You’re right, I didn’t make it clear whether or not I’ve changed this. The answer is, I don’t really know. I’ve noticed it, which is about as far as I’ve gone with the other reasons, too...noticing alone doesn’t mean I’ll be able to overcome my instincts next time I face a decision. However, it’s the kind of thing where just knowing makes it less likely for me to obey it, because to me it’s not a flattering reason and I would get pretty annoyed with myself for obeying it.
Do I disapprove of ambitious people? Not really. I still get some strong conflicted emotions when I think about it, but I suspect that has more to do with jealousy...and I’m okay with it being about jealousy. I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t feel jealousy, but there are circumstances in which I’d expect any given person to feel jealous, and it’s okay for now if I feel jealous in those circumstances too. I haven’t spent much effort on changing it yet.
You’re right, I didn’t make it clear whether or not I’ve changed this. The answer is, I don’t really know. I’ve noticed it, which is about as far as I’ve gone with the other reasons, too...noticing alone doesn’t mean I’ll be able to overcome my instincts next time I face a decision.
I could be wrong, but my interpretation of what you’ve written is that the other things are things you changed through your questioning them, and that this one is the one you haven’t really questioned at the same level yet—to the level of specific scenarios imagined, and seeing through the mistaken assumptions made by your earlier selves.
Do I disapprove of ambitious people? Not really.
In other words, yes, you do. ;-)
Let me rephrase the question: Can you approve of ambitious people? (Think of specific ambitious people, and imagine what it would be like to approve of them, inwardly smiling warmly at them as people.)
“Disapproval” is actually almost synonymous with “withholding approval”. So, if you can’t approve of someone (independent of approving their behavior), then you almost certainly disapprove of them.
I still get some strong conflicted emotions when I think about it, but I suspect that has more to do with jealousy...
There are two separate things there: disapproval is not equal to jealousy. You may be unwilling to approve of someone because you are jealous, but that doesn’t make them the same thing. Can you not approve of someone and be jealous of them at the same time?
There’s a difference between, “I’m so jealous—and I hate her”, and “I’m so jealous—I want to have what she’s having”. One is with disapproval, the other without. Jealousness itself is the same in both cases, the desire to have what someone else has, and that it ought to have been yours by right.
The first person who comes up when I give my brain that query is a guy I knew in high school, who I find pretty obnoxious to spend time with. Let me revise: he was likeable enough in grade nine, when the two of us were both in the geeky outgroup of our school. He’s ambitious in that he wants to be a politician, not a scientist. (For whatever reason, I find politicians a lot more irritating than scientists!)
He was our school valedictorian (which he deserved, he was involved in an incredible amount of volunteer work), and I remember finding his speech pretty irritating. I don’t recall much of the substance...in fact, the problem may have been that there wasn’t that much substance. Even my mom commented that he came across as kind of arrogant.
...In retrospect, I think I found him irritating because he seemed to be signalling a higher level of “coolness” than he actually had in the high school social environment, and my brain was like “you can’t do that! That’s cheating!” Now, I’m sure he’s done a lot of neat stuff since then, and is probably respected for reasons that he deserves. (Every once in a while one of his Facebook updates comes up on my news feed, and it’s something about campaigning for Israel, and my religion-mixed-with-politics detector goes off and triggers annoyance. But I expect a lot of people respect him for that work, too, and at the very least he’s more involved than me, which I should be able to respect.) Still...even thinking about him now gives me an “ick” reaction.
The second person that comes to mind when I ask myself to think of ambitious people is my boyfriend. Obviously I don’t disapprove of him. He doesn’t come across as arrogant to me at all, even though his area of ambition lies in economics and finance, which isn’t an area I necessarily approved of before. (I have an uncle who constantly mails us conspiracy-theory films about how banks are evil. I wouldn’t say I agree with him, but my family’s general attitude towards the financial sector is “parasites!”, and I couldn’t help absorbing it a little.) My boyfriend is passionate about economics (we’ve ended up literally lying in bed, in the dark, discussing the state of Third World economies), and for entertainment he reads books about it. He wants to be a “baller”, but that ambition seems to stem from his parents, Chinese immigrants who came to Canada at the cost of their own careers in order to do better for their children. I don’t know, but somehow my brain labels that reasoning as healthy. And most of the work of noticing my own lack of ambition as a motive came from the discussions I’ve had with him, the times our ideology has grated and made me realize it was ideology after all and not just the way the world was.
Come to think of it, one significant reason why I became apathetic with regards to the activities the “ambitious kids” did in high school is that they annoyed me so much. The idea of spending a lot of time with the kind of people who were in Volunteer Club in high school is pretty unbearable. I haven’t dug deep enough yet to figure out why that is.
Come to think of it, one significant reason why I became apathetic with regards to the activities the “ambitious kids” did in high school is that they annoyed me so much. The idea of spending a lot of time with the kind of people who were in Volunteer Club in high school is pretty unbearable.
Yeah, it’s that sort of “annoyance” and “ick” that’s the sort of disapproval I’m talking about. When you have one attached to a group stereotype, it means you’ll have an aversion to expressing any characteristic of yourself that “means” you’d be one of “them”.
For example, at one point I found vegans annoying, and this made it difficult for me to switch to a mostly-vegetable diet, because then I’d be one of “them”.
Unfortunately, this ingroup/outgroup signaling by our brains has almost nothing to do with actual morality OR personal utility. Our brains will rationalize like crazy to give us high-sounding reasons for our annoyance, to make us feel we’re taking a principled stand somehow, but in actuality the whole thing is moot. You approving of the “ambitious kids” (or your status-cheating valedictorian friend) as people won’t actually contribute to some sort of moral decay in society, no matter how much your tribal brain makes you feel like it is.
You approving of the “ambitious kids” (or your status-cheating valedictorian friend) as people won’t actually contribute to some sort of moral decay in society, no matter how much your tribal brain makes you feel like it is.
I think I get that more now...I wouldn’t use my annoyance to claim that he was a bad person. What I find annoying is a fact about my brain, not a fact about the outside world...and anyway, intellectually I know that I have no good reason to disapprove of people who try, and that the fact that I do disapprove of them doesn’t make me any better a person.
When I try to analyze it in my head, the thought of joining, I don’t know, the student council or something doesn’t so much turn me off because I’ll be “one of them”, but because I’ll have to be in the same room as “them.” I respect the kind of people who do student council, and politics later on...it’s a hard thing to do, and someone has to do it. It’s just really, really not my thing...and it’s possible that some of the unpleasantness I experienced doing certain activities rubbed off, in my head, on the people who did those activities. Which I can now say is unfair to them, but my thinking wasn’t that sophisticated when I was 15.
intellectually I know that I have no good reason to disapprove of people who try, and that the fact that I do disapprove of them doesn’t make me any better a person.
Right—but intellectually knowing that doesn’t help. What does is imagining what it would be like to actually approve of them.
Try it. It won’t lead to you actually spending time with people you annoy you, but it will either lift the feeling of annoyance or move you towards surfacing your real rejection here.
You might notice that I suggested imagining being approving and smiling warmly at the people in question; you might also notice that it’s the one thing your brain has consistently avoided doing ever since. ;-)
This is generalizing from the inside of my head, but I think part of what drives that sort of annoyance is fear that if one doesn’t resist other people taking part in an activity, one would be obligated to do it too.
This is generalizing from the inside of my head, but I think part of what drives that sort of annoyance is fear that if one doesn’t resist other people taking part in an activity, one would be obligated to do it too.
Meh. Those sorts of feelings usually drive reasoning, rather than being driven by it. (Which is not to say that you might not also be correct about your personal case. Perhaps you learned that it’s disloyal (i.e. worthy of disapproval) to not do what your group is doing? If so, then that’d be a source of self-disapproval even if you merely lacked a positive desire to do what the group is doing.)
You approving of the “ambitious kids” (or your status-cheating valedictorian friend) as people won’t actually contribute to some sort of moral decay in society, no matter how much your tribal brain makes you feel like it is.
I’m… not actually convinced this is true. Actually, the opposite seems true. If I approve of people whose activities (I believe) constitute “moral decay” (i.e. who do things that I disapprove of), then that encourages such behavior. The more other people approve of them, the more the behavior is encouraged. Moral decay results.
I think the original writer’s point is more nuanced than that. A) Something that is annoying to me/that I disapprove of isn’t necessarily something I consider “moral decay”, if I actually think about it. B) Many of my attitudes are acquired from childhood and thus don’t represent society as a whole, or anything objective–so I should be suspicious of my judgements of morality anyway. C) I don’t know most of the ‘annoying ambitious people’ very well, and this is why the human morality-judging instinct is a misfire; yeah, if my tribe consisted of 20 people, my disapproval could have a big effect on any given person, but given the size and complexity of our current society and the number of other friends all these people have, I’m likely to have a negligible effect even on the person I’m judging, much less on society as a whole.
Your point is valid for groups that closely represent the human ancestral environment–for example, small-ish tightly knit groups of friends, like those seen in middle and high school, or among people who go to the same church. In which case disapproval of ‘moral decay’ does have a significant effect. But I’m not in the tight-knit circle of any of the people I disapprove(d) of.
A) Something that is annoying to me/that I disapprove of isn’t necessarily something I consider “moral decay”, if I actually think about it.
Something that is annoying to you isn’t necessarily immoral, no, except insofar as your annoyance is a real negative externality that should enter into consideration by the person whose behavior is under discussion (even if the effect is in the end judged to be negligible), i.e. if I find my upstairs neighbor’s all-hours drum-playing annoying, that doesn’t mean that it’s immoral except insofar as said neighbor ought (morally speaking) to take my feelings into account.
Something that you disapprove of should be something you consider immoral, or else it’s nonsensical to say that you disapprove of it. There isn’t any other sensible interpretation of disapproval, I think; some people do use the term in ways like “I disapprove of Bob the Casual Acquaintance’s gambling and skydiving”, but I don’t think that’s an appropriate use of the word. In such a case we should say “I don’t like that he does that” or “I wouldn’t do that in his place” or some such. Considered disapproval ought to be reserved for things we think are immoral.
B) Many of my attitudes are acquired from childhood and thus don’t represent society as a whole, or anything objective–so I should be suspicious of my judgements of morality anyway.
Whether your attitude represents society as a whole, whether it represents something “objective” (see Eliezer’s posts on naturalistic metaethics for why that may not be the ideal term), and whether you should accept your attitude after consideration, are three quite different issues.
As for this:
given the size and complexity of our current society and the number of other friends all these people have, I’m likely to have a negligible effect even on the person I’m judging, much less on society as a whole.
First of all, your judgments of approval and disapproval have an effect on you, and on your moral sense and moral judgments. That’s pretty important, I think. Second of all, a small effect isn’t necessarily a negligible effect (i.e. one that may in fact be safely neglected). Thirdly, you are presumably in the tight-knit circles of some other people, and if I am close friends with Alice, my approval or disapproval of Bob has an effect on Alice, regardless of whether I am close friends with Bob and can affect him or not.
Really, the core of my objection is to the notion, apparently expressed by pjeby, that we just shouldn’t approve or disapprove of people’s behaviors, or of people on the basis of their behaviors. I don’t agree. Certainly if not wanting to be “like those people” prevents me from doing something that would be good for me to do, that’s bad. That doesn’t mean I should stop not wanting to be “like those people” in the ways that make them “those people”.
Something that you disapprove of should be something you consider immoral, or else it’s nonsensical to say that you disapprove of it.
Disapproval—in the sense being discussed in this thread—is an emotional response. An alief, not a belief. The entire point of what I wrote to Swimmer963 was to encourage her to rationally evaluate whether her feelings were just an irrational “ugh” field rather than a justified moral disapproval.
By default, our brains use ugh fields for moral reasoning, and generate moral reasons after the feeling of disgust pops up. This is, as far as I know, quite settled science at this point.
Really, the core of my objection is to the notion, apparently expressed by pjeby, that we just shouldn’t approve or disapprove of people’s behaviors, or of people on the basis of their behaviors.
Actually, “shouldn’t” is too strong; I’m simply saying it’s not really that useful. If a bunch of LWers got to living together in one place, then it might be useful to go around automatically having ugh feelings about certain behaviors, because it would actually do something positive for group norms. But most of us live in situations where any impact our disapproval might have on something is likely outweighed by dozens of competing forms of disapproval going in different directions.
Do understand, though, that “disapproval” here is strictly referring to automatic feelings of revulsion. It is quite possible to decide that a behavior has negative utility or that your life would be better off without having to interact with someone enacting that behavior, without having any automatic feelings of revulsion being involved.
yeah, if my tribe consisted of 20 people, my disapproval could have a big effect on any given person, but given the size and complexity of our current society and the number of other friends all these people have, I’m likely to have a negligible effect even on the person I’m judging, much less on society as a whole.
If I approve of people whose activities (I believe) constitute “moral decay” (i.e. who do things that I disapprove of), then that encourages such behavior.
Note that it’s possible to approve of a person while still disapproving of a specific behavior—“that’s disgusting” vs. “people who do that are disgusting”. The latter lacks utility outside of a context where your signaling will actually affect the behavior.
The more other people approve of them, the more the behavior is encouraged. Moral decay results.
Note that failing to disapprove actually equals ignoring the behavior, not reinforcing it. Also note that disapproval (especially of the personal, all-or-nothing variety) is punishment, not negative reinforcement. Punishment is not a reliable way to extinguish a behavior, unless there are always punishers around.
Unfortunately, we are biased towards believing our punishment is important, and so we’ll rationalize it on the basis that if we don’t, then everything will fall apart and chaos will reign. In truth, this is just our instinct to punish non-punishers talking. (i.e., he who speaks in favor of leniency towards those caught doing X must want to do X himself… Get him!)
Note that failing to disapprove actually equals ignoring the behavior, not reinforcing it. Also note that disapproval (especially of the personal, all-or-nothing variety) is punishment, not negative reinforcement. Punishment is not a reliable way to extinguish a behavior, unless there are always punishers around.
Yes, we need to punish the behavior and encourage its opposite. Failing to do both of those things is still bad.
In any case “failing to disapprove” is a red herring. The sentence of yours to which I was responding, and my response, was about approving of people. That’s encouragement.
I’m also not sure what it even means to “approve of a person” in some general sense while disapproving of their behavior. There isn’t some essential core of a person that can be separated from what they do. That sort of view leads to “hate the sin, love the sinner” type arguments where I say that your homosexual behavior is horribly disgusting but I don’t have anything against you as a person. (I’m not equating your point with that one, just giving an example where separating approval of a person’s behavior from approval of a person leads to clear absurdity.)
To bring this back to a more concrete discussion of Swimmer963′s comment — if being “ambitious”, whatever that means, leads people to behave like those high-school classmates of hers, then that should be a strike against being ambitious. Where is the fallacy?
That sort of view leads to “hate the sin, love the sinner” type arguments where I say that your homosexual behavior is horribly disgusting but I don’t have anything against you as a person. (I’m not equating your point with that one, just giving an example where separating approval of a person’s behavior from approval of a person leads to clear absurdity.)
I don’t see the absurdity, actually. Seems on par for me with, “I think your taste in [death metal, anchovies on pizza, toilet paper roll direction] is horribly disgusting, but I don’t have anything against you as a person”.
Or for that matter, “I think what you say is disgusting, but I defend your right to say it.”
Of course, AFAICT, this actually has nothing to do with what we’re discussing, which is the opposite sort of issue: where one is, say, inappropriately disgusted by sports because when you grew up the people who were into sports were mean to you, so that now you make excuses not to go to the gym without really knowing why.
To bring this back to a more concrete discussion of Swimmer963′s comment — if being “ambitious”, whatever that means, leads people to behave like those high-school classmates of hers, then that should be a strike against being ambitious. Where is the fallacy?
Your statement only makes sense if there is a natural reality-clustering around the term “ambitious”—or any other term. One of the techniques I teach people to use in this sort of situation is to ask if there are any ambitious people who don’t display those annoying qualities, to focus attention on counterexamples. The essential idea is to cleave your brain’s concept clustering to better match the diversity that exists in reality.
Sadly, our brains don’t often update on this sort of thing without an extra push from the outside. A lot of common personal development problems essentially consist of this sort of accidental agglomeration of concepts.
Think of the story of the neural network supposedly trained to spot camouflaged tanks, which had in fact only learned to distinguish between pictures taken at different times of day. (Because the pictures with tanks were all taken during a different part of the afternoon than the non-tank pictures.) In the same way, if something always goes together during our formative years (like being ambitious and being an asshole), our brains learn that “asshole” is part of what the word “ambitious” actually means.
Correcting (and equally important, detecting) that sort of mistaken learning is what mindhacking (or at least the sort I practice and preach) is all about. Hence the heuristic of always questioning feelings of moral indignation or superiority: they have a strong prior probability of being a source of motivated reasoning and confabulation.
To put it another way, any time you find yourself indignantly arguing for the value of moral disapproval, the prior probability that you are engaging in confabulation motivated by your existing feeling of disapproval is pretty astronomical, regardless of whether your reasoning is actually correct.
Think of the story of the neural network supposedly trained to spot camouflaged tanks, which had in fact only learned to distinguish between pictures taken at different times of day. (Because the pictures with tanks were all taken during a different part of the afternoon than the non-tank pictures.) In the same way, if something always goes together during our formative years (like being ambitious and being an asshole), our brains learn that “asshole” is part of what the word “ambitious” actually means.
That’s a great example. I would have upvoted just for this.
The latter lacks utility outside of a context where your signaling will actually affect the behavior.
To be more precise it lacks utility outside of a context where your signal will actually affect the behavior or the behavior or perception of any other person including yourself.
To be more precise it lacks utility outside of a context where your signal will actually affect the behavior or the behavior or perception of any other person including yourself.
I probably should’ve said “net utility”, as I meant “useful on balance given the cost of biasing yourself, including the costs of feeling bad and being unable to enact the relevant personal changes”.
I probably should’ve said “net utility”, as I meant “useful on balance given the cost of biasing yourself, including the costs of feeling bad and being unable to enact the relevant personal changes”.
I totally agree. It’s almost always a terrible idea.
How do you rate it as a direct means of influence? (I tend to resist letting it work on me but it does have an effect on some. Do you think that is worth using in some cases and on average?)
How do you rate it as a direct means of influence? (I tend to resist letting it work on me but it does have an effect on some. Do you think that is worth using in some cases and on average?)
