I like the norms of equality of opportunity and equality before the law.
Me too, but the problem is that those terms have become political signifiers in addition to their true meaning, with both sides claiming to pursue them while pushing their own agenda.
If I said that affirmative action isn't supposed to be opposed to any of that, it's supposed to counteract known disequities of opportunity in order to end at true meritocracy, like adjusting to the left because you know the sites on your gun are off a bit to the right, would you believe me?
If someone else said that all of our laws are already equal and all our bigotry is already ended, so all you have to do to get true meritocracy is get out of the way and let the market work, the invisible hand will take care of it all, would you believe them?
Unfortunately, it's all part of the culture war now, and which one of us someone believes typically has more to do with which side they're on than a careful consideration of all the mountains of evidence.
Which gets back to the basic problem of epistemic learned helplessness, and trusting your own experts and ingroup testimonials.
guesswho
8mo ago
I'd only add that people or entities with "free will" have responsibility and ownership of the things they choose through their free will as well. If it is in your nature to go murder people, then I think we should treat you like a murderer, even if the universe conspired to create a person with a murderous nature.
I\m not 100% sure how you ground out things like 'responsibility' and 'ownership' in a metaphysical sense here. But on the object-level of 'what should we actually do in the real world,' it's definitely in my nature to feel that way and do those things, and to want to live in a society where other people do that too. So I agree.
I'm a bit of a lifelong skeptic about these things. I lean very heavily towards "its all nothing". But not so heavily that I think its a complete waste of time for people to look into this stuff and try and figure it out.
Agreed. My only caveat, which I think you would agree with (?) but is worth pointing out in the context of OP's post, is that I'm allergic to people using the sparse/inconclusive evidence of this stuff as a bludgeon in some larger political/cultural/social argument. I definitely want at least a few scientifically-minded folks looking for new evidence in case we suddenly need to go take these things seriously, I just don't want that level of respect paid to the ideas to make people think they can be used in predicates for other arguments about how the world actually is.
guesswho
8mo ago
Unrelated to the central topic, but:
Yes, I catch lot of flak on this forum for maintaining that Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, but I feel that the discourse surrounding HBD is an apt illustration of the problem. Once you've gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to defend your preferred narrative or achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you?
Scott just recently wrote a post about this.
While I recognize that you can construct hypothetical examples where a utilitarian is forced to agree to something unpleasant, or imagine a lazy utilitarian who makes up half-baked arguments for why whatever they want to do is utilitarian optimal and that's why they get to violate strong heuristics/taboos/norms, I think those are thought experiments a lot more than they are descriptions of reality.
In reality, followers of other moral systems (or of no coherently named moral system) seem to me to make up lazy rationalizations for why to do whatever they want to do a lot more often than utilitarians, and are a lot easier to force into distasteful hypotheticals to boot.
The fact that actions have long-term consequences like 'all trust and honor across society breaks down' is not separate from utilitarianism, it's a part of the calculation, and that's why most utilitarians I talk to think about that stuff a lot more than most other people I know, and end up sticking to broad heuristics in most real-world cases.
We have noticed the skulls, as it were, and I think other moral systems which don't require you to think carefully and make explicit calculations and use your own best judgement under uncertainty, fail to teach their adherents the same carefulness. In practice, I think utilitarians end up doing better on average - obviously not perfect, but better than average.
guesswho
8mo ago
Firefox gives me an 'unsafe connection, file not downloaded' type error when I click the link to the paper.
guesswho
8mo ago
I just have some sense that material reality is missing something about health, and my best way to point at this phenomenon is to look at the placebo effect.
I definitely think that our human scientific models are missing a lot of important stuff on this topic, and that a lot of it is so complex and contingent and hard to measure that it will stay beyond our ability to directly model for a very long time, and approaches that draw on intuition and metaphor may do a better job modelling them for now.
But after I admit that, I don't feel like there's any need for a nonmaterial/supernatural factor in addition to that.
Free will exists, and it's not up for debate with me.
I think the interesting debate is less about whether free will exists, and more about what free will is.
