approve of it. There seem to be a lot of disability rights activists who seem to think that being disabled and making more disabled people is okay.
I should also mention, however, that I do think it is possible to mistakenly approve or disapprove of something. For instance I used to disapprove of pornography and voluntary prostitution. However, I eventually realized that the arguments for why those things were bad were wrong/incoherent, and realized that I should never have disapproved of those things. Disapproval of pornography and voluntary prostitution was never my CEV.
I think a large portion of disability-rights activists are also confused in their thinking, and would have different views if their thinking was clearer. For instance, many disability rights activists seem to think that any suggestion that disability is bad implies that the lives of disabled people aren’t worth living and that they should all be involuntarily euthanized, which is obviously false. It’s possible to believe your life is worth living while simultaneously believing it could be better.
So, with that in mind, I go back to your original comment that there is a fundamental difference between being queer and being deaf.
If I understand correctly, the difference you were seeing was that being queer was a “value,” which is related to it being something that queer people differentially approve of. Whereas deafness was an ability, which was importantly different.
But since then, you’ve concluded that being queer isn’t actually something (at least some people, like me) differentially approve of.
But you also believe that many Deaf people approve of deafness… you just think they’re mistaken to do so.
Have I got that right? I have to admit, I have trouble making all of that stuff cohere; it mostly seems to cache out as “Ghatananthoah believes being queer is different from being deaf, because Ghatananthoah disapproves of being deaf but doesn’t disapprove of being queer.”
Which I assume is an unfair characterization.
But perhaps you can understand why it seems that way to me, and thereby help me understand what I’m misunderstanding in your position?
But since then, you’ve concluded that being queer isn’t actually something (at least some people, like me) differentially approve of.
I’m not sure what I wrote that gave you this idea. I do think that queer people approve of being queer. What I’m talking about when I say “approval” is preferences that are ego-syntonic, that are line with the kind of person they want to be. Most queer people consider their preference to be ego-syntonic. Being queer is the kind of person they want to be and they would not change it if they could. Those who do not are usually motivated by mistaken religious ideas, rather than clearly reasoned disapproval.
What I am trying to say is that being queer is a statement about what people want to do. When we say that someone is queer that means that they have a desire to engage in romantic and sexual relationships that are different from the heterosexual norm. This desire is ego-syntonic, it is approved of.
Being deaf, by contrast, is a statement about what people are able do. They lack the ability to hear things.
If you removed someone’s deafness, none of their desires would change. They would still want everything they wanted before they were deaf. If they were really attached to their current lifestyle they could buy earplugs. By contrast, if you changed a queer person into a straight person, they would stop wanting to have non-heteronormative relationships. They’d be able to continue their current lifestyle (or at least, as able as anyone is in a heteronormative society), but they wouldn’t want to.
There are some people who claim that they prefer being deaf to being able to hear, and that being deaf is ego-syntonic. I believe that they are confused. I think what they really value isn’t being deaf, it’s the community that they have built with other deaf people. They are confusing their preference to display loyalty to their community with with a preference to not be able to hear. In addition I think they are confused for some other reasons:
Sour grapes. When people are unable to do something, they often convince themselves they didn’t want to do it anyway in order to assuage their ego.
Confusing “life could be better” with “life is not worth living.” As I said before, a lot of disability rights advocates seem to think that if you admit that their disability makes their life even slightly worse, that means their life is not worth living at all and they should be euthanized. This is not true.
Happy death spirals around their community. They love their community and want to say more and more good things about it. So they say that their community is so awesome that living in it is worth being significantly less good at sensing one’s surroundings.
To sum it up, I believe that being queer is an ego-syntonic desire. I believe that being deaf is not ego-syntonic, but people say it is out of a desire to have self-esteem and be proud of and loyal to the deaf community.
I’m not sure what I wrote that gave you this idea.
(nods) Months later, neither am I. Perhaps I’d remember if I reread the exchange, but I’m not doing so right now.
Regardless, I appreciate the correction.
And much like Vaniver below (above? earlier!), I am unsure how to translate these sorts of claims into anything testable.
Also I’m wary of the tendency to reason as follows: “I don’t value being deaf. Therefore deafness is not valuable. Therefore when people claim to value being deaf, they are confused and mistaken. Here, let me list various reasons why they might be confused and mistaken.”
I mean, don’t get me wrong: I share this intuition. I just don’t trust it. I can’t think of anything a deaf person could possibly say to me that would convince me otherwise, even if I were wrong.
Similarly, if someone were to say ” I believe that being queer is not ego-syntonic. I know people say it is, but I believe that’s because they’re confused and mistaken, for various reasons: x, y, z” I can’t think of anything I could possibly say to them to convince them otherwise. (Nor is this a hypothetical case: many people do in fact say this.)
And much like Vaniver below (above? earlier!), I am unsure how to translate these sorts of claims into anything testable
One thing I consider very suspicious is that deaf people often don’t just deny the terminal value of hearing. They also deny its instrumental value. The instrumental values of hearing are obvious. This indicates to me that they are denying it for self-esteem reasons and group loyalty reasons, the same way I have occasionally heard multiculturalists claim behaviors of obvious instrumental value (like being on time) are merely the subjective values of Western culture.
The typical defense of this denial (and other disability-rights type claims) is hearing only has instrumental value because society is structured in a way that makes use of it. But this is obviously false, hearing would be useful on a desert island, and there are some disabilities that society is not technologically capable of solving (there’s no way to translate instrumental music into sign language). Plus, structuring society around disabilities is essentially having society pay to enable a person instead of having biology do it for free. Obviously it’s better than not accommodating them, but it;s even better to have biology do the accommodation for free if that is possible.
I think another factor is simply my knowledge of the human brain structure, and the psychological unity of humankind. It seems like it would be a much smaller departure from standard brain design to switch the specific target of the “romance” module of the brain, than it would be to completely erase all desire to enjoy the pleasures that a sense of hearing can provide us, and to assign terminal value to being inconvenienced by things like not being able to talk to people who aren’t in your visual range.
I think another thing that supports my intuitions is Bostrom’s Reversal test. Imagine instead of discussing giving a preexisting sense to people who lack it, we were considering giving people a new sense that no human being has ever had before. Should we do that? If there were no side effects, I would say yes! As I told Vaniver in my reply to them, I really want to be able sense magnetic fields. Seeing infrared and ultraviolet would also be fun. The fact that my intuitions are the same in the Reversal Test provides evidence that they are not based on the Status Quo Bias.
I think some parallels still go through, if you consider the difference between “sex is for recreation!” (the queer-friendly view) and “sex is for procreation!” (the queer-unfriendly view). I don’t see anyone claiming that heterosexual sex never leads to babies, but I do see a lot of people trivializing the creation of babies.
It looks to me as if you may be mixing up being queer and preferring to be queer. It’s true that people tend to find themselves approving the way they actually are, but (as you actually acknowledge) there are queer people who would much prefer not to be queer, perhaps for very bad reasons, and I think there are also not-queer people who would prefer to be queer (I think I’ve seen, a few years ago on LW, a discussion of the possibility of hacking oneself to be bisexual).
I would say (in terms of the want/like/approve trichotomy already referenced) that what defines a person as queer is that they want and like sexual/romantic relationships that don’t fit the traditional heteronormative model. Approving or disapproving of such relationships is a separate matter. If tomorrow someone convinces Dave that fundamentalist Christianity is correct then he may start disapproving of queerness and wishing he weren’t queer, but he still will be.
