Leaving aside the amusing notion of LW outlawing sarcasm, I’m curious about how you concluded that wedrifid’s comment was (unsubtle) sarcasm.
(Just to be clear: I’m not contesting your freedom to downvote the comment for that reason or any other, including simply being irritated by people saying such things about children.)
He started “investigating” a child’s value to parents with things like the status they could gain from it, instead of obvious things like their instinctive emotional response to it, etc. That’s manifestly not what most parents think and feel like.
He started “investigating” a child’s value to parents with things like the status they could gain from it, instead of obvious things like their instinctive emotional response to it, etc. That’s manifestly not what most parents think and feel like.
Emotional distress caused does seem like another important consideration when calculating damages received for baby/property destruction. It probably shouldn’t be the only consideration. Just like if I went and cut someone’s arm off it would be appropriate to consider the future financial and social loss to that person as well as his emotional attachment to his arm.
It doesn’t seem very egalitarian but it may be a bigger crime to cut off the arm of a world class spin bowler (or pitcher) than the arm of a middle manager. It’s not like the latter does anything that really needs his arm.
True enough, but it simply doesn’t feel to me that a child can be meaningfully called “property” at all. Hell, I’m not completely sure that a pet dog can be called property.
Hypothetical question: if my child expresses the desire to go live with some other family, and that family is willing, and in my judgment that family will treat my child roughly as well as I will, is it OK for me to deny that expressed desire and keep my child with me?
OK, then… I suspect you and I have very different understandings of what being property entails. If you’re interested in unpacking your understanding, I’m interested in hearing it.
While I don’t fully disagree, I’m not sure that’s a meaningful objection. One implication of the status-signaling frame is that our instinctive emotional responses (among other cognitive patterns) are calibrated at least partly in terms of maximizing status; it doesn’t require any conscious attention to status at all, let alone an explicit campaign of manipulation.
Well, I think that self-signaling especially—and likely even signaling to very close people like family members too—is one of the basic needs of humans, and, being as entangled with human worldview as it is, deserves to be counted under the blanket term “emotional response”.
Even granting that, it’s still true that if Nornagest is right and my emotional responses are calibrated in terms of expected status-maximization, then it makes sense to consider emotional responses in terms of (among other things) status-maximization for legal purposes.
We clearly need to find out what kinds of emotional responses are calibrated by what adaptations in what proportion. Nominating status-seeking as the most important human drive here out of the blue just seems unjustified to me in this moment.
There’s a tradition of examining that frame here that’s probably inherited from Overcoming Bias; it’s related to a model of human cognitive evolution as driven primarily by political selection pressures, which seems fairly plausible to me. I should probably mention, though, that I don’t think it’s a complete model; it’s fairly hard to come up with an unambiguous counterexample to it, but it shares with a lot of evo-psych the problem of having much more explanatory than predictive power.
I think it’s best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model, hence the “frame” descriptor.
I described it as a frame because I think it’s best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model.
I have a suspicion that we’ll only be able to produce any totalizing model that’s much good after we crack human intelligence in general. I mean, look at all this entangled mess.
Well, “that’s much good” is the tough part. It’s not at all hard to make a totalizing model, and only a little harder to make one that’s hard to disprove in hindsight (there are dozens in the social sciences) but all the existing ones I know of tend to be pretty bad at prediction. The status-seeking model is one of the better ones—people in general seem more prone to avoiding embarrassment than to maximizing expected money or sexual success, to name two competing models—but it’s far from perfect.
Well, couching things in terms of status-signaling is conventional around here. But, sure, there are probably better candidates. Do you have anything in particular in mind you think should have been nominated instead?
Nothing in particular, no, just skepticism. A (brief, completely uneducated) outside view of the field especially suggests that elegant-sounding theories of the mind are likely to fail bad at prediction sooner or later.
For my own part, in the hypothetical context Konkvistador and Jayson_Virissimo established, of infanticide being a property crime, it seems at least superficially reasonable to consider how our legal system would assess damages for infanticide and how that would differ from the real world where infanticide isn’t a property crime.
And evaluating the potential gain that could in the future be obtained by the destroyed property is a pretty standard way of assessing such damages, much as damages found if someone accidentally chops my arm off generally take into account my likely future earnings had I kept both arms.
So I guess I’m saying that while I’m fairly sure wedrifid was being ironic (especially since I think he’s come out elsewhere as pro-babies and anti-infanticide on grounds other than potential gain to their parents), I found his use of irony relatively subtle.
Again, that doesn’t in any way preclude your objecting to his post.
The funny thing is, I haven’t felt even a tingle of outrage/whatever, I only objected to tone, on a formal principle, for a stupid reason which seems to have already vanished somewhere.
