You're failing to make any distinction between what people *think* is right, and what actually *is* right. Surely, at least for empirical or mathematical facts, what people *think* is right may not actually be right. I hope you agree that might cannot make 2+2=5.
Nor can might make Biblical stories right - which a large segment of the world population believes to be closely tied to their values. If that segment of the population understood that their fables are factually incorrect, then at least some of their moral values would change. Factually, there was not an entity called God that banned humans from wearing mixed fabrics or doing many other things. If those who avoid wearing mixed fabrics knew this, then their moral value against wearing mixed fabrics (and doing many other things) would likely change.
Values depend on facts. If a person's values depend on false factual beliefs, then their values are wrong. Values can be wrong.
Values can be wrong for other reasons than that, too. Generally speaking, what a person values after lengthy reflection and consideration, is more legitimate than what they valued initially. What you *really* value is what you would value if you considered it until you reached reflective equilibrium. Any value that you wouldn't hold in a state of reflective equilibrium, is wrong. (Just as any fact you wouldn't hold in a state of reflective equilibrium - having seen all relevant evidence - is wrong).
Reaching a state of reflective equilibrium with respect to values involves learning more facts, resolving conflicts between values (a person can hold two mutually incompatible values without realizing it, but once realizing it they would want to resolve this tension) and trying to form justifications for why they ought to value a certain thing, referring back to facts, consequences, and more fundamental values.
> If we interpret “makes right” to be “causes more to believe in a certain view of what’s right”
But we cannot interpret it that way. To make something right is different from to cause people to believe it is right, because people can be wrong about what is right. That's the distinction you failed to make.
Your title went even further and said "might makes the *best* right." Here you're applying your own endorsement. Historically, the mighty have very often promoted falsehoods, often deliberately to serve their interests, and the fact of their might never made the falsehoods right. The Earth isn't flat, Lysenkoism is wrong, cigarettes do not soothe your throat, magical religious myths are wrong.
It’s the other way around. Might is physical. Therefore, physical truths determine which organisms are mighty. These, in turn, depend on mathematical truths. An organism whose might is designed relying on the truth of the statement that two plus two make five won’t be mighty.
This is about what is actually true, of course. Just because your might depends on physical or mathematical truths doesn’t mean you need to have a human brain which believes those truths. You can use your might to torture others till they see five fingers where there are four, and then your might will dictate that the “social truth” is that two plus two make five.
Well, in an almost tautological sense you are right; if a creature gains power, the causes of its gain in power must be true statements. Their power, in that sense, depends on the truth.
But it comes with the heavy disclaimer that the agent need not believe or be aware of those true statements, may indeed strongly disbelieve them.
The Catholic church's might relied on the truth of many false statements. That didn't stop it. The false statements have something to do with its decline in modern times, after people started to think and question more. But the church wouldn't have gathered any power in the first place were it not for those falsehoods. The people controlling the Church sincerely believed the falsehoods, and did not merely cynically impose them on others.
To a certain extent, accurate knowledge of truth is necessary for power. Perhaps an ideal being, of theoretical maximum power given resource constraints, would believe only truths. I'd like that; that would be morally good.
But I think it ultimately has to come down to reflective equilibrium. We believe the truth, not necessarily because it is most effective at helping us get what we want, but because believing the truth *is* part of what we want (even if we're temporarily confused about it).
I agree with both the moral realism and manner of assessing moral statements. There is something inherent in the notion of morality that goes beyond the utilitarian effects of moral beliefs, and to shape "morality" to be primarily adaptive may be to leave behind what is moral. But also RH argues "more adaptive" or "more of might makes right" and he also says "if we interpret....then" so I'm not sure what his real stance is here, how much he'd object to moral realism.
The universal is that adaptation of all kinds is painful. Every item on your list.
Over the last 500 years, and especially since WWII, the western economies have been able to sand off the rough edges of life and mostly keep things like hunger, poverty, crime, disease, ecological degradation, rights violations, and war at a minimum. This relative comfort is not the norm for the vast majority of human existence, nor for life on Earth generally.
