My New Philosophy Website
fallibleideas.com
fallibleideas.com
engages alternate reality machine
Clearly our Roman traditions must be doing something right. After all, they have allowed us to build a rich and prosperous empire. It is good to follow these traditions of slavery, genocide, and chauvinism when we can, for they contain valuable knowledge.
turns off alternate reality machine
I know my example is contrived and somewhat silly, but somehow we got from ancient Rome to the modern world. This wasn't just due to change in technology or median income, it was from change in traditions and morality. I think it's incredibly egocentric to assume that we, today, have stumbled on the "best" set of traditions.
Which brings me to my real question: Why did you pick those traditions? If you were from a different culture, you would have picked different traditions. If you have some underlying reason for picking those traditions, why not make that the tradition to follow?
I think you've misunderstood a bit because I am not saying our current traditions are the best possible traditions. (That wouldn't even make much sense because they contradict each other frequently.) I am in favor of changing traditions in a gradualist, piecemeal fashion because I think that's the most effective way to make progress.
You might compare it to updating big, messy legacy code systems. You want to do one thing at a time and then run the code or the tests to make sure you didn't break anything and the change works as intended. If you add a bunch of stuff at once, and then there's a problem, it's harder to figure out which change was behind it.
For example, it would probably be helpful to study how cultures and traditions changed in the past. At some point, some guy changed his mind from pro-slavery to anti-slavery without initially wanting to become anti-slavery. How did this happen? If we could identify the sort of thought process that leads to these novel conclusions, we could apply it to our own traditions and figure out beneficial changes.
For slavery, I think he first noticed some kind of problem. Maybe he was a slave owner and didn't like disobedient, unproductive, or dishonest slaves. He may have at first thought this was just a problem with how he treated his own slaves that his neighbors had already fixed.
So he goes and asks his neighbors about it. He's not trying to rock the boat, just make a bit more money. He finds out his neighbors have the same problem. So that pushes him in the direction of seeing it as a problem with slavery in general. But he still expects there will be a solution that keeps slavery more or less in tact.
So then he looks for a solution. He tries different ways of treating his slaves and tries to figure out which result in more cotton production. As he learns about what works, it gradually leads him away from slavery.
This example shows how someone could end up becoming anti-slavery by accident, just by trying to solve immediate, practical problems.
There were also other ways to become opposed to slavery. For example, one could notice that slavery is an exception to widespread traditions that existed at the time. And one could wonder: what is the reason for making this exception? People did wonder that, and they had answers like that black people are less than human. But one could notice problems with those answers. They aren't very intellectually satisfying arguments and they had logical flaws. Or one might talk to a black man for an hour and notice he seems like a normal human.
(Price gouging during natural disasters is a good thing, because it encourages the accumulation of excess gougable goods. If a hurricane means you can rent your $500 chainsaw out for $10,000, it also means that it makes economic sense to own a chainsaw you'll rarely--or never--use. The disaster reallocates capital from the people who accumulated cash to the people who accumulated physical goods that help them survive disasters. The efficient market triumphs.)
That's actually the exact opposite of philosophy.
I started a blog to deal with some applications (it only has one essay so far (on consciousness) though): http://wsessays.blogspot.com/
If I was a survivalist, I'd stockpile canned food and some can openers.
By the way, do you have any data for your argument i.e. any incident after which ammo was the primary means of exchange? After the last war in Germany, cigarettes were pretty big. What do people in Haiti use? (Or is this not large-scale enough?) What did people use after the Tsunami in south-east Asia?
That attitude is most commonly applied to Republicans. Just kidding. It's most commonly applied to children." End Quote
Awesome!
http://lesswrong.com (click on the about page, and then start with the post sequences linked next to "about", not with the most recent posts)
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory_(sequence)
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysteri...
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_M...
The meta-ethics sequence is probably the closest thing to what I read on fallibleideas.com: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence
If you're easily distracted on a computer and you want this sort of stuff in book form, I recommend Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics by Gary Drescher.
If you look into eastern philosophies, you'll find an interesting concept: that there is in fact no objective truth that can be expressed.
This is subtly different from a relativistic argument, though. The idea is, we can only express thoughts, ideas, etc, in terms of words and concepts that are products of our minds. And those products of our minds are intrinsically personal. Even with mundane things like tables or hoovers we might disagree on the meaning of words. Society teaches us to have more or less the same meanings so we can communicate, but those are intrinsically relative.
So then, there may well be an underlying, intrinsically "absolutely true" reality (in fact, there almost certainly is), but any attempt to express it results in a statement of relative truth.
An idea in my mind is that 2+2=4. What's personal about that?
From http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr/how_to_convince_me_that_2_2_3/
I should note that Eliezer does not argue for moral relativism. Although there are no moral laws written into the fabric of the universe, humans all have very similar brains. With the exception of some outliers (sociopaths) most of our moral intuitions are very similar. There's also the caveat that culture, religion, and philosophy (among other things) can work as an "off switch" for these intuitions.
Trivially self-contradictory. Of course, you can word it like, "I don't know of any such objective truth", but then it's not a very compelling idea.
Agree denotationally but object connotatively. There are degrees of relativeness. Just because you can't be 100% sure about something doesn't mean you can't be 99.99999(insert more nines here)% sure. Of course there's some astronomically tiny chance that I'm a Boltzmann brain, but it's so small that I simply ignore it. Likewise, it's possible that my internal representations of some words or statements are quite different from everyone else's. But people don't look at me funny very often, so I guess I do a good enough job of conveying what I mean.
It's easy for someone to misinterpret your statement as endorsing the stereotypical hippie "dude, everything is like, relative, man" relativism when it's really very different.
I really hate to seem like a shill for the Less Wrong/Overcoming Bias crowd, but much of the discussion here has been covered there. For example, on truth: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth
Or at least, not the most readable. Pressing ctrl+- from that is much better.
On a side note, I feel the front page lacks structure. What are the links? Do they follow on from each other? Or can I just read each "block". Why are they separated into blocks?
About the structure, they are vaguely intended to be read in order, and they are grouped into related topics, but it's not especially important which is why I didn't emphasize it more.
It also looks quite good in my browser, for what it's worth. I don't mean to argue for argument's sake, but I wouldn't change it.
Incidentally, the small font size defaults caused me to buy the CSS upgrade at Wordpress for The Story's Story at http://jseliger.com . You tell me if it looks better than most other Wordpress blogs you've seen based the size of its font.
The 'John' character is especially frustrating, because he must know that he's operating from an unfair definition of "happiness" (Do whatever you want whenever you want it).
And the worst part is that instead of an enlightening payoff at the end, it's a 21st-century punchline.
I'm not trying to be mean - I was just hoping for an interesting read. I would suggest having an actual conversation with someone about education, children, and happiness - and then posting that with some edits for readability. And if that's what you did for this piece, then I would suggest refining your own thoughts more clearly before the next conversation and then choosing another dialogue parter.