Posts
Comments
While your insistence that I use colloquial rather than technical terms is cute, it’s also despicably ignorant and you’re not making strong arguments against the wider view of history I’m presenting.
It's a pretty basic principle of debate that you have to dispute things that people actually said. When "we" say that modern people are better than past people, that doesn't count the 1800s as modern, never mind the 1600s. If you don't want to call that "modern people", you can call it something else, but then your dispute is about the something else. The claim about your kind of modern is not one that people have been making; addressing it as though it is is addressing a straw man.
When I said that medieval Christians held a taboo against slavery and did not practice it, and explain the process by which secularization and early proto-sciences justified the creation of history’s most vicious form of slavery, medieval slavery in the Islamic world is not a counterexample in some kind of logical trap you’ve sprung.
You're equivocating between "religious" people and Christians specifically.
Rather, there are many mistaken and misunderstood aspects about the time and especially the role religion played
We may associate religion with the past in some vague way, an irrational set of beliefs that have been superseded by science.
Modern people are the ones who made religion a tool of harm,
If you're going to say things about "religion", Islam is relevant.
(You also brought up Jefferson claiming his religious misgivings were against slavery. Thomas Jefferson believed in God, but wasn't a Christian.)
While Liberal human rights tell you not to “keep serfs,” a stupid phrase meant to insist upon your false narrative of equivalence, remember that the most hard-headed Liberal of the early US, Thomas Jefferson, ensured that the institution of slavery would continue while owning slaves himself.
And the same goes for the things that your religion is supposedly doing--I can find prominent, influential, religious believers who thought that slavery or whatever is good. You just say that they don't count because they're "really" the state.
(Also, I'd appreciate a reference for Jefferson.)
Who cares what “most people” think, they’re fucking wrong!
You are supposedly criticizing other people:
We want to believe that as moderns we are better, more rational, so much more wise than people of the past, and it is this very conceited and highly sympathetic view of ourselves that is just so unthinkably blind.
If you are criticizing other people, you have to criticize what they are actually talking about. And pretty much none of them are saying that moderns under your definition are better than religious people. People who believe that "we are better than the past" count the 1800s as the past.
And there is no denying the modernity in the African slave trade
Of course there's denying the modernity. Because you're not defining "modern" to mean today, you're defining it to make your answer come out the way you want.
You also already gave the explanation:
Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap.
And you made the odd concession before:
The Islamic world did not in fact only enslave pagans.
Okay, so religious people, from your own specified time period, not only enslaved pagans, they also enslaved others. And somehow it still doesn't count as religious people from that time keeping slaves?
Serfs were not property of any master and ideally had protection against displacement and violence. In practice this didn’t always play out, but neither do liberal human rights.
Liberal human rights tells me to not keep serfs at all. And serfdom is evil at its core. "Serfs ideally weren't mistreated" means nothing, because they were being inherently mistreated by being serfs.
Their values of humility, honor, faith, and so on are so different from our own imperatives of competition, survival of the fittest, and so on.
Yet I don't keep slaves or have serfs. Your people of humility, honor, and faith did.
Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap.
I mean... yes? They had a problem doing lots of things well. Of course that means they couldn't oppress very well either.
We are the ones who did these things, not them,
Only if you carefully define "moderns" to... not be modern. Blaming pogroms and the Spanish Inquision on "moderns" is blatantly distorting what most people mean by that in order to whitewash religion.
Advocating for more lying seems like especially bad advice to give to people with poor social skills, because they lack the skills to detect if they’re succeeding at learning how to lie or if they’re just burning what little social capital they have for no gain.
I think the advice works better as "if it's a social situation, and the situation calls for what you consider to be a lie, don't let that stop you." You do not have to tell someone that you're not feeling fine when they ask how you're doing. You do not need to tell them that actually the color they painted their house in is really ugly. And you certainly shouldn't go to a job interview, get asked for your biggest weakness, and actually state your biggest weakness.
