Benefits compared to what? The main issue in any (personal, business or whatever) relationship is presumably opportunity cost. Convincing someone to make you their agent (and take 95% of their income from a groundbreaking novel they’ve written) benefits both of you financially compared to it not being sold. But it benefits them less than selling it through someone more fair-minded.
Also, manipulation does not just exist in providing incentives: it can involve misleading people on facts/reasoning, or psychologically tricking them into acting against their own interests.
I was considering intangible benefits and those which cannot be trivially quantified to be the major ones.
It isn’t immoral to notice that someone values friendship, and then to be their friend in order to get the favors from them that they willingly provide to their friends; disinformation and psychological tricks can still be inherently immoral, if they were before.
It depends on your ethical approach. At core, I think utilitarianism is true. But it’s complex to apply to dynamic situatuons, and as a practical rule of thumb for normal cases, virtue ethics helps. And in that model (as well as in any natural discussion), ‘being someone’s friend’ to get favours is not in fact being someone’s friend. It’s deceiving them, and possibly you.
Of being someone’s friend? Maybe: I guess the question is how the word is used in practice. Worth asking other people about; is someone who cultivate a relationship with someone for favours a friend? I think it’s almost the definition of not a friend, but I may be using words unusually.
It doesn’t uniquely determine it: but again, in any common usage sense it’s important. Phrases like ‘fair weather friend’ and similar stories etc. denote the basic human understanding that we see friendship motivated directly for favours isn’t friendship. If someone seemed to be my friend and it turned out they just like the fact I buy drinks, I would feel betrayed as they’d exploited what friendship is understood to be.
Are you saying that this view should be overturned, or that it isn’t actually the common understanding of friendship?
Would it not matter to you if a close friend turned out to be your ‘friend’ purely for the assoicated favours?
I think friendships can be instrumentally good, obviously. But there’s a distinction between ways in which friendships are instrumentally good. If I discovered a friend of mine revealing that they were only my friend for the fantastic conversation, the excellent company, the superb sense of humour etc. I wouldn’t feel cheated. If I found out they were only my friend because I drove a car and it was convenient for them to get around, I would feel cheated.
Suppose there were two people with equally good conversation, company, humor, &tc, one of whom had a car, and only enough time/resources for a hypothetical third party to develop a friendship with one of them? Would you feel cheated if your mundane instrumental utility was a factor at all?
You clearly implied “only”. The external favours were the basis of the motivation.
“It isn’t immoral to notice that someone values friendship, and then to be their friend [b]in order to get the favors[/b] from them that they willingly provide to their friends”
In answer to your question: I’d still find it a little weird, tbh.
Are you at all familiar with the concepts of evolutionary psychology? Do you think we even have the capacity for friendship in some altruistic way, that while evolution was busy fine-tuning our eyes and our livers into remarkably efficient instruments, that it let the moral aspects of our personalities run open loop, disconnected from any benefit they might possibly bring to us?
I am currently in the process of figuring out how to be somebody’s friend that I am attracted to, and she knows it. She is in the process of helping me to get it right, because she wishes me to be attracted to her, she wishes to be attracted to me, and she wishes to have this all in the context of friendship.
You can be sure we are studying each other in detail and trying to optimize. We are both doing it and we both know we are doing it.
I don’t think contempt or deception are part of the equation, at least no at the core.
If it’s mutually decided then it’s clearly not deception, and whatever floats your boat, tbh.
Your other responses referring to evolutionary psychology, the chance of altruistic friendship etc. etc.: there is a difference between the evolutionary fact that your inclination to be friends with someone will be based on ultimately selfish goals, and being selfish yourself. The psychological make-up we have is a brute fact of existence and we need to take it into account. But selfish genes do not mean that the concept of human unselfishness is a busted flush.
I am currently in the process of figuring out how to be somebody’s friend
Why? IME time is best spent among people you can be friends with effortlessly.
(YMMV? So many people talk about “cultivating” friendships that I guess that they just don’t like “wild” ones for some reason—but I wonder what that reason is.)
First, I take objection with using “pretty” as a by-word for “stupid”, and second, reversed stupidity is not intelligence (just because a stupid pretty girl said that the sky is blue doesn’t mean the sky is green). So, what is wrong with her reasoning?
What is wrong with her reasoning is that she doesn’t take in to account that she has a sufficient number of men interested in her without her doing anything to increase the number, but that is NOT the case for the other women whom she thinks are screwing up by not just taking the men who come their way naturally.
Have you read the section about mean and variance of this article? Doing “things explicitly to attract men [in general]” might not be as good as strategy as locating those men whom it would be the easiest for her to attract and focussing on them specifically.
Have you read the section about mean and variance of this article?
Even there the lukeprog speaks of consciously choosing one’s marketing style. Another person who would be better off with the hunter-gatherer sexual style? Or evidence that to market oneself consciously towards relationships is the norm?
You sound like a pretty girl wondering why some other girls do things explicitly to attract men.
I agreed, until I saw the context. But it turns out Army wasn’t merely neglecting difficulty of social tasks. Instead he was talking about making things more difficult for yourself by actively constructing a notoriously toxic situation.
Not quite. (Note that I didn’t even quote the part mentioning that mwengler was attracted to that person.)
More like, I meant that if ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her (whatever the reasons for that), odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her. (IOW, IME “love is like a fart” also applies to friendship; see this other comment of mine and guess whether I was happier back then or right now.)
More like, I meant that if ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her (whatever the reasons for that)
I retract my defence. Mwengler interpreted your intent correctly and so his reply is applicable. My reply then constitutes a steel-man (which can not reasonably be used to reject rebuttals that use the intended meaning).
“To actually believe that you’ve made a steel man, not a straw man, the person you’re arguing with would have to admit that you’ve created a stronger argument for their own position than they could.”
That’s rather obviously false. But let’s consider the steel man where “could” is replaced with “happened to have done in the particular case being replied to” which makes the claim fairly straightforward and true rather being nearly exactly backwards.
As Hugh observes in his reply it is almost always pointless to use the steel man concept in adversarial debate. Even in the rare case where the person agrees they still find it condescending (because it approximately as close to the literal meaning of condescending as it is possible to be). The best uses of steel men that I have seen is when someone takes an argument that is for some reason important or valuable and presents it to an audience in an improved version and then responds to the improved argument. The original arguer need not be involved at all.
Do note that my reply was not intended as a steel man at all. It was made as a response to mwengler with the intended audience of mwengler and anyone who, like myself, would read the quote mwengler made more charitably in the expanded context. I assigned a probability of about 0.65 that your intent was at least partially influenced by the additional details in the example beyond the need for learning. (p = 0.65 is pretty damn high for confidence assigned by me to for an interpretation task.)
(I disagree that just because someone happens to give me a boner it’s a bad idea to be friends with them, so long as we get along well.)
I didn’t claim that either (ie. that is a straw man). I have plenty of friends who have happened to “give me a boner” at some point and there is no particular problem with that. In fact I merely weakened the claim you made (or implied). Consider:
IF “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” AND “she is an accountant” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
In other words while I don’t agree fully with the advice to avoid social relationships that require work (for the reasons mwengler has explained) I do agree that the principle applies in many cases. In particular, for those people that mwengler is talking about—those for whom ALL friendships take effort due to weaker social skills, etc—there will most likely be alternative effortful friendship opportunities that at least don’t have the additional overhead of “(sexual) relationship drama without (sexual) relationship”.
