I’ve spent several years deep in the bowels of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. (It’s jolly good and I’m very proud to have had some small part in what we’ve achieved and continue to achieve.) Wikipedia has the rule “assume good faith”, which is of course a restatement of Hanlon’s razor, “never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.” Wikimedia is 100% made of sincere people who really believe in what they’re doing. Per Dumas’ razor, “I prefer rogues to imbeciles, as rogues sometimes rest,” this means that when one of these sincere, smart, dedicated people is doing something that’s actually blitheringly stupid, it’s ten times as hard to get across to them that they are in fact having a towering attack of dumbarse.
Every politician I’ve ever met has in fact been a completely sincere person who considers themselves to do what they do with the aim of good in the world. Even the ones that any outsider would say “haha, leave it out” to the notion. Every politician is completely sincere. I posit that this is a much more frightening notion than the comfort of a conspiracy theory.
There are few, if any, villains. There are people being stupid and foolish. These are frequently us. LessWrong’s catalogue of cognitive biases is to remind you that you, yes you, are in fact an idiot. As am I.
The hard part is to set the bozo bit on people in parts, rather than over the whole person. And allow for the notion of cluifiability.
This is simply not what I observe to be the case from my experience with politicians and high-level business people. People quite consciously play and want to play varied parts in life, some of which are villain parts.
There are certainly a fairly large group of people who are inclined to refer to others as “do-gooders” but I think this usually this is a consequence of not thinking of things in terms of wrong and right, but in terms of winners and losers. They adopt stereotypically villainous traits mockingly, to display their contempt for people they think are inferior to them. I know and see a lot of businessmen and commentators like that, but not many politicians, at least above the level of the president of the Young Tory or Debating society.
Similarly people who decide that the most important thing to do is to smash some “the other side” they can’t credibly be cast as oppressive tend to adopt villainous traits.
OK, that sounds about right.
I suspect that one difference is that we treat politicians as meaning different things. You may mean “candidates” while I’m also including lobbyests and other party organizers and influencers.
I would need actual examples of people who thought of themselves as villains here. (I realise this request may involve mindreading.)
Some do appear to be running through the Cool Villain pages on TVTropes, but would think of themselves as doing so to achieve an end. Some seem to have talked themselves into a position of moral ambiguity, where you can’t do just one thing and someone will always get hurt and they might as well be the ones trying to make the least hash of it and achieve something better than bad. And the Xanatos gambits! It’s quite dazzling having a party apparatchik describe to you their ridiculous gambit that they then seem to pull off. And wonder if the bit where they tell you about it was part of the gambit. Anything involving politics is a thirty Xanatos pileup every day anyway.
(It’s not a counterexample to what you’ve said, but I think of Pol Pot’s last recorded words, “Everything I did, I did for my country” and marvel at humans’ power not to paint themselves as villains. Though that quote could arguably show slight awareness sneaking in.)
Here is a This American Life episode about just such a real-life group of people: a collection of various chemical company executives arranging and implementing an international price fixing scheme that lasted years.
The episode focuses on an informant, a junior executive with one of the companies, who captured an enormous amount of footage of the executives jovially discussing the various ways and means they’d be using to knowingly screw over their customers and, in turn, a great deal of the agricultural and industrial economies that depended on their products. The footage is justly described as “probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act”.
Everyone has reasons for the things they do, post-hoc or otherwise; I think what distinguishes a villian is a callous acceptance of their own selfishness and a pointed indifference to, or even enjoyment of, the suffering inflicted upon others due to their actions.
Amusingly, I misparsed your sentence, and was about to point out that “was typical” is the same as “wasn’t atypical”.
I parsed ciphergoth’s comment as saying “I would want a lot more footage before I said that this footage is an exception to the rule of ‘mostly sincere stupidity’.”
I’ve met a few people on TVTropes who claim to be playing a villain role or something roughly cognate to one in real life, without having any particular higher-level reason for doing so in mind; the infamous Troper Tales pages are a particularly fruitful source of examples, although it’s likely that a lot of the more extreme ones come out of attempts at trolling.
Even if we discount active attempts at deception, that site selects for people who spend a lot of time thinking about character types, and additionally has the right demographics for many of them to put an excessively high priority on looking cool; it’s wise to take this sort of character identification with several grains of salt. As best I can tell the motivations involved aren’t usually all that villainous relative to most external observers, but it’s self-image that’s at issue here.
Every politician is completely sincere. I posit that
this is a much more frightening notion than the comfort of
a conspiracy theory.
Hear, hear.
I think of self-deception and ill will as lying on a
continuum with no bright line separating them.
Bad Jackie in
slacktivist’s “Jackie at the crossroads”
is a “bad person”, or at least a person who does a clearly
bad thing and does not repent, but she will be quite upset
with herself if she ever realizes this.
This is patently, staggeringly false. Politics isn’t Wikimedia. There are completely different motivations, rewards and therefore different people get into it. There is money, power, status involved and it’s a competitive setting.
