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I have to admit- I just think everyone deserves support and I suspect the fight will keep going forever or until conservatives kill all the abnormal people or stop trying to bully people who want to surgically alter themselves into giant spiders out of existence.
It's not going to end because um... why should it end exactly? I have this feeling of an underlying premise that there is an amount of weird that is... too weird. And... I just... don't have that premise. If something has pragmatic issues that prevent it from being pragmatic for society to support it, my first thought is "what technological advancements will cause support of this to be viable" not "lets suppress it forever."
But some people seem to see "technical advancements have caused support for this to be viable" and go into moral panic mode. Why?
Why are some people unhappy seeing the boundaries of the human condition expand? Why does it make some people uncomfortable?
What is wrong with your brains? Or is it me? What's wrong with my brain? Something is clearly wrong with someone's brain here.
Does pedophilia get the benefits of this expansion? What if you get the kids to consent to it?
Do you think encouraging children to engage in recreational use of heroin or methamphetamines is a good idea? If not, why not? Wouldn't this just be allowing them the freedom to make their own decisions about their own brain chemistry?
Like, I understand that dropping the pedo card is generally considered bad form. But you're the one saying letting people do what they want expands without limit. I don't think you actually mean that, because there are some very obvious limits I don't think you will, now at least, actually endorse! But you are emphatically saying those limits don't exist, so it seems necessary to point them out explicity.
So which is it? Do you actually recognize that some decisions, even personal decisions, should be restricted, or are you committed to "anything goes"?
The conservative position is that people are not, in fact, infinitely malleable, and pretending they are, or allowing them to pretend they are, can have serious consequences both for those people and for society as a whole. We can point to a long serious of fairly heinous consequences over the course of history to back this idea up.
[EDIT] - Would it be fair to say that you see gratification of one's desires as a terminal good? Would it also be fair to say that, excepting desires that clearly harm another, you don't believe there's such a thing as a bad desire?
I think there are better conservative positions, like- "we're not ready for this- yet. And won't be in our lifetimes so give up on it."
The conservative position that humans are not infinitely malleable is... either intended in the context of our lifetimes or just ridiculously shortsighted. We evolved from single celled organisms and we'll do it again.
Social progress is the ongoing process of distilling the baby out of the bathwater. Separating good from evil, and adopting the good while negating and subverting the evil.
I'm not saying everything should be permitted now. Far from it.
"Which technological advancements will make pedophilia viable?"
Well. Better systems to make sure they never fuck actual children.
Deepfaking technology.
Android technology.
Viability timeline estimation - 100 years
Will they ever be allowed to fuck actual children?
"Which technological advancements will make adults having intercourse with children viable?"
Very difficult to say. The costs are too high to explore...
the costs... are too high... to explore...
Absurdly predictive theory of child development and trauma formation.
Much better trauma treatment in cases where things go wrong, to the point that there are no known cases of even illegal violent rape that leave residual trauma after a week.
Enough supervision that every instance can be monitored even as it becomes socially normalized.
Viability timeline estimation - 1000 years or post singularity equivalent.
...
Will there even be human children in 1000 years or will pedophilia just mean intercourse with day old AI forks? Is sexting a fresh LLM instance pedophilia? Nah. Nah the concept just falls apart at that point. It's like asking ChatGPT whether its a man or a woman.
[EDIT] regarding your edit.
I think desires can be conditionally bad, but not innately bad. But this is usually a moot point. We live in conditions after all.
Having a strong, debilitating desire to be a squid as a 16th century peasant is not very useful, and you should work towards mitigating that until it is not debilitating and accept that you are probably going to be a human your whole life. Though- it would be fine to also accept that you still have the desire, if you can channel it to something tangible. Maybe that peasant becomes a famous squid painter. Maybe he just makes his family just a little richer through hard work so that maybe his children can follow their dreams one day.
It would be more accurate to say- my desire is to see humanity moving with the intention of shifting conditions so that more and more desires are supported, and fewer and fewer desires are bad.
It's less about the gratification of desires and more about them not being frustrated as they unspool into acts of creation that give birth to intense and unique existences and experiences.