But… Is it harder to be friends with people one is attracted to than with people one is not attracted to, in the real world (as opposed to stereotypes and Hollywood movies)? ISTM that, if anything, IME it’s the other way round (though the effect is smaller when controlling for age and gender), which is what I’d theoretically expect given that there is such a thing as the halo effect.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” AND “she is an accountant” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
Huh? The conjunction fallacy doesn’t apply to the right of the pipe—whereas P(AB|C) cannot possibly be greater than P(A|C), P(C|DE) can be less than, equal to, or greater than P(C|D). Am I missing something?
(In this particular example, I’d guess (with low confidence) that for A=“there are other people who would make better friends than her”, B=“ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her”, C=“there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama”, and D=“she is an accountant”, P(A|BCD) is slightly but not terribly lower than P(A|BC), by a reasoning that would be politically incorrect to fully explain but involves, among other things, looking at where “Accounting occs” are on this chart and wild-ass extrapolation from my personal experiences. :-))
The conjunction fallacy doesn’t apply to the right of the pipe
The intended meaning of the link was “generalised lesson of reasoning with conjunctions”. Since it is indeed possible to reformulate the message from the “IF THEN” format to probability assignments I can see how this could be misleading.
(I removed the link and now endorse the unadorned text.)
Are you truly unaware that some people have lots of friends some of them very good friends, while others have very few or even no friends? To the extent I fall in that second category, is it truly rational on my part to NOT attempt to do some of what it seems to me leads to better friendships using my rational mind to go that way?
A pretty french royal girl. “Let them eat cake.” Thank you.
My point is that a different, and IME superior, way of solving the “very few or even no friends” problem (e.g. myself 10 years ago, see the comment I linked to above) than trying harder to be friends with the people you’ve already tried to be friends with is to move on and try to be friends with different people.
YMMV. (I had taken “currently in the process of figuring out” to imply that so far it hadn’t worked out very well, but now from the “it seems to me leads to better friendships” I guess I was wrong.)
I empathize with some girl about whatever dopey thing she and her girlfriends have got in to, which I couldn’t have the least bit of interest in, but I am a nice guy. Later we have sex.
Bit of a random question. Are you saying that in the system the person above me used is ’I am providing her incentives to benefit me in the form of believing I care about her life—and ultimately it leads to most benefit for me (sex) but also benefit for her (faked sympathy? sex? not clear from your account)
If you mean where do I draw the line in manipulation, this doesn’t look like ‘providing incentives’, and given it involves open deception it looks more like trickery. Though frankly if I thought someone was trying to ‘provide incentives’ for a friend of mine to sleep with them, I’d advise my friend to run a mile. There’s no absolute line here, but a good rule of thumb is provided by Terry Pratchett: don’t treat people as things.
When I buy stuff from people I don’t know I’m mostly treating them as a means to an end. Not completely, because there are ways I’d try to be fair to a human that wouldn’t apply to a thing, but to a larger extent than I would want in personal / social relationships.
Another rule of thumb I kind of like is: don’t get people into interactions with you that they wouldn’t want if they knew what you were doing. I feel like that probably encourages erring too far on the side of caution and altruism. But if you know the other person would prefer you to empathise when not interested rather than be silent, leave or criticise, it’s allowed.
ETA: I’m interested in better guidelines, especially from people who get the distaste for manipulation.
Yes: buying stuff from people is pretty much instrumentalising them. That’s capitalism! Although there tend to be limits as you note. And the ‘would they like this if they knew what I was doing’ is obviously a very good rule of thumb.
Occasionally, you’ll have to break this. Sometimes somebody is irrationally self-destructive and you basically end up deciding that you have a better sense of what is best for them. But that’s an INCREDIBLY radical/bold decision to make and shouldn’t be done lightly.
Follow-up: I’m a little drunk, but my instincts are SCREAMING against your post’s whole language: ‘some girl’, ‘whatever dopey thing’, the false sincerity or lack of awareness in ‘I’m a nice guy’ etc. This just reads like an approach of trying to manipulate people who hold in contempt into sleeping with you. Hopefully it’s a hypothetical or I’m misreading it, but at a gut level this is pretty sad, and pretty horrible.
Women famously say “sometimes I just want to be listened to. Don’t try to solve my problems, just show me that you care.” When men do this, women say “yes, that’s what I’m talking about” and attempt to reinforce that behavior, perhaps unconsciously.
The people that own the bodies that I find attractive are women. If you pay attention women will tell you what they need in order to want to have sex with you.
Evolutionary psychology does not generally leave us conscious of why we react socially the way we react. Who can deny the widespread nature of men acting in a set of ways to attract a woman sexually? Who can deny the widespread nature of women acting certain ways to attract men? That we do this because we want the other person to be attracted to us, and not “sincerely” really mean we all hold each other in contempt?
Does the fact that I hold an evolutionary psychological interpretation of what is going on and express that understanding in unromantic terms make me any more or less likely to hold the object of my affection in contempt?
Oh, and the answer to your final question here is probably ‘yes’. The way you understand and talk about your own attitudes and activities definitely has feedback into said attitudes and activities.
On trying to be attractive: no, that doesn’t automatically translate as contempt. But then, not all attempting to be attractive is deceptive. You say that ‘women’ (all women it seems: this evo psych attitude seems to come with a side-serving of old-fashioned generalisation) want guys to ‘show that they care’. Ever thought that people saying that (even men!) might actually want people to care, not just to pretend?
I’m not saying we should be unconscious of how we’re built. I’m saying that the way we’re built itself means that if we treat something as an abstract scientific issue we experience it differently to if we treat it as a matter of personal relationships. Are you saying that the way we explain and discuss our actions doesn’t affect in turn how we act and think?
I agree with you on this. It matters whether we are conscious of something, it matters because we will act differently.
The way in which it matters is that we can fully engage our rational powers when we are conscious of something, whereas when we act unconsciously of it we rely only on what was hardcoded in.
Consider launching shells. Running irrationally, we would point the mortar in the right direction and tilt it up about the right amount. We would even tend to correct by tilting it further up and down to get the range closer. But using our rational mind, we develop a rangefinder optically, and a lookup table that may even include corrections for wind.
Perhaps the entire point of the rational mind is that it gets us a level deeper into optimizing a broad class of actions. We contain a model of the world, we play out scenarios in our mind, we remember what worked and didn’t work.
So here I am, an ubernerd, wondering why I don’t get the hot chicks while the knuckle-draggers around me have wives who look like hairdressers. They hang out with the guys, bragging about their misbehavior with other women, referring to the wife as “the ball and chain.” Then on the way home they pick up a bottle of white wine and some flowers because they want to get laid.
Am I supposed to learn nothing from watching this? Or pretend I’ve learned nothing?
Yes, I agree with you, the entire point of becoming conscious of something is that we will treat it differently. We will analyze it, figure out the moving parts. We will learn and optimize.
And when I go home with a bottle of white wine and some flowers I can truly say to whatever woman it is that I did it because I hoped she would enjoy it. And that I know that no one is “happy” unless the woman is “happy,” does that make me a selfish monster living in my head?