What do you think politicians think of themselves when they deceive, become corrupt, sacrifice the interest of the state for that of their own or their party, or go into the pocket of another nation/businessman/organised crime? Calling them “sincere” and acting for the good of the world sounds naive, like you don’t believe in the existence of cynical people. As long as the interest of someone else than the voter is being served, and the voter is being deceived about that, that’s not sincerity.
EDIT: the amount of upvotes the parent comment got is a bit scary. Either I’m missing something important, or there’s a lot of very innocent readers around...
Your idea is one of the principles of Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people. He goes on at length on the specific case of Al Capone, notorious 20th century American gangster.
In his autobiography, Blair relates that during the buildup to the Iraq war he used to tell anti-war Labour cabinet memebers and MPs “it’s worse than you think, I really believe in this”. Though as that episode shows, being a true believer isn’t the same thing as being honest or transparent in your justifications.
I had a brief relapse on this realisation recently, during the assault on Gaza, when it was revealed that (some) Israeli supporters on the net were coordinating and disseminating talking points using software released by PR firms (can’t remember if they were offficial gov’t agencies or just overenthusiastic), similar to what some AGW defenders have set up on twitter. Anyway this was briefly comforting, since I felt some of the arguments they were using were callous, and it was nice to think that they didn’t really mean them, but then it was pointed out that they weren’t being paid.
Dude. Arguments are soldiers. Of course they meant them. There are people who sincerely—as far as you, I or themselves could ever tell—believe things because they think they should.
I don’t know much about politicians, really, but I don’t find it difficult to imagine that many of them could believe they are doing neither good nor harm on any significant scale—perhaps that they could not do significant good or harm--, but by means of some combination of seeking benefit for their allies and doing what they feel is necessary to be politically successful are in fact doing more harm than they imagine, at least by comparison with a hypothetical replacement of greater intelligence/integrity/courage/rationality/etc. I’m just speculating, though, and I’m not sure what could be offered in response except anecdotal (and indirect) evidence.
Well, what goes into the alimentary canal is very nice, and what comes out is… not so nice. Wikipedia articles have problems with degrading over time when the creators leave and the deletionists take over.
No-one is a villain in their own mind, of course.
I’ve spent several years deep in the bowels of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. (It’s jolly good and I’m very proud to have had some small part in what we’ve achieved and continue to achieve.) Wikipedia has the rule “assume good faith”, which is of course a restatement of Hanlon’s razor, “never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.” Wikimedia is 100% made of sincere people who really believe in what they’re doing. Per Dumas’ razor, “I prefer rogues to imbeciles, as rogues sometimes rest,” this means that when one of these sincere, smart, dedicated people is doing something that’s actually blitheringly stupid, it’s ten times as hard to get across to them that they are in fact having a towering attack of dumbarse.
Every politician I’ve ever met has in fact been a completely sincere person who considers themselves to do what they do with the aim of good in the world. Even the ones that any outsider would say “haha, leave it out” to the notion. Every politician is completely sincere. I posit that this is a much more frightening notion than the comfort of a conspiracy theory.
There are few, if any, villains. There are people being stupid and foolish. These are frequently us. LessWrong’s catalogue of cognitive biases is to remind you that you, yes you, are in fact an idiot. As am I.
The hard part is to set the bozo bit on people in parts, rather than over the whole person. And allow for the notion of cluifiability.
This is simply not what I observe to be the case from my experience with politicians and high-level business people.
People quite consciously play and want to play varied parts in life, some of which are villain parts.
There are certainly a fairly large group of people who are inclined to refer to others as “do-gooders” but I think this usually this is a consequence of not thinking of things in terms of wrong and right, but in terms of winners and losers. They adopt stereotypically villainous traits mockingly, to display their contempt for people they think are inferior to them. I know and see a lot of businessmen and commentators like that, but not many politicians, at least above the level of the president of the Young Tory or Debating society.
Similarly people who decide that the most important thing to do is to smash some “the other side” they can’t credibly be cast as oppressive tend to adopt villainous traits.
OK, that sounds about right. I suspect that one difference is that we treat politicians as meaning different things. You may mean “candidates” while I’m also including lobbyests and other party organizers and influencers.
I would need actual examples of people who thought of themselves as villains here. (I realise this request may involve mindreading.)
Some do appear to be running through the Cool Villain pages on TVTropes, but would think of themselves as doing so to achieve an end. Some seem to have talked themselves into a position of moral ambiguity, where you can’t do just one thing and someone will always get hurt and they might as well be the ones trying to make the least hash of it and achieve something better than bad. And the Xanatos gambits! It’s quite dazzling having a party apparatchik describe to you their ridiculous gambit that they then seem to pull off. And wonder if the bit where they tell you about it was part of the gambit. Anything involving politics is a thirty Xanatos pileup every day anyway.
(It’s not a counterexample to what you’ve said, but I think of Pol Pot’s last recorded words, “Everything I did, I did for my country” and marvel at humans’ power not to paint themselves as villains. Though that quote could arguably show slight awareness sneaking in.)
Here is a This American Life episode about just such a real-life group of people: a collection of various chemical company executives arranging and implementing an international price fixing scheme that lasted years.
The episode focuses on an informant, a junior executive with one of the companies, who captured an enormous amount of footage of the executives jovially discussing the various ways and means they’d be using to knowingly screw over their customers and, in turn, a great deal of the agricultural and industrial economies that depended on their products. The footage is justly described as “probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act”.
Everyone has reasons for the things they do, post-hoc or otherwise; I think what distinguishes a villian is a callous acceptance of their own selfishness and a pointed indifference to, or even enjoyment of, the suffering inflicted upon others due to their actions.
O_O
Okay. Mostly there’s just sincere stupidity.
I’d want to see a lot more examples of covert villany footage to be confident that this footage was atypical.
Er, I don’t understand. Do you mean “was typical” or “wasn’t atypical”, or have I misparsed?
Amusingly, I misparsed your sentence, and was about to point out that “was typical” is the same as “wasn’t atypical”.
I parsed ciphergoth’s comment as saying “I would want a lot more footage before I said that this footage is an exception to the rule of ‘mostly sincere stupidity’.”
Yes, that’s what I meant.
I’ve met a few people on TVTropes who claim to be playing a villain role or something roughly cognate to one in real life, without having any particular higher-level reason for doing so in mind; the infamous Troper Tales pages are a particularly fruitful source of examples, although it’s likely that a lot of the more extreme ones come out of attempts at trolling.
Even if we discount active attempts at deception, that site selects for people who spend a lot of time thinking about character types, and additionally has the right demographics for many of them to put an excessively high priority on looking cool; it’s wise to take this sort of character identification with several grains of salt. As best I can tell the motivations involved aren’t usually all that villainous relative to most external observers, but it’s self-image that’s at issue here.
A fictional example of someone wanting to be a villain might be Shakespeare’s Richard III. In the opening soliloquy in the play:
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardiii/full.html
Of course, the real Richard III probably wasn’t that bad a chap, just poorly treated by Tudor propaganda (arguably)...
And it is so argued.
Hear, hear.
I think of self-deception and ill will as lying on a continuum with no bright line separating them. Bad Jackie in slacktivist’s “Jackie at the crossroads” is a “bad person”, or at least a person who does a clearly bad thing and does not repent, but she will be quite upset with herself if she ever realizes this.
This is patently, staggeringly false. Politics isn’t Wikimedia. There are completely different motivations, rewards and therefore different people get into it. There is money, power, status involved and it’s a competitive setting.
What do you think politicians think of themselves when they deceive, become corrupt, sacrifice the interest of the state for that of their own or their party, or go into the pocket of another nation/businessman/organised crime? Calling them “sincere” and acting for the good of the world sounds naive, like you don’t believe in the existence of cynical people. As long as the interest of someone else than the voter is being served, and the voter is being deceived about that, that’s not sincerity.
EDIT: the amount of upvotes the parent comment got is a bit scary. Either I’m missing something important, or there’s a lot of very innocent readers around...
Your idea is one of the principles of Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people. He goes on at length on the specific case of Al Capone, notorious 20th century American gangster.
In his autobiography, Blair relates that during the buildup to the Iraq war he used to tell anti-war Labour cabinet memebers and MPs “it’s worse than you think, I really believe in this”. Though as that episode shows, being a true believer isn’t the same thing as being honest or transparent in your justifications.
I had a brief relapse on this realisation recently, during the assault on Gaza, when it was revealed that (some) Israeli supporters on the net were coordinating and disseminating talking points using software released by PR firms (can’t remember if they were offficial gov’t agencies or just overenthusiastic), similar to what some AGW defenders have set up on twitter. Anyway this was briefly comforting, since I felt some of the arguments they were using were callous, and it was nice to think that they didn’t really mean them, but then it was pointed out that they weren’t being paid.
Dude. Arguments are soldiers. Of course they meant them. There are people who sincerely—as far as you, I or themselves could ever tell—believe things because they think they should.
This was what I realised when I found out they were volunteers. I think I ended that sentence a bit too abruptly to make that clear...
I don’t know much about politicians, really, but I don’t find it difficult to imagine that many of them could believe they are doing neither good nor harm on any significant scale—perhaps that they could not do significant good or harm--, but by means of some combination of seeking benefit for their allies and doing what they feel is necessary to be politically successful are in fact doing more harm than they imagine, at least by comparison with a hypothetical replacement of greater intelligence/integrity/courage/rationality/etc. I’m just speculating, though, and I’m not sure what could be offered in response except anecdotal (and indirect) evidence.
Fancy seeing you here. As someone somewhere along the same place in the Wikimedia alimentary canal, I agree entirely with this post.
I find your metaphor unsettling for reasons I’m having trouble putting my finger on.
Well, what goes into the alimentary canal is very nice, and what comes out is… not so nice. Wikipedia articles have problems with degrading over time when the creators leave and the deletionists take over.
What does cluifiability mean? It is neither in the dictionary, nor recognized by Google.
Ability to get a clue.
Ah! Well I had no cluifiability until you posted, thanks.
Ability to make a clu.