Whether to use “awesome” instead of “virtuous” is the question, not the answer. This is the question asked by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re set on using “awesome” instead of “good”, you’ve already chosen your answer to most of the difficult questions.
The challenge to awesome theory is the same one it has been for 70 years: Posit a world in which Hitler conquered the world instead of shooting himself in his bunker. Explain how that Hitler was not awesome. Don’t look at his outcomes and conclude they were not awesome because lots of innocent people died. Awesome doesn’t care how many innocent people died. They were not awesome. They were pathetic, which is the opposite of awesome. Awesome means you build a space program to send a rocket to the moon instead of feeding the hungry. Awesome history is the stuff that happened that people will actually watch on the History Channel. Which is Hitler, Napoleon, and the Apollo program.
If you don’t think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation, by saying “I don’t know exactly what awesome is, but someone that evil can’t be awesome.” Hitler was evil, not bad.
You think you can just redefine words, but you can’t,
That’s exactly right. Including “awesome”. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are awesome. A God who will squish you like a bug if you dare not to worship him is awesome, awe-full, and awful.
If you think “happiness” is the stuff, you might get confused and try to maximize actual happiness. If you think awesomeness is the stuff, it is much harder to screw it up.
Saying that it’s good because it’s vague, because it’s harder to screw up when you don’t know what you’re talking about, is contrary to the spirit of LessWrong.
That is, “awesome” already refers to the same things “good” is supposed to refer to.
Awesome already refers to the same things good is supposed to refer to, for those people who have already decided to use “awesome” instead of “good”. The “Is this right?” question that invokes virtues and rules is not a confused notion of what is awesome. It’s a different, incompatible view of what we “ought” to do.
I sometimes get the impression that I am the only person who reads MoR who actually thinks MoR!Hermione is more awesome than MoR!Quirrell. Of course I have access to at least some info others don’t, but still...
I sometimes get the impression that I am the only person who reads MoR who actually thinks MoR!Hermione is more awesome than MoR!Quirrell.
Canon!Luna is more awesome than MoR!Hermione too.
However, a universe with MoR!Hermione in it is likely to be far more awesome than a universe with canon!Luna substituted in. MoR!Hermione is a heck of a lot more useful to have around for most purposes, including the protection of awesome things such as canon!Luna.
MoR!Quirrel certainly invokes “Fictional Awesomeness”. That thing that makes many (including myself) think “Well he’s just damn cool and I’m glad he exists in that fictional universe (which can’t have any direct effect on me)”. Like Darth Vader is way more awesome than Anakin Skywalker even though being a whiny brat is somewhat less dangerous than being a powerful, gratuitously evil Sith Lord. I personally distinguish this from the ‘actual awesomeness’ of the kind mentioned here. I’m not sure to what extent others consider the difference.
Quirrell scans, to me, as more awesome along the “probably knows far more Secret Eldrich Lore than you” and “stereotype of a winner” axes, until I remember that Hermione is, canonically, also both of those things. (Eldrich Lore is something one can know, so she knows it. And she’s more academically successful than anyone I’ve ever known in real life.)
So when I look more closely, the thing my brain is valuing is a script it follows where Hermione is both obviously unskillful about standard human things (feminism, kissing boys, Science Monogamy) and obviously cares about morality, to a degree that my brain thinks counts as weakness. When I pay attention, Quirrell is unskillful about tons of things as well, but he doesn’t visibly acknowledge that he is/has been unskillful. He also may or may not care about ethics to a degree, but his Questionably Moral Snazzy Bad Guy archetype doesn’t let him show this.
It does come around to Quirrell being more my stereotype of a winner, in a sense. Quirrell is more high-status than Hermione—when he does things that are cruel, wrong or stupid he hides it or recontextualizes it into something snazzy—but Hermione is more honorable than Quirrell. She confronts her mistakes and failings publicly, messily and head-on and grows as a person because of that. I think that’s really awesome.
Well, to a first approximation, on a moral level, Quirrell is who I try not to be and Hermione is who I wish I was, and on the level of intelligence, it’s not possible for me to be viscerally impressed with either one’s intellect since I strictly contain both. Ergo I find Hermione’s choices more impressive than Quirrell’s choices.
Quirrel strikes me as the sort of character who is intended to be impressive. Pretty much all his charactaristics hit my “badass” buttons. The martial arts skills, the powerful magical field brushing at the edges of Harry’s little one, etc. However, I wouldn’t want to be like Quirrel, and I can’t imagine being Quirrel-like and still at all like myself. Whereas Hermione impresses me in the sense of being almost like a version of myself that gets everything I try to be right and is better than me at everything I think matters. Hermione is more admirable to me than Quirrel, but my sense of awe is triggered more by badass-ness than admiration.
This surprises me, but I’m not sure what I’ve mismodelled. To my mind, Hermione is trusting about moral rules in a way that I wouldn’t have expected you to like that much, but perhaps it’s just a trait that I don’t like that much.
Harry seems more awesome to me because he has a strong drive to get to the bottom of things—not the same thing as intelligence, though it might be a trait that wouldn’t be as interesting in an unintelligent character. (Or would it be? I can’t think of an author who’s tried to portray that.)
