Overall the disagreement underlying this post is obscured by a set of common names for very different protocols.
Under one protocol, praise and blame are tools for encouraging behavior the community wants and discouraging behavior the community does not want. If these categories are not manipulated for other motives, we have simulacra level 1 morality. This is the straightforward interpretation under which – if you hold it consistently and think it’s the predominant norm – the “Copenhagen interpretation” seems obviously perverse, legalizing blackmail seems obviously helpful, etc.
It gets more complicated if you think that the community may be mistaken about matters of praise or blame, and that someone might be manipulating these perceptions for their own ends. Now we’re in simulacra level 2 or 3, and people playing game 1 need a moral theory that helps them cooperate with each other, resist, evade, or recover from attacks by level-2 players, and avoid wasting their time interacting with level 3. This is the position of the Psalms.
Once manipulating the perception of praise or blame becomes the dominant game, we’re in simulacra level 4.
Level 4 focuses on blame rather than praise because of an asymmetry of zero-sum games with distinct targets. It’s not too hard to see why people would benefit from joining a majority expropriating from a blameworthy individual. But why would they join a majority transferring resources to a praiseworthy one? So, being singled out is much more bad than good here.
Deflecting blame by holding onto plausible deniability becomes one of the most important “ethical” skills. The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics becomes an intuitive and natural extension of this. If blame is a weapon we attack other people with for being responsible for things, you can avoid being blamed for a thing by preventing your capacity to do something about it from entering common knowledge. Localized creation of clarity around who causes what bad thing always seems bad for you and your friends, and legalizing blackmail is a massive DDOS attack on “ethics.” Since we’re habituated to calling “unethical” behavior “bad,” we just scale up that estimate and assume destroying the system would be extremely bad.
Crucially, the level-4 simulacrum of “justice” is not mistaken about how to set up prosocial incentives – it’s not trying to set up a set of incentives at all! It’s not solving any sort of collective action problem! It’s a Hobbesian state of war!
Imagining it as a technical error will always lead to becoming hopelessly confused and imagining that people are hopelessly stupid and perverse, rather than situationally constrained and habituated to do a thing that makes local sense.
1. It is not common knowledge that the level-4 simulacrum of justice is a level-4 simulacrum. Or even that it is not a level-1. There are people honestly trying to do level-1 justice using a mostly level-4 simulacrum, or a mix of all levels, etc. I feel like this error was present and somewhat ubiquitous, for various reasons good and bad, long before L-4 took over the areas in question, and its origin often *was* usefully thought of as a technical error. Its final one-winged-angel form is something else. 2. Even if something is not a technical error in the sense that no one was trying to solve a given technical problem, it is still true in many cases, including this one, that it claims that it *is* trying to solve the problem. Pointing out that it’s doing a piss-poor job of that can create knowledge or ideally common knowledge that allows the remaining lower-level players to identify and coordinate against it, or at least avoid making the mistake in their own thinking and realize what they are up against. 3. It can lead to potential ways out. One can imagine forcing common knowledge of being L-4 accelerating a reversion. Language has been destroyed, so anyone who cares about the object level can now exit and start again, and the system of levels (and perhaps The System, if it’s too linked to not be doomed) can collapse. That seems good. Alternatively, it can create value for the game piece of claiming that everything else is a simulacrum and thus one can invest substantial resources in creating something that is protected (at least for now) from that, to compete. Or, it can free the L-1 players from not only confusion but feeling bad about playing the game being played, since once there is only a game board, the game itself becomes the object level – that which no longer has *any* link to reality on the original level has its own distinct reality, and you can operate on that object level, and kind of start again with the new meanings of words. 4. Yes! These people ARE hopelessly perverse! And also, a sufficient amount of such pressures also makes them stupid because they don’t have any words or accurate information to think with! That’s in addition to being situationally constrained and habituated. These are not exclusive things.
In general, I have the instinct that pointing out that things *would be* technical errors if they were part of a proposed technical solution to the problem they claim to be solving, is a useful thing to do to help create common knowledge / knowledge.