There's an intuition that free will is at odds with determinism. But a system that is non-deterministic is just a system that is partially random.
Does it really feel right to say 'the more randomly you act, the more free will you have'? That feels deeply unsatisfying to me, and make me think that a definition of free-will that is defined in opposition to determinism is incoherent.
Compatibilism just says 'you have free will when you are able to act in accordance to your nature and your desires, and you lack free will when outside forces and contingent factors restrain your actions to be other than what you would choose.'
It doesn't matter whether you pursue your goals and act in accordance to your nature in a deterministic fashion or in a stochastic fashion.
As long as your own nature is guiding your actions, you have free will.
As long as your actions are constrained and determined by outside forces making you do things you don't like and wouldn't choose in the absence of those forces, your free will is violated.
That matches my intuitions about what it feels like to exercise my free will vs. have it violated. And it's a definition by which free will definitely exists, but can be abrogated and must be actively defended. Which I like.
guesswho
8mo ago
I can't conceive of a space between determinism and randomness where free will could exist.
Compatibilism, which OP dismisses out of hand without really describing it, is the generally-accepted answer to this question.
It basically does the magic trick of saying 'we all agree that we have some intuitive notion of free will which is very very important, and a cultural narrative says it is at odds with determinism, but that just means randomness which is clearly wrong. We suggest a new definition for the term 'free will' which is compatible with determinism, and if that new definition resonates with your intuitions then you should just adopt it as what you mean when you talk about free will from now on'.
The definition is, basically, how much the actions and outcomes of an agent in a deterministic system are caused by its own nature and preferences, versus caused by external constraints and contingent factors of the system.
Basically, if you have the freedom inside a system to act mostly how you want and have steering power over your own future, you have free will. It doesn't matter that how you act and what you steer towards is deterministic; it is still your own nature which causally determines your own actions and outcomes, rather than some other outside force.
And, if you are restrained and restricted and forced into actions against your nature and futures that you would not choose, then you have very little free will. This is a system in which your own nature and preferences has very little causal impact on how the system evolves over time, you have very little input or control, and the argument is that that's what the felt experience of having your free will violated actually corresponds to.
I think it's a pretty good idea.
I think it's just true that the idea that free will is opposed to determinism is an accident of history, where humans have an innate sense of being in-control or not-in-control of themselves and their destiny, and some philosophers and religious scholars hijacked that innate sense and built a narrative about God's Plan vs human nature and the origin of sin/pain vs materialism and scientific realism vs etc etc.
But that innate sense didn't have to be channeled into that specific debate. If you put kids on a dessert island and let them grow up outside culture and queried them about that innate sense as an adult, they wouldn't say 'obviously this is about whether the universe is deterministic or not'.
So, given that we've demonstrated that the narrative about determinism it got attached to ends up being pretty incoherent and has no answer which satisfyingly aligns with our intuitions, I think it totally makes sense to just say 'so lets throw out the idea that our sense of 'free will' has anything to do with that question, and find a better definition that matches out intuitions better.'
And I think Compatibilism offers a good version of that.
guesswho
8mo ago
A scientific framework can easily accept it. It just may not update on it as far as you do.
guesswho
8mo ago
I think you're dangerously confused between the social and cultural edifice of science and the scientific industry, and 'science' as an abstract method for obtaining knowledge about the world.
If the cultural edifice of science is harmful to society in dangerous ways that must be stopped, that fact is true one hundred percent independently of whether or not ESP is real or the world is materialist or anything else. The damage caused by the cultural edifice has nothing to do with whether the scientific method has been or is capable of producing true and complete knowledge about the world; those are separate questions.
And vice versa, if the scientific method were proven to be incapable of arriving at true knowledge, that would say nothing about whether or not the edifice of the science industry and its cultural hangers-on were doing social damage to the foundation of our civilization. The two questions have nothing to do with each other.
The fact that you seem to be using evidence from one of these to bolster points about the other indicates to me a confusion about how these are separate entities.
If you want a revival of religion because it would be good for society, then it doesn't matter whether it's true, it doesn't matter whether science is wrong and ESP is real.
