Agree that that looks an awful lot like an abuse of the noble savage meme. Barbara Alice Mann appears to be an anthropologist and a Seneca, so that’s at least two points where she should really know better—then again, there’s a long and more than somewhat suspect history of anthropologists using their research to make didactic points about Western society. (Margaret Mead, for example.)
Not sure I entirely agree re: fairness. “Life’s not fair” seems to me to succinctly express the very important point that natural law and the fundamentals of game theory are invariant relative to egalitarian intuitions. This can’t be changed, only worked around, and a response of “so make it fair” seems to dilute that point by implying that any failure of egalitarianism might ideally be traced to some corresponding failure of morality or foresight.
You are confusing “fairness” and egalitarianism. While everyone has their own definition of “fairness”, it feels obvious to me that, even if you’re correct about the cost of imposing reasonable egalitarianism being too high in any given situation, this does not absolve us from seeking some palliative measures to protect those left worst off by that situation. Reducing first the suffering of those who suffer most is an ok partial definition of fairness for me.
Despite (or due to, I’m too sleepy to figure it out) considering myself an egalitarian, I would prefer a world where the most achieving 10% get 200 units of income (and the top 10% of them get 1000), the least achieving 10% get 2 units and everyone else gets 5-15 units (1 unit supporting the lifestyle of today’s European blue-collar worker) to a world where the bottom 10% get 0.2 units and everyone else gets 25-50. Isn’t that more or less the point of charity (aside from signaling)?
even if you’re correct about the cost of imposing reasonable egalitarianism being too high in any given situation
I didn’t say this. Actually, I’d consider it somewhat incoherent in the context of my argument: if imposing reasonable egalitarianism (whatever “reasonable” is) was too costly to be sustainable, it seems unlikely that we’d have developed intuitions calling for it.
On the other hand, I suppose one possible scenario where that’d make sense would be if some of the emotional architecture driving our sense of equity evolved in the context of band-level societies, and if that architecture turned out to scale poorly—but that’s rather speculative, somewhat at odds with my sense of history, and in any case irrelevant to the point I was trying to make in the grandparent.
Anyway, don’t read too much into it. My point was about the relationship between the world and its mathematics and our anthropomorphic intuitions; I wasn’t trying to make any sweeping generalizations about our behavior towards each other, except in the rather limited context of game theory and its various cultural consequences. I certainly wasn’t trying to make any prescriptive statements about how charitable we should be.
if imposing reasonable egalitarianism (whatever “reasonable” is) was too costly to be sustainable, it seems unlikely that we’d have developed intuitions calling for it.
Some of the local Right are likely to claim that we developed them just for the purpose of signaling, and that they’re the worst thing EVAH when applied to reality. ;)
(Please don’t take this as a political attack, guys, my debate with you is philosophical. I just need a signifier for you.)
Well someone certainly has been digging into the LessWrong equivalent of Sith holocrons. You are getting pretty good at integrating their mental tool kit. It has made your thinking clearer, made your positions stronger than would have been otherwise possible.
Now far from me, to question such a search for knowledge. Indeed I commend it. It is a path to great predictive power! You will find that as you continue your studies it can offer many useful heuristics, that some would consider … unthinkable.
You know, I was not wholly unprepared for this ideological predicament. Since I first became interested in Fascist-like ideas and the history of political conflict surrounding them (during high school), I’ve always had a hunch that “the enemy” is far wiser, more attractive and more insidious than most people who pretend to “common sense” believe. It is the radical Right themselves and the radical Left who oppose both them and mainstream liberalism (which is “common sense” to our age) that have a more realistic estimate of this conflict’s importance. Even in spite of the fact that said Right has been hounded and suppressed since 1940, including, in a gentler way, by moderate conservatives eager to attain a more enlightened image. To quote again from Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf:
Suppose that Hitler’s programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of “living room” (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this monstrous decision across? It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. Again, the situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches. I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power — till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter — I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs — and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is there. He is the martyr, the victim. Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.
