Ultimately, when provided with optimally inconvenient and general forms of the dilemma, most of those who rejected the question will continue to make excuses to avoid answering the question on its own terms. They will insist that there must be superior alternatives, that external circumstances will absolve them from having to make a choice, or simply that they have no responsibility to address an artificial moral dilemma.
Of course we do. It would be crazy to answer such a question in a social setting if there is any possibility of avoiding it. Social adversaries will take your answer out of context and spin it to make you look bad. Honesty is not the best policy and answering such questions is nearly universally an irrational decision. Even when the questions are answered the responses should not be considered to have a significant correlation to actual behaviour.
I think I have a more plausible suggestion than the “spin it to make you look bad”
Think evolutionarily.
It absolutely sucks to be a psycho serial killer in public, if you are into making friends and acquaintances and likely to be a grandpa.
It sucks less to show that you would kill someone, specially if you were the actor of the death.
It sucks less to show that you would only kill someone by omission, but not by action.
It sucks less if you show that your brain is so well tuned not to kill people, that you (truly) react disgusted even to conceive of doing it.
This is the woman I want to have a child with, the one that is not willing to say she would kill under any circumstance.
Now, you may say that in every case, I simply ignored what would happen to the five other people (the skinny ones). To which I say that your brain processes both informations separately,”me killing fat guy” “people being saved by my action” and you only need one half to trigger all the emotions of “no way I’d kill that fat guy”
Is this an evolutionary nice story that explains a fact with hindsight. Oh yes indeed.
But what really matters is that you compare this theory with the “distortion” theory that many comments suggested. Admit it, only people who enjoy chatting rationally in a blog think it so important that their arguments will be distorted. Common folks just feel bad about killing fat guys.
I’d actually argue that social signaling is probably more important to “common folk” than a lot of the people here. Specifically, the old post about “Why nerds are unpopular” (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) comes to mind here. I’m entirely willing to say “I’m willing to kill”, because I value truth above social signaling
It also occurs to me that a big factor in my answer is that my social circle is full of people that I trust not to distort or misapply my answer. Put me in a sufficiently different social circle and eventually my “survival instincts” will get me to opt out of the problem as an excuse to avoid negative signaling.
If I just really didn’t want to kill the fat guy, it’d be much easier to say “oh, goodness, I could never kill someone like that!” rather than opting out of answering by playing to the absurdity of the scenario.
If attempting to avoid the question will also elicit a negative response, and the person really only wants to optimize their social standing, then they would be better off simply providing an answer calibrated to please whoever they most desired to avoid disapproval from. Mere signaling fails to account for many of these cases.
then they would be better off simply providing an answer calibrated to please whoever they most desired to avoid disapproval from
No they wouldn’t. Ambiguity is their ally. Both answers elicit negative responses, and they can avoid that from most people by not saying anything, so why shouldn’t they shut up?
EDIT: In case it’s not clear, I consider this tactic borderline Dark Arts (please note who originally said that ambiguity-ally line in HPMOR!), a purely political weapon with no role in conversations trying to be rational. I wouldn’t criticize its use as a defense against some political nitwit who’s trying to hurt you in front of an inexperienced audience; I would be unhappy with first-use of it as a primary political strategy.
In that case, I would expect them to reverse their rejection in the case of sufficient peer pressure, but this is frequently not the case.
Now I really do want to systematically test how people rejecting the dilemma respond to peer pressure. I’ve spent a great deal of time watching others deal with this particular dilemma , but my experience isn’t systematically gathered or well documented.
In retrospect, I should have held off on making this post until gathering that data; I wrote it up more in frustration at dealing with the same situation again than out of a desire to be informative, and I feel like I should probably have taken a karma hit for that.
I’d be interested in a trolley version of the Asch conformity experiment: line up a bunch of confederates and have them each give an answer, one way or another, and act respectfully to each other. Then see how the dodge rate of the real participant changes.
Then you could set it up so that one confederate tries to dodge, but is talked out of it. Etc.