Ah: this may be the underlying confusion. I don’t see the instrumentalist evo psych as bad and everything else as good. I see any deceptive, treating people as things approach as not valuing people.
I don’t see the people who brag about cheating and slag off their wives as models to aspire to. This is both in that I don’t particularly value the outcome they’re aiming for, and that I object to the deception and the treating people as things.
But on the broader point about attitude mattering: obviously it might change the activity in that way. But my point was more that you can’t step outside of your own psychology and humanity: thinking about people in this detached strategic way is not something done by a person looking in from outside the system: your sex life isn’t a game of The Sims. My intuition and experience is that doing something in a way constantly focused at trying to get individual bits of stuff out of it (’I will now buy this wine to get sex, I will now comfort my friend so that they will help me move house next week, I will try to understand this subject I’m studying so that I get a higher mark in the exam) leads to you having less fun and doing less good than engaging with things in their own terms (which is compatible with being aware of the underlying dynamics).
There’s also an issue of sincerity here, which to unpack into something that might be more appealing to your approach, is essentially game theoric. If you reassess for your benefit at every point, people can’t rely on you in tough situations. I would like people to be able to rely on me, and to be able to rely on them. Taking other people seriously and relating to them as people rather than strategies allows you to essentially pre-commit.
Women famously say “sometimes I just want to be listened to. Don’t try to solve my problems, just show me that you care.”
I generally decide whether to give people emotional support or concrete help based on what their problem is and on which way they tell me about it, not based on what type of genitalia they have. (It does correlate with what type of genitalia they have, but the correlation is not overwhelming—the correlation between genitalia and (say) height is much stronger.)
Women famously say “sometimes I just want to be listened to. Don’t try to solve my problems, just show me that you care.”
I would interpret that as being specific to problems. There may also be women who would like feigned interest in dopey things they’re into, or they may prefer to just discuss them with their girlfriends who are actually interested.
When men do this, women say “yes, that’s what I’m talking about” and attempt to reinforce that behavior, perhaps unconsciously.
Explicitly saying this can be taken at face value, I think, but unconsciously reinforcing the behaviour may be meant to reinforce actual interested listening. You can’t deduce which is the true preference.
The reason to think that sincerity may not be the main thing is the seeming fact that sexual attraction is pre-rational. I think it is quite common, especially among older humans, to WANT to have the close pre-rational relationship with someone who rationally fits a pile of criteria for you, but to not so strongly feel the sexual attraction as you did when you were younger and when they were younger. At that point, you thank them for wearing makeup and flattering clothing and presenting decolletage and batting their eyes at you and making you feel like a million dollars in a pre-rational way. If it brings the relationship over the pre-rational threshold for some hotness, then you both feel like winners.
Like any other tool, hacking attraction can be used for purposes you think are good and it can be used for purposes you think are bad. But given the prevalence of makeup, push up bras, slinky black and red dresses, hair coloring, flattery, brand-name signalling of wealth etc etc etc, I think hacking attraction is quite the norm across broad swathes of the population, inside and outside the rationalist community.
Hopefully it’s a hypothetical or I’m misreading it, but at a gut level this is pretty sad, and pretty horrible.
Plenty of people would disagree, so do I. What now? Your gut versus my gut? To each his own, I’d say.
(Ever tried the “no false sincerity” approach in a job interview? Never feigned interest in some of what a romantic interest was telling you, even if in fact you couldn’t care less?)
Never feigned interest in some of what a romantic interest was telling you, even if in fact you couldn’t care less?
Huh, no I haven’t—my romantic interests have tended to tell me things that I was genuinely interested in, or at least to be able to shortly realize when I wasn’t and change the topic consequently. Which is probably a large part of the difference between a romantic interest and someone I’d like to have a one-night stand with.
Now that I remember about it, I did that until I was about 17 -- towards people of the gender I’m not attracted to; for example, I would force myself to watch soccer matches even though I found them boring as hell.
Then I started hanging around people who didn’t give a damn either (mainly females, the kind of people whom Paul Graham here calls freaks, etc.).
I was asked where I draw the line, and this to me is beyond the line. So far beyond the line that it’s a dot to you etc. etc.. There may be plenty of people who agree that this sort of thing is fine, although I’m not clear on what they’re agreeing with. Are you saying it can be a moral good to ‘manipulate people who you hold into contempt into sleeping with you’ because everyone wins: they get the benefit of your (false) empathy and nice-guyness and you get sex? Or that this is a misrepresentation and everything’s more innocent than that.
But my problem is not any feigned interest at all—that’s part of a whole host of social dynamics—it’s about treating people as things. Feigning interest can actually be part of recognising that people are people. But doing it to get what you came for? Not so much.
Are you saying it can be a moral good to ‘manipulate people who you hold into contempt into sleeping with you’ because everyone wins: they get the benefit of your (false) empathy and nice-guyness and you get sex?
We can go with that example. “Moral good” is a lofty term, in the example it certainly gives the guy utilons, the girl utilons, seems like a win-win to me. Where’s the downside? Or are you thinking of some personified “honest truth never manipulate people to your benefit” avatar, an idea made flesh, who’s crying in a corner?
You could argue on the basis of “spoiling the common good by furthering a society full of dishonest manipulation”. But then again, you could do the same with non-vegetarians, or car-drivers, on similar grounds (common good). Personally, if I could optimize the world I would mandate honesty for everyone (minus myself), could you imagine?
Does that “people are people” paradigm mean it’s “pretty sad and pretty horrible” to press a secret button you see—but the other human does not --, the pressing of which will help both people involved? Because that’s just inefficient.
Where’s the benefit in losing optimizing power to adhere to some vague-cultural-norms-reified paradigm about “must not analyze human behavior and act accordingly”? You can of course value it for its own sake, but why should others?
The fact I’m not convinced it gives the girl utilons is basically my point: I’m a consequentialist at heart. My experience suggests that people sleeping with people who pretend to like them but actually hold them in contempt does not lead to good things. Not sure where avatars or crying in the corner comes into that.
The ‘people are people’ paradigm is translating an incredibly detailed, recursive consequentialist approach into a rule you can actually live by. It’s theoretically possible this person who screws people they detest is maximising mutual happiness, but it’s implausible to me. That person could probably sleep with someone who doesn’t hold them in contempt, for starters. I get the attraction of acting as a disinterest benefit-maximiser for the world—in my most recent real-world moral dispute I got in trouble for precisely this sort of attempt to tinker—but when it happens to correlate with getting laid I’m not convinced many people are good at analysing the situation.
If that’s the genuine intention, I think it shows a failure to allow for human nature. But I think in practice, one of the problems of the approach is that it makes it all too easy to justify whatever you feel like doing in terms of utilons.
Since your preferences already include the preferences of others to the degree that you care about other-preferences, just evaluating which course of action most satisfies your own preferences and then going with that is tautologically the course of action you should follow. (We probably agree thus far.)
Would you like everyone to have some equilibrium, converged utility function which values all other (humans? sentients?) preferences equal to “its own” (lacking a few qualifiers because of interdependencies)? “I will break this piece of bread into 7 billion pieces, or in as many pieces as I can effectively distribute”?
