The strongest taboos are not the sort of thing that people fear saying, but the sort that never even enter their heads (or go in one ear, then out the other). “Women are inferior in such and such way, therefore...” isn’t a way that conversations go.
women is on average is physically weaker than men
Amusingly, here’s the first google result on entering this for me: How Gendered Myths of Strength Keep Women Weaker
I don’t imagine Bonne Maman wants to stop women getting to their jam—I imagine that nobody cares.
Nobody is allowed to care. The notion that the average female is in any way inferior to the average male is one of the strongest taboos of “polite society”.
The Green Revolution, which saved millions from starvation in the second half of the twentieth century, was born from the same impulse as High Modernism: it is top-down, science-driven and generic, scaling standardized solutions across entire continents.
Stalinist collectivization wasn’t science-driven though, it was ideology-driven, which seems like an important distinction. Square evenly-spaced grids aren’t enough by themselves.
And even as scientific consensus on climate did eventually appear, most countries have done little of substance in response, because their incentives to ignore the consensus outweigh the perceived risk.
To clarify, the scientific consensus on climate change is that it’s emphatically not an extinction risk, abundant misleading media presentations notwithstanding.
I think much of woo in general has the same combination of “makes clearly nonsensical claims about reality, even as many of their practices have clear value and just lack legible mainstream explanations”.
How much value, though? The claim that any popular variety of woo provides some positive utility for its practitioners is, on the one hand, plausible, but on the other, unexciting. Meanwhile, woo-meisters tend to promise all sorts of crazy benefits, which is what mainly attracts (and repels) people.
Trying things out is good and all, but there’s always the opportunity cost. If you’re going into it clear-eyed, looking for some kind of a (poorly understood) therapeutic effect, which realistically wouldn’t change your life—by all means. If, however, you’re attracted by extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence is in short supply.
Interesting. How do actual top players deal with this, have private competitions based on honor system?
What is surprising to me is that despite being partially divorced from the narrative coherence, this coherent mind is, once recognized, still very legible and human-like.
I’d say that it’s even more human-like than a character entirely circumscribed by some idealistic narrative. “The face presented is not the whole model mind, and the model is the unit under selection in training” is entirely applicable to humans as well, after you swap “model” for “organism”.
If I was reasonably confident I knew better than you, how you should live, under what basis do I have the obligation to take away your agency to elect override your own preferences?
Under the norms of your society/culture. They obviously aren’t static, and can e.g. fade away, having lost to external competition (like vikings had), or change in response to internal critique (like how colonialism became discredited). If you would rather operate under some hypothetical perfect rules derived from first principles, then you will likely be disappointed, seeing how philosophy has for millennia utterly failed to discover those.
I think a better way of presenting it is in a different order:
I think insect suffering might cause a million times more suffering than human suffering
But that’s not the important rhetorical point that the claimant likely intends to make in this case. EAs know that insect suffering sounds obviously crazy to the uninitiated, so the likely target audience here are people who already think that animal suffering charities of some sort (e.g. factory farming-related) satisfy the “effective” criterion, which is equivalent to thinking that animal suffering (at some scale) could be more important than human suffering. From there the claim that suffering among one subset of animals swamps all other by orders of magnitude isn’t crazy at all.
I think that Palestinians are basically screwed regardless of what they do, but insofar as their goals include weakening/isolating Israel, they have achieved success beyond their wildest dreams (but at a grievous cost).
I don’t know that this is as true as it is in the popular mindset. A lot of the Weathermen, who were one of the most prolific terrorist organizations in American history, now hold positions of power, including very in-demand university sinecures.
Not to mention that a movie that’s at least ambivalent towards that sort of thing has literally just won the Best Picture.
Also, being a full-throated Hamas apologist doesn’t disqualify people from many positions of influence these days.
I think I buy some of this—some ‘moral progress’ is increasing wealth allowing us to afford more luxuries.
But I think I’m mostly interested in a different sort of progress—the kind where someone’s idea of what ‘the good’ is changes.
But these are largely the same. We are now rich enough to eschew slavery, so we can afford the “luxury” of banning it (and calling it utter evil). It’s plausible that we’ll soon be rich enough that eschewing animal meat will no longer be onerous, et cetera.
There’s a concept that sometimes gets used of ‘technological completion’—that is, you don’t know every logical fact, but you have come across all of the relevant designs.
Relevant to what? As long as our preference/motivation systems are subject to change (both through evolution and eventually through deliberate modification), I don’t see why we’ll ever run out of novel stuff to want. It’s a different story if we’ll get a singleton that decides to implement some sort of lock-in, in which case the talk about completion and end-points makes sense to me, but hopefully that could be avoided.
In particular, one of the reasons I think progress happens is that some things are pinned down by reality.
Indeed. To put it another way, what we call progress is mainly adaptation to changing material circumstances. So, there are uncountably many greatly diverging counterfactual moral endpoints, similarly to how there are uncountably many possible configurations of matter. Of course, some possibilities are more likely than others, in either realm.
Often, beliefs are adopted not because of their truth value but because they allow a person to do something they wanted to do.
I was mainly going of off this, the perceived implication being that there is a widely-applicable truth value in the uncorrupted idea.
If you mean that NVC hasn’t managed to completely take over the world, bring world peace and reshape everyone’s language, that’s of course true.
No, I thought that’s what you thought about its potential (minus the comedic exaggeration), if everybody got the uncorrupted message. If you simply meant that ten million might benefit instead of one million, I have no objections.
Well, I do agree that either an especially benign new religious movement or an especially benign communist dictatorship might be the way forward, but that still leaves more questions than answers.
Here’s a more cynical take: if a seemingly good “social idea” retains this status for a long time without making much progress beyond its most passionate proponents, it’s strong evidence that the idea isn’t good enough even in its “uncorrupted” form to be widely applicable.
It’s similar to how everybody and their grandma know all about cognitive biases these days, and yet they mysteriously refuse to go away even so—they’re there for a reason. Likewise, I’d imagine that there are good reasons for why people communicate “violently” by default, and unilaterally straying from this equilibrium puts one at a disadvantage.
This is not to say that nothing can ever be improved in the social realm, but IMO it’s not the sort of domain where “twenty-dollar bills” are plentiful and low-hanging.
Is it an attainable counterfactual, though? The only positive counterexamples you presented were a centuries-old Ottoman practice, and the aftermath of the worst war ever. These days, though, it doesn’t seem like anybody anywhere in the world does meritocracy better than the US, however faint a praise this might be, so clearly the problem is far from trivial.
What exactly leads you to believe that, under such repression, China could never reach the level of development enjoyed by the United States? Why not consider what might happen if the repression were relaxed?
My impression is that things are as relaxed as they are going to get, and the trend these days seems to be in the direction of increasing repression.
Clearly you have very unusual preferences/opinions, and ordinary relationships are highly unlikely to satisfy you. I’d say that your best bet is to become famous/impressive enough that an exceptional woman sends you a dating application (the Eliezer Yudkowsky/Scott Alexander strategy).