It may well be, as you suggest, that approval is actually a more important part of your personality than wants and likes, but that doesn’t mean that everything needs to be understood in terms of approval rather than wants and likes.
But does not wanting to change indicate that Dave’s queerness is really more about approving than about wanting and liking? I don’t think so. If someone pointed a weird science-fiction-looking device at me and announced that it would rewire my brain to make me stop wanting-and-liking chocolate and start wanting-and-liking aubergines, I would want them not to do it—but I don’t (I’m pretty sure) approve of liking chocolate and disliking aubergine any more than I do of the reverse. It’s just that I don’t want someone rewiring my brain. It seems very plausible to me that Dave’s queerness might be like my liking for chocolate in this respect.
I also wonder whether we’re at risk of being confused by the variety of meanings of “approve”. Perhaps that trichotomy needs to be a tetrachotomy or something. In particular, I don’t think “affectively endorsing the idea of oneself having quality Q” is the same thing as, e.g., “intellectually endorsing the idea of people in general having quality Q”, and when we talk about something like “approving of being queer” with the first meaning—which I think is the only relevant one here—there’s a danger of sounding as if we intend the second.
I agree that preferring being deaf seems likely to be the result of confusion and affective death spirals and whatnot. But … It seems quite possible to me that the following things might be true of some deaf person (let’s call her Debbie): (1) Debbie gets great benefits from being part of the deaf community. (2) If Debbie ceased to be deaf—especially if she did so by her own choice—and other deaf people discovered this, it would be awkward and would impair her ability to fit into that community. (3) That impairment would harm her more than ceasing to be deaf would help her. (4) Ceasing to be deaf and hiding the fact from others in the community would be psychologically disturbing for her and involve the risk of even greater ructions if found out. (4) That risk would also be, for Debbie, worse than the benefit of ceasing to be deaf. Therefore (5) Debbie would be better off remaining deaf, even if some simple and effective treatment were available to her. None of that means that being deaf is better in the abstract; it means that one can get into a situation where it’s better to stay deaf. (If it seems absurd on general principles that having greater abilities could ever be harmful on net, then go and read e.g. The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling, which contains plenty of counterexamples.)
(3) That impairment would harm her more than ceasing to be deaf would help her.
That’s the core claim that leads to everything else and the first question that pops into my head is: How do you (or anyone) know? Notably, I am not sure that Debbie is going to be able to make a good judgement in this case, plus there is a self-fulfilling prophecy element in here, too.
Oh, and for a fun exercise in mindkilling try substituting “on welfare” for “is deaf” X-/
I don’t. That’s why all I said was that it seems possible that it (along with those other things) might be true of some people. Community is really important to many people. Finding a new community and getting well integrated into it can be difficult. That seems sufficient to make it likely that for some people staying part of an important community they’re in could be overwhelmingly important.
try substituting “on welfare”
I’m not sure what point you’re making, but for what it’s worth the people I know who are on welfare don’t appear to me to constitute a being-on-welfare community. Perhaps I know the wrong ones?
[EDITED to add:] Oh, wait, maybe you were making a less specific analogy and remarking that some people on welfare can be made worse off if, e.g., they get a job. True enough, but nothing about that seems terribly relevant to the present discussion.
Being deaf, by contrast, is a statement about what people are able do. They lack the ability to hear things.
It seems to me that most people lack the ability to be aroused by people—typically, their ability is seriously limited, to half of the population at most.
I believe that they are confused. I think what they really value isn’t being deaf, it’s the community that they have built with other deaf people. They are confusing their preference to display loyalty to their community with with a preference to not be able to hear.
I suspect that most, if not all, queers have a preference to be queer (if they do) for this reason. But it’s not clear to me how to even test this one way or the other—even if one asked the hypothetical question “if there were a pill to make you straight, would you take it?” that puts one into far-mode, not near-mode, and it’s very possible that people will pick answers to please the community of potential romantic partners. (If you say “yes, I’d like to be straight,” that’ll increase your attractiveness to opposite-sex partners, but not actually increase their attractiveness to you!)
(I have thought, at times, ‘how convenient to be gay, since I probably would get along much better with men than women!’, but I can’t claim that I would choose to be gay for that reason, starting from emptiness. Why not bisexuality? Why not asexuality?)
It seems to me that most people lack the ability to be aroused by people—typically, their ability is seriously limited, to half of the population at most.
When I was talking about being queer I wasn’t just talking about the experience of being aroused, I was talking about the desire to have that experience, and that experience being egosyntonic. It’s fairly easy to rephrase any preference a person has to sound like an ability or lack thereof. For instance, you could say that I lack the ability to enjoy skinning people alive. But that’s because I don’t want to skin people alive, or to enjoy it! That’s a terminal value, the buck stops there.
Some other factors to consider:
Even if I was to define “being aroused” as an ability, that doesn’t perfectly map onto the discuss. In the case of removing deafness we are adding an ability. In the case of changing queerness to heterosexuality, we are either removing an ability to find some people arousing and replacing it with a different one (in the case of homosexuals) or removing an ability and replacing it with nothing (in the case of bisexuals).
Arousal has very little instrumental value compared to hearing. Even if someone with the power of hearing took no pleasure from music or people’s voices they would still benefit from being able to hear people talk outside of their visual range, and to hear cars coming when they cross the street. I can see deaf people denying the terminal benefits of hearing, but denying the instrumental ones seems obviously crazy.
I can’t claim that I would choose to be gay for that reason, starting from emptiness.
Starting from emptiness you would be completely indifferent to everything, including changes to your future preferences. To paraphrase Eliezer, you would be a rock, not a perfectly impartial being.
At some point you just have to say “These are my terminal values, the buck stops here.”
Now, while I would not say it is impossible to create a creature that assigns a terminal value to deafness, I find it unlikely that humans are such creatures. The way human psychology works makes me assign a much higher probability to their being self-deceived for group status purposes.
When I was talking about being queer I wasn’t just talking about the experience of being aroused, I was talking about the desire to have that experience, and that experience being egosyntonic.
Then I see how your claim that most queers are egosyntonic flows through, but it seems like reversing the order of how things go. I visualize the typical experience as something like “id wants X → ego understands id wants X → superego approves of id wanting X,” with each arrow representing a step that not everyone takes.
At some point you just have to say “These are my terminal values, the buck stops here.”
I agree, but I observe that there’s a difficulty in using egosyntonicity (which I would describe as both wanting X and wanting to want X) without a clear theory of meta-values (i.e. “I want to want X because wanting X is consistent with my other wants” is what it looks like to use consistency as a meta-value).
Starting from emptiness you would be completely indifferent to everything, including changes to your future preferences. To paraphrase Eliezer, you would be a rock, not a perfectly impartial being.
I was unclear—I meant emptiness with regards to sexual orientation, not values in general. One could imagine, say, someone who wants to become a priest choosing asexuality, and someone who wants to get ahead in fashion design choosing to be gay, someone who wants to have kids naturally choosing to be heterosexual, and so on. If you kept all of my values the same and deleted my sexual orientation, what would regrow? Compare to the “if you deleted all proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem from my mind, would I be able to reinvent it?” thought experiment.
(Since we are talking about values instead of beliefs, and it’s not obvious that values would ‘regrow’ similar to beliefs, it may be clearer to consider counterfactual mes of every possible sexual orientation, and comparing the justifications they can come up with for why it’s egosyntonic to have the orientation that they have. It seems some of them will have an easier time of it than others, but that all of them will have an easy enough time that it’s not clear I should count my justification as worth much.)
it may be clearer to consider counterfactual mes of every possible sexual orientation, and comparing the justifications they can come up with for why it’s egosyntonic to have the orientation that they have.