Do you go around comparing your net worth with every stranger walking you by, then equalize? Since you do not, apparently you also prefer some non-equal trade-off, you also haven’t incorporated the preferences of others into your own, giving equal weight. Having established that, we just need to haggle about the line. (But even if we don’t agree on that, what makes my line better or worse than yours? I think yours is worse, you think mine is, now what?)
So I guess you’d argue for considering the preferences of others as highly important, as opposed to tangentially important? Just concerning people you see face to face? Including nameless Chinese peasants, or do you privilege people who can talk to you? Do you reject the advertisement industry, plainly trying to manipulate people as things?
If you had a button which I could press and which would cause you to sign over all your resources to me, would I press it? Of course I would. You wouldn’t? I hope you never interact with the corporate world, inc.
Again, to each his/her own. What I reject is this valuing of some “treat people like people” self-crippling abandonment of efficiently optimizing other goals above other utility functions in some objective manner.
Then again, I object to any utility function being regarded as “good” or “bad” in a global sense, which does not preclude me from wanting to avoid certain utility functions from being implemented (think paperclip maximizer). But I do so for blatantly selfish reasons (it would impact me fulfilling my own utility function), and so do you (even if your utility function values other-preferences more highly).
An effective altruist who treats people like things instrumentally in accomplishing his/her goals can do more “good” (as judged by him/herself) overall. People are complex, treating people like things (if that’s what you’d mean by taking opportunities which clearly present themselves) doesn’t preclude you from valuing people.
A truly effective altruist might be justified in doing all sorts of things on consequentialist grounds. But I think incredibly few people are effective altruists. Once someone has reached the point of giving away almost all their money, doing things that make them clearly unhappy etc. for the point of the greater good, then I would see their manipulative actions in a different way. Where people actually inhabit a border-world where they can wield wider influence outside of a social context I think some radical positions can be justified: at the apex of revolution, killing the children can be justified for the greater good etc.
I just think there’s a natural scepticism about these sort of reasons when they’re used to justified to trick your way into getting laid.
Using ‘selfish’ to mean maximising your own utility function also bleeds meaning out of things: by what possible definition would someone not be selfish here? Does selfish simply mean incompetent: a person who actually values others but in practice tries to accumulate wealth and power is unselfish in this sense? You’re doing violence to language here. It might be justified if the main tension in life was between different models of utility, but given that for most people the immediate tension is between what you should do and what suits you, redefining selfishness is incredibly unhelpful.
I’d also be interested in what ‘valuing people’ you got from what I was responding to:
“I empathize with some girl about whatever dopey thing she and her girlfriends have got in to, which I couldn’t have the least bit of interest in, but I am a nice guy. Later we have sex.”
Using ‘selfish’ to mean maximising your own utility function also bleeds meaning out of things: by what possible definition would someone not be selfish here?
Someone can fail to maximize their own utility function due to akrasia, irrationality, or incorrect information. (But I agree that “selfish” is an extremely poor choice for a word for that. See e.g. this about “sacrificing one’s own happiness for the sake of others” vs “gaining one’s happiness through the happiness of others”.)
What is so much better about altruism than about just living your life however the hell you want? Whence the superiority?
I see two utility functions, I’m gonna prefer the one which is more in tune with my own needs. That is, I too would like everyone else to be a perfect altruist if that translates to them helping me fulfill my own preferences. The impression you exude is that you have a more objective, general notion in mind of why incorporating other-preferences into your own so strongly is somehow superior.
Would you share it? Why doesn’t it apply to the girl? If you were the girl in the situation, should you not oblige the guy and sleep with him, without him having to listen to her dopey? Clearly it’s his strong preference, no? So why wouldn’t you?
Using ‘selfish’ to mean maximising your own utility function also bleeds meaning out of things: by what possible definition would someone not be selfish here?
That’s just it, you can’t. I don’t see it as removing pertinent meaning, but more of as the removal of a misconception. Someone helping others out, because he likes the social affirmation he was taught to associate with it, is doing so because he originally liked the social affirmation and has grown to expect it, no different from the bell chiming for the Pavlovian dog. I still like people helping me out for doing so, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do so for selfish reasons (maybe they like me liking them) and/or having been conditioned.
In another sense, we can of course use ‘selfish’ to denote how much or how little other-preferences play a role in your own preferences, as long as we don’t forget that you maximize other-preferences because that’s what your own preferences are.
I’d also be interested in what ‘valuing people’ you got from what I was responding to:
Not to be facetious: He could rob her, drug her (in scenarios without palpable legal repercussions for him), use her insecurities to convince her to drop out of school to be at his beck and call. Instead, his behavior is more balanced: He seems like he’s willing to compromise some of her preferences (“only want to be with an honest guy”), help out some of her other preferences (“spent a great evening with a guy who takes my issues seriously, feel affirmed”), but does not strictly disregard all her preferences.
Seems like valuing her preferences—above being indifferent to them—to me. Let’s not underestimate the gravity of what “I dont care what happens to her at all” would actually mean. Empathy, to some degree, is ingrained in all of us. So are social boundaries, by ways of early conditioning. But, as always, just because we can explain the way our norms and instincts evolved does not make them superior in some objective sense to any others (that would be a naturalistic fallacy). Which does not preclude us from preferring others with values that more benefit our own, without putting such altruism on some pseudo-objective pedestal.
Someone helping others out, because he likes the social affirmation he was taught to associate with it, is doing so because he originally liked the social affirmation and has grown to expect it, no different from the bell chiming for the Pavlovian dog. I still like people helping me out for doing so, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do so for selfish reasons (maybe they like me liking them) and/or having been conditioned.
I do think altruism is superior: I’m not sure how exactly to unpack ethical statements, but I believe altruism is better than egoism, definitely. I also think that ‘selfishness’ has a very well understood meaning about maximising your own happiness/power/whatever and that redefining it so that it’s selfish to do what you think is right is fairly pointless. ‘Preferences’ is a ridiculously broad term and you seem to be treating ‘people follow their preferences’ as true by definition, meaning that ‘people are selfish’ doesn’t have much content as a claim.
In practice, people aren’t perfect altruists: but defining however you act as maximising your utility function and therefore just as good as anything else is just a refusal to engage on ethics: you end up reverting to brute force (‘I cannot object ethically to the fact your utility function involves rape and murder: but I can oppose you based on my utility function’). Not sure what good moving all ethical debate to this level achieves.
Oh, and on the altrustically having sex approach: again, we live in a society where we reasonably expect non-inteference and non-deception but don’t usually expect people to actively do what they don’t want to do: a theoretical utility-maximiser might have sex with people they’re not attracted to, sure.
On valuing people: I would understand valuing someone to go beyond the level of ‘I won’t actively harm and abuse you on a whim’. Although even in the hard sense of valuing (does he care about her at all) the statement that kicked this off doesn’t demonstrate any consideration for her experience. As you note, raping/drugging etc. have bad consequences for him, and as for getting her to drop out, I imagine it would be far more effort, have far more unpredictable results (her or friends might end up getting revenge for you screwing up her life) and not worth it if he just wants sex.
a theoretical utility-maximiser might have sex with people they’re not attracted to, sure
It depends on what their utility function is—assuming the orthogonality thesis, for any X whatsoever there’s a theoretical utility maximiser who might do X, so that’s not terribly informative about X.
Does that “people are people” paradigm mean it’s “pretty sad and pretty horrible” to press a secret button you see—but the other human does not --, the pressing of which will help both people involved?
Why couldn’t I just tell the other human about the button?
I empathize with some girl about whatever dopey thing she and her girlfriends have got in to, which I couldn’t have the least bit of interest in, but I am a nice guy.
No you aren’t, you are a Nice Guy™. If you were an actual small-n small-g nice guy, you would have genuine interest in whatever dopey thing she ans her girlfriends have got into.
Benefits compared to what? The main issue in any (personal, business or whatever) relationship is presumably opportunity cost. Convincing someone to make you their agent (and take 95% of their income from a groundbreaking novel they’ve written) benefits both of you financially compared to it not being sold. But it benefits them less than selling it through someone more fair-minded.
Also, manipulation does not just exist in providing incentives: it can involve misleading people on facts/reasoning, or psychologically tricking them into acting against their own interests.
I was considering intangible benefits and those which cannot be trivially quantified to be the major ones.
It isn’t immoral to notice that someone values friendship, and then to be their friend in order to get the favors from them that they willingly provide to their friends; disinformation and psychological tricks can still be inherently immoral, if they were before.
It depends on your ethical approach. At core, I think utilitarianism is true. But it’s complex to apply to dynamic situatuons, and as a practical rule of thumb for normal cases, virtue ethics helps. And in that model (as well as in any natural discussion), ‘being someone’s friend’ to get favours is not in fact being someone’s friend. It’s deceiving them, and possibly you.
And now we’ve ventured into pure definition territory.
Of being someone’s friend? Maybe: I guess the question is how the word is used in practice. Worth asking other people about; is someone who cultivate a relationship with someone for favours a friend? I think it’s almost the definition of not a friend, but I may be using words unusually.
Why does the motivation for the relationship determine the nature of the relationship?
It doesn’t uniquely determine it: but again, in any common usage sense it’s important. Phrases like ‘fair weather friend’ and similar stories etc. denote the basic human understanding that we see friendship motivated directly for favours isn’t friendship. If someone seemed to be my friend and it turned out they just like the fact I buy drinks, I would feel betrayed as they’d exploited what friendship is understood to be.
Are you saying that this view should be overturned, or that it isn’t actually the common understanding of friendship?
Would it not matter to you if a close friend turned out to be your ‘friend’ purely for the assoicated favours?
So what’s wrong with fostering an “actual friendship” because it is instrumentally better to have them then to not have them?
I think friendships can be instrumentally good, obviously. But there’s a distinction between ways in which friendships are instrumentally good. If I discovered a friend of mine revealing that they were only my friend for the fantastic conversation, the excellent company, the superb sense of humour etc. I wouldn’t feel cheated. If I found out they were only my friend because I drove a car and it was convenient for them to get around, I would feel cheated.
I never specified ‘only’.
Suppose there were two people with equally good conversation, company, humor, &tc, one of whom had a car, and only enough time/resources for a hypothetical third party to develop a friendship with one of them? Would you feel cheated if your mundane instrumental utility was a factor at all?
You clearly implied “only”. The external favours were the basis of the motivation.
“It isn’t immoral to notice that someone values friendship, and then to be their friend [b]in order to get the favors[/b] from them that they willingly provide to their friends”
In answer to your question: I’d still find it a little weird, tbh.
Are you at all familiar with the concepts of evolutionary psychology? Do you think we even have the capacity for friendship in some altruistic way, that while evolution was busy fine-tuning our eyes and our livers into remarkably efficient instruments, that it let the moral aspects of our personalities run open loop, disconnected from any benefit they might possibly bring to us?
I am currently in the process of figuring out how to be somebody’s friend that I am attracted to, and she knows it. She is in the process of helping me to get it right, because she wishes me to be attracted to her, she wishes to be attracted to me, and she wishes to have this all in the context of friendship.
You can be sure we are studying each other in detail and trying to optimize. We are both doing it and we both know we are doing it.
I don’t think contempt or deception are part of the equation, at least no at the core.
If it’s mutually decided then it’s clearly not deception, and whatever floats your boat, tbh.
Your other responses referring to evolutionary psychology, the chance of altruistic friendship etc. etc.: there is a difference between the evolutionary fact that your inclination to be friends with someone will be based on ultimately selfish goals, and being selfish yourself. The psychological make-up we have is a brute fact of existence and we need to take it into account. But selfish genes do not mean that the concept of human unselfishness is a busted flush.
Why? IME time is best spent among people you can be friends with effortlessly.
(YMMV? So many people talk about “cultivating” friendships that I guess that they just don’t like “wild” ones for some reason—but I wonder what that reason is.)
You sound like a pretty girl wondering why some other girls do things explicitly to attract men.
First, I take objection with using “pretty” as a by-word for “stupid”, and second, reversed stupidity is not intelligence (just because a stupid pretty girl said that the sky is blue doesn’t mean the sky is green). So, what is wrong with her reasoning?
What is wrong with her reasoning is that she doesn’t take in to account that she has a sufficient number of men interested in her without her doing anything to increase the number, but that is NOT the case for the other women whom she thinks are screwing up by not just taking the men who come their way naturally.
Have you read the section about mean and variance of this article? Doing “things explicitly to attract men [in general]” might not be as good as strategy as locating those men whom it would be the easiest for her to attract and focussing on them specifically.
Even there the lukeprog speaks of consciously choosing one’s marketing style. Another person who would be better off with the hunter-gatherer sexual style? Or evidence that to market oneself consciously towards relationships is the norm?
My point is not about whether or not your marketing is conscious, but about who its target is.
I agreed, until I saw the context. But it turns out Army wasn’t merely neglecting difficulty of social tasks. Instead he was talking about making things more difficult for yourself by actively constructing a notoriously toxic situation.
Not quite. (Note that I didn’t even quote the part mentioning that mwengler was attracted to that person.)
More like, I meant that if ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her (whatever the reasons for that), odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her. (IOW, IME “love is like a fart” also applies to friendship; see this other comment of mine and guess whether I was happier back then or right now.)
I retract my defence. Mwengler interpreted your intent correctly and so his reply is applicable. My reply then constitutes a steel-man (which can not reasonably be used to reject rebuttals that use the intended meaning).
“To actually believe that you’ve made a steel man, not a straw man, the person you’re arguing with would have to admit that you’ve created a stronger argument for their own position than they could.”
(I disagree that just because someone happens to give me a boner it’s a bad idea to be friends with them, so long as we get along well.)
That’s rather obviously false. But let’s consider the steel man where “could” is replaced with “happened to have done in the particular case being replied to” which makes the claim fairly straightforward and true rather being nearly exactly backwards.
As Hugh observes in his reply it is almost always pointless to use the steel man concept in adversarial debate. Even in the rare case where the person agrees they still find it condescending (because it approximately as close to the literal meaning of condescending as it is possible to be). The best uses of steel men that I have seen is when someone takes an argument that is for some reason important or valuable and presents it to an audience in an improved version and then responds to the improved argument. The original arguer need not be involved at all.
