#meta-rationality

[kukkotar]

On bridge building to the stage 5 of adult development

This David Chapman’s short article on our urgent need to build a bridge from stage 4 to stage 5 (of Kegan’s adult development model).

Although written already in 2016, this seems to be very much on point still, and probably, even more urgent. This is absolutely one of my best reads at the beginning of 2020.

https://meaningness.com/metablog/stem-fluidity-bridge?

[malcolmocean]

Simulating Religion

A Christian takes stock of Silicon Valley’s rationalist community

My response:

Sargeant says:

It’s almost as though rationalists view monogamous marriage as something like an outdated technology.

I think it's literally that, at least for many rationalists and others who practice non-monogamy. People preferring having only a single romantic or sexual partner (/at a time) is totally a reasonable thing, but I would view strictly-enforced monogamy as a technology only appropriate to hierarchical patriarchical plough cultures (the article is hosted on plough.com... COINCIDENCE?) ...in other words, yes, as a social technology that is outdated with respect to the contemporary situation, and rapidly becoming more so. At least in some places, that is: like all technology, the future is here but not evenly distributed, and in order for non-monogamy to work at all (let alone *well*) you need a bunch of other cultural knowledge packets.

"plough cultures"? see these excellent articles:

Patriarchy is the Problem (despite the title, this is not just a basic feminist take)

Hoe Cultures: A Type of Non-Patriarchal Society (it builds on the above post and contrasts hoe cultures with plough cultures)

“cultural knowledge packets”? see this excellent book, The Secret of Our Success, which talks about humans as being a species that is addicted to culture.

Another quote from Sargeant’s article:

One thing that frustrated me in my conversation with Altair was the way he treated each person’s values as almost immutable, the way he resisted making normative claims about what we should value. Surely, rationality shouldn’t only help us achieve whatever we happen to want; shouldn’t it also help us shape our desires in accord with truth? According to Altair, this is a contentious issue among rationalists, though he himself has “cheated” by simply making his fundamental goal knowing true things. Though I tried, I could not get him to concede that some of those truths might be moral facts about human purpose.

Mmm, moral realism. It seems clear that there are definitely facts about human purpose, similar to how there are facts about beaver purpose. And one can fail at beaver purpose, eg by building an ineffective dam and having your home wash away. Similarly, one can fail at human purpose, by having a life filled with meaningless suffering.

Morals are, I think, mostly an attempt to universalize one's own culture's "how we do things". There are also facts of how we do things! Like if you're a person from the (fictional) Pashuo tribe where it is customary not to eat eels in spring, and you eat an eel in spring, then you are failing at the Pashuo concept of human purpose! And as The Secret of Our Success makes clear, much of what it is to be a human is stored in memes, not in genes—including our ability to survive at all: without culture, a human or group of humans basically would not survive or thrive in any natural environment. Furthermore, the humans can't just have any culture—they need a culture that is appropriate to the environmental context.

(I'm kind of just thinking out loud here; I won't necessarily agree with what I'm saying tomorrow, or after further reflection.)

This would imply that moral facts, if we want to think of things that way, exist but in a context-sensitive way, relative to the memes of the humans involved. But they are not absolutely relativistic! A sparrow and a beaver have different purposes, and the moral facts of sparrow purpose are different than the moral facts of beaver purpose. Similarly, a human with a particular context may have different moral facts than a human with a different context.

The Christian meta-tribe, of course, somewhat unlike the Pashuo tribe, has a belief that their context is a universal one for humanity (which is kind of oxymoronic since it denies context) and therefore they believe that their moral facts apply to all humans, and that they're therefore universal moral facts about human purpose.

I suppose perhaps there are universal moral facts about human purpose, but we would expect those facts to be somewhat like the universal moral facts about beaver purpose: they are matters of consequence in the real world in which we live. Not matters of hypothetical post-reality consequence.

So empirically investigate-able matters, such as "does my suffering go away if I meditate?" and "does my sense of meaninglessness go away if I go to church?" may have very real consequences in the dimension of moral fact! From the article again:

On this front, Christians can engage those involved in the rationalist project. These atheists don’t live in a “disenchanted” world, but in one where their actions and beliefs have meaning, even eschatological meaning. The shape of their secular hope, the desire for a future ruled by a benevolent intelligence, points towards the inescapable human longing for the kingdom of God.

There is definitely an inescapable human longing for meaning. And there is an assumption among many people (and many peoples) that that meaning will be immutable and objective and eternal and context-free, and will come from some authority.

The Guru Papers says that most humans retain a sort of childish longing for an absolute authority who is benevolent and whose word is law. This sounds like pretty much exactly what Sargeant (the author of the article) is pointing at.

The authors of The Guru Papers point out that this childish longing is going to predictably lead to the destruction of human life on earth. In other words, if that longing is indeed inescapable, then so is our destruction. This may well be. But, if we assume the longing is actually pointing at something deeper, and that we can learn to long for that instead of false promises of absolute meaning and morality, then we might have a shot.

We need to find another way to do meaning, morality, etc, that's neither eternalistic nor nihilistic (like simple moral relativism). The main resource I know that's focusing specifically on this subject is the ebook Meaningness, which I also highly recommend.

FWIW: while to some extent I think it’s reasonable to view the quest for a Friendly AI as being driven from this childish longing for a benevolent authority (as Sargeant does) (well, except for the part where he probably doesn’t think the longing is childish) it also seems to me that the people who are actually working on AI Safety or even just thinking hard about it in their spare time have on some levels a very good grasp of how meaning is neither objective/eternal, nor utterly relative/nihilistic/non-existent, and that this greatly informs their work and the reason why they think it’s important.

More generally, I think that a lot of rationalist thinking is pretty compatible with the viewpoint that I’m speaking from here, and a lot of what isn’t is converging towards it. This is encouraging.