Way too much of my motivation for ‘having true beliefs’ breaks down to ‘maybe then they’ll like me.’
Way too much of everyone’s motivation for anything breaks down to “maybe then group X will have/stop having attitude Y towards me”. And the vast majority of the time, we’re completely unaware of it.
So actually, you’ve got a leg up over all the people who are doing the same thing, but have a different X and Y than you and are unaware of it. (AFAICT, people who orient on “true beliefs” tend to be more about respect/status rather than affiliation, but apart from motivating slightly different behaviors, it might as well be the same thing. Affiliation-based motivation often results in “nicer” behaviors though, so that’s actually a plus for you.)
I really think that you should be less dismissive of the possibility that some people really are trying to form their beliefs in order to act on the world, rather than on other people.
some people really are trying to form their beliefs in order to act on the world, rather than on other people.
In which case, their desire to act on the world is typically because of a need to influence other people by way of their world-acting-on.
Or are you talking about people whose autism is so severe that they’ve never formed a bond with any other human being, including their parents?
If that’s not who you’re talking about, you should probably reconsider.
Barring such extreme cases, people generally learned to do whatever they do—including any desire to “act on the world”—as a consequence of their interactions (or lack thereof, in some cases) with other people.
As children, we tend to choose our values based on our attempts to get love and/or attention from our parents, and those early decisions tend to shape later ones. I got rewarded with attention for being the “smart one” in my family, which led me to value learning and knowledge.
For most of my life, I assumed that this valuing was independent of any such early circumstances. Instead, I merely felt like it was the right thing to value knowledge, to seek the truth, etc., and that people who didn’t value these things were not as worthy of respect or attention.
And all the while, I never realized that this was just a lens I viewed the world through… a lens that I put on to better manipulate my parents when I was about 2 or 3 years old.
Now, you might say, “hey, what difference does it make how you get your values, as long as you ended up with good ones?” Unfortunately, it makes quite a bit of difference.
For example, my particular way of learning that value led to me:
being dismissive and impatient with people
assuming I was (and ought to be) the smartest person in any given room (and thus becoming upset or even depressed when I was not), and
valuing the “knowing” of things and knowing the “right” (respectable, reward-worthy) ways of doing things, in preference to actually doing things...
And that’s just a few of particularly awful side-effects I wound up with, off the top of my head.
Now, I’ve been able to shed these issues to some degree recently, but that’s not the same thing as undoing or avoiding the damage in the first place. And if I’d been any more dismissive of the idea that my underlying motives weren’t based on influencing people, there’s no way I’d have spotted the problems!
IOW, I think it’s delusional near-insanity to assume that your value system is not rooted in these types of covert and implicit motivations. Even if you claim to have hardware differences between yourself and other humans, it’s still not a safe assumption to make without actually checking the sources of your values and beliefs.
IOW, believing you’re not human won’t make it so. Litany of Tarski: if my motivations are impure, then I want to know that they are impure.
You seem to be confusing the causes of people’s preferences with their preferences. The fact that we want sugar because of evolution doesn’t mean that we don’t really want sugar.
Also, I’m not at all sure of what exactly you mean by ‘a bond’.
Also, not everyone needs to do anything to get adequate love and attention. Some people do in fact grow up as only children in large families or otherwise unconditionally attended to.
I do actually think there are some important hardware differences between myself and most people, but they aren’t nearly as important as the above as responses to your point. Related, I don’t think I want to not be human (though I have a strong desire to somehow blend characteristics of adult and immature humans which may not be compatible). If anything, that’s what UFAI enthusiasts want. I also don’t think I believe in purity, to a fairly anomalous degree, though that’s probably less relevant.
You seem to be confusing the causes of people’s preferences with their preferences. The fact that we want sugar because of evolution doesn’t mean that we don’t really want sugar.
That depends on your definition of “want”. My point is that the causes of preferences can’t really be untangled from the preferences, because they have causal influence over how you will attempt to fulfill them, and most of that influence is subconscious or completely unconscious.
IOW, I’m focusing on the link between the cause of preferences, and how you end up behaving, thereby bypassing the difficult problem of pinning down an adequate definition of “want”. ;-)
Also, not everyone needs to do anything to get adequate love and attention. Some people do in fact grow up as only children in large families or otherwise unconditionally attended to.
And those people still get their values shaped by that attention, just differently. So I’m not clear on what you’re getting at there.
