Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

But What About the Right?

[mitigatedchaos]

There may be some people that read this blog and think “you’re criticizing the Left for doing these things, but the right-wing and American government do some of them, too.  Does it not backfire for them?  Why do right-wingers get a pass?”

And, in fact, it does backfire for them.  It has been backfiring for decades, and has damaged them in the culture wars.  Yes, they haven’t constantly lost electorally, but they’ve lost the mindshare they used to have, and the faith in the establishment.  It’s a price paid in National Will.  

What does America look like without anti-war counter-culture from the Vietnam War?  What does America look like if people have higher trust in the national institutions, in families, and so on?  There was, apparently, once a time when people talked of men of science, industry, and government working together to build a better world, but sadly, at that very time, that combination did not deserve that level of trust.  

How many of these movements and shifts are reactions to betrayals that were not deserved?

To hold power over the long term, to create something that lasts, it isn’t enough just to seize control.  One must be worthy.

The Right, in many ways, has not been.  And they think that’s about Christian morality, but it isn’t really, not as they conceive it.

[mailadreapta]

All this talk of “becoming worthy” makes you sound like NRx, my bro.

[mitigatedchaos]

If I recall correctly (and I may not), one of the most famous emperors of China used deception and murder to achieve his rule - but under him, the people and the Empire prospered.

Less dramatically, and far more modern, Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party have used lawsuits and other means to suppress their political opposition.  But what have they achieved?  Did they exercise virtue in statecraft?  Did the people under their rule prosper?

(Though even that modern example has had its risks - there is some worry that with LKY no longer at the helm, there may have been mismanagement of government funds at the very top.)

Not only must the people be worthy, but the structure and ideology must be worthy, too.  Systems, interlocking, that must find those who are worthy and elevate them, reward virtue, and minimize vice.

The Neoreactionaries are wrong, though that does not mean their opponents are right.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

What you call "time travel ethics" is more like "acausal ethics", people intuitively grasp the acausal negotiations that underlie our ethical systems.

In this case, I disagree.  This represents a potential recommitment to bad policy on the grounds that you or your ancestors (who are not you) did it before.  I’d say it’s more similar to a sunk cost fallacy than an acausal negotiation.

That’s why I gave an example of a 16 year old girl having a kid.  This is, clearly and obviously, a bad policy.  

And if you’re reading this, you probably either agree abortion should be legal (in which case you disagree with the logic of the argument), xor you probably agree that mass migration isn’t such a great idea (in which case you disagree with the logic of the argument).  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

It’s not Time Travel Ethics

Suppose there is a girl who was born when her mother was sixteen.  And her mother was born when her grandmother was sixteen.  And suppose this burden of caring for a child at the age of 16 has contributed to an intergenerational cycle of poverty that has harmed her family and her education.

A boy of sixteen comes to her and says (roughly translated),

“Hey girl, your mother recklessly had a kid at age 16, and her mom recklessly had a kid at age 16, so you should get with me and recklessly have a kid at age 16!  After all, if they didn’t do the same thing, you wouldn’t exist!”

Is this a good idea?  I mean, after all, if they didn’t do it, she wouldn’t exist.

No, it is not a good idea.  In fact, this argument does not make sense…

unless, implicit in the argument, you have access to a time machine and can change the past.

However, if one did have a time machine, that opens up an entirely different bucket of ethics which this argument completely fails to address.

This applies to abortion regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if your mother aborted you…” implies time travel.

This applies to immigration, regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if immigration laws were different…” implies time travel.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

You don't have to read the whole of unsong to get at the bit relevant to your concept of omnibenevolence, as the author of the book posted it before the book started as a separate post google "slate star codex answer to job"

Yeah, I’ve read that one.  

There are probably other ways to go about it as well.  The point is less about that specific way, and more that “omnibenevolent” can be rescued, but only if it looks like something other than what religion says it looks like.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

What if free will is normally distributed and sociopaths are the righthand tail. Not sure what the lefthand tail would be though?

This is an interesting ask, but I’m not sure what the left-hand tail would be, either.  Either way, I tend to believe that our ability to self-control is somewhat limited and thus consequences should also be limited, usually.  

Sometimes the consequences need to be more severe because of incentives and the structure of society.  It isn’t really something to be celebrated, just something we have to put up with.

At some point it doesn’t matter if Godzilla can’t help himself.  He must be removed from Tokyo.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[forgetfuljust]

Ideas emerge naturally from interactions with the environment.  Creativity involves creating new links between existing concepts.  Plus, people just think about stuff.  This is the source of ideas mutating and new ideas entering.