Of course, the above can’t be applied to all such right-wing radicals without adjusting for their personal differences—e.g. Mencius criticizing idealism as the root of all evil both on the right and on the left, while himself possessing a less-than-obvious but very distinct sort of idealism [1] - but still. If exposed to today’s political blogosphere, Orwell could undoubtedly have constructed similar respectful warnings for all his radical opponents he’d find solid. The people who dreaded and obsessed over “Fascism”, and continue to do so to this day—as well as the contrarians who actually walk that path—have clearer vision than the complacent masses. That the idea is in retreat and on the decline does not affect its strict consistency, decent compatibility with human nature and inherent potential.
Still, when all’s said and done I view the situation as half a rational investigation and half a holy war (for a down-to-earth definition of “holy”); I don’t currently feel any erosion in my values or see myself reneging at the end of it. Yet—and thank you for your compliment—I’m certainly eager to familiarize myself with as much of the other side’s intellectual weaponry as it’s possible to without getting significantly Sapir-Whorfed.
-[1] (I’m not going to describe in detail here Moldbug’s many similarities and differences with classical thought that has been called fascist; I’ll only mention that he himself admitted that calling his vision a “fascist technocracy” has “a grain of truth”—and, of course, I’m rather skeptical of his pretensions to exceptional pragmatism and non-mindkilledness)
Original parent says, “The world is neither fair nor unfair”, meaning, “The world is neither deliberately fair nor deliberately unfair”, and my comment was meant to be interpreted as replying, “Of course the world is unfair—if it’s not fair, it must be unfair—and it doesn’t matter that it’s accidental rather than deliberate.” Also to counteract the deep wisdom aura that “The world is neither fair nor unfair” gets from counterintuitively violating the (F \/ ~F) axiom schema.
It matters hugely that it’s not deliberately unfair. People get themselves into really awful psychological holes—in particular the lasting and highly destructive stain of bitterness—by noting that the world is not fair, and going on to adopt a mindset that it is deliberately unfair.
It matters hugely that it’s not deliberately unfair.
It matters a lot (to those who are vulnerable to the particular kind of irrational bitterness in question) that the universe is not deliberately unfair.
I took Eliezer’s “it doesn’t matter” to be the more specific claim “it does not matter to the question of whether the universe is unfair whether the unfairness present is deliberate or not-deliberate”.
Err, the “question of whether the universe is unfair” sounds a lot to me like the “question of whether the tree makes a sound”. What query are we trying to hug here? I think what I call “unfairness”—something due to some agent—is something we can at least sometimes usefully respond by being pissed off, because the agent doesn’t want us to be pissed off. But the Universe absolutely cannot care whether we’re pissed off, and so putting it under the same category as eg discrimination engenders the wrong response.
What makes being pissed off at an agent who treats me unfairly useful is not that the agent doesn’t want me to be pissed off. In fact, I can sometimes be usefully pissed off at an unfair agent that is entirely indifferent to, or even unaware of, my existence. In much the the same way, I can sometimes be usefully pissed off at a non-agent that behaves in ways that I would classify as “unfair” if an agent behaved that way.
Admittedly, asking when it’s useful to classify something as “unfair” is different from asking what things are in fact unfair.
On the other hand, in practice the first of those seems most relevant to actual human behavior. The second seems to pretty quickly lead to either the answer “everything” (all processes result in output distributions that are not evenly distributed across some metric) or “nothing” (all processes are equally constrained and specified by physical law) and neither of those answers seems terribly relevant to what anyone means by the question.
No, that fairness isn’t a characteristic you can measure of the world. There’s such a thing as fairness when it comes to eg dividing a cake between children.
“The world is fair” = world.fairness > 0 “The world is unfair” = world.fairness < 0 “The world is neither fair nor unfair” = world.fairness == 0, or something like this.
