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I never liked the proverb that goes like hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue (why is paying a tribute a compelling metaphor here?), but the underlying sentiment is somewhat relevant. Specifically, (1) unlike the rat-adjacent crowd, most people don't have absolute, immutable values nor are even particularly disturbed by the prospect of value drift; (2) they experience "conflicting" values/terms in their value function (ones that you can't maximise simultaneously) not as a fun math problem but as painful and embarrassing; (3) if a pair of values they hold keeps causing problems as in 2., they will happily gradually do away with one of them as in 1. (At some point vice is driven to default?)
Now, add to this that most people also, apart from any other values, hold pragmatism and reasonableness as a value, as well as (more cynically) being perceived as following universal, elegant principles of the kind that get mentioned as a Philosophy in textbooks, as opposed to boring non-universalisable ones like "more power to my race". As a result, it's generally actually quite effective to promulgate the statement that some object-level aspect of your target's value system is inconsistent, impractical and/or non-universalisable. They will feel the tension between the "LARP as philosopher-king" value and whatever other value you are challenging (e.g. abortion views, religion, in-group favouritism) and often enough the other value will be the easier one for them to do away with.
(Of course, this also creates the continued demand for apologetics, * Studies and other word slop that basically serves to shield the object-level values from having to be traded off against the acting-reasonable value.)
The intended meaning is here is that the hypocrite, even if they are not virtuous themselves, are at least "paying tribute" to virtue in the sense that they are acknowledging virtue as something that is high status and that ought to be desired and/or aspired to.
Meanwhile a plain language reading of your post would seem to suggest that that you would prefer a world where in which civic virtue is disregarded in favor of some nebulous ideal of technocratic objectivity. If that is the case, I reject the premise, and posit that if push comes to shove there is a decent chance that you and I will find ourselves on opposing sides in a shooting war. I hope it doesn't come to that but don't expect me or mine to pull our punches if it does.
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I think "paying tribute" is here meant in the sense of "homage", not in the sense of a literal tax. The idea is that by aping the appearance of virtue, vice is implicitly praising virtue, i.e. paying homage to virtue, i.e. paying tribute to virtue.
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I would be very interested in reading some effort posts that explore how people actually change their core moral principles. Off the top of my head, some of the historical examples that I don't fully understand are:
I have a decent sense of what happened for each of these topics individually, but I feel like there's a lot of commonalities / general principles that good be extracted here. I feel like this could provide a good sense of "epistemic hygiene" to help me from changing my mind when I don't intend to, help me better predict what future society will look like, and help me better convince people of my own moral intuitions. Maybe something like this already exists buried in the lesswrong archives?
I'm skeptical that there's a single story that hits all of these categories, without being so broad as to be useless. That said...
There are three competing narratives, here:
The real answer is a mix of all three (and probably one feeding into another), but the proportions matter. I hope for the mistake theory, but the more cynical I'm feeling the more The Crush seems plausible - not helped by the extreme unwillingness of anyone serious to engage with the possibility, even to recognize its failure in the trans stuff.
I think your explanations are missing a driver of why these trends started happening. (I also think you are underemphasizing the greater difficulty of being opposed to gay marriage when one has gay friends or family, though I am not so ambitious as to attempt to explain why being gay seems more common now than 50 years ago.) Anyway, for Gen X/Milennials, the traditional opposition to gay marriage from Boomers and previous generations was severely undermined by the prevalence of divorce among Boomers; why should younger generations take Boomers' moralizing about marriage seriously? This seems like a perfect issue for rebellion.
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Another factor (technically fits under deluge I guess?): widespread access to pornography leading to men seeing lots of dicks which desensitized their natural disgust reaction to another man's dick having sex.
I'd put the desensitization under Mistake Theory - if you actually want a throbbing hard cock (in your porn), it doesn't matter whether that's because you're desensitized or it just isn't that gross - but they're not exactly natural categories. I'm more motioning around 'mistake' if it's about changing an average person's beliefs, and more 'deluge' if it's about changing policies or elite beliefs, but your framework may be more helpful for your perspective.
