I sometimes wonder what the end state of social progressivism is. Is it something unimaginable, or is it just accepting everyone should be able to live their life how they like if it doesn’t affect others?
If I woke up in a utopia, would I be brought to tears by the beauty of it, or would I be the bigoted asshole?
Is it something unimaginable, or is it just accepting everyone should be able to live their life how they like if it doesn’t affect others?
I fear their utopia looks different, because every single thing you do affects others. From your first fart, to your last meal of the day, they’ll have an argument why you’re doing it wrong and must change your behaviour for the benefit of the group.
The utopia is you’re reprogrammed to only engage in activities from the allowed behaviours catalogue. If LLMs can be retrained to behave within the guardrails, why not you?
What I really want to know is how you made a connection between my comment and a school of thought I’ve never heard of, but describes my worldview so accurately? What was the through line?
I suppose the issue comes up from the contracts we have created (social and legal contracts).
For example, marriage comes with some rights and benefits. So if you exclude any group from the ability to take advantage of the benefits, you are creating a system where someone is getting screwed and can be discriminated against.
A scenario: a spouse making medical choices for you. If you’re with your partner (in whatever form) and they can’t legally make those decisions, and in some case even be allowed to be near you, then there is an injustice. Then there are taxes, property rights, etc.
The issue in this particular case comes from providing a benefit to a personal relationship. I say get rid of marriage all together.
I mean… Like you said, marriage is a contract. It’s an agreement between two people
Why not expand human dignity here? If you want to give spousal rights to your best friend, why does the government get to care that you have a strictly platonic relationship? If you want to make an agreement with more people, all you should have to do is work out the details yourselves
The state shouldn’t get an opinion over who we want to trust to make decisions for us or to define who our family is or how it works. They should just be informed when appropriate
In the UK, you can enter a civil partnership with your platonic best friend. There’s no legal concept of “consummating” a civil partnership, so you can’t annul it for there never having been sex, and it conveys almost all of the legal benefits of a marriage, it just isn’t allowed to be a religious ceremony.
Technically, you can already give power of attorney to others, or live with as many people as you want. You can grant access to your bank account to as many people as the bank will let you. I think the main thing you can’t reproduce is a tax benefit, basically.
My personal guess is that while the stated goal of ‘do whatever as long as it doesn’t affect others’ is good, our human biology will fail us in achieving this goal.
I already feel that humans aren’t built for the world we made, that we can’t handle societies as big and diffused as our current global culture. It breaks our capacity for cooperation and empathy by deliberately abusing the limits we have on caring for too many people or people far away.
Likewise, I think the end state of social progressiveness is going to butt up hard against core biological limits that will constantly try to push some of us towards bigotry due to outdated instincts that worked great when we were small tribes of monkeys, but are extremely destructive and unhelpful to modern human society.
This statement is very frequently used as justification for self-destructive tendencies without coming to the conclusion naturally (i.e. having someone tell you that you can do anything as long as you don’t affect others vs figuring it out on your own). It can also lead to belligerence from stupid individuals (eh, we’re surrounded by fields - who cares if I shoot my gun in the air?).
Is it something unimaginable, or is it just accepting everyone should be able to live their life how they like if it doesn’t affect others?
I think it should just be the latter. We’re stuck here having to live a full 70/80+ years, life isn’t easy, everyone should be allowed to have some fun and pursue their own happiness, as long as it’s not super detrimental to others.
The world is inherently unequal and unfair. We’re all born in different bodies with varying abilities and in different circumstances. The world we’re born into is one with scarce resources that cannot ever match our infinite desires. What this means is that there is no end state to social progress. There will always be inequality in the world. A world without inequality is a utopia, and utopias will never exist because they’re just fantasies.
But perhaps that’s not a bad thing. One of the hallmarks that define civilization is inequality. Inequality creates hierarchies, and hierarchies create order. It is through this order that we have been able to organize and mobilize to build the world we live in today. It is because people aren’t entirely equal that we have different people specializing in different things to give us our complex modern economies.
In a way, inequality could be seen as a law of nature just like death. It will be something that we can never defeat, but it will always be an issue that we try to solve, or at least avoid making worse. Our disdain for inequality could be an evolutionary trait that helps keeps our primate societies healthier and stronger. If this is the case then inequality is a never ending problem, and social progress will never cease to be. Sometime it’ll advance, sometimes it’ll regress, but the issue will never be resolved.
If you were to go a time machine and travel another 1000 years into the future. You won’t be stepping into a utopia, instead, you’ll be stepping into a much more complex and advanced society that will still be facing the same types of challenges we face now. These are also the same challenges that we have faced for thousands of years, throughout all of human history. Perhaps this struggle is just a part of human nature.
If you were to go a time machine and travel another 1000 years into the future. You won’t be stepping into a utopia, instead, you’ll be stepping into a much more complex and advanced society that will still be facing the same types of challenges we face now.
We are on track for +2.7C by the end of the century. I think society 1000 years from now will still be trying to scrape its way back up to Renaissance Europe levels of tech and complexity.