My general impression is that the only people who are affected in a useful way by disapproval are those who on some level agree with your disapproval, in that they learned either that the specific thing was worthy of disapproval, or that they were generally worthy of disapproval.
For example, a sales person who believes salespeople are pushy and therefore worthy of disapproval will likely be very sensitive to people disapproving of their pushiness. Likewise, a salesperson who grew up being (implicitly) taught that they themselves are generally unworthy, without any specific relation to sales, will also be sensitive to people disapproving of them.
In contrast, people who grew up learning that “pushy” behaviors are actually called “friendly”, will probably not respond to disapproval in the same way. They will probably conclude that the objecting person must really need a friend, if they are being so grouchy as to disapprove of them being friendly. ;-)
A person who learns, on the other hand, that being pushy is how you get ahead in life, will probably react with disapproval of their own to any criticism of their behavior. They’ll perceive someone disapproving of their pushiness as being someone who’s trying to put them out of work.
In short, disapproval only usefully affects people who have been socialized to believe in sufficiently-overlapping targets of disapproval. And even then, it first and foremost motivates signalling behaviors like guilt and remorse. I think disapproval (like the chances of criminals being caught) has to be virtually omnipresent and certain in order to actually affect behaviors other than increased compliance signalling and enhanced stealth. ;-)
Yeah. I feel this way about attractive and popular people. I hate them too much to ever consider imitating them. (not sure why I have to give up the hatred though.)
You don’t “have to” do anything. But you’ll likely experience “ugh fields” and akrasia trying to do anything that will make you too much like an “attractive and popular” person, until/unless you drop it.
Er, true, but that’s not what I meant. I mean that you might have other goals—goals you might not expect to be related, but which, as a side effect, might make you “like” (be similar to) those people in some minor way, and end up with a puzzling ugh field or akrasia, if you didn’t consciously notice the connection.
This is a common enough occurrence that I have patterns for working on it, in myself and in people who consult me for akrasia problems.
You’re right, I didn’t make it clear whether or not I’ve changed this. The answer is, I don’t really know. I’ve noticed it, which is about as far as I’ve gone with the other reasons, too...noticing alone doesn’t mean I’ll be able to overcome my instincts next time I face a decision. However, it’s the kind of thing where just knowing makes it less likely for me to obey it, because to me it’s not a flattering reason and I would get pretty annoyed with myself for obeying it.
Do I disapprove of ambitious people? Not really. I still get some strong conflicted emotions when I think about it, but I suspect that has more to do with jealousy...and I’m okay with it being about jealousy. I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t feel jealousy, but there are circumstances in which I’d expect any given person to feel jealous, and it’s okay for now if I feel jealous in those circumstances too. I haven’t spent much effort on changing it yet.
I could be wrong, but my interpretation of what you’ve written is that the other things are things you changed through your questioning them, and that this one is the one you haven’t really questioned at the same level yet—to the level of specific scenarios imagined, and seeing through the mistaken assumptions made by your earlier selves.
In other words, yes, you do. ;-)
Let me rephrase the question: Can you approve of ambitious people? (Think of specific ambitious people, and imagine what it would be like to approve of them, inwardly smiling warmly at them as people.)
“Disapproval” is actually almost synonymous with “withholding approval”. So, if you can’t approve of someone (independent of approving their behavior), then you almost certainly disapprove of them.
There are two separate things there: disapproval is not equal to jealousy. You may be unwilling to approve of someone because you are jealous, but that doesn’t make them the same thing. Can you not approve of someone and be jealous of them at the same time?
There’s a difference between, “I’m so jealous—and I hate her”, and “I’m so jealous—I want to have what she’s having”. One is with disapproval, the other without. Jealousness itself is the same in both cases, the desire to have what someone else has, and that it ought to have been yours by right.
The first person who comes up when I give my brain that query is a guy I knew in high school, who I find pretty obnoxious to spend time with. Let me revise: he was likeable enough in grade nine, when the two of us were both in the geeky outgroup of our school. He’s ambitious in that he wants to be a politician, not a scientist. (For whatever reason, I find politicians a lot more irritating than scientists!)
He was our school valedictorian (which he deserved, he was involved in an incredible amount of volunteer work), and I remember finding his speech pretty irritating. I don’t recall much of the substance...in fact, the problem may have been that there wasn’t that much substance. Even my mom commented that he came across as kind of arrogant.
...In retrospect, I think I found him irritating because he seemed to be signalling a higher level of “coolness” than he actually had in the high school social environment, and my brain was like “you can’t do that! That’s cheating!” Now, I’m sure he’s done a lot of neat stuff since then, and is probably respected for reasons that he deserves. (Every once in a while one of his Facebook updates comes up on my news feed, and it’s something about campaigning for Israel, and my religion-mixed-with-politics detector goes off and triggers annoyance. But I expect a lot of people respect him for that work, too, and at the very least he’s more involved than me, which I should be able to respect.) Still...even thinking about him now gives me an “ick” reaction.
