[moldbug]

So their arguments establishing a causal chain back to a certain system of values is too long to summarize here?

Um, too obvious to summarize here? I really find it difficult to believe you're this obtuse. You seem quite adept with words but I'm not sure you're saying much.

Do you really find it difficult to get from the Enlightenment beliefs that all men are born equally free, equally good and equally talented, to Cabrini-Green?

If all men were equally noble, a social system that treats all men as nobles - that is, by making them financially independent and (pretty much) free of external government - would create a "vertical community" full of noblemen. Indeed this very thought is found in all sorts of 19th-century reformers (and 18th and 20th). Google "and above this ridge new peaks will rise."

Instead, every time the experiment is tried - in both the modern and antique worlds - we get Cabrini-Green or something like it. The epitome not of nobility, but of ignobility.

Proving no more than the basic counter-Enlightenment reality that the poor are not (on average) natural noblemen, and need for the sake of their own humanity to be forced to work if they want to eat. (Actually, this is true of most of the non-poor as well.) Whether this compulsion is implemented by an overseer with a whip, or by impersonal economic forces, is not terribly meaningful on an individual basis.

[stcredzero]

Um, too obvious to summarize here? I really find it difficult to believe you're this obtuse. You seem quite adept with words but I'm not sure you're saying much.

If you can't accurately quantify all the concurrent things you're hypothesizing about (like: values as practiced from values as professed) then your "experiments" just show correlation and not causation.

Proving no more than the basic counter-Enlightenment reality that the poor are not (on average) natural noblemen, and need for the sake of their own humanity to be forced to work if they want to eat.

So, just have less than perfect people on average, but keep the rest of the Enlightenment values. I don't see any problem with amending those with what we now know about human nature. (I think if one examines noblemen close enough, one finds a few impure motivations here and there.) This is pretty much the ideology of the folks over at lesswrong.com.

[moldbug]

If you can't accurately quantify all the concurrent things you're hypothesizing about (like: values as practiced from values as professed) then your "experiments" just show correlation and not causation.

You can't "accurately quantify" anything significant in human affairs. This is why history is an art, not a science. So is government. (So is running a startup.)

This is pretty much the ideology of the folks over at lesswrong.com.

The folks over at lesswrong.com seem to exist in a bizarre philosophical and historical vacuum in which they're the only intelligent people who ever lived. All of them, Eliezer not at all excepted, could benefit greatly from exposure to the thought of other times and places. Especially Victorian thought, which has the great advantage that (a) it's written in English and (b) universally available for free.

Part of the problem is that the contemporary "humanities" are so empty, sterile, and meretricious that it's really tempting to behave as if no one else has ever had anything interesting to say, ever. But this is a disorder of the present, not the past.