site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33101 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It doesn't take a very inelegant patch to say that there's a qualitative difference between something that was sapient and will likely become so if either left alone or given minimal care, versus something that is not, never was, but may become sapient if a large amount of time and resources were to be poured into it.

This addresses my arguments pretty well, but I think you're contorting things by starting with the central definition of a person as a being who is sapient.

Sleeping people are still people, so a person should be "a being who is or recently was sapient."

OK, but dead people are no longer people, so a person should be "a being who is or recently was sapient and will be in the future."

OK, but people in comas are still people, even if the comas last a long time. So a person should be "a being who was ever previously sapient and will be in the future."

People in comas may not wake up, but they're still people. So a person should be "anyone who was previously sapient and may again be sapient".

Do they need to have previously been sapient though? I'd argue that if people came into existence as fully-formed adults, needing only to be woken up, those people would be people even though they have never previously been sapient. So now we're back to square one, "people are any beings which may become sapient." At that point we run into obvious issues like the ones you've mentioned--do we classify random biomass as a person?

I'd prefer to start with an alternate definition: a person is any theoretically sapient being. Most such beings do not and will not ever exist, but I consider it a moral obligation to bring as many of them into existence as possible, so long as existing people aren't harmed too much by this. Sleeping people, people in comas, and dead people are all included by this definition. Do dead people have a right to life? I'd say so, if we could give it to them. Do unborn people (so far nonexistent) have a right to life? Yes, I'd say so. I think we're morally obligated to bring more people into existence to share in our enjoyment of this wonderful life. Going a step further, I think even very miserable people are still better off existing than not. I was one myself for a very long time, and noticed that all the things that caused me the most misery were not actually bad things, but rather the absence of good things, which implies that from an objective standpoint life is far better than the baseline of nonexistence.

A baby has obviously less need for cultivation than a random pile of biomass to become sapient, yet it still needs a great deal more to attain its potential. A sleeping person doesn't.

Somebody in a coma does though, sometimes even more than a baby.

I can't disagree, and you won't find me arguing that my views don't have drawbacks and tradeoffs. Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided, but in this case if it's the parent's doing the deed, I see no principled reason for society to intervene unless we're also rounding up mother's who smoke crack or treat themselves to red wine while pregnant. I still don't see it as major enough to override personal autonomy in such matters, unless society bites the bullet and also punishes the idiots engaging in such obviously dysgenic activities.

Ha, I would be totally down to round people up for that sort of thing as well. In some states (including mine) that sort of behavior is classified as child abuse which I think is the right approach.

I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of temporal discounting, all else being equal, saving a grown adult versus a newborn will incur far lower opportunity costs, and $1000 now is better than $10,000 50 years later in most contexts. If I was confronted with a drowning baby versus an adult, I'd save the adult because they represent a great deal of investment and are already productive.

This is part of what @Blueberry was gesturing towards when he mentioned how helpless babies are. If an adult and baby are both drowning, the former is likely to survive longer without assistance, be harmed less by temporary oxygen deprivation, and be more likely to recover from a longer stay in the water than the baby. If you absolutely had to choose one then I don't think choosing the adult is necessarily the wrong choice (they may have people relying on them at home etc.), but in practice most of the time the baby will be a better choice, and our moral intuitions should ideally guide us towards the best choices in those practical situations.

I get that it's just a thought experiment but I really want to stress that saving the baby would usually be the correct choice.

More importantly, I'm not sure temporal discounting should apply to happiness. Yes, it does apply in our day-to-day decisions, but that's because nothing in real life is guaranteed and we are built accordingly. In real life the choice isn't "one marshmallow right now vs two in ten minutes", it's "99% chance of a marshmallow right now vs. 99-x% chance of a marshmallow in ten minutes", which is further worsened because two marshmallows isn't double as good as one. I think the QALY of the baby and the adult should just be compared directly, taking things like lifespan, expected happiness, etc. into account. Most of the time the baby would come out on top, but maybe if the baby is disabled, or the adult is young and very happy or has lots of people depending on them, then the calculus changes.

