I feel you exaggerate the case here Eliezer. Overcoming bias will not solve all the problems in the world. There’s even a chance it could make them worst. Let’s look at hypocrisy, for instance:
This is the great case against hypocrisy, that hypocrisy allows us to act contrary to our ideals, and at times our ideals could have prevented holocausts. I suppose on the other side of the ledger must go the various “social graces” where hypocrisy supposedly smooths social interactions and lets us save face. Is there a way to weigh these two sides against each other, or is there a way to distinguish them, so we could have the good hypocrisy without excessive risk of the bad slipping in too?
There’s a huge positive chunk of hypocrisy that we’re missing there—hypocrisy allows us to have ideals higher than we can (and do) attain in our actions. It can have a tremendously aspirational effect. The phrase “all men are created equal” was written by rich, white slaveowners. Eliezer feels that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have written the same phrase, and set all their slaves free. I fear that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have kept their slaves and instead written “all rich, white men are created equal”. And future progress would have been ruled out.
To summarise: hypocrisy is the distance between ideals and actions. Erasing that distance does not tell us whether our actions will rise or if our ideals will fall—especially over several generations. Without hypocrisy, people may just become more tolerant of those “arguments which are too brutal for most people to face”.
I feel you exaggerate the case here Eliezer. Overcoming bias will not solve all the problems in the world. There’s even a chance it could make them worst. Let’s look at hypocrisy, for instance:
This is the great case against hypocrisy, that hypocrisy allows us to act contrary to our ideals, and at times our ideals could have prevented holocausts. I suppose on the other side of the ledger must go the various “social graces” where hypocrisy supposedly smooths social interactions and lets us save face. Is there a way to weigh these two sides against each other, or is there a way to distinguish them, so we could have the good hypocrisy without excessive risk of the bad slipping in too?
There’s a huge positive chunk of hypocrisy that we’re missing there—hypocrisy allows us to have ideals higher than we can (and do) attain in our actions. It can have a tremendously aspirational effect. The phrase “all men are created equal” was written by rich, white slaveowners. Eliezer feels that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have written the same phrase, and set all their slaves free. I fear that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have kept their slaves and instead written “all rich, white men are created equal”. And future progress would have been ruled out.
To summarise: hypocrisy is the distance between ideals and actions. Erasing that distance does not tell us whether our actions will rise or if our ideals will fall—especially over several generations. Without hypocrisy, people may just become more tolerant of those “arguments which are too brutal for most people to face”.
Related:
“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer (By Dalinar Kholin)