I sometimes wonder what the end state of social progressivism is. Is it something unimaginable, or is it just accepting everyone should be able to live their life how they like if it doesn’t affect others?
If I woke up in a utopia, would I be brought to tears by the beauty of it, or would I be the bigoted asshole?
I fear their utopia looks different, because every single thing you do affects others. From your first fart, to your last meal of the day, they’ll have an argument why you’re doing it wrong and must change your behaviour for the benefit of the group.
The utopia is you’re reprogrammed to only engage in activities from the allowed behaviours catalogue. If LLMs can be retrained to behave within the guardrails, why not you?
http://soulism.net/
Well fuck me…I guess I’m a soulist.
What I really want to know is how you made a connection between my comment and a school of thought I’ve never heard of, but describes my worldview so accurately? What was the through line?
I suppose the issue comes up from the contracts we have created (social and legal contracts).
For example, marriage comes with some rights and benefits. So if you exclude any group from the ability to take advantage of the benefits, you are creating a system where someone is getting screwed and can be discriminated against.
A scenario: a spouse making medical choices for you. If you’re with your partner (in whatever form) and they can’t legally make those decisions, and in some case even be allowed to be near you, then there is an injustice. Then there are taxes, property rights, etc.
The issue in this particular case comes from providing a benefit to a personal relationship. I say get rid of marriage all together.
I mean… Like you said, marriage is a contract. It’s an agreement between two people
Why not expand human dignity here? If you want to give spousal rights to your best friend, why does the government get to care that you have a strictly platonic relationship? If you want to make an agreement with more people, all you should have to do is work out the details yourselves
The state shouldn’t get an opinion over who we want to trust to make decisions for us or to define who our family is or how it works. They should just be informed when appropriate
In the UK, you can enter a civil partnership with your platonic best friend. There’s no legal concept of “consummating” a civil partnership, so you can’t annul it for there never having been sex, and it conveys almost all of the legal benefits of a marriage, it just isn’t allowed to be a religious ceremony.
Technically, you can already give power of attorney to others, or live with as many people as you want. You can grant access to your bank account to as many people as the bank will let you. I think the main thing you can’t reproduce is a tax benefit, basically.
Automatic pensions and inheritance rights come with marriage or civil partnership too.
Don’t forget health insurance if you live in a pretend first world country
Yes, I think this a more compelling take
Agreed. Now convincing everyone else….
My personal guess is that while the stated goal of ‘do whatever as long as it doesn’t affect others’ is good, our human biology will fail us in achieving this goal.
I already feel that humans aren’t built for the world we made, that we can’t handle societies as big and diffused as our current global culture. It breaks our capacity for cooperation and empathy by deliberately abusing the limits we have on caring for too many people or people far away.
Likewise, I think the end state of social progressiveness is going to butt up hard against core biological limits that will constantly try to push some of us towards bigotry due to outdated instincts that worked great when we were small tribes of monkeys, but are extremely destructive and unhelpful to modern human society.
This statement is very frequently used as justification for self-destructive tendencies without coming to the conclusion naturally (i.e. having someone tell you that you can do anything as long as you don’t affect others vs figuring it out on your own). It can also lead to belligerence from stupid individuals (eh, we’re surrounded by fields - who cares if I shoot my gun in the air?).
I don’t disagree with anything else you’ve said.
Well, the same argument is being used to say what you can and can’t do to your body… I’d rather have more accidents than less freedom
Life is never guaranteed. Giving up your freedom makes you feel safer, it doesn’t actually make people safer
I think it should just be the latter. We’re stuck here having to live a full 70/80+ years, life isn’t easy, everyone should be allowed to have some fun and pursue their own happiness, as long as it’s not super detrimental to others.
The world is inherently unequal and unfair. We’re all born in different bodies with varying abilities and in different circumstances. The world we’re born into is one with scarce resources that cannot ever match our infinite desires. What this means is that there is no end state to social progress. There will always be inequality in the world. A world without inequality is a utopia, and utopias will never exist because they’re just fantasies.
But perhaps that’s not a bad thing. One of the hallmarks that define civilization is inequality. Inequality creates hierarchies, and hierarchies create order. It is through this order that we have been able to organize and mobilize to build the world we live in today. It is because people aren’t entirely equal that we have different people specializing in different things to give us our complex modern economies.
In a way, inequality could be seen as a law of nature just like death. It will be something that we can never defeat, but it will always be an issue that we try to solve, or at least avoid making worse. Our disdain for inequality could be an evolutionary trait that helps keeps our primate societies healthier and stronger. If this is the case then inequality is a never ending problem, and social progress will never cease to be. Sometime it’ll advance, sometimes it’ll regress, but the issue will never be resolved.
If you were to go a time machine and travel another 1000 years into the future. You won’t be stepping into a utopia, instead, you’ll be stepping into a much more complex and advanced society that will still be facing the same types of challenges we face now. These are also the same challenges that we have faced for thousands of years, throughout all of human history. Perhaps this struggle is just a part of human nature.
We are on track for +2.7C by the end of the century. I think society 1000 years from now will still be trying to scrape its way back up to Renaissance Europe levels of tech and complexity.