The second person that comes to mind when I ask myself to think of ambitious people is my boyfriend. Obviously I don’t disapprove of him. He doesn’t come across as arrogant to me at all, even though his area of ambition lies in economics and finance, which isn’t an area I necessarily approved of before. (I have an uncle who constantly mails us conspiracy-theory films about how banks are evil. I wouldn’t say I agree with him, but my family’s general attitude towards the financial sector is “parasites!”, and I couldn’t help absorbing it a little.) My boyfriend is passionate about economics (we’ve ended up literally lying in bed, in the dark, discussing the state of Third World economies), and for entertainment he reads books about it. He wants to be a “baller”, but that ambition seems to stem from his parents, Chinese immigrants who came to Canada at the cost of their own careers in order to do better for their children. I don’t know, but somehow my brain labels that reasoning as healthy. And most of the work of noticing my own lack of ambition as a motive came from the discussions I’ve had with him, the times our ideology has grated and made me realize it was ideology after all and not just the way the world was.
Come to think of it, one significant reason why I became apathetic with regards to the activities the “ambitious kids” did in high school is that they annoyed me so much. The idea of spending a lot of time with the kind of people who were in Volunteer Club in high school is pretty unbearable. I haven’t dug deep enough yet to figure out why that is.
Yeah, it’s that sort of “annoyance” and “ick” that’s the sort of disapproval I’m talking about. When you have one attached to a group stereotype, it means you’ll have an aversion to expressing any characteristic of yourself that “means” you’d be one of “them”.
For example, at one point I found vegans annoying, and this made it difficult for me to switch to a mostly-vegetable diet, because then I’d be one of “them”.
Unfortunately, this ingroup/outgroup signaling by our brains has almost nothing to do with actual morality OR personal utility. Our brains will rationalize like crazy to give us high-sounding reasons for our annoyance, to make us feel we’re taking a principled stand somehow, but in actuality the whole thing is moot. You approving of the “ambitious kids” (or your status-cheating valedictorian friend) as people won’t actually contribute to some sort of moral decay in society, no matter how much your tribal brain makes you feel like it is.
I think I get that more now...I wouldn’t use my annoyance to claim that he was a bad person. What I find annoying is a fact about my brain, not a fact about the outside world...and anyway, intellectually I know that I have no good reason to disapprove of people who try, and that the fact that I do disapprove of them doesn’t make me any better a person.
When I try to analyze it in my head, the thought of joining, I don’t know, the student council or something doesn’t so much turn me off because I’ll be “one of them”, but because I’ll have to be in the same room as “them.” I respect the kind of people who do student council, and politics later on...it’s a hard thing to do, and someone has to do it. It’s just really, really not my thing...and it’s possible that some of the unpleasantness I experienced doing certain activities rubbed off, in my head, on the people who did those activities. Which I can now say is unfair to them, but my thinking wasn’t that sophisticated when I was 15.
Right—but intellectually knowing that doesn’t help. What does is imagining what it would be like to actually approve of them.
Try it. It won’t lead to you actually spending time with people you annoy you, but it will either lift the feeling of annoyance or move you towards surfacing your real rejection here.
You might notice that I suggested imagining being approving and smiling warmly at the people in question; you might also notice that it’s the one thing your brain has consistently avoided doing ever since. ;-)
This is generalizing from the inside of my head, but I think part of what drives that sort of annoyance is fear that if one doesn’t resist other people taking part in an activity, one would be obligated to do it too.
Meh. Those sorts of feelings usually drive reasoning, rather than being driven by it. (Which is not to say that you might not also be correct about your personal case. Perhaps you learned that it’s disloyal (i.e. worthy of disapproval) to not do what your group is doing? If so, then that’d be a source of self-disapproval even if you merely lacked a positive desire to do what the group is doing.)
I’m… not actually convinced this is true. Actually, the opposite seems true. If I approve of people whose activities (I believe) constitute “moral decay” (i.e. who do things that I disapprove of), then that encourages such behavior. The more other people approve of them, the more the behavior is encouraged. Moral decay results.
I think the original writer’s point is more nuanced than that. A) Something that is annoying to me/that I disapprove of isn’t necessarily something I consider “moral decay”, if I actually think about it. B) Many of my attitudes are acquired from childhood and thus don’t represent society as a whole, or anything objective–so I should be suspicious of my judgements of morality anyway. C) I don’t know most of the ‘annoying ambitious people’ very well, and this is why the human morality-judging instinct is a misfire; yeah, if my tribe consisted of 20 people, my disapproval could have a big effect on any given person, but given the size and complexity of our current society and the number of other friends all these people have, I’m likely to have a negligible effect even on the person I’m judging, much less on society as a whole.