I think that maybe all of them would be perfectly justifying in saying that their sexual orientation is a terminal value and the buck stops there.
On the other hand, I’m nowhere near 100% sure I wouldn’t take a pill to make me bisexual.
If you kept all of my values the same and deleted my sexual orientation, what would regrow?
I think a way to help tease out your intuition would be Bostrom’s reversal test. If transhumanist scientists invented a new kind of sexual orientation, a new kind of sexual experiences, and so on, would you want to be modified to be able to enjoy this new, never before seen type of sex. I don’t know how you’d reply, for me it would probably be yes or no, depending on specific details of the new kind of sex.
I think the reason I would sometimes say yes is that I have a strong preexisting preference for novelty and novel experiences. So my desire for new sexual preferences would grow out of that.
Incidentally, Bostrom’s reversal test also supports my intuitions about deafness. If transhumanists invented new senses that no human has ever had before, would I want to have them if there were no side effects? Of course I would! I especially want to be able to sense magnetic fields like sharks can.
Point for a really eloquent rebuttal, but I wonder if this might actually hold some merit. I think that a theist who is looking forward to paradise is guilty of less (or at least, different) bad thinking then an atheist who embraces mortality, because the theist does have a goal that is achieved through death. Are there any secular goals that are only achievable through the continuing mortality of humans? What about human evolution?
Evolution in its conventional meaning of changes in a population caused by differential breeding success of individuals coupled with descent-with-modification arguably requires mortality, but I’m not sure I know anyone who values evolution in that sense as compared to some other mechanism that makes equally valuable changes in the population (e.g. via technology).
Some people do seem to have goals that involve killing other people; presumably eliminating mortality prevents them from achieving those goals.
Are there any secular goals that are only achievable through the continuing mortality of humans?
Well—“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ; more colloquially “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
If we postulate that for any given level of scientific progress there are a number of existential risks it is not yet capable of addressing, it may well turn out that ubiquitous clinical immortality poses an existential risk to the human race.
Well—“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ; more colloquially “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
I’ve heard this proposition before, but I find it extremely dubious. Looking at my own professors, for instance, considering the length of time they’d been teaching, some of them would have to have seriously altered their course content over time to reflect advancements in scientific knowledge.
Veteran scientists may not adopt new findings as easily as they should, but in general the notion that old scientists must die off for new information to become widely adopted seems to be false.
This idea about science progressing by funerals is generally ascribed to Kuhn, but his own views were more nuanced. His primary relevant work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is definitely worth reading. Note that for most of history this claim is empirically false. For example, during the “Copernican Revolution” there are many recorded instances of astronomers who used Ptolemy’s model and then adopted the model of Tycho, or Copernicus or Kepler (or one of the many weird hybrid systems that was going around). Similarly, in the case of the chemical revolution, a major part of why Joseph Priestly’s insistence on the phlogiston theory to his dying day was so noteworthy was that all his peers had long ago given up on it, and so his work in his later years was to a large extent ignored. When Einstein came up with special relativity, many physicists who were quite old and had only worked in a Newtonian framework embraced it.
The notion that science progresses by the death of the elderly scientists seems to be empirically false. Moreover, in so far as there are limited problems of this sort they are likely due to the difficulties that arise when brains become old and have more trouble learning or adopting to new ideas. If life-extension keeps brains young and healthy (likely), or is accompanied by technology that increases general brain power (probably not as likely but not very unlikely either) the genuine parts of this problem will be alleviated.
If life-extension keeps brains young and healthy (likely), or is accompanied by technology that increases general brain power (probably not as likely but not very unlikely either) the genuine parts of this problem will be alleviated.
Will be easily alleviated, we imagine, anyhow. It is certainly true that ideology and moral progress seems to be a generational phenomenon, and while scientific progress might be able to overcome that problem now, I don’t know that general/popular ethics and politics are, yet.
So we need solutions. Rigorous instrumental rationality, to me, is a potential solution to that problem, though.
It is certainly true that ideology and moral progress seems to be a generational phenomenon
This empirically seems to be difficult to confirm. Let’s pick two major historical issues where attitudes are considered to have changed rapidly in the United States, attitudes towards interracial marriage and attitudes towards gay marriage.
I’m using Gallup as a rough estimate for historical interracial attitudes. In 1958, there was an approval rating of 4% for interracial marriage and a disapproval rate of around 94%. In 1969 that had changed to 20% and 73%. Now, the population was around 174 million in 1958 and 200 million in 1968. Using the estimated death rates from here, which gives about 2 million people dying yearly and assuming that about 2/3rds of all people who died were against interracial marriage and that about 2/3rds who were entering the population (for a year 10 year period, really not actual births but people who had been too young to earlier have an opinion or if have an opinion be asked about it in polls, but roughly the same as just new people), then one gets around 18 million people leaving the disapprove group and around 8 million entering, for a total delta of −10 million, which gives an expected value percentage of 164/200= .82%.
Of course, the most questionable number here is the 2/3rds. That seems like a safe estimate, but if one assumes a larger fraction then one gets other results. If one assumes that instead of 2/3rd it is nearly complete conversion (only disapproves dying and only approves entering the population) then one somewhat undershoots this. But at least from this sort of estimate it seems difficult to say that deaths were the only cause of the changing attitude. It does seem however that deaths were a major part.
Similarly, approval rates for gay marriage and civil unions have changed faster than a simple population die off model would work.(source) Here it is worth seeing how extreme the numbers are. There’s been about a 10% decline between 2001 and 2011 in the fraction opposing gay marriage and about a 10% increase in the percentage who are ok with it. There are around 2.5 million deaths a year in the US in the last decade, meaning that about 25 million people died. (source) There were in 2001 a population of around 281 million, so with a 57% disapproval of gay marriage that translates to around 160 million people. So if all 25 million died off from that population then one gets around 135 million disapproving which out of 308 million population is around 44% disapproval, which is about the current rate. Now, it might look from that like die off is the only cause here, but this model assumes that almost everyone dying is in the disapprove category and that almost no new people are entering into that category. The second assumption is at least empirically wrong. From those numbers one sees that young people are much more likely to approve, but it isn’t enough to justify this sort of assumption.
So the data seems to suggest that death is a major cause of moral changes but at least for both these issues, a major part is people actually changing their minds. Now, it is possible that they are changing their minds in part because the older authority figures are dying off, but that’s a more subtle narrative.
Overall, crunching these numbers has made me update more in the direction of deaths mattering. When I started pulling up the numbers I expected it to be much more clear cut in the direction of deaths not being sufficient. This seems to suggest that they aren’t sufficient, but it does seem like in reasonably simple. plausible models deaths do explain a large fraction and possibly majority of the change.
Getting more detailed understandings might require much more careful demographic study.
Similarly, approval rates for gay marriage and civil unions have changed faster than a simple population die off model would work
I have noticed in the past that the majority of people allow their opinions to be swayed by a minority of individuals. So I suspect that ‘die off rates’ might be magnified in this manner—but I can’t really corroborate that. It’s worth investigating at some point, especially if I’m going to raise it as an issue.
the majority of people allow their opinions to be swayed by a minority of individuals.
I don’t see how to make predictions from this or easily modify it to be able to do so. Note that every majority opinion consists of slightly different opinions that are each minority opinions.
