I find that there is often a conflict between a motivation to speak only the truth and a motivation to successfully communicate as close approximations to the most relevant truths as constraints of time, intelligence and cultural conversational conventions allow.
wuwei
I suppose I might count as someone who favors “organismal” preferences over confusing the metaphorical “preferences” of our genes with those of the individual. I think your argument against this is pretty weak.
You claim that favoring the “organismal” over the “evolutionary” fails to accurately identify our values in four cases, but I fail to see any problem with these cases.
I find no problem with upholding the human preference for foods which taste fatty, sugary and salty. (Note that consistently applied, the “organismal” preference would be for the fatty, sugary and salty taste and not foods that are actually fatty, sugary and salty. E.g. We like drinking diet Pepsi with Splenda almost as much as Pepsi and in a way roughly proportional to the success with which Splenda mimics the taste of sugar. We could even go one step further and drop the actual food part, valuing just the experience of [seemingly] eating fatty, sugary and salty foods.) This doesn’t necessarily commit me to valuing an unhealthy diet all things considered because we also have many other preferences, e.g. for our health, which may outweigh this true human value.
The next two cases (fear of snakes and enjoying violence) can be dealt with similarly.
The last one is a little trickier but I think it can be addressed by a similar principle in which one value gets outweighed by a different value. In this case, it would be some higher-order value such as treating like cases alike. The difference here is that rather than being a competing value that outweighs the initial value, it is more like a constitutive value which nullifies the initial value. (Technically, I would prefer to talk here of principles which govern our values rather than necessarily higher order values.)
I thought your arguments throughout this post were similarly shallow and uncharitable to the side you were arguing against. For instance, you go on at length about how disagreements about value are present and intuitions are not consistent across cultures and history, but I don’t see how this is supposed to be any more convincing than talking about how many people in history have believed the earth is flat.
Okay, you’ve defeated the view that ethics is about the values all humans throughout history unanimously agree on. Now what about views that extrapolate not from perfectly consistent, unanimous and foundational intuitions or preferences, but from dynamics in human psychology that tend to shape initially inconsistent and incoherent intuitions to be more consistent and coherent—dynamics, the end result of which can be hard to predict when iteratively applied and which can be misapplied in any given instance in a way analogous to applications of the dynamic over beliefs of favoring the simplest hypothesis consistent with the evidence.
By the way, I don’t mean to claim that your conclusion is obviously wrong. I think someone favoring my type of view about ethics has a heavy burden of proof that you hint at, perhaps even one that has been underappreciated here. I just don’t think your arguments here provide any support for your conclusion.
It seems to me that when you try to provide illustrative examples of how opposing views fail, you end up merely attacking straw men. Perhaps you’d do better if you tried to establish that any opposing views must have some property in common and that such a property dooms those views to failure. Or that opposing views must go one of two mutually exclusive and exhaustive routes in response to some central dilemma and both routes doom them to failure.
I really would like to see the most precise and cogent version of your argument here as I think it could prompt some important progress in filling in the gaps present in the sort of ethical view I favor.
“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. … Science advances whenever an Art becomes a Science. And the state of the Art advances too because people always leap into new territory once they have understood more about the old.”
-- Donald Knuth
“One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.”
-- David Hilbert
There is a mathematical style in which proofs are presented as strings of unmotivated tricks that miraculously do the job, but we found greater intellectual satisfaction in showing how each next step in the argument, if not actually forced, is at least something sweetly reasonable to try. Another reason for avoiding [pulling] rabbits [out of the magicians’s hat] as much as possible was that we did not want to teach proofs, we wanted to teach proof design. Eventually, expelling rabbits became another joy of my professional life.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
Edit: Added context to “rabbits” in brackets.
“The correlation between liking of the date and evaluation of the date’s physical attractiveness is .78 for male subjects and .69 for female subjects. . . Sheer physical attractiveness appears to be the overriding determinant of liking.”
Also interesting: “The correlation between how much the man says he likes his partner and how much she likes him is virtually zero: r = .03.”
“Male’s MSAT scores correlate .04 with both the woman’s liking for him and her desire to date him.” (For females the equivalent figure was around -.06.)
