Things like broken or harmful are inherently values talk. You can only criticise a value by bringing it into conflict with another value you hold. Otherwise, if your values are broken in a way you do not care about, even if you would have cared about it in the past before you adopted your values, you simply will not care by definition. An argument which the party hearing it does not care about is a waste of time since the whole point of moral argument is changing actions, so if it fails to move people to action there is no point to it.
Maybe you agree with all of that, but in that case, please note that that is what people mean when they see your values define you and cannot be questioned. The argument is that perhaps my values are bad in a sense, but if that type of badness is something I do not value, then of course, I won’t care about this defect.
> > that the cultural processes that created your shared values is badly broken
> This is mostly *because* of treating values like preferences as you suggest here in this article; ie arbitrary expressions of taste.
Can you outline the evidence that treating values like arbitrary expressions of taste is the cause of most breakages of cultural processes? Or just provide an example from history?
Is there a subtle distinction here between “values” and “temperament”? The former implies abstract, conceptual thought, and lends itself to viewing human consciousness as tabula rasa. The latter implies inborn traits which are less concepts or ideas and more tendencies or visceral reactions. Sound right?
Some values build society, some values are corrosive to society. We should argue against the corrosive values and support the productive values. Not sure I understand your broadside against ALL values. Is the goal here to soften up values-based resistance to your grand Futarchy vision?
Well, the people only get to choose from whatever is on offer, and if all the major providers are wrong, then there's not much prospect of improvement.
A person‘s values and more importantly, the hierarchy of values, absolutely defines how they will engage the world. Put another way., one’s values are a huge part of what a person is. An individual’s values can change over time and certainly lower level values in the hierarchy should change to better line with a higher more important values.
But if a person wants to be the best person they can be it does seem like a question they should be asking themselves a lot is “what exactly do I value?”
What is a value that most westerners seem to take as obviously true that you think might be wrong? It feels like there’s obvious conclusions if this that you avoid spelling out because they would be so horribly unpopular
As far as I can tell from reading Hanson's blog for over a year, Hanson is concerned with a suite of modern, Western values that lead to below-replacement fertility. I agree with Hanson, that these values do indeed lead to low fertility. My own solution is: decrease wealth inequality. A more egalitarian society promotes fertility for this reason: because in a more egalitarian society, parents are not so preoccupied about how to position themselves so that their children end up in the middle or upper classes. When you are already middle-class and have existential security, its easier to relax and enjoy having a family.
I think the values Robin is referring to are things like delaying marriage, delaying child birth, abortion, secondary education, women having careers, pro lgbt culture, etc. These things he says are culturally maladaptive. Here he calls them "broken and misshapen". And he might be right. But he's stayed short of calling to abolish them for obvious reasons. I don't see how there's any going back on any of these things in western society.
He writes "I need to get you to consider this, i.e., that the cultural processes that created your shared values are badly broken. Wish me luck". I just can't imagine how one could succeed. Alas, good luck, Robin.
Yes, that has been my inference -- "delaying marriage, delaying child birth, abortion, secondary education, women having careers, pro lgbt culture, etc" -- these lead to low fertility, in combination with status striving and other things I discussed in my comments here.
Re: how one could succeed. But in the US, Trump, Maga, Project 2025, current US admin attacks against higher ed, Christian fundamentalists do want to banish these things at least in part. Although, these groups' are not laser-focused on defeating feminist gains, but the larger, complex and only partially interlinked goals of establishing autocracy and maintaining white privilege. I have never seen Hanson write that he himself sees the things in quotes above as culturally maladaptive **except in the context that these values reduce fertility.**. A couple times I've asked Hanson to explain more but he mostly refers me to his prior posts (which help partly but not fully).
I agree that a sort of religious awakening would plausibly do it. But I don't see one coming, and I don't think the current state of christianity is that culturally different from the seculars. I also think Robin would argue fixing fertility in that way doesn't fix cultural drift. So the underlying problem would still be there.