Leaving aside the amusing notion of LW outlawing sarcasm, I’m curious about how you concluded that wedrifid’s comment was (unsubtle) sarcasm.
(Just to be clear: I’m not contesting your freedom to downvote the comment for that reason or any other, including simply being irritated by people saying such things about children.)
He started “investigating” a child’s value to parents with things like the status they could gain from it, instead of obvious things like their instinctive emotional response to it, etc. That’s manifestly not what most parents think and feel like.
Emotional distress caused does seem like another important consideration when calculating damages received for baby/property destruction. It probably shouldn’t be the only consideration. Just like if I went and cut someone’s arm off it would be appropriate to consider the future financial and social loss to that person as well as his emotional attachment to his arm.
It doesn’t seem very egalitarian but it may be a bigger crime to cut off the arm of a world class spin bowler (or pitcher) than the arm of a middle manager. It’s not like the latter does anything that really needs his arm.
True enough, but it simply doesn’t feel to me that a child can be meaningfully called “property” at all. Hell, I’m not completely sure that a pet dog can be called property.
Hypothetical question: if my child expresses the desire to go live with some other family, and that family is willing, and in my judgment that family will treat my child roughly as well as I will, is it OK for me to deny that expressed desire and keep my child with me?
(quick edit)
Yes, it’s OK, just the same as with a mentally impaired relative under your care, and for roughly the same reasons.
If said relative couldn’t be considered property, then neither does this judgment signify that children are property.
OK, then… I suspect you and I have very different understandings of what being property entails. If you’re interested in unpacking your understanding, I’m interested in hearing it.
Ok, maybe later.
While I don’t fully disagree, I’m not sure that’s a meaningful objection. One implication of the status-signaling frame is that our instinctive emotional responses (among other cognitive patterns) are calibrated at least partly in terms of maximizing status; it doesn’t require any conscious attention to status at all, let alone an explicit campaign of manipulation.
Well, I think that self-signaling especially—and likely even signaling to very close people like family members too—is one of the basic needs of humans, and, being as entangled with human worldview as it is, deserves to be counted under the blanket term “emotional response”.
Even granting that, it’s still true that if Nornagest is right and my emotional responses are calibrated in terms of expected status-maximization, then it makes sense to consider emotional responses in terms of (among other things) status-maximization for legal purposes.
We clearly need to find out what kinds of emotional responses are calibrated by what adaptations in what proportion. Nominating status-seeking as the most important human drive here out of the blue just seems unjustified to me in this moment.
There’s a tradition of examining that frame here that’s probably inherited from Overcoming Bias; it’s related to a model of human cognitive evolution as driven primarily by political selection pressures, which seems fairly plausible to me. I should probably mention, though, that I don’t think it’s a complete model; it’s fairly hard to come up with an unambiguous counterexample to it, but it shares with a lot of evo-psych the problem of having much more explanatory than predictive power.
I think it’s best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model, hence the “frame” descriptor.
I have a suspicion that we’ll only be able to produce any totalizing model that’s much good after we crack human intelligence in general. I mean, look at all this entangled mess.
Well, “that’s much good” is the tough part. It’s not at all hard to make a totalizing model, and only a little harder to make one that’s hard to disprove in hindsight (there are dozens in the social sciences) but all the existing ones I know of tend to be pretty bad at prediction. The status-seeking model is one of the better ones—people in general seem more prone to avoiding embarrassment than to maximizing expected money or sexual success, to name two competing models—but it’s far from perfect.
Yup. My point exactly.
Well, couching things in terms of status-signaling is conventional around here. But, sure, there are probably better candidates. Do you have anything in particular in mind you think should have been nominated instead?
Nothing in particular, no, just skepticism. A (brief, completely uneducated) outside view of the field especially suggests that elegant-sounding theories of the mind are likely to fail bad at prediction sooner or later.
Agreed on both counts, and thanks for clarifying.
For my own part, in the hypothetical context Konkvistador and Jayson_Virissimo established, of infanticide being a property crime, it seems at least superficially reasonable to consider how our legal system would assess damages for infanticide and how that would differ from the real world where infanticide isn’t a property crime.
And evaluating the potential gain that could in the future be obtained by the destroyed property is a pretty standard way of assessing such damages, much as damages found if someone accidentally chops my arm off generally take into account my likely future earnings had I kept both arms.
So I guess I’m saying that while I’m fairly sure wedrifid was being ironic (especially since I think he’s come out elsewhere as pro-babies and anti-infanticide on grounds other than potential gain to their parents), I found his use of irony relatively subtle.
Again, that doesn’t in any way preclude your objecting to his post.
The funny thing is, I haven’t felt even a tingle of outrage/whatever, I only objected to tone, on a formal principle, for a stupid reason which seems to have already vanished somewhere.
Nor was I inferring outrage.