In case it may interest you: I’ve bookmarked this link to use as an inspirational reference for the novel I started writing for NaNoWriMo, for a sub-setting therein in which many members of one group can do terrible things to members of another group without any measurable risk of any measurable repercussions.
DataPacRat
Karma: 2,006
If you could pick one music track that, if turned into a music video, could most exemplify the emotions resulting from LW-style rationality, what would that song be?
(I apologize for not responding sooner; I’ve just realized I’m in one of my periodic bouts of anhedonia and social procrastination.)
My short absence seems to have given enough time to get a selection of votes in, and since I’m just about to actually apply the results of this discussion to my fiction, it’s time to analyze the results.
I’m ruling out ‘rational self-interest’ as already being used to refer to a closely-related but not-quite-identical concept, so that I can have my characters discuss the differences.
First word:
effective: 6
rational: 6 (or 4)
strategic: 3
It looks like ‘rational’ or ‘effective’ beat out all the other suggestions fairly handily. This happens to line up with my own instincts, so I’m willing to take it as confirmation.
Second word:
self-interest: 5 (or 3)
egoism: 4
living: 2
self-care: 2
well-being: 1
And, again, it looks like we have two clear winners, with enough margin over the others to be confident they’re actually the most popular.
Checking the votes of the available combinations of those, though
effective self-interest: 3
effective egoism: 2
rational egoism: 1
… there isn’t quite as clear a preference for any one over any of the others. (As in, a single weird voter could have skewed the results.) But it looks like either ‘effective egoism’ or ‘effective self-interest’ is going to win out. … And, at least for fictional purposes, I think I’ll apply the Crazy Straws principle and simply have continuing arguments over which of the two terms should be applied in any given case.
“Do whatever you want”
I /want/ to go camping on Phobos. There are certain practical problems in accomplishing that. Likewise, there are a great many practical problems in accomplishing many other more ordinary things that I want to do; but some of those problems are soluble, depending on the resources I choose to throw at them, but with only a finite amount of resources, I have to make choices about /which/ of my wants to try to full.
Fake Selfishness
choose between dying immediately to save the Earth, or living in comfort for one more year and then dying along with Earth.
I’m aiming for not dying at all. (At least, not permanently.) Which leads, in this case, to not considering there to be much difference between having a few more seconds of life compared to one year of life, if those are the only two options; and as long as humanity survives, then there’s a small but reasonable chance of an approximation of my mind being reconstructed, which, while not as good a choice as a full continuation of all my memories, is still better than nothing. So I would selfishly choose to save the Earth.
On the other hand, if I consider the original question...
“Would you sacrifice your own life to save the entire human species?”
… without assuming that I’m a member of humanity doomed to die anyway, such as if I’m an upload; I’m currently drafting a novel in which the consideration of precisely that question is a significant plot point, and it is not a One-Sided Policy Debate.
“If you had to choose one event or the other, would you rather that you stubbed your toe, or that the stranger standing near the wall there gets horribly tortured for fifty years?”
If I live in a world where someone in physical proximity to me is likely to be horribly tortured for fifty years, then I very likely live in a world where /I/ have a moderately high chance of being horribly tortured for fifty years. If I balance the odds, then a certainty of minor pain from a stubbed toe seems a small price to pay to not live in a world with even a moderate chance of me experiencing fifty years of horrible torture.
“Would you steal a thousand dollars from Bill Gates if you could be guaranteed that neither he nor anyone else would ever find out about it?”
Mu; I do not think that such a guarantee is feasible.
Thank you for pointing out the term ‘production-possibility frontier’ in this context, which helps clarify some of my thoughts.
As it is, I don’t actually disagree with you, in the main. More than once, I’ve mentioned that it’s often the case that considering both effective altruism and effective egoism (by whatever name) as guides tends to lead towards the same behaviour, in most everyday situations.
effective altruists should be interested in spreading effective self-care both amongst others since altruism is about making others better off, and amongst themselves because if you take good care for yourself you are in a better position to help others, and if you are efficient about it you have more resources to help others.
Consider this line to have gotten an extra thumbs-up from me. :)
“Effective self-care” … “Effective Egoism”
The fact that you have highlit the differences between these two closely-related concepts, which I hadn’t managed to think through on my own, means this thread has been worthwhile whatever the result of the poll might be.
Yes, yes, we are all fundamentally merely computational algorithms running on the same sort of hardware substrate made of stardust, with no fundamental differences between one another. But if one piece of the universe which my algorithms identify as ‘other’ comes towards the piece of the universe which my algorithms identify as ‘myself’ while waving a knife and screaming, I’m still going to treat the ‘other’ differently than I will treat ‘myself’ and give myself’s desire to run a higher priority than the other’s desire to grab my wallet. Other bits of stardust’s algorithms will lead to different behaviours, such as surrendering the wallet freely, and my algorithms find it useful to have words that can describe the different behaviours differently. Thus, even if the underlying theory is false, being able to describe the dichotomy still has value in terms of instrumental rationality, and in this case (using a scifi terminology anology), there is no reason to coin a new word like ‘smeerp’ since the existing term ‘rabbit’ already exists and is generally understood well enough to allow both thought and communication.