My intuition is that people have different thresholds of agreement around them to hold each opinion they have. If 60% of people are at least comfortable holding an opinion so long as at least 50% hold it, and a subset of them, at least 50%, are comfortable holding it so long as at least 40% do, etc., the belief will be stable.
But if support for an opinion is shallow and fragile, such that some people are only comfortable holding it if it is nearly universal, and others only if it is overwhelmingly popular, and others only if it is a supermajority opinion, etc., support for it could unravel quickly even if people change little.
I remember hearing about people complaining that cochlear implants were damaging deaf culture, or something. A quick google turned this up as the first hit, which seems to be evidence that what I heard was somewhat real.
I’m pretty sure I have heard about people saying that technology for having unimpaired children is in some way ‘against’ the disabled.
An awful lot of people do not think straight.
I think it’s… more complicated than that? The issue of audio quality is present; right now, there’s no implant that can cause a Deaf person to hear things without significant distortion. It makes sense to me that some Deaf people would want a shot at communicating face-to-face with a broader spectrum of people, and others would feel that the lack of sound quality wasn’t worth an invasive, expensive surgery which is only sporadically covered by insurance. The factors of choice involved are what make doing implant surgeries on babies a bit problematic.
It’s relevant that non-disabled people rate the probable quality of life of the disabled as significantly lower than do the disabled people themselves.
You can find audio samples online that attempt to represent what speech and music sound like through a cochlear implant. It ain’t pretty.
But it’s much more than that. Here’s my understanding, based on some ASL classes and reading on the subject. If there is a Deaf person reading this, I hope you’ll correct any errors or exaggerations I’ve made:
Deaf culture is a linguistic minority group as well as a disability minority group. People involved in Deaf culture strongly value their language — sign language. There’s a solid reason for this: Many years ago, most schools for the deaf had policies of suppressing the use of sign language and instead forced deaf kids to learn as much oral language, lip-reading, and so forth, as they could. This was called “oralism”. And it turns out that oralism inhibits and slows language acquisition to the point that kids don’t become competent in any language during the critical early years when the human brain is capable of primary language acquisition.
As a result, deaf people taught through exclusive oralism have lower reading comprehension and even IQ than deaf people taught through sign language. In contrast, those who learn sign language early are subsequently able to learn to read and write at the same level as hearing people. Sign language (e.g. ASL) turns out to work as well as spoken language in developing the brain’s general language ability.
Basically, oralism causes learning disability: it literally makes people stupider. And so, failing to teach sign language to a deaf kid is basically considered a form of child abuse.
So, as a consequence, there is a very negative reaction to the idea of taking deaf kids away from the Deaf (i.e. sign-language) linguistic community; doing so is historically associated with child abuse; with ruining that child’s development; depriving him or her of a primary language, linguistic ability, and a language community in which he or she can fully participate. So, to some, cochlear implants are seen as threatening to take a person out of first-class status in a small community (Deaf culture) and instead giving them second-class status in a larger community (hearing culture).
I wonder how much that remains true with cochlear implants; I would expect that cochlear implants + oralism (lip reading, etc.) > sign language > oralism alone.
… though I’m not even sure of the last bit; from Wikipedia:
Do you have any sources for Oralism being worse than sign language, and not merely less popular among the deaf? (the latter is evidence, but weaker than serious research)
When I first encountered this some years ago, it made my head spin.
After some thinking about it, I ultimately concluded that it’s not a completely alien idea.
I acknowledge that life is more difficult in certain readily quantifiable ways for queer people than for straight people, but it doesn’t follow that I would use a reliable therapy for making me straight if such a thing existed… and in fact I wouldn’t. Nor would I encourage the development of such a therapy, particularly, and indeed the notion of anyone designing such a therapy makes me more than faintly queasy. And if it existed, I’d be reluctant to expose my children to it. And I would be sympathetic to claims that developers and promoters of such a technology are in some way acting ‘against’ queer folk.
And that’s not because I want the difficulties themselves; I don’t. I want those differential difficulties to disappear; I just don’t like the idea of having them disappear by making everyone straight. I want them to disappear by having the culture treat queers and straights in ways that don’t create differential difficulties.
Perhaps, were I a more rational being, I would make different choices along these lines… perhaps this is a sign of non-straight thinking on my part (no pun intended). I can see a reasonable argument along those lines.
My head still spins when I try to extend that understanding to Deaf folks who say similar things about deafness. But objectively I’m not sure it’s that different.
I think it’s reasonable to argue that deafness (just for example) is more fundamentally limiting than having a “nonstandard” sexuality. It’s not just a matter of social norms. Choosing to be deaf is one thing, but intentionally having deaf children is problematic. (I can understand the attitude that current medical techniques are a calculated risk, of course.)
There’s also the issue that not everyone is comfortable with the way their mind or body happens to be put together (on every side of things). Telling those people that they can’t change themselves because somebody thinks that they’re “betraying their heritage” or whatever else strikes me as rather the opposite of what transhumanism is all about.
So, I definitely sympathize with the sentiment in your first paragraph, but I am not sure how much weight to actually grant that sympathy. There are plenty of situations where I am far more disturbed by the notion of people choosing X for their children than I am by people choosing X for themselves, but… well… so, yes, OK, I’m disturbed. So what?
So, if I try to strip my sense of the situation of all those implicit appeals to my emotional intuitions and see what’s left, what I’m left with is a tentative sense that the gay/straight difference is more of a social construct than the deaf/hearing thing. That does seems relevant, but I have a very hard time articulating precisely what’s relevant about it and what follows from that.
Unrelatedly: I agree with your second paragraph… but then again, telling people that they have to change themselves because somebody thinks that they “aren’t living up to their potential” or whatever also seems to be not quite right.
Mostly, I feel like transhumanism is implicitly built on top of an idea that we can/will/should eliminate scarcity and externally imposed limits, and that so many of the dichotomies that feel emotionally important to me are based on scarcity and limits that real transhumanism would not select one side or the other of those dichotomies so much as cause the dichotomy itself to disappear into absurdity: they will just come to feel like silly questions.
I definitely agree that a mature transhuman society would probably regard these sort of issues as non-problems. That’s certainly where I want to end up, if I end up anywhere at all. But such a society might have its own equivalent problems: What do you think of genetically propagated religion?
My real concern, though, is with the transition period: How do you legislate, say, a medical procedure that can only be applied to young children? How to you handle people who adamantly want to pass on their “unique” genetics to their children? Do you get the same answer for autism as for blindness? What about for being really short? What about for a genetic disorder that might kill you?
For that matter, how do you handle people who want to indoctrinate their children into Scientology? Christianity? Islam? Do you think that no possible biological state can have so much influence?
At some point it becomes a form of abuse, I think. Being gay doesn’t really involve losing something internally, relative to being straight. Even the possible losses due to social norms strike me as involving relatively little utility, unless your identity happens to strongly involve being gay. But I don’t have a fully specified theory, or any good way of avoiding all the usual failure modes for social intervention. At the same time, I’m not willing to say “oh well” and let people destroy themselves (or others) if I can help it.
My answers in the short-to-mid term mostly center around rethinking how we relate to children and families. A lot of these specific questions become much simpler if I sidestep our cultural incoherence around that.
Personally I’m fond of the general principle that accountability goes hand-in-hand with power… if my debts ultimately get paid to some degree from your account, then you’ve some say in when and how I can risk indebtedness. If how I raise my children affects your quality of life, then you’re entitled to some say in how I raise my children. (And vice versa.) If I don’t want to grant you that power, I ought to “buy out your share” in some fashion or another.