Harry seems more awesome to me because he has a strong drive to get to the bottom of things—not the same thing as intelligence, though it might be a trait that wouldn’t be as interesting in an unintelligent character. (Or would it be? I can’t think of an author who’s tried to portray that.)
I would be fascinated to read a character who can Get Curious and think skeptically and reflectively about competing ideas, but is only of average intelligence.
Trying to model this character in my head has resulted in some sort of error though, so there’s that...
Except Watson was intended to be above average intelligence, but below Sherlock level intelligence, so he fails on the last account. He was very intelligent, just not as absurdly inelligent as Sherlock, so he appeared to be of average or lower intelligence.
Amazon link. The primary takeaway from the book is that high consumption and high wealth draw from the same resource pool, and so conflict.
In general, I wonder if this shows up as characters who see virtue as intuitive, rather than deliberative. Harry sometimes gets the answer right, but he has to think hard and avoid tripping over himself to get there; Hermione often gets the answer right from the start because she appears to have a good feel for her situation.
Moving back to wealth, and generalizing from my parents, it’s not clear to me that they sat down one day and said “you know how we could become millionaires? Not spending a lot of money!” rather than having the “consume / save?” dial in their heads turned towards save, in part because “thrift ⇒ wealth” is an old, old association.
If you model intelligence differences as primarily working memory differences, it seems reasonable to me that high-WM people would be comfortable with nuance and low-WM people would be uncomfortable with it; the low-WM person might be able to compensate with external devices like writing things down, but it’s not clear they can synthesize things as easily on paper as a high-WM person could do in their head (or as easily as the high-WM person using paper!).
I can imagine writing this character, because it’s the way I feel a lot of the time… Knowing I read some important fact once but not being able retrieve it, lacking the working memory to do logic problems in my head and having to stop and pull out pen and paper, etc. I’m arguably of somewhat higher than average intelligence, but I’m quite familiar with the feeling of my brain not being good enough for what I want to do.
This is exactly what I was trying to describe, and this happens to me as well. If you ever do write such a figure, be sure to let me know, I’d like to read about them. :)
One of my previous novels somewhat touches on this. The main character is quite intelligent, but has grown up illiterate, and struggles with this limitation. If you want to check it out, see here.
Those personality traits are not just correlated with intelligence, they almost certainly cause it—thinking is to some degree a skill set, and innate curiosity + introspection + skepticism would result in constant
deliberate practice.
So those traits + average intelligence can only coexist if the character has recently undergone a major personality change, or suffered brain damage.
it’s not possible for me to be viscerally impressed with either one’s intellect since I strictly contain both
That’s probably why. For many mere mortals like myself MoR!Quirrell is simply awesome: competent, unpredictable, in control, a level above everyone else. Whereas MoR!Hermione is, while clever and knowledgeable, too often a damsel in distress, and her thought process, decisions and actions are uniformly less impressive than those of Harry or Quirrell. Not sure if this is intentional or not. At this point I’m rooting for Quirrell to win. Maybe there will be an alternate ending which explores this scenario.
Well, I meant the question as a question, not as a rhetorical statement. That aside, I do think it’s possible to be affected by the tendency to admire what appears currently to be the winning team even if I suspect, or even believe, that they will eventually lose. Human knowledge is rarely well-integrated. That aside, I haven’t read HP:MOR in a very long time, so any estimates of who wins I make would be way obsolete. I don’t even quite know what Quirrell/Voldemort’s “win conditions” are. So I have no idea what can happen if he does. That said, I vaguely recall EY making statements about writing Quirrell that I took at the time to mean that EY is buying into the sorts of narrative conventions that require Quirrell to not win (though not necessarily to lose).
I’ll hazard a guess that your concepts have more internal structure than those of most people. You’ve probably looked at the interactions between the concepts you’ve learned, analyzed them, and refined them to be more intensional and less extensional. Whereas for most people, the concept “awesome” is a big bag of all the stuff they were looking at when someone said “Awesome!”
If you don’t think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation, by saying “I don’t know exactly what awesome is, but someone that evil can’t be awesome.” Hitler was evil, not bad.
And that you probably haven’t watched stuff like Triumph of the Will to understand why Nazi aesthetics and propaganda could be so effective.
Clearly reducing the number of disgusting Untermenschen and increasing the Lebensraum for the master race is awesome if you consider yourself to be one of the latter.
[EDIT] Hmm, feels like a knee-jerk downvote. Maybe I’m missing something.
[EDIT] Hmm, feels like a knee-jerk downvote. Maybe I’m missing something.
You totally are. The point of Goetz’s comment and mine was not that Hitler was ‘awesome’ simply because of ordinary in-group/out-group dynamics which apply to like every other leader ever and most of whom are not particularly ‘awesome’; the point was that Hitler and the Nazis were unusually ‘awesome’ in appreciating shock and awe and technocratic superiority and Nazi Science (sneers at unimpressive projects) and geez I even named one of the stellar examples of this, Triumph of the Will, which still remains one of the best examples of the Nazi regime’s co-option of scientists and artists and film-makers and philosophers to glorify itself and make it awesome. It’s an impressive movie, so impressive that
Riefenstahl’s techniques, such as moving cameras, the use of long focus lenses to create a distorted perspective, aerial photography, and revolutionary approach to the use of music and cinematography, have earned Triumph recognition as one of the greatest films in history.
or
The Economist wrote that Triumph of the Will “sealed her reputation as the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century”.[7]
(Oh, how that must burn in the hearts of American feminists: the great female filmmaker is not American, and was a lackey of the Nazis.)
I watched it once, and was very impressed, personally.
Take a moment to savor that. Hitler and Naziism are the ultimate embodiment of evil in the West; modern cinema, invented in America & Europe, are world-around still recognized as one of the quintessentially Western mediums. But here we have a propaganda movie, produced to glorify Hitler and Naziism, 100% glorifying Hitler and Naziism, featuring only Hitler and Naziism, commissioned by Hitler who “served as an unofficial executive producer”, etc etc and not only has it not been consigned to the dust-heap of history, it is still watched, admired, and studied by those who are sworn to hate Naziism and anything even slightly like it such as eugenics or criticism of Israel.
Also, I had a fit of the far view, and it occurred to me that Germany was rather a medium-sized country (I’m so used to continental superpowers, but the world wasn’t always like that), and it tried to become a large country, and it took a big alliance of the other major powers to take it down. This is awesome from a sufficient distance.
They had population of 70 million (probably after eating Austria) which was quite a lot at the time, compared to 48 million of Britain and about as much of France. The only more populous independent countries in 1939 were China, USA, the USSR and perhaps Japan.
Wikipedia says 73 million in 1940. For Germany it says 69,3 million in 1939 and almost exactly 70 million, but apparently without the annexed populations of Austria and Sudetenland, which I estimate at about 10 million or more.
Edit: not sure whether to include the population of Korea into Japan’s statistics, which would make Japan more populous than Germany with certainty. The 73 million figure is without Korea.
That was the German narrative, was it not? Starting from the avowed English-French ‘encircling’ of Germany—why do you think they were allied in the first place with decrepit Poland?
Probably. I remember a similar conversation where I posted a Wittgenstein lambasting mindless British nationalism in a WWII context, and VladimirM stepped in to defend said nationalism to much upvotes.
Not very rational to vote down a fact >:( it’s not even politics like that one just the things they believed. Is there any post on bias against the poor Nazis, it seems a bad plan if you want human rationality to tar facts about them with the same brush as their evil deeds.
Not really. It falls under standard biases like ‘horns effect’ (dual of ‘halo effect’). Sometimes LWers point out in comments good aspects of the Nazis, like their war on cancer & work on anti-smoking, or animal cruelty laws, but no one’s written any sort of comprehensive discussion of this.
I’m thinking this evil halo effect regarding Nazis is the most common bias in our civilization, we all know about Godwin ;) but most people who come here probably have a bit of this stuff in their head. If we know this is true maybe it should be fought (or is the benefit from no Jew bashing allowed so huge its OK?)
There’s not really any benefit from fixing that bias, though. So the Nazis were expressing a general German sentiment in disliking the Franco-British grand-strategic encirclement. So they had some great policies on health and animals. Why does any of that really matter to non-historians?
The best I can think of is it makes for an interesting sort of critical thinking or bias test: give someone a writeup of, say, Nazi animal welfare policies & reforms, and see how they react. Can they emit a thoughtful reply rather than canned outrage?
That is, if they react ‘incredible how evil Nazis were! They would even steal animal rights to fool good people into supporting them!’ rather than ‘huh’ or ‘I guess no one is completely evil’ or ‘I really wonder how it is possible for us humans to compartmentalize to such an extent as to be opposed to animal cruelty and support the Holocaust’, you have learned something about them.
There’s not really any benefit from fixing that bias, though.
In most people Eugenics (even the good ones) is evil Nazi stuff and this can count even helpful GM as evil.
The best I can think of is it makes for an interesting sort of critical thinking or bias test: give someone a writeup of, say, Nazi animal welfare policies & reforms, and see how they react. Can they emit a thoughtful reply rather than canned outrage?
But we fail the test thus our sanity waterline could be raised :(
I realize this is super belated and may not actually be seen, but if I get an answer, that’d be cool:
If we see the horns effect in how people talk about Nazis as evidence that our sanity waterline could be raised, wouldn’t trying to fight the thing you’re calling “bias against the poor Nazis” be like trying to treat symptom of a problem instead of the problem itself?
Examples I can think of that might illustrate what I mean:
Using painkillers instead of (or before?) finding out a bone is broken and setting it. Trying to teach a martial arts student the routine their opponent uses instead of teaching them how to react in the moment and read their opponent. Teaching the answers to a test instead of teaching the underlying concept in a way that the student can generalize.
It seems to me that doing that would only lead to reducing the power of the “Nazi response” as evidence of sanity waterline.
sidenote: I’m finding this framing really fascinating because of how I see the underlying problem/topic generalizing to other social biases I feel more strongly affected by.
The challenge to awesome theory is the same one it has been for 70 years: Posit a world in which Hitler conquered the world instead of shooting himself in his bunker. Explain how that Hitler was not awesome. Don’t look at his outcomes and conclude they were not awesome because lots of innocent people died. Awesome doesn’t care how many innocent people died. They were not awesome. They were pathetic, which is the opposite of awesome.
Can’t we resolve this simply by amending the statement to “Morality is awesome for everybody.” Dying pathetically is not an awesome outcome for the people who had to do it. Arguing that innocent people were pathetic actually emphasizes the point. If Hitler’s actions made tons of people pathetic instead of awesome then those actions were most certainly immoral.
