undefined | Better HN

0 pointssullyj38y ago0 comments

What you're gesturing at is that it's illogical to make value judgements, period, without a standard that your object of interest is being judged against. This fact, which is blatantly obvious once pointed out, is obscured by the shortcomings of our language.

Usually the standard is implicit, but obvious from context, for instance if we were talking about racing, we could say that a Mclaren is better than a Volkwagen, and elide that we mean "better at moving quickly around a racetrack".

It certainly makes sense to judge cultures, as long as you remember to have a standard in mind. For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.

The fact that different cultures value different things shouldn't be a problem for discourse, as long as your interlocutors have values in common. Lack of objective truth about values shouldn't prevent one from working towards the values that they personally hold.

Relativism isn't (or at least shouldn't be) "there's no objective truth about values, so therefore every value system should be treated as equally valid". That would be an objective normative claim, and making it would be inconsistent with relativism. Relativism is just "there's no objective truth about values", and it stops there. Nothing about that prevents you from preferring your own values to those of others.

0 comments

leohutson8y ago

> For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.

But it might be hard to convince a 1850s white American to adopt that standard.

It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter.

Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.

All you need to decide is if the other culture is similar enough to tolerate it.

sullyj3OP8y ago

> Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.

Ok, so, suppose we met a culture that thought it was a good thing to burn children alive as sacrifices to Moloch. Would you say, "Hey let them do their thing, all cultural practices are equally valid", or would you say "I'm going to try to prevent this from happening, even though my belief that the practice is wrong is due to my particular cultural upbringing"?

I'm assuming the second one. So doesn't that constitute an act of holding another culture to your own cultural standards? And here, the point is to save lives.

Again, to reiterate, just because different cultures value different things, and the question of which value system is "correct" is not really coherent, does not prevent me from condemning practices from within my own cultural framework, and having good reasons to do so.

interfixus8y ago

> It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter

Which definition would that be?

leohutson8y ago

I can't respond to your other question, but the particular value we were discussing was this:

> For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.

Shouldn't really be controversial, but America is going through a regression right now so who knows..

1 more reply

leohutson8y ago

We'll perhaps there are some HN commenters that have those values, but I hope not!

But 1850's American culture is distasteful to me and also to sullyj3 as they say:

"it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s"

1 more reply

xelxebar8y ago

Even more concretely, the terms better and worse are only capable of encoding relative positions on a linear scale.

I find it instructive to look for those scales directly--e.g. rates of violent crime, GDP, life expectancy, etc. This also makes it more natural to recognize specific problems with such linear reductions.

leohutson8y ago

All those scales are valued differently by different cultures.

If I show a conservative American gun crime statistics that we agree on and we agree that are caused by American gun culture, I cannot tell them that American gun culture is inferior, because I just get back "Thats the price of freedom!"

Life expectancy, "It's not the years in your life but the life in your years!"

GDP is the most hilarious one, because it's not even per-capita. Assuming that its a high median per capita GDP: "That's materialistic! We're much happier than those greedy capitalists"

xelxebar8y ago

This is a good point. Any particular statistic probably doesn't capture the nuances of human values. I think statistics are quite useful though, since they make it easier to differentiate between "facts we can share" and "personal values".

In my experience, a lot of disagreement gets chocked up to opinion differences when in fact it's mainly a failure to unpack beliefs into sets of values and facts.

I like to distinguish between so called "terminal values" which are things we intrisically care about, versus "intermediate values" which are things that matter to us for their external effects. For example, I think the internet is good because of the communications it facilitates. If it did the opposite, I'd probably feel oppositely as well, so my feelings on the internet are an intermediate value. On the other hand, I probably value my mom intrinsically.

Of course, we could further unpack that. Are my feelings on "facile communication" terminal or intermediate? My mental image here is of a sort of a branching set of trees, a forest, of values where the root nodes are our terminal values and the intervening nodes are our intermediate values.

I doubt that we humans actually differ all that much on terminal values. If we take this stance axiomatically, it certainly makes a lot of sense to deconstruct intermediate values into the causal links they're composed of, i.e. facts and statistics.

1 more reply

adrianN8y ago

There are attempts to measure "happiness". They surely have their own problems, but if we could measure that relatively objectively it seems to me that "average happiness" would be a good starting point to use to compare different cultures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointssullyj38y ago0 comments

0 comments

leohutson8y ago

> For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.

But it might be hard to convince a 1850s white American to adopt that standard.

It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter.

Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.

All you need to decide is if the other culture is similar enough to tolerate it.

sullyj3OP8y ago

> Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.

I'm assuming the second one. So doesn't that constitute an act of holding another culture to your own cultural standards? And here, the point is to save lives.

interfixus8y ago

> It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter

Which definition would that be?

leohutson8y ago

I can't respond to your other question, but the particular value we were discussing was this:

> For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.

Shouldn't really be controversial, but America is going through a regression right now so who knows..

1 more reply

leohutson8y ago

We'll perhaps there are some HN commenters that have those values, but I hope not!

But 1850's American culture is distasteful to me and also to sullyj3 as they say:

"it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s"

1 more reply

xelxebar8y ago

Even more concretely, the terms better and worse are only capable of encoding relative positions on a linear scale.

leohutson8y ago

All those scales are valued differently by different cultures.

Life expectancy, "It's not the years in your life but the life in your years!"

GDP is the most hilarious one, because it's not even per-capita. Assuming that its a high median per capita GDP: "That's materialistic! We're much happier than those greedy capitalists"

xelxebar8y ago

In my experience, a lot of disagreement gets chocked up to opinion differences when in fact it's mainly a failure to unpack beliefs into sets of values and facts.

1 more reply

adrianN8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse