By modern morality, do you mean liberalism? The title of this article is a copout. Liberalism is merely being taken to its natural conclusion. Welcome to the world you wanted!
Interesting think piece. I'm not sure I can concur with all your closing paragraph/conclusions, but I'll ponder. Does seem to have a USA-centric flavor, though, much like de Tocqueville in its focus on demonization in politics.
Are you making the case that all parties in our contemporary stew (left, right, whatever) have subscribed to the negative morality formulation? I might buy that, but I'm sure some culture warriors in the current scrum would beg to differ.
Sep 30, 2023·edited Sep 30, 2023Liked by Erik Torenberg
Great piece. The analysis has a Nietzschean feel.
Question—re: "but in many places you can go to jail for saying systemic racism isn’t real." Is this true, or hyperbole? I haven't heard of anything like this.
Canada and the UK don't have the same protections the US has for speech. I haven't seen this specific example but have seen some incredibly egregious ones, like an old lady arrested for silently praying outside an abortion clinic
I think "jail" was hyperbole. But systemic racism deniers have lost their jobs (teachers, librarians, etc) as have systemic racism decriers lost their jobs. Just depends on where you live and what books are being banned in your jurisdiction.
It's boring and not very useful to think of morality in terms of subjective value.
David Deutsch provides a much better definition of morality that is objective: a system that improves error correction.
Seen in this way it's easy to understand how tech innovation gives rise to moral innovation.
TI is better explanations that increase our understanding of the material world, enabling the conversion of resources into wealth, eliminating scarcity, and increasing prosperity.
MI is anything that preserves or enhances the condition that allow for TI. This starts with the source of any and all good explanations, Hss.
Chimps have limited tech and suffer from limited resources. Their morality is might is right. What enables survival, not what enhances better tools for more generalized prosperity.
Hss has 10 commandments that hold Hss live to be very valuable and worthy of protection-- step 1 of ensuring you maximize the good explanations and minimize the bad ones, i.e. maximize error correction.
If we continue on a path of TI, we will continue on a path of MI, an upward and outward spiral.
If we destroy the means of error correction via censorship, dogma, emotional reasoning, pessimism, and degrowth-- we will have moral regression and return to might is right.
Centralized power and its agent of self-preservation and expansion are the enemy of anyone who values morality in the only sense of the word that is worthy of a discussion, ie. error correction.
Is the negativity an artifact of summarising based on what shows up online, like ChatGPT?
On the one hand, it seems like there’s a bias to the negative in what gets attention online. On the other, the desire to summarise leads to thinking about generalised vibes rather than specific people and projects.
It’s true that people orient to opposing different evils, like climate change, business exploiting labour, biased institutions, or worries about stolen elections and public health measures. But is that the end of the story? Can’t we get and assess evidence about which of these things are real?
I think that looking at specific people you might find some positive values. Especially among those doing work to help their communities, much of which is orthogonal to online discourse.
I think there's a germ of a good idea here. Would like to see it expanded.
By modern morality, do you mean liberalism? The title of this article is a copout. Liberalism is merely being taken to its natural conclusion. Welcome to the world you wanted!
Interesting think piece. I'm not sure I can concur with all your closing paragraph/conclusions, but I'll ponder. Does seem to have a USA-centric flavor, though, much like de Tocqueville in its focus on demonization in politics.
Are you making the case that all parties in our contemporary stew (left, right, whatever) have subscribed to the negative morality formulation? I might buy that, but I'm sure some culture warriors in the current scrum would beg to differ.
Great piece. The analysis has a Nietzschean feel.
Question—re: "but in many places you can go to jail for saying systemic racism isn’t real." Is this true, or hyperbole? I haven't heard of anything like this.
Canada and the UK don't have the same protections the US has for speech. I haven't seen this specific example but have seen some incredibly egregious ones, like an old lady arrested for silently praying outside an abortion clinic
I think "jail" was hyperbole. But systemic racism deniers have lost their jobs (teachers, librarians, etc) as have systemic racism decriers lost their jobs. Just depends on where you live and what books are being banned in your jurisdiction.
It's boring and not very useful to think of morality in terms of subjective value.
David Deutsch provides a much better definition of morality that is objective: a system that improves error correction.
Seen in this way it's easy to understand how tech innovation gives rise to moral innovation.
TI is better explanations that increase our understanding of the material world, enabling the conversion of resources into wealth, eliminating scarcity, and increasing prosperity.
MI is anything that preserves or enhances the condition that allow for TI. This starts with the source of any and all good explanations, Hss.
Chimps have limited tech and suffer from limited resources. Their morality is might is right. What enables survival, not what enhances better tools for more generalized prosperity.
Hss has 10 commandments that hold Hss live to be very valuable and worthy of protection-- step 1 of ensuring you maximize the good explanations and minimize the bad ones, i.e. maximize error correction.
If we continue on a path of TI, we will continue on a path of MI, an upward and outward spiral.
If we destroy the means of error correction via censorship, dogma, emotional reasoning, pessimism, and degrowth-- we will have moral regression and return to might is right.
Centralized power and its agent of self-preservation and expansion are the enemy of anyone who values morality in the only sense of the word that is worthy of a discussion, ie. error correction.
Is the negativity an artifact of summarising based on what shows up online, like ChatGPT?
On the one hand, it seems like there’s a bias to the negative in what gets attention online. On the other, the desire to summarise leads to thinking about generalised vibes rather than specific people and projects.
It’s true that people orient to opposing different evils, like climate change, business exploiting labour, biased institutions, or worries about stolen elections and public health measures. But is that the end of the story? Can’t we get and assess evidence about which of these things are real?
I think that looking at specific people you might find some positive values. Especially among those doing work to help their communities, much of which is orthogonal to online discourse.