1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds. I agree that this is not common knowledge, and never has been. I’d like to hear more about why you think the situation is new.
(It’s plausible to me that something’s changed recently, in response to the Enlightenment, and that something changed with the initial spread of Christianity, and that something else changed with the initial growth of cities and centralized cults.)
2. I agree. I think it’s more helpful if we additionally clarify that while there’s not really a good-faith reason to stay confused about this, many people have a strong perceived motive to stay confused, so the persistence of confusion is not strong evidence that our apparently decisive arguments are missing an important technical point. (Also, it’s better if noticing this doesn’t immediately lead to self-sabotage via indignantly pretending scapegoating norms don’t exist.)
Not much to add on 3 and 4, except that my response to 2 bears on 3 as well. Strongly agree with:
In general, I have the instinct that pointing out that things *would be* technical errors if they were part of a proposed technical solution to the problem they claim to be solving, is a useful thing to do to help create common knowledge / knowledge.
I cannot speak for Zvi, but I suggest that the new thing is communication pollution.
Reality is far away and expensive. Signs are immediate and basically free. I intuitively suspect the gap is so huge that it is cheaper and easier to do a kind of sign-hopping, like frequency hopping, in lieu of working on or confronting the reality of the matter directly.
To provide more intuition about what I mean, compare communication costs to the falling costs of light over time. When our only lights were firewood it cost a significant fraction of the time of illumination in labor, for gathering and chopping wood. Now light is so ubiquitous that we turn them on with virtually no thought, and light pollution is a thing.
Interesting in this context that the Biblical version of the tower of Babel (as distinguished from e.g. the Babylonian account) was specifically constructed as a signal tower to overcome coordination difficulties due to large distances.
1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds.
One (potential?) disagreement is that I think it’s quite plausible that level-4-simulacrums are in fact the original morality, or co-evolved with level-1 morality. I think it actually took work to get morality to a point where it made any “sense” in a principled way. (At least, with principles that LWers are likely to endorse)
My current best guess is that morality is rooted in two things:
1) the need to coordinate political factions (who has enough friends that they could beat someone and take their stuff, or avoid having themselves beaten-up-and-stuff-taken). Notions of ‘fairness’ (which come from the anger module), getting filtered through “what can a group of people agree is fair?”, as a coordination mechanism.
2) something something repurposing our disgust module (from diseased individuals) to dislike people that seemed dangerous to have around. (So low status, powerless people often produce a disgust reaction. If you hang around a diseased person you might get sick. If you hang around powerless people you might get stuck with a spear).
The oldest simulacrum-level-1 morality I can imagine would have involved coordinating hunters and maybe building shelters (where it matters how skilled people are). But I’d expect the same time period to already involve maintaining your position within a political tribe, and I’d expect higher-level-simulacra morality to already be at work in that context.
(I’m not sure whether it makes sense to think of levels 1-through-4 as distinct stages)
I’d expect the explicit level 1-4 transition to become relevant after we moved to hierarchical agricultural societies, but for that to be happening alongside levels 2-4 already existing in some form.
Coevolution seems plausible to me, but preexisting doesn’t. Forager-typical fairness norms seem like a coherent shared social agenda, which is I think all that’s required to be at simulacra level 1. The anger “module” is fundamentally social and seems to be object-level. Plenty of social animals not smart enough to be Machiavellian experience anger, a sense of fairness, etc.
It’s not too hard to see why people would benefit from joining a majority expropriating from a blameworthy individual. But why would they join a majority transferring resources to a praiseworthy one? So, being singled out is much more bad than good here.
This makes intuitive sense, but it doesn’t seem to be borne out by modern experience; when coalitions attack blameworthy individuals these days, they don’t usually get any resources out of it, the resources just end up destroyed or taken by a government that wasn’t part of the coalition.
Not true; each member of the coalition responsible for destroying the enemy gains recognition as “one of the good people”, and temporary security from being branded as an enemy themselves.
If that’s what people are getting out of it, it’s symmetric, and they might as well join praise-gangs, so this fails to explain the asymmetry. You are disagreeing with Benquo just as much as Jimrandomh is.
If you praise one who is praised by many others, you might be doing it only to get with the “in” crowd, and that is worthless; it costs you nothing and it therefore signals nothing. But if you help to destroy one who is targeted by many others, it does not matter if others are also destroying him, then you incur the dual cost of ensuring the destruction of one of the enemy faction, and of marking yourself as being a foe of that enemy faction; these are costs, and thus make for a strong signal (that you are not one of Them).
OK, if praise-gangs don’t actually do anything, while destruction gangs actually destroy, then praise-gangs are cheap talk. But that sounds to me like it’s just pushing it back another level. Benquo claimed that there was an asymmetry in joining putatively effective gangs. If destruction is 10x as effective as creation, then maybe a pebble promoting creation should get 1⁄10 as much credit as a pebble promoting destruction.
and that is worthless; it costs you nothing and it therefore signals nothing.
signaling conformity, counter to beliefs, is not costless. Praise that is popular is evidence AT LEAST that conformity on this topic is more important to the judgment-expresser than unpopular blame. so some mix of “actual praise” and “complaint less important than conformity”.
Thanks for pushing towards clarity here! I’m a bit confused about what you’re saying, in part because I find the references in Said’s comment a bit unclear (e.g. what exactly is implied by “recognition as ‘one of the good people’”?). I also don’t see how the “temporary security” paradigm works symmetrically. Would you be wiling to unpack this a bit?
In the battle between Us and Them, you must continually prove that you are one of Us, lest we suspect that you are secretly with Them. Taking part on the destruction of one of Them is evidence that you are not yourself one of Them, as failing do so is evidence of the opposite; for who would not wish to destroy Them, but one of their own?
This is the sort of thing that seems increasingly unappealing, the less you’re operating under the assumption that things are zero-sum within the relevant domain. I agree that this assumption is often false! And yet, many people seem to be acting on it in many contexts.
What do you mean by “modern experience”? If you mean things happening at new scales, like twitter mobs, probably game theory is not the right way to describe it, but accidental consequences of psychology adapted for smaller settings. Whereas I think Benquo is talking about smaller scales, like office politics, where the resources are near enough to seize. That may well explain irrational behavior at broader scales. (Although I think twitter mobs aren’t that asymmetric.)
Endorse following that link above to simulacra level 1, for anyone following this.
One would think that it would also be powerful (at level 4) to create common knowledge of your *lack* of ability to interact with or help with a thing, which can be assisted by the creation of common knowledge blaming someone else. And in fact I do think we observe a lot of attempts to create common “knowledge” (air quotes because the information in question is often incomplete, misleading or outright false) about who is to blame for various things.
It is also reasonable in some sense, at that point, to put a large multiplier on bad things for which we establish common knowledge if we expect that most bad things do not become common knowledge, to the extent that one might be judged to be as bad as the worst established action.
Which in turn results in anything and anyone under sufficient hostile scrutiny, which has taken a bunch of action, to be seen as bad.
The Copenhagen Interpretation actually is perverse and is quite bad, whether or not it is a locally reasonable action in some cases for people on L-2 or higher.
One of the big advantages, to me, of TCI is that in addition to explaining specific behaviors very well in many cases, it also points out that the people involved can’t be L-1 players, and since most people agree with TCI, most people aren’t L-1.
Of course, it is rather silly to think that no one in the community is making honest mistakes about what deserve praise or blame; in addition to any and all dishonest ‘mistakes’ there are constant important honest ones as well. So hanging on to a pure L-1 perspective has its own problems even with only L-1 players, before a war into L-2.
There’s a ton of hostile action but you don’t need it to generate a lot of the same results anyway at lower magnitudes.
Agree that the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics model is important in large part because it clarifies that most people are not computing a simulacrum level 1 morality. We’re going to need to be better about saying this explicitly, because the default outcome for posts like yours is to get interpreted as claiming that people really are just making an unmotivated technical error. I think that’s what happened with LessWrong, and we both know how that project failed. Tsuyoku Naritai!
I’m actually a bit confused about whether Copenhagen is automatically not Level 1 Simulacrum.
(also, I’m noticing that we’re using multiple layers of jargon here and this whole conversation could use a distillation down into plain English, but for now will stay knee-deep in the jargon)
Whether Copenhagen is perverse depends a bit on how reasonable it is to halfway solve a problem, or how suspicious it is to benefit from solving a problem.
In todays world, problems are immense and complicated and you definitely want people making partial progress on them, and don’t want to incentivize people to ignore problems. But this isn’t obviously true to me among ancient hunter gatherers. (I don’t currently have a clear model of what problems ancient hunter-gatherers actually faced, and how hard they were to fix, and so this isn’t a place where I have a strong opinion much at all, just that the current arguments seem underjustified to me)
I recall when my dad would get mad at me for mowing half the lawn. I’m not sure how to think about this. Obviously mowing half the lawn is better than mowing zero. But, his point was “Actually, it is not that hard to mow the whole god damn lawn. It is virtuous to finish things that you start. You (Ray) seem to be working yourself up into a sense that you’ve worked so hard and should get to stop when you just haven’t actually worked that hard and you could finish the rest of the lawn in another 30 minutes and then the whole thing would be done.”
Whether this is reasonable or not depends on whether you think it’s more important to get laws partially mowed, and whether you think my feeling of exhaustion after mowing half the lawn was legitimate, or a psychological defense mechanism for giving myself an excuse to stop an feel good about myself without having completed the entire job. (I don’t actually know myself)
Noting that I also replied to Benquo’s comments back at the original post (he posted them in both places): https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/04/25/asymmetric-justice/. I will cross-post the ‘first wave’ of replies here but may or may not post subsequent waves should they exist.
Overall the disagreement underlying this post is obscured by a set of common names for very different protocols.
Under one protocol, praise and blame are tools for encouraging behavior the community wants and discouraging behavior the community does not want. If these categories are not manipulated for other motives, we have simulacra level 1 morality. This is the straightforward interpretation under which – if you hold it consistently and think it’s the predominant norm – the “Copenhagen interpretation” seems obviously perverse, legalizing blackmail seems obviously helpful, etc.
It gets more complicated if you think that the community may be mistaken about matters of praise or blame, and that someone might be manipulating these perceptions for their own ends. Now we’re in simulacra level 2 or 3, and people playing game 1 need a moral theory that helps them cooperate with each other, resist, evade, or recover from attacks by level-2 players, and avoid wasting their time interacting with level 3. This is the position of the Psalms.
Once manipulating the perception of praise or blame becomes the dominant game, we’re in simulacra level 4.
Level 4 focuses on blame rather than praise because of an asymmetry of zero-sum games with distinct targets. It’s not too hard to see why people would benefit from joining a majority expropriating from a blameworthy individual. But why would they join a majority transferring resources to a praiseworthy one? So, being singled out is much more bad than good here.
Deflecting blame by holding onto plausible deniability becomes one of the most important “ethical” skills. The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics becomes an intuitive and natural extension of this. If blame is a weapon we attack other people with for being responsible for things, you can avoid being blamed for a thing by preventing your capacity to do something about it from entering common knowledge. Localized creation of clarity around who causes what bad thing always seems bad for you and your friends, and legalizing blackmail is a massive DDOS attack on “ethics.” Since we’re habituated to calling “unethical” behavior “bad,” we just scale up that estimate and assume destroying the system would be extremely bad.
Crucially, the level-4 simulacrum of “justice” is not mistaken about how to set up prosocial incentives – it’s not trying to set up a set of incentives at all! It’s not solving any sort of collective action problem! It’s a Hobbesian state of war!
Imagining it as a technical error will always lead to becoming hopelessly confused and imagining that people are hopelessly stupid and perverse, rather than situationally constrained and habituated to do a thing that makes local sense.
(Replying to the last two paragraphs)
Agreed. Several things one could say here.
1. It is not common knowledge that the level-4 simulacrum of justice is a level-4 simulacrum. Or even that it is not a level-1. There are people honestly trying to do level-1 justice using a mostly level-4 simulacrum, or a mix of all levels, etc. I feel like this error was present and somewhat ubiquitous, for various reasons good and bad, long before L-4 took over the areas in question, and its origin often *was* usefully thought of as a technical error. Its final one-winged-angel form is something else.
2. Even if something is not a technical error in the sense that no one was trying to solve a given technical problem, it is still true in many cases, including this one, that it claims that it *is* trying to solve the problem. Pointing out that it’s doing a piss-poor job of that can create knowledge or ideally common knowledge that allows the remaining lower-level players to identify and coordinate against it, or at least avoid making the mistake in their own thinking and realize what they are up against.
3. It can lead to potential ways out. One can imagine forcing common knowledge of being L-4 accelerating a reversion. Language has been destroyed, so anyone who cares about the object level can now exit and start again, and the system of levels (and perhaps The System, if it’s too linked to not be doomed) can collapse. That seems good. Alternatively, it can create value for the game piece of claiming that everything else is a simulacrum and thus one can invest substantial resources in creating something that is protected (at least for now) from that, to compete. Or, it can free the L-1 players from not only confusion but feeling bad about playing the game being played, since once there is only a game board, the game itself becomes the object level – that which no longer has *any* link to reality on the original level has its own distinct reality, and you can operate on that object level, and kind of start again with the new meanings of words.
4. Yes! These people ARE hopelessly perverse! And also, a sufficient amount of such pressures also makes them stupid because they don’t have any words or accurate information to think with! That’s in addition to being situationally constrained and habituated. These are not exclusive things.
In general, I have the instinct that pointing out that things *would be* technical errors if they were part of a proposed technical solution to the problem they claim to be solving, is a useful thing to do to help create common knowledge / knowledge.
1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds. I agree that this is not common knowledge, and never has been. I’d like to hear more about why you think the situation is new.
(It’s plausible to me that something’s changed recently, in response to the Enlightenment, and that something changed with the initial spread of Christianity, and that something else changed with the initial growth of cities and centralized cults.)
2. I agree. I think it’s more helpful if we additionally clarify that while there’s not really a good-faith reason to stay confused about this, many people have a strong perceived motive to stay confused, so the persistence of confusion is not strong evidence that our apparently decisive arguments are missing an important technical point. (Also, it’s better if noticing this doesn’t immediately lead to self-sabotage via indignantly pretending scapegoating norms don’t exist.)
Not much to add on 3 and 4, except that my response to 2 bears on 3 as well. Strongly agree with:
I cannot speak for Zvi, but I suggest that the new thing is communication pollution.
Reality is far away and expensive. Signs are immediate and basically free. I intuitively suspect the gap is so huge that it is cheaper and easier to do a kind of sign-hopping, like frequency hopping, in lieu of working on or confronting the reality of the matter directly.
To provide more intuition about what I mean, compare communication costs to the falling costs of light over time. When our only lights were firewood it cost a significant fraction of the time of illumination in labor, for gathering and chopping wood. Now light is so ubiquitous that we turn them on with virtually no thought, and light pollution is a thing.
Interesting in this context that the Biblical version of the tower of Babel (as distinguished from e.g. the Babylonian account) was specifically constructed as a signal tower to overcome coordination difficulties due to large distances.
One (potential?) disagreement is that I think it’s quite plausible that level-4-simulacrums are in fact the original morality, or co-evolved with level-1 morality. I think it actually took work to get morality to a point where it made any “sense” in a principled way. (At least, with principles that LWers are likely to endorse)
My current best guess is that morality is rooted in two things:
1) the need to coordinate political factions (who has enough friends that they could beat someone and take their stuff, or avoid having themselves beaten-up-and-stuff-taken). Notions of ‘fairness’ (which come from the anger module), getting filtered through “what can a group of people agree is fair?”, as a coordination mechanism.
2) something something repurposing our disgust module (from diseased individuals) to dislike people that seemed dangerous to have around. (So low status, powerless people often produce a disgust reaction. If you hang around a diseased person you might get sick. If you hang around powerless people you might get stuck with a spear).
The oldest simulacrum-level-1 morality I can imagine would have involved coordinating hunters and maybe building shelters (where it matters how skilled people are). But I’d expect the same time period to already involve maintaining your position within a political tribe, and I’d expect higher-level-simulacra morality to already be at work in that context.
(I’m not sure whether it makes sense to think of levels 1-through-4 as distinct stages)
I’d expect the explicit level 1-4 transition to become relevant after we moved to hierarchical agricultural societies, but for that to be happening alongside levels 2-4 already existing in some form.
Coevolution seems plausible to me, but preexisting doesn’t. Forager-typical fairness norms seem like a coherent shared social agenda, which is I think all that’s required to be at simulacra level 1. The anger “module” is fundamentally social and seems to be object-level. Plenty of social animals not smart enough to be Machiavellian experience anger, a sense of fairness, etc.
This makes intuitive sense, but it doesn’t seem to be borne out by modern experience; when coalitions attack blameworthy individuals these days, they don’t usually get any resources out of it, the resources just end up destroyed or taken by a government that wasn’t part of the coalition.
Not true; each member of the coalition responsible for destroying the enemy gains recognition as “one of the good people”, and temporary security from being branded as an enemy themselves.
If that’s what people are getting out of it, it’s symmetric, and they might as well join praise-gangs, so this fails to explain the asymmetry. You are disagreeing with Benquo just as much as Jimrandomh is.
If you praise one who is praised by many others, you might be doing it only to get with the “in” crowd, and that is worthless; it costs you nothing and it therefore signals nothing. But if you help to destroy one who is targeted by many others, it does not matter if others are also destroying him, then you incur the dual cost of ensuring the destruction of one of the enemy faction, and of marking yourself as being a foe of that enemy faction; these are costs, and thus make for a strong signal (that you are not one of Them).
OK, if praise-gangs don’t actually do anything, while destruction gangs actually destroy, then praise-gangs are cheap talk. But that sounds to me like it’s just pushing it back another level. Benquo claimed that there was an asymmetry in joining putatively effective gangs. If destruction is 10x as effective as creation, then maybe a pebble promoting creation should get 1⁄10 as much credit as a pebble promoting destruction.
signaling conformity, counter to beliefs, is not costless. Praise that is popular is evidence AT LEAST that conformity on this topic is more important to the judgment-expresser than unpopular blame. so some mix of “actual praise” and “complaint less important than conformity”.
Thanks for pushing towards clarity here! I’m a bit confused about what you’re saying, in part because I find the references in Said’s comment a bit unclear (e.g. what exactly is implied by “recognition as ‘one of the good people’”?). I also don’t see how the “temporary security” paradigm works symmetrically. Would you be wiling to unpack this a bit?
In the battle between Us and Them, you must continually prove that you are one of Us, lest we suspect that you are secretly with Them. Taking part on the destruction of one of Them is evidence that you are not yourself one of Them, as failing do so is evidence of the opposite; for who would not wish to destroy Them, but one of their own?
The double double double double cross, shows evidence of being one of Us, but actually being one of Them.
Or, even better, Being both at once. The prestige, oh the prestige...
This is the sort of thing that seems increasingly unappealing, the less you’re operating under the assumption that things are zero-sum within the relevant domain. I agree that this assumption is often false! And yet, many people seem to be acting on it in many contexts.
What do you mean by “modern experience”? If you mean things happening at new scales, like twitter mobs, probably game theory is not the right way to describe it, but accidental consequences of psychology adapted for smaller settings. Whereas I think Benquo is talking about smaller scales, like office politics, where the resources are near enough to seize. That may well explain irrational behavior at broader scales. (Although I think twitter mobs aren’t that asymmetric.)