Ideas, then, will traffic on a combination of their appeal and their linkage with reality, with appeal higher in pressure when the effects are far more distant.  This forms the basis for the selective pressure.

Yes, that was my argument. Ideas form “randomly” (let’s say) then go through a form of natural selection. The ones that produce a stable society come out on top. My claim is that those ideas come out on top because the universe was coded with God’s Law in mind (divine decree), so whatever bullshit can get people to work halfway within it is sufficient for an ancient society to not collapse.

The obvious alternative is that my religion came from the same source as all the other religions, as you say. Dealing with that is much like dealing with any other doubt.

---

It’s worth noting that in @argumate‘s recent chain of posts, one user brought up that the Catholic church had stricter standards for heresy, because the common people were more eager to accuse others of witchcraft and the like.  These impulses and status warring, then, can explain some of the other effects, including those of the Left eating itself.

I think if you observe the actual cases of how more radical Leftists deal with the slightly less radical Left, it’s much more about total revulsion to the beliefs of their “right-wing” opponents than personal status. After all, Ted Cruz is very similar to Bernie Sanders in the broad scale of history: he doesn’t want to kill gays, doesn’t want to directly police sex, doesn’t seem to want coverture or slavery, etc. But he’s an utterly, completely repulsive bigot. If you were to actually look at and measure a radical leftist’s response to Ted Cruz’s visceral awfulness, it’s a lot more like being triggered by a repulsive piece of fiction or the death of Mike Brown than fierce virtue-signaling.

And it’s all relative. They react to Not Left Enough Leftists in similar ways. Dave Rubin is a conservative from their perspective, as is Bill Clinton, as is Thomas Jefferson, etc. There is a considerable amount of ladder-climbing and status-seeking in the victim cult complex created by these core radicals, in their friends who want to remain friends and the people who [one would think] signal out of fear or status hunger. But the actual center of this Tootsie Pop is a lot closer to a misguided, militant Varys than Littlefinger.

[mitigatedchaos]

That implies that people cannot meme themselves into these beliefs.  Social belief isn’t purely surface level.  Sometimes people even succeed at memeing themselves into religion.

And as for the very far end, much like those who go out and murder women for “fornication” out of deep hatred for them, can that not be of biological origin?  The disgust reactions run deep, and because of the prevalence of risk in the past, this was for good reason.  Something on the far end of the bell curve should exist if there is natural variation in these traits, even if the rest of the progressive movement is a wave of “try to be more progressive than the other guys”.

[forgetfuljust]

A deep and unsettling revulsion to patriarchy, private property, the nuclear family, parenthood, submission to authorities, the Rule of Law, killing violent criminals, distrust of statistically dangerous outsiders, sexual norms, the requirement of work to live… mostly things that would have saved their lives, rather than harmed them, in a human’s natural habitat.

But sure. It could be biological, on its face. Could be something else, too. The question is ultimately of premises, and whether there’s a Word of God that reveals certain truths. These are all isolated examples of a model that clearly governs nature, but they are isolated. Whether or not you connect the dots is up to you, and has much more to do with your reaction to the supernatural than logical analysis.

No righteous God would frame the world so you live if you’re good at thinking and die if you’re not. That’s not the test here.

What does “memeing yourself” mean?

[mitigatedchaos]

But sure. It could be biological, on its face.

It sounds absurd - if you assume it really is that detailed.  But it doesn’t need to be that detailed.

Take laziness or boredom.  Surely this isn’t a useful trait, right?  Why should it exist?  Wouldn’t it be more effective if people worked hard all the time?  Fatigue protects muscles, surely, but what advantage is there in true laziness?

Well, energy is scarce, especially in pre-industrial environments.  It isn’t always clear what task will actually yield food.  So at some point, you must give up working on the current task if it does not yield a reward, or you will literally starve to death continuing to perform a task that is useless.

And humans are complex, so it probably does not involve only one gene.

But what happens if all the genes for this shutoff end up in one individual?  Then it can become pathological, as the shutoff point becomes too aggressively biased towards giving up early.

The Golden Mean is actually pretty legit for lots of behaviors.

You can posit that evil hates the light, but the more likely explanation is that dislike of authority is useful on some level as long as it isn’t extreme (because IRL sometimes authority is wrong, or you can become the new authority and get more resources, etc), and that there is more than one path to get there.  A bit of sleeping around can be a successful reproductive strategy, too.  Plus openness to experience is valuable at the group level for finding out what is safe to eat, since all traditions were once new.