Your point is valid for groups that closely represent the human ancestral environment–for example, small-ish tightly knit groups of friends, like those seen in middle and high school, or among people who go to the same church. In which case disapproval of ‘moral decay’ does have a significant effect. But I’m not in the tight-knit circle of any of the people I disapprove(d) of.
Something that is annoying to you isn’t necessarily immoral, no, except insofar as your annoyance is a real negative externality that should enter into consideration by the person whose behavior is under discussion (even if the effect is in the end judged to be negligible), i.e. if I find my upstairs neighbor’s all-hours drum-playing annoying, that doesn’t mean that it’s immoral except insofar as said neighbor ought (morally speaking) to take my feelings into account.
Something that you disapprove of should be something you consider immoral, or else it’s nonsensical to say that you disapprove of it. There isn’t any other sensible interpretation of disapproval, I think; some people do use the term in ways like “I disapprove of Bob the Casual Acquaintance’s gambling and skydiving”, but I don’t think that’s an appropriate use of the word. In such a case we should say “I don’t like that he does that” or “I wouldn’t do that in his place” or some such. Considered disapproval ought to be reserved for things we think are immoral.
Whether your attitude represents society as a whole, whether it represents something “objective” (see Eliezer’s posts on naturalistic metaethics for why that may not be the ideal term), and whether you should accept your attitude after consideration, are three quite different issues.
As for this:
First of all, your judgments of approval and disapproval have an effect on you, and on your moral sense and moral judgments. That’s pretty important, I think. Second of all, a small effect isn’t necessarily a negligible effect (i.e. one that may in fact be safely neglected). Thirdly, you are presumably in the tight-knit circles of some other people, and if I am close friends with Alice, my approval or disapproval of Bob has an effect on Alice, regardless of whether I am close friends with Bob and can affect him or not.
Really, the core of my objection is to the notion, apparently expressed by pjeby, that we just shouldn’t approve or disapprove of people’s behaviors, or of people on the basis of their behaviors. I don’t agree. Certainly if not wanting to be “like those people” prevents me from doing something that would be good for me to do, that’s bad. That doesn’t mean I should stop not wanting to be “like those people” in the ways that make them “those people”.
Disapproval—in the sense being discussed in this thread—is an emotional response. An alief, not a belief. The entire point of what I wrote to Swimmer963 was to encourage her to rationally evaluate whether her feelings were just an irrational “ugh” field rather than a justified moral disapproval.
By default, our brains use ugh fields for moral reasoning, and generate moral reasons after the feeling of disgust pops up. This is, as far as I know, quite settled science at this point.
Actually, “shouldn’t” is too strong; I’m simply saying it’s not really that useful. If a bunch of LWers got to living together in one place, then it might be useful to go around automatically having ugh feelings about certain behaviors, because it would actually do something positive for group norms. But most of us live in situations where any impact our disapproval might have on something is likely outweighed by dozens of competing forms of disapproval going in different directions.
Do understand, though, that “disapproval” here is strictly referring to automatic feelings of revulsion. It is quite possible to decide that a behavior has negative utility or that your life would be better off without having to interact with someone enacting that behavior, without having any automatic feelings of revulsion being involved.
Is that clearer now?
Exactly!
Note that it’s possible to approve of a person while still disapproving of a specific behavior—“that’s disgusting” vs. “people who do that are disgusting”. The latter lacks utility outside of a context where your signaling will actually affect the behavior.
Note that failing to disapprove actually equals ignoring the behavior, not reinforcing it. Also note that disapproval (especially of the personal, all-or-nothing variety) is punishment, not negative reinforcement. Punishment is not a reliable way to extinguish a behavior, unless there are always punishers around.
Unfortunately, we are biased towards believing our punishment is important, and so we’ll rationalize it on the basis that if we don’t, then everything will fall apart and chaos will reign. In truth, this is just our instinct to punish non-punishers talking. (i.e., he who speaks in favor of leniency towards those caught doing X must want to do X himself… Get him!)
Yes, we need to punish the behavior and encourage its opposite. Failing to do both of those things is still bad.
In any case “failing to disapprove” is a red herring. The sentence of yours to which I was responding, and my response, was about approving of people. That’s encouragement.
I’m also not sure what it even means to “approve of a person” in some general sense while disapproving of their behavior. There isn’t some essential core of a person that can be separated from what they do. That sort of view leads to “hate the sin, love the sinner” type arguments where I say that your homosexual behavior is horribly disgusting but I don’t have anything against you as a person. (I’m not equating your point with that one, just giving an example where separating approval of a person’s behavior from approval of a person leads to clear absurdity.)