Incidentally, I do not expect nyan_sandwich to retitle the OP based on my comment. I think that the “for everybody” part can probably just be implicit.
odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation
Exactly right. In fact I do this explicitly, by invoking “fake utility functions” in point 2.
You think you can just redefine words, but you can’t,
You’re right I’m playing fast and loose a bit here. I guess my “morality is awesome” idea doesn’t work for people who are in possession of the actual definition of awesome.
In that case, depending on whether you are being difficult or not, I recommend finding another vaguely good and approximately meaningless word that is free of philosophical connotations to stand in for “awesome”, or just following the “if you are still confused” procedure (read metaethics).
Saying that it’s good because it’s vague, because it’s harder to screw up when you don’t know what you’re talking about, is contrary to the spirit of LessWrong.
Perhaps. I certainly wouldn’t endorse it in general. I have inside view reasons that it’s a good idea (for me) in this particular case, though; I’m not just pulling a classic “I don’t understand, therefore it will work”. Have you seen the discussion here?
for those people who have already decided to use “awesome” instead of “good”. The “Is this right?” question that invokes virtues and rules is not a confused notion of what is awesome. It’s a different, incompatible view of what we “ought” to do.
I’m confused about what you are saying. Here you seem to be identifying consequentialism with “awesome”, but above, you used similar phrasings and identified “awesome” with Space Hitler, which nearly everyone (including consequentialists) would generally agree was only good if you don’t look at the details (like people getting killed).
Was Space Hitler awesome? Yes. Was Space Hitler good? No. If you say “morality is what is awesome,” then you are either explicitly signing on to a morality in which the thing to be maximized is the glorious actions of supermen, not the petty happiness of the masses, or you are misusing the word “awesome.”
Was Space Hitler awesome? Yes. Was Space Hitler good? No.
This doesn’t seem to pose any kind of contradiction or problem for the “Morality is Awesome” statement, though I agree with you about the rest of your comment.
Is Space Hitler awesome? Yes. Is saving everyone from Space Hitler such that no harm is done to anyone even more awesome? Hell yes.
Remember, we’re dealing with a potentially-infinite search space of yet-unknown properties with a superintelligence attempting to maximize total awesomeness within that space. You’re going to find lots of Ninja-Robot-Pirate-BountyHunter-Jedi-Superheroes fighting off the hordes of Evil-Nazi-Mutant-Zombie-Alien-Viking-Spider-Henchmen, and winning.
And what’s more awesome than a Ninja-Robot-Pirate-BountyHunter-Jedi-Superhero? Being one. And what’s more awesome than being a Ninja-Robot-Pirate-BountyHunter-Jedi-Superhero? Being a billion of them!
Suppose a disaster could be prevented by foresight, or narrowly averted by heroic action. Which one is more
awesome? Which one is better?
Preventing disaster by foresight is more likely to work than narrow aversion by heroic action, so the the awesomeness of foresight working gets multiplied by a larger probability than the awesomeness of heroic action working when you decide to take one approach over the other. This advantage of the action that is more likely to work belongs in decision theory, not your utility function. Your utility function just says whether one approach is sufficiently more awesome than the other to overcome its decision theoretic disadvantage. This depends on the probabilities and awesomeness in the specific situation.
My numerous words are defeated by your single link. This analogy is irrelevant, but illustrates your point well.
Anyway, that’s pretty much all I had to say. The initial argument I was responding to sounded weak, but your arguments now seem much stronger. They do, after all, single-handedly defeat an army of Ninja-Robot-… of those.
Reading this comment thread motivated me to finally look this up—the words “cheesy” and “corny” actually did originally have something to do with cheese and corn!
Upvoted; whatever its relationship to what the OP actually meant, this is good.
Saying that it’s good because it’s vague, because it’s harder to screw up when you don’t know what you’re talking about, is contrary to the spirit of LessWrong.
Reminding yourself of your confusion, and avoiding privileging hypotheses, by using vague terms as long as you remember that they’re vague doesn’t seem so bad.
Don’t look at his outcomes and conclude they were not awesome because lots of innocent people died. Awesome doesn’t care how many innocent people died. They were not awesome. They were pathetic, which is the opposite of awesome. Awesome means you build a space program to send a rocket to the moon instead of feeding the hungry. Awesome history is the stuff that happened that people will actually watch on the History Channel. Which is Hitler, Napoleon, and the Apollo program.
I would say that the world being taken over by an evil dictator is a lot less awesome than the world being threatened by an evil dictator who’s heroically defeated.
I think your post is aimed too high. Nyan is not trying to resolve the virtue ethics / deontology / consequentilist dispute.
Instead, he’s trying to use vocabulary to break naive folks out of the good --> preferences --> good.
At that level of confusion, the distinction between good, virtue, or utility is not yet relevant. Only after people stop defining good in an essentially circular fashion is productive discussion of different moral theories even possible.
Whether to use “awesome” instead of “virtuous” is the question, not the answer. This is the question asked by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil.
Awesome doesn’t care how many innocent people died. They were not awesome. They were pathetic, which is the opposite of awesome.
[...]
Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are awesome. A God who will squish you like a bug if you dare not to worship him is awesome
[...]
Hitler was evil, not bad.
