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I’m nerveWrangler on discord
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You can’t say values “aren’t objective” without some semantic sense of objectivity that they are failing to fulfill.
If you can communicate such a sense to me, I can give you values to match. That doesn’t mean your sense of objectivity will have been perfect and unarbitrary; perhaps I will want to reconcile with you about our different notions of objectivity.
Still, I’m damn going to try to be objectively good.
It just so happens that my values connote all of your values, minus the part about being culturally local; funny how that works.
If you explicitly tell me that your terminal values require culturally local connotations then I can infer you would have been equally happy with different values had you been born in a different time or place. I would like to think that my conscience is like that of Sejong the Great’s and Benjamin Lay’s: relatively less dependent on my culture’s sticks and carrots.
The dictionary defines arbitrary as:
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system
The more considerate and reasoned your choice, the less random it is. If the truth is that your way of being considerate and systematic isn’t as good as it could have been, that truth is systematic and not magical. The reason for the non-maximal goodness of your policy is a reason you did not consider. The less considerate, the more arbitrary.
There is no real reason to choose either the left or right side of the road for driving but it’s very useful to choose either of them.
Actually there are real reasons to choose left or right when designing your policy; you can appeal to human psychology; human psychology does not treat left and right exactly the same.
If one person says I don’t really need that many error codes, I don’t want to follow arbitrary choices and send 44 instead of 404, this creates a mess for everyone who expects the standard to be followed.
If the mess created for everyone else truly outweighs the goodness of choosing 44, then it is arbitrary to prefer 44. You cannot make true arbitrariness truly strategic just by calling it so; there are facts of the matter besides your stereotypes. People using the word “arbitrary” to refer to something that is based on greater consideration quality are wrong by your dictionary definition and the true definition as well.
You are wrong in your conception of arbitrariness as being all-or-nothing; there are varying degrees, just as there are varying degrees of efficiency between chess players. A chess player, Bob, half as efficient as Kasparov, makes a lower-quality sum of considerations; not following Kasparov’s advice is arbitrary unless Bob can know somehow that he made better considerations in this case;
maybe Bob studied Kasparov’s biases carefully by attending to the common themes of his blunders, and the advice he’s receiving for this exact move looks a lot like a case where Kasparov would blunder. Perhaps in such a case Bob will be wrong and his disobedience will be arbitrary on net, but the disobedience in that case will be a lot less arbitrary than all his other opportunities to disobey Kasparov.
A policy that could be better — could be more good — is arbitrarily bad. In fact the phrase “arbitrarily bad” is redundant; you can just say “arbitrary.”
It is better to be predictably good than surprisingly bad, and it is better to be surprisingly good than predictably bad; that much will be obvious to everyone.
I think it is better to be surprisingly good than predictably good, and it is better to be predictably bad than surprisingly bad.EDIT: wait, I’m not sure that’s right even by deontology’s standards; as a general categorical imperative, if you can predict something will be bad, you should do something surprisingly good instead, even if the predictability of the badness supposedly makes it easier for others to handle. No amount of predictable badness is easier for others to handle than surprising goodness.EDIT EDIT: I find the implication that we can only choose between predictable badness and surprising badness to be very rarely true, but when it is true then perhaps we should choose to be predictable. Inevitably, people with more intelligence will keep conflicting with people with less intelligence about this; less intelligent people will keep seeing situations as choices between predictable badness and surprising badness, and more intelligent people will keep seeing situations as choices between predictable badness and surprising goodness.
Focusing on predictability is a strategy for people who are trying to minimize their expectedly inevitable badness. Focusing on goodness is a strategy for people who are trying to secure their expectedly inevitable weirdness.
I don’t yet have any opinions about the arbitrariness of those rules. It is possible that I would disagree with you about the arbitrariness if I was more familiar.
Still, you claim that those rules are arbitrary and then defend them; what on Earth is the point of that? If you know they are arbitrary then you must know there are, in principle, less arbitrary policies available. Either you have a specific policy that you know is less arbitrary, in which case people should coordinate around that policy instead as a matter of objective fact, or you don’t know a specific less arbitrary policy, and in that case maybe you want people with better Strategic Goodness about those topics to come up with a better policy for you that people should coordinate around instead.
You can complain about the inconvenience of improving, sure. But the improvement will be highly convenient for some other people. There’s only so long you can complain about the inconvenience of improving before you’re a cost-benefit-dishonest asshole and also people start noticing that fact about you.
Either ‘fallacious’ is not the true problem or it is the true problem but the stereotypes about what is fallacious do not align with reality: A Unifying Theory in Defense of Logical Fallacies
People defend normal rules by saying they’re “not arbitrary.” But if they were arbitrariness minimizers the rules would certainly be different. Why should I tolerate an arbitrary level of arbitrariness when I can have minimal instead?
Your policy’s non-maximal arbitrariness is not an excuse for its remaining arbitrariness.
I do not suggest the absence of a policy if such an absence would be more arbitrary than the existing policy. All I want is a minimally arbitrary policy; that often implies replacing existing rules rather than simply doing away with them. Sometimes it does mean doing away with them.
If someone said “you’ll never persuade people like that” to me I’d probably just ask them what’s arbitrary about my position. If it’s arbitrary then they may have a point. If it’s not arbitrary then people will in fact be persuaded.
When I try to do virtue ethics, I find that all my virtues turn to swiss cheese after a day’s worth of exception handling.