Agree that that looks an awful lot like an abuse of the noble savage meme. Barbara Alice Mann appears to be an anthropologist and a Seneca, so that’s at least two points where she should really know better—then again, there’s a long and more than somewhat suspect history of anthropologists using their research to make didactic points about Western society. (Margaret Mead, for example.)
Not sure I entirely agree re: fairness. “Life’s not fair” seems to me to succinctly express the very important point that natural law and the fundamentals of game theory are invariant relative to egalitarian intuitions. This can’t be changed, only worked around, and a response of “so make it fair” seems to dilute that point by implying that any failure of egalitarianism might ideally be traced to some corresponding failure of morality or foresight.
You are confusing “fairness” and egalitarianism. While everyone has their own definition of “fairness”, it feels obvious to me that, even if you’re correct about the cost of imposing reasonable egalitarianism being too high in any given situation, this does not absolve us from seeking some palliative measures to protect those left worst off by that situation. Reducing first the suffering of those who suffer most is an ok partial definition of fairness for me.
Despite (or due to, I’m too sleepy to figure it out) considering myself an egalitarian, I would prefer a world where the most achieving 10% get 200 units of income (and the top 10% of them get 1000), the least achieving 10% get 2 units and everyone else gets 5-15 units (1 unit supporting the lifestyle of today’s European blue-collar worker) to a world where the bottom 10% get 0.2 units and everyone else gets 25-50. Isn’t that more or less the point of charity (aside from signaling)?
I didn’t say this. Actually, I’d consider it somewhat incoherent in the context of my argument: if imposing reasonable egalitarianism (whatever “reasonable” is) was too costly to be sustainable, it seems unlikely that we’d have developed intuitions calling for it.
On the other hand, I suppose one possible scenario where that’d make sense would be if some of the emotional architecture driving our sense of equity evolved in the context of band-level societies, and if that architecture turned out to scale poorly—but that’s rather speculative, somewhat at odds with my sense of history, and in any case irrelevant to the point I was trying to make in the grandparent.
Anyway, don’t read too much into it. My point was about the relationship between the world and its mathematics and our anthropomorphic intuitions; I wasn’t trying to make any sweeping generalizations about our behavior towards each other, except in the rather limited context of game theory and its various cultural consequences. I certainly wasn’t trying to make any prescriptive statements about how charitable we should be.
Some of the local Right are likely to claim that we developed them just for the purpose of signaling, and that they’re the worst thing EVAH when applied to reality. ;)
(Please don’t take this as a political attack, guys, my debate with you is philosophical. I just need a signifier for you.)
ominous theme music
Well someone certainly has been digging into the LessWrong equivalent of Sith holocrons. You are getting pretty good at integrating their mental tool kit. It has made your thinking clearer, made your positions stronger than would have been otherwise possible.
Now far from me, to question such a search for knowledge. Indeed I commend it. It is a path to great predictive power! You will find that as you continue your studies it can offer many useful heuristics, that some would consider … unthinkable.
You know, I was not wholly unprepared for this ideological predicament. Since I first became interested in Fascist-like ideas and the history of political conflict surrounding them (during high school), I’ve always had a hunch that “the enemy” is far wiser, more attractive and more insidious than most people who pretend to “common sense” believe. It is the radical Right themselves and the radical Left who oppose both them and mainstream liberalism (which is “common sense” to our age) that have a more realistic estimate of this conflict’s importance. Even in spite of the fact that said Right has been hounded and suppressed since 1940, including, in a gentler way, by moderate conservatives eager to attain a more enlightened image. To quote again from Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf:
Of course, the above can’t be applied to all such right-wing radicals without adjusting for their personal differences—e.g. Mencius criticizing idealism as the root of all evil both on the right and on the left, while himself possessing a less-than-obvious but very distinct sort of idealism [1] - but still. If exposed to today’s political blogosphere, Orwell could undoubtedly have constructed similar respectful warnings for all his radical opponents he’d find solid. The people who dreaded and obsessed over “Fascism”, and continue to do so to this day—as well as the contrarians who actually walk that path—have clearer vision than the complacent masses. That the idea is in retreat and on the decline does not affect its strict consistency, decent compatibility with human nature and inherent potential.
