anon_goha said in #4752 1mo ago:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-abstraction
I find Robin Hanson quite good. He has the ability to generate interesting, actually new thoughts, which is a skill that shouldn't be taken for granted these days. He speaks plainly and can cut through bullshit quickly as a result. Even in this tiny blog post, he gets straight to the heart of an issue that we discuss around here often:
> The biggest cultural event of the 20th century was World War II, and the one thing everyone agreed on afterward is that they were all now anti-Nazi. Intellectuals then framed the key Nazi mistake as “social Darwinism”; German military aggression, racism, and genocide were due to Germans seeing themselves as in a fierce competition with other peoples. (Never mind that Hitler didn’t believe in human evolution.) And soon afterward, many decided to choose “post-modernism”.
> So my guess is that Darwinism applied to humans was the key abstraction that elites saw as too threatening to their cherished ideals. A threat big enough to induce them to reject the till-then inspiring vision of finding an integrated abstract analysis of everything important. A vision toward which humanity was making rapid progress.
Darwinism applied to humans is, of course, also called eugenics. Whatever one's thoughts are on the topic, I have not before seen eugenics framed as the high-water mark of abstract reasoning. We typically frame and discuss it as a high-water mark of the 'one true philosophical tradition', especially as opposed to the 'modernism' that Hanson's framing places on the same ladder of 'abstraction'. In other words, I would like to hear opinions on what the actual intellectual tradition is that births eugenics/human darwinism/the law of selection.
To get things started, my opinion is mostly that of the yellow book. Namely, that eugenics is actually one of the oldest pieces of human knowledge, and is not derived so much from abstract reasoning as from "That which before us lies in daily life" which "Is the prime wisdom", to quote Milton. I think this is shown well anthropologically by the yellow book, e.g. Tutsis, Germanic tribes of Tacitus, Nuristanis, or even by Plutarch on Lycurgus. There are countless examples. Furthermore, I agree with the yellow book that because the law of selection is so 'obvious' or close to the naturally aristocratic mode of life, it's actually epistemologically prior to any sort of 'abstraction' that lies on the same thread as 'modernism'. Can anyone steelman Hanson's case?
I find Robin Hanson quite good. He has the ability to generate interesting, actually new thoughts, which is a skill that shouldn't be taken for granted these days. He speaks plainly and can cut through bullshit quickly as a result. Even in this tiny blog post, he gets straight to the heart of an issue that we discuss around here often:
> The biggest cultural event of the 20th century was World War II, and the one thing everyone agreed on afterward is that they were all now anti-Nazi. Intellectuals then framed the key Nazi mistake as “social Darwinism”; German military aggression, racism, and genocide were due to Germans seeing themselves as in a fierce competition with other peoples. (Never mind that Hitler didn’t believe in human evolution.) And soon afterward, many decided to choose “post-modernism”.
> So my guess is that Darwinism applied to humans was the key abstraction that elites saw as too threatening to their cherished ideals. A threat big enough to induce them to reject the till-then inspiring vision of finding an integrated abstract analysis of everything important. A vision toward which humanity was making rapid progress.
Darwinism applied to humans is, of course, also called eugenics. Whatever one's thoughts are on the topic, I have not before seen eugenics framed as the high-water mark of abstract reasoning. We typically frame and discuss it as a high-water mark of the 'one true philosophical tradition', especially as opposed to the 'modernism' that Hanson's framing places on the same ladder of 'abstraction'. In other words, I would like to hear opinions on what the actual intellectual tradition is that births eugenics/human darwinism/the law of selection.
To get things started, my opinion is mostly that of the yellow book. Namely, that eugenics is actually one of the oldest pieces of human knowledge, and is not derived so much from abstract reasoning as from "That which before us lies in daily life" which "Is the prime wisdom", to quote Milton. I think this is shown well anthropologically by the yellow book, e.g. Tutsis, Germanic tribes of Tacitus, Nuristanis, or even by Plutarch on Lycurgus. There are countless examples. Furthermore, I agree with the yellow book that because the law of selection is so 'obvious' or close to the naturally aristocratic mode of life, it's actually epistemologically prior to any sort of 'abstraction' that lies on the same thread as 'modernism'. Can anyone steelman Hanson's case?
referenced by: >>4753
I find Robin Hanson