So there are these genes out there.  They don’t get bred out because they’re useful as long as you don’t have too many of them - which is also why the core people you describe are rare, since it’s statistically improbable for them to have all these genes in one person.

And these aren’t formalized genetic political beliefs.  They’re… intuitions or emotions or something along those lines.  Deeper.  The ideology, which gives you your specific manifestations, is rooted in or goes on top of that.

What does “memeing yourself” mean?

I may have been too informal.  I meant that sometimes by trying to get yourself to believe something, you can believe that thing, for some people.  I’m terrible at it, personally.  My intuition searches through ideas and ideologies (like yours) to find things that look like active subversion mechanisms, and then rejects them on that basis.  (Part of why I reject SJWism.)  Others, however, seem to have more luck with it sometimes.

I intuitively read your ideology/religion as having mechanisms intended to bypass all mental defenses and overwrite my mind, and thus feel the need to resist it.

(Bad SJ has “Shut up and listen, because you’re a [MEMBER of ETHNIC GROUP]!” which is similar.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

One would think you’d have to be consistent, and regard certain people in your heart as you would a dog, if they don’t meet that standard, even if they should be afforded a level of normal legal rights.

Go far enough down, do enough damage, and they are less.  

And that hurts.  You still remember what they were before.  To be reduced in such a way is a half-death.

You can still see the spark.  The dying embers of the flame, isolated moments when some greater fragment of who they once were can rise to the surface.  You desperately try to keep those fragments, until they, too, fade, and the person you cared for is gone.

Why should that damage be possible?

“Free Will” is a handwave, a copout.  If infinite resources for mind engineering are available, there is no excuse that can retain omnibenevolence while remaining what religions now are.  Something different, something exotic would be required.

On some level, you must know this.  You must know that it doesn’t make sense.

The alternative is that sociopaths, unbound by empathy, have more free will than ordinary people.  That they are more worthy than ordinary people.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

a rough approximation of God’s Law with regard to the family works, never mind the specifics.

Plants and animals are subject to evolution, undergoing mutation, replication, and selective pressures from their environments, including other plants and animals.  This has been observed in at least one species (of lizard, I believe) within human lifespans, nevermind the bacteria.

Why would ideas be any different?

You believe that this similarity emerges because of divine decree, but there is another path.  

Ideas emerge naturally from interactions with the environment.  Creativity involves creating new links between existing concepts.  Plus, people just think about stuff.  This is the source of ideas mutating and new ideas entering.

Ideas, then, will traffic on a combination of their appeal and their linkage with reality, with appeal higher in pressure when the effects are far more distant.  This forms the basis for the selective pressure.

Any religion that spreads to be widely believed, then, is going to contain a number of concepts that are effective.  If it were too ineffective, it would be destroyed, either by destroying those who hold to it or by being abandoned.  If your plan for making a canoe involves drilling a big hole in the bottom, it isn’t going to propagate.

Some of these concepts can be things like, in environments without antibiotics and genetic paternity tests, monogamous marriage and banning adultery.

But of course, that isn’t a guarantee that all these practices will be good.  Multigenerational cousin marriage is a tradition in the middle east, where it is successful at some goals (keeping wealth within the family), and damaging over the longer term to health and wellness.

So, of course, the alternative reason that these patterns, which have some success and similar to ones in your religion, keep coming up, is that your religion itself was evolved to obtain them in much the same way.

It’s worth noting that in @argumate‘s recent chain of posts, one user brought up that the Catholic church had stricter standards for heresy, because the common people were more eager to accuse others of witchcraft and the like.  These impulses and status warring, then, can explain some of the other effects, including those of the Left eating itself.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Since I mentioned it in the previous post, let me present an idea of an alien way that omnibenevolence could exist, which is not addressed in religion.

An omnibenevolent deity could create every possible reality, thus ensuring that all possible persons that could exist do exist at some place and time, in some branch of the multiverse.

Obviously, this allows a great deal of suffering and evil, and also creates an untold number of religions that are false, because someone that believes in a false religion is a different person from someone who believes in a true one.

That might be against our intuitions - we might say that a life which knows only pure torment is not better than never-existence - but it does look more like the kind of alien value that a true omnibenevolence might have.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

Philosophy is not engineering, but neither is computer science, at least not the good bits. But that’s a bit of a sidetrack.