“Put simply: inconsistency between words and actions is no big deal. Why should your best estimate about good strategies be anchored to what you’re already doing? The anti-hypocrisy norm seems to implicitly assume we’re already perfect; it leaves no room for people who are in the process of trying to improve.”
— Abram Demski, Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
”With ‘unlimited power’ you have no need to crush your enemies. You have no moral defense if you treat your enemies with less than the utmost consideration.
With ‘unlimited power’ you cannot plead the necessity of monitoring or restraining others so that they do not rebel against you. If you do such a thing, you are simply a tyrant who enjoys power, and not a defender of the people.
Unlimited power removes a lot of moral defenses, really. You can’t say ‘But I had to.’ You can’t say ‘Well, I wanted to help, but I couldn’t.’ The only excuse for not helping is if you shouldn’t, which is harder to establish.
You cannot take refuge in the necessity of anything—that is the meaning of unlimited power.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Not Taking Over the World
You appreciate my essay (and feel seen), but neverthess you believe I was being deliberately deceitful and misleading?
I just finished saying that your honest and good-faith participation was not to be punished; I mean it. You can be misleading out of innocent beginner-level familiarity; there is no need for deliberation. I was only upset that you were misleading about the general LessWrong philosophy’s stance on emotion; it is a common misrepresentation people make. I am not commenting on the misleadingness of anything else.
My (personal, individual) only conditions for your emotional expression:
Keep in mind to craft the conversation so that both of us walk away feeling more benefitted that it happened than malefitted, and keep in mind that I want the same.
Keep in mind that making relevant considerations not made before, and becoming more familiar of each other’s considerations, are my fundamental units of progress.
I accept everything abiding by those considerations, even insults. I am capable of terrible things; to reject all insults under all circumstances reflects overconfidence in one’s own sensitivity to relevance.
“Trying very hard not to be pattern-matched to a Straw Vulcan” does not make for correct emotional reasoning.
Perhaps, but you implied there was a norm to not talk about feelings here; there is no such norm! Well, I expect not at least; maybe we are habitually shy about looking irrationally emotional even if we have internalized the proper philosophical relationship with emotion. Still it is clear from your remark that you do not have experience with the great multitude of occasions where this common misconception about LessWrong rationalists has been corrected.
Then it’s a good thing that we are in a community that values truth over social niceness, isn’t it?
I find it doubtful that you spoke truth, and I find it doubtful that you were non-misleading. Still, your honest and good-faith participation in the community is not to be punished, indeed; it was only a microaggression. I do not care for activist sense generally; just in this case the opportunity of compelling comparison was tempting.
I think this community generally values truth over social niceness, yes. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves and can be held accountable to, which is not an irrelevant improvement compared to the outside population.
As for myself I do not value truth over niceness, to be frank. I recognize downvotes as the fair price for saying such a thing. “Social niceness” is irrelevant to me if it is not also real niceness. Without truth you will be misled (though you can be misled even with some truth). If you mislead others, that is not nice. Truths which seemed irrelevant can turn out to be relevant. So the nice thing is always to tell the non-misleading truth, save for extreme edge cases.
But we aren’t supposed to talk about feelings here, are we?
ZT5, my friend. That’s not how this place works at all. You are playing around with groundless stereotypes. Activist sense (somewhat alike and unlike common sense) would say you have committed a microaggression. :)
Anyways, I appreciated your essay for a number of reasons but this paragraph in particular makes me feel very seen:
Rational reasoning is based on the idea of local validity. But your thoughts aren’t locally valid. They are only approximately locally valid. Because you can’t tell the difference.
You can’t build a computer if each calculation it does is only 90% correct. If you are doing reasoning in sequential steps, each step better be 100% correct, or very, very close to that. Otherwise, after even a 100 reasoning steps (or even 10 steps), the answer you get will be nowhere near the correct answer.
I don’t disagree with the main thrust of your comment, but,
I just wanna point out that ‘fallacious’ is often a midwit objection, and either ‘fallacious’ is not the true problem or it is the true problem but the stereotypes about what is fallacious do not align with reality: A Unifying Theory in Defense of Logical Fallacies
On that note, I’d love to get more feedback on this shortform of mine, which I feel is very underrated and full of great potential:
I think your comment should try to track what’s actually going on, not what you want to be going on.
Well the latter is obviously more arbitrary (and less strategic) than the former; you do need a non-misleading map to behave strategically within the territory, and the world does not get the way humans want it to be by convincing each other that it is already that way, except for some rare self-fulfilling prophecies such as your group’s collective belief in the ability to correct each other.
And the people who take the time to comment have very likely put more thought into their vote than the median, so even if they represented their reasons accurately, it’d still be a distorted picture.
A distorted picture of why it was downvoted? But if the karma is determined arbitrarily then it is questionably valuable apart from the subset which does respond.
If people babble about why they downvoted, the babble will usually be related in some way even if it is imperfect. Also, your babble should be aligned with your sense of strategy rather than being arbitrary.
Actually I think we should be called LessWrong for a reason.
I’m always refreshing this page, where I see all shortforms:
https://www.lesswrong.com/allPosts?sortedBy=new&karmaThreshold=-1000
If things that are true feel better to believe, explain why people who believe that an Abrahamic God exists explain their belief by saying it benefits their happiness, even though God does not exist. If your theory was true, people would be happier believing in the absence of an Abrahamic God, and they are not happier.
The Principle of Nameless Heartsmarts: It is pointless to complain that I acted with propriety if in the end I was too dense to any relevant consideration.