I agree with you that eradicating the political movement called feminism would increase family size. So yes, you are correct. This would especially work if done carefully along with other, obvious social movements such as promoting childbearing as women's main goal and life purpose.
Just because you have identified one solution doesn't mean it is the only solution to a problem and may overlook the negative effects of that solution.
Social change to reduce women's power and agency would increase family size. But, social objection would be fierce to removing men and women's rights to control fertility and choose when to have children.
The opposition to eliminating women's political gains would be intense. For one thing, many men prefer women as equals and as breadwinners. I myself supported a male partner through graduate school and allowed a second partner, my husband of 12 years, to not work for 10 years while he pursued his dream of becoming a novelist. These men were not complaining about feminism. Many men exist like them, especially young college-educated men.
My earlier point to which you responded is simply that there are multiple methods to increase fertility. When Hanson says rethink our values, I am taking him at his word -- let's rethink lots of our values. One American value we could rethink is the acceptance (and even promotion) of wealth inequity and the value of allowing people to use virtually any tool available to accumulate wealth. Check what Bezos, Musk and the other billionaires own and the declining wages of working Americans despite impressive gains in productivity since the 1970s.
The problem is philosophical. Liberalism = disaster. Modern liberalism, in both its classical and progressive forms, is a moral ideology without metaphysics. It treats moral principles as free-floating imperatives, detached from any coherent account of the human good. The “ought” cut off from the “is”
Good point. We agree. For example: liberalism's emphasis on radical individualism and self-interest has eroded the traditional institutions—like family and community—that provide human connection and meaning.
and:
By valuing individual choice above all else, liberalism creates a moral relativism,that can lead to societal decay and nihilism.
and:
modern liberal focus on market liberalization has resulted in vast economic inequality. In practice, this has led to a concentration of wealth at the top, while many are left with limited opportunities for advancement. This has fueled resentment and a sense of abandonment among many citizens.
My most strongly-held values, I developed at ~16. I do actually consider those values a defining feature of "me"; the person I came from before that age was only "me" insofar as it was the type-of-person with the proto-values that turned into my current values, and had the continuity of memory of becoming me with my values. If someone said "hey we're not going to physically or mentally harm you in any way, but we *are* going to randomly and permanently distribute one or two of your most strongly-held values back to human baseline, and you will no longer be the type-of-person to re-develop those values" I'd prefer they just kill me.
Most disconcerting story: my twenties were completely overtaken by attempting to implement utilitarianism.
Giving me moral vertigo, I would have probably been an anti-utilitarian had I been presented with the exact same trolley problem, but in the opposite order.
I pulled the lever to save the greater number. Then when they said "what about pushing a fat man off a bridge" I realized immediately that to be consistent, I'd have to do so, so said yes.
Imagine the first thing I'd heard was pushing the fat man off the bridge. I'd have said "well, I shouldn't do that", then when they said the lever situation I'd say "well, to be consistent, I'd have to say no".
What are your "values" if they are so sensitive to minor variations?
There is no permanent stable "you" (let's call it You-Stable to distinguish between other definitions of "you"). This is usually just trying to sneak in the assumption of a soul.
This leads to question: well, if something isn't "you" unless it's permanent across time, does any type of You-Stable exist?
As best as I can tell, no. There isn't any feature of human experience that is permanent and stable throughout time.
We've just got to let go of the idea of a soul, even if it's dressed up in seeming innocuous wording.
You state that "the cultural processes that created your shared values is badly broken" and that you want to try and get us to reconsider the cultural drift period we seem to be in i.e. shifting our values back to the past. Your argument is in fact, a pretty bold value judgement. To sum up in the very simplest terms what I think your argument is, we need to embrace the future and forget about the values of the past. Unfortunately, I think some cultures (the US in particular) are perfectly willing to embrace the future (AI, widespread surveillance, drone warfare) while cherry-picking values from the past that allow the powerful to gain more power and wealth. So, in a sense, it will be cultural drift for majority (feudalistic like hierarchies propped up by religious and nationalistic fervor) and elitism for a small minority.
