Assemble modern demographic & mortality data on cancer & obesity.
Consider this hypothetical: ‘If the Nazis had not attacked Russia and negotiated a peace with Britain, and remained in control of their territories, would the lives saved by the health benefits of their policies outweigh the genocides they were committing?’
Did you answer yes, or no? Why?
As you pondered these questions, was there ever genuine doubt in your mind? Why was there or not?
I’m a very bad rationalist. I have a strongly preferred answer to those questions.
Of course, it’s hard to predict what the amount of murder would have been—they wanted to wipe out the Poles, but didn’t have enough time.
I do think you’ve just given a argument for why measuring in terms of lives isn’t good enough if it treats suffering as irrelevant.
It’s completely obvious why there is no doubt in my mind—I’ve spent a lot of years believing that if I’d been there, I’d be one of the corpses. I don’t think I have an obligation to be that abstract about the happy healthy people who might have resulted if Nazism had been unopposed.
I’ve slept on this, and here are a couple of more angles.
I’ve read a fair amount of argument about racism, sexism, and related topics, and have been considerably influenced as a result—and not always in the ways anyone in the arguments intended. I’m still sorting the thing out.
Two of the things I took away is that power isn’t given, it’s taken, and that I’m not obligated to be polite or neutral when I’m advocating for my right to exist.
These played into my response. I suspect I would have reacted more calmly if the question had been raised as “What do you think?” rather than as a test of rationality.
The thing is, I don’t think that approach is entirely right or entirely wrong. After I’d posted, I was getting into what I think is a trained response of wondering whether Less Wrong was worth bothering with if things like gwern’s comment could be said here. I believe that sort of purity-driven reaction is actually unwise, especially when it’s other people’s ideas about purity, but I still have to dig past other people’s status issues that I’ve picked up.
I don’t think the privilege model is entirely false—look at what happened when Eliezer brought up his problems with exercise and weight loss. Most of the people who replied didn’t notice what he actually said, and just rolled forward with the usual advice. Eliezer’s situation is in a blind spot which is highly socially supported, and even people who are quite intelligent and working on rationality got snagged by the blind spot. The result was harder on Eliezer than it was on them.
At the same time, I don’t want to tell people that they should have known better, though it’s very tempting. I’m sensitized to that particular issue because I’ve been fascinated by it. Not everyone is.
Tying the two topics back together, I was fascinated by the fact that Nazis were the first to connect smoking and lung cancer. You mean “health Nazi” isn’t just a random metaphor?
I at first had a similar reaction to yours, but perhaps more severe. I was somewhat humbled and even slightly ashamed to be honest by how reasonable your response was. After thinking about it in a dispassionate sense I realized that especially considering the context there is nothing worth getting upset over. I mean there are discussions about baby eaters where people didn’t get upset over billions of hypothetical alien teenagers dying painfully because of their parents preferences in the baby-eater civilization. This scenario:
‘If the Nazis had not attacked Russia and negotiated a peace with Britain, and remained in control of their territories, would the lives saved by the health benefits of their policies outweigh the genocides they were committing?’
Isn’t really any less hypothetical unless someone comes up with a time machine or we where posting on a site that was actively hostile to the groups that would suffer dis-utility in such a scenario (where it would serve as fantasy).
gwern really highlighted a blind-spot of mine (mind-killing conditioning) with her questions and while I can’t judge what effect this has on other people, particularly the net effect, I am very grateful for the personal insight.
I’m impressed how status signaling resistant LW community is, at least it seems resistant to the kinds of signaling that get a strong conditioned response from me.
It does have some blind-spots but these don’t seem to be exactly the same as those of the man on the street or society at large.
Least convenient world. National socialism limiting itself to a fair chunk of Europe results in a net gain in life, and perhaps even say net gain in happy productive pain free years by say the current date.
Even in this scenario I don’t think anyone here expects people to cheer-lead a system that would most likley lead to their death or the death of their family regardless of its utility (or dis-utility).
Grudging acceptance is the most one can reasonably demand of a person.
But here I’m going to go on a limb and flat out say it that when the difference between being selfish and not being selfish is survival I think it inhumane (in the sense of being out of sync with most of humanities values, despite what Christianity tries to convince a good 2 billion) to punish it if the gain is only marginal.
The localized suffering needs to be significantly smaller than the globalized gains.
I’ll come out and admit bias here since I and all my family and many of my friends would also be most definitely dead in this scenario (or better said our grandparents would most definitely be dead).
My number is a profit of 30 million happy productive man years (in other words a scenario where the suffering just balances out the grains has disutlitly compared to the present, I do have other values than people being generally well off and yes some are selfish.