My girlfriend was a philosophy/english major and I was an engineering major. I was studying some mathy stuff and she brought up that she feels bad for not being able to discuss this particular interest with me. I told her that’s fine. I’m getting lots out of this study as it is, and that she and I have good conversations about other things.
Her response: “why would you want to learn something, if you’re not going to talk about it?”. I’m perfectly okay with the idea that I can’t talk about math to impress someone. I’ll be able to use the knowledge to impact the physical world in useful ways.
Of course, on a higher level, my goal in learning this math is still based on impressing people, but it’s for impressing them with physical results (or to help me raise my status, which will ultimately impress people) as opposed to having an impressive conversation.
Break down almost any human effort and at the bottom of it you’ll usually find a struggle for social status, which is/was directly conductive to reproductive success (especially for males, for females it’s more about looks when it comes to attracting a partner, but social status of cause still plays a critical role for surviving and thriving in a social group).
I seriously doubt any one of us can outrun our nature without cognitive engineering, so my preferred way of dealing with this side of human nature is to look at it as a “serious game” not terribly different from competitive poker. Win some, lose some—take it serious but don’t obsess over it to the point where you make it the core and center of your very existence. It’s not “meaningful” enough, or indeed meaningful at all given a transhuman perspective.
If we could upload and re-engineer our minds tomorrow, I’d probably strongly advocate to cut this “social status” nonsense from our cognitive make-up. By now it has outstayed its purpose and as far as I’m concerned its welcome, it has only brought untold misery upon humans and there are much more worthy things to be motivated by.
Hell, social status is even a significant roadblock for discussions among rationalists. Almost any possible communication between humans has an undercurrent that carries information about social status. So arguing and disagreeing were never ways to arrive at rational conclusions to begin with, they are actually ways to impose your will and influence and dominance onto others—so when we level a criticism or disagreement even to a fellow rationalist around here, we often feel the need to first make a little linguistic dance of appeasement to ensure our fellow apes don’t take our disagreement as an assassination attempt on their social status. Especially not while everyone’s watching from their desktops and treetops .
And sometimes, if you’re really lucky it actually works.
Do you have any recommendations on how to combat this? Obviously, mixing with groups that reward behaviour you wish to cultivate would be a good first step, but what other steps can one take? Do you think making a concious effort to identify more/feel friendlier towards people whose behaviour you consider laudable would help? This would be a step much more readily made for most people than changing their actual social group.
Way too much of everyone’s motivation for anything breaks down to “maybe then group X will have/stop having attitude Y towards me”. And the vast majority of the time, we’re completely unaware of it.
So actually, you’ve got a leg up over all the people who are doing the same thing, but have a different X and Y than you and are unaware of it. (AFAICT, people who orient on “true beliefs” tend to be more about respect/status rather than affiliation, but apart from motivating slightly different behaviors, it might as well be the same thing. Affiliation-based motivation often results in “nicer” behaviors though, so that’s actually a plus for you.)
I really think that you should be less dismissive of the possibility that some people really are trying to form their beliefs in order to act on the world, rather than on other people.
In which case, their desire to act on the world is typically because of a need to influence other people by way of their world-acting-on.
Or are you talking about people whose autism is so severe that they’ve never formed a bond with any other human being, including their parents?
If that’s not who you’re talking about, you should probably reconsider.
Barring such extreme cases, people generally learned to do whatever they do—including any desire to “act on the world”—as a consequence of their interactions (or lack thereof, in some cases) with other people.
As children, we tend to choose our values based on our attempts to get love and/or attention from our parents, and those early decisions tend to shape later ones. I got rewarded with attention for being the “smart one” in my family, which led me to value learning and knowledge.
For most of my life, I assumed that this valuing was independent of any such early circumstances. Instead, I merely felt like it was the right thing to value knowledge, to seek the truth, etc., and that people who didn’t value these things were not as worthy of respect or attention.
And all the while, I never realized that this was just a lens I viewed the world through… a lens that I put on to better manipulate my parents when I was about 2 or 3 years old.
Now, you might say, “hey, what difference does it make how you get your values, as long as you ended up with good ones?” Unfortunately, it makes quite a bit of difference.
For example, my particular way of learning that value led to me:
being dismissive and impatient with people
assuming I was (and ought to be) the smartest person in any given room (and thus becoming upset or even depressed when I was not), and
valuing the “knowing” of things and knowing the “right” (respectable, reward-worthy) ways of doing things, in preference to actually doing things...