A point to raise is that a value creates breakage when misplaced, but is agnostic on its own. Formed due to external and not necessarily attuned forces.
We are facing the limits of a globalized society where values that are ecologically attuned in one cultural space, get exported and diluted with other opposing ones. Values for me are a factor reduction happening at a super individual level of mental models that get validated in specific cultural contexts. We try to capture patterns of collective psyche and behavior via them, but fail to appreciate that the problem is not in values per se (no value in isolation makes more sense than others) but in their out-of-date status in the present / context.
Others raised a similar point, and I think is a right observation: values can be judged objectively due to an external parameter that supersedes or is disconnected from their set.
If a value is judged better/worse than another value, we must have this objective parameter - how can we accomplish this task?
Values are context dependent and serve better or worse dependent on it. But nonetheless they are mental structures, not objective parameters sitting on a continuous scale.
A value can be only ecologically better than another but values make people "broken" only if they are misplaced with respect to their environment.
I strongly agree on this blogpost. I think there is a trend among rationalists that uses and abuses the "utility function of the agent" framing to think about intelligent entities like humans and strong AIs. Yudkowsky's paperclip maximizer and his reflections on optimizers and the orthogonality thesis may have entrenched that idea. I don't know. But the fact is that the "utility function" is not a good description of reality, at least for humans. Values and preferences are not carved in stone and, as pointed out in the post, it's not a flaw, it's important, it's a chance. A chance to evolve, to get smarter, to actualize towards a better world model.
Let's start with "In fact, however, you are not your values." Calling this "overconfident" seems mild. Robin is claiming to have an answer to the ancient question, struggled with by philosophers from Parmenides to Bill Clinton, of what "is" is, what it means to "be".
They struggled because it isn't a philosophical problem (what is?), but a linguistic one. When Aristotle distinguished between potential and actual infinity, and when he distinguished between the way Socrates is a man, and the way a boy is a man, he said we have to stop and think what we really mean in each of the different cases we use the word /εἶναι/ ("is"), and then talk about that instead. You could say that Aristotle was trying to prevent Heidegger. I also think of the language e-prime, which is ordinary English, plus the rule that you should avoid using the word "is" any time that you can expand it into the justification for it. Instead of writing "Scrooge was a miser", write "Scrooge wouldn't heat the office in winter". Instead of writing "You are your values" (the positive case, which we must understand before negating it), write... what? What would "you are your values" mean?
When we say there "are" three apples on the table, "are" doesn't mean quite the same thing as when we say there "are" an infinite number of integers. The first "are", Aristotle argued, was arithmetic; the second "are" is beyond physics. When we say "you are not your values", we're doing metaphysics. Which literally means, We're talking non-sense.
When Robin says "there was a before time, when you existed but had not yet embraced such values", that requires a Platonist metaphysics in which you have an eternal, unchanging essence. This is not just non-sense, but nonsense. We empirically do not have eternal unchanging essences. We are changing collections of atoms. I'm confident that Robin believes that. We develop values over time, in the same way we develop the rest of our selves: iteratively, by our bootstraps.
If you want to convince me that I "am not" my values, you need to give an operational definition of "am" (is) that explains how that cashes out in reality.
I think Robin has done that implicitly. It seems he's saying that I shouldn't be totally committed to my values, and should instead be committed to something /else/, so I can decide whether my "values" are still helping me achieve my <insert something else here>.
That something else sounds an awful lot like a value to me. And so it circles back to that same Platonist / Rationalist metaphysics of eternal essences.
What we need to do is to escape from the Rationalist (and old-school Yudkowskian, I haven't read his recent stuff) view of values as /axioms/, the unchanging and unquestionable foundations of systems of belief, which goes together with belief in unchanging essences. What's needed isn't a new layer of metaphysics to give us meta-values, so we can fight over those instead of just boring old non-transcendent earthly values. What's needed is… SCIENCE!