The Nazis also believed many sane things, like exercise and the value of nature and animal welfare and the harmful nature of smoking.
one question I pondered at times is if the experiments done on prisoner by Mengele and others actually lead to anything interesting. In theory the lack of ethics would allow for more research with less effort. But it seems they did not, and actually worked rather sloppy.
I guess that is preferably, because otherwise the ethics people would have a hard time keeping eager researchers in check.
There are interesting data on hypothermia based on Nazi human experimentation, which are especially interesting because it’s impossible to replicate these measurements for obvious reasons. The ethics of using and citing those have been a matter of controversy for decades: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/experi02_no.html
Otherwise, however, the human experiments done by Nazi doctors seem to have been scientifically worthless. Mengele in particular was just a particularly cruel dilettante.
There’s a lot of stuff involving patient secrecy that would be convenient to not worry about. Conglomerating everyone’s medical records could result in dramatic gains in knowledge on efficacy of treatment. But it should be possible to do that in a way that respects patient secrecy, and I don’t think ethics is the true rejection there.
There are a number of cases where people consider it unethical to use controls. AZT is a famous example, where they stopped the study midway through because AZT was so effective for the experimental group, but then some nasty side effects started showing up- and it was unclear how much was due to the AZT, because there wasn’t a control group to compare to anymore.
(Assuming that not only institutional ethics but my own sense of morality is not a constraint.)
A lot of the really interesting things we know about broad-scale human neurology, particularly some tricky stuff about the nature of consiousness, are due to the study of people who have suffered brain damage. If there were no ethical constraints, I would deliberately induce carefully controlled forms of brain damage on humans and observe the results.
I’m afraid I have no citations handy for this, but I seem to recall reading that a number of Nazi medical experiments, such as the ones simulating (fatal) high altitude exposure, were in fact quietly studied and used by the occupiers, in addition to the more famous rocketry and other research. (Probably the more bizarre experiments, like Mengele’s torture of twins, did not attract the military’s interest.)
I also read once that Japanese intelligence agencies made a deal with the Americans to turn over the results from their biowarfare units in exchange for them being quietly overlooked and not included in the war crimes tribunals that executed the likes of Hideki Tōjō.
The Nazis also believed many sane things, like exercise and the value of nature and animal welfare and the harmful nature of smoking.
Possible rationalist exercise:
Read The Nazi War on Cancer
Assemble modern demographic & mortality data on cancer & obesity.
Consider this hypothetical: ‘If the Nazis had not attacked Russia and negotiated a peace with Britain, and remained in control of their territories, would the lives saved by the health benefits of their policies outweigh the genocides they were committing?’
Did you answer yes, or no? Why?
As you pondered these questions, was there ever genuine doubt in your mind? Why was there or not?
I’m a very bad rationalist. I have a strongly preferred answer to those questions.
Of course, it’s hard to predict what the amount of murder would have been—they wanted to wipe out the Poles, but didn’t have enough time.
I do think you’ve just given a argument for why measuring in terms of lives isn’t good enough if it treats suffering as irrelevant.
It’s completely obvious why there is no doubt in my mind—I’ve spent a lot of years believing that if I’d been there, I’d be one of the corpses. I don’t think I have an obligation to be that abstract about the happy healthy people who might have resulted if Nazism had been unopposed.
I’ve slept on this, and here are a couple of more angles.
I’ve read a fair amount of argument about racism, sexism, and related topics, and have been considerably influenced as a result—and not always in the ways anyone in the arguments intended. I’m still sorting the thing out.
Two of the things I took away is that power isn’t given, it’s taken, and that I’m not obligated to be polite or neutral when I’m advocating for my right to exist.
These played into my response. I suspect I would have reacted more calmly if the question had been raised as “What do you think?” rather than as a test of rationality.
The thing is, I don’t think that approach is entirely right or entirely wrong. After I’d posted, I was getting into what I think is a trained response of wondering whether Less Wrong was worth bothering with if things like gwern’s comment could be said here. I believe that sort of purity-driven reaction is actually unwise, especially when it’s other people’s ideas about purity, but I still have to dig past other people’s status issues that I’ve picked up.
I don’t think the privilege model is entirely false—look at what happened when Eliezer brought up his problems with exercise and weight loss. Most of the people who replied didn’t notice what he actually said, and just rolled forward with the usual advice. Eliezer’s situation is in a blind spot which is highly socially supported, and even people who are quite intelligent and working on rationality got snagged by the blind spot. The result was harder on Eliezer than it was on them.