Which makes me wonder: Is it possible to get back to rapid adaptation while we maintain this comfortable life we've gotten used to?
Now Malthus might say: We can enjoy being fat and slow for the time being, but eventually we will bump into *some* hard boundary that will make us uncomfortable again, and this will force us back into adaptive mode. I can see why people would want to defer that.
The one place where we seem to still welcome ruthless competition (and "might makes right") is the economy. Maybe that is our out. If a system like futarchy can bring cultural issues into the economic sphere, that could increase our rate of adaptation.
Ah, this connects the dots for me. Economic systems are one of the last areas where we tolerate significant diversity and welcome robust competition and "might makes right" – so that is the likeliest vector by which adaptation will occur. Makes sense.
> We call those who win in war, population, and economic competitions “mighty”, and their behaviors, including their morals, tend to be more adaptive.
Is this so? It seems that those who win in war and economic competitions are somewhat like the elite, which seem to me to be maladaptive (using the definition of adaptive: high fertility). If we only look at at winning in population, the claim looks (to me) to be
- call those who win in population mighty
- call high fertility/winning in population adaptive
-> mighty are more adaptive (and thus might makes the best right),
which seems to just come down to the claim "high fertility is best", and has little to do with other forms of might/lore/etc.
Can you give a pointer for why those who win in war, population, and economic competitions tend to be more adaptive, and what adaptive means other than just high fertility?
The most lasting way to change culture is to introduce new technology to it. Technology has been a stronger force than war. There's a big qualitative difference between hunter-gatherer cultures/religions and farming cultures/religions, because of lifestyle differences caused by farming technology. Religion adapts to the technology.
Hunter-gatherer tribes constantly warred with each other, but this resulted in a hundred thousand years of stagnant cultural evolution. The evolution only came through the adoption of new technology (farming).
That depends a lot on how you classify forces. For example, using the categorization of forces into "human DNA evolution", "cultural evolution" and "other evolution", it seems likely that cultural evolution is the biggest force favoring more cultural evolution.
Prestige-bias seems different from conformist bias - lumping these together is a bit odd. Anti-conformist bias gets no mention - nor does brilliance bias. Overall, this seems like a bit of a simplified picture.
Love the premise / definitional move in the second sentence and the original angle, but find the base teeter-tottery. So many ifs! If we don't develop enough robots / AI to lift the economy; if we don't eventually find a way to increase fertility; if the pattern of social and economic collapse happens according to these projections; if being adaptive in one decade means being adaptive in the next; if one way of being adaptive in one area doesn't produce maladaptive behavior in another area; if the real reason for dropping fertility rates is really cultural, rather than economic.....Why not just: the greatest threat to civilization is the disparate rates of development in the hard and social sciences? The idea that we threaten our own civilization with advanced weapons because on a social level, we're just too primitive to stop killing each other? Very unoriginal, I know, and yawn-worthy, but that doesn't mean it's not true. It's a rational conclusion because of the much greater number of factors / complexity involved with the social sciences when compared to the hard. Why isn't the big thing we should be doing to prevent civilizational collapse trying to develop AI to help us model the complexity of the interactions involved in economics, politics, law, psychology, sociology etc?
All the suppositions that threaten my claim also threaten yours, while yours are also dependent on very specific contingencies. You are making a specific prediction and pairing it with an original, insightful solution, while I'm making an unoriginal, very general observation--but for that very reason, my claim is more probable.