No; really. Empirical science can be operationally defined in one sentence: One becomes an empirical scientist when one refuses to consider probabilities of zero, or probabilities of one. David Hume had it right; but it's a feature, not a bug.
The first time this was proposed, AFAIK, was in Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620). The first time the rationale for it was explained at length was in Sprat (1667). The rationale was that the European population had just been literally decimated in one generation by people claiming absolute certainty about their beliefs, so everybody should stop pretending that the real world was like geometry, in which you could prove things absolutely and for all eternity; and everybody should agree not to kill people for disagreeing with them.
Then there is no need for meta-values beyond our values, to consult when our values get corrupted. We just have to keep interrogating our values. And we /can do that/, as empiricists, because when you tag your values with certainties (probabilities) greater than zero and less than one, then you can optimize them /relative to each other/ by updating them iteratively, using energy relaxation. This is literally circular reasoning; but circular reasoning with probabilities greater than zero and less than one /works/, as is proven every time somebody trains a deep neural network. Axioms are what make people mass-murder each other, and empiricists don't need axioms.
There is still the technical problem that without /any/ values or axioms, you can't discern Heaven from Hell. That is, if one set of values is coherent and self-consistent, the complete opposite system, which puts, e.g, high value on pain and a negative value on happiness, is also coherent and self-consistent. There are examples from human history in which large subsets of cultural values have been thus inverted, and insulated from the rest of the values by clever Rational sophistry.
But this is only a "problem" because we have a wide variety of pleasures and pains built into us. If we had no qualia, Hell would be as good as Heaven! But with them, we can already rule out or improve on many existing value systems, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, which include some variation on the belief that death is better than life. This ever-popular piece of "wisdom" corrupts vast regions of those ideologies' values into reducing pleasure and increasing pain.
The first system for building a culture along these lines, worked out over the next few hundred years after the American Revolution, was liberal democracy, with its complete toolkit of free speech, free markets, free debate, toleration, and some form of highly-distributed decision-making democracy (though not necessarily one-person one-vote). I personally consider the highest degree of human flourishing in history to be exemplified by Athens, Venice before the Libro d'Oro, parts of Italy in the 14th century, the Netherlands after that, then the US, and then Europe. Many societies have been more-pleasant from time-to-time, but systems without some liberty of thought and trade have never sustained the development of empirical knowledge about the world. Increase of flourishing requires increase of knowledge, requires increase of technology, requires liberty of thought and of action. Liberal democracy is thus the only framework we know of within which some people can, at some times, see the world as it is rather than as they want it to be.
When one solution develops independently, multiple times, and succeeds dramatically better than all others, I am tempted to call it "the" solution. I certainly see no reason to give up on it yet, though I think we still need to trim out the remaining Platonist / Christian / Hegelian idealism.
I don't think Robin disagrees with me about liberal democracy being a good thing. He focuses on its common failure mode, which is necessary to stop it from failing. But someone reading Robin's recent posts on cultural drift could emphasize some things more and some things less, and end up envisioning something more like Imperial China, also without technically disagreeing with Robin. Imperial China was also impressive, and a better place to live than most, but IMHO not as nice as what we still have.
Things like broken or harmful are inherently values talk. You can only criticise a value by bringing it into conflict with another value you hold. Otherwise, if your values are broken in a way you do not care about, even if you would have cared about it in the past before you adopted your values, you simply will not care by definition. An argument which the party hearing it does not care about is a waste of time since the whole point of moral argument is changing actions, so if it fails to move people to action there is no point to it.
Maybe you agree with all of that, but in that case, please note that that is what people mean when they see your values define you and cannot be questioned. The argument is that perhaps my values are bad in a sense, but if that type of badness is something I do not value, then of course, I won’t care about this defect.
Well, yes, but I am also not evolution's values.
I am a misaligned mesa-optimiser, yes, but I do not want to become aligned.
> that the cultural processes that created your shared values is badly broken
This is mostly *because* of treating values like preferences as you suggest here in this article; ie arbitrary expressions of taste.