If you want a revival of religion because religion is true, then it doesn't matter whether scientists are ruining the country.
The closest you could say is 'I want a revival of religion because is is both true and good for society,' and that you are presenting arguments for it from both of those angles, I guess.
But it doesn't feel like you're presenting evidence for both of those points independently. It feels like you're just making an attack on 'science' from both angles, as if evidence against 'science' on each of those axes is cumulative towards proving the same hypothesis.
But it's not; there are two hypotheses there, the evidence towards each is independent of the other.
guesswho
8mo ago
I think this whole post is confused in very common ways about what it means for something to be material vs scientific vs transcendental.
ESP being real wouldn't disprove science.
It would mean that individual scientists failed to notice something for a long time, possibly it would more intensely highlight the type of problematic resistance to paradigm shifts that we already know the entrenched scientific establishment can be prone to.
But it wouldn't break the notion of cause and effect. It wouldn't break the notion of learning through induction. It wouldn't break Bayesian updating on evidence.
Basically, it might embarrass specific individual scientists who fell down on the job, but it wouldn't break the Scientific Method. It wouldn't invalidate known and proven-reliable relationships between different types of sensory experiences (like the experience of letting go of a rock and the experience of seeing it fall). It wouldn't break the process by which we acquire knowledge, or any of the knowledge which we acquired by using it correctly.
ESP would just be one more natural phenomenon for us to study and learn about. If it had weird properties that made it resistant to being studied, that's fine; the insides of black holes are also difficult to study, and the Uncertainty Principle is a real bitch. We might have a hard time learning about ESP, but that doesn't make it a non-scientific process.
Nor would disproving materialism break science. Maybe there exist both physical and mental objects, maybe all objects are mental constructs and our experience of a physical world is just a hacked-together perceptual interface to let us manipulate those purely-mental objects efficiently. Lots of scientists have contemplated natural systems like that and how to investigate and model them with science.
So long as the non-materialist 'true' universe still works by cause and effect, so long as it is possible to gather sensory inputs from it that correlate in any way with 'true' features of it, you can still do science at it. And if it doesn't, then you have to explain why the hell our sensorium appears to present such a world so reliably, which gets you all the way back to the problem of Solipsism and all the arguments against it.
Neither ESP nor non-materialism would disprove or break science.
Science can only be broken by proving that its process for noticing statistical correlations between sensory experiences is in some way incorrect, or unreliable in some specific domain, or etc.
And that takes a lot more than discovering some weird new thing we didn't think existed... that happens all the time.
Furthermore, neither ESP nor non-materialism would prove the existence of supernatural entities such as Gods, nor would it prove any one specific religion or their teachings to be correct. Discovering that you were wrong to deny the existence of one thing does not prove the existence of all other thing you ever denied; reversed stupidity is not smartness.
And even proving the existence of a specific religion's specific God or Gods would not prove that modern-day science-influenced cultural and political movements are wrong. Even if it were proved that a God exists and it dislikes what we're doing, you'd still have to argue why we should replace our utility function with its, whether we should give into its threats about hell or it's emotional blackmail about being our creator, etc.
I'm not saying your position is as unsophisticated as 'Seems like there's some evidence for ESP being real, that probably means that scientists are wrong about vaccines and we shouldn't take them, and also we all need to start obeying God's will as defined by the convocation of Canterbury in 1870 right now before it's too late.'
But it does rhyme with that argument. I think it's making the same types of incorrect leaps in logic.
guesswho
8mo ago
This feels to me like a pretty disingenuous interpretation by the court, though.
Like, the question wasn't 'Can a state choose to take someone off the ballot just because they feel like it?' That wasn't what the states said they were doing, that wasn't the legal argument being presented.
The legal argument being presented was 'the federal government has passed a law that insurrectionists may not be elected, we are following that federal law.'
That's not the states having power over the federal government, it's the states following rules set by the federal government, precisely in line with the original intent. Like, the states not electing insurrectionists is exactly what they laws says the states have to do, and the states claim they are just following that law.
Whether or not some states want to follow that law for political reasons, and are being extra-scrupulous about following the law in cases where it benefits them, seem wholly irrelevant to whether they are following the law properly or not.
It seems like any attempt to rule on the law has to answer whether or not the state is following the law as written.
To instead say 'you following a law because you want to follow it is sort of like you breaking the law to get your own way, which we don't like, so we rule against that without answering the question of what the law says' seems really blatantly politically motivated rather than legally correct.
guesswho
8mo ago
if you remove merit, quality suffers.
If you remove merit, yes.
If you remove 'merit', not necessarily.
We all know Goodhart's Law, right?
There may be some abstract sense in which, for the next marginal position you want to hire for, you could in principle rank every person in the world on how much they would increase your long-term profitability, control that for how much pay they would demand, and get a ranked-order listing of candidates by merit.
But why in the world would you think that whatever combination of resumes/test scores/etc you get from your limited candidate pool, combined with whatever HR person has to make the decision, would return anything close to the same result?
Like, the first problem is that we don't even really know what we actually need for any marginal position, the second problem is that we only have very indirect proxy measures of the things we think we need, and the third problem is that everyone knows what those measures are, and we are mostly selecting on ability to produce those measures, not the things they are proxies for.
(and the zeroth problem is that the HR person is probably underpaid and overworked and lazy and doesn't care that much and isn't that competent and doesn't know that much about the position, to begin with)
If the options were 1. Have a true, perfect meritocracy vs 2. Have affirmative action, obviously you pick 1.
But the option is 'Everything is a shitshow, our metrics are fucked, most of what happens is arbitrary and depends on starting conditions.'
Given which, we may as well throw in additional arbitrary bullshit that 1. We expect to work counter to some of the other anti-meritocratic arbitrary bullshit already in the system, maybe readjusting us slightly more on target, and 2. Accomplishes other important social projects we care about.
My belief is that the world is shaped, on the whole, by the truly excellent. And the only question is whether you create a system that rewards them, whoever they may be, or one that stands in their way.
Are you referring to Trump or to Biden here? I guess both, since they were both leader of the free world for a while.
Or maybe Sam Bankman-Fried? He really rose to the top and gained incredible wealth and influence incredibly quickly, he must be one of the truly excellent elites that we should reward and let guide our future.
And etc. This is a nice sentiment, but it's not how the world works by default, and it's not how the world works today. Things are way more contingent and contextual and stochastic than that, and the traits that lead to someone seizing power and influence aren't identical with the traits that make them excellent at wielding it for the public good.
You don't get this outcome by default, just by taking a hands-off approach. You have to monitor and regulate the system to make it give you an outcome like that.
guesswho
8mo ago
This is an attribution fallacy: the bad luck of the blacks enslaved does not entail that they are victims at the hands of whites, because the blacks themselves came from a culture which believed slavery was permissible and did not have a moral argument against it. The feeling of pity for bad luck is misattributed as a harm against a group by another group.
Your argument seems to imply that it if you abduct a child from a society in which some number of forced child brothels exist, and then keep that child in your basement and rape them every day, you haven't committed any sin because that was something that could have happened to them in their society anyway. True or false?
guesswho
8mo ago
Unfunded liabilities have an open time window, ie those obligations are what we expect to pay out over the next 50, 75, 100, 200 years...
Most of the people who will pay the taxes for that money haven't been born yet.
So the operation of dividing that number by the total number of current citizens and saying we each have to pay our $X share, is just transparently wrong and misleading.
Nowhere from reputable sources can I find an estimate of unfunded liabilities even close to half that number (let me know if you have one), and it seems like the alarmism is based on completely failing to describe what that number actually means.
That money is everything any government agency expects to spend on anything at all, ever.... like, in the next 50 years, or 75 years, or two hundred years. Any time someone has said 'the program will last for X years and we estimate it will pay something like $Y per year', X*Y gets added to that number, even if X=200.
So saying that 'each current citizen owes $X to pay for unfunded mandates' when most of the people who will pay for them have not been born yet, is just so transparently wrong that it flatly demonstrates someone who either doesn't understand what they are writing about, or doesn't care about misleading their audience.
