Former LWDC organizer. Hikikomori. Trans woman—she/her or ze/zir pronouns.
RobinZ
Karma: 6,705
Belatedly: some more vivid examples of “hope”:
From the movie Aliens (1986), jung Evcyrl ertnvarq jura fur urneq Arjg fpernz in the scene where fur tbrf ba gur erfphr zvffvba.
From The Order of the Stick: during the exploration of Girard’s tomb, the difference between Roy’s attitude here and Roy’s attitude here.
Think back to an occasion when you were playing some game or level within a game or the like such that:
You thought you had a good probability of winning at first, and...
Small thing after small thing going against you caused that probability to fall to the point to the point that...
You ceased giving a serious effort to win. At this point, you had lost hope.
I continue to endorse being selective in whom one spends time arguing with.
Is the long form also unclear? If so, could you elaborate on why it doesn’t make sense?
I didn’t propose that you should engage in detailed arguments with anyone—not even me. I proposed that you should accompany some downvotes with an explanation akin to the three-sentence example I gave.
Another example of a sufficiently-elaborate downvote explanation: “I downvoted your reply because it mischaracterized my position more egregiously than any responsible person should.” One sentence, long enough, no further argument required.
Glad to hear it. :)
I may have addressed the bulk of what you’re getting at in another comment; the short form of my reply is, “In the cases which ‘heroic responsibility’ is supposed to address, inaction rarely comes because an individual does not feel responsible, but because they don’t know when the system may fail and don’t know what to do when it might.”
I think I see what you’re getting at. If I understand you rightly, what “heroic responsibility” is intended to affect is the behavior of people such as [trigger warning: child abuse, rape] Mike McQueary during the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, who stumbled upon Sandusky in the act, reported it to his superiors (and, possibly, the police), and failed to take further action when nothing significant came of it. [/trigger warning] McQueary followed the ‘proper’ procedure, but he should not have relied upon it being sufficient to do the job. He had sufficient firsthand evidence to justify much more dramatic action than what he did.
Given that, I can see why you object to my “useless”. But when I consider the case above, I think what McQueary was lacking was the same thing that Hermione was lacking in HPMoR: a sense of when the system might fail.
Most of the time, it’s better to trust the system than it is to trust your ability to outthink the system. The system usually has access to much, much more information than you do; the system usually has people with much, much better training than you have; the system usually has resources that are much, much more abundant than you can draw on. In the vast majority of situations I would expect McQueary or Hermione to encounter—defective equipment, scheduling conflicts, truancy, etc. - I think they would do far worse by taking matters into their own hands than by calling upon the system to handle it. In all likelihood, prior to the events in question, their experiences all supported the idea that the system is sound. So what they needed to know was not that they were somehow more responsible to those in the line of fire than they previously realized, but that in these particular cases they should not trust the system. Both of them had access to enough data to draw that conclusion*, but they did not.
If they had, you would not need to tell them that they had a responsibility. Any decent human being would feel that immediately. What they needed was the sense that the circumstances were extraordinary and awareness of the extraordinary actions that they could take. And if you want to do better than chance at sensing extraordinary circumstances when they really are extraordinary and better than chance at planning extraordinary action that is effective, determination is nice, but preparation and education are a whole lot better.
* The reasons differ: McQueary shouldn’t have trusted it because:
One cannot rely on any organization to act against any of its members unless that member is either low-status or has acted against the preferences of its leadership.
In some situations, one’s perceptions—even speculative, gut-feeling, this-feels-not-right perceptions—produce sufficiently reliable Bayesian evidence to overwhelm the combined force of a strong negative prior on whether an event could happen and the absence of supporting evidence from others in the group that said event could happen.
...while Hermione shouldn’t have trusted it because:
Past students like James Potter got away with much because they were well-regarded.
Present employees like Snape got away with much because they were an established part of the system.
I confess, it would make sense to me if Harry was unfamiliar with metaethics and his speech about “heroic responsibility” was an example of him reinventing the idea. If that is the case, it would explain why his presentation is as sloppy as it is.
No, I haven’t answered my own question. In what way was Harry’s monologue about consequentialist ethics superior to telling Hermione why McGonagall couldn’t be counted upon?
...huh. I’m glad to have been of service, but that’s not really what I was going for. I meant that silent downvoting for the kind of confusion you diagnosed in me is counterproductive generally—“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means” is not a hypothesis that springs naturally to mind. The same downvote paired with a comment saying:
This is a waste of time. You keep claiming that “heroic responsibility” says this or “heroic responsibility” demands that, but you’re fundamentally mistaken about what heroic responsibility is and you can’t seem to understand anything we say to correct you. I’m downvoting the rest of this conversation.