If we were to apply temporal discounting to QALYs then we'd have to conclude that people from the past were morally more valuable than we are.

Imagine that, as a doctor, I'm counseling a person with a terminal illness and terrible QOL in two different scenarios:

In one, medical science has stalled, and I can credibly claim that no treatment or cure will ever be found for the condition they're facing, they're doomed to having their remaining life be worse than death with no recourse. In that case, I'd earnestly suggest they opt for euthanasia instead of suffering till the end.

In the other scenario, I've received word that very promising clinical trials are underway, and that there's a greater than even chance that a cure is forthcoming before the patient expects to die. If they can stomach the pain of some period, they have a long and healthy life ahead of them. Why on earth would I encourage them to euthanize themselves? I'd tell them to grit their teeth and pull through, but only because of a credible hope, not because I fetishize extending a life of suffering.

Similarly, I genuinely believe that in the next 10 years we either solve nearly all of our technological and societal problems, or die in the process, with only small odds of a business-as-usual outcome.

The death of an 80 year old man in the 1950s is far less tragic than the death of one in 2028, when it's plausible that we have working senolytic drugs or other therapies.

Sure, and this sounds like the second scenario. There's a credible hope that even very miserable people will become quite happy in a few years. Even if they don't contribute to the Singularity their lives still have value.

I think we're morally obligated to bring more people into existence to share in our enjoyment of this wonderful life. Going a step further, I think even very miserable people are still better off existing than not.

This seems to imply endorsing the Repugnant Conclusion.

I think the Repugnant Conclusion is very overhyped. There's room in this universe for countless quintillions of people, and who knows what will be possible when our understanding of physics is further along. Also I don't think bringing new people into the world actually decreases the others' standard of living. For quite a few reasons (economies of scale, increased specialization, etc.) I think we are all better off when there are more people around.

If miserable people were miserable by definition then I'm not sure I'd want to tile the universe with them, but if we ever get to that point then surely we will have solutions to their problems. As I mentioned though, I don't think miserable people are really all that miserable at all anyways. I think the vast majority of people dealing with terrible situations are quite happy.

The Repugnant Conclusion deviates enough from everything I understand about reality to not seem very insightful or useful to me.

As I mentioned though, I don't think miserable people are really all that miserable at all anyways.

People have tried using this explanation already.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

Moreover, several theorists have suggested that our intuition is misguided by a misapprehension of what it is like to lead a life in Z, i.e., a life that is barely worth living. The idea is that once we realize that such a life is not terrible but perhaps a life not much different from a normal privileged one, the conclusion loses its sting

...

However, this conclusion might not be much of a comfort since there are other impossibility results that do not rely on avoidance of the Repugnant Conclusions as one of its adequacy condition but on avoidance of the intuitively even more unacceptable Very Repugnant Conclusion

People have tried using this explanation already.

Yes, people have tried using all sorts of explanations. The existence of counterarguments doesn't automatically make the original argument wrong. This is especially true when my argument was less "in theory the repugnant conclusion is wrong" and more "In practice the repugnant conclusion seems highly unlikely to ever be relevant or useful." I feel like the Repugnant Conclusion, more than any other thought experiment, directly leads people to make conclusions about real life, and this is highly unwarranted. Whether you think it's true or not has very very little to do with whether the current population of the earth should be increased or decreased.

Still, to the extent that I must pick a repugnant conclusion, the repugnant conclusion seems far more correct than the other conclusions. See Magic9Mushroom's comment on astralcodexten:

If I can’t find any system of axioms that doesn’t do something terrible when extended to infinity,

The philosophers have gotten ahead of you on that one. Surprised you haven't already read it, actually.

https://www.iffs.se/media/2264/an-impossibility-theorem-for-welfarist-axiologies-in-ep-2000.pdf

It's a proof that any consistent system of utilitarianism must either accept the Repugnant Conclusion ("a larger population with very low but positive welfare is better than a small population with very high welfare, for sufficient values of 'larger'"), the Sadistic Conclusion ("it is better, for high-average-welfare populations, to add a small number of people with negative welfare than a larger number with low-but-positive welfare, for sufficient values of 'larger'"), the Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion ("for any population of some number of people and equal utility among all of those people, there is a population with lower average utility distributed unevenly that is better"), or the Oppression Olympics ("all improvement of people's lives is of zero moral value unless it is improvement of the worst life in existence").