You appear to have invented your own highly specific meaning of “awesome”, which appears synonymous with “effective”. As such, “awesome” (in my experience generally used as a contentless expression of approval, more or less, with connotations of excitingness) is not fulfilling it’s intended goal of intuition-pump for you. Poor you. Those of us who use “awesome” in the same way as nyan_sandwich, however, have no such problem.
If you don’t think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation
That is explicitly the goal here—to use the vague goodness of “awesome” as a hack to access moral intuitions more directly.
The purpose of using awesome instead of good failed in this case. If you think that rocketry is more awesome than genocide is lame, (e.g.), then you think Hitler increased awesomeness.
Whether to use “awesome” instead of “virtuous” is the question, not the answer. This is the question asked by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re set on using “awesome” instead of “good”, you’ve already chosen your answer to most of the difficult questions.
The challenge to awesome theory is the same one it has been for 70 years: Posit a world in which Hitler conquered the world instead of shooting himself in his bunker. Explain how that Hitler was not awesome. Don’t look at his outcomes and conclude they were not awesome because lots of innocent people died. Awesome doesn’t care how many innocent people died. They were not awesome. They were pathetic, which is the opposite of awesome. Awesome means you build a space program to send a rocket to the moon instead of feeding the hungry. Awesome history is the stuff that happened that people will actually watch on the History Channel. Which is Hitler, Napoleon, and the Apollo program.
If you don’t think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation, by saying “I don’t know exactly what awesome is, but someone that evil can’t be awesome.” Hitler was evil, not bad.
That’s exactly right. Including “awesome”. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are awesome. A God who will squish you like a bug if you dare not to worship him is awesome, awe-full, and awful.
Saying that it’s good because it’s vague, because it’s harder to screw up when you don’t know what you’re talking about, is contrary to the spirit of LessWrong.
Awesome already refers to the same things good is supposed to refer to, for those people who have already decided to use “awesome” instead of “good”. The “Is this right?” question that invokes virtues and rules is not a confused notion of what is awesome. It’s a different, incompatible view of what we “ought” to do.
I sometimes get the impression that I am the only person who reads MoR who actually thinks MoR!Hermione is more awesome than MoR!Quirrell. Of course I have access to at least some info others don’t, but still...
Canon!Luna is more awesome than MoR!Hermione too.
However, a universe with MoR!Hermione in it is likely to be far more awesome than a universe with canon!Luna substituted in. MoR!Hermione is a heck of a lot more useful to have around for most purposes, including the protection of awesome things such as canon!Luna.
MoR!Quirrel certainly invokes “Fictional Awesomeness”. That thing that makes many (including myself) think “Well he’s just damn cool and I’m glad he exists in that fictional universe (which can’t have any direct effect on me)”. Like Darth Vader is way more awesome than Anakin Skywalker even though being a whiny brat is somewhat less dangerous than being a powerful, gratuitously evil Sith Lord. I personally distinguish this from the ‘actual awesomeness’ of the kind mentioned here. I’m not sure to what extent others consider the difference.
Let’s say they’re different kinds of awesome to me. Overall, I think Quirrell is more awesome… until I remember Hermione is twelve.
I didn’t, and still don’t… but now I’m a little bit disturbed that I don’t, and want to look a lot more closely at Hermione for ways she’s awesome.
Quirrell scans, to me, as more awesome along the “probably knows far more Secret Eldrich Lore than you” and “stereotype of a winner” axes, until I remember that Hermione is, canonically, also both of those things. (Eldrich Lore is something one can know, so she knows it. And she’s more academically successful than anyone I’ve ever known in real life.)
So when I look more closely, the thing my brain is valuing is a script it follows where Hermione is both obviously unskillful about standard human things (feminism, kissing boys, Science Monogamy) and obviously cares about morality, to a degree that my brain thinks counts as weakness. When I pay attention, Quirrell is unskillful about tons of things as well, but he doesn’t visibly acknowledge that he is/has been unskillful. He also may or may not care about ethics to a degree, but his Questionably Moral Snazzy Bad Guy archetype doesn’t let him show this.
It does come around to Quirrell being more my stereotype of a winner, in a sense. Quirrell is more high-status than Hermione—when he does things that are cruel, wrong or stupid he hides it or recontextualizes it into something snazzy—but Hermione is more honorable than Quirrell. She confronts her mistakes and failings publicly, messily and head-on and grows as a person because of that. I think that’s really awesome.
Yeah, that sounds like either a miscalibrated sense of awe (i.e. very different priorities), or like a reaction to private information.
Well, to a first approximation, on a moral level, Quirrell is who I try not to be and Hermione is who I wish I was, and on the level of intelligence, it’s not possible for me to be viscerally impressed with either one’s intellect since I strictly contain both. Ergo I find Hermione’s choices more impressive than Quirrell’s choices.
Quirrel strikes me as the sort of character who is intended to be impressive. Pretty much all his charactaristics hit my “badass” buttons. The martial arts skills, the powerful magical field brushing at the edges of Harry’s little one, etc. However, I wouldn’t want to be like Quirrel, and I can’t imagine being Quirrel-like and still at all like myself. Whereas Hermione impresses me in the sense of being almost like a version of myself that gets everything I try to be right and is better than me at everything I think matters. Hermione is more admirable to me than Quirrel, but my sense of awe is triggered more by badass-ness than admiration.
This surprises me, but I’m not sure what I’ve mismodelled. To my mind, Hermione is trusting about moral rules in a way that I wouldn’t have expected you to like that much, but perhaps it’s just a trait that I don’t like that much.
Harry seems more awesome to me because he has a strong drive to get to the bottom of things—not the same thing as intelligence, though it might be a trait that wouldn’t be as interesting in an unintelligent character. (Or would it be? I can’t think of an author who’s tried to portray that.)
I would be fascinated to read a character who can Get Curious and think skeptically and reflectively about competing ideas, but is only of average intelligence.
Trying to model this character in my head has resulted in some sort of error though, so there’s that...
Arguably Watson is an attempt at this.
Except Watson was intended to be above average intelligence, but below Sherlock level intelligence, so he fails on the last account. He was very intelligent, just not as absurdly inelligent as Sherlock, so he appeared to be of average or lower intelligence.
The Millionaire Next Door may include a bunch of people who can think clearly without being able to handle a lot of complexity.
Amazon link. The primary takeaway from the book is that high consumption and high wealth draw from the same resource pool, and so conflict.
In general, I wonder if this shows up as characters who see virtue as intuitive, rather than deliberative. Harry sometimes gets the answer right, but he has to think hard and avoid tripping over himself to get there; Hermione often gets the answer right from the start because she appears to have a good feel for her situation.
Moving back to wealth, and generalizing from my parents, it’s not clear to me that they sat down one day and said “you know how we could become millionaires? Not spending a lot of money!” rather than having the “consume / save?” dial in their heads turned towards save, in part because “thrift ⇒ wealth” is an old, old association.
If you model intelligence differences as primarily working memory differences, it seems reasonable to me that high-WM people would be comfortable with nuance and low-WM people would be uncomfortable with it; the low-WM person might be able to compensate with external devices like writing things down, but it’s not clear they can synthesize things as easily on paper as a high-WM person could do in their head (or as easily as the high-WM person using paper!).
Maybe Next Door? Or am I missing something?
Just a typo (now corrected) rather than a joke or reference.
I can imagine writing this character, because it’s the way I feel a lot of the time… Knowing I read some important fact once but not being able retrieve it, lacking the working memory to do logic problems in my head and having to stop and pull out pen and paper, etc. I’m arguably of somewhat higher than average intelligence, but I’m quite familiar with the feeling of my brain not being good enough for what I want to do.
This is exactly what I was trying to describe, and this happens to me as well. If you ever do write such a figure, be sure to let me know, I’d like to read about them. :)
One of my previous novels somewhat touches on this. The main character is quite intelligent, but has grown up illiterate, and struggles with this limitation. If you want to check it out, see here.
Coincidences are funny: my name happens to be Asher.
I’ll put this on my reading list.
That’s a dangerous combination.
Those personality traits are not just correlated with intelligence, they almost certainly cause it—thinking is to some degree a skill set, and innate curiosity + introspection + skepticism would result in constant deliberate practice. So those traits + average intelligence can only coexist if the character has recently undergone a major personality change, or suffered brain damage.
Time to taboo intelligence.
Question for those who’ve tracked MOR more carefully than I have: How much is Harry’s curiosity entangled with his desire for power?
That’s probably why. For many mere mortals like myself MoR!Quirrell is simply awesome: competent, unpredictable, in control, a level above everyone else. Whereas MoR!Hermione is, while clever and knowledgeable, too often a damsel in distress, and her thought process, decisions and actions are uniformly less impressive than those of Harry or Quirrell. Not sure if this is intentional or not. At this point I’m rooting for Quirrell to win. Maybe there will be an alternate ending which explores this scenario.
Is this simply a case of rooting for whoever looks like they’re going to win?
You think that [I think that] Quirrell/Voldemort is going to win? O.O I wish. After all, what’s the worst that can happen if he does?
Well, I meant the question as a question, not as a rhetorical statement.
That aside, I do think it’s possible to be affected by the tendency to admire what appears currently to be the winning team even if I suspect, or even believe, that they will eventually lose. Human knowledge is rarely well-integrated.
That aside, I haven’t read HP:MOR in a very long time, so any estimates of who wins I make would be way obsolete. I don’t even quite know what Quirrell/Voldemort’s “win conditions” are. So I have no idea what can happen if he does.
That said, I vaguely recall EY making statements about writing Quirrell that I took at the time to mean that EY is buying into the sorts of narrative conventions that require Quirrell to not win (though not necessarily to lose).
I think either Harry will win, or everybody will lose.
Wait, all of her? Including the obnoxious controlling parts?
I’ll hazard a guess that your concepts have more internal structure than those of most people. You’ve probably looked at the interactions between the concepts you’ve learned, analyzed them, and refined them to be more intensional and less extensional. Whereas for most people, the concept “awesome” is a big bag of all the stuff they were looking at when someone said “Awesome!”
And that you probably haven’t watched stuff like Triumph of the Will to understand why Nazi aesthetics and propaganda could be so effective.
Clearly reducing the number of disgusting Untermenschen and increasing the Lebensraum for the master race is awesome if you consider yourself to be one of the latter.
[EDIT] Hmm, feels like a knee-jerk downvote. Maybe I’m missing something.
