From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 14:01:13 MDT
At 01:05 PM 7/17/2003, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>>http://psych.unm.edu/faculty/moral_vision.htm
>
>The behaviors depicted are implausible because they don't occupy a local
>memetic optimum and hence are not evolutionarily stable. If ethics as a
>means of displaying status took off, it would short out on whichever
>ethics were most faddishly popular and instinctively appealing, just as it
>does today on ineffective Third World charities, environmentalism, charity
>balls and so on. Watch the witch hunts for people insufficiently
>supportive of the ethical fad of the month, ethics reality TV shows,
>etc. Virtually all of the money would be wasted on the same popular
>failures year-after-year, and the movement would sustain itself not on a
>tiny handful of small successes and a big heaping handful of scapegoats.
In Miller's view, ethics is primarily about signaling, so whether the
ethical investments are well spent is largely irrelevant to his story. It
is analogous to the signaling theory of education, which says that you
don't learn much useful in school, but since the better workers find it
easier to put up with school, you can infer who is the better worker by
seeing who got more school.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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