I think what this post was doing was pretty important (colliding two quite different perspectives). In general there is a thing where there is a “clueless / naive” perspective and a “loser / sociopath / zero-sum / predatory” perspective that usually hides itself from the clueless perspective (with some assistance from the clueless perspective; consider the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” mindset, a strategy for staying naive). And there are lots of difficulties in trying to establish communication. And the dialogue grapples with some of these difficulties.
I think some people got the impression that I entirely agreed with the charity worker. And I do mostly agree with the charity worker. I don’t think there were things at the time of writing, said by the charity worker, that I outright thought were false at the time, although some that I thought were live hypotheses but not “very probably true”.
Having the thing in dialogue form probably helped me write it (because I wasn’t committing to defensibly believing anything) and people listen to it (because it’s obviously not “accusatory” and can be considered un-serious / metaphorical so it doesn’t directly trigger people’s political / etc defenses)
Some things that seem possibly false/importantly incomplete to me now:
“Everyone cares about themselves and their friends more” assumes a greater degree of self-interest in social behavior than is actually the case; most behavior is non-agentic/non-self-interested, although it is doing a kind of constraint satisfaction that is, by necessity, solving local constraints more than non-local ones. (And social systems including ideology can affect the constraint-satisfaction process a bunch in ways that make it so local constraint-satisfaction tries to accord with nonlocal constraint-satisfaction)
It seems like the “conformity results from fear of abandonment” hypothesis isn’t really correct (and/or is quite euphemistic), I think there are also coalitional spite strategies that are relevant here, where the motive comes from (a) self-protection from spite strategies and (b) engaging in spite strategies one’s self (which works from a selfish-gene perspective). Also, even without spite strategies, scapegoating is often violent (both historically and in modern times, see prison system, identity-based oppression, sadistic interpersonal behavior, etc), and conservative strategies for resisting scapegoating can be quite fearful even when the actual risk is low. (This accords more with “the act is violence” from earlier in the dialogue, I think I probably felt some kind of tension between exaggerating/euphemizing the violence aspect, which shows up in the text; indeed, it’s kind of a vulnerable position to be saying “I think almost everyone is committing spiteful violence against almost everyone else almost all the time” without having pretty good elaboration/evidence/etc)
Charities aren’t actually universally fraudulent, I don’t think. It’s a hyperbolic statement. (Quite a lot are, in the important sense of “fraud” that is about optimized deceptive behavior rather than specifically legal liability or conscious intent, especially when the service they provide is not visible/verifiable to donors; so this applies more to international than local charities)
“It’s because of dysfunctional institutions” is putting attention on some aspects of the problem but not other aspects. Institutions are made of people and relationships. But anyway “institutions” are a useful scapegoat in part because most people don’t like them and are afraid of them, and they aren’t exactly people. (Of course, a good solution to the overall problem will reform / replace / remove / etc institutions)
It seems like the charity worker gets kind of embarrassed at the end and doesn’t have good answers about why they aren’t doing something greater, so changes the subject. Which is… kind of related to the lack of self-efficacy I was feeling at the time of writing. (In general, it’s some combination of actually hard and emotionally difficult to figure out what ambitious things to do given an understanding like this one) Of course, being evasive when it’s locally convenient is very much in character for the charity worker.
[this is a review by the author]
I think what this post was doing was pretty important (colliding two quite different perspectives). In general there is a thing where there is a “clueless / naive” perspective and a “loser / sociopath / zero-sum / predatory” perspective that usually hides itself from the clueless perspective (with some assistance from the clueless perspective; consider the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” mindset, a strategy for staying naive). And there are lots of difficulties in trying to establish communication. And the dialogue grapples with some of these difficulties.
I think this post is quite complementary with other posts about “improv” social reality, especially The Intelligent Social Web and Player vs. Character.
I think some people got the impression that I entirely agreed with the charity worker. And I do mostly agree with the charity worker. I don’t think there were things at the time of writing, said by the charity worker, that I outright thought were false at the time, although some that I thought were live hypotheses but not “very probably true”.
Having the thing in dialogue form probably helped me write it (because I wasn’t committing to defensibly believing anything) and people listen to it (because it’s obviously not “accusatory” and can be considered un-serious / metaphorical so it doesn’t directly trigger people’s political / etc defenses)
Some things that seem possibly false/importantly incomplete to me now:
“Everyone cares about themselves and their friends more” assumes a greater degree of self-interest in social behavior than is actually the case; most behavior is non-agentic/non-self-interested, although it is doing a kind of constraint satisfaction that is, by necessity, solving local constraints more than non-local ones. (And social systems including ideology can affect the constraint-satisfaction process a bunch in ways that make it so local constraint-satisfaction tries to accord with nonlocal constraint-satisfaction)
It seems like the “conformity results from fear of abandonment” hypothesis isn’t really correct (and/or is quite euphemistic), I think there are also coalitional spite strategies that are relevant here, where the motive comes from (a) self-protection from spite strategies and (b) engaging in spite strategies one’s self (which works from a selfish-gene perspective). Also, even without spite strategies, scapegoating is often violent (both historically and in modern times, see prison system, identity-based oppression, sadistic interpersonal behavior, etc), and conservative strategies for resisting scapegoating can be quite fearful even when the actual risk is low. (This accords more with “the act is violence” from earlier in the dialogue, I think I probably felt some kind of tension between exaggerating/euphemizing the violence aspect, which shows up in the text; indeed, it’s kind of a vulnerable position to be saying “I think almost everyone is committing spiteful violence against almost everyone else almost all the time” without having pretty good elaboration/evidence/etc)
Charities aren’t actually universally fraudulent, I don’t think. It’s a hyperbolic statement. (Quite a lot are, in the important sense of “fraud” that is about optimized deceptive behavior rather than specifically legal liability or conscious intent, especially when the service they provide is not visible/verifiable to donors; so this applies more to international than local charities)
“It’s because of dysfunctional institutions” is putting attention on some aspects of the problem but not other aspects. Institutions are made of people and relationships. But anyway “institutions” are a useful scapegoat in part because most people don’t like them and are afraid of them, and they aren’t exactly people. (Of course, a good solution to the overall problem will reform / replace / remove / etc institutions)
It seems like the charity worker gets kind of embarrassed at the end and doesn’t have good answers about why they aren’t doing something greater, so changes the subject. Which is… kind of related to the lack of self-efficacy I was feeling at the time of writing. (In general, it’s some combination of actually hard and emotionally difficult to figure out what ambitious things to do given an understanding like this one) Of course, being evasive when it’s locally convenient is very much in character for the charity worker.