Scott Alexander, you totally fell down as a rationalist when you saw one of the biggest effect sizes ever, in a study that controlled for so many things
Controlled for so many things = A lot of potential for P-hacking
A single P-hacked correlational study is generally not strong evidence and doctors are trained to require more evidence for the medical actions they take.
This poll asked people if they did “malicious online activity directed at somebody they didn’t know”, and 28% said that they did.
If someone answers “yes” to that question that tells us little about whether the person benefited from engaging in the malicious activity. It also doesn’t tell us whether the actions are prosocial. A person who gets people on facebook banned by reporting their posts does harm to other people but they might think that it’s good to do so because it removes people from facebook who are harmful.
I don’t think you have done a good job at defining evil. I would expect that a good portion of evil behavior in the sense that it does damage to another person while producing no personal gain is due to heuristics build for determining group status.
If Bob is together with Dave, there’s a question of whether Bob or Dave is higher in social rank. Engaging in an action that does damage to Dave without Dave being able to do anything about it is a way for Bob to assert that he has higher social rank.
Evolution trained some heuristics into us to engage in such status moves.
I have found myself telling a mean joke about a friend which might have made the friend uncomfortable while providing no value to myself. I have the self awareness to flag the behavior as an error but most people don’t in a similar situation.
A mean joke that’s doesn’t do more then a few dozens of seconds of discomfort isn’t a big evil but it’s nevertheless evil in the above sense. I would expect that most bullying arises out of instinct that exist for making moves to assert status in ancestral enviroment.
Bullying in schools often happens in enviroments with strong status competition and is likely a result of status dynamics (with the caveat that it’s following heuristics that produce status in the ancestral enviroment and not all of those necessarily actually produce status in the enviroment of the school). When a group bullies together toxoplasma is involved where it’s a strong signal of group loyality to bully and defection to the group when speaking up in favor of the victim.
Strong upvote as I find this is a very useful lens for parsing this kind of behavior from others and checking such impulses in myself. Importantly, this also opens a whole other dimension for resisting bullying: One need not be able to win the specific game the bully wants to play (e.g., prove who’s stronger and can win fights), mere be able to credibly threaten their status another way. Framing it as a negotiation over status ties up the strong majority of this behavior IMO.
Mind you, there’s still the kid that thinks lighting a cat on fire is delightful fun—whole other league of not right in the head. I’m not sure the above being 90% right fundamentally alters the main thesis of the post. There are people who enjoy having absolute power of life or death over something or someone else; I’m not convinced that is truly a different impulse than the one that leads to bullying as much as a matter of degree.
Cats hunt mice and play with them in ways that’s adds more pain then necessary to kill the mice.
Hunter gathers have to learn to kill animals and that requires some ability to desensitize yourself against the pain of hurting prey. I think that lighting a cat on fire might be downstream of that.
Interaction with prey is very different then status competition with other humans.
Maybe, but for modern-ish humans in western cultures cats aren’t prey and really never have been. Certainly never to the extent that torturing non-prey animals for fun has been. AFAIK that behavoir is currently considered a predictor for escalating to similar abuse against humans.
Contrast that to society’s reaction to meat production: don’t make them suffer needlessly, or at least don’t make me watch/know about it.
Contrast that to society’s reaction to meat production: don’t make them suffer needlessly, or at least don’t make me watch/know about it.
This shows you that there are barriers that aren’t easy to overcome. A hunter gather needs to overcome those emotional barriers to be a functioning hunter gatherer. Evolution needs to have installed strategies that allow a hunter gather to overcome his empathy towards an animal and kill it.
In the least convenient possible world, everyone has impulses to dominate others and would find that power directly enjoyable because they all have the same brain hardware. Many have the means at some point and try it; those with early failures are deterred, the rest find they like it. Most are ultimately deterred or constrained by some combination of reputational, social, cultural, or moral reasoning – they don’t stop such behavior but do reach equilibrium and stop escalating for lack of actual or perceived means. The remainder eventually become your serial abusers. This drive is not easily removed or isolated because it’s integral to how we process status hierarchies and social situations. Society has exhausted all low hanging fruit for pushing the numbers at each state as low as possible. Any mind we might construct that must process and participate in status higherarcies is suceptable to the same drives.
Controlled for so many things = A lot of potential for P-hacking
A single P-hacked correlational study is generally not strong evidence and doctors are trained to require more evidence for the medical actions they take.
If someone answers “yes” to that question that tells us little about whether the person benefited from engaging in the malicious activity. It also doesn’t tell us whether the actions are prosocial. A person who gets people on facebook banned by reporting their posts does harm to other people but they might think that it’s good to do so because it removes people from facebook who are harmful.
I don’t think you have done a good job at defining evil. I would expect that a good portion of evil behavior in the sense that it does damage to another person while producing no personal gain is due to heuristics build for determining group status.
If Bob is together with Dave, there’s a question of whether Bob or Dave is higher in social rank. Engaging in an action that does damage to Dave without Dave being able to do anything about it is a way for Bob to assert that he has higher social rank.
Evolution trained some heuristics into us to engage in such status moves.
I have found myself telling a mean joke about a friend which might have made the friend uncomfortable while providing no value to myself. I have the self awareness to flag the behavior as an error but most people don’t in a similar situation.
A mean joke that’s doesn’t do more then a few dozens of seconds of discomfort isn’t a big evil but it’s nevertheless evil in the above sense. I would expect that most bullying arises out of instinct that exist for making moves to assert status in ancestral enviroment.
Bullying in schools often happens in enviroments with strong status competition and is likely a result of status dynamics (with the caveat that it’s following heuristics that produce status in the ancestral enviroment and not all of those necessarily actually produce status in the enviroment of the school). When a group bullies together toxoplasma is involved where it’s a strong signal of group loyality to bully and defection to the group when speaking up in favor of the victim.
Strong upvote as I find this is a very useful lens for parsing this kind of behavior from others and checking such impulses in myself. Importantly, this also opens a whole other dimension for resisting bullying: One need not be able to win the specific game the bully wants to play (e.g., prove who’s stronger and can win fights), mere be able to credibly threaten their status another way. Framing it as a negotiation over status ties up the strong majority of this behavior IMO.
Mind you, there’s still the kid that thinks lighting a cat on fire is delightful fun—whole other league of not right in the head. I’m not sure the above being 90% right fundamentally alters the main thesis of the post. There are people who enjoy having absolute power of life or death over something or someone else; I’m not convinced that is truly a different impulse than the one that leads to bullying as much as a matter of degree.
Cats hunt mice and play with them in ways that’s adds more pain then necessary to kill the mice.
Hunter gathers have to learn to kill animals and that requires some ability to desensitize yourself against the pain of hurting prey. I think that lighting a cat on fire might be downstream of that.
Interaction with prey is very different then status competition with other humans.
Maybe, but for modern-ish humans in western cultures cats aren’t prey and really never have been. Certainly never to the extent that torturing non-prey animals for fun has been. AFAIK that behavoir is currently considered a predictor for escalating to similar abuse against humans.
Contrast that to society’s reaction to meat production: don’t make them suffer needlessly, or at least don’t make me watch/know about it.
This shows you that there are barriers that aren’t easy to overcome. A hunter gather needs to overcome those emotional barriers to be a functioning hunter gatherer. Evolution needs to have installed strategies that allow a hunter gather to overcome his empathy towards an animal and kill it.
In the least convenient possible world, everyone has impulses to dominate others and would find that power directly enjoyable because they all have the same brain hardware. Many have the means at some point and try it; those with early failures are deterred, the rest find they like it. Most are ultimately deterred or constrained by some combination of reputational, social, cultural, or moral reasoning – they don’t stop such behavior but do reach equilibrium and stop escalating for lack of actual or perceived means. The remainder eventually become your serial abusers. This drive is not easily removed or isolated because it’s integral to how we process status hierarchies and social situations. Society has exhausted all low hanging fruit for pushing the numbers at each state as low as possible. Any mind we might construct that must process and participate in status higherarcies is suceptable to the same drives.
Here’s to hoping it’s not really quite that bad…