There's a lot of literature here to fight that strand of thought.
Most notably Alastair McIntyre's "After Virtue", or Charles Taylor's "What is human agency?".
We also wrote a paper on this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10636
Oh—Taylor looks really interesting. Thanks for the pointer!
> > that the cultural processes that created your shared values is badly broken
> This is mostly *because* of treating values like preferences as you suggest here in this article; ie arbitrary expressions of taste.
Can you outline the evidence that treating values like arbitrary expressions of taste is the cause of most breakages of cultural processes? Or just provide an example from history?
Is there a subtle distinction here between “values” and “temperament”? The former implies abstract, conceptual thought, and lends itself to viewing human consciousness as tabula rasa. The latter implies inborn traits which are less concepts or ideas and more tendencies or visceral reactions. Sound right?
Some values build society, some values are corrosive to society. We should argue against the corrosive values and support the productive values. Not sure I understand your broadside against ALL values. Is the goal here to soften up values-based resistance to your grand Futarchy vision?
This statement, while not incorrect, is overly general. Aztec values build Aztec society, Christian values built Christian society.
Let’s start with ours.
“Argue against the corrosive values and support the productive values”
Who decides which are which? By what criteria?
In a democratic republic, the idea is that the people decide by means of elected representatives.
Well, the people only get to choose from whatever is on offer, and if all the major providers are wrong, then there's not much prospect of improvement.
As if “the people” would know
Yikes! This elitist disdain for democracy is a perfect example of a value corrosive to the liberal order of our society.
Good luck.
A person‘s values and more importantly, the hierarchy of values, absolutely defines how they will engage the world. Put another way., one’s values are a huge part of what a person is. An individual’s values can change over time and certainly lower level values in the hierarchy should change to better line with a higher more important values.
But if a person wants to be the best person they can be it does seem like a question they should be asking themselves a lot is “what exactly do I value?”
What is a value that most westerners seem to take as obviously true that you think might be wrong? It feels like there’s obvious conclusions if this that you avoid spelling out because they would be so horribly unpopular
Wealth inequality is bad (false)
Equality/equity (false)
Diversity, equity and inclusion (false)
All men are created equal (false)
The first 3 are hardly universal western values that the vast majority of westerners hold. I don't think that's what Robin is talking about
Um…since the Enlightenment, liberalism has been by far the dominant ideology and equality is indeed the 1st commandment of this “ought-only” ideology
As far as I can tell from reading Hanson's blog for over a year, Hanson is concerned with a suite of modern, Western values that lead to below-replacement fertility. I agree with Hanson, that these values do indeed lead to low fertility. My own solution is: decrease wealth inequality. A more egalitarian society promotes fertility for this reason: because in a more egalitarian society, parents are not so preoccupied about how to position themselves so that their children end up in the middle or upper classes. When you are already middle-class and have existential security, its easier to relax and enjoy having a family.
I think the values Robin is referring to are things like delaying marriage, delaying child birth, abortion, secondary education, women having careers, pro lgbt culture, etc. These things he says are culturally maladaptive. Here he calls them "broken and misshapen". And he might be right. But he's stayed short of calling to abolish them for obvious reasons. I don't see how there's any going back on any of these things in western society.
He writes "I need to get you to consider this, i.e., that the cultural processes that created your shared values are badly broken. Wish me luck". I just can't imagine how one could succeed. Alas, good luck, Robin.
Yes, that has been my inference -- "delaying marriage, delaying child birth, abortion, secondary education, women having careers, pro lgbt culture, etc" -- these lead to low fertility, in combination with status striving and other things I discussed in my comments here.
Re: how one could succeed. But in the US, Trump, Maga, Project 2025, current US admin attacks against higher ed, Christian fundamentalists do want to banish these things at least in part. Although, these groups' are not laser-focused on defeating feminist gains, but the larger, complex and only partially interlinked goals of establishing autocracy and maintaining white privilege. I have never seen Hanson write that he himself sees the things in quotes above as culturally maladaptive **except in the context that these values reduce fertility.**. A couple times I've asked Hanson to explain more but he mostly refers me to his prior posts (which help partly but not fully).
