I can’t tell if I’m being upvoted for my sarcasm or for mistaken impressions of sincerity, but 18 seems like a lot of points for snark. Either is okay, I guess, but there is some conflict.
Until thescoundrel’s reply I didn’t take the question seriously. It seemed to me that Dumbledore and Hermione were self righteously congratulating themselves for how not evil they were, and that MarkusRamikin was fishing for participation only for the sake of socializing.
I took ArisKatsaris’s and yours to be Dumbledore’s and Hermione’s answers to that question, respectively, and was amused.
Humor gets highly upvoted. 18 upvotes doesn’t mean person X thinks your comment is better than a comment with 10 upvotes; it means that on net 18 people thought to upvote it. And lots of people upvote for humor.
I can’t tell if I’m being upvoted for my sarcasm or for mistaken impressions of sincerity, but 18 seems like a lot of points for snark. Either is okay, I guess, but there is some conflict.
I evaluated your response relative to the question, not your intent (and would have put the intent down as ‘satire’).
Those are actually two of the most powerful reasons real people don’t ‘be evil’ and would even serve as a non-trivial component of what a description of ‘evil’ would reduce to if we wanted to break down how the cognitive algorithm works.
I identify as ‘evil’ when it’s safe to do so, because it’s apt. I worry about people who think they’re not evil but act evil when they think no one could ever know, or who think they’re outright good but may one day be faced with a traumatically delivered realization of the fiction that is the ordered, punishment-delivering universe their parents conditioned them to act as though they believed in, or who surrender their judgement of right and wrong to the mob.
Those sorts of people tend to not be very good at being good, and to be even worse at being bad. They can’t be depended on to either follow a system of laws or their own self-interest to the best of their ability. They are difficult to model and surprisingly volatile.
Of course, my problem with this might be my fault. I’m not sayin’; I’m just sayin’.
Now, now. Your preferences might not always reveal you wanting “good” things to the exclusion of “evil” ones, but I guess that you’re socialized and “brainwashed” well enough to value valuing “good” things above the vast majority of selfish or neutral ones. You’ve said before that you’d be scared to self-modify to want what you now want to want… but your moral intuition is fairly ever-present even when you aren’t listening to it, right? Or am I just projecting myself?
Well yes but there is quite a big difference between having moral standards and actually living up to them enough to think of oneself as “good”. At least in my brain truly “good” people are very rare.
Haha, the thing is, I was raised partly on D&D, which was my first source of a metaethical theory, and there, at least in theory, much of alignment is defined by intentions (at least, that’s how I read it in my teenage years). Then again, I might have twisted that a bit to conform to my own beliefs. Either way, I grew up believing that e.g. a witch who has never actually hurt anyone personally but helps an evil tribe and would betray marauding “heroes” to them can indeed be “Lawful Evil”, and, consequentially, a con artist who’s sensitive, guilt-ridden and helps the poor sometimes can indeed be “Chaotic Good” (Oskar Schindler—the real one, not Spielberg’s flat copy—is a hero for me, his case feels incredibly heart-warming). It’s a carticature of my actual feelings, of course, but nonetheless I’m attracted to what is derisively called comic-book morality; I find it, at the very least, better for society than e.g. “rational egoism” informed with Hansonian theory.
That’s a very fair complaint. I’ll edit my previous post.
They are difficult to model and surprisingly volatile.
Feature. Not bug.
I suppose. Objectivists are less worrisome, but admittedly inferior company. And the rare few who by every appearance are as good for goodness sake as you could ask may not cause worry, but there’s always something disquieting about them.
Speaking practically, I suspect that indoctrination is responsible for a surprising percentage of the good attitudes people have. Society putting up a giant wall of opprobrium to bad acts in children is in all likelihood a major factor in why we are good—habits are wonderful things.
It’s a word that’s often used negatively, but it’s not necessarily bad. Embedding a doctrine into a child is a pretty necessary part of parenting, I’d say.
