The winner worldview is that you have responsibility for your own life and it is irrelevant who is at fault if the people at fault can’t or won’t fix the problem. I’ve noticed over the course of my life that winners ignore questions of blame and fault and look for solutions they can personally influence. Losers blame others for their problems and expect that to produce results.
Scott Adams musing on what that woman in the Manhattan harassment video could do.
This actually clashes with the idea of heroic responsibility, a popular local notion. I guess it depends on what your values are.
Or what your skills are. People who are poor at soliciting the cooperation of others might begin to classify all actions which intend to change others’ behavior as “blame” and thus doomed to fail, just because trying to change others’ behavior doesn’t usually succeed for them.
What could the woman in the harassment video do? Maybe she could start an entire organization dedicated to ending harassment, and then stay in NY as a way to signal she is refusing to let the harassers win. Or if the tradeoff isn’t worth it to her personally, leave as Adams suggests. She isn’t making it Scott Adam’s problem, she’s making it the problem of anybody who actually wants it to also be their problem. That’s how cooperation works, and people can be good or bad at encouraging cooperation, in completely measurable ways. Assigning irremediable blame, or refusing to encourage change at all are both losing solutions.
I don’t exactly see how it clashes with heroic responsibility?
“When you do a fault analysis, there’s no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can’t change afterward, it’s like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity.”
I can’t tell if your misinterpreting him or if he real meant something that stupid. The problem with “doing the impossible” is that it amounts to an injunction to use all available and potentially available resources to address the problem. Of course, its impossible to do this for every problem.
Of course, its impossible to do this for every problem.
I don’t think anyone implied “every problem”. Only the one you think is really worth the trouble. Like FAI for Eliezer (or the AI-box toy example), or the NSA spying for Snowden. The risk, of course, is that the problem might be too hard and you fail, after potentially wasting a lot of resources, including your life.
I think I buy this line of reasoning in general, but I don’t think Adams is applying it correctly in this case. If group A is doing something that makes you unhappy because group B is rewarding them for it, then it is no more “winner behavior” to go after group B than group A: in both cases you’re trying to get others to fix your problems for you, by adding a negative incentive in one case and by removing a positive incentive in another.
I can make sense of this in a few ways: maybe Adams thinks at some level that B has agency as a group but A doesn’t. (This is, clearly, wrong.) Or maybe he thinks that you’re just more likely to convince members of B than members of A, which at least isn’t obviously wrong but still requires assumptions not in evidence.
I think taking responsibility for everything whether or not you caused in is exactly what heroic responsibility is about.
Apart from that Scotts get’s a lot in the article wrong. In particular Scott argues:
The men in the street video are presumably repeat offenders. And that means they are getting a reward, at least occasionally, from their shouted public compliments. And I assume the reward comes from the occasional women who appreciate the compliments and smile back.
That’s a naive view. It’s probably wrong.
To the extend that Eliezer argues “Do the impossible” he doesn’t argue doing things that literally have 0% of success. TDT discourages doing things with 0% of success. Eliezer doesn’t argue virtue ethics where it matters that you try regardless of whether you succeed.
Not stopping with a naive view and actually working on the problem is something that Eliezer advocates and that’s useful in cases like this. Even if it leads to questions that are even more politically incorrect then the ones Scott is asking.
Scott Adams musing on what that woman in the Manhattan harassment video could do.
This actually clashes with the idea of heroic responsibility, a popular local notion. I guess it depends on what your values are.
Or what your skills are. People who are poor at soliciting the cooperation of others might begin to classify all actions which intend to change others’ behavior as “blame” and thus doomed to fail, just because trying to change others’ behavior doesn’t usually succeed for them.
What could the woman in the harassment video do? Maybe she could start an entire organization dedicated to ending harassment, and then stay in NY as a way to signal she is refusing to let the harassers win. Or if the tradeoff isn’t worth it to her personally, leave as Adams suggests. She isn’t making it Scott Adam’s problem, she’s making it the problem of anybody who actually wants it to also be their problem. That’s how cooperation works, and people can be good or bad at encouraging cooperation, in completely measurable ways. Assigning irremediable blame, or refusing to encourage change at all are both losing solutions.
I don’t exactly see how it clashes with heroic responsibility?
“When you do a fault analysis, there’s no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can’t change afterward, it’s like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity.”
Because it might seem to you that you cannot change it, but if you have Eliezer’s do the impossible attitude, then maybe you can.
I can’t tell if your misinterpreting him or if he real meant something that stupid. The problem with “doing the impossible” is that it amounts to an injunction to use all available and potentially available resources to address the problem. Of course, its impossible to do this for every problem.
I don’t think anyone implied “every problem”. Only the one you think is really worth the trouble. Like FAI for Eliezer (or the AI-box toy example), or the NSA spying for Snowden. The risk, of course, is that the problem might be too hard and you fail, after potentially wasting a lot of resources, including your life.
I think I buy this line of reasoning in general, but I don’t think Adams is applying it correctly in this case. If group A is doing something that makes you unhappy because group B is rewarding them for it, then it is no more “winner behavior” to go after group B than group A: in both cases you’re trying to get others to fix your problems for you, by adding a negative incentive in one case and by removing a positive incentive in another.
I can make sense of this in a few ways: maybe Adams thinks at some level that B has agency as a group but A doesn’t. (This is, clearly, wrong.) Or maybe he thinks that you’re just more likely to convince members of B than members of A, which at least isn’t obviously wrong but still requires assumptions not in evidence.
I think taking responsibility for everything whether or not you caused in is exactly what heroic responsibility is about.
Apart from that Scotts get’s a lot in the article wrong. In particular Scott argues:
That’s a naive view. It’s probably wrong.
To the extend that Eliezer argues “Do the impossible” he doesn’t argue doing things that literally have 0% of success. TDT discourages doing things with 0% of success. Eliezer doesn’t argue virtue ethics where it matters that you try regardless of whether you succeed.
Not stopping with a naive view and actually working on the problem is something that Eliezer advocates and that’s useful in cases like this. Even if it leads to questions that are even more politically incorrect then the ones Scott is asking.