I agree that a sort of religious awakening would plausibly do it. But I don't see one coming, and I don't think the current state of christianity is that culturally different from the seculars. I also think Robin would argue fixing fertility in that way doesn't fix cultural drift. So the underlying problem would still be there.
The evidence doesn’t support your ‘solution’. The problem is feminism and the feminization of culture.
I agree with you that eradicating the political movement called feminism would increase family size. So yes, you are correct. This would especially work if done carefully along with other, obvious social movements such as promoting childbearing as women's main goal and life purpose.
Just because you have identified one solution doesn't mean it is the only solution to a problem and may overlook the negative effects of that solution.
Social change to reduce women's power and agency would increase family size. But, social objection would be fierce to removing men and women's rights to control fertility and choose when to have children.
The opposition to eliminating women's political gains would be intense. For one thing, many men prefer women as equals and as breadwinners. I myself supported a male partner through graduate school and allowed a second partner, my husband of 12 years, to not work for 10 years while he pursued his dream of becoming a novelist. These men were not complaining about feminism. Many men exist like them, especially young college-educated men.
My earlier point to which you responded is simply that there are multiple methods to increase fertility. When Hanson says rethink our values, I am taking him at his word -- let's rethink lots of our values. One American value we could rethink is the acceptance (and even promotion) of wealth inequity and the value of allowing people to use virtually any tool available to accumulate wealth. Check what Bezos, Musk and the other billionaires own and the declining wages of working Americans despite impressive gains in productivity since the 1970s.
The problem is philosophical. Liberalism = disaster. Modern liberalism, in both its classical and progressive forms, is a moral ideology without metaphysics. It treats moral principles as free-floating imperatives, detached from any coherent account of the human good. The “ought” cut off from the “is”
Good point. We agree. For example: liberalism's emphasis on radical individualism and self-interest has eroded the traditional institutions—like family and community—that provide human connection and meaning.
and:
By valuing individual choice above all else, liberalism creates a moral relativism,that can lead to societal decay and nihilism.
and:
modern liberal focus on market liberalization has resulted in vast economic inequality. In practice, this has led to a concentration of wealth at the top, while many are left with limited opportunities for advancement. This has fueled resentment and a sense of abandonment among many citizens.
My most strongly-held values, I developed at ~16. I do actually consider those values a defining feature of "me"; the person I came from before that age was only "me" insofar as it was the type-of-person with the proto-values that turned into my current values, and had the continuity of memory of becoming me with my values. If someone said "hey we're not going to physically or mentally harm you in any way, but we *are* going to randomly and permanently distribute one or two of your most strongly-held values back to human baseline, and you will no longer be the type-of-person to re-develop those values" I'd prefer they just kill me.
Convince lesbians to have more IVF.
Most disconcerting story: my twenties were completely overtaken by attempting to implement utilitarianism.
Giving me moral vertigo, I would have probably been an anti-utilitarian had I been presented with the exact same trolley problem, but in the opposite order.
I pulled the lever to save the greater number. Then when they said "what about pushing a fat man off a bridge" I realized immediately that to be consistent, I'd have to do so, so said yes.
Imagine the first thing I'd heard was pushing the fat man off the bridge. I'd have said "well, I shouldn't do that", then when they said the lever situation I'd say "well, to be consistent, I'd have to say no".
What are your "values" if they are so sensitive to minor variations?
There is no permanent stable "you" (let's call it You-Stable to distinguish between other definitions of "you"). This is usually just trying to sneak in the assumption of a soul.
This leads to question: well, if something isn't "you" unless it's permanent across time, does any type of You-Stable exist?
As best as I can tell, no. There isn't any feature of human experience that is permanent and stable throughout time.
We've just got to let go of the idea of a soul, even if it's dressed up in seeming innocuous wording.