And it doesn’t “take a village”, but parents are not generally the only influences a child has—school, friends, TV, extended family, and the like all exist, and most of them do a decent job of trying to pound certain important things into kids’ heads.
It’s a word that’s often used negatively, but it’s not necessarily bad. Embedding a doctrine into a child is a pretty necessary part of parenting, I’d say.
Thanks. I’d still like to know if and how you differentiate indoctrination from non-indocrtinary child-rearing.
It’s not a topic I’ve given sufficient thought to to provide a well-considered answer. But at first blush, I’d say that “indoctrination” only refers to subjective things—morality, ideology, religion, and that sort. Objective things—letters, numbers, etc. - are simply education.
Hm. I’m not quite sure in what sense a choice of language is objective but a choice of religion is subjective. They both strike me as aspects of a culture… though it is admittedly easier to raise a child without a religion at all than to raise one without a language. Then again, I’m content to say that human parenting pretty-much-universally involves indoctrination. As does education, for that matter, although not all indoctrination is educational and not all education is indoctrination.
But you’re not teaching the kid to believe in English, just how to speak it. Saying to your kid “This is what Christians believe” would be education, saying “This is what we believe” is indoctrination. It’s the difference between creating knowledge and creating belief(as fuzzy as that line can be sometimes).
(nods) Similarly, you aren’t saying “this is what English-speakers speak,” you are saying “this is what we speak.”
I’m not suggesting that indoctrinating someone in a language is the same thing as indoctrinating them in a religion, or that it’s morally equivalent, or that they are equally useful, or anything of the sort. But they are both indoctrination (as well as both being education).
Thesetwo posts make up about a quarter of the total karma points I have. They are outliers beyond my outliers. The reasons people give for upvoting them are entirely worth investigation.
By people who are in my ingroup? Certainly. People who I see as “them” (outgroup) can rage at me all they want. Overall this one seems weak.
your parents would be so very disappointed with you
It is very interesting how powerful this one still seems to be in my mind. I suspect I would have major psychological difficulties dealing with immortality for all or the abolishment of privacy.
your parents would be so very disappointed with you
Yes. Don’t know about the other two, but seeking the approval of various authority figures as they appear in my mind, consciously or not, is definitely one of my most frequent motivations when I act altruistically. Not too troubled about privacy or immortality, though; I view both as more or less inevitable if a half-decent singularity does come, unless it’s incredibly weird, not just Eliezer-level weird. That is, I want to want both, and don’t currently worry too much as to whether I want either one in my heart of hearts.
Not too troubled about privacy or immortality, though; I view both as more or less inevitable if a half-decent singularity does come, unless it’s incredibly weird, not just Eliezer-level weird. That is, I want to want both, and don’t currently worry too much as to whether I want either one in my heart of hearts.
The thing is that as awful as this sounds authority figures you care about dying is a source of freedom for people. I would never want my parents to die so I have say more “freedom” in defining my morality (or perhaps in ways my model of them in my head would disapprove of), but we would be locked into our socially defined roles much more than we are today.
Also an erosion of privacy makes normative feedback from your social group basically instant, people are pretty conformist, so a reduction of privacy means society wide greater conforming to social norms.
Which obviously can be a good thing by say much reducing murder or rape, but again is pretty much a big step towards say political totalitarianism and the domination of one human value system (that happens to be favoured by such an envrionment or happens by pure chance to be the dominant one when the transition happens) over others.
Assuming evil people will be susceptible to such arguments is similar to assuming a sufficiently smart AI will automatically become good.. well, you didn’t say otherwise.
Because I grew up watching Thundercats as a kid and it’s not what Liono would do.
Because it would look terrible on my TV Tropes page.
Because the part of me that handles abstract reasoning vetos producing negative utilons and this part actually gets quite a lot of voting power over anything I have time to think about—it’s even the part I call “me”.
There are many parts of Eliezer that are casting votes for good and against evil, for quite widely separated reasons ranging from the silly to the extremely approvable, and once I realized that instead of thinking that there had to be “the” reason, I understood myself a lot better.
But not a million reasons, though. Hermione is severely exaggerating.
1) In most situations, it is not the most efficient means to an end (interestingly, in Voldemort’s case, it may have come close).
2) A reputation for defection in PD-like situations means nobody will ally with you. Unless you are in an undisputed leadership position, this is a very bad thing.
It does seem like a good idea. One of the big surprises for me, when I was first exposed to people of alternative practices, was how much easier it was for the dom/sadist types to find a partner than the sub/masochist ones.
1.Unless you have supreme power over everyone, you are very likely to need help from other people, and evil inhibits your ability to gain that help.
Evil causes cascade ripples with consequences that are very hard to see- large numbers of people you don’t know about having personal vendettas against you, etc.
It is hard to inspire people to your cause with evil- they people you are using must at least think they are acting in accordance with good, and at some level have what we would consider a “good” set of rules for how they deal with each other.
Because evil must be alone, as it cannot be trusted.
Because your plans will not all succeed, and it is more harmful to be revealed as everyone’s enemy than as someone’s friend.
Because caring about other people provides an additional source of motivation.
(I know ego depletion causes a reduction in acts of altruism, but I thought I remembered that engaging in acts of altruism could counter ego depletion. Now I can’t seem to find any research supporting this, so perhaps not.)
Anyone care to name three?
you will be scolded
your parents would be so very disappointed with you
this is certain to go on your permanent record
Surely “You’ve broken at least 3 school rules” belongs at the top of Hermione’s list.
I thought you were being an ass. And I thought what you said was funny.
I can’t tell if I’m being upvoted for my sarcasm or for mistaken impressions of sincerity, but 18 seems like a lot of points for snark. Either is okay, I guess, but there is some conflict.
Until thescoundrel’s reply I didn’t take the question seriously. It seemed to me that Dumbledore and Hermione were self righteously congratulating themselves for how not evil they were, and that MarkusRamikin was fishing for participation only for the sake of socializing.
I took ArisKatsaris’s and yours to be Dumbledore’s and Hermione’s answers to that question, respectively, and was amused.
Humor gets highly upvoted. 18 upvotes doesn’t mean person X thinks your comment is better than a comment with 10 upvotes; it means that on net 18 people thought to upvote it. And lots of people upvote for humor.
I evaluated your response relative to the question, not your intent (and would have put the intent down as ‘satire’).
Those are actually two of the most powerful reasons real people don’t ‘be evil’ and would even serve as a non-trivial component of what a description of ‘evil’ would reduce to if we wanted to break down how the cognitive algorithm works.
Your response basically is why I’m not “evil”. I up voted because of that.
People like you worry me.
I identify as ‘evil’ when it’s safe to do so, because it’s apt. I worry about people who think they’re not evil but act evil when they think no one could ever know, or who think they’re outright good but may one day be faced with a traumatically delivered realization of the fiction that is the ordered, punishment-delivering universe their parents conditioned them to act as though they believed in, or who surrender their judgement of right and wrong to the mob.
Those sorts of people tend to not be very good at being good, and to be even worse at being bad. They can’t be depended on to either follow a system of laws or their own self-interest to the best of their ability. They are difficult to model and surprisingly volatile.
Of course, my problem with this might be my fault. I’m not sayin’; I’m just sayin’.
I don’t think I ever claimed to be “good”.
Most people do.
Feature. Not bug.
Now, now. Your preferences might not always reveal you wanting “good” things to the exclusion of “evil” ones, but I guess that you’re socialized and “brainwashed” well enough to value valuing “good” things above the vast majority of selfish or neutral ones.
You’ve said before that you’d be scared to self-modify to want what you now want to want… but your moral intuition is fairly ever-present even when you aren’t listening to it, right? Or am I just projecting myself?
Well yes but there is quite a big difference between having moral standards and actually living up to them enough to think of oneself as “good”. At least in my brain truly “good” people are very rare.