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To temper that cynicism a little, I’d think that the “crush” scenario can only work, or at least only be really durable, when the “mistake theory” is also true (and probably with a “deluge” period in between). By the time “crush” factors were meaningfully coming into play, the overwhelming majority of the public was already on board with gay rights broadly, or at least cared so little about the issue that the opposition seemed at least as out-there as the supporters. This meant the only people being meaningfully “crushed” were easily written off by a supermajority of the public as wingnuts and weirdos. Certainly homophobia, especially the really hardcore type, has become drastically rarer in the US compared to, say, the 1980s, or even the 2000s. That win is organic and durable.
One could argue that this frame also describes the relative failure of the trans rights movement: trying to speedrun the deluge and ride the momentum straight into a crush, while skipping entirely over the long slog of boring acceptance into society which made the deluge -> crush political strategy actually work for gay rights.
That's true to an extent, but in turn it's easy to overstate it. Prop 8 got majority support in California at the same time that the Crush side was boycotting entire states or beating Brendan Eich in public. Much of the Crush side's successes came through expansive understandings of employment law, which only required only a small number of people to be persuaded (sometimes not even judges: a lawyer or HR head warning of potential liability is persuasive for big companies, even if they might win the eventual lawsuit).
Maybe. Another option's just that the terrain was rough. Both trans sports and puberty blockers had a pretty severe problem where they didn't work, and clearly didn't work, in a way that was hard for all but the most blinkered activists to deny, and which the Crush strategy could no longer serve to silence.
Not sure.
(Counterthought: If AIDS had hit in 2003, rather than the 1980s, would that have meant gay rights would have normalized in the Reagan era and then been marginalized again? Hit, but not marginalized by it? Or without the organization and tempering HIV politics caused, would they have stayed marginalized longer? Or would there have been a better reaction to the early stages of GRID, either internal or external?
Probably unknowable.)
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Our appointed, highest legislative body decided it shall be so
For gay marriage?
In legal terms, in the USA, kinda. A dozen-ish states had already made gay marriage legal by legislation or referendum before Obergefell, and dozens more had already legalized it based on state court or lower federal court rulings, but Obergefell did cover a third of the country in one swoop.
In terms of core moral principles, no. Support for gay marriage in America went from 27% in the 1996 up to 60% right before Obergefell, and it kept going up along basically the same linear trend with no significant disruption one way or the other for 6 or 7 years afterward, before leveling off or declining a bit in the last few years.
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Mostly cohort effects, meaning new people and not existing people changing.
Religions do not necessarily change moral intuitions. Instead, they appeal to existing intuitions and create Schelling points around doctrines which promote those existing intuitions.
Probably like anti-smoking. Had to do with empirical beliefs about alcohol, not moral intuition. The United States is still the most deeply anti-alcohol country in the West.
Cohort effects.
Iraqi, Pashtun, and Vietnamese moral intuitions are contra Anglo people's democracy.
Yes, every moderately educated person knows all of this. I want a grand unified theory of mind change that simultaneously explains all of these historical effects and simultaneously makes predictions about the future.
Most moderately educated people actually think all of this was just some kind of vague arc of justice bending towards equality, culturally of course. A minority of educated people might suspect a clearer image, but they can't prove it with certainty.
Great. That sounds really interesting. Are you prepared for it to be extremely politically incorrect, philosophically alienating, and mathematically dry? What you're asking for will look like a poison mixture of HBD, free will denial, and quantitative modeling at least at the level of stochastic calculus, which is generally considered post-grad and too hard for 90% or more of people to understand. Making something like this would take a lot of effort, potentially result in cancellation, ostracization, and denialism, to whatever extent it wouldn't just be ignored. Because the free marketplace of ideas hates hereditarianism, human instrumentalism, and math.
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"Cthulhu always swims left"
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The rate of "should be valid" answers to the question "Do you think marriages between same-sex couples should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?" went steadily from 27% in 1996 to 70% in 2021, faster than the old "one funeral at a time" method of changing people's minds would allow. Although the results vary with age in the direction you'd expect, the 50-64 and 65+ groups are still at around 60%. The difference between retirees and young adults today is lower than the difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Views toward America in Vietnam were 84% favorable vs 11% unfavorable in the latest large-scale survey I could find; 84% was higher than in any of the other 36 countries being polled. Part of this is probably that they weren't as disappointed by Trump as most, but the favorable/unfavorable margin for America there was still nearly double their margin on confidence in Trump. 69% specifically said they like "American ideas about democracy", higher than any other country polled except South Korea.