If someone reads the advice and thinks "Lying, that's an idea! I'll use it every time I can" they've overcorrected by far too much.
The alternative theory is that political bias has gotten much greater, and the acceptable political beliefs are strongly in the direction of trusting some groups and not trusting others. By that theory, progressive movements are trusted more because they have better press. Realizing that you can increase trust by creating worker co-ops would then be an example of Goodhart's Law--optimizing for "being trusted" independently of "being trustworthy" is not a worthy goal.
I am not making the simple argument that religion makes for better societies, and I can see you’re totally confused here.
If all you're saying is that at least one thing was better in at least one religious society in at least one era, then I can't disagree, but there isn't much to disagree with either.
And I think you're making an excessively fine distinction if you're not arguing that religion makes for better societies, but you are arguing that religion doesn't damage society. (Unless you think religion keeps things exactly the same?)
Scott once had a post about how it's hard to get advice only to the people who need it.
Sam Bankman-Fried may have lied too much (although the real problem was probably goals that conflict with ours) but the essay here is aimed at the typical LW geek, and LW geeks tend not to lie enough.
I would think that if your "common ground" with someone is something 99% of humans agree with and which is absurdly broad anyway, you haven't really found common ground.
In the premodern Christian medieval context, slavery was all but completely forbidden
It feels like you're gerrymandering a time, place, and scenario to make the answer come out correctly. The medieval era was not the only era where Christianity was powerful, and you're just handwaving it away by saying that Christianity was an arm of the state after that (and ignoring the period before that--the Romans kept slaves even when they were Christian.) You're also including or not including Islam depending on whether it's convenient for your argument (they don't count when they keep slaves, but they count as religion being a source of learning). And you're handwaving away serfdom--yes, it isn't slavery, but it's still a pretty big violation of human rights practiced by religious people back then that we don't practice today.
(For that matter, I'm not convinced that "we only enslave pagans" is much of an excuse. Modern secular society doesn't enslave pagans, after all, so we're still better than them.)
How can the church hold back something which doesn’t yet exist?
By making it dangerous for it to come into existence.
it is fair to say that religious people in the industrial era have the desire to hold back science. But they simply don’t have the power anymore, they are no longer the center of learning.
There's a big gap between "no power worth speaking of" and "not in the position of the Pope in 1500". For instance, religion had enough power to be a serious obstacle to the acceptance of evolution, even if in the 21st century the remaining creationists are a joke.
We can happily and easily disprove the idea that Judeo-Christian cosmology “damages society” by comparing the modern secular society developing after 1500AD with that of the Christian society before it.
-
You're cherrypicking features of the society. I could respond by pointing to feudalism or slavery, for instance. Having less hospitality but no slavery seems overall positive.
-
I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating what hospitality requires. If it was actually required to feed and house all beggars who come to your door, people would be overwhelmed by beggars.
-
"Judeo-Christian" here doesn't make sense. You'll have to at least include Islam. And even then, I wouldn't say that non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions made the society especially horrible. Ancient China and Japan weren't great, but in ways comparable to how "Judeo-Christian" societies weren't great.
-
"Judeo-Christian" cosmology "causes problems" by holding science back. Obviously, ancient societies had less science than we do, so this is perfectly consistent with reality.
He asks “How interested are you in Widgets?” He has learnt from previous job interviews that, if he answers honestly, the interviewer will think he is any of lying, insane, or too weird to deal with, and not hire him, even though this is not in the best financial interests of the company, were they fully informed.
By the standard "intentionally or knowingly cause the other person to have false beliefs", answering 'honestly' would be lying, and answering in a toned down way would not (because it maximizes the truth of the belief that the interviewer gets).
In Materialist Conceptions of God, I wrote about how one can interpret religious claims as hyperstititions, beliefs that become true as a result of you believing in them.