You totally are. The point of Goetz’s comment and mine was not that Hitler was ‘awesome’ simply because of ordinary in-group/out-group dynamics which apply to like every other leader ever and most of whom are not particularly ‘awesome’; the point was that Hitler and the Nazis were unusually ‘awesome’ in appreciating shock and awe and technocratic superiority and Nazi Science (sneers at unimpressive projects) and geez I even named one of the stellar examples of this, Triumph of the Will, which still remains one of the best examples of the Nazi regime’s co-option of scientists and artists and film-makers and philosophers to glorify itself and make it awesome. It’s an impressive movie, so impressive that
or
(Oh, how that must burn in the hearts of American feminists: the great female filmmaker is not American, and was a lackey of the Nazis.)
I watched it once, and was very impressed, personally.
Take a moment to savor that. Hitler and Naziism are the ultimate embodiment of evil in the West; modern cinema, invented in America & Europe, are world-around still recognized as one of the quintessentially Western mediums. But here we have a propaganda movie, produced to glorify Hitler and Naziism, 100% glorifying Hitler and Naziism, featuring only Hitler and Naziism, commissioned by Hitler who “served as an unofficial executive producer”, etc etc and not only has it not been consigned to the dust-heap of history, it is still watched, admired, and studied by those who are sworn to hate Naziism and anything even slightly like it such as eugenics or criticism of Israel.
Now that is “awesome”.
Also, I had a fit of the far view, and it occurred to me that Germany was rather a medium-sized country (I’m so used to continental superpowers, but the world wasn’t always like that), and it tried to become a large country, and it took a big alliance of the other major powers to take it down. This is awesome from a sufficient distance.
They had population of 70 million (probably after eating Austria) which was quite a lot at the time, compared to 48 million of Britain and about as much of France. The only more populous independent countries in 1939 were China, USA, the USSR and perhaps Japan.
Meh. Japan does seem like it was higher, according to projections. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=country+populations+1939)
Wikipedia says 73 million in 1940. For Germany it says 69,3 million in 1939 and almost exactly 70 million, but apparently without the annexed populations of Austria and Sudetenland, which I estimate at about 10 million or more.
Edit: not sure whether to include the population of Korea into Japan’s statistics, which would make Japan more populous than Germany with certainty. The 73 million figure is without Korea.
That was the German narrative, was it not? Starting from the avowed English-French ‘encircling’ of Germany—why do you think they were allied in the first place with decrepit Poland?
I don’t understand why this was downvoted :( I upvoted it because it’s a good point and true. Is it too understanding to Nazis?
Probably. I remember a similar conversation where I posted a Wittgenstein lambasting mindless British nationalism in a WWII context, and VladimirM stepped in to defend said nationalism to much upvotes.
Not very rational to vote down a fact >:( it’s not even politics like that one just the things they believed. Is there any post on bias against the poor Nazis, it seems a bad plan if you want human rationality to tar facts about them with the same brush as their evil deeds.
Not really. It falls under standard biases like ‘horns effect’ (dual of ‘halo effect’). Sometimes LWers point out in comments good aspects of the Nazis, like their war on cancer & work on anti-smoking, or animal cruelty laws, but no one’s written any sort of comprehensive discussion of this.
The closest I can think of is Yvain’s classic post on religion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fm/a_parable_on_obsolete_ideologies/
I’m thinking this evil halo effect regarding Nazis is the most common bias in our civilization, we all know about Godwin ;) but most people who come here probably have a bit of this stuff in their head. If we know this is true maybe it should be fought (or is the benefit from no Jew bashing allowed so huge its OK?)
There’s not really any benefit from fixing that bias, though. So the Nazis were expressing a general German sentiment in disliking the Franco-British grand-strategic encirclement. So they had some great policies on health and animals. Why does any of that really matter to non-historians?
The best I can think of is it makes for an interesting sort of critical thinking or bias test: give someone a writeup of, say, Nazi animal welfare policies & reforms, and see how they react. Can they emit a thoughtful reply rather than canned outrage?
That is, if they react ‘incredible how evil Nazis were! They would even steal animal rights to fool good people into supporting them!’ rather than ‘huh’ or ‘I guess no one is completely evil’ or ‘I really wonder how it is possible for us humans to compartmentalize to such an extent as to be opposed to animal cruelty and support the Holocaust’, you have learned something about them.
In most people Eugenics (even the good ones) is evil Nazi stuff and this can count even helpful GM as evil.
But we fail the test thus our sanity waterline could be raised :(
We don’t fail the eugenics test, though. So that’s evidence that maybe our waterline could be higher but it is higher than elsewhere.
I realize this is super belated and may not actually be seen, but if I get an answer, that’d be cool:
If we see the horns effect in how people talk about Nazis as evidence that our sanity waterline could be raised, wouldn’t trying to fight the thing you’re calling “bias against the poor Nazis” be like trying to treat symptom of a problem instead of the problem itself?
Examples I can think of that might illustrate what I mean:
Using painkillers instead of (or before?) finding out a bone is broken and setting it.
Trying to teach a martial arts student the routine their opponent uses instead of teaching them how to react in the moment and read their opponent.
Teaching the answers to a test instead of teaching the underlying concept in a way that the student can generalize.