By making new universes I meant defining possible worlds, either on paper, or better yet in executable form. These can be humdrum, such as the world of Minecraft, made up of discrete cubes of material with certain laws of interaction, or much more abstract, like a distributed database system where there is no global clock to give a single unambiguous ordering of events, and it is a struggle to achieve a consistent interpretation of the current state for every observer. Or you can go even higher and try and define a dependent type theory that can unify mathematical proof and executable code, which is what we really need.

The interesting thing about these worlds is that we have direct access to the underlying laws and can address questions of object properties and identity directly. Most of them are not reductionist in the way that the real world is, so you can have a chair that literally exists as an independent object that is not made up of smaller parts, and lots of traditional reasoning about object identity then applies.

If we look at a reductionist universe like Conway’s Life, then I think there is not much to say about objects. The only fundamental entities in this universe are grid cells, and the absolute time step that updates them. Influences can propagate through the grid, and particular patterns of cells might be labelled as “objects” while analysing their behaviour, eg. gliders. But this is for notational convenience, we can’t actually learn anything at the object level that we couldn’t learn by studying the underlying cells.

You can create Turing machines in Life, and then you can analyse them as if they were abstract computing devices, ignoring the grid cells. But if a stray glider crashes into the machine, it will break, and the analysis will fail, just as if a chair in the real world caught fire: at some point your mental model would shift from chair, to burning chair, to smouldering remains of what once was a chair, or just pile of unidentified ash.

So there is clearly not much point for philosophers to debate the fundamental nature of Conway’s Life (right? I am assuming this).

The real world is still less well-defined, and there is behaviour we have not yet explained, and laws we have not fully worked out. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and if someone thinks that a chair has existence independently of the particles that make it up, well I don’t really know what to say to them. I mean, the question of what objects are was answered 2500 years ago by Democritus: arrangements of atoms in the void. Even I know that :)

Since there are no intrinsic properties of objects that can’t be dissolved into statements about their component parts, the only reason to have a theory of objects at all is for convenience in modelling and communication. But both of those have specific requirements, there is no single model of objects that will be ideal for every use case. You are going to need a very different model of chairs depending on whether you are talking to a furniture designer, a cafe owner, a Roomba, or a hunter gatherer.

[mitigatedchaos]

I was speaking in a very compressed way about causal bundling just now, but I wasn’t joking.

A chair has qualities that its subcomponent parts do not, in terms of how it deflects the development of the world towards different directions/timelines vs a non-chair.

In this case, a chair is not an absolute definition, but rather a causal bundle - a cluster within the matter configuration space which has a high probability of producing certain related outcomes.  

You can, then, learn something at the object level that you couldn’t by studying the atoms of the chair.

[argumate]

Yes, because it’s causally entangled with arrangements of atoms in the brains of a certain species of ape.

[mitigatedchaos]

Most possible configurations of matter within the same bounding box are not chairs. And at the atomic level, if you take the same atoms, there are almost infinite permutations within the same macro-scale shape of any given chair that have nearly-indentical outcomes in interacting with the environment. Where we put the boundary around the fuzzy cluster is our choice and to some degree arbitrary, but the cluster itself is legitimate macro-scale information.

[mitigatedchaos]

only because of the entanglement with us

I disagree.  The effect on worldlines is also present for animals and plants, particularly less WRT chairs, and moreso with things like boats or rafts, with the propagation of animals across oceans.

Because of the way those parts work together, an animal is functionally more than the sum of its parts: a wave which the parts ride on.

You can get all the behavior of the animal if you simulate the whole thing at the subatomic level, but that’s because you’re including the wave when you do so.  90% of an animal is quite different from 100% of an animal.

[argumate]

Is gut bacteria part of the animal in which it resides? How about a bone replaced with titanium?

[mitigatedchaos]

Yes, kind of.

Your earlier observation “definition for what purpose?” is relevant here, sort of.

You’re pushing out farther from the center of the cluster, and there is more than one cluster of causative properties or w/e that exist simultaneously.  Having a titanium bone is closer in terms of causal influence than missing the leg, but it’s farther out than a natural bone from the primary human cluster.  

Breaking these down into linguistic representations for humans, then, gets into your “definition for what?” situation, since not only are there multiple functional/causal groupings, but they may not even be hierarchical, and then you have to draw boundary lines and tie symbols to things.

Not sure if I’ve conveyed the above adequately.  Quite tired.