If you don't endorse the repugnant conclusion, which of those do you endorse? I'd ordinarily be very sympathetic to arguments along the lines of "all of these thought experiments are just thought experiments, and real ethics in the real world must be more practical" but you're the one trying to constrain me into endorsing a highly theoretical thought experiment, so I expect you to have some kind of answer here, or a good reason why these 29 philosophers are wrong.

Here's another good article, responding to what Scott wrote on the subject. In short, utilitarian attempts to "dodge" one of these conclusions seem to lead to either obvious contradictions or to even worse repugnant conclusions.

If you don't endorse the repugnant conclusion, which of those do you endorse?

The "this is why utilitarianism sucks" conclusion.

my argument was less "in theory the repugnant conclusion is wrong" and more "In practice the repugnant conclusion seems highly unlikely to ever be relevant or useful."

Counterarguments and reductio ad absurdum don't work that way.

If I say "your reasoning implies that all left-handers should be executed", it's not a valid reply to say "well, I'll never be in a position where I have a chance to execute any left-handers". A valid principle applies even to situations that are logically consistent but can't actually happen.

The "this is why utilitarianism sucks" conclusion.

If utilitarianism has any value at all, and it does, it's important to decide what flavor of utilitarianism is most correct. The best way to do that is by taking it to extremes, deciding which extreme sounds most correct, and then extrapolating from there back to normal actually relevant morality. This is because deciding whether to create 1 happy person or increase someone's standard of living by 1% may not be intuitively clear, but imo the answer to the impossibility theorem is pretty clear, and that can inform our decisions on more proximate questions, though it shouldn't determine them.

I'm not a pure utilitarian--I'd probably be closest to being an ethical intuitionist--but I think we can hone our ethical intuitions by being knowledgeable and consistent about other theories of morality. So I don't think you should just dismiss the thought experiment entirely.

Counterarguments and reductio ad absurdum don't work that way.

If I say "your reasoning implies that all left-handers should be executed", it's not a valid reply to say "well, I'll never be in a position where I have a chance to execute any left-handers". A valid principle applies even to situations that are logically consistent but can't actually happen.

Let me be more clear:

  1. The universe is not designed such that the Repugnant Conclusion will ever matter

  2. If it were, then my moral beliefs would be different than they are.

If my reasoning implies that both left-handers should be executed, and also that left-handers don't exist, "I'll never be in a position to execute left-handers" absolutely is a valid response to any complaints against the "left-handers should be executed" conclusion. Any scenario where I'm convinced that left-handers do exist is also one where I rethink whether they should be executed. Our moral beliefs are shaped by reality, so my beliefs about reality are relevant to my moral beliefs.

If you look at what I actually said though, I never said the repugnant conclusion etc. was totally irrelevant, just that it was mostly irrelevant. I did answer your question pretty quickly. The repugnant conclusion just seems particularly nefarious to me because people take it way beyond where any thought experiment should be taken, directly porting conclusions back to reality despite the numerous differences between the hypothetical and reality.

If my reasoning implies that both left-handers should be executed, and also that left-handers don't exist,

If your reasoning implies that left-handers don't exist because the concept is logically impossible, you don't have to care whether it tells you to execute them. But there's a difference between "it's logically impossible" and "it doesn't exist in practice".

Sure. My original response did include:

If miserable people were miserable by definition then I'm not sure I'd want to tile the universe with them, but if we ever get to that point then surely we will have solutions to their problems.

So I feel I was pretty clear about my position.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats