Transitive Tolerance Means Intolerance

I like Scott Alexander's discussion of symmetric vs asymmetric weapons. Symmetric weapons lead to an unceasing battle, which as you said has at least become less directly violent, but whose outcomes are more or less a random walk. But asymmetric weapons pull ever so slightly toward, well, a weakly extrapolated volition of the players on both sides.

Brownian motion plus a small term looks just like Brownian motion until you look a long ways back and notice the unlikeliness of the trend. The arc of the moral universe is long, etc.

(Of course, in this century we very probably don't have the luxury of a long arc...)

The very concept of moral uncertainty is pretty foreign to the vast majority of humanity.  Tolerance and forbearance wax and wane in popularity, but actually acknowledging that you don't know what's best just doesn't happen. 

As an example of the reasoning of moral vanguards, a few days ago I became curious how the Age of Enlightenment (BTW, did those people know how to market themselves or what?) came about. How did the Enlightenment philosophers conclude (and convince others) that values like individualism, freedom, and equality would be good, given what they knew at the time? Well, judge for yourself. From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment:

However, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) is the classical source of modern liberal political theory. In his First Treatise of Government, Locke attacks Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), which epitomizes the sort of political theory the Enlightenment opposes. Filmer defends the right of kings to exercise absolute authority over their subjects on the basis of the claim that they inherit the authority God vested in Adam at creation. Though Locke’s assertion of the natural freedom and equality of human beings in the Second Treatise is starkly and explicitly opposed to Filmer’s view, it is striking that the cosmology underlying Locke’s assertions is closer to Filmer’s than to Spinoza’s. According to Locke, in order to understand the nature and source of legitimate political authority, we have to understand our relations in the state of nature. Drawing upon the natural law tradition, Locke argues that it is evident to our natural reason that we are all absolutely subject to our Lord and Creator, but that, in relation to each other, we exist naturally in a state of equality “wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another” (Second Treatise, §4). We also exist naturally in a condition of freedom, insofar as we may do with ourselves and our possessions as we please, within the constraints of the fundamental law of nature. The law of nature “teaches all mankind … that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (§6). That we are governed in our natural condition by such a substantive moral law, legislated by God and known to us through our natural reason, implies that the state of nature is not Hobbes’ war of all against all. However, since there is lacking any human authority over all to judge of disputes and enforce the law, it is a condition marred by “inconveniencies”, in which possession of natural freedom, equality and possessions is insecure. According to Locke, we rationally quit this natural condition by contracting together to set over ourselves a political authority, charged with promulgating and enforcing a single, clear set of laws, for the sake of guaranteeing our natural rights, liberties and possessions. The civil, political law, founded ultimately upon the consent of the governed, does not cancel the natural law, according to Locke, but merely serves to draw that law closer. “[T]he law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men” (§135). Consequently, when established political power violates that law, the people are justified in overthrowing it. Locke’s argument for the right to revolt against a government that opposes the purposes for which legitimate government is taken by some to justify the political revolution in the context of which he writes (the English revolution) and, almost a hundred years later, by others to justify the American revolution as well.

Often, I think about such changes as about phase transitions on a network.

If we assume that these processes (nucleation of clique of the new phase, changes in energy on edge boundaries,...)  are independent of the content of moral change,  we can expect the emergence of "fluctuations" of new moral phases. Then the question is which of these fluctuations grow to eventually take over the whole network; from an optimistic perspective, this is where relatively small differences between moral phases caused by some phases being "actually better" break the symmetry and lead to gradual moral progress. 

Stated in other words, if you look at the micro-dynamic, when you look at the individual edges and nodes, you see the main terms are social pressure, coercion, etc., but the 3rd order terms representing something like "goodness of the moral system in the abstract " act as a symmetry-breaking term and have large macroscopic consequences.

Turning to longtermism, network-wise, it seems advantageous for the initial bubble of the new phase to spread to central nodes in the network - which seems broadly in line with what EA is doing.  Plausibly,  in this phase, reasoning plays larger role, and coercion smaller - which is what you see. On the other hand, if longtermism becomes sufficiently large / dominant, I would expect it will become more coercive.

If you expect to be judged for your transitive associations, then all that your transitive associations tell me about your character is that you have reason to care about your social status. I learn nothing else about your actual values in this way.

You can choose to draw your bounds of tolerance as broadly as you like!

On a prescriptive level, I'm offering a coherent alternative that's between "tolerate everybody" and "tolerate nobody".

On a descriptive level, I'm pointing out why you encounter consequences when you damn the torpedoes and try to personally tolerate every fringe believer.