My prediction (~80% confidence) is, given one subject and six confederates and a typical Asch setup, if all confederates give the non-safe answer (e.g., they say “I’d throw one person under the train” or whatever), you’ll see a 40-60% increase in the subject’s likelihood of doing the same compared to the case where they all dodge.
If one confederate dodges and is chastised for it, I really don’t know what to expect. If I had to guess, I’d guess that standard Asch rules apply and the effect of the local group’s pressure goes out the window, and you get a 0-10% increase over the all-dodge case. But my confidence is low… call it 20%.
What I’d really be interested in is whether, after going through such a setup, subjects’ answers to similar questions in confidential form change.
If one confederate dodges and is chastised for it, I really don’t know what to expect. If I had to guess, I’d guess that standard Asch rules apply and the effect of the local group’s pressure goes out the window
That’s not the normal Asch setup- the dissenter isn’t ridiculed for it; the subject feels free to dissent because they’ve seen someone else dissent and ‘get away with it’. I would expect that the chastistement variation on any Asch test would produce even more, rather than less, conformity.
Yeah, I can see why you say that, and you might be right, but I’m not entirely sure. I’ve never seen the results of an Asch study where the dissenter is chastised. And this particular example is even weirder, because the thing they’re being chastised for—dodging the question—is itself something that we hypothesize is the result of group conformity effects. So… I dunno. As I say, my confidence in this case is low.
I would expect them to reverse their rejection in the case of sufficient peer pressure,
Unless, of course, they’re willing to put up with some short-term hassling to avoid long-term problems. Given that either answer could be taken out of context and used against them by all the people currently applying that pressure, there’s no point (short of, say, locking them in a room and depriving them of sleep for an extended period of time, which is really a whole different kettle of fish) where answering the question becomes preferable.
Giving either response can be harmful if you are trying to avoid the disapproval of someone who fails at conservation of expected evidence. (This failure could happen even to us rationalists who are aware of the possibility, by simply not thinking about how we would interpret the alternative response we did not observe, especially if our interpretation is influenced by a clever arguer who wants us to disapprove.)
If attempting to avoid the question will also elicit a negative response, and the person really only wants to optimize their social standing, then they would be better off simply providing an answer calibrated to please whoever they most desired to avoid disapproval from.
You appear to be saying “but they could give a perfect zinger of an answer!” Yes, they could. But refusing the question—“Homey don’t play that”—is quite a sensible answer in most practical circumstances, and may discourage people from continuing to try to entrap them, which may be better than answering with a perfect zinger.
They could, for example, give an answer that at the same time signaled their deep and profound compassion for people who are run over by trolleys and their willingness to… reluctantly… after exploring all available third alternatives to the extent that time allowed… and assuming as a personal favor to the questioner that they somehow were certain of all the facts that the problem asserts, even though that state isn’t epistemically reachable… and with the understanding that they’d probably be in expensive therapy for years afterwards to repair the damage to their compliant-with-social-norms-really-honest-no-fooling psyches… throw one person under the train to save five people.
Wincing visibly while saying it would help, also.
This both signals their alliance with the “don’t throw people under trains!” social norm and their moral sophistication. This is a general truth of political answers… the most useful answer is the one that lets everyone hear what they want to hear while eliciting disapproval from nobody. (Of course, in the long term that creates a community that disapproves of ambivalence. Politics is a semantic arms race, after all.)
In this vein, my usual answer to trolley questions and the like starts with “It depends: are you asking me what I think I would actually do in that setting? Or are you asking me what I think is the right thing to do in that setting? Because they’re different.”
But, yeah, I agree that refusing to answer the question can often be more practical, especially if you don’t have an artful dodge ready to hand and aren’t good at creating them on-the-fly.
In this vein, my usual answer to trolley questions and the like starts with “It depends: are you asking me what I think I would actually do in that setting? Or are you asking me what I think is the right thing to do in that setting? Because they’re different.”