“Rationality” is the tool, but by itself, doesn’t describe what goals and values the tool is being used to promote. There can be rational altruists, rational hedonists, rational omnicidal maniacs who want to eliminate suffering by eliminating life, rational egoists, and so on.
There are various counter-arguments, such as that if there are too few egoists and too many altruists, then then Overton Window will shift to the point that egoism can become socially disapproved of; or that altruism isn’t even necessary for reasonably rational egoists to engage in positive-sum interactions which are nearly indistinguishable from altruistic behaviour, as has been explored in some depth by libertarian philosophers; or that any one egoist is unlikely to be able to persuade any significant number of altruists to become egoists, so the optimal egoist approach is more likely to focus attention on one’s own actions rather than persuading others to become egoists; and so on.
That’s a very good suggestion list, and a good link; thank you kindly. :)
Hm… is it possible that my stab at a temporary term is actually sufficient as a permanent one?
I have had conversations with some self-proclaimed Objectivists who were of the opinion that sticking to their stated principles was more important than avoiding dying; in other words, that Objectivism was so manifestly correct that it was a suicide pact; restated again, they said that death was preferable to negotiation and tactical compromise on econo-political arguments; put still another way, they had not “learned how to lose”. That form of Objectivism falls outside the parameters of the form of egoism I seek to name.
How bout “Egoism”?
Unfortunately, that term is somewhat overbroad, as it includes variants of egoism that I want to be able to avoid pointing to when I use ‘Effective Egoism’ (and/or its replacement term) to point to the specific category of egoism I’m focusing on. Eg, I want to avoid including certain forms of Randian Objectivism which lead to long-term harm, I want to exclude simple hedonism, and I definitely want to exclude uses of the term ‘egoism’ that aren’t about the ethical aspects, such as psychological egoism.
if we cared about reaching out, some egoists we’d be, yeah?
I may be an egoist (by some definitions), and I may have schizoid personality disorder, but modern medicine has saved my life on more than one occasion, and if I subscribed to a form of egoism which disparaged such interactions, then I’d be doing myself harm. /Because/ I’m selfish, I care about promoting the good for other people, at least in certain specific ways.
Yes, I came across that term; but it doesn’t quite fit, any more than the mere term ‘altruism’ fits the concept of ‘effective altruism’.
Seeking better name for “Effective Egoism”
Of course anyone can.
My thinking is different enough from the norm that I can’t apply super-rationality, and as a single individual my individual efforts in eating or not eating meat have approximately 0% effect on animal suffering. Plus, as I mention here and there, my moral system is based around me being a selfish bastard (just not a /stupid/ selfish bastard, and a selfish bastard interested in the long-term fulfillment of my values, which tends to lead towards nearly the same behaviour of a rational altruist), and I have values I have a stronger wish to be fulfilled than eliminating non-sophont suffering (like spending my time trying to think of ways to ensure the continued existence of sophonts).
6-volt, low-amp inverters don’t seem to be the sorts of electronics that show up on Ebay. Feel free to let us know what you use for that piece of hardware. :)
$5
$1.50: local AA batteries
I find myself strangely tempted to hit up Ebay for one of the el-cheapo electrical-acupuncture “tens massager” (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) machines; or even just a 6-volt 4xAA battery case, some alligator clips, and whatever fiddlery is required to attach the latter to some electrodes stuck on at the mastoid.
Anyone want to try to talk me into and/or out-of wasting $5 on such silliness?
I’m having an un-rational moment, and despite knowing that, it’s still affecting my behaviour.
Earlier today, my newsfeed included the datum discussed here, of Trump having a phone call with the President of Taiwan; and the item discussed here, about Trump talking about ‘shutting down’ the Internet. And later, while listening to my music playlist of the Merry Wives of Windsor, one of the tunes that popped up was “Green Fields of France”, one version of which can be heard here. And I started wondering whether I was prepared for politics to go in an even more negative direction than I’d thought it might back during the American elections, faster than I thought it might.
Specifically, I have the question stuck in my head: “Have I made the appropriate level of preparations, in case of significant military conflict within the year?”. There are a variety of possibilities, from America’s Congress passing laws that I find abhorrent, to China engaging in cyberwar against North American network infrastructure, to a minor US/Canadian dispute blowing up to the point Trump convinces some portion of the US military across the border to ensure the continued flow of “vital resources”, to worse.
Put another way—I’ve just finished figuring out what I would want to have done this month if, some time next year, many websites I find valuable become permanently deleted and unrecoverable (in spite of the Internet Archive’s efforts). (Part of the answer: the program wget and an archival Blu-Ray burner.)
The thing is, from inside my own head, I can’t tell whether my thoughts have been doing this particular set of planning because I’m currently in the middle of one of my bouts of depression, or if it’s actually a perfectly reasonable response to modern life and current events. So I’m looking for some external auditing, here where the sanity waterline is reasonably high:
How crazy do I sound to you?