In the sequences I find Correspondence Bias scary. It is the usual Fundamental Attribution Error / Just World Hypothesis issue and what I find scary is that Eliezer casually assumes we know the motives of our actions better than the motives of the actions of other people. That we judge ourselves more accurately than we judge others. And the scary part is that it is such as easy assumption.
Yet IMHO it is not so. Nemo iudex in causa sua. We tend to judge ourselves way too leniently, actually how we judge others is more accurate as how we judge ourselves because the bias that generates excuses for our own behavior is stronger than the bias that generates blame for the behavior for others.
The scary thing here is how easily a self-critical Rationalist can give in to the mood of the era: the mood of the current era is certainly about “not beating up yourself” i.e. letting yourself get away on excuses far to easily.
150 years ago the nemo iudex in causa sua principle was more expected and people thought roughly the way I explained it: you judge others more accurately than yourself, you should be judging others not yourself, and you should let other judge you, because this way you all will be stricter and that is a good thing because more or less we all suck.
Of course, the article is more about predicting behavior rather than assigning blame: the idea is that unusual circumstances predict unusual behavior better than unusual personalities. While my point is more about moral blame.
What follows from all this? If we both are right and people with usual personalities do blameworthy things in unusual circumstances, it simply means usual personalities are not good enough. We cannot simply accept that if we are doing whatever people with usual personalities are doing in that situation then that is good enough. There is probably a strong bias working towards “if I am usual then I am okay” because the evolutionary origin of morality is probably being good enough to not thrown out from a tribe or hunting band as an uncooperative member, so the evolved algorithm is saying being usual is good enough.
Yet, I think the only solution here is accepting usual is still bad. Reason 143 why I am a religion-friendly atheist: we need a bit of a we-are-all-sinners attitude. People with usual personalities will do morally blameworthy things in unusual situations and the solution is not to excuse them—this is what I am railing against here, the excusatory tone of the article—but to find the usual personality blameworthy.
Look at people in prison. Discount the obvious bad apples, about 25%, the rest are basically you, except in worse situations, more temptation, or willpower broken down by a series of bad situations. The same heated argument that made me only throw a glass against the wall may have made someone-like-me who had his willpower broken down by circumstances stick a knife into someone. Either all those people are basically innocent and not deserving of punishment—meaning almost any inhumane act can be excused by pleading unusually tough circumstances—or I am, in a sense, a “sinner” who simply had the good luck so far of not being tempted enough.
This is fairly ironic. If unusual circumstances predict unusual behavior better than unusual personalities, and if you think the general system of blame and punishment today is still roughly correct, for wanting a better one, then you must accept the position of something sort of an atheist-Augustine claiming we all are “sinners”.
In the sequences I find Correspondence Bias scary. It is the usual Fundamental Attribution Error / Just World Hypothesis issue and what I find scary is that Eliezer casually assumes we know the motives of our actions better than the motives of the actions of other people. That we judge ourselves more accurately than we judge others. And the scary part is that it is such as easy assumption.
Yet IMHO it is not so. Nemo iudex in causa sua. We tend to judge ourselves way too leniently, actually how we judge others is more accurate as how we judge ourselves because the bias that generates excuses for our own behavior is stronger than the bias that generates blame for the behavior for others.
The scary thing here is how easily a self-critical Rationalist can give in to the mood of the era: the mood of the current era is certainly about “not beating up yourself” i.e. letting yourself get away on excuses far to easily.
150 years ago the nemo iudex in causa sua principle was more expected and people thought roughly the way I explained it: you judge others more accurately than yourself, you should be judging others not yourself, and you should let other judge you, because this way you all will be stricter and that is a good thing because more or less we all suck.
Of course, the article is more about predicting behavior rather than assigning blame: the idea is that unusual circumstances predict unusual behavior better than unusual personalities. While my point is more about moral blame.
What follows from all this? If we both are right and people with usual personalities do blameworthy things in unusual circumstances, it simply means usual personalities are not good enough. We cannot simply accept that if we are doing whatever people with usual personalities are doing in that situation then that is good enough. There is probably a strong bias working towards “if I am usual then I am okay” because the evolutionary origin of morality is probably being good enough to not thrown out from a tribe or hunting band as an uncooperative member, so the evolved algorithm is saying being usual is good enough.
Yet, I think the only solution here is accepting usual is still bad. Reason 143 why I am a religion-friendly atheist: we need a bit of a we-are-all-sinners attitude. People with usual personalities will do morally blameworthy things in unusual situations and the solution is not to excuse them—this is what I am railing against here, the excusatory tone of the article—but to find the usual personality blameworthy.
Look at people in prison. Discount the obvious bad apples, about 25%, the rest are basically you, except in worse situations, more temptation, or willpower broken down by a series of bad situations. The same heated argument that made me only throw a glass against the wall may have made someone-like-me who had his willpower broken down by circumstances stick a knife into someone. Either all those people are basically innocent and not deserving of punishment—meaning almost any inhumane act can be excused by pleading unusually tough circumstances—or I am, in a sense, a “sinner” who simply had the good luck so far of not being tempted enough.
This is fairly ironic. If unusual circumstances predict unusual behavior better than unusual personalities, and if you think the general system of blame and punishment today is still roughly correct, for wanting a better one, then you must accept the position of something sort of an atheist-Augustine claiming we all are “sinners”.