To bring this back to a more concrete discussion of Swimmer963′s comment — if being “ambitious”, whatever that means, leads people to behave like those high-school classmates of hers, then that should be a strike against being ambitious. Where is the fallacy?
I don’t see the absurdity, actually. Seems on par for me with, “I think your taste in [death metal, anchovies on pizza, toilet paper roll direction] is horribly disgusting, but I don’t have anything against you as a person”.
Or for that matter, “I think what you say is disgusting, but I defend your right to say it.”
Of course, AFAICT, this actually has nothing to do with what we’re discussing, which is the opposite sort of issue: where one is, say, inappropriately disgusted by sports because when you grew up the people who were into sports were mean to you, so that now you make excuses not to go to the gym without really knowing why.
Your statement only makes sense if there is a natural reality-clustering around the term “ambitious”—or any other term. One of the techniques I teach people to use in this sort of situation is to ask if there are any ambitious people who don’t display those annoying qualities, to focus attention on counterexamples. The essential idea is to cleave your brain’s concept clustering to better match the diversity that exists in reality.
Sadly, our brains don’t often update on this sort of thing without an extra push from the outside. A lot of common personal development problems essentially consist of this sort of accidental agglomeration of concepts.
Think of the story of the neural network supposedly trained to spot camouflaged tanks, which had in fact only learned to distinguish between pictures taken at different times of day. (Because the pictures with tanks were all taken during a different part of the afternoon than the non-tank pictures.) In the same way, if something always goes together during our formative years (like being ambitious and being an asshole), our brains learn that “asshole” is part of what the word “ambitious” actually means.
Correcting (and equally important, detecting) that sort of mistaken learning is what mindhacking (or at least the sort I practice and preach) is all about. Hence the heuristic of always questioning feelings of moral indignation or superiority: they have a strong prior probability of being a source of motivated reasoning and confabulation.
To put it another way, any time you find yourself indignantly arguing for the value of moral disapproval, the prior probability that you are engaging in confabulation motivated by your existing feeling of disapproval is pretty astronomical, regardless of whether your reasoning is actually correct.
That’s a great example. I would have upvoted just for this.
To be more precise it lacks utility outside of a context where your signal will actually affect the behavior or the behavior or perception of any other person including yourself.
I probably should’ve said “net utility”, as I meant “useful on balance given the cost of biasing yourself, including the costs of feeling bad and being unable to enact the relevant personal changes”.
I totally agree. It’s almost always a terrible idea.
How do you rate it as a direct means of influence? (I tend to resist letting it work on me but it does have an effect on some. Do you think that is worth using in some cases and on average?)
My general impression is that the only people who are affected in a useful way by disapproval are those who on some level agree with your disapproval, in that they learned either that the specific thing was worthy of disapproval, or that they were generally worthy of disapproval.
For example, a sales person who believes salespeople are pushy and therefore worthy of disapproval will likely be very sensitive to people disapproving of their pushiness. Likewise, a salesperson who grew up being (implicitly) taught that they themselves are generally unworthy, without any specific relation to sales, will also be sensitive to people disapproving of them.
In contrast, people who grew up learning that “pushy” behaviors are actually called “friendly”, will probably not respond to disapproval in the same way. They will probably conclude that the objecting person must really need a friend, if they are being so grouchy as to disapprove of them being friendly. ;-)
A person who learns, on the other hand, that being pushy is how you get ahead in life, will probably react with disapproval of their own to any criticism of their behavior. They’ll perceive someone disapproving of their pushiness as being someone who’s trying to put them out of work.
In short, disapproval only usefully affects people who have been socialized to believe in sufficiently-overlapping targets of disapproval. And even then, it first and foremost motivates signalling behaviors like guilt and remorse. I think disapproval (like the chances of criminals being caught) has to be virtually omnipresent and certain in order to actually affect behaviors other than increased compliance signalling and enhanced stealth. ;-)
Yeah. I feel this way about attractive and popular people. I hate them too much to ever consider imitating them. (not sure why I have to give up the hatred though.)
You don’t “have to” do anything. But you’ll likely experience “ugh fields” and akrasia trying to do anything that will make you too much like an “attractive and popular” person, until/unless you drop it.
true dat.
Doesn’t even need to go as far as ugh fields and akrasia—it’s an explicit choice.
Er, true, but that’s not what I meant. I mean that you might have other goals—goals you might not expect to be related, but which, as a side effect, might make you “like” (be similar to) those people in some minor way, and end up with a puzzling ugh field or akrasia, if you didn’t consciously notice the connection.
This is a common enough occurrence that I have patterns for working on it, in myself and in people who consult me for akrasia problems.