Also, there’s little virtue in not using abilities you don’t have on moral grounds
There’s some virtue in not acquiring those abilities if you think there’s no decent use for them.
Very seriously, those who relinquish the known dark arts will invent their own path to the abyss, a path without the protective guard-rails and warning signs worked out by billions of predecessors. We end up self-deceiving in unusual ways, but predictable ways for someone who has met enough rationalists.
Examples for both?
Do you find that all influential people use what rationalists would call Dark Arts? Do you think that there’s such a thing as influence which tends to make people more clear-headed?
The most obvious is that beliefs and values are not that distinctly represented in the human brain. If you can’t tweak your beliefs to be self-aggrandizing the default outcome is for your values to become self-aggrandizing instead. In practice, this also leads to low salience for those virtues where you are deficient so that the successes that come from the possession of virtues other than your own looks like ‘luck’ to you, even when such successes happen repeatedly and even when you know that luck is a synonym for probability favoring someone and probability is in the map not in the territory. This problem is particular severe when the virtues in question are framed by your culture as passive, treated as simply being the absences of vices which your culture pretends people should be able to routinely eliminate and which your culture morally blames people for not eliminating.
Let me give an example to test whether I understand correctly. I am lazy. Laziness belongs to the described category of vices that are expected to be routinely eliminated. Now I can’t value hard work too high and simultaneously be aware of my laziness, since that would violate the self-aggrandising axiom. I am too rational to deceive myself that I am actually not lazy, so I have to adjust my values instead and accept laziness as normal. Perhaps this makes me less virtuous.
Well, if this is what you have meant, I agree that (for me) it actually works like that, but I wouldn’t call it self-deception.
Deceiving yourself about how much you would value hard work in the absence of your laziness leads to predictable mistakes when you then model others with your value of yourself and don’t understand why the others don’t like you (because you are tacitly modeling them as not considering laziness very bad).
These predictable mistakes add up to much worse life performance in aggregate than if they didn’t occur.
I haven’t said that I suppose my values in the absence of laziness would be the same. I also don’t expect others to have the same values as myself. Even if I did, that would be example of the “mind projection fallacy” or “false agreement fallacy” which was discussed here several times. Do you think that the lesswrongers are in tackling these biases substantially worse than they (we) think?
I don’t think that we even think that we are avoiding using ourselves as our default model of other people in many situations, nor that we can do so in principle, but I wasn’t of the impression that people though that they could.
There’s some virtue in not acquiring those abilities if you think there’s no decent use for them.
Examples for both?
Do you find that all influential people use what rationalists would call Dark Arts? Do you think that there’s such a thing as influence which tends to make people more clear-headed?
I second the question. If the unusual deception patterns are predictable, there are certainly lot of examples.
If there are actual examples, some overview thereof would be great topic for a top level post.
The most obvious is that beliefs and values are not that distinctly represented in the human brain. If you can’t tweak your beliefs to be self-aggrandizing the default outcome is for your values to become self-aggrandizing instead. In practice, this also leads to low salience for those virtues where you are deficient so that the successes that come from the possession of virtues other than your own looks like ‘luck’ to you, even when such successes happen repeatedly and even when you know that luck is a synonym for probability favoring someone and probability is in the map not in the territory. This problem is particular severe when the virtues in question are framed by your culture as passive, treated as simply being the absences of vices which your culture pretends people should be able to routinely eliminate and which your culture morally blames people for not eliminating.
Let me give an example to test whether I understand correctly. I am lazy. Laziness belongs to the described category of vices that are expected to be routinely eliminated. Now I can’t value hard work too high and simultaneously be aware of my laziness, since that would violate the self-aggrandising axiom. I am too rational to deceive myself that I am actually not lazy, so I have to adjust my values instead and accept laziness as normal. Perhaps this makes me less virtuous.
Well, if this is what you have meant, I agree that (for me) it actually works like that, but I wouldn’t call it self-deception.
Deceiving yourself about how much you would value hard work in the absence of your laziness leads to predictable mistakes when you then model others with your value of yourself and don’t understand why the others don’t like you (because you are tacitly modeling them as not considering laziness very bad).
These predictable mistakes add up to much worse life performance in aggregate than if they didn’t occur.
I haven’t said that I suppose my values in the absence of laziness would be the same. I also don’t expect others to have the same values as myself. Even if I did, that would be example of the “mind projection fallacy” or “false agreement fallacy” which was discussed here several times. Do you think that the lesswrongers are in tackling these biases substantially worse than they (we) think?
I don’t think that we even think that we are avoiding using ourselves as our default model of other people in many situations, nor that we can do so in principle, but I wasn’t of the impression that people though that they could.