Do note that my reply was not intended as a steel man at all. It was made as a response to mwengler with the intended audience of mwengler and anyone who, like myself, would read the quote mwengler made more charitably in the expanded context. I assigned a probability of about 0.65 that your intent was at least partially influenced by the additional details in the example beyond the need for learning. (p = 0.65 is pretty damn high for confidence assigned by me to for an interpretation task.)
I didn’t claim that either (ie. that is a straw man). I have plenty of friends who have happened to “give me a boner” at some point and there is no particular problem with that. In fact I merely weakened the claim you made (or implied). Consider:
IF “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” AND “she is an accountant” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
In other words while I don’t agree fully with the advice to avoid social relationships that require work (for the reasons mwengler has explained) I do agree that the principle applies in many cases. In particular, for those people that mwengler is talking about—those for whom ALL friendships take effort due to weaker social skills, etc—there will most likely be alternative effortful friendship opportunities that at least don’t have the additional overhead of “(sexual) relationship drama without (sexual) relationship”.
But… Is it harder to be friends with people one is attracted to than with people one is not attracted to, in the real world (as opposed to stereotypes and Hollywood movies)? ISTM that, if anything, IME it’s the other way round (though the effect is smaller when controlling for age and gender), which is what I’d theoretically expect given that there is such a thing as the halo effect.
Huh? The conjunction fallacy doesn’t apply to the right of the pipe—whereas P(AB|C) cannot possibly be greater than P(A|C), P(C|DE) can be less than, equal to, or greater than P(C|D). Am I missing something?
(In this particular example, I’d guess (with low confidence) that for A=“there are other people who would make better friends than her”, B=“ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her”, C=“there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama”, and D=“she is an accountant”, P(A|BCD) is slightly but not terribly lower than P(A|BC), by a reasoning that would be politically incorrect to fully explain but involves, among other things, looking at where “Accounting occs” are on this chart and wild-ass extrapolation from my personal experiences. :-))
The intended meaning of the link was “generalised lesson of reasoning with conjunctions”. Since it is indeed possible to reformulate the message from the “IF THEN” format to probability assignments I can see how this could be misleading.
(I removed the link and now endorse the unadorned text.)
Are you truly unaware that some people have lots of friends some of them very good friends, while others have very few or even no friends? To the extent I fall in that second category, is it truly rational on my part to NOT attempt to do some of what it seems to me leads to better friendships using my rational mind to go that way?
A pretty french royal girl. “Let them eat cake.” Thank you.
My point is that a different, and IME superior, way of solving the “very few or even no friends” problem (e.g. myself 10 years ago, see the comment I linked to above) than trying harder to be friends with the people you’ve already tried to be friends with is to move on and try to be friends with different people.
YMMV. (I had taken “currently in the process of figuring out” to imply that so far it hadn’t worked out very well, but now from the “it seems to me leads to better friendships” I guess I was wrong.)
I empathize with some girl about whatever dopey thing she and her girlfriends have got in to, which I couldn’t have the least bit of interest in, but I am a nice guy. Later we have sex.
Where do you draw the line? Is there a line?
Bit of a random question. Are you saying that in the system the person above me used is ’I am providing her incentives to benefit me in the form of believing I care about her life—and ultimately it leads to most benefit for me (sex) but also benefit for her (faked sympathy? sex? not clear from your account)
If you mean where do I draw the line in manipulation, this doesn’t look like ‘providing incentives’, and given it involves open deception it looks more like trickery. Though frankly if I thought someone was trying to ‘provide incentives’ for a friend of mine to sleep with them, I’d advise my friend to run a mile. There’s no absolute line here, but a good rule of thumb is provided by Terry Pratchett: don’t treat people as things.
When I buy stuff from people I don’t know I’m mostly treating them as a means to an end. Not completely, because there are ways I’d try to be fair to a human that wouldn’t apply to a thing, but to a larger extent than I would want in personal / social relationships.
Another rule of thumb I kind of like is: don’t get people into interactions with you that they wouldn’t want if they knew what you were doing. I feel like that probably encourages erring too far on the side of caution and altruism. But if you know the other person would prefer you to empathise when not interested rather than be silent, leave or criticise, it’s allowed.
ETA: I’m interested in better guidelines, especially from people who get the distaste for manipulation.
Yes: buying stuff from people is pretty much instrumentalising them. That’s capitalism! Although there tend to be limits as you note. And the ‘would they like this if they knew what I was doing’ is obviously a very good rule of thumb.
Occasionally, you’ll have to break this. Sometimes somebody is irrationally self-destructive and you basically end up deciding that you have a better sense of what is best for them. But that’s an INCREDIBLY radical/bold decision to make and shouldn’t be done lightly.
Follow-up: I’m a little drunk, but my instincts are SCREAMING against your post’s whole language: ‘some girl’, ‘whatever dopey thing’, the false sincerity or lack of awareness in ‘I’m a nice guy’ etc. This just reads like an approach of trying to manipulate people who hold in contempt into sleeping with you. Hopefully it’s a hypothetical or I’m misreading it, but at a gut level this is pretty sad, and pretty horrible.
Women famously say “sometimes I just want to be listened to. Don’t try to solve my problems, just show me that you care.” When men do this, women say “yes, that’s what I’m talking about” and attempt to reinforce that behavior, perhaps unconsciously.
The people that own the bodies that I find attractive are women. If you pay attention women will tell you what they need in order to want to have sex with you.
Evolutionary psychology does not generally leave us conscious of why we react socially the way we react. Who can deny the widespread nature of men acting in a set of ways to attract a woman sexually? Who can deny the widespread nature of women acting certain ways to attract men? That we do this because we want the other person to be attracted to us, and not “sincerely” really mean we all hold each other in contempt?
Does the fact that I hold an evolutionary psychological interpretation of what is going on and express that understanding in unromantic terms make me any more or less likely to hold the object of my affection in contempt?
Oh, and the answer to your final question here is probably ‘yes’. The way you understand and talk about your own attitudes and activities definitely has feedback into said attitudes and activities.
On trying to be attractive: no, that doesn’t automatically translate as contempt. But then, not all attempting to be attractive is deceptive. You say that ‘women’ (all women it seems: this evo psych attitude seems to come with a side-serving of old-fashioned generalisation) want guys to ‘show that they care’. Ever thought that people saying that (even men!) might actually want people to care, not just to pretend?
So as long as we operate unconscious of how we are built we are OK? A surprising assumption for a utilitarian.
I’m not saying we should be unconscious of how we’re built. I’m saying that the way we’re built itself means that if we treat something as an abstract scientific issue we experience it differently to if we treat it as a matter of personal relationships. Are you saying that the way we explain and discuss our actions doesn’t affect in turn how we act and think?
I agree with you on this. It matters whether we are conscious of something, it matters because we will act differently.
The way in which it matters is that we can fully engage our rational powers when we are conscious of something, whereas when we act unconsciously of it we rely only on what was hardcoded in.
Consider launching shells. Running irrationally, we would point the mortar in the right direction and tilt it up about the right amount. We would even tend to correct by tilting it further up and down to get the range closer. But using our rational mind, we develop a rangefinder optically, and a lookup table that may even include corrections for wind.
