You have heard that it was said: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”
But I give to you this meme:
EDIT:
Okay, I see I failed to communicate what I wanted. My fault. Maybe next time.
For clarification, this was inspired by watching the reactions of Astral Codex Ten readers. Most of the time, Scott Alexander tries to be as charitable as possible, sometimes extending the charity even to Time Cube or <outgroup>. When that happens, predictably many readers consider it a weakness, analogical to bringing a verbal argument into a gun fight. They write about how rationalists are too autistic to realize that some people are acting in bad faith, etc.
Recently (in the articles about Nietzschean morality) Scott made an exception, in my opinion in a very uncontroversial situation, and said that people who say they prefer that other people suffer are… well, bad. Immediately, those people and their defenders got angry, and accused Scott of being insufficiently charitable and therefore irrational.
Conclusion: you can’t win (the approval of the audience). You are considered stupid by the audience for both being maximally charitable or realistic towards your opponents.
I mean, it’s always been a pretty suspect aphorism, usually in a religious context (expanding to “you shouldn’t judge someone, because God will judge you more harshly if you do”). And never applied very rigorously—judgement is RIFE everywhere, and perhaps more so in communities who claim God is the only true Judge.
Judgement is about all that humans do. With a little bit of reasoning to justify (and in the best cases, adjust slightly) their judgements.
I take it to mean “Judging yourself harshly = judging other people harshly”. If you think anything less than an A is poor performance, then you will also judge your friends if they get less than an A. If you criticize other people for suboptimal performance, then you put a burden on yourself to perform optimally (if you’re too intelligent to trick yourself into accepting your own hypocrisy, at least, which I think most LW users are).
Higher standards helps push us towards perfection (at least, when they don’t lead to procrastination from the fear of failire), but they also make us think worse of most things in existence.
So the bible makes a valid point, as did Nietzsche when he said “I love the great despisers, because they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore” and “There is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smells foul: nausea itself creates wings and water-divining powers!”. I’m not sure how this relates to AI, though. It seems to apply to value judgements, rather than judgements about right and wrong (as truth values)
You have heard that it was said: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”
But I give to you this meme:
EDIT:
Okay, I see I failed to communicate what I wanted. My fault. Maybe next time.
For clarification, this was inspired by watching the reactions of Astral Codex Ten readers. Most of the time, Scott Alexander tries to be as charitable as possible, sometimes extending the charity even to Time Cube or <outgroup>. When that happens, predictably many readers consider it a weakness, analogical to bringing a verbal argument into a gun fight. They write about how rationalists are too autistic to realize that some people are acting in bad faith, etc.
Recently (in the articles about Nietzschean morality) Scott made an exception, in my opinion in a very uncontroversial situation, and said that people who say they prefer that other people suffer are… well, bad. Immediately, those people and their defenders got angry, and accused Scott of being insufficiently charitable and therefore irrational.
Conclusion: you can’t win (the approval of the audience). You are considered stupid by the audience for both being maximally charitable or realistic towards your opponents.
I mean, it’s always been a pretty suspect aphorism, usually in a religious context (expanding to “you shouldn’t judge someone, because God will judge you more harshly if you do”). And never applied very rigorously—judgement is RIFE everywhere, and perhaps more so in communities who claim God is the only true Judge.
Judgement is about all that humans do. With a little bit of reasoning to justify (and in the best cases, adjust slightly) their judgements.
I take it to mean “Judging yourself harshly = judging other people harshly”. If you think anything less than an A is poor performance, then you will also judge your friends if they get less than an A. If you criticize other people for suboptimal performance, then you put a burden on yourself to perform optimally (if you’re too intelligent to trick yourself into accepting your own hypocrisy, at least, which I think most LW users are).
Higher standards helps push us towards perfection (at least, when they don’t lead to procrastination from the fear of failire), but they also make us think worse of most things in existence.
So the bible makes a valid point, as did Nietzsche when he said “I love the great despisers, because they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore” and “There is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smells foul: nausea itself creates wings and water-divining powers!”. I’m not sure how this relates to AI, though. It seems to apply to value judgements, rather than judgements about right and wrong (as truth values)