There is a sort of desire that becomes a religion. A driving need. A purpose. I don't know how many people have even experienced what I'm talking about. It's difficult to describe because thinking about it is placing me in an intense state of... blissful thirst for new sensations. I need to go.
What evidence can you offer that you in particular or Social Progressivism generally has any fixed definition of "good" or "evil", "baby" or "bathwater"? If, as seems obvious to me, you have no such fixed definition, what do these statements even mean?
Why not? How do we adjudicate which changes can be permitted now and which later?
You're reducing the problem to one of logistics. But of course, previous iterations of Social Progress, including the Trans issue that prompts this discussion, have demanded changes to values and social systems now, with logistical solutions promised in the indefinite future. Why should I believe that Social Progress will confine itself to thoroughly tested and engineered solutions when it has never done so before?
And this ignores the question of whether it really is just a question of logistics. What if they really, really want to fuck kids, for real, and are not satisfied with your simulacra? In that eventuality, on what basis do you deny their deeply-held, arguably-innate desires? What if they promise to only fuck the kids they clone and grow themselves?
How do you even know their desires are wrong? On what basis? Because "studies show"?
Based on what, your opinion? People like me tell you that [$thing] has a cost too high to explore, and you laugh us off and explore the fuck out of it anyway, and then expect your own pronouncements to be treated as holy writ? Progressives disagreed with your opinion in the past, and actively encouraged and enabled pedophilia through the power of the state, because they knew better and "studies showed". Do you have some radical new insight that they somehow missed the last go-round?
...Rather than go point by point, let me try to draw this together: you talk as though there is an obvious good and evil, an obvious moral standard of correctness. You reject my claim to possess such a standard out of hand, and then you presume that your preferred standard is simply, obviously correct and needs no further justification. You do this in apparent blissful ignorance of the heaps of skulls previously generated by exactly the attitude you're currently displaying.
You frame the concepts of drift-of-form and drift-of-values in the most anodyne ways possible, ignoring all the obvious, glaring pitfalls, as though it's all about body-shape and inside we're of course all be true-blue (Berkeley progressive circa 2023) Americans. What if I decide I don't like having a conscience? What if I want to bake hatred of [$group] into myself on a genetic level, so I can pass it on to my kids? What if I want to self-modify to reverse my empathy so that observed injustice gives me orgasmic pleasure? What if the giant spider morph wants to eat children? What if trans surgery doesn't actually help and is actually mutilation? What if marketing heroin to kids is super-profitable and highly effective? What if the definition of human shifts, and some former persons don't make the cut (60 million abortions and counting, government-sponsored ads for Euthanasia as a cost-cutting measure)? What if it turns out some sector of the population is, like, really harshing your vibe, man?
What if, in short, the line between good and evil really does run through every human heart, and solving hatred and malice and greed and the urge to predation is not just a matter of engineering everybody into a sim-pod?
...And of course, all this is done, ignoring the fact that right now we don't have the tech, and you're arguing in favor of the people who push the "start" button anyway.
And the idea that these mostly-fictional or literally unimaginable desires might be frustrated weighs on your moral thinking, such that you're willing to assist in the radical, arguably-coercive restructuring of a society built and largely peopled by individuals who have no idea what the fuck you're on about, but are not interested in what you're selling? Like, Progressives collectively make this pitch, I and people like me say, "fuck no", and you try to push us into the hopper anyway? That about the size of it?
Have you considered that maybe you just have a fetish for novelty?
Arguably coercive? My friend. We live in a society. It's always been coercive. You see progressives say that they want more diverse sets of people to be permitted to exist, and conservatives say they want to be allowed to force people to all fit a certain mold, and you call the former coercive?
Very well. It may well be. We live in a society until the day we are all so powerful that we no longer need to and can live in deep intergalactic space off the skin of our hydrogen collectors. But don't tell me the society crafted by our forefathers isn't just as coercive if not moreso.
Holy writ? No not by everyone. I expect combat. I expect culture war. I would prefer a peaceful unfolding. But I am here to change the world. Not to coddle it.