A combined analysis of "Unleash Capitalism" and "Might Makes the Best Right" raises the hypothesis that it is possible for an AI transhumanist richest man, utilizing Malthusian concepts in the practice of social economics, to achieve a successful outcome for the Immortalist Society idea. To what end? There must be content in the self-aware intelligence of the being that can, in some way, attribute something functioning as a quest for meaning. Does it matter to be "immortal" if there is no meaning? Does it matter if you are the richest man on Earth if you have no actual quest for meaning in your practice as a living self-aware intelligent being? Just because an individual mutation could be an insipient existential success means nothing in the biological terms of most that is understood scientifically about life as a dynamic process of learning, adaptation, and growth. In my working hypothesis based on the science and history I am associated with in my family history, the panspermia origins of life on Earth and meaning in this are recited annually in the texts found accounting for the "tout saints" holidays correlating with the global Eco disaster when the world was carpet-bombed by meteors from a passing comet 13,000 years ago during that ancient ceremony demarcated by the zenith of the constellation of the Pleiades in the shoulder of Taurus (about the 30th of October). Since then, symbols of the Judgment Day flood and fire with references to the horns of Taurus, the Bull, have always been around the planet associated with this "Halloween" holiday in human cultures dating back thousands of years in many locations around this globe. Why is it we can identify in our quest for meaning with such depths of essay around death and destruction, and this same does not present in most of our cultural history for newborn babies and spring flowers? Given the instincts of the natural history evolution of a carnivorous primate, the first story is how Kane killed his brother in jealousy, Able hiding this fact as much as he could from discovery by his God above. We need to pay more attention to that the applied science of Immortalism is a science of rebirth and renewal of the vitality of our lives, not a mindset in mortality referenced history to some thoughtless lore about death's ultimate power, and winning chaos over all the orderly processes known to life. The meaning of our Immortalist practice of a science is connected to how, facing impossible odds, life travels across unfathomable distances to more life, learning, and growing.
You're failing to make any distinction between what people *think* is right, and what actually *is* right. Surely, at least for empirical or mathematical facts, what people *think* is right may not actually be right. I hope you agree that might cannot make 2+2=5.
Nor can might make Biblical stories right - which a large segment of the world population believes to be closely tied to their values. If that segment of the population understood that their fables are factually incorrect, then at least some of their moral values would change. Factually, there was not an entity called God that banned humans from wearing mixed fabrics or doing many other things. If those who avoid wearing mixed fabrics knew this, then their moral value against wearing mixed fabrics (and doing many other things) would likely change.
Values depend on facts. If a person's values depend on false factual beliefs, then their values are wrong. Values can be wrong.
Values can be wrong for other reasons than that, too. Generally speaking, what a person values after lengthy reflection and consideration, is more legitimate than what they valued initially. What you *really* value is what you would value if you considered it until you reached reflective equilibrium. Any value that you wouldn't hold in a state of reflective equilibrium, is wrong. (Just as any fact you wouldn't hold in a state of reflective equilibrium - having seen all relevant evidence - is wrong).
Reaching a state of reflective equilibrium with respect to values involves learning more facts, resolving conflicts between values (a person can hold two mutually incompatible values without realizing it, but once realizing it they would want to resolve this tension) and trying to form justifications for why they ought to value a certain thing, referring back to facts, consequences, and more fundamental values.
I am speaking to one issue, and not speaking to another issue you care about. That's not the same as "failing to make a distinction."
You said:
> If we interpret “makes right” to be “causes more to believe in a certain view of what’s right”
But we cannot interpret it that way. To make something right is different from to cause people to believe it is right, because people can be wrong about what is right. That's the distinction you failed to make.
Your title went even further and said "might makes the *best* right." Here you're applying your own endorsement. Historically, the mighty have very often promoted falsehoods, often deliberately to serve their interests, and the fact of their might never made the falsehoods right. The Earth isn't flat, Lysenkoism is wrong, cigarettes do not soothe your throat, magical religious myths are wrong.
Both definitions are coherent.
> I hope you agree that might cannot make 2+2=5.
It’s the other way around. Might is physical. Therefore, physical truths determine which organisms are mighty. These, in turn, depend on mathematical truths. An organism whose might is designed relying on the truth of the statement that two plus two make five won’t be mighty.