That’s easier to state as a principle than to actually work out a coherent implementation of, of course, but it suggests that for each question you raise I should be trying to approximate the difference in expected value to person X of how I’m raising my children compared to some cultural norm, aggregated across all Xes affected and weighted by the severity of the effect on X.
Even more simply, though, it suggests that if someone takes a devil’s offer in a way that doesn’t affect me at all (say, they kill themselves while arranging to have themselves replaced by something else that provides me with the same EV that they do), I am not entitled to prevent them from doing so in any way. If they take a devil’s offer that affects nobody except themselves, then nobody is so entitled.
I’m not comfortable with that, but it seems easier to defend than anything else I can think of.
So if I want to subject my children to horrible agonizing torture, you have no problem with that as long as it doesn’t affect you?
A few things.
Your inference only follows if you insert a “and only if” into the sentence you quote. Just like “if you do work for me then you’re entitled to compensation” doesn’t imply that you aren’t also entitled to compensation under other circumstances, “if how I raise my kids affects you then you’re entitled to a say in how I do it” doesn’t imply that you aren’t also entitled to a say under other circumstances as well. Your willingness to jump so quickly to an unjustified inference suggests to me that you’re projecting a context onto my post that I didn’t put there. That sort of thing can cause a lot of misunderstandings; I encourage you to slow down a little accordingly.
I have lots of problems with you subjecting your kids to horrible agonizing torture.
Many of those problems are emotional and visceral. I don’t think you have any obligation to take my emotional reactions to your child-raising practices into account. (Well, except in the very tenuous sense that those reactions do incur some very marginal costs on my part, but in practice that’s lost in the noise.)
If I disregard my emotional problems, and I disregard all cases where there is an effect on me, and I ask what’s left over, I conclude that the value of the world (using my valuation, ’cuz who else’s would I use?) with more tortured people in it is lower than with fewer. There is something to be said here about how that gives me a basis for action, but that’s rather beside my original point.
It also suggests that I have a basis for action to prevent you from torturing yourself when your doing so doesn’t affect me at all, which is relevant to (and runs counter to) my original point. That’s basically why I say I’m not comfortable with my original point. But I’m also not comfortable with saying you’re entitled to forcibly keep me alive just because you think I’m better off alive than dead (or entitled to kill me if you think I’m better off dead than alive), so I don’t think that situation is particularly simple or easy to defend.
The trick is that the principle is sound, but those implications don’t follow, because if I mind if someone does something, it thereby affects me.
One might ask: if I don’t know something, how can it affect me, for “we care only about our own states of mind”?
As it turns out, I care about the world directly, and that’s the meaning of “affect” here—affecting my utility, not affecting my perception of my utility.
In that case TheOtherDave’s statement is completely vacuous.
That goes too far, though. There are plenty of people in the world who would think that all of us should be executed for the doctrines we accept as a common background here. How much say do you think they are entitled to have in LessWrong?
If it’s not what they want, that they’re not getting it is negative, but it doesn’t mean anything here is a net negative.
Regarding “How much say...they are entitled to have”, even if they are affected it isn’t necessarily good to grant them anything. A loose analogy: in a psychology experiment where one makes even bets on card color from a deck of blue and red cards, if one determines ~75% are red, one should bet red every time. Likewise, those who would execute LWers for common doctrines here should have zero sway despite having an interest greater than zero.
I think there is a fundamental difference between being queer and being deaf. Being queer means you have different values from other people. You are attracted to different types of people than is typical. Being deaf means you have different abilities from other people. You can’t hear things a typical person can. If you are struck deaf your fundamental values haven’t changed. If your sexual orientation has changed, they have.
If you weren’t queer you would have more difficulties fulfilling your values, not less. If your value is to find a mate of Type A, and you modify yourself to like Type B instead, you will be even less likely to find a mate of Type A than you were before, since your new self will be pursuing Type B people. In other words, if you weren’t queer you wouldn’t be better off because you wouldn’t be you, you’d be somebody else.
Now, you might argue that the fact that the new you can fulfill his values more easily can compensate for this. I would disagree. I am not a negative utilitarian, but I do believe there are many circumstances where creating and fulfilling new values/people cannot fully compensate for the destruction of old values/people, even if the new values are easier to fulfill than the old ones. And I believe that changing one’s sexual orientation is usually one of those circumstances.
So, I agree that there’s a difference between being queer and being deaf along the lines of what you describe.
It’s not clear to me how this difference justifies the distinction in my thinking I was describing.
How do we tell whether what I value is to find a mate of Type A, or to find a mate I find attractive?
I’m pretty sure I disagree with this completely.
If I woke up tomorrow morning and I was no longer sexually attracted to men, that would be startling, and it would be decidedly inconvenient in terms of my existing marriage, but I wouldn’t be someone else, any more than if I stopped being sexually attracted to anyone, or stopped liking the taste of beef, or lost my arm.
Is this simply a semantic disagreement—that is, do we just have different understandings of what the phrase “who I am” refers to? Or is there something we’d expect to observe differently in the world were you correct and I mistaken about this?
I believe the difference is that in the case of deaf people, you are improving their lives by giving them more abilities to achieve the values they have (in this case, an extra sense). By contrast, with queerness you are erasing a value a person has and replacing it with a different value that is easier to achieve. I believe that helping a person achieve their existing values is a laudable goal, but that changing a person’s values is usually morally problematic, even if their new values are easier to achieve than their old ones.
Now, keep in mind that I am speaking in principle, not in practice. In the real-life case of deafness this issue is more complicated than the way I just described it. There are other issues, for instance, the value of an extra sense is to some extent tied to the support mechanisms society has developed for it. I think that the deaf community may be voicing a valid concern that society has good set of support mechanism for people who are fully deaf and fully hearing, but not as good mechanisms for people with the kind of mid-range hearing that cochlear implants provide.
But those are concerns of practice, not principle. In principle having extra senses should make it easier to achieve your values. I mean, wouldn’t you want super-hearing, microscopic vision, etc if you could get them without any side-effects.
I think the fact that you are unwilling to have your criteria for attractiveness be modified is good evidence that it is the former and not the latter.
I think there are two issues, one is semantic, the other is that I did completely understand what you meant by being changed into someone who isn’t queer.
First, the semantic issue. I have been trying to approach the issue of Personal Identity by righting a wrong question. Instead of asking “Am I the same person as him?” I instead ask “How desirable would it be for me to change into that person?” I find that this approache generates the same intuitive results as traditional approaches to personal identity (for instance both approaches identify being killed and being wireheaded as very undesirable outcomes) but doesn’t get bogged down by the issues of what exactly it means to be “the same.”
Saying that you literally wouldn’t be the same person was hyperbolic of me. I was trying to draw attention to the fact that our values are an important part of who we are, and that changing our values can change our identity. It would be more accurate to say something like “the new you is only 90% the same person as the previous you.”
The other issue is that I don’t think I quite understood what you meant when you talked about being changed. To give a framework to what I mean, I call your attention to Yvain’s famous post on Wanting, Liking, and Approving. When you talked about being changed to not be queer, I assumed you meant that your Wanting, Liking, and Approving stats had all been changed. You had been changed so that you wanted to not be queer, liked it, and deeply approved of this fact.
However, this does not match your description of what you imagine the subjective experience of being modified to not be attracted to men would be like. You say:
That sounds to me like your Wanting and Liking stats have been modified, but your Approving stat has stayed the same.
I consider the “Approving” portion of your personality to be a much bigger part of your personal identity than “Wanting” and “Liking.” So if the change left the “Approving” portion of your personality intact, I would completely agree with you that you are still the same person that you were before, regardless of what personal-identity framework I am using.
Interesting.
So, speaking personally, I approve of people seeking same-sex mates, I approve of us seeking opposite-sex mates, I approve of us seeking no mates at all, I approve of various other possibilities and none of this seems especially relevant to what I’m talking about when I describe myself as queer. People just as queer as I am could have completely different approval patterns.
So, yes, as you say, I’m not envisioning having what I approve of modified when I talk about not being queer, merely what I “want” and “like”. Straight-Dave approves of all the same things that queer-Dave does, he just desires/prefers different mates.
Rereading your original comment keeping in mind that you’re talking mostly about approval rather than desire or preference… so, would you say that Deaf people necessarily disapprove of deafness? It sounds that way from the way you talk about it, but I want to confirm that.
I’d say that a good portion of them do approve of it. There seem to be a lot of disability rights activists who seem to think that being disabled and making more disabled people is okay.
I should also mention, however, that I do think it is possible to mistakenly approve or disapprove of something. For instance I used to disapprove of pornography and voluntary prostitution. However, I eventually realized that the arguments for why those things were bad were wrong/incoherent, and realized that I should never have disapproved of those things. Disapproval of pornography and voluntary prostitution was never my CEV.
I think a large portion of disability-rights activists are also confused in their thinking, and would have different views if their thinking was clearer. For instance, many disability rights activists seem to think that any suggestion that disability is bad implies that the lives of disabled people aren’t worth living and that they should all be involuntarily euthanized, which is obviously false. It’s possible to believe your life is worth living while simultaneously believing it could be better.
So, with that in mind, I go back to your original comment that there is a fundamental difference between being queer and being deaf.
If I understand correctly, the difference you were seeing was that being queer was a “value,” which is related to it being something that queer people differentially approve of. Whereas deafness was an ability, which was importantly different.
But since then, you’ve concluded that being queer isn’t actually something (at least some people, like me) differentially approve of.
But you also believe that many Deaf people approve of deafness… you just think they’re mistaken to do so.
Have I got that right? I have to admit, I have trouble making all of that stuff cohere; it mostly seems to cache out as “Ghatananthoah believes being queer is different from being deaf, because Ghatananthoah disapproves of being deaf but doesn’t disapprove of being queer.”
Which I assume is an unfair characterization.
But perhaps you can understand why it seems that way to me, and thereby help me understand what I’m misunderstanding in your position?
I’m not sure what I wrote that gave you this idea. I do think that queer people approve of being queer. What I’m talking about when I say “approval” is preferences that are ego-syntonic, that are line with the kind of person they want to be. Most queer people consider their preference to be ego-syntonic. Being queer is the kind of person they want to be and they would not change it if they could. Those who do not are usually motivated by mistaken religious ideas, rather than clearly reasoned disapproval.
What I am trying to say is that being queer is a statement about what people want to do. When we say that someone is queer that means that they have a desire to engage in romantic and sexual relationships that are different from the heterosexual norm. This desire is ego-syntonic, it is approved of.
Being deaf, by contrast, is a statement about what people are able do. They lack the ability to hear things.
If you removed someone’s deafness, none of their desires would change. They would still want everything they wanted before they were deaf. If they were really attached to their current lifestyle they could buy earplugs. By contrast, if you changed a queer person into a straight person, they would stop wanting to have non-heteronormative relationships. They’d be able to continue their current lifestyle (or at least, as able as anyone is in a heteronormative society), but they wouldn’t want to.
There are some people who claim that they prefer being deaf to being able to hear, and that being deaf is ego-syntonic. I believe that they are confused. I think what they really value isn’t being deaf, it’s the community that they have built with other deaf people. They are confusing their preference to display loyalty to their community with with a preference to not be able to hear. In addition I think they are confused for some other reasons:
Sour grapes. When people are unable to do something, they often convince themselves they didn’t want to do it anyway in order to assuage their ego.
Confusing “life could be better” with “life is not worth living.” As I said before, a lot of disability rights advocates seem to think that if you admit that their disability makes their life even slightly worse, that means their life is not worth living at all and they should be euthanized. This is not true.
If people got hit in the head with a baseball bat every day.....
Happy death spirals around their community. They love their community and want to say more and more good things about it. So they say that their community is so awesome that living in it is worth being significantly less good at sensing one’s surroundings.
To sum it up, I believe that being queer is an ego-syntonic desire. I believe that being deaf is not ego-syntonic, but people say it is out of a desire to have self-esteem and be proud of and loyal to the deaf community.
I’m not sure what I wrote that gave you this idea.
(nods) Months later, neither am I. Perhaps I’d remember if I reread the exchange, but I’m not doing so right now.
Regardless, I appreciate the correction.
And much like Vaniver below (above? earlier!), I am unsure how to translate these sorts of claims into anything testable.
Also I’m wary of the tendency to reason as follows: “I don’t value being deaf. Therefore deafness is not valuable. Therefore when people claim to value being deaf, they are confused and mistaken. Here, let me list various reasons why they might be confused and mistaken.”
I mean, don’t get me wrong: I share this intuition. I just don’t trust it. I can’t think of anything a deaf person could possibly say to me that would convince me otherwise, even if I were wrong.
Similarly, if someone were to say ” I believe that being queer is not ego-syntonic. I know people say it is, but I believe that’s because they’re confused and mistaken, for various reasons: x, y, z” I can’t think of anything I could possibly say to them to convince them otherwise. (Nor is this a hypothetical case: many people do in fact say this.)
One thing I consider very suspicious is that deaf people often don’t just deny the terminal value of hearing. They also deny its instrumental value. The instrumental values of hearing are obvious. This indicates to me that they are denying it for self-esteem reasons and group loyalty reasons, the same way I have occasionally heard multiculturalists claim behaviors of obvious instrumental value (like being on time) are merely the subjective values of Western culture.
The typical defense of this denial (and other disability-rights type claims) is hearing only has instrumental value because society is structured in a way that makes use of it. But this is obviously false, hearing would be useful on a desert island, and there are some disabilities that society is not technologically capable of solving (there’s no way to translate instrumental music into sign language). Plus, structuring society around disabilities is essentially having society pay to enable a person instead of having biology do it for free. Obviously it’s better than not accommodating them, but it;s even better to have biology do the accommodation for free if that is possible.
I think another factor is simply my knowledge of the human brain structure, and the psychological unity of humankind. It seems like it would be a much smaller departure from standard brain design to switch the specific target of the “romance” module of the brain, than it would be to completely erase all desire to enjoy the pleasures that a sense of hearing can provide us, and to assign terminal value to being inconvenienced by things like not being able to talk to people who aren’t in your visual range.
I think another thing that supports my intuitions is Bostrom’s Reversal test. Imagine instead of discussing giving a preexisting sense to people who lack it, we were considering giving people a new sense that no human being has ever had before. Should we do that? If there were no side effects, I would say yes! As I told Vaniver in my reply to them, I really want to be able sense magnetic fields. Seeing infrared and ultraviolet would also be fun. The fact that my intuitions are the same in the Reversal Test provides evidence that they are not based on the Status Quo Bias.
I think some parallels still go through, if you consider the difference between “sex is for recreation!” (the queer-friendly view) and “sex is for procreation!” (the queer-unfriendly view). I don’t see anyone claiming that heterosexual sex never leads to babies, but I do see a lot of people trivializing the creation of babies.