I don't expect- I think our world is built up from the tragedies of the violent birth of our species into a hostile world. Our precedents are the sacrifices we have made to keep ourselves alive. And even thinking about it costs energy. Costs scarce resources. Time spent arguing over whether it is time to remove Chesterton's fence is time not spent growing food. The legal system costs millions of dollars and the time of our best and brightest just to print and execute precedent at a grueling rate. I get that it's not cheap. I get that it has value that we have paid dearly for.
But- this is probably because I am an American born in the Live Free or Die state. But I expect people to not terminally value fences- to merely instrumentally value them. Even though I do understand- you can terminally value just about anything.
What I want... I want people to have... reasons beyond inertia or precedent for why things are bad. I want people to actually be interested in understanding why Chesterton's fence is there, and remain aware of when it can, or should be torn down. They don't have to be objectively correct. I don't expect all humans to have the same understanding of good and evil or the same predictions of the consequences of actions. I just want everyone to remain aware and humor the idea that there is a point at which we outgrow the fences we have erected for our safety. I want people to imagine when tearing it down would be viable, so that they can give one another firm expectations of what they have to build if they really need it torn down. If the suppression of trans people and enforcement of gender norms hadn't been so coercive, if conservatives could have made some compromises and set firm expectations for what trans people have to do before they're allowed to remove that fence-
If we had been cooperating on this from the start with clear expectations then this culture war never would have happened.
Of course this is a fantasy. Our history didn't build us up as people who could have cooperated like that.
Skulls? I have seen millennia of skulls. Skulls of the strange and the outliers. Skulls of the weird slaughtered in the name of conformity to make sure food could be grown. Are we simply looking at different skull piles here? I get that sometimes, when the weird grow in power, walking off the beaten path, the food stops getting made, and the skulls become myriad. I am told "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". And I agree, but I also contend- "Do not let the good be the enemy of the better."
Morality? Everyone has one. Get yours now. 50% off. If you don't like having a conscience get rid of it. Don't worry. I won't get rid of mine. If you hurt someone I'll just kill you. If you can erase your conscience without doing that- or want to die- go for it. That's not a threat. It's more... this all just seems so simple to me. We are all here. Just don't let go of the parts you want to keep and they'll stick around. Yes. It doesn't escape me that conservatives are doing the same thing- to a degree. I can appreciate that trans people may have pushed too deeply too quickly for systems to adapt. I can appreciate that where exactly I draw the line is somewhat arbitrary, that some people might not want to let go of the gender binary for reasons more terminal in addition to the pragmatic. But my concern is more the lack of interest some people have in letting the systems ever change to support more types of people. Some people don't seem to be looking for how the world can become better, they are only looking at how the world can become worse.
I have a fetish for novelty. Definitely. Novelty and intensity. Glory, expression, fire, intensity, fearlessness.
Ah, yes. perhaps I do expect other humans to at least taste a hint of why those things are good. Even if they weigh them against other values.
I think conservatives have a fetish for safety. I think many of them have very reasonable takes around safety and sustainability. But I think some of them have a fear-driven blindness to almost everything else that makes the universe wonderful. I think conservatives, as the leaders on caring about safety and sustainability- should have been the ones thinking about global warming. Not necessarily cutting emissions earlier- there were real economic tradeoffs there that merited consideration. But actually recognizing and thinking about the problem. But instead it was fully denied because of the implication that we might have to change the way we live our lives over it. Something has gone horribly wrong- when precedent is the thing blinding us to the safety it was built for. When safety is the thing stopping us from living the lives it was built to preserve.
You:
Also You:
You say you want to tear down restrictions without end. I point out that some of those restrictions are load-bearing, that they're there for very good reasons. You say it's fine, because you're only going to tear down unnecessary restrictions, and of course are totally fine with coercive punishment of bad behavior in all the usual ways, so long as you get to be in charge of judging which restrictions are unnecessary, and which behaviors are bad and deserve suppression through force. You offer zero grounding for those judgements other than your personal aesthetic preferences. You indicate that your judgements are entirely relative and change over time, such that the arguments you make and accept now will not be the arguments you make and accept next month or next year, so any agreement we arrive at is simply a temporary respite between aggressive renegotiations. You appear to be incapable of good-faith agreement, of reaching a solution and then sticking with it long-term. Your positions cannot be reliably predicted in advance, even by yourself, because they do not derive from an axiomatic structure, but rather a meta-structure where the only constant is change.