While this works for some religious claims, it doesn't work for many of the most important ones. If heaven doesn't exist, believing in it, and even acting as though you want to go there, won't get you there. And believing that the world was created in seven literal days, and acting thus, not only doesn't cause the world to have been created in seven literal days, it leads you to damage the society around you.
Here’s how easy it is to run an LLM evaluation of a debate.
Running it through the LLM is easy.
Refuting the argument that you're using the LLM's output for takes longer, though.
The motte and bailey is:
- "All I'm asking you to do is to run this through an LLM".
But
- "Actually, that's not all I'm asking you to do. You also need to refute this whole post."
And your stated reason for not responding to any of it is that it’s inconvenient.
It's inconvenient to reply to lots of things, even false things. I probably wouldn't reply to a homeopath or a Holocaust denier, for instance, especially not to refute the things he says.
When someone in my family expresses their concern that Covid-19 vaccines are causing harm to the population, I can respond by: “I also think that it is very important to seriously monitor the adverse health effects of all drugs, in the case of [...]”.
If they said that the Jews are drinking the blood of Christian babies, would you reply that of course you think it's important to keep babies safe?
Your description of finding common ground is within a hairsbreadth of being concern trolling.
You're going heavy on the motivated reasoning here. The reason people don't want to respond to you is not that you're pure genius, it's that it isn't worth the effort.
You're also doing a motte and bailey on exactly what argument you're trying to make. If all you're saying is "sending X through an LLM produces Y", then yes, I could just try an LLM. But that's not all that you're saying. You're trying to draw conclusions from the result of the LLM. Refuting those conclusions is a lot of effort for little benefit.
The challenge was to simply run the argument provided above through your own LLM and post the results. It would take about 30 seconds.
If you claim that "Not one of you made a case. Not one of you pointed to an error.", that isn't going to be resolved by running the argument through an LLM. Pointing to an error means manually going through your argument and trying to refute it.
Not one of you made a case. Not one of you pointed to an error. And yet the judgment was swift and unanimous. That tells me the argument was too strong, not too weak. It couldn’t be refuted, so it had to be dismissed.
Believing that your post was voted down because it was too strong is very convenient for you, which means that your belief that it was voted down because it's too strong is likely motivated reasoning.
It's a lot easier to write BS than to refute it, so people don't usually want to bother exhaustively analyzing why BS is BS.
I support putting bank robbers in jail. Yet I refuse to support anything that would put myself in jail. I'm clearly supporting it in an imbalanced way that is beneficial to myself.
Even if we make the extremely conservative assumption that their deaths are only one 600,000th as bad, in terms of suffering, as humans deaths, insect suffering is still obviously the worst thing in the world.
But you pulled the number 600000 out of thin air.
People, when asked to name a small number or a large number, will usually name numbers within a certain range, and think "well, that number sounds good to me". That doesn't mean that the number really is small or large enough. It may be in normal situations--$600000 can buy a lot--but if you try to do calculations with it, the fact that people name numbers in certain ranges lets you manipulate the result by starting from a "conservative" number and coming to an absurd conclusion.
If it was, oh, 10000000000000000000000 instead, your conclusion would be very different. The fact that not many people will pick 10000000000000000000000, and that you can conclude insect suffering is important based on 600000, says more about how people pick numbers than it does about insect suffering.
People will pay as much to save 2,000 birds as 20,000 and 200,000 birds.
When you ask the question "what would you pay to save 2000 birds", the fact that your question contains the number 2000 is information about how many birds it is important and/or possible to save. If you ask the question with different numbers, each version of the question provides different information, and therefore should produce inconsistent answers (unless it's a poll question specifically designed to test different numbers, but most people won't take that into account).
One refers to morality emerging spontaneously from intelligence—which I argue is highly unlikely without a clear mechanism.
That's not emerging artifically. That's emerging naturally. "Emerging artificially" makes no sense here, even as a concept being refuted.