At the same time, I don’t want to tell people that they should have known better, though it’s very tempting. I’m sensitized to that particular issue because I’ve been fascinated by it. Not everyone is.
Tying the two topics back together, I was fascinated by the fact that Nazis were the first to connect smoking and lung cancer. You mean “health Nazi” isn’t just a random metaphor?
What can happen when utilitarianism meets obesity
I at first had a similar reaction to yours, but perhaps more severe. I was somewhat humbled and even slightly ashamed to be honest by how reasonable your response was. After thinking about it in a dispassionate sense I realized that especially considering the context there is nothing worth getting upset over. I mean there are discussions about baby eaters where people didn’t get upset over billions of hypothetical alien teenagers dying painfully because of their parents preferences in the baby-eater civilization. This scenario:
Isn’t really any less hypothetical unless someone comes up with a time machine or we where posting on a site that was actively hostile to the groups that would suffer dis-utility in such a scenario (where it would serve as fantasy).
gwern really highlighted a blind-spot of mine (mind-killing conditioning) with her questions and while I can’t judge what effect this has on other people, particularly the net effect, I am very grateful for the personal insight.
I’m impressed how status signaling resistant LW community is, at least it seems resistant to the kinds of signaling that get a strong conditioned response from me. It does have some blind-spots but these don’t seem to be exactly the same as those of the man on the street or society at large.
Least convenient world. National socialism limiting itself to a fair chunk of Europe results in a net gain in life, and perhaps even say net gain in happy productive pain free years by say the current date.
Even in this scenario I don’t think anyone here expects people to cheer-lead a system that would most likley lead to their death or the death of their family regardless of its utility (or dis-utility).
Grudging acceptance is the most one can reasonably demand of a person.
But here I’m going to go on a limb and flat out say it that when the difference between being selfish and not being selfish is survival I think it inhumane (in the sense of being out of sync with most of humanities values, despite what Christianity tries to convince a good 2 billion) to punish it if the gain is only marginal.
The localized suffering needs to be significantly smaller than the globalized gains.
I’ll come out and admit bias here since I and all my family and many of my friends would also be most definitely dead in this scenario (or better said our grandparents would most definitely be dead).
My number is a profit of 30 million happy productive man years (in other words a scenario where the suffering just balances out the grains has disutlitly compared to the present, I do have other values than people being generally well off and yes some are selfish.
one question I pondered at times is if the experiments done on prisoner by Mengele and others actually lead to anything interesting. In theory the lack of ethics would allow for more research with less effort. But it seems they did not, and actually worked rather sloppy. I guess that is preferably, because otherwise the ethics people would have a hard time keeping eager researchers in check.
There are interesting data on hypothermia based on Nazi human experimentation, which are especially interesting because it’s impossible to replicate these measurements for obvious reasons. The ethics of using and citing those have been a matter of controversy for decades:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/experi02_no.html
Otherwise, however, the human experiments done by Nazi doctors seem to have been scientifically worthless. Mengele in particular was just a particularly cruel dilettante.
Poll: what studies would you do if ethics were not a constraint?
There’s a lot of stuff involving patient secrecy that would be convenient to not worry about. Conglomerating everyone’s medical records could result in dramatic gains in knowledge on efficacy of treatment. But it should be possible to do that in a way that respects patient secrecy, and I don’t think ethics is the true rejection there.
There are a number of cases where people consider it unethical to use controls. AZT is a famous example, where they stopped the study midway through because AZT was so effective for the experimental group, but then some nasty side effects started showing up- and it was unclear how much was due to the AZT, because there wasn’t a control group to compare to anymore.
(Assuming that not only institutional ethics but my own sense of morality is not a constraint.)
A lot of the really interesting things we know about broad-scale human neurology, particularly some tricky stuff about the nature of consiousness, are due to the study of people who have suffered brain damage. If there were no ethical constraints, I would deliberately induce carefully controlled forms of brain damage on humans and observe the results.
I am not a doctor. And I have no clue on the methodology they have available avoid ethic trouble. But I can imagine a few things.
I’m afraid I have no citations handy for this, but I seem to recall reading that a number of Nazi medical experiments, such as the ones simulating (fatal) high altitude exposure, were in fact quietly studied and used by the occupiers, in addition to the more famous rocketry and other research. (Probably the more bizarre experiments, like Mengele’s torture of twins, did not attract the military’s interest.)
I also read once that Japanese intelligence agencies made a deal with the Americans to turn over the results from their biowarfare units in exchange for them being quietly overlooked and not included in the war crimes tribunals that executed the likes of Hideki Tōjō.