Good point. The truth is, my starting point is much less libertarian than most LWers, if I recall survey results correctly. I’m trying to understand the other side, which is I gather virtuous within a rationality framework. I wasn’t trying to bias what answers I would get, but you’re right that it could in some fashion or other.
Bart119
Karma: 113
Survey of older folks as data about one’s future values and preferences?
Shaving: Less Long
I like this post. You’re coming from religion, you’re seeking truth, you don’t want to toss out the religion completely. I think asking what self-identified rationalists have to say about that is entirely appropriate. As mwengler implies, a religious background is as good a place to get values from as anyplace else.
I was raised as an atheist, toyed with Quakerism for a while, but went back to atheism, but with a kinder view of religion. Quakers may not be great at cost-benefit tradeoffs, but they’ve been at the forefront of progressive values forever. I’m also a Unitarian-Universalist atheist, and enjoy the community a church provides (a mix of atheists and theists). We teach our kids about all major religions, and then let them choose their beliefs (most choose what amounts to atheism, but they have some idea who they share the world with. One parent said he brought his kids to UU Sunday School to “inoculate them against religion”).
But if I sing a line like, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty… only thou art holy, there is none beside thee, perfect in power, love and purity.” it makes me feel kind of teary and good. As does, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” What a great idea, that someone else is watching out for you, someone who knows best! Sometimes it can be helpful, for instance for reducing unproductive anxiety. 90% of me focuses on the fact it isn’t true and 10% on its value. For a questioning believer, maybe it’s 90-10 the other way.
All I ask of believers is to subscribe to what I’ve heard described as the liberal bargain. We do not expect to come to agreement on important issues of values and how life should be led. Persuasion is fine, but coercion is not. All you have to do is be a good neighbor, abiding by widely shared ethical beliefs: leave other people alone and treat them with a modicum of respect. Let the public schools teach (secular) science. We do interfere inside families enough to prevent child abuse, but that’s about it (and arguably we do too much of that). And I hope/expect that all a believer needs to buy into the liberal bargain is just a little bit of doubt.
So I say go ahead and pray, go to church, whatever works. Churches do a lot of good works. You already know that God helps those who help themselves, which means you’re doing pretty much the same thing with or without a God.
I realize some people who were raised with religion and reject it have substantial anger against religion and need to denounce religion in strong terms. Sometimes they seem to want to make believers feel like idiots. I think that is unfortunate.
I tend to fall on the side of those who say, “Wait, don’t panic”. Well, ‘panic’ would be a strong emotion of the kind you say you’re not having, but you’re obviously uneasy, and rightly so. Right to feel that way.
When ‘the system’ looks at you, they’re going to see a person who is functioning pretty well in the world. That’s the major thing they care about. And it’s no small thing!
Things are likely to change at your age, simply with the passing of time. Are you going to go to college? Get out of the house somehow? That could get you more perspective on your parents and more opportunity to see what life is like without them. Frequent advice to despairing young people is that “it gets better”. It usually does, and when it doesn’t, you at least get a better idea of the problem you’re trying to solve.
I might posit a LW tendency (bias?) to act as opposed to waiting. I think psychedelics would be a terrible idea, frankly. Way too much of a radical act.
My IQ is somewhere in the 130s, and a standard deviation is usually something like 12-15 points, so taking advice from my future self would be like taking advice from a normal 100 IQ person now! I don’t pay terribly much attention to what such people say… I’d still pay a lot of attention to any message from the future because my future dim elderly self has all the fruits of my higher IQ periods to draw on, but this observation is enough to largely eliminate the interest of contemporary averages.
My suggestion wasn’t that older people would be smarter or think more clearly, or even have access to some fount of wisdom that the young don’t have. It was that their values and preferences change. To take a made-up example (though more plausible than some I could think of), suppose that 95% of 60-year-olds say that they seriously regret having had any body piercings. If you at 25 are considering a body piercing, you might do your utility calculation figuring your enjoyment of it now on the plus side, and then subtracting your expected displeasure with it as you get older. This could conceivably come in to play on such questions as whether to spend those extra 2 years finishing your Ph.D. too.
Far negatives of cryonics?
58% of French people consider themselves Catholic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_France
34% of French people assent to: “I believe there is a God”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Europe
Of course, there are methodological issues and this doesn’t prove the matter definitively, but it certain suggests that a lot of French people are “cultural Catholics” the way we have “cultural Jews” in the US.
I think atheists sometimes have a one-dimensional extreme view of believers. I never was a believer really (though I tried to be a Quaker for a while). I am a Unitarian-Universalist for social reasons (one joking definition of UUs is “atheists with children”—and I’d encourage atheists to consider if it might meet their needs).
Believers know very well that there have been no unambiguous miracles lately, that really horrible things happen in the world despite a presumably benevolent God, and that the evidence for God is indirect. I think very few lie on their deathbeds with unalloyed peace and calm with the absolute conviction that they’re going to heaven.
