Somewhere in Polybius is a line about character. Men have characters. Yours may lead you to greatness, but when times change and your character is ill-suited to new circumstances, you remain the same. Disaster follows.
I agree that there is a problem. I think that it has been recognised long ago and has no solution.
I was very struck that in our imaginations we are always the good guys. I have developed serious doubts about this. Looking back on my life it struck me that as a young man I was rather attracted by authoritarian governments. If I had been a 13 year old German boy when Hitler came to power in 1933 I would have worshipped the man. He would have been my hero and I would have believed all that stuff about Jews.
I’m not trying to shock or abase myself. There is actually an element of smugness as I feel ahead of head of the pack in realising that the good guys and the bad guys are mostly just ordinary guys and land on one side or the other because it is hard to transcend ones circumstances. We know that Hitler was popular in 1933. What must also be true is that if we had been young and German we might well have fallen under his spell. We might perhaps have been proud of our philosophical sophistication and knowledge of Heidegger but it wouldn’t have helped.
I see the post as aiming way too high. If you are crap at lying that has consequences, perhaps good, perhaps bad. Time will tell, don’t worry about it. The more interesting question is about how to transcend ones circumstances. How does one avoid being one of the brownshirts?
When we worry here about promoting maximally accurate beliefs it is self-deception that is the principle concern, not the deception of others. Eliezer posted about affective death spirals. An example could be being so impressed by the Fuehrer that we believe everything he says. Later, we notice that he says an awful lot. We notice, wtih some surprise, that It is all true. What a genius! And round we go. I’ve understood Eliezer to be addressing the issue of how we can tell from the inside; how we can escape our own affective death spirals. That is a very different problem from seeing the problem in others and opposing them.
See, that’s where your post first goes wrong. This is LW: you need to quote either anime, SF, fanfiction, or something preferably all three. I’ll spot you a suitable quote, but next time you’re on your own!
‘Somewhere in Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert writes “A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation.”...’
Somewhere in Polybius is a line about character. Men have characters. Yours may lead you to greatness, but when times change and your character is ill-suited to new circumstances, you remain the same. Disaster follows.
I agree that there is a problem. I think that it has been recognised long ago and has no solution.
I was very struck that in our imaginations we are always the good guys. I have developed serious doubts about this. Looking back on my life it struck me that as a young man I was rather attracted by authoritarian governments. If I had been a 13 year old German boy when Hitler came to power in 1933 I would have worshipped the man. He would have been my hero and I would have believed all that stuff about Jews.
I’m not trying to shock or abase myself. There is actually an element of smugness as I feel ahead of head of the pack in realising that the good guys and the bad guys are mostly just ordinary guys and land on one side or the other because it is hard to transcend ones circumstances. We know that Hitler was popular in 1933. What must also be true is that if we had been young and German we might well have fallen under his spell. We might perhaps have been proud of our philosophical sophistication and knowledge of Heidegger but it wouldn’t have helped.
I see the post as aiming way too high. If you are crap at lying that has consequences, perhaps good, perhaps bad. Time will tell, don’t worry about it. The more interesting question is about how to transcend ones circumstances. How does one avoid being one of the brownshirts?
When we worry here about promoting maximally accurate beliefs it is self-deception that is the principle concern, not the deception of others. Eliezer posted about affective death spirals. An example could be being so impressed by the Fuehrer that we believe everything he says. Later, we notice that he says an awful lot. We notice, wtih some surprise, that It is all true. What a genius! And round we go. I’ve understood Eliezer to be addressing the issue of how we can tell from the inside; how we can escape our own affective death spirals. That is a very different problem from seeing the problem in others and opposing them.
See, that’s where your post first goes wrong. This is LW: you need to quote either anime, SF, fanfiction, or something preferably all three. I’ll spot you a suitable quote, but next time you’re on your own!