If you think it could emerge artificially, you need to explain the mechanism, not just assert the possibility.
...
If you hardwire morality as a primary goal, then yes, the AGI might be moral.
I don't see you explaining any mechanism in the second quote. (And how is it possible for something to emerge artificially anyway?)
Your comment reads like it's AI generated. It doesn't say much, but damn if it doesn't have a lot of ordered and numbered subpoints.
Food gets used up quickly, but it takes a long while to use up housing, so banning new housing really isn't comparable to banning making food.
I don’t know where you’re getting this notion that speculation is evasion
The liar faces a conundrum. He can ask to modify the theory again, which is perfectly fine, but whatever he comes up with to accommodate “dog isn’t sick” fact will directly contradict the preceding “Gillian stole cookies but didn’t eat them” theory.
You've described this kind of speculation as specific to liars, yet innocent people will end up having to do it too.
If a client is either factually innocent or guilty-but-sober-minded, there’s no difficulty getting them to admit the incriminating nature of incriminating evidence.
If an innocent person was shown evidence, of course he's going to try to explain why the evidence is consistent with his innocence. Why do you think he wouldn't do this?
If they have no idea what is going on, but have been accused, they need to do what they can to maximize the chance of being believed. Sometimes this means responding with a theory. And such responses will look like evasion by your standards.
There aren't (useful) "other ways" for an innocent person with no direct knowledge to act, unless he gets lucky, like by catching the culprit.
But if the innocent person doesn't know what's going on (other than his own innocence), his alternative theory might not comport with reality--because he has no idea what's going on. All he can do is make hypotheses and try to confirm them. It may take several hypotheses before he gets it right. If you're going to "force liars to commit to a single alternative theory", you've put the innocent person in a position where unless he gets lucky and picks the right answer the first time, he can't defend himself because he committed to the theory and it turned out not to be true, and he doesn't get to change it.
There's no way for anyone to know that you didn't write the essay unless they already know that your username isn't an alias of the writer. You didn't write "here is a post by someone else" or anything else which makes clear that the post is not yours, let alone that you don't endorse it. In fact the essay starts with "In this essay, I will", making the normal assumption that the only person whose username is attached to the post is who "I" refers to.
If you're sharing it, but don't endorse it, you should say that you don't endorse it. If not, readers have a right to assume that you endorse it.
(And you seem to be in this limbo where you're sort of endorsing it but sort of not.)
The response wouldn't actually be lying, but it would be indistinguishable by an outsider from the kind of deflection that you describe here and that you consider part of lying.
And I don't think "this example is unrealistically convenient" lets you handwave this away. The exact response "maybe a friend of Gillian's stopped over" is specific to your example, but that type of response is not. If Jake is innocent in this scenario but accused of lying, the only possible response is to try to come up with ways to explain the available information. That's the exact same thing that would be deflection when done by a guilty person.
The same goes for wearing a suit. I don’t imply that anyone else should wear a suit, and the people around me don’t imply that I shouldn’t wear a suit. Telling other people what to do isn’t socially expensive because it costs “weirdness points”. It is socially expensive because people don’t like it when you tell them to do things they don’t want to do.
By that reasoning you could refuse to ever say "please" and "thank you". After all, you're not telling anyone else not to say "please" and "thank you".
There are two things going on in the vegan example that you haven't noticed. First, it's possible for something to be bad for more than one reason. Something can be pushy, and weird even ignoring the pushiness, at the same time. Second, being vegan by itself doesn't cost you that many weirdness points, because being vegan is a thing that people are familiar with as part of our society, not just as something that one strange guy does.
Wearing a suit when people don't expect a suit is more like refusing to eat round foods, or taking all your meals on green plates, than it is like veganism. If you just made up the weird action (not the thing you're basing it on--suits already exist, but round foods already exist too), it's going to be seen as a lot weirder than something seen occasionally in society.
Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ would fall squarely in the category that people would have a reason to feel negative about.