They are also well aware that different factions even within Christianity reach different conclusions about what God wants them to do.
There’s a reason that religious communities are always dealing with doubters and speak of the need for having faith (despite a dearth of evidence), and understand that faith gets weaker and stronger. I think most have thought about losing their faith and what it would mean.
I don’t have any statistics to quote, but I bet the majority of believers have views that are nuanced at least to this degree.
Yes, it was vague. I’ll try to be more precise—as much as I can.
Suppose we do a pilot experiment in a small region on the Tigris and Euphrates where people have been living in high population densities for a long time. We have large numbers of people coming back from the dead, perhaps 10 times the current population? Perhaps with infant mortality we have 5 times as many children as adults—lots of infants and young children.
But the UN is ready, prepared in advance. There is land for everyone. We figure at least that the dead have lost the right to their property, so we put them all up in modular housing we make outside the present city.
But there are so many formerly dead, from older linguistic and cultural and religious groups, that they form their own political parties and take over the government.
I could go on, but it’s apparent to me that the social order is completely messed up. Now suppose I’m an Egyptian, and it comes to a vote: Do we want to implement this program in Egypt? Assuming that the as-yet-unresurrected dead don’t get a vote, I can see the proposal being voted down overwhelmingly.
My moral intuition is that the Egyptians have no moral obligation to resurrect their ancestors. They have a right to continue their ways of existence.
Of course, this is an extreme thought experiment, and arguing about details won’t be productive.
I have a similar intuition about, say unrestricted immigration. If someone said that utility would be maximized if anyone could move anywhere on earth they wanted, I have an intuition that I as an American have a right to resist that. The status quo has some weight.
Applying rationality to problems can go too far. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of very smart, very thoughtful, very knowledgeable people thought Communism was going to be a great idea. But due to a few slip-ups and miscalculations, it turned out it wasn’t—which we can see with hindsight. No, they didn’t have modern notions of rationalism, but they had the best thinking of their day.
A truism is that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It’s easier to compute utility on the level of individuals. You can spin a story based on that about what society should look like, but I think you might be biased by the fact that your tool can apply. If the alternative is, “My tools don’t have anything to say on that issue because of complex interactions among people and the entire fabric of society”, then you would be biased to reject that alternative.
I know this brings up a lot of issues, some of which should be considered separately. And I am ignorant of a lot of LW work. Pointers to other work welcome.
These speculations are interesting. I think it’s always worth wheeling evolutionary thought up to a problem to see what it says.
However, surveying real people in our real, modern-day world seems far more direct.
I don’t think either that evolution would have much of a reason to cleanly engineer a stable end-state after which development just entirely stops, and leaves you with a well-adjusted, perfectly functional body or brain. That may not be a trivial task after all.
Evolution is constantly making trade-offs, and (last I knew) the reason our bodies fall apart was that evolution didn’t have a strong incentive to keep them going. We last as long as we do because we take care of grandkids, maybe, and Jared Diamond suggested a reason for longevity was that an old person was a storehouse of knowledge.
I’ve been aware of the concept of cognitive biases going back to 1972 or so, when I was a college freshman. I think I’ve done a decent job of avoiding the worst of them—or at least better than a lot of people—though there is an enormous amount I don’t know and I’m sure I mess up. Less Wrong is a very impressive site for looking into nooks and crannies and really following things through to their conclusions.
My initial question is perhaps about the social psychology of the site. Why are two popular subjects here (1) extending lifespan, including cryogenics, (2) increasingly powerful AIs leading to a singularity. Is there an argument that concern for these things is somehow derivable from a Bayesian approach? Or is it more or less an accident that these things are of interest to the people here?
Examples of other things that might be of interest could be (a) “may I grow firmer, quieter, warmer” (rough paraphrase of Dag Hammarskjold), (b) I want to make the very best art, (c) economics rules and the key problem is affording enough for everyone. I’m not saying those are better, just that they’re different. Are there reasons people here talk about the one set and not the other?
LW in general seems to favor a very far view. I’m trying to get used to that, and accept it on its own terms. But however useful it may be in itself, a gross mismatch between the farness of views which are taken to be relevant to each other is a problem.
It is widely accepted that spreading population beyond earth (especially in the sense of offloading significant portions of the population) is a development many hundreds of years in the future, right? A lot of extremely difficult challenges have to be overcome to make it feasible. (I for one don’t think we’ll ever spread much beyond earth; if it were feasible, earlier civilizations would already be here. It’s a boring resolution to the Fermi paradox but I think by far the most plausible. But this is in parentheses for a reason).
Extending lifespans dramatically is far more plausible, and something that may happen within decades. If so, we will have to deal with hundreds or thousands of years of dramatically longer lifespans without galactic expansion as a relief of population pressures. It’s not a real answer to a serious intermediate-term problem. Among other issues, such a world will set the context within which future developments that would lead to galactic expansion would take place.
