We need to taboo “evil”, and split this confusing mental bucket into multiple less confusing ones.
everyone partly fulfils the definition of psychopath
What exactly does this mean? Psychopaths are incapable of certain emotions (such as compassion), which allows them to develop certain skills (such as lying and manipulating people) to a degree almost unimaginable for an average person (who would be aware, and hampered by, consequences of the lies and manipulation on other people; and would therefore every day miss thousand opportunities to practice). Are normies also capable of lying and manipulation? Sure they are. Does this make them partial psychopaths? Nope.
People commonly have a terminal value of dragging other people down.
I have a problem with the word “terminal”, because it is easy to imagine instrumental reasons (and difficult to verify whether they actually exist outside of my imagination), such as intuitively perceiving the world as a zero-sum game, and trying to increase one’s relative status by dragging other people down. In an ancient tribe, sometimes you only need to drag down about dozen people to get on the top.
On the other hand, what is instrumental from evolutionary perspective, may still be terminal for a human mind. Humans, as a species, are evil to certain degree. (Also good. Also inconsistent.) Another question is whether some groups of humans are more evil than others. Seems plausible; if we have people who are taller than others, or smarter than others, why not also people who are more innately evil than others? That is, they have a stronger version of the universal instinct for evil. (This is different from psychopathy, because the natural assumption would be that this kind of innate evil exists on the bell curve. Psychopathy is bimodal. The person with strong version of universal evil would probably enjoy hurting people in some ways a lot, and yet feel genuine regret for accidentally hurting them in a different way. On the contrary, an ethical psychopath would not give a fuck about human suffering, but might refrain from hurting people for some non-emotional reason.)
People often turn off empathy for an outgroup. I don’t even know how to correctly classify this, because the instinct is obviously innate, but the definition of outgroup is learned.
Now, having said this all, I believe this article points towards an important thing. Yes, demonizing one’s outgroup is classic propaganda / cognitive bias. But we should not revert this stupidity blindly. Sometimes people are different. And if we assume that people differ on the scale of innate evil, you may happen to be more good than the average… in which case you are likely to meet people or groups of people who are more innately evil than you. (Okay, but really what is the chance that Less Wrong just happens to be the place where good people gather? Dunno, it’s a website about saving the world, maybe this resonates with some. Another possible hypothesis is that Less Wrong is for nerds, nerds are more likely to be on the autistic spectrum, and maybe autists are less evil… because evil, in some sense, is a social skill? No idea, just made this up.)
We need to taboo “evil”, and split this confusing mental bucket into multiple less confusing ones.
What exactly does this mean? Psychopaths are incapable of certain emotions (such as compassion), which allows them to develop certain skills (such as lying and manipulating people) to a degree almost unimaginable for an average person (who would be aware, and hampered by, consequences of the lies and manipulation on other people; and would therefore every day miss thousand opportunities to practice). Are normies also capable of lying and manipulation? Sure they are. Does this make them partial psychopaths? Nope.
I have a problem with the word “terminal”, because it is easy to imagine instrumental reasons (and difficult to verify whether they actually exist outside of my imagination), such as intuitively perceiving the world as a zero-sum game, and trying to increase one’s relative status by dragging other people down. In an ancient tribe, sometimes you only need to drag down about dozen people to get on the top.
On the other hand, what is instrumental from evolutionary perspective, may still be terminal for a human mind. Humans, as a species, are evil to certain degree. (Also good. Also inconsistent.) Another question is whether some groups of humans are more evil than others. Seems plausible; if we have people who are taller than others, or smarter than others, why not also people who are more innately evil than others? That is, they have a stronger version of the universal instinct for evil. (This is different from psychopathy, because the natural assumption would be that this kind of innate evil exists on the bell curve. Psychopathy is bimodal. The person with strong version of universal evil would probably enjoy hurting people in some ways a lot, and yet feel genuine regret for accidentally hurting them in a different way. On the contrary, an ethical psychopath would not give a fuck about human suffering, but might refrain from hurting people for some non-emotional reason.)
People often turn off empathy for an outgroup. I don’t even know how to correctly classify this, because the instinct is obviously innate, but the definition of outgroup is learned.
Now, having said this all, I believe this article points towards an important thing. Yes, demonizing one’s outgroup is classic propaganda / cognitive bias. But we should not revert this stupidity blindly. Sometimes people are different. And if we assume that people differ on the scale of innate evil, you may happen to be more good than the average… in which case you are likely to meet people or groups of people who are more innately evil than you. (Okay, but really what is the chance that Less Wrong just happens to be the place where good people gather? Dunno, it’s a website about saving the world, maybe this resonates with some. Another possible hypothesis is that Less Wrong is for nerds, nerds are more likely to be on the autistic spectrum, and maybe autists are less evil… because evil, in some sense, is a social skill? No idea, just made this up.)