And if you want to talk about the actual US debt, a plurality of the huge numbers that ussually get cited is intragovernmental debt that one department will be paying another such that the government doesn't actually lose that money when paying it, followed by debt held by US investors such that the money stays in the US when it is paid so it's not a net loss to the economy, followed by foreign investors who mostly want to use the bonds and notes the debt is held in as critical financial tools that they could not perform their own jobs if they closed out.
I'm not literate enough in this area to say that our current level of debt is good or correct or w/e. But I'm literate enough to know when alarmists are being hugely incorrect or misleading at a fundamental level, and that happens consistently enough in the alarmist arguments I encounter that I am no longer alarmed about this topic.
guesswho
8mo ago
The General Election vote is still 9 months away, I'll be surprised if the Israel/Palestine conflict is in the same place then that it is today. Hard to predict what it will be but I wouldn't assume it affects that election the same way it affects primaries.
Furthermore the way people vote on a foregone-conclusion primary is generally not what they will do in a heated election. Unless Trump has some brilliant plan for peace that he somehow convinces progressive democrats he will implement and solve everything, I don't think these people will want Trump any more than they want Biden on this issue.
This like many other things is a relevant indicator of low enthusiasm for Biden among Democratic voters, which is certainly relevant to the general election. But I wouldn't try to draw any more direct analogies than that.
guesswho
8mo ago
Conservatives are not libertarian free-speech absolutists, even if they also hate SJWs.
Conservatives by-and-large want crackdowns on all kinds of speech, from porn to trans activism to marxism to critical race theory to etc.
The fact that the internet already skews against them only reinforces the benefit. Under the current legal regime, they can already be shut up by corporate platform owners and activist moderators who disagree with them or find them bad for business. Meanwhile, their opponents get positive treatment.
They can't win the war for the internet by the will of the market. Turning the law onto it is their best hope to suppress the speech an punish the enemies they want to target.
guesswho
8mo ago
As far as I can tell from googling, it's something like 38% of gay/lesbian adults married or cohabiting with a long-term partner, vs about 62% for straight adults (with the caveat that the LGBT community skews young right now, so those rates might be higher if you looked at adults 30+, but I can't find that data).
That's definitely a gap, but 38% of people in traditional pair-bonded relationships (vs a baserate of 62%, so like 28/62=61% conversion rate) is nothing to sneeze at from a conservative family values viewpoint.
If you are talking about your personal experiences, I'd guess that this has a lot to do with selection effects; married people tend to disappear from a lot of communities, especially those based around dating and hookups, and of course this is hugely correlated with age.
guesswho
8mo ago
I expect that over time societies that are making progress will repeal laws against victimless things, with gay marriage and polyamorous marriage both being examples, alongside marijuana, blasphemy, etc.
I don't especially see an argument that one thing along that track leads to another thing long that track, just because they happen in order.
guesswho
8mo ago
A couple of weirdos convincing themselves of self-serving lies does not reverse all cultural norms and laws.
guesswho
8mo ago
That's not fantasy vs real, that's entirely different neural mechanisms giving entirely different experiences.
It's also about victimless crimes, where my whole point here is that people will allow victimless crimes while drawing the line at things with victims.
guesswho
8mo ago
I was saying there's no a priori reason they would want kids less, not no a priori reason we would expect them to have less kids.
I guess my point can be restated as 'I would expect all types of couples to want the same number of kids on average, and I would expect the number of kids a couple have to converge towards the number they want over time as technology and society improves and barriers to having kids/accidental ways of getting kids are removed/mitigated.'
Also this is 'converging in the infinite limit', not making a confident claim about how fast they will converge because yeah, this is partially an argument based on extrapolating future technology and social change, which is hard/impossible.
guesswho
8mo ago
I mean the example I am responding to here is OP saying that that pride has become too family friendly and people are complaining about that. You can reject that premise if you disagree, but then OP loses it as an example in their own argument, which supports my original position.
This is not fun to talk about.
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