Avoiding Moral Fads?

You understand that one of the most important aspects of things like that is that it's dangerous to publicly question them, right?

Think of 10 commonly accepted truths that you'd be afraid to question in public, preferably ones that you would feel uncomfortable even questioning in your own mind. Things where if you did question them, you'd expect to hear either a two-sentence "argument for" treated as obviously overcoming all possible objections, or a vehement, impassioned refusal to even talk about it because "the question is Settled". Extra points if it's been Settled by Science(TM).

Probably at least one or two of them will be false, or only sometimes or partly true, or have far less ironclad support than you initially feel they do. Maybe more than that. Of course, some of them will also be 100 percent true, but you'll have generated some candidates.

Take, for example, your own example of eugenics. Forced sterilization is discredited. Mass extermination is discredited. But those are means, not ends. They are not what the word "eugenics" meant to the people advocating for it. "Eugenics" just means any change in reproductive actions made based on the obvious truth that some human heritable characteristics are more desirable than others.

If you know that 25 percent of your offspring will definitely die after short lives of horrible pain, and you therefore personally choose not to have any children, then you are absolutely practicing eugenics. The fact that that sort of choice is, in fact, sometimes looked askance at, and treated as somehow equivalent to rounding other people up and putting them into camps, or even seen as a dangerous step on the path to rounding people up and putting them in camps, is a harmful orthodoxy of the kind you are looking for. And it does affect the medical advice that people get.

If you want a guess as to something that's already started to change, and that may in the future be anathema, one real possibility would be the idea that it's OK to eat meat.

I think if a person cannot point to several opinions they currently have that are regarded as abhorrent or stupid by most people, then it is unlikely that they would actually have held "correct"* opinions on the matters mentioned above, and other similar matters. 

*i.e. opinions regarded as correct in <current year>.

Intelligence is no antitode. The philosopher Heidegger was closely allied with the Nazis. The most famous economist J M Keynes was Director of the British Eugenics Society (1937-1944).

I do hold several such opinions but there is no way I am going to state them in public. One thing that has not changed is the intolerance for divergent opinions. If anything it has become worse.

I am old enough to have seen many changes such that opinions regarded as totally abhorrent have now become the orthodoxy. And the old opinion is now regarded as abhorrent. I see the new generation quietly adopt the new opinion and easily condemn those who grew up in earlier times.

A few years back a young less-wronger informed me how grateful he was to have grown up in a time and place where he had a peer group with correct opinions on all the important issues. My thought was that it was mostly likely that the reason he thought those opinions were correct was because they were held by his peer group. Not especially because they are correct.

We actually had a session on this at the local LW where we tried to imagine current beliefs that a future generation would regard as terrible. 

One scenario someone came up with was that society became much more conservative (plausability from the idea that coservatives and the like tend to have more children) and many of the current 'woke' beliefs would be seen as very regrettable and harmful. 

Another was a kind of Idiocracy scenario where the policies of our time were regarded as a catastrophe because they were dysgenic (e.g subsidies for low-IQ single mothers etc). I do stress these were scenarios we came up with, not beliefs we hold.

I don't think rationalists or Effective Altruists would have been taken in much by the Nazis, but I worry that when it comes to whether we would have supported eugenics, many of us might have failed the test -- after all, this was very much scientific and medical orthodoxy at the time.

Why? Before the national socialists were successful in elections they had strong support in universities. At the time in Germany, if you were in the market for an idealistic ideology that you want to self-identify with, national socialism and communism were the strongest options. 

I do think that plenty of EA's join EA to be able to self-identify in a way that convinces them they and other EA's are morally superior compared to other people.

How are we to know that we aren't making similar errors today?

Based only on priors, the probability we aren't is very low indeed. A better question is, given an identified issue, how can change happen? One main problem is that contra-orthodox information on moral issues tends not to travel easily.  

One exercise you can try is imagining a world where your currently popular belief is as unpopular as eugenics is now. Almost no one thinks your belief is plausible; most people are dumbfounded or angered by your sincere assertions, and ascribe bad motives to you. Some get mad just because you make an argument that might indirectly support that view. Take 5 minutes to think about what it would be like to experience such a world. If you find yourself less attached to the belief, you might be unduly influenced by its current popularity.
(If you're inclined to contrarianism, imagine the opposite.)

Holden Karnofsky writes about this here
https://www.cold-takes.com/future-proof-ethics/

Similarly, there was an extended period in the 1980s and 1990s where many scientists and media figures believed that techniques known as "recovered memory therapy" were helping people recover suppressed memories of abuse they had actually suffered as children -- now the general view is that this therapy was creating false memories, not bringing hidden true ones to the surface.

I think the general view is that some of the memories are false. 

My read is that the rationalist/EA communities wouldn’t contest whether eugenics was a good idea in principle, but would notice the glaring moral issues with the ways that it was actually pursued.

Interesting post. What are in your opinion some of those ideas held by a significant fraction of the community that could be shown in the future to be akin to eugenics?

Today

Today's analog to eugenics, lobotomy and "recovered memories" seems extremely obvious to me: transgenderism, especially in its manifestations as puberty blockers and "reassignment" surgery applied to prepubescent children who are not true morphogenetic intersexes.

We are living through an atrocity justified by a weirdly Gnostic view of human identity, and I expect the eventual reckoning to be terrible.