...would have been more like what I wanted to encourage.
If I believed you to be a virtue ethicist, I might say that you must be mindful of your audience when dispensing advice. If I believed you to be a deontologist, I might say that you should tailor your advice to the needs of the listener. Believing you to be a consequentialist, I will say that advice is only good if it produces better outcomes than the alternatives.
Of course, you know this. So why do you argue that Harry’s speech about heroic responsibility is good advice?
You are analyzing “heroic responsibility” as a philosophical construct. I am analyzing it as [an ideological mantra]. Considering the story, there’s no reason for Harry to have meant it as the former, given that it is entirely redundant with the pre-existing philosophical construct of consequentialism, and every reason for him to have meant it as the latter, given that it explains why he must act differently than Hermione proposes.
[Note: the phrase “an ideological mantra” appears here because I’m not sure what phrase should appear here. Let me know if what I mean requires elaboration.]
s/work harder, not smarter/get more work done, not how to get more work done/
This advice doesn’t tell people how to fix things, true, but that’s not the point—it tells people how to get into the right mindset to fix things.
Why do you believe this to be true?
Neither Hermione nor Harry dispute that they have a responsibility to protect the victims of bullying. There may be people who would have denied that, but none of them are involved in the conversation. What they are arguing over is what their responsibility requires of them, not the existence of a responsibility. In other words, they are arguing over what to do.
Human beings are not perfect Bayesian calculators. When you present a human being with criteria for success, they do not proceed to optimize perfectly over the universe of all possible strategies. The task “write a poem” is less constrained than the task “write an Elizabethan sonnet”, and in all likelihood the best poem is not an Elizabethan sonnet, but that doesn’t mean that you will get a better poem out of a sixth-grader by asking for any poem than by giving them something to work with. The passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Eliezer Yudkowsy quoted back during the Overcoming Bias days, “Original Seeing”, gave an example of this: the student couldn’t think of anything to say in a five-hundred word essay about the United States, Bozeman, or the main street of Bozeman, but produced a five-thousand word essay about the front facade of the Opera House. Therefore, when I evaluate “heroic responsibility”, I do not evaluate it as a proposition which is either true or false, but as a meme which either produces superior or inferior results—I judge it by instrumental, not epistemic, standards.
Looking at the example in the fanfic and the example in the OP, as a means to inspire superior strategic behavior, it sucks. It tells people to work harder, not smarter. It tells people to fix things, but it doesn’t tell them how to fix things—and if you tell a human being (as opposed to a perfect Bayesian calculator) to fix something, it sounds like you’re telling them to fix it themselves because that is what it sounds like from a literary perspective. “You’ve got to get the job done no matter what” is not what the hero says when they want people to vote in the next school board election—it’s what the hero says when they want people to run for the school board in the next election, or to protest for fifteen days straight outside the meeting place of the school board to pressure them into changing their behavior, or something else on that level of commitment. And if you want people to make optimal decisions, you need to give them better guidance than that to allocating their resources.
I downvoted RobinZ’s comment and ignored it because the confusion about what heroic responsibility means was too fundamental, annoyingly difficult to correct and had incidentally already been argued for far more eloquently elsewhere in the thread.
I would rather you tell me that I am misunderstanding something than downvote silently. My prior probability distribution over reasons for the −1 had “I disagreed with Eliezer Yudkowsky and he has rabid fans” orders of magnitude more likely than “I made a category error reading the fanfic and now we’re talking past each other”, and a few words from you could have reversed that ratio.
I’m realizing that my attitude towards heroic responsibility is heavily driven by the anxiety-disorder perspective, but telling me that I am responsible for x doesn’t tell me that I am allowed to delegate x to someone else, and—especially in contexts like Harry’s decision (and Swimmer’s decision in the OP) - doesn’t tell me whether “those nominally responsible can’t do x” or “those nominally responsible don’t know that they should do x”. Harry’s idea of heroic responsibility led him to conflate these states of affairs re: McGonagall, and the point of advice is to make people do better, not to win philosophy arguments.