It looks to me as if you may be mixing up being queer and preferring to be queer. It’s true that people tend to find themselves approving the way they actually are, but (as you actually acknowledge) there are queer people who would much prefer not to be queer, perhaps for very bad reasons, and I think there are also not-queer people who would prefer to be queer (I think I’ve seen, a few years ago on LW, a discussion of the possibility of hacking oneself to be bisexual).
I would say (in terms of the want/like/approve trichotomy already referenced) that what defines a person as queer is that they want and like sexual/romantic relationships that don’t fit the traditional heteronormative model. Approving or disapproving of such relationships is a separate matter. If tomorrow someone convinces Dave that fundamentalist Christianity is correct then he may start disapproving of queerness and wishing he weren’t queer, but he still will be.
It may well be, as you suggest, that approval is actually a more important part of your personality than wants and likes, but that doesn’t mean that everything needs to be understood in terms of approval rather than wants and likes.
But does not wanting to change indicate that Dave’s queerness is really more about approving than about wanting and liking? I don’t think so. If someone pointed a weird science-fiction-looking device at me and announced that it would rewire my brain to make me stop wanting-and-liking chocolate and start wanting-and-liking aubergines, I would want them not to do it—but I don’t (I’m pretty sure) approve of liking chocolate and disliking aubergine any more than I do of the reverse. It’s just that I don’t want someone rewiring my brain. It seems very plausible to me that Dave’s queerness might be like my liking for chocolate in this respect.
I also wonder whether we’re at risk of being confused by the variety of meanings of “approve”. Perhaps that trichotomy needs to be a tetrachotomy or something. In particular, I don’t think “affectively endorsing the idea of oneself having quality Q” is the same thing as, e.g., “intellectually endorsing the idea of people in general having quality Q”, and when we talk about something like “approving of being queer” with the first meaning—which I think is the only relevant one here—there’s a danger of sounding as if we intend the second.
I agree that preferring being deaf seems likely to be the result of confusion and affective death spirals and whatnot. But … It seems quite possible to me that the following things might be true of some deaf person (let’s call her Debbie): (1) Debbie gets great benefits from being part of the deaf community. (2) If Debbie ceased to be deaf—especially if she did so by her own choice—and other deaf people discovered this, it would be awkward and would impair her ability to fit into that community. (3) That impairment would harm her more than ceasing to be deaf would help her. (4) Ceasing to be deaf and hiding the fact from others in the community would be psychologically disturbing for her and involve the risk of even greater ructions if found out. (4) That risk would also be, for Debbie, worse than the benefit of ceasing to be deaf. Therefore (5) Debbie would be better off remaining deaf, even if some simple and effective treatment were available to her. None of that means that being deaf is better in the abstract; it means that one can get into a situation where it’s better to stay deaf. (If it seems absurd on general principles that having greater abilities could ever be harmful on net, then go and read e.g. The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling, which contains plenty of counterexamples.)
That’s the core claim that leads to everything else and the first question that pops into my head is: How do you (or anyone) know? Notably, I am not sure that Debbie is going to be able to make a good judgement in this case, plus there is a self-fulfilling prophecy element in here, too.
Oh, and for a fun exercise in mindkilling try substituting “on welfare” for “is deaf” X-/
I don’t. That’s why all I said was that it seems possible that it (along with those other things) might be true of some people. Community is really important to many people. Finding a new community and getting well integrated into it can be difficult. That seems sufficient to make it likely that for some people staying part of an important community they’re in could be overwhelmingly important.
I’m not sure what point you’re making, but for what it’s worth the people I know who are on welfare don’t appear to me to constitute a being-on-welfare community. Perhaps I know the wrong ones?
[EDITED to add:] Oh, wait, maybe you were making a less specific analogy and remarking that some people on welfare can be made worse off if, e.g., they get a job. True enough, but nothing about that seems terribly relevant to the present discussion.
Yes—or that they believe they’ll be made worse off. Not terribly relevant, true, that’s why it was a side remark.
It seems to me that most people lack the ability to be aroused by people—typically, their ability is seriously limited, to half of the population at most.
I suspect that most, if not all, queers have a preference to be queer (if they do) for this reason. But it’s not clear to me how to even test this one way or the other—even if one asked the hypothetical question “if there were a pill to make you straight, would you take it?” that puts one into far-mode, not near-mode, and it’s very possible that people will pick answers to please the community of potential romantic partners. (If you say “yes, I’d like to be straight,” that’ll increase your attractiveness to opposite-sex partners, but not actually increase their attractiveness to you!)
(I have thought, at times, ‘how convenient to be gay, since I probably would get along much better with men than women!’, but I can’t claim that I would choose to be gay for that reason, starting from emptiness. Why not bisexuality? Why not asexuality?)
When I was talking about being queer I wasn’t just talking about the experience of being aroused, I was talking about the desire to have that experience, and that experience being egosyntonic. It’s fairly easy to rephrase any preference a person has to sound like an ability or lack thereof. For instance, you could say that I lack the ability to enjoy skinning people alive. But that’s because I don’t want to skin people alive, or to enjoy it! That’s a terminal value, the buck stops there.
Some other factors to consider:
Even if I was to define “being aroused” as an ability, that doesn’t perfectly map onto the discuss. In the case of removing deafness we are adding an ability. In the case of changing queerness to heterosexuality, we are either removing an ability to find some people arousing and replacing it with a different one (in the case of homosexuals) or removing an ability and replacing it with nothing (in the case of bisexuals).
Arousal has very little instrumental value compared to hearing. Even if someone with the power of hearing took no pleasure from music or people’s voices they would still benefit from being able to hear people talk outside of their visual range, and to hear cars coming when they cross the street. I can see deaf people denying the terminal benefits of hearing, but denying the instrumental ones seems obviously crazy.
Starting from emptiness you would be completely indifferent to everything, including changes to your future preferences. To paraphrase Eliezer, you would be a rock, not a perfectly impartial being.
At some point you just have to say “These are my terminal values, the buck stops here.”
Now, while I would not say it is impossible to create a creature that assigns a terminal value to deafness, I find it unlikely that humans are such creatures. The way human psychology works makes me assign a much higher probability to their being self-deceived for group status purposes.
Then I see how your claim that most queers are egosyntonic flows through, but it seems like reversing the order of how things go. I visualize the typical experience as something like “id wants X → ego understands id wants X → superego approves of id wanting X,” with each arrow representing a step that not everyone takes.
I agree, but I observe that there’s a difficulty in using egosyntonicity (which I would describe as both wanting X and wanting to want X) without a clear theory of meta-values (i.e. “I want to want X because wanting X is consistent with my other wants” is what it looks like to use consistency as a meta-value).
I was unclear—I meant emptiness with regards to sexual orientation, not values in general. One could imagine, say, someone who wants to become a priest choosing asexuality, and someone who wants to get ahead in fashion design choosing to be gay, someone who wants to have kids naturally choosing to be heterosexual, and so on. If you kept all of my values the same and deleted my sexual orientation, what would regrow? Compare to the “if you deleted all proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem from my mind, would I be able to reinvent it?” thought experiment.
(Since we are talking about values instead of beliefs, and it’s not obvious that values would ‘regrow’ similar to beliefs, it may be clearer to consider counterfactual mes of every possible sexual orientation, and comparing the justifications they can come up with for why it’s egosyntonic to have the orientation that they have. It seems some of them will have an easier time of it than others, but that all of them will have an easy enough time that it’s not clear I should count my justification as worth much.)