Those skulls were produced as an apparently-irreducible byproduct of stable, prosperous civilization. The skulls people like you produce come in much larger volumes on much shorter time-scales, and the byproduct they produce is failed states and large-scale immiseration. People arguing that we should ditch the old structures and just figure it out through reason and the scientific method killed somewhere between 100 and 200 million humans in a mere century, and ruined the lives of many hundreds of millions more. They created what was arguably the greatest concentration of misery and injustice the world has ever seen, based explicitly on the logic that you are preaching.
We have reasons beyond inertia and precedent for why we think things are bad. Do you have reasons beyond aesthetic reaction? If so, you have failed to describe them.
...Then we'd be right back here regardless, with you arguing that we did it wrong and the fence has to come down anyway, because your only standard for when the fence comes down is whether you can imagine a different solution working better. Between cold fact and your imagination, imagination will always win, and so you will always vote to gut what we've built to chase your dreams of a brighter world, and to hell with the consequences.
It sounds like you think it's impossible to know that a change will improve things, that it will inevitably kill tons of people, and we shouldn't try. But you seem to be talking about communism and the French revolution and so on. I'm willing to build things up via incrementalism rather than revolution. I'm not willing to stop moving altogether. I am certain that there are restrictions that most people think of as unthinkable to remove, that will prove worthless and die after the thousandth cut to their necessity. But that certainty is just a prediction. Whether I'm right or wrong will be obvious enough when the time comes. If I go crazy and pretend it's obvious when the opposite is true. Stop me. Sorry for the hassle in that timeline. I aim to avoid it.
I'm not here to tear down the wall per se. I'm here to tear down the thing it's keeping out, then share the good news once that's done. And expect that- at that point someone else will tear the wall down for me.
And the thing I keep saying that I want- for people to focus more on what the wall is keeping out than the wall itself, is a good idea anyway. You have to maintain the walls as they rot. And in order to maintain them you have to know what they were for. You have to know whether it's actually true when someone like me says the thing on the other side is dead. You can't just coast on your ancestors cached outputs and assume they will be applicable forever, because even if you wanted to, you can't make the world stand still enough.
Besides, those piles of skulls were made by people who didn't know what the fence was for weren't they? It seems that at some point or another, the people who don't know why the fence is there overdo things in one direction or the other. And we start seeing revolutions and skullpiles.
It depends on what you mean by "improve"; I think moral progress, in the sense most people understand it, is impossible. We can certainly make ourselves richer and more comfortable though. Being richer and more comfortable is not morally better, but if we can do it without compromising our moral values, why not do so?
On the other hand, I think stable, peaceful, prosperous society is not the normal state of humans, and is actually a fairly rare and highly valuable thing. I don't think it happens by accident. I think it's easier to destroy than most people appreciate. If damaged or destroyed, I think it's much harder to reconstruct than people commonly appreciate. I think we should be very, very careful about monkeying with the social systems that serve as its foundation.
Incrementalism is great when you have stable values and axioms, and use incremental adjustments of policy in an attempt to reconcile what is with what ought to be.
You are incrementally modifying the values and axioms themselves. You don't seem to have a fixed understanding of what ought to be. Scott once wrote a parable about "Murder Gandhi" that talks about why this poses a problem for optimization, but the short version is that your opinion of what ought to be is derived from how things are, so if we agree to your proposed changes, you'll just change your proposals and demand further changes. You've declared that you can't possibly be satisfied, so there's no point in attempting to satisfy you. There's no concrete objective you're actually aiming for, and so for those of us that do have such an objective, our best play is to exclude you from the process because you are indistinguishable from a defect-bot.