Still, when all’s said and done I view the situation as half a rational investigation and half a holy war (for a down-to-earth definition of “holy”); I don’t currently feel any erosion in my values or see myself reneging at the end of it. Yet—and thank you for your compliment—I’m certainly eager to familiarize myself with as much of the other side’s intellectual weaponry as it’s possible to without getting significantly Sapir-Whorfed.
-[1] (I’m not going to describe in detail here Moldbug’s many similarities and differences with classical thought that has been called fascist; I’ll only mention that he himself admitted that calling his vision a “fascist technocracy” has “a grain of truth”—and, of course, I’m rather skeptical of his pretensions to exceptional pragmatism and non-mindkilledness)
I think that Robert Smith has a much wiser take on this: “The world is neither fair nor unfair”
The world is neither F nor ~F?
Unfair is the opposite of fair, not the logical complement. The moon is neither happy nor sad.
That is indeed possible if F is incoherent or has no referent. The assertion seems equivalent to “There’s no such thing as fairness”.
I’m confused because it was Eliezer who taught me this.
EDIT: I’m now resisting the temptation to tell Eliezer to “read the sequences”.
Original parent says, “The world is neither fair nor unfair”, meaning, “The world is neither deliberately fair nor deliberately unfair”, and my comment was meant to be interpreted as replying, “Of course the world is unfair—if it’s not fair, it must be unfair—and it doesn’t matter that it’s accidental rather than deliberate.” Also to counteract the deep wisdom aura that “The world is neither fair nor unfair” gets from counterintuitively violating the (F \/ ~F) axiom schema.
It matters hugely that it’s not deliberately unfair. People get themselves into really awful psychological holes—in particular the lasting and highly destructive stain of bitterness—by noting that the world is not fair, and going on to adopt a mindset that it is deliberately unfair.
It matters a lot (to those who are vulnerable to the particular kind of irrational bitterness in question) that the universe is not deliberately unfair.
I took Eliezer’s “it doesn’t matter” to be the more specific claim “it does not matter to the question of whether the universe is unfair whether the unfairness present is deliberate or not-deliberate”.
Err, the “question of whether the universe is unfair” sounds a lot to me like the “question of whether the tree makes a sound”. What query are we trying to hug here? I think what I call “unfairness”—something due to some agent—is something we can at least sometimes usefully respond by being pissed off, because the agent doesn’t want us to be pissed off. But the Universe absolutely cannot care whether we’re pissed off, and so putting it under the same category as eg discrimination engenders the wrong response.
What makes being pissed off at an agent who treats me unfairly useful is not that the agent doesn’t want me to be pissed off. In fact, I can sometimes be usefully pissed off at an unfair agent that is entirely indifferent to, or even unaware of, my existence. In much the the same way, I can sometimes be usefully pissed off at a non-agent that behaves in ways that I would classify as “unfair” if an agent behaved that way.
Admittedly, asking when it’s useful to classify something as “unfair” is different from asking what things are in fact unfair.
On the other hand, in practice the first of those seems most relevant to actual human behavior. The second seems to pretty quickly lead to either the answer “everything” (all processes result in output distributions that are not evenly distributed across some metric) or “nothing” (all processes are equally constrained and specified by physical law) and neither of those answers seems terribly relevant to what anyone means by the question.
No, that fairness isn’t a characteristic you can measure of the world. There’s such a thing as fairness when it comes to eg dividing a cake between children.
“The world is fair” =
world.fairness > 0
“The world is unfair” =
world.fairness < 0
“The world is neither fair nor unfair” =
world.fairness == 0
, or something like this.