The OP’s point needs a better answer.
OK. Forgive my modest research skills. I’ve certainly seen lots of posts that assume that indefinite lifespans are a good thing, but I had never seen any that made contrary claims or rebutted such claims. I would welcome pointers to the best such discussions. It was not intended as a rant.
I stumbled here while searching some topic, and now I’ve forgotten which one. I’ve been posting for a few weeks, and just now managed to find the “About” link that explains how to get started, including writing an intro here. Despite being a software engineer by trade these past 27-odd years, I manage to get lost navigating websites a lot, and I still forget to use Google and Wikipedia on topics. Sigh. I’m 57, and was introduced to cognitive fallacies years as long ago as 1972. I’ve tried to avoid some of the worst ones, but I also fail a lot. I kept a blog with issue-related essays for a while, and whatever its shortcomings, I was proud of the fact that when I ran out of thing to say, I stopped posting. With the prospect of a community like this one that might respond substantively, maybe I’ll be inspired to write more here.
This description of a guy who believed in objective morality but lost his faith impressed me a lot. That’s me. I don’t think there’s any very compelling reason to live one’s life in a particular way, or any real reason that some actions are preferable to others. That might be called nihilism. I live a decent life, though, because I’m happier pretending not to be a nihilist and making moral arguments and living honorably and all. But when the going gets tough (as in unpleasant consequences to some line of thought that doesn’t make me happy), I always have the option of shrugging my shoulders, yawning, and going on to the next topic. Rationality too is a fun tool. I find it most helpful within the relatively small questions of life.
What I would do is close to what a certain fairly mainstream set of health care reformers would like to do. It would involve reducing much spending in the last three months of life when a terminal condition exists, it would involve taking age into account in allocating donated organs. It would involve drug companies showing that a proposed new drug is more effective (or otherwise significantly superior to) existing medications, not just that it is effective. Although this is not an idea I have seen elsewhere, I might also take an “end-to-end” approach to medical research, wanting to see a sort of “business plan” that shows enough benefit to enough patients to justify costs. Any life extension treatments would be considered using the same set of criteria. Giving frail, confused 85-year-olds another ten years of the same kind of life would not qualify as a positive outcome.
As I see it, once you accept the idea that we are just a dance of particles (as I do too), then in an important sense ‘all bets are off’. A person comes up with something that works for them and goes with it. You don’t have any really good reason not to become a serial murderer, and no good reason to save the world if you know how. So most of us (?) pick a set of values in line with human moral intuition and what other people pick and and just go back to living. It makes us happiest. I claim you can’t be secretly miserable in an existential-angsty sort of way—there is no deeper reality which supports that. There may be deeper realities we aren’t seeing that we should worry about, but they are all within the scope of values we have chosen. But I’ve certainly had the experience that when I’m feeling bad I get reminded of the dance-of-particles situation and it further bums me out.
I see a decision about killing yourself as (in a way) constructing your future ‘contentment curve’ and seeing if the area above zero is larger than the area below. Rational people who get a painful terminal illness sometimes see lots of negative and that’s where physician-assisted suicide comes in. This is subject to the enormous, hard-to-emphasize-enough cognitive distortion that badly depressed people are terrible at constructing future contentment curves. Then irrreversibility comes in as an argument, and the suggestion that a person should let others help them figure it out too.
Thanks for pointers into what is a large and complex subject. I’m not remotely worried about things coming in from the stars. As for letting the AI out of the jar, I’m a bit perplexed. The transcripts are not available for review? If not, what seems relevant is the idea that an ideal encryption system has to be public so the very smartest people can try to poke holes in it. Of course, the political will to keep an AI in the box may be lacking—if you don’t let it out, someone else will let another one out somewhere else. Seems related to commercial release of genetically modified plants, which in some cases may have been imprudent.
Like CuSithBell, I’ll plead the restrictive relative clause interpretation, bolstered by the absence of a comma. I’ll also plead common sense as an ambiguity resolution tool. And not only do we have the existence of cultural Catholics, we’ve got as our first estimate a minimum (if every God-believing French person were a Catholic) of 41% of Catholics who don’t subscribe to a vital church teaching.
I think you (and most commenters) are treating this hypothetical believer in a rather disrespectful and patronizing fashion. I would think the ethical thing to do is to engage in a meta-discussion with such a person and see whether there are certain subjects that are off limits, how they feel about your differing views on God, how they would feel about losing their faith, etc. They might ask you similar questions about what might make you become a believer. You might find yourself incorrect about what might make them lose their belief.
It’s certainly possible to remain in a religious community without one’s faith intact—I think it happens to a large percentage of people in any religious group. Consider all the European Catholics who are essentially atheists.