It's not like wearing a suit in a swimming pool. Never saying "thank you" doesn't physically damage things. It just makes people upset because of the social inappropriateness, like the inappropriate suit.
This reasoning would justify violating any social convention whatsoever. "Refusing to say 'please' and 'thank you' signals confidence and self-esteem".
Yes, it does, but signalling those things and signalling social cluelessness are entwined. "My self esteem is more important than these petty rules" can mean that you think you are really important compared to the rules, or that the rules are unimportant compared to you. You're also overrating self-esteem. Signalling self-esteem is often a bad thing.
(Remember how fedoras became a sign of cluelessness? It's not very different from out of context suits.)
But, the social signalling game is exhausting.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that you can just avoid it and its consequences. Like war, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you. And if you can't avoid sometimes messing up, you can at least avoid making it worse than it has to be (such as by gratuitously wearing inappropriate clothes).
They have actually just genuinely had enough with the hall of mirrors game and have declared themselves to no longer be playing.
Yes, but he's acting like it's a triumphant success. Voluntarily deciding "I don't want social skills" is a surrender that seriously harms you. If you can't get social skills perfect, at least do what you can. And he certainly can avoid wearing inappropriate suits, even if he might mess up deciding when to buy drinks.
As a political comparison, Donald Trump didn’t propose putting a “Rivera of the Middle East” in Gaza because he is politically clueless, he did so because he doesn’t care about being politically clued-in and he wants everyone to know it.
Genuinely communicating "I don't care and I want you to know it" without communicating bad things at the same time is countersignalling. Not just anyone can countersignal. Trump can do this because he's in a powerful position that implies a certain amount of cluefulness (and even then, his opponents are happy to jump on this sort of stuff as evidence of cluelessness).
Spend your weirdness points wisely.
Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says "I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things". The fact that people will eventually stop asking you about the suit does not mean that you are no longer saying this message, nor does it mean that people will stop listening to it.
And if your reaction is "I'm just not conforming. I'm not harming anyone, why do they care?", it's sending a message. Messages don't need to cause harm for people to react to them.
That’s because if you wear a suit in a casual culture, then you want to be sending the subconscious message It’s no big deal that I’m wearing a suit.
You have a limited ability to choose the message that your action sends. It may not be possible to wear the suit and avoid sending the message that you are socially clueless. You also have a limited ability to make people believe your message. You can send the message "I think the suit is no big deal", but nobody is forced to agree that the suit is no big deal.
Because 1) they would be able to trade with (or threaten) humans and 2) even ignoring that, humans behave differently towards obvious sentients--anti-slavery movements and anti-whale-oil movements are not comparable.
This example is being chosen in hindsight. You could easily have E-coli being afraid that the apes would evolve into something that destroys them, or humans being afraid that dogs would evolve into something that would destroy them.
Also, if whales could argue like this, whale relations with humans would be very different, and hunting whales for lamp oil would be unlikely, or at least would be about the same status as hunting humans for slaves is now.
To make an analogy, which involves accusations of baby killing in a completely unrelated context, imagine an abortion opponent who calls someone a baby killer in a context where it's not obvious he's talking about abortion. When questioned on this, he replies "I sincerely think abortion is baby killing, so my description was accurate, to the best of my knowledge". What's wrong with his reasoning?
What's wrong with his reasoning is that if you're trying to honestly and accurately communicate, you need to describe someone's position in uncontroversial terms. It doesn't matter whether you personally think abortion is baby killing; you're communicating with people who don't, and it's not your place to say "well, if I assume my side of this controversial issue is right, then my description is accurate". If you want your description to be accurate, describe it in ways that would give an accurate impression even to people who disagree with you.
"He thinks terrorists should have access... well, that's true because I personally think he has no good or principled way to exclude terrorists" is at worst just that kind of deception. (At best, of course, it's pedantry after all.)
