1) Do you find this to be helpful as an examination of some crucial element of the vengeful disposition?
No. It’s extremely hard to read. I think it might be getting at revenge as a way of ensuring that there is a logic of peace. An attack on unjust social realities rather than any material cause of some potential future strife; but if I didn’t already have that idea in my head, I wouldn’t recognise it here. I feel like it’s forcing me to guess something that it could have just said outright with very little prose.
Generally. Any discussion of vengeful disposition that does not build from new decision theories (functional decision theory, best learned through the arbital pages about LDT) is going to be needlessly circuitous and is likely to repeat certain mistakes. “the meaning is seemingly illogical”, for instance. It doesn’t commit to this position, but it doesn’t begin to refute it either.
Basically… our new decision theories are an account of rationality under which things like revenge- policies which an agent benefits from holding, but which, when actuated, do not causally bring about future benefits- are not irrational. They are rational. The standard model of rationality (CDT) was wrong. The fact that CDT was regularly doing things that brought about suboptimal outcomes should have been a big clue to people that they were not describing the true dao.
I should emphasise, because this is quite radical, FDT contends that the rationality, or irrationality, of an action is not purely a function of its future consequences. That there has to be much more to it. An action can have negative consequences and still be a crucial part of a rational policy. If you can’t justify that claim from the metaphysics of survival, you can’t speak with clarity about vengeance policies.
No. It’s extremely hard to read. I think it might be getting at revenge as a way of ensuring that there is a logic of peace. An attack on unjust social realities rather than any material cause of some potential future strife; but if I didn’t already have that idea in my head, I wouldn’t recognise it here. I feel like it’s forcing me to guess something that it could have just said outright with very little prose.
Generally. Any discussion of vengeful disposition that does not build from new decision theories (functional decision theory, best learned through the arbital pages about LDT) is going to be needlessly circuitous and is likely to repeat certain mistakes. “the meaning is seemingly illogical”, for instance. It doesn’t commit to this position, but it doesn’t begin to refute it either.
Basically… our new decision theories are an account of rationality under which things like revenge- policies which an agent benefits from holding, but which, when actuated, do not causally bring about future benefits- are not irrational. They are rational. The standard model of rationality (CDT) was wrong. The fact that CDT was regularly doing things that brought about suboptimal outcomes should have been a big clue to people that they were not describing the true dao.
I should emphasise, because this is quite radical, FDT contends that the rationality, or irrationality, of an action is not purely a function of its future consequences. That there has to be much more to it. An action can have negative consequences and still be a crucial part of a rational policy. If you can’t justify that claim from the metaphysics of survival, you can’t speak with clarity about vengeance policies.