Perhaps the entire point of the rational mind is that it gets us a level deeper into optimizing a broad class of actions. We contain a model of the world, we play out scenarios in our mind, we remember what worked and didn’t work.
So here I am, an ubernerd, wondering why I don’t get the hot chicks while the knuckle-draggers around me have wives who look like hairdressers. They hang out with the guys, bragging about their misbehavior with other women, referring to the wife as “the ball and chain.” Then on the way home they pick up a bottle of white wine and some flowers because they want to get laid.
Am I supposed to learn nothing from watching this? Or pretend I’ve learned nothing?
Yes, I agree with you, the entire point of becoming conscious of something is that we will treat it differently. We will analyze it, figure out the moving parts. We will learn and optimize.
And when I go home with a bottle of white wine and some flowers I can truly say to whatever woman it is that I did it because I hoped she would enjoy it. And that I know that no one is “happy” unless the woman is “happy,” does that make me a selfish monster living in my head?
Ah: this may be the underlying confusion. I don’t see the instrumentalist evo psych as bad and everything else as good. I see any deceptive, treating people as things approach as not valuing people.
I don’t see the people who brag about cheating and slag off their wives as models to aspire to. This is both in that I don’t particularly value the outcome they’re aiming for, and that I object to the deception and the treating people as things.
But on the broader point about attitude mattering: obviously it might change the activity in that way. But my point was more that you can’t step outside of your own psychology and humanity: thinking about people in this detached strategic way is not something done by a person looking in from outside the system: your sex life isn’t a game of The Sims. My intuition and experience is that doing something in a way constantly focused at trying to get individual bits of stuff out of it (’I will now buy this wine to get sex, I will now comfort my friend so that they will help me move house next week, I will try to understand this subject I’m studying so that I get a higher mark in the exam) leads to you having less fun and doing less good than engaging with things in their own terms (which is compatible with being aware of the underlying dynamics).
There’s also an issue of sincerity here, which to unpack into something that might be more appealing to your approach, is essentially game theoric. If you reassess for your benefit at every point, people can’t rely on you in tough situations. I would like people to be able to rely on me, and to be able to rely on them. Taking other people seriously and relating to them as people rather than strategies allows you to essentially pre-commit.
I generally decide whether to give people emotional support or concrete help based on what their problem is and on which way they tell me about it, not based on what type of genitalia they have. (It does correlate with what type of genitalia they have, but the correlation is not overwhelming—the correlation between genitalia and (say) height is much stronger.)
I would interpret that as being specific to problems. There may also be women who would like feigned interest in dopey things they’re into, or they may prefer to just discuss them with their girlfriends who are actually interested.
Explicitly saying this can be taken at face value, I think, but unconsciously reinforcing the behaviour may be meant to reinforce actual interested listening. You can’t deduce which is the true preference.
The reason to think that sincerity may not be the main thing is the seeming fact that sexual attraction is pre-rational. I think it is quite common, especially among older humans, to WANT to have the close pre-rational relationship with someone who rationally fits a pile of criteria for you, but to not so strongly feel the sexual attraction as you did when you were younger and when they were younger. At that point, you thank them for wearing makeup and flattering clothing and presenting decolletage and batting their eyes at you and making you feel like a million dollars in a pre-rational way. If it brings the relationship over the pre-rational threshold for some hotness, then you both feel like winners.
Like any other tool, hacking attraction can be used for purposes you think are good and it can be used for purposes you think are bad. But given the prevalence of makeup, push up bras, slinky black and red dresses, hair coloring, flattery, brand-name signalling of wealth etc etc etc, I think hacking attraction is quite the norm across broad swathes of the population, inside and outside the rationalist community.
Plenty of people would disagree, so do I. What now? Your gut versus my gut? To each his own, I’d say.
(Ever tried the “no false sincerity” approach in a job interview? Never feigned interest in some of what a romantic interest was telling you, even if in fact you couldn’t care less?)
Huh, no I haven’t—my romantic interests have tended to tell me things that I was genuinely interested in, or at least to be able to shortly realize when I wasn’t and change the topic consequently. Which is probably a large part of the difference between a romantic interest and someone I’d like to have a one-night stand with.
Not even as a teenager?
Now that I remember about it, I did that until I was about 17 -- towards people of the gender I’m not attracted to; for example, I would force myself to watch soccer matches even though I found them boring as hell.
Then I started hanging around people who didn’t give a damn either (mainly females, the kind of people whom Paul Graham here calls freaks, etc.).
Not that I can remember of, but then again I was a helluva dork back then.
I was asked where I draw the line, and this to me is beyond the line. So far beyond the line that it’s a dot to you etc. etc.. There may be plenty of people who agree that this sort of thing is fine, although I’m not clear on what they’re agreeing with. Are you saying it can be a moral good to ‘manipulate people who you hold into contempt into sleeping with you’ because everyone wins: they get the benefit of your (false) empathy and nice-guyness and you get sex? Or that this is a misrepresentation and everything’s more innocent than that.
But my problem is not any feigned interest at all—that’s part of a whole host of social dynamics—it’s about treating people as things. Feigning interest can actually be part of recognising that people are people. But doing it to get what you came for? Not so much.
We can go with that example. “Moral good” is a lofty term, in the example it certainly gives the guy utilons, the girl utilons, seems like a win-win to me. Where’s the downside? Or are you thinking of some personified “honest truth never manipulate people to your benefit” avatar, an idea made flesh, who’s crying in a corner?
You could argue on the basis of “spoiling the common good by furthering a society full of dishonest manipulation”. But then again, you could do the same with non-vegetarians, or car-drivers, on similar grounds (common good). Personally, if I could optimize the world I would mandate honesty for everyone (minus myself), could you imagine?
Does that “people are people” paradigm mean it’s “pretty sad and pretty horrible” to press a secret button you see—but the other human does not --, the pressing of which will help both people involved? Because that’s just inefficient.
Where’s the benefit in losing optimizing power to adhere to some vague-cultural-norms-reified paradigm about “must not analyze human behavior and act accordingly”? You can of course value it for its own sake, but why should others?
The fact I’m not convinced it gives the girl utilons is basically my point: I’m a consequentialist at heart. My experience suggests that people sleeping with people who pretend to like them but actually hold them in contempt does not lead to good things. Not sure where avatars or crying in the corner comes into that.
The ‘people are people’ paradigm is translating an incredibly detailed, recursive consequentialist approach into a rule you can actually live by. It’s theoretically possible this person who screws people they detest is maximising mutual happiness, but it’s implausible to me. That person could probably sleep with someone who doesn’t hold them in contempt, for starters. I get the attraction of acting as a disinterest benefit-maximiser for the world—in my most recent real-world moral dispute I got in trouble for precisely this sort of attempt to tinker—but when it happens to correlate with getting laid I’m not convinced many people are good at analysing the situation.
If that’s the genuine intention, I think it shows a failure to allow for human nature. But I think in practice, one of the problems of the approach is that it makes it all too easy to justify whatever you feel like doing in terms of utilons.
Since your preferences already include the preferences of others to the degree that you care about other-preferences, just evaluating which course of action most satisfies your own preferences and then going with that is tautologically the course of action you should follow. (We probably agree thus far.)
