From 574229fa58fba1fefc40bb04c636268312492518 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2020 20:26:10 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] finish "The Feeling Is Mutual" (I think this can basically be published whenever, but I'm not thinking about scheduling now, I need to write "Sexual Dimorphism" in the dying hours of this tragic Sunday) --- content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md | 11 +++++------ 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md b/content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md index 764ac69..9a1eb15 100644 --- a/content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md +++ b/content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ Title: The Feeling Is Mutual Date: 2020-05-01 Category: commentary -Tags: moral theory, symmetry +Tags: morality, symmetry Status: draft > She is clearly a villain—but there is such a thing as a sympathetic villain, and it's not as if our sympathy is a finite resource. It seems like she's hurting herself most of all, and it's just because of the brain poison she was fed [...] I can imagine how I might have turned out the same way if I had been born a few years earlier and read the wrong things in the wrong order. @@ -10,13 +10,12 @@ Status: draft "I can easily imagine being a villain, in a nearby possible world in which my analogue read different books in a different order," is—[or should be](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8bWbNwiSGbGi9jXPS/epistemic-luck)—a deeply unsettling thought. -In all philosophical strictness, a [physicalist](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/) universe such as our own isn't going to have some objective morality that [all agents are compelled to recognize](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PtoQdG7E8MxYJrigu/no-universally-compelling-arguments), but even if there is necessarily _some_ element of subjectivity in that we value sentient life rather than [tiling the universe with diamonds](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/diamond_maximizer/), we usually expect morality to at least [not be completely arbitrary](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RBszS2jwGM4oghXW4/the-bedrock-of-morality-arbitrary): we want to _argue_ that a villain is in the _wrong_ because of _reasons_, rather than simply observing that she has her values, and we have ours, and we label ours "good" and hers "evil" because we're us, even though she places those labels the other way around because she's her. +In all philosophical strictness, a [physicalist](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/) universe such as our own [isn't going to have some objective morality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PtoQdG7E8MxYJrigu/no-universally-compelling-arguments) that all agents are compelled to recognize, but even if there is necessarily _some_ element of subjectivity in that we value sentient life rather than [tiling the universe with diamonds](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/diamond_maximizer/), we usually expect morality to at least [not be completely arbitrary](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RBszS2jwGM4oghXW4/the-bedrock-of-morality-arbitrary): we want to _argue_ that a villain is in the _wrong_ because of _reasons_, rather than simply observing that she has her values, and we have ours, and we label ours "good" and hers "evil" because we're us, even though she places those labels the other way around because she's her. If good and evil aren't arbitrary, but our _understanding_ of good and evil depends on which books we read in what order, and which books we read in what order _does_ seem like an arbitrary historical contingency, then how do we _know_ our sequence of books led us to actually being in the right, when we would have predictably thought otherwise had we encountered the villain's books instead?—how do we break the symmetry? If the villain is at all smart, she should be asking herself the same question. -And that's how I break the moral symmetry: by acknowledging it. I _don't_ think I have fundamentally different _values_ from those whom I [happen to be fighting](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/). I think I happen to _know_ some decision-relevant facts and philosophy that they don't, and I can [trace the causal chain of what I think I know how I think I know it](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence). They see me as complicit with their oppressors, and mine; I see them as _not understanding what I'm trying to do_. +And that's how I break the symmetry: by acknowledging it when my counterparts don't. I _don't_ think I have fundamentally different _values_ from those whom I [happen to be fighting](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/). I think I happen to _know_ some decision-relevant facts and philosophy that they don't, and I can [trace back the causal chain of what I think I know and how I think I know it](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence). They see me as complicit with their oppressors, and mine; I see them as _not understanding what I'm trying to do_. -I'm trying to construct a map that reflects the territory. If this entails some risk of self-fulfilling prophecies, if the act +I'm trying to construct a map that reflects the territory. If this should entail some risk of self-fulfilling prophecies—if some corner of reality is all twisted up such that any attempt to describe that reality would thereby change it (for the map is _part_ of the territory)—then I want a map of how _that_ process works. - -https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ \ No newline at end of file +If the one should see this only as service to our oppressors, then I should happily taste the steel of her [beautiful weapons](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/), if she could only tell me in sufficient detail how describing me as the villain [shortens the length of the message needed to describe her observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length). I'm _listening_. -- 2.17.1