A non-answer is still safer. That parry, in and of itself, could be twisted into an admission that you routinely and knowingly violate your own moral code.
Not even twisted, really; it is such an admission. But entirely agreed that a non-answer is safer than such an admission. (I suppose “In this vein” is a mis-statement, then.)
If attempting to avoid the question will also elicit a negative response, and the person really only wants to optimize their social standing, then they would be better off simply providing an answer calibrated to please whoever they most desired to avoid disapproval from.
It may be easier in the short term but in the future it will come back to haunt you with sufficient probability for it to dominate your decision making. Never answer moral questions honestly, lie (to yourself first, of course). If there is no good answer to give the questioner then avoid the question. If possible, make up the question you wish they asked and answer that one instead. Don’t get trapped in a hostile frame of interrogation.
Mere signaling fails to account for many of these cases.
When it comes to morality there is nothing ‘mere’ about signalling. Signalling accounts for all of these cases.
Do you predict, then, that if you put a person in a group where every other person disapproves more of attempts to dodge the question than to provide either answer, and makes this known,then they will never refuse to answer the question on its own terms?
Also, what makes you believe that providing an answer will lead to negative repercussions? I’ve participated in more discussions of this topic than I could reasonably hope to count, never refused to provide my own answer, and have never observed others to revise their behavior towards me as a result. I can imagine how it might have negative repercussions for a person to provide an answer, but I’ve never known it to happen to anyone to a significant enough degree that they’d notice. It’s possible that signaling accounts for some of these cases, but I think you’re generalizing your own attitude to the entire population in a situation where it really doesn’t apply.
I think you’re generalizing your own attitude to the entire population
Excuse me? The opposite is closer to the truth. I’ve realised that my own attitude to interpreting things primarily in the abstract isn’t universal. Even a minority of people who use verbal symbols primarily politically is enough to warrant caution.
Then I’ll ask again whether you predict that in a group where everyone else projected disapproval of attempts to dodge the question, nobody would refuse to answer the question on its own terms. This should not be that hard to test; with a few Less Wrong collaborators, we should at least be able to carry it out in online form.
You could certainly engineer a circumstance in which answering questions about hypothetical lose-lose scenarios is considered better than avoiding them, e.g. philosophical discussion of hypothetical lose-lose scenarios. However, your original post does not restrict itself to these scenarios, but generalises to everyone who doesn’t want to play that game, with no apparent understanding of the practical reasons people here are trying to explain to you for why people might very sensibly not want to play that game.
Not to speak for wedrifid, but I agree with their main point, and I would not predict this.
What I would predict is that fewer people in such a group would dodge the question (and those that did would dodge it less strenuously) than in a group where everyone projected disapproval of throwing people under trolleys.
I would further predict that the reduction in dodging (DR) would be proportional to how confident the subject was that the group really did disapprove more of dodging the question than of throwing people under trolleys… that is, that the group wasn’t lying, and that he wasn’t misinterpreting the group norm. Given that priors strongly suggest the opposite—that is, given that most groups are more opposed to throwing people under trolleys than avoiding a question—I would expect obtaining significant confidence to be nontrivial.
Relatedly, I predict that DR would be proportional to how certain the subject was that their answer would be kept confidential.
By the way, as long as we’re doing this exercise, I’d also predict that people who don’t dodge the question in normal settings, but rather claim they’d throw someone under the train, are more likely to be contrarian in general—that is, I’d expect that to correlate well with making other controversial claims. This is even more true for people who often bring up trolley problems in ordinary conversation.
I would further predict that the reduction in dodging (DR) would be proportional to how
confident the subject was that the group really did disapprove more of dodging the
question than of throwing people under trolleys…
Seriously? Well, sure. I for one would not dodge the question then, in case they would throw me under a trolley for it. :)
Do you predict, then, that if you put a person in a group where every other person disapproves more of attempts to dodge the question than to provide either answer, and makes this known, then they will never refuse to answer the question on its own terms?
I predict this will have a large effect on the number who refuse to answer the question, increasing with the closeness of the peer group and the level of disapproval. Enough to flip 75% nonresponse to 25% nonresponse or something like that.
Do you have any evidence that the largest negative reaction comes from actually answering the question?
My feeling is that the largest negative social repercussion comes from rejecting the question. However, I’m not positive that I’m not generalizing from my own initial reaction to those who reject the question.
My general feeling is that taking a stance on such questions would be respected by those who I deal with on a day-to-day basis, and dodging the question would be less respected.
I respect answering these questions more than dodging them and answer them myself whenever I know the answer (I would pull the switch; I would also push the fat man). I don’t have a problem with being candid because most people whose opinions I care about prefer candidness. In one previous discussion with a bunch of non-rationalists who probably don’t consider the questions often, there wasn’t much dodging.
Of course we do. It would be crazy to answer such a question in a social setting if there is any possibility of avoiding it. Social adversaries will take your answer out of context and spin it to make you look bad. Honesty is not the best policy and answering such questions is nearly universally an irrational decision. Even when the questions are answered the responses should not be considered to have a significant correlation to actual behaviour.
I think I have a more plausible suggestion than the “spin it to make you look bad”
Think evolutionarily.
It absolutely sucks to be a psycho serial killer in public, if you are into making friends and acquaintances and likely to be a grandpa.
It sucks less to show that you would kill someone, specially if you were the actor of the death.
It sucks less to show that you would only kill someone by omission, but not by action.
It sucks less if you show that your brain is so well tuned not to kill people, that you (truly) react disgusted even to conceive of doing it.
This is the woman I want to have a child with, the one that is not willing to say she would kill under any circumstance.
Now, you may say that in every case, I simply ignored what would happen to the five other people (the skinny ones). To which I say that your brain processes both informations separately,”me killing fat guy” “people being saved by my action” and you only need one half to trigger all the emotions of “no way I’d kill that fat guy”
Is this an evolutionary nice story that explains a fact with hindsight. Oh yes indeed.
But what really matters is that you compare this theory with the “distortion” theory that many comments suggested. Admit it, only people who enjoy chatting rationally in a blog think it so important that their arguments will be distorted. Common folks just feel bad about killing fat guys.
I’d actually argue that social signaling is probably more important to “common folk” than a lot of the people here. Specifically, the old post about “Why nerds are unpopular” (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) comes to mind here. I’m entirely willing to say “I’m willing to kill”, because I value truth above social signaling
It also occurs to me that a big factor in my answer is that my social circle is full of people that I trust not to distort or misapply my answer. Put me in a sufficiently different social circle and eventually my “survival instincts” will get me to opt out of the problem as an excuse to avoid negative signaling.
If I just really didn’t want to kill the fat guy, it’d be much easier to say “oh, goodness, I could never kill someone like that!” rather than opting out of answering by playing to the absurdity of the scenario.
Are you sure you can’t have both?
If attempting to avoid the question will also elicit a negative response, and the person really only wants to optimize their social standing, then they would be better off simply providing an answer calibrated to please whoever they most desired to avoid disapproval from. Mere signaling fails to account for many of these cases.
No they wouldn’t. Ambiguity is their ally. Both answers elicit negative responses, and they can avoid that from most people by not saying anything, so why shouldn’t they shut up?
EDIT: In case it’s not clear, I consider this tactic borderline Dark Arts (please note who originally said that ambiguity-ally line in HPMOR!), a purely political weapon with no role in conversations trying to be rational. I wouldn’t criticize its use as a defense against some political nitwit who’s trying to hurt you in front of an inexperienced audience; I would be unhappy with first-use of it as a primary political strategy.
In that case, I would expect them to reverse their rejection in the case of sufficient peer pressure, but this is frequently not the case.
Now I really do want to systematically test how people rejecting the dilemma respond to peer pressure. I’ve spent a great deal of time watching others deal with this particular dilemma , but my experience isn’t systematically gathered or well documented.