You state that "the cultural processes that created your shared values is badly broken" and that you want to try and get us to reconsider the cultural drift period we seem to be in i.e. shifting our values back to the past. Your argument is in fact, a pretty bold value judgement. To sum up in the very simplest terms what I think your argument is, we need to embrace the future and forget about the values of the past. Unfortunately, I think some cultures (the US in particular) are perfectly willing to embrace the future (AI, widespread surveillance, drone warfare) while cherry-picking values from the past that allow the powerful to gain more power and wealth. So, in a sense, it will be cultural drift for majority (feudalistic like hierarchies propped up by religious and nationalistic fervor) and elitism for a small minority.
A point to raise is that a value creates breakage when misplaced, but is agnostic on its own. Formed due to external and not necessarily attuned forces.
We are facing the limits of a globalized society where values that are ecologically attuned in one cultural space, get exported and diluted with other opposing ones. Values for me are a factor reduction happening at a super individual level of mental models that get validated in specific cultural contexts. We try to capture patterns of collective psyche and behavior via them, but fail to appreciate that the problem is not in values per se (no value in isolation makes more sense than others) but in their out-of-date status in the present / context.
Others raised a similar point, and I think is a right observation: values can be judged objectively due to an external parameter that supersedes or is disconnected from their set.
If a value is judged better/worse than another value, we must have this objective parameter - how can we accomplish this task?
Values are context dependent and serve better or worse dependent on it. But nonetheless they are mental structures, not objective parameters sitting on a continuous scale.
A value can be only ecologically better than another but values make people "broken" only if they are misplaced with respect to their environment.
I strongly agree on this blogpost. I think there is a trend among rationalists that uses and abuses the "utility function of the agent" framing to think about intelligent entities like humans and strong AIs. Yudkowsky's paperclip maximizer and his reflections on optimizers and the orthogonality thesis may have entrenched that idea. I don't know. But the fact is that the "utility function" is not a good description of reality, at least for humans. Values and preferences are not carved in stone and, as pointed out in the post, it's not a flaw, it's important, it's a chance. A chance to evolve, to get smarter, to actualize towards a better world model.
Damn, shit just got philosophical.
Let's start with "In fact, however, you are not your values." Calling this "overconfident" seems mild. Robin is claiming to have an answer to the ancient question, struggled with by philosophers from Parmenides to Bill Clinton, of what "is" is, what it means to "be".
They struggled because it isn't a philosophical problem (what is?), but a linguistic one. When Aristotle distinguished between potential and actual infinity, and when he distinguished between the way Socrates is a man, and the way a boy is a man, he said we have to stop and think what we really mean in each of the different cases we use the word /εἶναι/ ("is"), and then talk about that instead. You could say that Aristotle was trying to prevent Heidegger. I also think of the language e-prime, which is ordinary English, plus the rule that you should avoid using the word "is" any time that you can expand it into the justification for it. Instead of writing "Scrooge was a miser", write "Scrooge wouldn't heat the office in winter". Instead of writing "You are your values" (the positive case, which we must understand before negating it), write... what? What would "you are your values" mean?
When we say there "are" three apples on the table, "are" doesn't mean quite the same thing as when we say there "are" an infinite number of integers. The first "are", Aristotle argued, was arithmetic; the second "are" is beyond physics. When we say "you are not your values", we're doing metaphysics. Which literally means, We're talking non-sense.
When Robin says "there was a before time, when you existed but had not yet embraced such values", that requires a Platonist metaphysics in which you have an eternal, unchanging essence. This is not just non-sense, but nonsense. We empirically do not have eternal unchanging essences. We are changing collections of atoms. I'm confident that Robin believes that. We develop values over time, in the same way we develop the rest of our selves: iteratively, by our bootstraps.
If you want to convince me that I "am not" my values, you need to give an operational definition of "am" (is) that explains how that cashes out in reality.