I think that maybe all of them would be perfectly justifying in saying that their sexual orientation is a terminal value and the buck stops there.
On the other hand, I’m nowhere near 100% sure I wouldn’t take a pill to make me bisexual.
I think a way to help tease out your intuition would be Bostrom’s reversal test. If transhumanist scientists invented a new kind of sexual orientation, a new kind of sexual experiences, and so on, would you want to be modified to be able to enjoy this new, never before seen type of sex. I don’t know how you’d reply, for me it would probably be yes or no, depending on specific details of the new kind of sex.
I think the reason I would sometimes say yes is that I have a strong preexisting preference for novelty and novel experiences. So my desire for new sexual preferences would grow out of that.
Incidentally, Bostrom’s reversal test also supports my intuitions about deafness. If transhumanists invented new senses that no human has ever had before, would I want to have them if there were no side effects? Of course I would! I especially want to be able to sense magnetic fields like sharks can.
Is the opposition to cochlear implants really an example of bad thinking, or merely certain deaf individuals having different goals?
Note: I do not necessarily support these goals.
Is opposition to life extension/immortality really an example of bad thinking, or merely certain individuals having different goals?
Point for a really eloquent rebuttal, but I wonder if this might actually hold some merit. I think that a theist who is looking forward to paradise is guilty of less (or at least, different) bad thinking then an atheist who embraces mortality, because the theist does have a goal that is achieved through death. Are there any secular goals that are only achievable through the continuing mortality of humans? What about human evolution?
Evolution in its conventional meaning of changes in a population caused by differential breeding success of individuals coupled with descent-with-modification arguably requires mortality, but I’m not sure I know anyone who values evolution in that sense as compared to some other mechanism that makes equally valuable changes in the population (e.g. via technology).
Some people do seem to have goals that involve killing other people; presumably eliminating mortality prevents them from achieving those goals.
Well—“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ; more colloquially “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
If we postulate that for any given level of scientific progress there are a number of existential risks it is not yet capable of addressing, it may well turn out that ubiquitous clinical immortality poses an existential risk to the human race.
Definitely a problem that needs addressing.
I’ve heard this proposition before, but I find it extremely dubious. Looking at my own professors, for instance, considering the length of time they’d been teaching, some of them would have to have seriously altered their course content over time to reflect advancements in scientific knowledge.
Veteran scientists may not adopt new findings as easily as they should, but in general the notion that old scientists must die off for new information to become widely adopted seems to be false.
This idea about science progressing by funerals is generally ascribed to Kuhn, but his own views were more nuanced. His primary relevant work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is definitely worth reading. Note that for most of history this claim is empirically false. For example, during the “Copernican Revolution” there are many recorded instances of astronomers who used Ptolemy’s model and then adopted the model of Tycho, or Copernicus or Kepler (or one of the many weird hybrid systems that was going around). Similarly, in the case of the chemical revolution, a major part of why Joseph Priestly’s insistence on the phlogiston theory to his dying day was so noteworthy was that all his peers had long ago given up on it, and so his work in his later years was to a large extent ignored. When Einstein came up with special relativity, many physicists who were quite old and had only worked in a Newtonian framework embraced it.
The notion that science progresses by the death of the elderly scientists seems to be empirically false. Moreover, in so far as there are limited problems of this sort they are likely due to the difficulties that arise when brains become old and have more trouble learning or adopting to new ideas. If life-extension keeps brains young and healthy (likely), or is accompanied by technology that increases general brain power (probably not as likely but not very unlikely either) the genuine parts of this problem will be alleviated.
Will be easily alleviated, we imagine, anyhow. It is certainly true that ideology and moral progress seems to be a generational phenomenon, and while scientific progress might be able to overcome that problem now, I don’t know that general/popular ethics and politics are, yet.
So we need solutions. Rigorous instrumental rationality, to me, is a potential solution to that problem, though.
This empirically seems to be difficult to confirm. Let’s pick two major historical issues where attitudes are considered to have changed rapidly in the United States, attitudes towards interracial marriage and attitudes towards gay marriage.
I’m using Gallup as a rough estimate for historical interracial attitudes. In 1958, there was an approval rating of 4% for interracial marriage and a disapproval rate of around 94%. In 1969 that had changed to 20% and 73%. Now, the population was around 174 million in 1958 and 200 million in 1968. Using the estimated death rates from here, which gives about 2 million people dying yearly and assuming that about 2/3rds of all people who died were against interracial marriage and that about 2/3rds who were entering the population (for a year 10 year period, really not actual births but people who had been too young to earlier have an opinion or if have an opinion be asked about it in polls, but roughly the same as just new people), then one gets around 18 million people leaving the disapprove group and around 8 million entering, for a total delta of −10 million, which gives an expected value percentage of 164/200= .82%.
Of course, the most questionable number here is the 2/3rds. That seems like a safe estimate, but if one assumes a larger fraction then one gets other results. If one assumes that instead of 2/3rd it is nearly complete conversion (only disapproves dying and only approves entering the population) then one somewhat undershoots this. But at least from this sort of estimate it seems difficult to say that deaths were the only cause of the changing attitude. It does seem however that deaths were a major part.
Similarly, approval rates for gay marriage and civil unions have changed faster than a simple population die off model would work.(source) Here it is worth seeing how extreme the numbers are. There’s been about a 10% decline between 2001 and 2011 in the fraction opposing gay marriage and about a 10% increase in the percentage who are ok with it. There are around 2.5 million deaths a year in the US in the last decade, meaning that about 25 million people died. (source) There were in 2001 a population of around 281 million, so with a 57% disapproval of gay marriage that translates to around 160 million people. So if all 25 million died off from that population then one gets around 135 million disapproving which out of 308 million population is around 44% disapproval, which is about the current rate. Now, it might look from that like die off is the only cause here, but this model assumes that almost everyone dying is in the disapprove category and that almost no new people are entering into that category. The second assumption is at least empirically wrong. From those numbers one sees that young people are much more likely to approve, but it isn’t enough to justify this sort of assumption.
So the data seems to suggest that death is a major cause of moral changes but at least for both these issues, a major part is people actually changing their minds. Now, it is possible that they are changing their minds in part because the older authority figures are dying off, but that’s a more subtle narrative.
Overall, crunching these numbers has made me update more in the direction of deaths mattering. When I started pulling up the numbers I expected it to be much more clear cut in the direction of deaths not being sufficient. This seems to suggest that they aren’t sufficient, but it does seem like in reasonably simple. plausible models deaths do explain a large fraction and possibly majority of the change.
Getting more detailed understandings might require much more careful demographic study.
I have noticed in the past that the majority of people allow their opinions to be swayed by a minority of individuals. So I suspect that ‘die off rates’ might be magnified in this manner—but I can’t really corroborate that. It’s worth investigating at some point, especially if I’m going to raise it as an issue.
I don’t see how to make predictions from this or easily modify it to be able to do so. Note that every majority opinion consists of slightly different opinions that are each minority opinions.
My intuition is that people have different thresholds of agreement around them to hold each opinion they have. If 60% of people are at least comfortable holding an opinion so long as at least 50% hold it, and a subset of them, at least 50%, are comfortable holding it so long as at least 40% do, etc., the belief will be stable.
But if support for an opinion is shallow and fragile, such that some people are only comfortable holding it if it is nearly universal, and others only if it is overwhelmingly popular, and others only if it is a supermajority opinion, etc., support for it could unravel quickly even if people change little.