From his short story Three Worlds Collide:
*When our children legalized rape, we thought that the Future had gone wrong."
Akon's mouth hung open. "You were that prude?"
The Confessor shook his head. "There aren't any words," the Confessor said, "there aren't any words at all, by which I ever could explain to you. No, it wasn't prudery. It was a memory of disaster."
"Um," Akon said. He was trying not to smile. "I'm trying to visualize what sort of disaster could have been caused by too much nonconsensual sex -"
"Give it up, my lord," the Confessor said. He was finally laughing, but there was an undertone of pain to it.
Fucking rationalists, man.
Afaik, he says he wrote this to show how far out of our grasp future generations and their morality will be.
He says, how today we balk and wonder at how anyone could legalise slavery and criminalise homosexuality, too would future generations balk and wonder at things in our society.
He claims he is not saying that rape would be legal in the future, but that what we might consider today to be normal to ban and normal to legalise, would be considered wrong on a similar scale to saying rape should be legal today. If not in actuality, then in the effect that statement has on our present society.
Imo, this is utter horseshit. Yudkowsky completely lacks any actual knowledge or understanding of how “morality” changes across generations. He does not know or, more likely, just ignores the fact that people have always protested against slavery, and always protested for homosexuality. That, in fact, it is the bourgeois state (and it’s ancestor the feudal state) that enforces these laws to suit its own political and economic needs.
It’s not that humans and our morality changes, but the economic relations of production that emphasise and de-emphasise certain positions and attitudes as is dictated by and needed for its own development.
He is a “rationalist”. So, of course, this kind of actual materialist thinking would make his brain explode. It’s much easier to believe what is ultimately just another liberal-idealist (and white supremacist, if you get down to it) position that furthers capitalist interests.
A far better “example” for something for future generations to be aghast at is how we treat animals — veganism is the morality of the future. And, of course, wage labour and capitalism, but I doubt he could ever even think of that going away.
i pretty much figured. the basic idea of imagining a moral universe totally unlike "ours" isn't offensive, and in fact the basis for much of the best sci-fi. the problem is Yudkowsky is an incurious asshole who wanted to put the edgiest idea he could to page, but didn't want to do the work of imagining how a society that doesn't even nominally value sexual consent would function.
All three of our species have empathy, we have sympathy, we have a sense of fairness - the Babyeaters even tell stories like we do, they have art. Shouldn't that be enough? Wasn't that supposed to be enough? But all it does is put us into enough of the same reference frame that we can be horrible by each others' standards.
he lays out the point pretty plainly here. Except our relationship to "historical" moral abominations like slavery and homophobia isn't anything like what he's describing because, if you make the slightest effort, it's really not difficult to see how the people of a century ago, or a decade ago, or last week, aren't too different from us, and to hold the implications of our disgust at them up to the world we live in now.
Honestly, I think your average LessWrong cultist would have reacted worse if he'd used veganism.
I'd like to offer some context:
This is totally the guy's fetish.
(What, were you expecting the context to make him look better?)
Get him talking long enough about anything and it becomes yet another mind control fetish power fantasy. :kombucha-disgust:
Yud is like Tarantino in that he can't keep his fetishes out of his work, but unlike Tarantino, Yud's fetishes are actively horrifying
I may bring up that creep a fair bit but I didn't actually know to what depths he actually wallowed.
Considering the (CW: sexual violence)
spoiler
drug-induced brainwashing he brags about doing in the techbro rape orgies he organizes
I should have known.
there's nothing about the socratic dialogue that necessitates that it be used by absolute morons, and yet somehow, every time you trace the arms in the hand puppets, there's always one of them on the other end.
daily reminder that you don't actually have to include rape in your fantasy stories even if "rape was everpresent during war" or some shit
like, it's your choice what is it that you're showcasing
Comments are predictably wild --
Tho those who hinted at "legalized rape": READ AGAIN. You seem not to have understood that the abolition of the law carried with it free retaliation against rapists and prediction markets that surely ended up influencing the incidence of rape.
Jeez, I dunno how that zinged past you.
:jesse-wtf:
