a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal
It’s not just about ignoring death. These men and women in the armed forces are heroes… if you abandon the definition above and use a more useful definition. “A person who has qualities or performed acts which are useful to the community, who can serve as models for others, so that more people will act like them.” It’s a Hansonian status signal.
To allow a little anthropomorphizing, a society wants to reinforce that which makes it stronger. If you were to design a civilization from scratch which is involved in wars, the first thing you’d do is grant +200 status points to everybody who died in the service of their country, regardless of if they were effective or not effective. That will get you more recruits; that will make wars easier. It doesn’t matter if the words are true or the definitions are consistent, granting those bonus status points would help you achieve your goals. It makes sense for a society to do that, and it makes sense that a society would punish people who point out it’s reinforcement systems.
These men and women in the armed forces are heroes… if you abandon the definition above and use a more useful definition. “A person who has qualities or performed acts which are useful to the community, who can serve as models for others, so that more people will act like them.”
The second part of that definition is unhelpfully recursive… choosing to call people “heroes” or otherwise laud them is an important part of what turns them into models for others. To make that laudability part of the definition of heroism risks emptying the word of all content: heroism becomes anything we describe as heroic.
Leaving that aside… lots of things are useful to the community, so the first part of that definition covers a lot of ground. Using the model you suggest, it seems if I was to design a civilization from scratch that consumed food, presumably I would also label farmers “heroes,” and if I was to design a civilization from scratch that produced organic wastes, presumably I would also label sewage engineers “heroes”.
That doesn’t seem to describe the world I live in. It would seem there’s more to be explained.
The non-cynical explanation is that what makes soldiers unique is morale. We can encourage farmers and sewage engineers via steady monetary compensation, and we don’t have to worry that hazardous manure will make them break and run, and if 5% of them were to suddenly quit then we’d be okay eating 95% as much food and paying some overtime to maintain the pipes. With soldiers, shit really does turn lethal, a 5% retreat can quickly cascade into a rout, and less mercenary compensation (using status and esteem instead of just money) seems to make such a rout less likely.
Although I think Hayes’ points were apt and his treatment despicable, he may be missing a similar point: thinking of soldiers as “heros” rather than just regular employees may also reduce peoples’ desire to risk their lives unnecessarily. You can see an overreach of the same effect in public attitudes toward the space program: death counts that would go unremarked in heavy construction projects are considered intolerable because the dying astronauts are heroes to us.
I agree that certain roles, like warfare, are much less tolerant than others of individuals unexpectedly refusing to perform the functions of the role. I agree that certain roles (again, like warfare) are much more likely than others to involve intermittent periods of extremely high risk, which makes steady-state reward very easy to game. I agree that both of those factors seem to explain a lot more of what we call heroic than the “useful to the community, who can serve as models for others” metric proposed earlier.
It is not clear to me that we’re less willing to tolerate astronaut’s deaths or soldier’s deaths than we are construction workers’ deaths… we seem pretty willing to tolerate all of them, though we make a much bigger fuss about the former group. I suspect our lack of support for the space program has other causes.
You can see an overreach of the same effect in public attitudes toward the space program: death counts that would go unremarked in heavy construction projects are considered intolerable because the dying astronauts are heroes to us.
It may be significant that their deaths are associated with projects which are not only highly visible but orders of magnitude more expensive.
I suspect that if we decided to build a proper Tower of Babel, and people died in the construction, their deaths would get plenty of publicity.
If you were to design a civilization from scratch which is involved in wars, the first thing you’d do is grant +200 status points to everybody who died in the service of their country, regardless of if they were effective or not effective.
Just how much is 200 points? That might lead to a lot of people being really careless in battle.
Ah, not necessarily. If being the one who achieves actual military objectives is worth any points at all, the optimal strategy is to get killed the day before you retire. (see also “retirony”)
As an explicit example of this, Jewish Orthodox doctrine has it that anyone who dies “for the sanctification of The Name” gets an automatic ticket to Awesome Afterlife. The thing is, that class includes those murdered by anti-Semites—so you can go to Heaven for someone else’s bigotry.
anyone who dies “for the sanctification of The Name” gets an automatic ticket to Awesome Afterlife. The thing is, that class includes those murdered by anti-Semites—so you can go to Heaven for someone else’s bigotry.
Whoa, that sure does explain a lot!
As it turns out, that Adolf dude with the funny moustache has optimally maximized discounted utility up to T=∞ for a lot of folks! And he didn’t even take credit for it—he just did it out of sheer willingness to do the moral and utility-maximizing thing. What a cool guy, right? Could anyone even believe that people view him as the personification of evil?
It’s not just about ignoring death. These men and women in the armed forces are heroes… if you abandon the definition above and use a more useful definition. “A person who has qualities or performed acts which are useful to the community, who can serve as models for others, so that more people will act like them.” It’s a Hansonian status signal.
To allow a little anthropomorphizing, a society wants to reinforce that which makes it stronger. If you were to design a civilization from scratch which is involved in wars, the first thing you’d do is grant +200 status points to everybody who died in the service of their country, regardless of if they were effective or not effective. That will get you more recruits; that will make wars easier. It doesn’t matter if the words are true or the definitions are consistent, granting those bonus status points would help you achieve your goals. It makes sense for a society to do that, and it makes sense that a society would punish people who point out it’s reinforcement systems.
This is how being a cell in an organism feels from the outside.
The second part of that definition is unhelpfully recursive… choosing to call people “heroes” or otherwise laud them is an important part of what turns them into models for others. To make that laudability part of the definition of heroism risks emptying the word of all content: heroism becomes anything we describe as heroic.
Leaving that aside… lots of things are useful to the community, so the first part of that definition covers a lot of ground. Using the model you suggest, it seems if I was to design a civilization from scratch that consumed food, presumably I would also label farmers “heroes,” and if I was to design a civilization from scratch that produced organic wastes, presumably I would also label sewage engineers “heroes”.
That doesn’t seem to describe the world I live in. It would seem there’s more to be explained.
The non-cynical explanation is that what makes soldiers unique is morale. We can encourage farmers and sewage engineers via steady monetary compensation, and we don’t have to worry that hazardous manure will make them break and run, and if 5% of them were to suddenly quit then we’d be okay eating 95% as much food and paying some overtime to maintain the pipes. With soldiers, shit really does turn lethal, a 5% retreat can quickly cascade into a rout, and less mercenary compensation (using status and esteem instead of just money) seems to make such a rout less likely.
Although I think Hayes’ points were apt and his treatment despicable, he may be missing a similar point: thinking of soldiers as “heros” rather than just regular employees may also reduce peoples’ desire to risk their lives unnecessarily. You can see an overreach of the same effect in public attitudes toward the space program: death counts that would go unremarked in heavy construction projects are considered intolerable because the dying astronauts are heroes to us.
I agree that certain roles, like warfare, are much less tolerant than others of individuals unexpectedly refusing to perform the functions of the role.
I agree that certain roles (again, like warfare) are much more likely than others to involve intermittent periods of extremely high risk, which makes steady-state reward very easy to game.
I agree that both of those factors seem to explain a lot more of what we call heroic than the “useful to the community, who can serve as models for others” metric proposed earlier.
It is not clear to me that we’re less willing to tolerate astronaut’s deaths or soldier’s deaths than we are construction workers’ deaths… we seem pretty willing to tolerate all of them, though we make a much bigger fuss about the former group. I suspect our lack of support for the space program has other causes.
It may be significant that their deaths are associated with projects which are not only highly visible but orders of magnitude more expensive.
I suspect that if we decided to build a proper Tower of Babel, and people died in the construction, their deaths would get plenty of publicity.
Just how much is 200 points? That might lead to a lot of people being really careless in battle.
Ah, not necessarily. If being the one who achieves actual military objectives is worth any points at all, the optimal strategy is to get killed the day before you retire. (see also “retirony”)
As an explicit example of this, Jewish Orthodox doctrine has it that anyone who dies “for the sanctification of The Name” gets an automatic ticket to Awesome Afterlife. The thing is, that class includes those murdered by anti-Semites—so you can go to Heaven for someone else’s bigotry.
Whoa, that sure does explain a lot!
As it turns out, that Adolf dude with the funny moustache has optimally maximized discounted utility up to T=∞ for a lot of folks! And he didn’t even take credit for it—he just did it out of sheer willingness to do the moral and utility-maximizing thing. What a cool guy, right? Could anyone even believe that people view him as the personification of evil?
Well, if we’re concerned about consequences of actions rather than some other metric of moral value, that’s not unreasonable.