Citation needed. This paper suggests cohort effects can explain a super majority of the shift. Very likely, there's a cohort effect kernel driving the change, with smaller period effects following as a result of mimesis dragging everyone closer to the new cohort mean.
"Are sexual relations between two adults of the same sex not wrong at all?" is not exactly the same question as "should same-sex marriage be legal" in logical terms, but the societal changes track pretty well, and we have a longer history of finer-grained data on the former via the General Social Survey. Figure 1(a) here gives some estimates of the magnitudes of intra-cohort changes. Before around 1990 there was no trend at all; afterwards every cohort who were adults in 1990 but still young enough to have a complete sample by 2005 shows some upswing; the ones still adults with a large sample size past 2020 show roughly 40% swings. That's a clear supermajority of the roughly 50% swing for the country as a whole. Each cohort usually starts out with more "not wrong at all" responses than their next-nearest-age peers, but by a few percent, not a few tens of percent.
You mean the new total mean? "50 year olds' opinions are changing to better match the opinions of 50 year olds" wouldn't have any effect.
But the total mean can't be affecting everyone - 35-49 year olds have been tracking right around the mean, and 18-34 year olds have been steadily moving away from it.
How do you come up with "very likely"? The data seems to match "peoples opinions are all being affected by their environment, but the older you are the farther back your environment goes" just as well.
I can't rule out that 50-year-olds are trying to mimic 25-year-olds' views specifically, except by anecdote (does the phrase "kids these days" sound like it's going somewhere positive, or somewhere negative?), but I'll note that even if this were true, it isn't what people generally mean by "cohort effects"; it would be something much more strange and interesting.
I read the whole paper, and it would appear that the way the article models that chart is by having there be a cohort change force which bubbles up into earlier generations through social pressure, where people shrink towards the new mean of each year slightly. Which exactly what I said.
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I was around when Obergefell v. Hodges was ruled on. What happened in a nut-shell was that there was an entire campaign to convince people that being gay was ok. It took family members coming out to each other on a personal level, the whole "born this way narrative" trying to indicate that this wasn't a choice. I especially think the fact that friends and family were gay really made the issue salient: should I really be against my brother, uncle, etc. Marrying another man if thats what they like? In particular, I also think most of the arguments against being gay or gay marriage itself are kinda ass.
But another factor that is likely worth taking into consideration is demographic shifts. We simply are a less religious society as we were before, and younger generations tend to be more liberal than older ones. Its just plain old demographic replacement. As to why the young are more liberal than the old - I couldnt tell you.
I can, 24/7 stream of messaging from school, mass media and "social pressure". It took us all the way to Zoomers to start seeing rejection of "the message" and I hazard that's at least in a good part driven by the unconscious knee-jerk rejection of "the olds" politics.
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It feels obvious to me that this is directly related to the politics of the educators. At this point we're into at least a second or third generation (probably more, it's not like I was around to observe between the 70s and the 90s) of libmarxist teachers doing their thing.
You might like this video
I think its something else entirely, but ill wait till next week to flesh this out. My hypothesis is that as societies become richer and more technologically advanced, there becomes less of need for conservative rules. This allows for more liberal morals to flourish.
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This is white-washing how the campaign actually went down. The gay marriage campaign was the first large deployment of cancellation as a political tactic. A vote was held in the form of Proposition 8, the gay marriage side lost, and then proceeded to explain to the people where political power actually flows from in America by going after and taking down prominent supporters including high profile targets like Brendan Eich and Chik-Fil-A, but also seeking heretics like random pizza parlors in small towns who might not cater a gay wedding. Catholic adoption agencies were shut down for having the views that won at the ballot box. Our rulers then corrected the vote that had gone wrong. People took note and changed their beliefs to match power.