In retrospect, I should have held off on making this post until gathering that data; I wrote it up more in frustration at dealing with the same situation again than out of a desire to be informative, and I feel like I should probably have taken a karma hit for that.
I’d be interested in a trolley version of the Asch conformity experiment: line up a bunch of confederates and have them each give an answer, one way or another, and act respectfully to each other. Then see how the dodge rate of the real participant changes.
Then you could set it up so that one confederate tries to dodge, but is talked out of it. Etc.
I would too.
My prediction (~80% confidence) is, given one subject and six confederates and a typical Asch setup, if all confederates give the non-safe answer (e.g., they say “I’d throw one person under the train” or whatever), you’ll see a 40-60% increase in the subject’s likelihood of doing the same compared to the case where they all dodge.
If one confederate dodges and is chastised for it, I really don’t know what to expect. If I had to guess, I’d guess that standard Asch rules apply and the effect of the local group’s pressure goes out the window, and you get a 0-10% increase over the all-dodge case. But my confidence is low… call it 20%.
What I’d really be interested in is whether, after going through such a setup, subjects’ answers to similar questions in confidential form change.
That’s not the normal Asch setup- the dissenter isn’t ridiculed for it; the subject feels free to dissent because they’ve seen someone else dissent and ‘get away with it’. I would expect that the chastistement variation on any Asch test would produce even more, rather than less, conformity.
Yeah, I can see why you say that, and you might be right, but I’m not entirely sure. I’ve never seen the results of an Asch study where the dissenter is chastised. And this particular example is even weirder, because the thing they’re being chastised for—dodging the question—is itself something that we hypothesize is the result of group conformity effects. So… I dunno. As I say, my confidence in this case is low.
Unless, of course, they’re willing to put up with some short-term hassling to avoid long-term problems. Given that either answer could be taken out of context and used against them by all the people currently applying that pressure, there’s no point (short of, say, locking them in a room and depriving them of sleep for an extended period of time, which is really a whole different kettle of fish) where answering the question becomes preferable.
Giving either response can be harmful if you are trying to avoid the disapproval of someone who fails at conservation of expected evidence. (This failure could happen even to us rationalists who are aware of the possibility, by simply not thinking about how we would interpret the alternative response we did not observe, especially if our interpretation is influenced by a clever arguer who wants us to disapprove.)
You appear to be saying “but they could give a perfect zinger of an answer!” Yes, they could. But refusing the question—“Homey don’t play that”—is quite a sensible answer in most practical circumstances, and may discourage people from continuing to try to entrap them, which may be better than answering with a perfect zinger.
Well, it needn’t be a zinger, per se.
They could, for example, give an answer that at the same time signaled their deep and profound compassion for people who are run over by trolleys and their willingness to… reluctantly… after exploring all available third alternatives to the extent that time allowed… and assuming as a personal favor to the questioner that they somehow were certain of all the facts that the problem asserts, even though that state isn’t epistemically reachable… and with the understanding that they’d probably be in expensive therapy for years afterwards to repair the damage to their compliant-with-social-norms-really-honest-no-fooling psyches… throw one person under the train to save five people.
Wincing visibly while saying it would help, also.
This both signals their alliance with the “don’t throw people under trains!” social norm and their moral sophistication. This is a general truth of political answers… the most useful answer is the one that lets everyone hear what they want to hear while eliciting disapproval from nobody. (Of course, in the long term that creates a community that disapproves of ambivalence. Politics is a semantic arms race, after all.)
In this vein, my usual answer to trolley questions and the like starts with “It depends: are you asking me what I think I would actually do in that setting? Or are you asking me what I think is the right thing to do in that setting? Because they’re different.”
But, yeah, I agree that refusing to answer the question can often be more practical, especially if you don’t have an artful dodge ready to hand and aren’t good at creating them on-the-fly.
A non-answer is still safer. That parry, in and of itself, could be twisted into an admission that you routinely and knowingly violate your own moral code.
Not even twisted, really; it is such an admission. But entirely agreed that a non-answer is safer than such an admission. (I suppose “In this vein” is a mis-statement, then.)