On a deeper level, you seem to be arguing that most moral states are good, and we should explore as many of them as possible. It seems obvious to me that most moral states are bad; injustice comes in infinite variety, but justice is boring and regular and repetative, one of those stolid, archaic fences you complain about. Notably, justice loses all coherence if the principles behind it are not stable over time. If we do eye for an eye today when you poked my eye out, and then we do mandatory forgiveness tomorrow when I poke your eye out, that isn't a system of justice that anyone is actually going to accept. Your obsession with change destroys the entire foundation of cooperation between individuals; by constantly changing the rules, you remove any incentive to consent to the game.
Why not? Why should murder and rape and thieving not stay illegal and immoral four thousand years in the future, as they were four thousand years in the past? What is gained by changing our principles on them?
Then it should be trivial to point to basic restrictions that have previously been successfully removed. Certainly there is no shortage of historical examples of such attempted abolitions: take the various attempts at abolishing the family, for instance, or the attempts to stamp out religion, or attempts to radically reshape definitions of justice, or property, or economic principles, or sexual/relationship norms. Which attempts to undercut old systems stand out to you as successes worthy of imitation?
Of course, since you have no fixed position, you are immune to contrary evidence. If your proposed changes result in disaster, well, that would just mean we need to change things even more, wouldn't it?
I complain that someone stole my wallet. Friend A says he saw that guy over there pickpocket me, and look, there he is looking through my wallet, we should go over and take my wallet back and maybe kick his ass. Friend B says that the real problem here is that we live in a society where money is needed to satisfy our material needs, and we should all come together to coordinate a general solution to the problem of scarcity and want.
It seems to me that you are claiming that Friend A is "focused on the wall", while friend B is "focused on the thing the wall is supposed to keep out". I call it "dealing with the actual problem", as opposed to "ignoring the actual problem by focusing on pointless speculative abstractions".
Points for nominative determinism, though.
A task made easier if we restrain people like yourself who are actively trying to rot them.
Suppose I told you that you can't just coast on your ancestors' cached outputs and assume they will be applicable forever, which is why you need to respond to my endless arguments about why 2+2 actually equals 5, and that even if you wanted to, you can't make the world stand still enough. Get with the times, man!
Only, that's not how it works, is it? Math doesn't give a fuck what year it is. Correct sums are correct sums in Sumer and in New York City. I observe that it is the same with morals and values: what humans are and what we want does not change over time, neither what is healthy for us, neither what causes us to grow strong and to wither. I can observe that the principles underlying the Code of Hammurabi are entirely clear and sensical to me, and in fact that my own society is built on largely identical principles, with at most only minor adjustments in weighting despite vastly different material conditions, a temporal distance of thousands of years, and a completely alien culture. The historical record argues against you.
They thought they did, they claimed they did, and they convinced a lot of people that they did. Evidence indicates they were mistaken or lying. I think the nature of the mistake (or lie) can be observed and analyzed, and similar mistakes and lies therefore become easier to detect, which is why I'm objecting when I see you making what seem to me to be similar claims. Society is an intricate, alien machine designed to minimize the size of the skull-piles humans naturally produce. The really big piles of skulls happen when people deliberately break that machine in an attempt to get it to do things it can't actually do. That is why demands for outcomes that seem impractical or impossible should be treated with suspicion.
Murder isn't illegal in Minecraft because it's not really murder.
That's about all there is to say about this. There are reasons murder is bad, and they don't apply in Minecraft.
The thing I am talking about has already happened for murder. It hadn't happened for murder for hundreds of thousands of years, and then someone made video games, and all of the sudden, you could kill without consequence.
If you don't think it has happened for murder, then we still aren't on the same page, because I am talking about precisely this sort of thing, the ability to bathe in aesthetics previously associated with evil, without any of the actual evil.
If you don't think there will be a day when you can get stabbed with a knife and laugh, pull it out and heal the wound instantly, that's understandable, but I think there will be such a day, and in that era, the idea of locking someone up for doing something mildly annoying will seem like disproportionate retribution, so we won't.
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