This is about what is actually true, of course. Just because your might depends on physical or mathematical truths doesn’t mean you need to have a human brain which believes those truths. You can use your might to torture others till they see five fingers where there are four, and then your might will dictate that the “social truth” is that two plus two make five.
Well, in an almost tautological sense you are right; if a creature gains power, the causes of its gain in power must be true statements. Their power, in that sense, depends on the truth.
But it comes with the heavy disclaimer that the agent need not believe or be aware of those true statements, may indeed strongly disbelieve them.
The Catholic church's might relied on the truth of many false statements. That didn't stop it. The false statements have something to do with its decline in modern times, after people started to think and question more. But the church wouldn't have gathered any power in the first place were it not for those falsehoods. The people controlling the Church sincerely believed the falsehoods, and did not merely cynically impose them on others.
To a certain extent, accurate knowledge of truth is necessary for power. Perhaps an ideal being, of theoretical maximum power given resource constraints, would believe only truths. I'd like that; that would be morally good.
But I think it ultimately has to come down to reflective equilibrium. We believe the truth, not necessarily because it is most effective at helping us get what we want, but because believing the truth *is* part of what we want (even if we're temporarily confused about it).
I agree with both the moral realism and manner of assessing moral statements. There is something inherent in the notion of morality that goes beyond the utilitarian effects of moral beliefs, and to shape "morality" to be primarily adaptive may be to leave behind what is moral. But also RH argues "more adaptive" or "more of might makes right" and he also says "if we interpret....then" so I'm not sure what his real stance is here, how much he'd object to moral realism.
I am avoiding taking a stance on moral realism here.
The universal is that adaptation of all kinds is painful. Every item on your list.
Over the last 500 years, and especially since WWII, the western economies have been able to sand off the rough edges of life and mostly keep things like hunger, poverty, crime, disease, ecological degradation, rights violations, and war at a minimum. This relative comfort is not the norm for the vast majority of human existence, nor for life on Earth generally.
Which makes me wonder: Is it possible to get back to rapid adaptation while we maintain this comfortable life we've gotten used to?
Now Malthus might say: We can enjoy being fat and slow for the time being, but eventually we will bump into *some* hard boundary that will make us uncomfortable again, and this will force us back into adaptive mode. I can see why people would want to defer that.
The one place where we seem to still welcome ruthless competition (and "might makes right") is the economy. Maybe that is our out. If a system like futarchy can bring cultural issues into the economic sphere, that could increase our rate of adaptation.
Futarchy or more letting capitalism run most everything.
Capitalism if left too much to itself will form into single monopoly and morph into a dictatorship.
Ah, this connects the dots for me. Economic systems are one of the last areas where we tolerate significant diversity and welcome robust competition and "might makes right" – so that is the likeliest vector by which adaptation will occur. Makes sense.
> We call those who win in war, population, and economic competitions “mighty”, and their behaviors, including their morals, tend to be more adaptive.
Is this so? It seems that those who win in war and economic competitions are somewhat like the elite, which seem to me to be maladaptive (using the definition of adaptive: high fertility). If we only look at at winning in population, the claim looks (to me) to be
- call those who win in population mighty
- call high fertility/winning in population adaptive
-> mighty are more adaptive (and thus might makes the best right),
which seems to just come down to the claim "high fertility is best", and has little to do with other forms of might/lore/etc.
Can you give a pointer for why those who win in war, population, and economic competitions tend to be more adaptive, and what adaptive means other than just high fertility?
War has been the strongest force over the last 20Kyrs pushing for cultural evolution. Via the winners cultures and DNA becoming more common.
The most lasting way to change culture is to introduce new technology to it. Technology has been a stronger force than war. There's a big qualitative difference between hunter-gatherer cultures/religions and farming cultures/religions, because of lifestyle differences caused by farming technology. Religion adapts to the technology.
Hunter-gatherer tribes constantly warred with each other, but this resulted in a hundred thousand years of stagnant cultural evolution. The evolution only came through the adoption of new technology (farming).
That depends a lot on how you classify forces. For example, using the categorization of forces into "human DNA evolution", "cultural evolution" and "other evolution", it seems likely that cultural evolution is the biggest force favoring more cultural evolution.
Prestige-bias seems different from conformist bias - lumping these together is a bit odd. Anti-conformist bias gets no mention - nor does brilliance bias. Overall, this seems like a bit of a simplified picture.
RH: In case you haven't seen it, thought this might interest you: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/inside-the-chinese-city-that-said-cash-rewards-brought-a-baby-boom-f8996e24?mod=hp_lead_pos8
I think you’re right. Or might. Whichever gets the last word.
https://kapterev.substack.com/p/might-might-make-right
Passionate, eloquent, but confused.
Love the premise / definitional move in the second sentence and the original angle, but find the base teeter-tottery. So many ifs! If we don't develop enough robots / AI to lift the economy; if we don't eventually find a way to increase fertility; if the pattern of social and economic collapse happens according to these projections; if being adaptive in one decade means being adaptive in the next; if one way of being adaptive in one area doesn't produce maladaptive behavior in another area; if the real reason for dropping fertility rates is really cultural, rather than economic.....Why not just: the greatest threat to civilization is the disparate rates of development in the hard and social sciences? The idea that we threaten our own civilization with advanced weapons because on a social level, we're just too primitive to stop killing each other? Very unoriginal, I know, and yawn-worthy, but that doesn't mean it's not true. It's a rational conclusion because of the much greater number of factors / complexity involved with the social sciences when compared to the hard. Why isn't the big thing we should be doing to prevent civilizational collapse trying to develop AI to help us model the complexity of the interactions involved in economics, politics, law, psychology, sociology etc?
I see so many ifs in your claim that the "greatest threat to civilization is the disparate rates of development in the hard and social sciences?"
All the suppositions that threaten my claim also threaten yours, while yours are also dependent on very specific contingencies. You are making a specific prediction and pairing it with an original, insightful solution, while I'm making an unoriginal, very general observation--but for that very reason, my claim is more probable.
A combined analysis of "Unleash Capitalism" and "Might Makes the Best Right" raises the hypothesis that it is possible for an AI transhumanist richest man, utilizing Malthusian concepts in the practice of social economics, to achieve a successful outcome for the Immortalist Society idea. To what end? There must be content in the self-aware intelligence of the being that can, in some way, attribute something functioning as a quest for meaning. Does it matter to be "immortal" if there is no meaning? Does it matter if you are the richest man on Earth if you have no actual quest for meaning in your practice as a living self-aware intelligent being? Just because an individual mutation could be an insipient existential success means nothing in the biological terms of most that is understood scientifically about life as a dynamic process of learning, adaptation, and growth. In my working hypothesis based on the science and history I am associated with in my family history, the panspermia origins of life on Earth and meaning in this are recited annually in the texts found accounting for the "tout saints" holidays correlating with the global Eco disaster when the world was carpet-bombed by meteors from a passing comet 13,000 years ago during that ancient ceremony demarcated by the zenith of the constellation of the Pleiades in the shoulder of Taurus (about the 30th of October). Since then, symbols of the Judgment Day flood and fire with references to the horns of Taurus, the Bull, have always been around the planet associated with this "Halloween" holiday in human cultures dating back thousands of years in many locations around this globe. Why is it we can identify in our quest for meaning with such depths of essay around death and destruction, and this same does not present in most of our cultural history for newborn babies and spring flowers? Given the instincts of the natural history evolution of a carnivorous primate, the first story is how Kane killed his brother in jealousy, Able hiding this fact as much as he could from discovery by his God above. We need to pay more attention to that the applied science of Immortalism is a science of rebirth and renewal of the vitality of our lives, not a mindset in mortality referenced history to some thoughtless lore about death's ultimate power, and winning chaos over all the orderly processes known to life. The meaning of our Immortalist practice of a science is connected to how, facing impossible odds, life travels across unfathomable distances to more life, learning, and growing.