Cancellation works. Forced conversion works. The line of increased acceptance of gay marriage is a testament to its power. If you consider gay marriage a moral good, it worked on you too (this is what being a second-generation Muslim around the seventh century feels like from the inside). It's why the left switched to using cancellation for everything it wants, and the Right turned skeptical of democracy (because who could know which future votes would also be sham votes?) So much of our current politics is downstream of the fact that gay marriage substituted compulsion for persuasion and it worked.
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Like I said in my post:
I'm not looking for individualized explanations of these events. I'm looking for a grand overarching theory of society mind changes that can simultaneously explain all of them.
I was grasping at this in my original response, but I think this is the closest to a grand overarching theory:
You're a supporter of a sports team. You win some, you lose some. Then a fellow supporter of your sports team reveals themselves to be someone who fingerpaints artworks with his own shit. This is then levied as ammunition against fans of the sports team. To avoid being considered someone who fingerpaints artwork with their own shit, you disavow ever being a fan of the sports team, to avoid being perceived as someone who fingerpaints with their own shit.
I believe this dynamic plays out everywhere, over everything. Hipsters always get there first, and then are hated, and then what they like becomes the norm as people realize hipsters are there first and want to be seen as one of the first and not into the old thing. Then hipsters move on. 9/11 happens, America supports war in the Middle East, then they realize the people who want war in the Middle East are incompetent and/or abhorrent, then they pretend they never supported it in the first place. Social justice waves are kind of like this; everyone supported it until they realized this put them in company with lunatics, and the purity tests of standing with lunatics drove away people who didn't want to be associated with them. "Passing" is an understood phenomenon from older African-Americans, decades later people attempted to pass for black.
For related phenomena: gold on the leper colony, TLP narcissism theory.
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As someone who saw the shift in attitudes towards gay marriage play out I suspect it had a lot to do with the dominant culture shifting.
It wasn't that long ago that the evangelical religious right were an extremely powerful political force in America, with their own champions, cultural icons, shibboleths, set of not-entirely-related-beliefs-that-served-as-tribe-signals and bespoke rituals.
Then they got old, set their own credibility on fire by conducting unpopular wars, spent the federal budget to the bone, and nosedived their political causes into the ground.
So signaling that they weren't part of the evangelical religious right became more important than any sincerely held belief. Gay marriage is also easy to move the needle on because the political and actual costs aren't high, and it benefits marriage/divorce lawyers.
I wasnt there back then, but wasnt this kinda how Britney Spears started out, from what I heard?
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Explainability/Interpretability in modelling is often directly anti-correlated with predictability. Modern AI/ML is a very good example of this. Highly flexible models often gain predictive power by learning complex, distributed, nonlinear structure that is hard for humans to summarize cleanly.
Societal Genetic Algorithms and Multi-Agent Game theory is probably your best starting point. Assume the fitness function is the resilience of such a system to survive + the desire of participants to propagate it/adopt it/live in it. Develop the theory from there.
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Is it hypocrisy to realize some values require compromises to achieve others? Robin Hanson wrote a good book years ago that I think did an excellent job in explaining what really motivates our outward value displays and the stories we love to tell about ourselves; and more specifically just how completely out of register it often is with the truth.
There are ways of being consistent and ways of not being consistent. Human beings tend to flout their values however when they feel they’re powerful enough to do so and believe there’s no blowback to getting away with it.
Even theologically, deontological ethics reduces to consequentialist ones. You can’t go up to someone and say “You’re going to Hell if you don’t X, Y, or Z.” If that person has no desire to avoid Hell, that argument will have no effect on them; it’s essentially meaningless. In every day life, people fear reprisal for not sufficiently conforming to the prevailing values and attitudes. When you see cracks bleed through the value systems are the seams, IMO it’s less about individuals being corrupted by some influence. You’re seeing their real values of naked self-interest at work trying to quickly snatch something for the present moment.
I rather believe something like the converse - most instances of what we consider "hypocrisy" are actually mostly tradeoffs between values, perhaps more specifically outwardly displayed ones and embarrassing/"naked self-interest" ones that are kept concealed. I don't think "naked self-interest" is a clearly delineated, distinct category of values anyway.
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