RE: Thinking the unthinkable: taboos and transhumanism

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Aug 09 2003 - 12:52:18 MDT

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    Rafal contributes

    > On page 42 of the article (" Tetlock, P.E., Kristel, O., Elson, B., Green,
    > M., and Lerner, J (final revision process/2000). The psychology of the
    > unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical
    > counterfactuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology"), I
    > found the following:

    So this is not on-line anywhere?

    > "Greenberg et al.'s (1994) terror-management theory posits that people who
    > are reminded of their mortality seek out the existential comfort of a
    > collectively shared world view that transcends their mortal life spans and
    > endows their lives with moral significance. Linking this alternative theory
    > of people as intuitive theologians to the SVPM leads to the hypothesis that,
    > agnostic Bayesian libertarians excepted, people reminded of their mortality
    > should be especially outraged by taboo trade-offs,

    Is anyone willing to elaborate on what might be meant by
    "taboo trade-offs"?

    > forbidden base rates,

    What do you think this is?

    > and heretical counterfactuals that de-stabilize their worldview,
    > and especially inclined to moral cleansing"

    I guess that moral cleansing includes any effort to make a
    group's views more uniform by exerting pressure on the
    iconoclasts. (By "pressure" I mean anything in excess of
    rational criticism, including dismissals as "uninformed",
    "illogical", etc., even when we believe those to be true.)

    > ### I am an agnostic Bayesian libertarian, and Tetlock's
    > findings are an incredibly powerful synthesis of what it
    > means to be me,

    I.e., if we copy an object and the copy turns out not to have
    these traits, it is not Rafal

    > as opposed to non-agnostic, non-Bayesian non-libertarians.

    Or perhaps any one of the three!

    > Explains among others why I reacted to intimations of my own
    > mortality by signing a cryonics contract,

    sounds more prudent than suddenly espousing collective yearnings
    for humankind or embracing theology

    > how my long process of psychological self-modification
    > could lead to the almost complete removal of the three
    > Fiskean schemata from my mind,

    What are these, and how does one tell if he's been successful
    at their removal?

    > and how these internally inconsistent elements could be
    > supplanted by a unified, volition-based ethical construct.

    Well, one does wish for consistency inside one's value system.
    I sort of hope that you are not saying more than that here.

    Lee



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