Haha, the thing is, I was raised partly on D&D, which was my first source of a metaethical theory, and there, at least in theory, much of alignment is defined by intentions (at least, that’s how I read it in my teenage years). Then again, I might have twisted that a bit to conform to my own beliefs. Either way, I grew up believing that e.g. a witch who has never actually hurt anyone personally but helps an evil tribe and would betray marauding “heroes” to them can indeed be “Lawful Evil”, and, consequentially, a con artist who’s sensitive, guilt-ridden and helps the poor sometimes can indeed be “Chaotic Good” (Oskar Schindler—the real one, not Spielberg’s flat copy—is a hero for me, his case feels incredibly heart-warming). It’s a carticature of my actual feelings, of course, but nonetheless I’m attracted to what is derisively called comic-book morality; I find it, at the very least, better for society than e.g. “rational egoism” informed with Hansonian theory.
That’s a very fair complaint. I’ll edit my previous post.
I suppose. Objectivists are less worrisome, but admittedly inferior company. And the rare few who by every appearance are as good for goodness sake as you could ask may not cause worry, but there’s always something disquieting about them.
Speaking practically, I suspect that indoctrination is responsible for a surprising percentage of the good attitudes people have. Society putting up a giant wall of opprobrium to bad acts in children is in all likelihood a major factor in why we are good—habits are wonderful things.
Is there an amount of external modification of behavior that you’d allow as child-rearing without calling it indoctrination?
Or can you tell me precisely what you mean by that word?
Or, for that matter, the word ‘society’? Aren’t ‘parents’ enough? Does it really take a village?
It’s a word that’s often used negatively, but it’s not necessarily bad. Embedding a doctrine into a child is a pretty necessary part of parenting, I’d say.
And it doesn’t “take a village”, but parents are not generally the only influences a child has—school, friends, TV, extended family, and the like all exist, and most of them do a decent job of trying to pound certain important things into kids’ heads.
Thanks. I’d still like to know if and how you differentiate indoctrination from non-indocrtinary child-rearing.
It’s not a topic I’ve given sufficient thought to to provide a well-considered answer. But at first blush, I’d say that “indoctrination” only refers to subjective things—morality, ideology, religion, and that sort. Objective things—letters, numbers, etc. - are simply education.
Hm.
I’m not quite sure in what sense a choice of language is objective but a choice of religion is subjective. They both strike me as aspects of a culture… though it is admittedly easier to raise a child without a religion at all than to raise one without a language.
Then again, I’m content to say that human parenting pretty-much-universally involves indoctrination. As does education, for that matter, although not all indoctrination is educational and not all education is indoctrination.
But you’re not teaching the kid to believe in English, just how to speak it. Saying to your kid “This is what Christians believe” would be education, saying “This is what we believe” is indoctrination. It’s the difference between creating knowledge and creating belief(as fuzzy as that line can be sometimes).
(nods) Similarly, you aren’t saying “this is what English-speakers speak,” you are saying “this is what we speak.”
I’m not suggesting that indoctrinating someone in a language is the same thing as indoctrinating them in a religion, or that it’s morally equivalent, or that they are equally useful, or anything of the sort. But they are both indoctrination (as well as both being education).
You spend way too much time worrying about how you’re getting too much karma, man :p
Curiosity is a virtue.
These two posts make up about a quarter of the total karma points I have. They are outliers beyond my outliers. The reasons people give for upvoting them are entirely worth investigation.
I asked seriously, but I upvoted you for making me smile.
thescoundrel’s list seems more like things Quirrell or Harry would come up with than Dumbledore or Hermione.
Also, I thought your comment was hilarious, so there’s that. Maybe it’s because I read it in 11-year-old Emma Watson’s voice.
By people who are in my ingroup? Certainly. People who I see as “them” (outgroup) can rage at me all they want. Overall this one seems weak.
It is very interesting how powerful this one still seems to be in my mind. I suspect I would have major psychological difficulties dealing with immortality for all or the abolishment of privacy.
This one is very strong too.
Yes. Don’t know about the other two, but seeking the approval of various authority figures as they appear in my mind, consciously or not, is definitely one of my most frequent motivations when I act altruistically.
Not too troubled about privacy or immortality, though; I view both as more or less inevitable if a half-decent singularity does come, unless it’s incredibly weird, not just Eliezer-level weird. That is, I want to want both, and don’t currently worry too much as to whether I want either one in my heart of hearts.
The thing is that as awful as this sounds authority figures you care about dying is a source of freedom for people. I would never want my parents to die so I have say more “freedom” in defining my morality (or perhaps in ways my model of them in my head would disapprove of), but we would be locked into our socially defined roles much more than we are today.
Also an erosion of privacy makes normative feedback from your social group basically instant, people are pretty conformist, so a reduction of privacy means society wide greater conforming to social norms.
Which obviously can be a good thing by say much reducing murder or rape, but again is pretty much a big step towards say political totalitarianism and the domination of one human value system (that happens to be favoured by such an envrionment or happens by pure chance to be the dominant one when the transition happens) over others.
...thanks. I think.
Because evil causes people to feel pain.
Because evil causes people to feel grief.
Because evil causes people to feel fear.
Of course they do.
Why is this a problem?
Assuming evil people will be susceptible to such arguments is similar to assuming a sufficiently smart AI will automatically become good.. well, you didn’t say otherwise.
I didn’t say evil people will be susceptible to such arguments.
I was naming three reasons that good people have to not be evil, not three arguments that would cause evil people to stop being evil.
I think Dumbledore was looking for the latter, though.
He isn’t going to find any, but that’s beside the point.
Because I grew up watching Thundercats as a kid and it’s not what Liono would do.
Because it would look terrible on my TV Tropes page.
Because the part of me that handles abstract reasoning vetos producing negative utilons and this part actually gets quite a lot of voting power over anything I have time to think about—it’s even the part I call “me”.
There are many parts of Eliezer that are casting votes for good and against evil, for quite widely separated reasons ranging from the silly to the extremely approvable, and once I realized that instead of thinking that there had to be “the” reason, I understood myself a lot better.
But not a million reasons, though. Hermione is severely exaggerating.
1) In most situations, it is not the most efficient means to an end (interestingly, in Voldemort’s case, it may have come close).
2) A reputation for defection in PD-like situations means nobody will ally with you. Unless you are in an undisputed leadership position, this is a very bad thing.
3) People are likely to try to kill you.
Because it’s boring if you aren’t a sadist
Because there’s more fun stuff to do
Because you may prefer to think of yourself as a sort of person who is not evil.
Self-modify to be a sadist. Actually, do that regardless, it’s fun and non-evil sadism is easy to come by.
It does seem like a good idea. One of the big surprises for me, when I was first exposed to people of alternative practices, was how much easier it was for the dom/sadist types to find a partner than the sub/masochist ones.
1.Unless you have supreme power over everyone, you are very likely to need help from other people, and evil inhibits your ability to gain that help.
Evil causes cascade ripples with consequences that are very hard to see- large numbers of people you don’t know about having personal vendettas against you, etc.
It is hard to inspire people to your cause with evil- they people you are using must at least think they are acting in accordance with good, and at some level have what we would consider a “good” set of rules for how they deal with each other.
Why bother?
Idiots and cowards are sure to take care of it for you.
Akrasia.
Because evil must be alone, as it cannot be trusted.
Because your plans will not all succeed, and it is more harmful to be revealed as everyone’s enemy than as someone’s friend.
Because caring about other people provides an additional source of motivation.
(I know ego depletion causes a reduction in acts of altruism, but I thought I remembered that engaging in acts of altruism could counter ego depletion. Now I can’t seem to find any research supporting this, so perhaps not.)
Her, him, and me.