Caplan has a weird relationship with his genetic predictions.
I think he's basically trying to tell UMC liberals to chill out and have one more kid, and he chooses a message that he thinks will resonate. If you press him beyond that he changes his reasoning and conclusions. He also doesn't live his own life like it's true (he homeschools, is very involved in his kids lives, and travels the world with them).
I even found out recently that his parenting method is less free range and more "we have a lot of money and hired a lot of nannies."
Your point about "common sense for who" is important. Common sense for normies and common sense for UMC liberals are different things.
Caplan's revealed preferences are more YIYBY than YIMBY. He also brags about living in a culturally homogeneous bubble bordered by tenure and high property values.
I agree that we should use common sense (depending on what you mean with "common sense") to do morality. But the place I'll disagree with you (I think) is that doing so won't manifest in making the "common sense judgement" in every particular case. The reason is that all our common sense judgements cannot all be right at the same time. This is because common sense is not just limited to judgements about particular scenarios, but also judgements about more general constraints on our principles, as well as what the things are that matter when we make particular judgements. As an example, I think transitivity of the better-than relation is very common sense--in fact much more common sense than most judgements about particular cases.
Sticking with what at first seems to be the common sense judgement about a particular scenario will often involve rejecting much more plausible general principles, and so ultimately be less common sense overall. So I think it's a mistake to say that positions, like accepting the repugnant conclusion or that human progress over the last 150 years might very well have been negative all in all, are not common sense. I think that rejecting these positions will require moves that go much more contrary to common sense than accepting them.
I overall agree with this article. I have one counterpoint though: people are born with variation in their moral foundations. There may be a human norm, but there are also considerable differences between different people and cultures. There are more black and white moral issues, like chattel slavery, but also less black and white ones, like whether polygamy should be socially acceptable.
I think it can take a sophisticated understanding of culture, history, and human variation to know where the line is between the two... If there even is one. I think it's a spectrum.
"One of the fundamental beliefs of left-liberals like Scott Alexander is that common sense is highly fallible and ought to be treated with suspicion."
As I've gotten older, I've gotten less confident about the ability of reason to outstrip common sense outside of the natural sciences. Theoretically you could use the methods of the physical sciences on social questions, but in practice politics gets in the way and sociologists and so on wind up telling their ideological supporters what they want to hear.
Common sense morality = let people make choices within a market of options
First Principles morality = central planning
Does BC think markets are perfect? No, so the problems SA brings up do not disprove markets they just highlight cases where we might want a market with better products and pricing of externalities
> Alexander presents the idea that “education doesn’t work” and “parenting doesn’t have a huge long term impact on children” as wildly contrary to common sense. But those two ideas are not far off from what most people throughout history have believed
It seems to me that people in ancient Rome who hired tutors to teach their children to read, and found their children could then read, would have ascribed their children's ability to read to them having being taught it.
And from the ancient world on, many people have been taught to read, and no-one would have bothered doing this if they thought education didn't work.
I think Common Sense has shifted from "the things people tend to discover via their own reasoning process and repeat to one another in organic relationships" to "this plus all the indoctrination school indoctrination stuff". With institutionalized, homogenized, modern education getting the better, more energetic part of five out of seven days in the formative years of a child and young adult, there's quite a bit of volume in repetition that sticks. The school programming stuff is mostly overly abstract, meaningless, conformity-ensuring, subversive, ideological, misleading or irrelevant, so being distrusting of common sense since the days of mass education seems warranted.
I think "tolerating" injustices (ie. not endorsing the injustice as a positive good but still participating) is still a moral wrong. Though we could say these people who tolerate injustices out of convenience still had moral knowledge (and common sense is a great way of getting learning this knowledge), they still weren't moral people, because that would require them to not participate in the injustice. Because on your definition it seems that the nazi excuse of "I was just doing my job" is valid?
Yeah i think wrongness is proportional to the directness of your actions and their negative effects. I agree there, I think the matter at hand though is just one of assigning boundaries between "immoral person" and "amoral person" and "moral person". And I think following cultural conventions certainly gets you no higher than "amoral person"
It was a moral wrong to slaughter the Native Americans and take their land.
I'm glad we slaughtered the Native Americans and took their land. The world is better for it. We made much better use of it.
The number of people who actually slaughtered the natives was pretty tiny. But they wouldn't have bothered unless people who found it objectionable bought their goods and paid for the conquered land. The people doing that might have had some problems with how the Natives were treated, but it didn't stop them from buying the conquered land and putting it to productive use.
We can't be worried about every fucking thing all the fucking time.
Caplan has a weird relationship with his genetic predictions.
I think he's basically trying to tell UMC liberals to chill out and have one more kid, and he chooses a message that he thinks will resonate. If you press him beyond that he changes his reasoning and conclusions. He also doesn't live his own life like it's true (he homeschools, is very involved in his kids lives, and travels the world with them).
I even found out recently that his parenting method is less free range and more "we have a lot of money and hired a lot of nannies."
Your point about "common sense for who" is important. Common sense for normies and common sense for UMC liberals are different things.
Caplan's revealed preferences are more YIYBY than YIMBY. He also brags about living in a culturally homogeneous bubble bordered by tenure and high property values.
It was like the Yglesias comment on Twitter a while back: "I think 70% of people don't need to own homes."
Response: "But you're in the other 30%, right?"
YIYBY is something I have to borrow.
I agree that we should use common sense (depending on what you mean with "common sense") to do morality. But the place I'll disagree with you (I think) is that doing so won't manifest in making the "common sense judgement" in every particular case. The reason is that all our common sense judgements cannot all be right at the same time. This is because common sense is not just limited to judgements about particular scenarios, but also judgements about more general constraints on our principles, as well as what the things are that matter when we make particular judgements. As an example, I think transitivity of the better-than relation is very common sense--in fact much more common sense than most judgements about particular cases.
Sticking with what at first seems to be the common sense judgement about a particular scenario will often involve rejecting much more plausible general principles, and so ultimately be less common sense overall. So I think it's a mistake to say that positions, like accepting the repugnant conclusion or that human progress over the last 150 years might very well have been negative all in all, are not common sense. I think that rejecting these positions will require moves that go much more contrary to common sense than accepting them.
I overall agree with this article. I have one counterpoint though: people are born with variation in their moral foundations. There may be a human norm, but there are also considerable differences between different people and cultures. There are more black and white moral issues, like chattel slavery, but also less black and white ones, like whether polygamy should be socially acceptable.
I agree that there’s some variation. But there is a central human norm. The people I’m arguing against claim that there is no central norm.
I think it can take a sophisticated understanding of culture, history, and human variation to know where the line is between the two... If there even is one. I think it's a spectrum.
"One of the fundamental beliefs of left-liberals like Scott Alexander is that common sense is highly fallible and ought to be treated with suspicion."
As I've gotten older, I've gotten less confident about the ability of reason to outstrip common sense outside of the natural sciences. Theoretically you could use the methods of the physical sciences on social questions, but in practice politics gets in the way and sociologists and so on wind up telling their ideological supporters what they want to hear.
Common sense morality = let people make choices within a market of options
First Principles morality = central planning
Does BC think markets are perfect? No, so the problems SA brings up do not disprove markets they just highlight cases where we might want a market with better products and pricing of externalities
> Alexander presents the idea that “education doesn’t work” and “parenting doesn’t have a huge long term impact on children” as wildly contrary to common sense. But those two ideas are not far off from what most people throughout history have believed
It seems to me that people in ancient Rome who hired tutors to teach their children to read, and found their children could then read, would have ascribed their children's ability to read to them having being taught it.
And from the ancient world on, many people have been taught to read, and no-one would have bothered doing this if they thought education didn't work.
I think Common Sense has shifted from "the things people tend to discover via their own reasoning process and repeat to one another in organic relationships" to "this plus all the indoctrination school indoctrination stuff". With institutionalized, homogenized, modern education getting the better, more energetic part of five out of seven days in the formative years of a child and young adult, there's quite a bit of volume in repetition that sticks. The school programming stuff is mostly overly abstract, meaningless, conformity-ensuring, subversive, ideological, misleading or irrelevant, so being distrusting of common sense since the days of mass education seems warranted.
I think "tolerating" injustices (ie. not endorsing the injustice as a positive good but still participating) is still a moral wrong. Though we could say these people who tolerate injustices out of convenience still had moral knowledge (and common sense is a great way of getting learning this knowledge), they still weren't moral people, because that would require them to not participate in the injustice. Because on your definition it seems that the nazi excuse of "I was just doing my job" is valid?
Choosing to buy a product is a far cry from shooting people with a machine gun.
Yeah i think wrongness is proportional to the directness of your actions and their negative effects. I agree there, I think the matter at hand though is just one of assigning boundaries between "immoral person" and "amoral person" and "moral person". And I think following cultural conventions certainly gets you no higher than "amoral person"
What if you lived in a society where all of the cultural conventions were morally impeccable?
I'd say most people would be moral
Yes, but...
It was a moral wrong to slaughter the Native Americans and take their land.
I'm glad we slaughtered the Native Americans and took their land. The world is better for it. We made much better use of it.
The number of people who actually slaughtered the natives was pretty tiny. But they wouldn't have bothered unless people who found it objectionable bought their goods and paid for the conquered land. The people doing that might have had some problems with how the Natives were treated, but it didn't stop them from buying the conquered land and putting it to productive use.
We can't be worried about every fucking thing all the fucking time.