Its funny to find this as the rerun of the day. I was actually earlier realizing that I implicitly believed that there is a complex and sensible human morality "out there" which we are all working to glean from noisy clues of our human intuition. It wasn't until I started drafting a blog post about this that I realized where my belief came from: it was left over from the Roman Catholicism I had abandoned at about age 10! My experience of my RC training before that was: there is a right and wrong, God knows it, even defines it, it is highly in your interest to figure it out, lucky for you we have an ancient and venerable institution in the Roman Catholic church from which you can get these answers.
So I had dumped the science fiction omnibenevolent monster God, but had forgotten to dump the One True Morality which was an integral source of his magic powers.
45 years since I gave up Roman Catholicism and I am just noticing this now.
Today's post, The Genetic Fallacy was originally published on 11 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
The genetic fallacy seems like a strange kind of fallacy. The problem is that the original justification for a belief does not always equal the sum of all the evidence that we currently have available. But, on the other hand, it is very easy for people to still believe untruths from a source that they have since rejected.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was My Kind of Reflection, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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