Correlation does imply some sort of causal link.
For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.
Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink
Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.
Replications prove there’s something new under the sun.
Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?
Are they both controlled by something already begun?
Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?
So let’s imagine what to you is a counter factual: that there is a universal moral law, and it’s derived from reason alone. If true, this implies that whatever God-derived moral law you currently think exists is actually false—potentially even evil—insofar as it contradicts the moral law of reason. You might be emotionally in the thrall of an evil masquerading as good, and demanding that what is good scratch an emotional itch. You might be worshipping a golden calf, to put it in biblical language.
If God presented you with a moral law that didn’t feel good or feel emotionally compelling, would you tell God “come back later when your morality is more interesting to me?” Or would you accept that moral law despite your misgivings, since after all it comes from God?
Presuming you would accept the moral law from God even if it didn’t hit you on a gut level, then why would you insist that moral law hit you on a gut level when it comes from reason?
In short, if you refuse to eat your morality salad unless it comes with a big squirt of emotional dressing, but you’ll eat the emotional dressing even if there’s no moral salad underneath, then I question whether you actually care about morality at all.
Deontological ethics approaches morality from a non-utilitarian standpoint. It’s probably best if you read the Britannica article and report back with your impressions:
Well, you may not like their approach, but the original argument you were making, I think, was that EA think tanks weren’t addressing this issue. This paper certainly dealt with the topic in more depth than the listicle, not that that’s saying much, and it did it 2-3 years earlier. Also it took me all of 10 seconds to find it. So again, can you be a little more precise in saying what you mean by “most EA think tanks?”
Or are you mainly saying that you’d have liked to have seen EA screaming at giant, obvious, institutional level against gain of function research, rather than writing some tidy policy papers?
Here’s a paper from FHI from 2016 on a cost benefit analysis of GoF research:
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/GoFv9-1.pdf
I don’t know how carefully you’ve quantified “most of the EA think tanks,” but maybe worth adding some precision here?
Are you saying we should have been marching in the streets and putting up banners? Criticizing the end of the ban more in public? Or taking steps against it, somehow, using alternative mechanisms like advocacy with any contacts we might have in the world of virology?
For every dead enemy soldier, you create 2 bereaved parents, 1.5 bereaved siblings, many bereaved friends and a country full of terrified draftees.
I’m just finishing Nixonland, which focuses on the military/political intersection of the Vietnam war from the American perspective.
In Vietnam, the decision of whether or not to get involved in the first place, and whether or not to pull out, was indeed highly political. We got entangled (after initially supporting Hochimin) because France claimed that they’d fall under Soviet influence if we didn’t help them keep their colony. Then it was the domino effect theory. And then it was (under Nixon) a hard to parse concern that losing Vietnam would harm America’s stature as a superpower.
Perversely, it was these political concerns that drove some of the intensity of the punishing American bombing. Nixon wanted to show off how violent he could be. There’s a parallel here to the decision to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima partly to show off our willingness to use a nuclear bomb to the Soviets.
As another example, a key victory in driving the French out was when Hochimin slaughtered an entire dug-in French army corps in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. He lost 3x the men, but it showed France just how much death they’d have to suffer to continue colonizing Vietnam. They did assassinate bureaucrats too. But a lot of those bureaucrats were Vietnamese mandarins. The French already thought they were inferior people, so why would they care? There’s nothing like wiping out a huge number of enemy troops to make them think twice about pressing on.
Violence is a form of signaling. And signaling your willingness to use, escalate, and sustain violence by doing so is part of the political theater. So I’m not really convinced that history shows alternatives to violence to achieve political ends being the norm.
It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.
That really is a nice quote, though.
You’re just gonna have to be the sort of person for whom solving the wave equation of the hydrogen atom is a juicy project.
That’s a nice quote. I’m working on a handbook for how to self-study. Mind if I (tentatively) use it?
6. Treat the problem of measurement with the same care you treat the intervention. Much of rationality training will have its origins in introspection and intuitive inference. Figuring out what effects your hypothesis ought to predict, precisely enough to come up with a solid form of measurement, might be a lot harder than designing an intervention. Just because you don’t have a good way to measure what you’re doing doesn’t mean it has “no evidence.” But if you can find a way to measure, that can be very powerful.
This is a great idea. I find it not impossible that if you build an arduino watch implementing this, that you could make a nice little business patenting (?) and selling them. I’m sure many people would say “why not just learn to enjoy being a little early?” But for whatever reason, some people just don’t have much success with that. A gadget that corrected their problem might do just the trick.
Many of the coolest and most useful activities for learning are sealed off from non-professionals, or at least are expensive and time confusing to obtain certification or access. Usually for good reason.