The important question to ask is “how many innocent people” are worth killing to achieve an end? A 2014 study estimated that 4% of death row inmates would be exonerated, had they remained under sentence of death indefinitely,
"Exonerated" doesn't usually mean "innocent", it typically means "is guilty of something slightly lesser".
We could have the exact same court procedures, just change the law on the books from 3–5 years to 3–5 fingers.
We could, but with actual humans, we won't.
Or are you just stating, without any justification
"By observing human beings" is not "without any justification". We know what societies that mutilate prisoners are like, because plenty of them have existed.
Also, individuals don't have to "become irrational" for the ones who are already irrational to gain more influence.
You won't find systems with none at all, but you can easily find systems with those aspects to a significantly larger or smaller degree.
I would agree that eight years of imprisonment can be as bad or worse as mutilation. But the problem is that punishing people by mutilation has different incentives than punishing them with jail--at least among actual human punishers. When you look at the history of societies that punish people by mutilation, you find that mutilation goes hand in hand (no pun intended) with bad justice systems--dictatorship, corruption, punishment that varies between social classes, lack of due process, etc. Actual humans aren't capable of implementing a justice system which punishes by mutilation but does so in a way that you could argue is fair.
We accept that innocent people die due to our actions all the time, and making a special exception here is an isolated demand for rigour.
This is also true for life imprisonment, actually. We'll be sentencing some innocent people to life imprisonment. And although perhaps some of them will be exonerated, it's a statistical certainty that not all of them will be, and a statistical certainty that therefore we will destroy some innocent people's lives piecemeal. But we're okay with that, or at least it doesn't get the ire that the death penalty does.
In fact, this is a general problem with all public policies. Anything you do that affects a large number of people is going to statistically kill a number of innocents, unless it's the absolute optimal policy. You can't avoid killing innocents whether you have executions or not.
The idea that we can pay reparations for a mistake is bizarre even considering just widely accepted punishments. You can't imprison someone for 40 years, discover they're innocent, and "pay reparations" for the mistake--there's nothing you can pay someone to give them 40 years. Never mind paying reparations for mutilation, you can't do it for imprisonment.
Also, in practice, societies which cut off the hands of thieves are not societies where justice is served even ignoring the punishments themselves. Tyrants like cutting off hands precisely because it's a punishment that can't be reversed, and you don't have to wait 40 years for it to become permanent.
This smells like AI slop.
In this context, see https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/ .
Are you going to remove everything from the rest of the argument which depends on the "always"? Which seems to be all of it.
Now, what percent of the 33% of hierarchical societies that do not practise human sacrifice are Abrahamic?
This is like saying "I think that Rhode Islanders are all murderers. What percentage of the people that do not murder are from Rhode Island?" This is illogical; the reasoning is backwards.
Do you think that Japan is a hierarchial society? Do you think that Japan performs human sacrifice?
I am sure of the logic of sacrifice in all cultures
You are trying to argue with the real world.
I know that idolatry doesn't lead to human sacrifice, because there are actual idolators who don't sacrifice humans. You are just saying "yes it does". No it doesn't. It's not hard to check the real world and see if your pronouncements match reality. They do not.
Idolatry always leads to human sacrifice because to prove your idol more important than the human soul the natural test is to sacrifice a human in the altar of the idol.
This is nonsense. You are pulling this from nowhere. I'm sure we could find some sun worshippers or nature worshippers who don't sacrifice any humans.
Also, this whole post reminds me of Sherlock Holmes style deductions. You know, the one where the detective says something that's mostly right most of the time, then makes a deduction based on something else that's mostly right, until he has a dozen links in his chain of reasoning and the compounded error rate for all those mostly correct steps means the detective could not realistically exist. You are connecting a lot of things that are mostly correct, to the point where your conclusion is worthless.
I am not convinced this is true.
The game certainly has entities that will eat you regardless of whether you're too clever, but that's not the same thing.