I came to the conclusion a long time ago that it was impossible to be a good man and a philosopher. If you believe you are obligated to help others, you will instinctively come up with justifications why helping others means doing what you wanted to anyway, instead of selling off all your earthly possessions to feed the starving.
If you seek to believe the truth above all else, you can’t allow yourself any reason to want to deceive yourself, to regret knowing the truth. Altruism creates these regrets in spades. A true seeker of truth must rid himself of altruism.
Of course, this does not apply if, like Eliezer, you only seek truth in the service of your altruism. It would do Eliezer no good to toss aside his altruism in search of the truth. However, this is his weakness as a rationalist. You can only maximize one variable, and if you’re maximizing altruism, you’re not maximizing truth.
If you believe you are obligated to help others, you will instinctively come up with justifications why helping others means doing what you wanted to anyway, instead of selling off all your earthly possessions to feed the starving.
Of course, you can mitigate this by, y’know, actually trying.
You can only maximize one variable, and if you’re maximizing altruism, you’re not maximizing truth.
This is only necessarily the case if you’re on the Pareto frontier, which no human is. There are reasons to think that there are sometimes better ways to optimize X than trying to optimize X. (I agree that an altruist and a truthseeker would and (by their preferences) should do different things, but it’s not as simple as you make it sound.)
I came to the conclusion a long time ago that it was impossible to be a good man and a philosopher. If you believe you are obligated to help others, you will instinctively come up with justifications why helping others means doing what you wanted to anyway, instead of selling off all your earthly possessions to feed the starving.
If you seek to believe the truth above all else, you can’t allow yourself any reason to want to deceive yourself, to regret knowing the truth. Altruism creates these regrets in spades. A true seeker of truth must rid himself of altruism.
Of course, this does not apply if, like Eliezer, you only seek truth in the service of your altruism. It would do Eliezer no good to toss aside his altruism in search of the truth. However, this is his weakness as a rationalist. You can only maximize one variable, and if you’re maximizing altruism, you’re not maximizing truth.
Of course, you can mitigate this by, y’know, actually trying.
This is only necessarily the case if you’re on the Pareto frontier, which no human is. There are reasons to think that there are sometimes better ways to optimize X than trying to optimize X. (I agree that an altruist and a truthseeker would and (by their preferences) should do different things, but it’s not as simple as you make it sound.)