This seems like a fundamental dilemma of the role of school. To make students directly see what’s cool about different subjects, they need lots of hands-on experience. But the vast majority of their time, and most of their evaluation prior to grad school, comes from book work. Access to hands-on projects and a sense of freedom and agency is limited at best.
And ultimately, that’s for reasons of safety and expense, which we can’t just criticize away.
It seems then that a big learning skill is maximizing access to such applied projects.
I wonder, then, if it would be better to orient school around single subjects from an earlier age. It makes more sense to give a student heightened access to mentorship, equipment, and materials if that stuff is their obsession. And for a self-studier, it seems important to figure out first what you want to obsess yourself with, and then focus on getting maximum access to applied learning environments.
Always enjoying your thoughts. Thanks chemslug. My expectation is that there are more safe and tractable micro-projects out there than the average student takes for granted. But I am also raising these questions to confirm a suspicion I have: that despite our love for the idea of “learning by doing,” there are many disciplines where a long slog of paper-based learning, punctuated by a few carefully regulated experiments, has to precede any kind of creative or independent hands-on activity.
LessWrong’s steeped in “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley culture, which seems to inform a fair bit of the perspectives on education I see shared here. One reason why I appreciate your comments here is that you bring insight from a less-represented discipline, one with a different set of norms and requirements than we find in Programland.
Do you think that most aspiring chemists would do well to figure out how to set up their own home lab, figuring out how to manage the risks and invest in some equipment? A fume hood costs a few thousand dollars, which is pricey but not completely impossible. Or is there a pretty hard norm that you don’t do any serious chemistry outside a professional lab setting? At what point do chemists become qualified to design and execute their own projects?
These are great ideas, thanks! I like both the specific suggestions and the idea of contacting societies popularizing the subjects. I hadn’t thought of that idea.
Agreed that there are real issues with doing “interesting” chemistry at home. I do think that this is one area where the idea that students can motivate themselves by finding an “applied” project to work on might not be the best advice.
Here’s another way of stating the exercise:
Take a subject you’re familiar with, or ideally are an expert in.
Pick a sub-sub skill out of an introductory textbook on the topic. For example, if your subject is biochemistry, you might pick “RNA aptamers.” If the subject is differential equations, you might pick “separable equations.”
Propose a micro-project where a student who had an introductory-level grasp of that topic would find it directly relevant. This micro-project should ideally be safe, cheap, legal/ethical, tractable for a self-studying introductory student, challenging/fun enough to be interesting. It should also be at least thematically related to real-world work in that field, in the way that coding a tic-tac-toe game is thematically related to professional programming work.
Those are nice examples/test cases!
Here’s what I think is the right way to understand what’s going on in the phone case. Let’s say you’re looking for an ice cream stand in a park.
Your brain takes input from the phone and your eyeballs. It synthesizes them, along with memories and other sense data, into a prediction about where you should walk and what you should look at in order to find the ice cream stand. Based on that mental synthesis, it sends outputs to your body, causing you to walk/read/look around.
In this conception, there’s ultimately only “search in map,” where the map is in your brain. “Search in territory” is just a fancy label we give to a certain subset of sense impressions that aren’t focusing on what we conventionally call a “map.”
I think that John is interested here in this distinction from a more practical, engineering perspective. When is it efficient for some instrumental goal to create or consult what we’d conventionally call a “map?” Here, the important thing seems to be the distinction between accumulating and storing information in a legible format, versus acquiring data anew each time.
I’m just pointing out that ultimately, there has to be some abstract synthesis of signals. The idea of transducing signals from one form into another might be more helpful for understanding this side of things. Here, the important thing is tracing the transduction of information from one processing mechanism to another.
To me, these seem importantly different, so I’m advocating that they be split apart rather than lumped together.
So your original question was whether or not it’s possible, on a gut level, to believe that a moral world is possible.
Now, you are focused on whether it’s possible for you, personally, to feel morally inspired outside the context of your church. That is a separate question, having to do with the quirks of your psychology. You might have just as much trouble feeling morally inspired by, say, Hindu moral beliefs in a Hindu religious context, as you have in feeing that way about a secular morality.
It is entirely possible that you would never feel the same way about reason-based morality as you do about your church’s moral architecture. That doesn’t say much about whether reason-based morality is true, even less about whether it’s possible, and still less about whether it’s possible for somebody else to feel inspired by reason-based morality. As an atheist who feels inspired by a reason-based morality, I can tell you the latter is possible for some people.
I think that I would have a hard time feeling inspired by a Christian approach to moral inspiration, but it wouldn’t be completely impossible. So I’d suggest starting with a prior that it’s likely difficult, but not impossible, for you to have a genuine affiliation for secular morality. You just don’t know how to get there. And bear in mind that even if you can’t, you might just be attached to a false belief. Plenty of people are—cf astrology and that boyfriend who you know really loves you even though he hits you sometimes.