Would you like everyone to have some equilibrium, converged utility function which values all other (humans? sentients?) preferences equal to “its own” (lacking a few qualifiers because of interdependencies)? “I will break this piece of bread into 7 billion pieces, or in as many pieces as I can effectively distribute”?
Do you go around comparing your net worth with every stranger walking you by, then equalize? Since you do not, apparently you also prefer some non-equal trade-off, you also haven’t incorporated the preferences of others into your own, giving equal weight. Having established that, we just need to haggle about the line. (But even if we don’t agree on that, what makes my line better or worse than yours? I think yours is worse, you think mine is, now what?)
So I guess you’d argue for considering the preferences of others as highly important, as opposed to tangentially important? Just concerning people you see face to face? Including nameless Chinese peasants, or do you privilege people who can talk to you? Do you reject the advertisement industry, plainly trying to manipulate people as things?
If you had a button which I could press and which would cause you to sign over all your resources to me, would I press it? Of course I would. You wouldn’t? I hope you never interact with the corporate world, inc.
Again, to each his/her own. What I reject is this valuing of some “treat people like people” self-crippling abandonment of efficiently optimizing other goals above other utility functions in some objective manner.
Then again, I object to any utility function being regarded as “good” or “bad” in a global sense, which does not preclude me from wanting to avoid certain utility functions from being implemented (think paperclip maximizer). But I do so for blatantly selfish reasons (it would impact me fulfilling my own utility function), and so do you (even if your utility function values other-preferences more highly).
An effective altruist who treats people like things instrumentally in accomplishing his/her goals can do more “good” (as judged by him/herself) overall. People are complex, treating people like things (if that’s what you’d mean by taking opportunities which clearly present themselves) doesn’t preclude you from valuing people.
A truly effective altruist might be justified in doing all sorts of things on consequentialist grounds. But I think incredibly few people are effective altruists. Once someone has reached the point of giving away almost all their money, doing things that make them clearly unhappy etc. for the point of the greater good, then I would see their manipulative actions in a different way. Where people actually inhabit a border-world where they can wield wider influence outside of a social context I think some radical positions can be justified: at the apex of revolution, killing the children can be justified for the greater good etc.
I just think there’s a natural scepticism about these sort of reasons when they’re used to justified to trick your way into getting laid.
Using ‘selfish’ to mean maximising your own utility function also bleeds meaning out of things: by what possible definition would someone not be selfish here? Does selfish simply mean incompetent: a person who actually values others but in practice tries to accumulate wealth and power is unselfish in this sense? You’re doing violence to language here. It might be justified if the main tension in life was between different models of utility, but given that for most people the immediate tension is between what you should do and what suits you, redefining selfishness is incredibly unhelpful.
I’d also be interested in what ‘valuing people’ you got from what I was responding to:
“I empathize with some girl about whatever dopey thing she and her girlfriends have got in to, which I couldn’t have the least bit of interest in, but I am a nice guy. Later we have sex.”
Someone can fail to maximize their own utility function due to akrasia, irrationality, or incorrect information. (But I agree that “selfish” is an extremely poor choice for a word for that. See e.g. this about “sacrificing one’s own happiness for the sake of others” vs “gaining one’s happiness through the happiness of others”.)
What is so much better about altruism than about just living your life however the hell you want? Whence the superiority?
I see two utility functions, I’m gonna prefer the one which is more in tune with my own needs. That is, I too would like everyone else to be a perfect altruist if that translates to them helping me fulfill my own preferences. The impression you exude is that you have a more objective, general notion in mind of why incorporating other-preferences into your own so strongly is somehow superior.
Would you share it? Why doesn’t it apply to the girl? If you were the girl in the situation, should you not oblige the guy and sleep with him, without him having to listen to her dopey? Clearly it’s his strong preference, no? So why wouldn’t you?
That’s just it, you can’t. I don’t see it as removing pertinent meaning, but more of as the removal of a misconception. Someone helping others out, because he likes the social affirmation he was taught to associate with it, is doing so because he originally liked the social affirmation and has grown to expect it, no different from the bell chiming for the Pavlovian dog. I still like people helping me out for doing so, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do so for selfish reasons (maybe they like me liking them) and/or having been conditioned.
In another sense, we can of course use ‘selfish’ to denote how much or how little other-preferences play a role in your own preferences, as long as we don’t forget that you maximize other-preferences because that’s what your own preferences are.
Not to be facetious: He could rob her, drug her (in scenarios without palpable legal repercussions for him), use her insecurities to convince her to drop out of school to be at his beck and call. Instead, his behavior is more balanced: He seems like he’s willing to compromise some of her preferences (“only want to be with an honest guy”), help out some of her other preferences (“spent a great evening with a guy who takes my issues seriously, feel affirmed”), but does not strictly disregard all her preferences.
Seems like valuing her preferences—above being indifferent to them—to me. Let’s not underestimate the gravity of what “I dont care what happens to her at all” would actually mean. Empathy, to some degree, is ingrained in all of us. So are social boundaries, by ways of early conditioning. But, as always, just because we can explain the way our norms and instincts evolved does not make them superior in some objective sense to any others (that would be a naturalistic fallacy). Which does not preclude us from preferring others with values that more benefit our own, without putting such altruism on some pseudo-objective pedestal.
“So which of these two is the actual altruist? Whichever one actually holds open doors for little old ladies.”
I do think altruism is superior: I’m not sure how exactly to unpack ethical statements, but I believe altruism is better than egoism, definitely. I also think that ‘selfishness’ has a very well understood meaning about maximising your own happiness/power/whatever and that redefining it so that it’s selfish to do what you think is right is fairly pointless. ‘Preferences’ is a ridiculously broad term and you seem to be treating ‘people follow their preferences’ as true by definition, meaning that ‘people are selfish’ doesn’t have much content as a claim.
In practice, people aren’t perfect altruists: but defining however you act as maximising your utility function and therefore just as good as anything else is just a refusal to engage on ethics: you end up reverting to brute force (‘I cannot object ethically to the fact your utility function involves rape and murder: but I can oppose you based on my utility function’). Not sure what good moving all ethical debate to this level achieves.
Oh, and on the altrustically having sex approach: again, we live in a society where we reasonably expect non-inteference and non-deception but don’t usually expect people to actively do what they don’t want to do: a theoretical utility-maximiser might have sex with people they’re not attracted to, sure.
On valuing people: I would understand valuing someone to go beyond the level of ‘I won’t actively harm and abuse you on a whim’. Although even in the hard sense of valuing (does he care about her at all) the statement that kicked this off doesn’t demonstrate any consideration for her experience. As you note, raping/drugging etc. have bad consequences for him, and as for getting her to drop out, I imagine it would be far more effort, have far more unpredictable results (her or friends might end up getting revenge for you screwing up her life) and not worth it if he just wants sex.
It depends on what their utility function is—assuming the orthogonality thesis, for any X whatsoever there’s a theoretical utility maximiser who might do X, so that’s not terribly informative about X.
Why couldn’t I just tell the other human about the button?
No you aren’t, you are a Nice Guy™. If you were an actual small-n small-g nice guy, you would have genuine interest in whatever dopey thing she ans her girlfriends have got into.
(SCNR.)