“Importance of Physical Attractiveness in Dating Behavior”, Elaine Walster, et al., p. 514-515 http://www2.hawaii.edu/~elaineh/13.pdf
I trust this data more than folk psychology or self-reports, but I would be interested if anyone knows of any subsequent studies confirming or disconfirming these types of figures, or assessing its generalizability from 18 year olds on blind dates.
Hi.
I’ve read nearly everything on less wrong but except for a couple months last summer, I generally don’t comment because a) I feel I don’t have time, b) my perfectionist standards make me anxious about meeting and maintaining the high standards of discussion here and c) very often someone has either already said what I would have wanted to say or I anticipate from experience that someone will very soon.
- 17 Apr 2010 18:00 UTC; 8 points) 's comment on Attention Lurkers: Please say hi by (
Would you bet on resource depletion?
I still have very little idea what you mean by ‘objectification’ and ‘objectify people’.
I was momentarily off-put by Roko’s comment on the desire to have sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get. This was because of:
the focus on sex, whereas I would desire a relationship.
the connotation of ‘attractive’ which in my mind usually means physical attractiveness, whereas my preferences are dominated by other features of women.
the modifier ‘extremely’ which seems to imply a large difference in utility placed on sex with extremely attractive women vs. very attractive or moderately attractive women, especially when followed by identifying this desire as a generator for desiring high social status rather than vice versa or discussing both directions of causation. (The latter would have made more sense to me in the context of Roko saying we should value social influential power.)
I had negative associations attached to Roko’s comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko’s suggestions. However, I wouldn’t have voiced these negative associations in any phrases along the lines of ‘objectificaton’ or ‘objectifying’, or in terms of any moral concerns. The use of the word ‘get’ by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of ‘getting a girlfriend/boyfriend’.
According to an old story, a lord of ancient China once asked his physician, a member of a family of healers, which of them was the most skilled in the art.
The physician, whose reputation was such that his name became synonymous with medical science in China, replied, “My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape and so his name does not get out of the house.”
“My elder brother cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood.”
“As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords.”
-- Thomas Cleary, Introduction to The Art of War
“The Fermi paradox is actually quite easily resolvable. There are zillions of aliens teeming all around us. They’re just so technologically advanced that they have no trouble at all hiding all evidence of their existence from us.”
Upvoted because I appreciate Alicorn’s efforts and would like to hear additional rational presentations of views in the same neighborhood as her’s.
I would bet I also upvoted some of the comments Alicorn is referring to as comments that perpetuate the problem.
And I will suggest in turn that you are guilty of the catchy fallacy name fallacy. The giant cheesecake fallacy was originally introduced as applying to those who anthropomorphize minds in general, often slipping from capability to motivation because a given motivation is common in humans.
I’m talking about a certain class of humans and not suggesting that they are actually motivated to bring about bad effects. Rather all it takes is for there to be problems where it is significantly easier to mess things up than to get it right.
Thanks for clarifying what factors you think are relevant. I agree that those have not been tested.
Do you think that morality or rationality recommends placing no intrinsic weight or relevance on either a) backwards-looking considerations (e.g. having made a promise) as opposed to future consequences, or b) essentially indexical considerations (e.g. that I would be doing something wrong)?
Its painfulness.
After some medical procedure, there have been some patients for whom pain is not painful. When asked whether their pain is still there, they will report that the sensation of pain is still there just as it was before, but that they simply don’t mind it anymore.
That feature of pain that their pain now lacks is what I am calling its painfulness and that is what is bad about pain.
Yes. And since being a maverick has a similar negative expectation for most working people, it seems well-placed to explain the slow spread of good ideas more generally as well.
Yes, but not all self-help needs to involve positive affirmations.
I was going to ask whether repeating positive statements about oneself has actually been recommended on lesswrong. Then I remembered this post. Perhaps that post would have made a more suitable target than the claim that rationalists should win.
Wouldn’t a rationalist looking to win simply welcome this study along with any other evidence about what does or does not work?
I think many of the most pressing existential risks (e.g. nanotech, biotech and AI accidents) come from the likely actions of moderately intelligent, well-intentioned, and rational humans (compared to the very low baseline). If that is right then increasing the number of such people will increase rather than decrease risk.
“Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.”
-- Frank Herbert, Dune