When I came up with the three-point plan I gave to you, I did not do so by asking, “what would be the best way to stop this bullying?” I did so by asking myself, “if McGonagall is the person best placed to stop bullying, but official school action might only drive bullying underground without stopping it, what should I do?” I asked myself this because subsidiarity includes something that heroic responsibility does not: the idea that some people are more responsible—better placed, better trained, better equipped, etc. - than others for any given problem, and that, unless the primary responsibility-holder cannot do the job, those farther away should give support instead of acting on their own.
(Actually, thinking about localism suggested a modification to my Step 1: brief the prefects on the situation in addition to briefing McGonagall. That said, I don’t know if that would be a good idea in this case—again, I stopped reading twenty chapters before.)
Full disclosure: I stopped reading HPMoR in the middle of Chapter 53. When I was researching my comment, I looked at the immediate context of the initial definition of “heroic responsibility” and reviewed Harry’s rationality test of McGonagall in Chapter 6.
I would have given Harry a three-step plan: inform McGonagall, monitor situation, escalate if not resolved. Based on McGonagall’s characterization in the part of the story I read, barring some drastic idiot-balling since I quit, she’s willing to take Harry seriously enough to act based on the information he provides; unless the bullies are somehow so devious as to be capable of evading both Harry and McGonagall’s surveillance—and note that, with McGonagall taking point, they wouldn’t know that they need to hide from Harry—this plan would have a reasonable chance of working with much less effort from Harry (and much less probability of misfiring) than any finger-snapping shenanigans. Not to mention that, if Harry read the situation wrong, this would give him a chance to be set straight. Not to mention that, if McGonagall makes a serious effort to crack down on bullying, the effect is likely to persist for far longer than Harry’s term.
On the subject of psychology: really, what made me so emphatic in my denouncing “heroic responsibility” was [edit: my awareness of] the large percentage of adults (~10-18%) subject to anxiety disorders of one kind or another—including me. One of the most difficult problems for such people is how to restrain their instinct to blame themselves—how to avoid blaming themselves for events out of their control. When Harry says, “whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault” to such persons, he is saying, “blame yourself for everything” … and that makes his suggestion completely useless to guide their behavior.
My referent for ‘heroic responsibility’ was HPMoR, in which Harry doesn’t trust anyone to do a competent job—not even someone like McGonagall, whose intelligence, rationality, and good intentions he had firsthand knowledge of on literally their second meeting. I don’t know the full context, but unless McGonagall had her brain surgically removed sometime between Chapter 6 and Chapter 75, he could actually tell her everything that he knew that gave him reason to be concerned about the continued good behavior of the bullies in question, and then tell her if those bullies attempted to evade her supervision. And, in the real world, that would be a perfect example of comparative advantage and opportunity cost in action: Harry is a lot better at high-stakes social and magical shenanigans relative to student discipline than McGonagall is, so for her to expend her resources on the latter while he expends his on the former would produce a better overall outcome by simple economics. (Not to mention that Harry should face far worse consequences if he screws up than McGonagall would—even if he has his status as Savior of the Wizarding World to protect him.) (Also, leaving aside whether his plans would actually work.)
I am advocating for people to take the initiative when they can do good without permission. Others in the thread have given good examples of this. But you can’t solve all the problems you touch, and you’ll drive yourself crazy if you blame yourself every time you “could have” prevented something that no-one should expect you to have. There are no rational limits to heroic responsibility. It is impossible to fulfill the requirements of heroic responsibility. What you need is the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Well, let’s imagine a system which actually is—and that might be a stretch—intelligently designed.
Us? I’m a mechanical engineer. I haven’t even read The Checklist Manifesto. I am manifestly unqualified either to design a user interface or to design a system for automated diagnosis of disease—and, as decades of professional failure have shown, neither of these is a task to be lightly ventured upon by dilettantes. The possible errors are simply too numerous and subtle for me to be assured of avoiding them. Case in point: prior to reading that article about Air France Flight 447, it never occurred to me that automation had allowed some pilots to completely forget how to fly a plane.
The details of automation are much less important to me than the ability of people like Swimmer963 to be a part of the decision-making process. Their position grants them a much better view of what’s going on with one particular patient than a doctor who reads a chart once a day or a computer programmer who writes software intended to read billions of charts over its operational lifespan. The system they are incorporated in should take advantage of that.
Heads-up: Meeting starts as normal in the courtyard, but there is an event tomorrow and the preparations might lead to disruptions around 5 p.m. Just for general reference: the backup location is the Luce Center on the third floor—same side of the building as the big spiral staircase, toward the right if you’re standing at the top of the staircase facing the outside wall.