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The more I think about politics, I always end up coming back to this quote from a very good video (from a very good youtuber!).
I think in most cases, politics are about values. To piggy back off the abortion example. The go to argument surrounding this typically is bodily autonomy, and although one could argue that this isn't really consistent on a factual, legal level. If I were in the room debating a pro-choice person on the issue, here is how it would go.
PC Person
The fetus is not entitled to its mothers body, consider the court case McFall v Shimp: McFall suffered from a life-threatening bone marrow disease and his cousin, Shimp, was a compatible bone marrow donor. Shimp refused to donate bone marrow. McFall requested Shimp be compelled to donate. The Court considered Shimp’s refusal “morally indefensible,” but still ruled in Shimp’s favor, explaining,
“For a society which respects the rights of one individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for another member, is revolting to our hard-wrought concepts of jurisprudence. Forcible extraction of living body tissue causes revulsion to the judicial mind.”
Judith Jarvis Thomson tackles the issues of bodily integrity and moral obligations in her essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson asks us to imagine a famous violinist with a fatal kidney ailment. One day a bunch of music lovers kidnap you and hook your kidneys up to the violinist’s circulatory system. In nine months the violinist will have recovered, but if you disconnect yourself prematurely the violinist will die. Thomson asks, “Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?”
When you drive (have sex), you know there’s a possibility you could crash into someone (conceive). Even when you drive very cautiously (use contraception), there is still a chance of a car accident. Should you be in a car crash in which the victim’s life is at stake, the law does not compel you to donate blood or organs to save the victim. While it would be admirable for you to donate, you are not required to do so."
Me:
"Thats cool. Lets say you, for whatever reason, are a psychopath who enjoys taking children, draining them of their blood, hospitalizing them and or possibly killing. If I was king for a day, and assuming your blood was a match, I would sentence you to life in prison, and then order that your blood be drained and given to the remaining children to save them. Fight Me"
I don't find this to be unreasonable, given that we would already use lethal injection for these kinds of people (also a violation of "bodily autonomy"). Draining someone of their blood would be no less worse than forcefully injecting them.
You are free to think I'm a crazy person, fine. But that's not my main point. The same problem exists for issues like nationalism & immigration. You can scream all day about how immigrants are a net gain to the economy, or how they commit less crime. But a ethno-nationalist will simply go "No, I value the culture and heritage of the green people, and I'd rather them go extinct than to have our way of life polluted by the purples.".
Another explicit example of what im talking about is race. A black person does not vote democrat because they are factually good for the economy (whether or not they are is besides the point). If you asked average black voter to produce a study about specific policies that cite this, they would come up short. Support for democrats comes from the idea of racial solidarity, and the fact that black people value the black race, and would like to advance black interest.
I have no clue how one would even go about resolving this. Morals & values are not empirical - you cant prove bodily autonomy and cultural heritage are good in the same way you can prove what foods are and aren't healthy. These things are based on moral intuitions that are fundamentally subjective. I don't think I could ever change my personal mind on that issue to be completely honest, but on a societal scale, this is obviously not sustainable. There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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