Endorse following that link above to simulacra level 1, for anyone following this.
One would think that it would also be powerful (at level 4) to create common knowledge of your *lack* of ability to interact with or help with a thing, which can be assisted by the creation of common knowledge blaming someone else. And in fact I do think we observe a lot of attempts to create common “knowledge” (air quotes because the information in question is often incomplete, misleading or outright false) about who is to blame for various things.
It is also reasonable in some sense, at that point, to put a large multiplier on bad things for which we establish common knowledge if we expect that most bad things do not become common knowledge, to the extent that one might be judged to be as bad as the worst established action.
Which in turn results in anything and anyone under sufficient hostile scrutiny, which has taken a bunch of action, to be seen as bad.
The Copenhagen Interpretation actually is perverse and is quite bad, whether or not it is a locally reasonable action in some cases for people on L-2 or higher.
One of the big advantages, to me, of TCI is that in addition to explaining specific behaviors very well in many cases, it also points out that the people involved can’t be L-1 players, and since most people agree with TCI, most people aren’t L-1.
Of course, it is rather silly to think that no one in the community is making honest mistakes about what deserve praise or blame; in addition to any and all dishonest ‘mistakes’ there are constant important honest ones as well. So hanging on to a pure L-1 perspective has its own problems even with only L-1 players, before a war into L-2.
There’s a ton of hostile action but you don’t need it to generate a lot of the same results anyway at lower magnitudes.
Agree that the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics model is important in large part because it clarifies that most people are not computing a simulacrum level 1 morality. We’re going to need to be better about saying this explicitly, because the default outcome for posts like yours is to get interpreted as claiming that people really are just making an unmotivated technical error. I think that’s what happened with LessWrong, and we both know how that project failed. Tsuyoku Naritai!
I’m actually a bit confused about whether Copenhagen is automatically not Level 1 Simulacrum.
(also, I’m noticing that we’re using multiple layers of jargon here and this whole conversation could use a distillation down into plain English, but for now will stay knee-deep in the jargon)
Whether Copenhagen is perverse depends a bit on how reasonable it is to halfway solve a problem, or how suspicious it is to benefit from solving a problem.
In todays world, problems are immense and complicated and you definitely want people making partial progress on them, and don’t want to incentivize people to ignore problems. But this isn’t obviously true to me among ancient hunter gatherers. (I don’t currently have a clear model of what problems ancient hunter-gatherers actually faced, and how hard they were to fix, and so this isn’t a place where I have a strong opinion much at all, just that the current arguments seem underjustified to me)
I recall when my dad would get mad at me for mowing half the lawn. I’m not sure how to think about this. Obviously mowing half the lawn is better than mowing zero. But, his point was “Actually, it is not that hard to mow the whole god damn lawn. It is virtuous to finish things that you start. You (Ray) seem to be working yourself up into a sense that you’ve worked so hard and should get to stop when you just haven’t actually worked that hard and you could finish the rest of the lawn in another 30 minutes and then the whole thing would be done.”
Whether this is reasonable or not depends on whether you think it’s more important to get laws partially mowed, and whether you think my feeling of exhaustion after mowing half the lawn was legitimate, or a psychological defense mechanism for giving myself an excuse to stop an feel good about myself without having completed the entire job. (I don’t actually know myself)
To answer the topline question I think that you can accept Copenhagen and still be on Level 1.
I like the lawn example because in many ways it is clean. There are a number of ways your dad can be right to get mad, and ways he can be wrong.
Or, alternately: I’m not 100% sure what Level 1 Morality is supposed to mean here.
Noting that I also replied to Benquo’s comments back at the original post (he posted them in both places): https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/04/25/asymmetric-justice/. I will cross-post the ‘first wave’ of replies here but may or may not post subsequent waves should they exist.
Likewise
People with the simulacra level 4th can praise their political allies.