The one thing that caught my eye in your scenario is the stipulation that, in the case of your actual brother, there are no other people present. Is this because you would be made somehow to feel guilt if there were witnesses or because the presence of others who also failed to save your brother somehow mitigates the guilt? It is an interesting situation given the dynamic between your brother and yourself but the witness factor is what intrigues me.
No, I would feel the same if there were witnesses to my failure to risk myself to save my actual bad-blood-brother in such a hypothetical situation. I just stipulated the ‘no witnesses’ to contrast with the first situation fully.
I’m just saying: “okay, here’s a hypothetical situation where none of the reasons proposed in this article for the existence of guilt apply, and yet I’d expect to feel great guilt. By contrast, here’s a situation where they all apply but I wouldn’t expect to feel guilt.”
The question is, do you other people feel my expectations are wrong? Would you expect differently for yourselves? How do you think most people would [expect to feel/actually feel if such a thing happened]? Do you think I’m mistaken about how my hypothetical situations relate to the arguments in this article? Etc
Oh, and actually, I already do feel that I did miss an opportunity to save him. If I had been more mature myself while we were growing up, I could have been an awesome big brother. Preventing him from ever getting near being as lost as he is now probably would have been possible through behavioral means, I mean
But of course I couldn’t teach him not to be an idiot, because I hadn’t learned yet myself, because nobody had thought to teach me in any deliberately optimized way, and I had to learn it from a long streak of experiences that just happened through good luck to be sequenced in an order that stopped me from getting hopelessly lost myself. Which took a long time.
But I don’t feel guilty for not being lucky enough to have an environment that would have taught me the level of maturity I would have needed to save him, soon enough that I could have done so.
I feel sad, remembering the little boy that was me carrying the little boy that was him through the forest on my shoulders, and knowing that only one of those little boys was lucky enough to become a man who is at least trying to be a nice person and a positive force in the world.
And I feel a great need to figure out how to stop future repeats of tragedies like this (which I feel is quite possible), and I wish I could figure out how to recover this one (which by contrast I feel will probably stay beyond my powers for a very long time).
I feel sad, but I don’t feel guilty. Is this maybe just because this is one situation where I have succeeded in feeling rationally?
I know my mom definitely has suffered a lot of self-flagellation over this. Is that difference just because she is a mother whereas I am merely a brother? Or does the fact that she is not an aspiring rationalist also have something to do with it, I wonder?
Thanks, although I had just found the answer myself on the FAQ page when I saw the little red ‘you got a reply’ envelope come on. Would have found it sooner, but of course this is ‘less wrong of the many interesting links’, and if you aint focused, you will be distracted.
How I missed seeing the “help” button in the first place though, I don’t have any excuse for. :P
Well, yes, you’re right of course. There are lots of different factors at work there. What I’m wondering is, does rationality seem likely to be one of them?
That’s a horribly uncontrolled situation for actually answering the question, but that’s the context in which I thought of it.
Actually, if aspiring rationalists should be better at not feeling ‘undeserved guilt’, and guilt serves the ‘purpose’ Yvain is saying it might, that could be another defecting by accident situation, couldn’t it?
No, I would feel the same if there were witnesses to my failure to risk myself to save my actual bad-blood-brother in such a hypothetical situation. I just stipulated the ‘no witnesses’ to contrast with the first situation fully.
I’m just saying: “okay, here’s a hypothetical situation where none of the reasons proposed in this article for the existence of guilt apply, and yet I’d expect to feel great guilt. By contrast, here’s a situation where they all apply but I wouldn’t expect to feel guilt.”
The question is, do you other people feel my expectations are wrong? Would you expect differently for yourselves? How do you think most people would [expect to feel/actually feel if such a thing happened]? Do you think I’m mistaken about how my hypothetical situations relate to the arguments in this article? Etc
The one thing that caught my eye in your scenario is the stipulation that, in the case of your actual brother, there are no other people present. Is this because you would be made somehow to feel guilt if there were witnesses or because the presence of others who also failed to save your brother somehow mitigates the guilt? It is an interesting situation given the dynamic between your brother and yourself but the witness factor is what intrigues me.
No, I would feel the same if there were witnesses to my failure to risk myself to save my actual bad-blood-brother in such a hypothetical situation. I just stipulated the ‘no witnesses’ to contrast with the first situation fully.
I’m just saying: “okay, here’s a hypothetical situation where none of the reasons proposed in this article for the existence of guilt apply, and yet I’d expect to feel great guilt. By contrast, here’s a situation where they all apply but I wouldn’t expect to feel guilt.”
The question is, do you other people feel my expectations are wrong? Would you expect differently for yourselves? How do you think most people would [expect to feel/actually feel if such a thing happened]? Do you think I’m mistaken about how my hypothetical situations relate to the arguments in this article? Etc
Oh, and actually, I already do feel that I did miss an opportunity to save him. If I had been more mature myself while we were growing up, I could have been an awesome big brother. Preventing him from ever getting near being as lost as he is now probably would have been possible through behavioral means, I mean
But of course I couldn’t teach him not to be an idiot, because I hadn’t learned yet myself, because nobody had thought to teach me in any deliberately optimized way, and I had to learn it from a long streak of experiences that just happened through good luck to be sequenced in an order that stopped me from getting hopelessly lost myself. Which took a long time.
But I don’t feel guilty for not being lucky enough to have an environment that would have taught me the level of maturity I would have needed to save him, soon enough that I could have done so.
I feel sad, remembering the little boy that was me carrying the little boy that was him through the forest on my shoulders, and knowing that only one of those little boys was lucky enough to become a man who is at least trying to be a nice person and a positive force in the world.
And I feel a great need to figure out how to stop future repeats of tragedies like this (which I feel is quite possible), and I wish I could figure out how to recover this one (which by contrast I feel will probably stay beyond my powers for a very long time).
I feel sad, but I don’t feel guilty. Is this maybe just because this is one situation where I have succeeded in feeling rationally?
I know my mom definitely has suffered a lot of self-flagellation over this. Is that difference just because she is a mother whereas I am merely a brother? Or does the fact that she is not an aspiring rationalist also have something to do with it, I wonder?
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Thanks, although I had just found the answer myself on the FAQ page when I saw the little red ‘you got a reply’ envelope come on. Would have found it sooner, but of course this is ‘less wrong of the many interesting links’, and if you aint focused, you will be distracted.
How I missed seeing the “help” button in the first place though, I don’t have any excuse for. :P
You are not the first!
Part of it could be that she was an adult when things were going wrong with your brother.
Well, yes, you’re right of course. There are lots of different factors at work there. What I’m wondering is, does rationality seem likely to be one of them?
That’s a horribly uncontrolled situation for actually answering the question, but that’s the context in which I thought of it.
Actually, if aspiring rationalists should be better at not feeling ‘undeserved guilt’, and guilt serves the ‘purpose’ Yvain is saying it might, that could be another defecting by accident situation, couldn’t it?
No, I would feel the same if there were witnesses to my failure to risk myself to save my actual bad-blood-brother in such a hypothetical situation. I just stipulated the ‘no witnesses’ to contrast with the first situation fully.
I’m just saying: “okay, here’s a hypothetical situation where none of the reasons proposed in this article for the existence of guilt apply, and yet I’d expect to feel great guilt. By contrast, here’s a situation where they all apply but I wouldn’t expect to feel guilt.”
The question is, do you other people feel my expectations are wrong? Would you expect differently for yourselves? How do you think most people would [expect to feel/actually feel if such a thing happened]? Do you think I’m mistaken about how my hypothetical situations relate to the arguments in this article? Etc