And that’s just a few of particularly awful side-effects I wound up with, off the top of my head.
Now, I’ve been able to shed these issues to some degree recently, but that’s not the same thing as undoing or avoiding the damage in the first place. And if I’d been any more dismissive of the idea that my underlying motives weren’t based on influencing people, there’s no way I’d have spotted the problems!
IOW, I think it’s delusional near-insanity to assume that your value system is not rooted in these types of covert and implicit motivations. Even if you claim to have hardware differences between yourself and other humans, it’s still not a safe assumption to make without actually checking the sources of your values and beliefs.
IOW, believing you’re not human won’t make it so. Litany of Tarski: if my motivations are impure, then I want to know that they are impure.
You seem to be confusing the causes of people’s preferences with their preferences. The fact that we want sugar because of evolution doesn’t mean that we don’t really want sugar.
Also, I’m not at all sure of what exactly you mean by ‘a bond’.
Also, not everyone needs to do anything to get adequate love and attention. Some people do in fact grow up as only children in large families or otherwise unconditionally attended to.
I do actually think there are some important hardware differences between myself and most people, but they aren’t nearly as important as the above as responses to your point. Related, I don’t think I want to not be human (though I have a strong desire to somehow blend characteristics of adult and immature humans which may not be compatible). If anything, that’s what UFAI enthusiasts want. I also don’t think I believe in purity, to a fairly anomalous degree, though that’s probably less relevant.
That depends on your definition of “want”. My point is that the causes of preferences can’t really be untangled from the preferences, because they have causal influence over how you will attempt to fulfill them, and most of that influence is subconscious or completely unconscious.
IOW, I’m focusing on the link between the cause of preferences, and how you end up behaving, thereby bypassing the difficult problem of pinning down an adequate definition of “want”. ;-)
And those people still get their values shaped by that attention, just differently. So I’m not clear on what you’re getting at there.
My girlfriend was a philosophy/english major and I was an engineering major. I was studying some mathy stuff and she brought up that she feels bad for not being able to discuss this particular interest with me. I told her that’s fine. I’m getting lots out of this study as it is, and that she and I have good conversations about other things.
Her response: “why would you want to learn something, if you’re not going to talk about it?”. I’m perfectly okay with the idea that I can’t talk about math to impress someone. I’ll be able to use the knowledge to impact the physical world in useful ways.
Of course, on a higher level, my goal in learning this math is still based on impressing people, but it’s for impressing them with physical results (or to help me raise my status, which will ultimately impress people) as opposed to having an impressive conversation.
Massively agreed.
Break down almost any human effort and at the bottom of it you’ll usually find a struggle for social status, which is/was directly conductive to reproductive success (especially for males, for females it’s more about looks when it comes to attracting a partner, but social status of cause still plays a critical role for surviving and thriving in a social group).
I seriously doubt any one of us can outrun our nature without cognitive engineering, so my preferred way of dealing with this side of human nature is to look at it as a “serious game” not terribly different from competitive poker. Win some, lose some—take it serious but don’t obsess over it to the point where you make it the core and center of your very existence. It’s not “meaningful” enough, or indeed meaningful at all given a transhuman perspective.
If we could upload and re-engineer our minds tomorrow, I’d probably strongly advocate to cut this “social status” nonsense from our cognitive make-up. By now it has outstayed its purpose and as far as I’m concerned its welcome, it has only brought untold misery upon humans and there are much more worthy things to be motivated by.
Hell, social status is even a significant roadblock for discussions among rationalists. Almost any possible communication between humans has an undercurrent that carries information about social status. So arguing and disagreeing were never ways to arrive at rational conclusions to begin with, they are actually ways to impose your will and influence and dominance onto others—so when we level a criticism or disagreement even to a fellow rationalist around here, we often feel the need to first make a little linguistic dance of appeasement to ensure our fellow apes don’t take our disagreement as an assassination attempt on their social status. Especially not while everyone’s watching from their desktops and treetops .
And sometimes, if you’re really lucky it actually works.
Do you have any recommendations on how to combat this? Obviously, mixing with groups that reward behaviour you wish to cultivate would be a good first step, but what other steps can one take? Do you think making a concious effort to identify more/feel friendlier towards people whose behaviour you consider laudable would help? This would be a step much more readily made for most people than changing their actual social group.
Combat what, precisely? Being human? ;-)
(Honestly, though, I’m not clear from your questions what it is that you’re trying to accomplish.)