I think Robin has done that implicitly. It seems he's saying that I shouldn't be totally committed to my values, and should instead be committed to something /else/, so I can decide whether my "values" are still helping me achieve my <insert something else here>.
That something else sounds an awful lot like a value to me. And so it circles back to that same Platonist / Rationalist metaphysics of eternal essences.
What we need to do is to escape from the Rationalist (and old-school Yudkowskian, I haven't read his recent stuff) view of values as /axioms/, the unchanging and unquestionable foundations of systems of belief, which goes together with belief in unchanging essences. What's needed isn't a new layer of metaphysics to give us meta-values, so we can fight over those instead of just boring old non-transcendent earthly values. What's needed is… SCIENCE!
No; really. Empirical science can be operationally defined in one sentence: One becomes an empirical scientist when one refuses to consider probabilities of zero, or probabilities of one. David Hume had it right; but it's a feature, not a bug.
The first time this was proposed, AFAIK, was in Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620). The first time the rationale for it was explained at length was in Sprat (1667). The rationale was that the European population had just been literally decimated in one generation by people claiming absolute certainty about their beliefs, so everybody should stop pretending that the real world was like geometry, in which you could prove things absolutely and for all eternity; and everybody should agree not to kill people for disagreeing with them.
Then there is no need for meta-values beyond our values, to consult when our values get corrupted. We just have to keep interrogating our values. And we /can do that/, as empiricists, because when you tag your values with certainties (probabilities) greater than zero and less than one, then you can optimize them /relative to each other/ by updating them iteratively, using energy relaxation. This is literally circular reasoning; but circular reasoning with probabilities greater than zero and less than one /works/, as is proven every time somebody trains a deep neural network. Axioms are what make people mass-murder each other, and empiricists don't need axioms.
There is still the technical problem that without /any/ values or axioms, you can't discern Heaven from Hell. That is, if one set of values is coherent and self-consistent, the complete opposite system, which puts, e.g, high value on pain and a negative value on happiness, is also coherent and self-consistent. There are examples from human history in which large subsets of cultural values have been thus inverted, and insulated from the rest of the values by clever Rational sophistry.
But this is only a "problem" because we have a wide variety of pleasures and pains built into us. If we had no qualia, Hell would be as good as Heaven! But with them, we can already rule out or improve on many existing value systems, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, which include some variation on the belief that death is better than life. This ever-popular piece of "wisdom" corrupts vast regions of those ideologies' values into reducing pleasure and increasing pain.
The first system for building a culture along these lines, worked out over the next few hundred years after the American Revolution, was liberal democracy, with its complete toolkit of free speech, free markets, free debate, toleration, and some form of highly-distributed decision-making democracy (though not necessarily one-person one-vote). I personally consider the highest degree of human flourishing in history to be exemplified by Athens, Venice before the Libro d'Oro, parts of Italy in the 14th century, the Netherlands after that, then the US, and then Europe. Many societies have been more-pleasant from time-to-time, but systems without some liberty of thought and trade have never sustained the development of empirical knowledge about the world. Increase of flourishing requires increase of knowledge, requires increase of technology, requires liberty of thought and of action. Liberal democracy is thus the only framework we know of within which some people can, at some times, see the world as it is rather than as they want it to be.
When one solution develops independently, multiple times, and succeeds dramatically better than all others, I am tempted to call it "the" solution. I certainly see no reason to give up on it yet, though I think we still need to trim out the remaining Platonist / Christian / Hegelian idealism.
I don't think Robin disagrees with me about liberal democracy being a good thing. He focuses on its common failure mode, which is necessary to stop it from failing. But someone reading Robin's recent posts on cultural drift could emphasize some things more and some things less, and end up envisioning something more like Imperial China, also without technically disagreeing with Robin. Imperial China was also impressive, and a better place to live than most, but IMHO not as nice as what we still have.
Refs:
Francis Bacon, 1620. Novum Organum.
Thomas Sprat, 1667 (mostly written in 1663). History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. London. https://books.google.com/books?id=g30OAAAAQAAJ