It seems to me that doing that would only lead to reducing the power of the “Nazi response” as evidence of sanity waterline.
sidenote: I’m finding this framing really fascinating because of how I see the underlying problem/topic generalizing to other social biases I feel more strongly affected by.
Minor note: According to an article in Wired recently, the Nazis invented 3D movies.
Can’t we resolve this simply by amending the statement to “Morality is awesome for everybody.” Dying pathetically is not an awesome outcome for the people who had to do it. Arguing that innocent people were pathetic actually emphasizes the point. If Hitler’s actions made tons of people pathetic instead of awesome then those actions were most certainly immoral.
Incidentally, I do not expect nyan_sandwich to retitle the OP based on my comment. I think that the “for everybody” part can probably just be implicit.
Exactly right. In fact I do this explicitly, by invoking “fake utility functions” in point 2.
You’re right I’m playing fast and loose a bit here. I guess my “morality is awesome” idea doesn’t work for people who are in possession of the actual definition of awesome.
In that case, depending on whether you are being difficult or not, I recommend finding another vaguely good and approximately meaningless word that is free of philosophical connotations to stand in for “awesome”, or just following the “if you are still confused” procedure (read metaethics).
Perhaps. I certainly wouldn’t endorse it in general. I have inside view reasons that it’s a good idea (for me) in this particular case, though; I’m not just pulling a classic “I don’t understand, therefore it will work”. Have you seen the discussion here?
I’m confused about what you are saying. Here you seem to be identifying consequentialism with “awesome”, but above, you used similar phrasings and identified “awesome” with Space Hitler, which nearly everyone (including consequentialists) would generally agree was only good if you don’t look at the details (like people getting killed).
Can you clarify?
Was Space Hitler awesome? Yes. Was Space Hitler good? No. If you say “morality is what is awesome,” then you are either explicitly signing on to a morality in which the thing to be maximized is the glorious actions of supermen, not the petty happiness of the masses, or you are misusing the word “awesome.”
This doesn’t seem to pose any kind of contradiction or problem for the “Morality is Awesome” statement, though I agree with you about the rest of your comment.
Is Space Hitler awesome? Yes. Is saving everyone from Space Hitler such that no harm is done to anyone even more awesome? Hell yes.
Remember, we’re dealing with a potentially-infinite search space of yet-unknown properties with a superintelligence attempting to maximize total awesomeness within that space. You’re going to find lots of Ninja-Robot-Pirate-BountyHunter-Jedi-Superheroes fighting off the hordes of Evil-Nazi-Mutant-Zombie-Alien-Viking-Spider-Henchmen, and winning.
And what’s more awesome than a Ninja-Robot-Pirate-BountyHunter-Jedi-Superhero? Being one. And what’s more awesome than being a Ninja-Robot-Pirate-BountyHunter-Jedi-Superhero? Being a billion of them!
Suppose a disaster could be prevented by foresight, or narrowly averted by heroic action. Which one is more awesome? Which one is better?
Tvtropes link: Really?
Preventing disaster by foresight is more likely to work than narrow aversion by heroic action, so the the awesomeness of foresight working gets multiplied by a larger probability than the awesomeness of heroic action working when you decide to take one approach over the other. This advantage of the action that is more likely to work belongs in decision theory, not your utility function. Your utility function just says whether one approach is sufficiently more awesome than the other to overcome its decision theoretic disadvantage. This depends on the probabilities and awesomeness in the specific situation.
My numerous words are defeated by your single link. This analogy is irrelevant, but illustrates your point well.
Anyway, that’s pretty much all I had to say. The initial argument I was responding to sounded weak, but your arguments now seem much stronger. They do, after all, single-handedly defeat an army of Ninja-Robot-… of those.
Reading this comment thread motivated me to finally look this up—the words “cheesy” and “corny” actually did originally have something to do with cheese and corn!
Upvoted; whatever its relationship to what the OP actually meant, this is good.
Reminding yourself of your confusion, and avoiding privileging hypotheses, by using vague terms as long as you remember that they’re vague doesn’t seem so bad.
I would say that the world being taken over by an evil dictator is a lot less awesome than the world being threatened by an evil dictator who’s heroically defeated.
I think your post is aimed too high. Nyan is not trying to resolve the virtue ethics / deontology / consequentilist dispute.
Instead, he’s trying to use vocabulary to break naive folks out of the good --> preferences --> good.
At that level of confusion, the distinction between good, virtue, or utility is not yet relevant. Only after people stop defining good in an essentially circular fashion is productive discussion of different moral theories even possible.
Attacking Nyan for presuming moral realism is fighting the hypothetical.
You appear to have invented your own highly specific meaning of “awesome”, which appears synonymous with “effective”. As such, “awesome” (in my experience generally used as a contentless expression of approval, more or less, with connotations of excitingness) is not fulfilling it’s intended goal of intuition-pump for you. Poor you. Those of us who use “awesome” in the same way as nyan_sandwich, however, have no such problem.
That is explicitly the goal here—to use the vague goodness of “awesome” as a hack to access moral intuitions more directly.
Actually, aren’t there existing connotations of “awesome”—exciting, dramatic and so on—for everyone?
Not ones that interfere wit the technique, hopefully.
The purpose of using awesome instead of good failed in this case. If you think that rocketry is more awesome than genocide is lame, (e.g.), then you think Hitler increased awesomeness.