I like the theory but ‘does not moralize’ is definitely not a feature I would ascribe to Eliezer. We even have people quoting Eliezer’s moralizing for the purpose of spreading the moralizing around!
In terms of general moralizing tendencies of people who identify as rationalists they seem to moralize slightly less than average but the most notable difference is what they choose to moralize about. When people happen to have similar morals to yourself it doesn’t feel like they are moralizing as much.
Not everything that is not purely consequentialist reasoning is moralizing. You can have consequentialist justifications of virtue ethics or even consequentialist justifications of deontological injunctions, and you are allowed to feel strongly about them, without moralizing. It’s a 5-second-level emotional direction, not a philosophical style.
Sigh. This is why I said, “But trying to define exactly what constitutes ‘moralizing’ isn’t going to get us any closer to having nice rationalist communities.”
A 5-second method (that I employ to varying levels of success) is whenever I feel the frustration of a failed interaction, I question how it might have been made more successful by me, regardless of whose “fault” it was. Your “sigh” reaction comes across as expressing the sentiment “It’s your fault for not getting me. Didn’t you read what I wrote? It’s so obvious”. But could you have expressed your ideas almost as easily without generating confusion in the first place? If so, maybe your reaction would be instead along the lines of “Oh that’s interesting. I thought it was obvious but I guess I can see how that might have generated confusion. Perhaps I could...”.
FWIW I actually really like the central idea in this post, and arguably too many of the comments have been side-tracked by digressions on moralizing. However, my hunch is that you probably could have easily gotten the message across AND avoided this confusion. My own specific suggestion here is that stipulative definitions are semantic booby traps, so if possible avoid them. Why introduce a stipulative definition for “moralize” when a less loaded phrase like “suspended judgement” could work? My head hurts reading these comments trying to figure out how each person is using the term “moralize” and I now have to think twice when reading the term on LW, including even your old posts. This is an unnecessary cognitive burden. In any case, my final note here would be to consider that you’d be lucky if your target audience for your upcoming book(s) was anywhere near as sharp as wedrifid. So if he’s confused, that’s a valuable signal.
Eliezer, did you mean something different by the “does not get bullet” line than I thought you did? I took it as meaning: “If your thinking leads you to the conclusion that the right response to criticism of your beliefs is to kill the critic, then it is much more likely that you are suffering from an affective death spiral about your beliefs, or some other error, than that you have reasoned to a correct conclusion. Remember this, it’s important.”
This seems to be a pretty straightforward generalization from the history of human discourse, if nothing else. Whether it fits someone’s definition of “moralizing” doesn’t seem to be a very interesting question.
I agree with the parent but maintain everything in the grandparent. There just isn’t any kind of contradiction of the kind that from the sigh I assume is intended.
You say rationalists don’t moralize. Could you give me three concrete examples of moralizing that also promote a moral imperative that rationalists agree with, such as “One should respond to bad arguments with counterarguments rather than gunfire”?
Really? The LW website attracts aspergers types and apparently morality is stuff aspergers people like.
That’s true, and usually I say ‘a lot more’ rather than ‘slightly less’. However in this instance Eliezer seemed to be referring to a rather limited subset of ‘moralizing’. He more or less excluded being obnoxiously judgemental but phrasing your objections with consequentialist language. So the worst of nerd-moralizing was cut out.
I suspect that what aspergers types like—if that post is correct and they do like it—is more the rules part of morality than the being judgmental[1] part of it. Rules for strict rules for interacting with other folks make social interactions less error prone when you literally don’t—can’t—get those social cues others do.
I’ve been judged to be at best borderline aspery (absent any real testing, who knows) and manifest many of the more subtle symptoms, and my take(s) on morality are (1) that it is much like driving regulations. No one gives a flying f’ which side of the road you drive on as long as everybody does. (no need to get judgemental about it unless someone is deliberately doing it wrong) and (2) that the human animal (at least neurotypical human animals) have behavior patterns that are a result of both evolution and society. Following these behavior patterns will keep you from some fun and lots of pain, and will generally get you into the fat part of the bell curve. Break the wrong ones and you will wind up in the ugly part of the curve. Figure out how to break the right ones the right way and you get into the cool part of the bell curve where interesting shit happens.
Oh, and sometimes when you break these rules you hurt other people. When you hurt them by accident that’s bad, when you hurt them on purpose and they don’t deserve it, that’s even worse. If they do deserve it then it’s probably because they broke one of the rules.
People do shit for all sorts of reasons, and in contemporary society there are all sorts of people in power advocating all sorts of mildly to wildly stupid shit. Can’t really blame someone all that much if they spent 12 years in schools that pushed the sort of “education” that you get from compromising between fundamentalist Christians, New Age Fruit Cakes, Universal Church Members, and your typical politicians. Oh, and people with masters degrees in Education, much less Doctorates.
Seriously, you’re better off with the f’ing Jesuits. They might believe in God (it’s hard to tell sometimes) but at least they also believe in Latin, in Logic and Math, and in “The book of nature”
Oh, that got a little off topic. Oops.
[1]Making judgments is what thinking people do all day long. Using those judgements to attach moral worth to someone is different.
I like the theory but ‘does not moralize’ is definitely not a feature I would ascribe to Eliezer. We even have people quoting Eliezer’s moralizing for the purpose of spreading the moralizing around!
“Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.”
In terms of general moralizing tendencies of people who identify as rationalists they seem to moralize slightly less than average but the most notable difference is what they choose to moralize about. When people happen to have similar morals to yourself it doesn’t feel like they are moralizing as much.
Not everything that is not purely consequentialist reasoning is moralizing. You can have consequentialist justifications of virtue ethics or even consequentialist justifications of deontological injunctions, and you are allowed to feel strongly about them, without moralizing. It’s a 5-second-level emotional direction, not a philosophical style.
Sigh. This is why I said, “But trying to define exactly what constitutes ‘moralizing’ isn’t going to get us any closer to having nice rationalist communities.”
A 5-second method (that I employ to varying levels of success) is whenever I feel the frustration of a failed interaction, I question how it might have been made more successful by me, regardless of whose “fault” it was. Your “sigh” reaction comes across as expressing the sentiment “It’s your fault for not getting me. Didn’t you read what I wrote? It’s so obvious”. But could you have expressed your ideas almost as easily without generating confusion in the first place? If so, maybe your reaction would be instead along the lines of “Oh that’s interesting. I thought it was obvious but I guess I can see how that might have generated confusion. Perhaps I could...”.
FWIW I actually really like the central idea in this post, and arguably too many of the comments have been side-tracked by digressions on moralizing. However, my hunch is that you probably could have easily gotten the message across AND avoided this confusion. My own specific suggestion here is that stipulative definitions are semantic booby traps, so if possible avoid them. Why introduce a stipulative definition for “moralize” when a less loaded phrase like “suspended judgement” could work? My head hurts reading these comments trying to figure out how each person is using the term “moralize” and I now have to think twice when reading the term on LW, including even your old posts. This is an unnecessary cognitive burden. In any case, my final note here would be to consider that you’d be lucky if your target audience for your upcoming book(s) was anywhere near as sharp as wedrifid. So if he’s confused, that’s a valuable signal.
Eliezer, did you mean something different by the “does not get bullet” line than I thought you did? I took it as meaning: “If your thinking leads you to the conclusion that the right response to criticism of your beliefs is to kill the critic, then it is much more likely that you are suffering from an affective death spiral about your beliefs, or some other error, than that you have reasoned to a correct conclusion. Remember this, it’s important.”
This seems to be a pretty straightforward generalization from the history of human discourse, if nothing else. Whether it fits someone’s definition of “moralizing” doesn’t seem to be a very interesting question.
Agreed.
I agree with the parent but maintain everything in the grandparent. There just isn’t any kind of contradiction of the kind that from the sigh I assume is intended.
I find myself frequently confused by Eliezer’s “sigh”s.
Noticing your confusion is the first step to understanding.
Poster child for ADBOC.
Good point, link added.
You say rationalists don’t moralize. Could you give me three concrete examples of moralizing that also promote a moral imperative that rationalists agree with, such as “One should respond to bad arguments with counterarguments rather than gunfire”?
Really? The LW website attracts aspergers types and apparently morality is stuff aspergers people like.
That’s true, and usually I say ‘a lot more’ rather than ‘slightly less’. However in this instance Eliezer seemed to be referring to a rather limited subset of ‘moralizing’. He more or less excluded being obnoxiously judgemental but phrasing your objections with consequentialist language. So the worst of nerd-moralizing was cut out.
I suspect that what aspergers types like—if that post is correct and they do like it—is more the rules part of morality than the being judgmental[1] part of it. Rules for strict rules for interacting with other folks make social interactions less error prone when you literally don’t—can’t—get those social cues others do.
I’ve been judged to be at best borderline aspery (absent any real testing, who knows) and manifest many of the more subtle symptoms, and my take(s) on morality are (1) that it is much like driving regulations. No one gives a flying f’ which side of the road you drive on as long as everybody does. (no need to get judgemental about it unless someone is deliberately doing it wrong) and (2) that the human animal (at least neurotypical human animals) have behavior patterns that are a result of both evolution and society. Following these behavior patterns will keep you from some fun and lots of pain, and will generally get you into the fat part of the bell curve. Break the wrong ones and you will wind up in the ugly part of the curve. Figure out how to break the right ones the right way and you get into the cool part of the bell curve where interesting shit happens.
Oh, and sometimes when you break these rules you hurt other people. When you hurt them by accident that’s bad, when you hurt them on purpose and they don’t deserve it, that’s even worse. If they do deserve it then it’s probably because they broke one of the rules.
People do shit for all sorts of reasons, and in contemporary society there are all sorts of people in power advocating all sorts of mildly to wildly stupid shit. Can’t really blame someone all that much if they spent 12 years in schools that pushed the sort of “education” that you get from compromising between fundamentalist Christians, New Age Fruit Cakes, Universal Church Members, and your typical politicians. Oh, and people with masters degrees in Education, much less Doctorates.
Seriously, you’re better off with the f’ing Jesuits. They might believe in God (it’s hard to tell sometimes) but at least they also believe in Latin, in Logic and Math, and in “The book of nature”
Oh, that got a little off topic. Oops.
[1]Making judgments is what thinking people do all day long. Using those judgements to attach moral worth to someone is different.