It may be easier in the short term but in the future it will come back to haunt you with sufficient probability for it to dominate your decision making. Never answer moral questions honestly, lie (to yourself first, of course). If there is no good answer to give the questioner then avoid the question. If possible, make up the question you wish they asked and answer that one instead. Don’t get trapped in a hostile frame of interrogation.
When it comes to morality there is nothing ‘mere’ about signalling. Signalling accounts for all of these cases.
Do you predict, then, that if you put a person in a group where every other person disapproves more of attempts to dodge the question than to provide either answer, and makes this known,then they will never refuse to answer the question on its own terms?
Also, what makes you believe that providing an answer will lead to negative repercussions? I’ve participated in more discussions of this topic than I could reasonably hope to count, never refused to provide my own answer, and have never observed others to revise their behavior towards me as a result. I can imagine how it might have negative repercussions for a person to provide an answer, but I’ve never known it to happen to anyone to a significant enough degree that they’d notice. It’s possible that signaling accounts for some of these cases, but I think you’re generalizing your own attitude to the entire population in a situation where it really doesn’t apply.
Excuse me? The opposite is closer to the truth. I’ve realised that my own attitude to interpreting things primarily in the abstract isn’t universal. Even a minority of people who use verbal symbols primarily politically is enough to warrant caution.
Then I’ll ask again whether you predict that in a group where everyone else projected disapproval of attempts to dodge the question, nobody would refuse to answer the question on its own terms. This should not be that hard to test; with a few Less Wrong collaborators, we should at least be able to carry it out in online form.
You could certainly engineer a circumstance in which answering questions about hypothetical lose-lose scenarios is considered better than avoiding them, e.g. philosophical discussion of hypothetical lose-lose scenarios. However, your original post does not restrict itself to these scenarios, but generalises to everyone who doesn’t want to play that game, with no apparent understanding of the practical reasons people here are trying to explain to you for why people might very sensibly not want to play that game.
Not to speak for wedrifid, but I agree with their main point, and I would not predict this.
What I would predict is that fewer people in such a group would dodge the question (and those that did would dodge it less strenuously) than in a group where everyone projected disapproval of throwing people under trolleys.
I would further predict that the reduction in dodging (DR) would be proportional to how confident the subject was that the group really did disapprove more of dodging the question than of throwing people under trolleys… that is, that the group wasn’t lying, and that he wasn’t misinterpreting the group norm. Given that priors strongly suggest the opposite—that is, given that most groups are more opposed to throwing people under trolleys than avoiding a question—I would expect obtaining significant confidence to be nontrivial.
Relatedly, I predict that DR would be proportional to how certain the subject was that their answer would be kept confidential.
By the way, as long as we’re doing this exercise, I’d also predict that people who don’t dodge the question in normal settings, but rather claim they’d throw someone under the train, are more likely to be contrarian in general—that is, I’d expect that to correlate well with making other controversial claims. This is even more true for people who often bring up trolley problems in ordinary conversation.
Seriously? Well, sure. I for one would not dodge the question then, in case they would throw me under a trolley for it. :)
I predict this will have a large effect on the number who refuse to answer the question, increasing with the closeness of the peer group and the level of disapproval. Enough to flip 75% nonresponse to 25% nonresponse or something like that.
Do you have any evidence that the largest negative reaction comes from actually answering the question?
My feeling is that the largest negative social repercussion comes from rejecting the question. However, I’m not positive that I’m not generalizing from my own initial reaction to those who reject the question.
My general feeling is that taking a stance on such questions would be respected by those who I deal with on a day-to-day basis, and dodging the question would be less respected.
I respect answering these questions more than dodging them and answer them myself whenever I know the answer (I would pull the switch; I would also push the fat man). I don’t have a problem with being candid because most people whose opinions I care about prefer candidness. In one previous discussion with a bunch of non-rationalists who probably don’t consider the questions often, there wasn’t much dodging.