It’s easy to be noble when the sun is shining and the weather is warm.
It is even easier to be noble when you’re telling other people how they should act.
The Last Psychiatrist made a totally different point. He doesn’t say they should have not played along. He says they’re not heroes for getting captured. Any idiot can get captured. They shouldn’t have been given special honors for it, since they didn’t actually do anything. They don’t deserve credit for simply being a kind of person, or saying they are a kind of person.
This is the real issue: how useless this discussion is. It’s very easy to say, sitting comfortably in my chair, that “If it were me, I’d stand by my principles.” I may even feel like I’m a better person than they are, because I’d stand by my principles. This is narcissism; I am taking credit for something I have never done, and likely would not do were I actually pressed. If I’m in that position, and I do stand by my principles, then I deserve credit for my actions. To sit here in our armchairs and say men who literally chose their lives over their principles are cowards, while patting ourselves on the back for how principled we are for saying we wouldn’t do that, is the very essence of narcissism.
There’s also a legitimate argument they did nothing wrong, since only very specific interpretations of Christianity would make their actions wrong; God is supposed to be forgiving, after all. That story sounds more like the commentator wanted to feel superior about how good of a Christian she is, because she can claim she’d die for her principles without actually having to, y’know, die for her principles, or even be mildly inconvenienced for her principles.
“It’s very easy to say, sitting comfortably in my chair, that “If it were me, I’d stand by my principles.”″
I agree. As much as professionalism and the weight of evidence (which admittedly I have not fully investigated—the morality of these individual men is not particularly of concern to me, the social attitude towards the accepted truth is more important) leads me to believe that these men probably acted in cowardice, I intentionally avoided stating that as truth. It is fully plausible that these men chose the lesser of two evils. I think you might be making the very same mistake I made yesterday: http://lesswrong.com/lw/13i/shut_up_and_guess/yh7?context=1#yh7
But I get the sense that there’s a thread of ad hominem present in your post. I’m not going to confront that, I’m more interested in your motivations behind it. Essentially you say that criticizing these men is nothing but Armchair Quarterbacking...
Isn’t that precisely the point to these two websites? To review mistakes that were made due to predictable human fallibility, examine them, and then correct them?
If you want to say that I would be just as prone to cowardice as these men—well, that’s irrelevant. My point was that they didn’t behave rationally given their morals. I was constructing an argument that even us rationalists have deep moral obligations upon us, that we have an integrity to maintain; even if we’re not in such scary situations as soldiers, we still have challenges that are frightening and we should be prepared to meet them.
Honestly, you seem to be avoiding the thrust of my argument—which is that you ought to have integrity—and your very manner of undermining my argument [ad hominem, a dark art] undermines your integrity as a rationalist. In some ways you’re strongly supporting my point.
As to the debate on whether it was “true Christianity or not”—I’m at a loss. I’m well aware that Theology contains within it an infinite number of twists and turns, and I’d far rather spend my time deconstructing Star Trek (the show that killed science fiction) than any religion. I used her quote because it sent me on a fortnight of thought about Atheism.
As a finishing point, I’d just like to say that I am a fan of yours PsychoHistorian. I don’t spend much time on the comment threads here, and for me to recognize a name speaks volumes. I couldn’t cite your work, but I do have a deep level of respect for it.
I think this post hit a nerve with you. The idea that rationality combined with even the simplest of moralities might require sacrifice of life is deeply repugnant in civilized society, and even more in the Intelligentsia. That is precisely why I wrote this piece.
The idea that rationality combined with even the simplest of moralities might require sacrifice of life is deeply repugnant in civilized society, and even more in the Intelligentsia.
The post reads more like, “Yay, self sacrifice!” than it does, “If you ascribe to moral philosophy X, Action(self-sacrifice) yields a more desirable output than Action(Not-self-sacrifice).” If you’d written the latter successfully, that might have struck a nerve. As it is, you struck a nerve by (A) quoting TLP out of context (his post is unrelated to your conclusion) and (B) claiming moral superiority for something you’ve never and (P~=.99999) will never do.
I think it’s pretty easy to hypothesize accurately what we’d do if Omega showed up with a couple of boxes. I do not think it’s possible to hypothesize accurately what we would do with the world burning and a gun to our head. The mind estimates the future off our present emotional state, and no one here is in that emotional state, and almost everyone here never has nor will be. I have no problem with you claiming it’s the right thing to do (well, except that I think you failed to support that claim), but it does bother me that you end the post by basically patting yourself on the back for your opinion.
This was a long response, but I changed it to a simple few questions. More interesting this way, I think.
What if you were ordered to convert to Islam or watch someone else be shot? 10 people? 10,000 people? When do you convert, if ever? After all, he’s the crazy person killing people, not you. If you do convert, why does it make such a difference who the gun is pointed at? Why is it more moral to sacrifice your own life to a madman than it is to sacrifice someone else’s?
Hm, I wonder what it says about me, my perceptions of the LW community, and Aurini’s prose style that the idea of this sort of hypocrisy never ever crossed my mind while reading the post.
It is even easier to be noble when you’re telling other people how they should act. The Last Psychiatrist made a totally different point. He doesn’t say they should have not played along. He says they’re not heroes for getting captured. Any idiot can get captured. They shouldn’t have been given special honors for it, since they didn’t actually do anything. They don’t deserve credit for simply being a kind of person, or saying they are a kind of person.
This is the real issue: how useless this discussion is. It’s very easy to say, sitting comfortably in my chair, that “If it were me, I’d stand by my principles.” I may even feel like I’m a better person than they are, because I’d stand by my principles. This is narcissism; I am taking credit for something I have never done, and likely would not do were I actually pressed. If I’m in that position, and I do stand by my principles, then I deserve credit for my actions. To sit here in our armchairs and say men who literally chose their lives over their principles are cowards, while patting ourselves on the back for how principled we are for saying we wouldn’t do that, is the very essence of narcissism.
There’s also a legitimate argument they did nothing wrong, since only very specific interpretations of Christianity would make their actions wrong; God is supposed to be forgiving, after all. That story sounds more like the commentator wanted to feel superior about how good of a Christian she is, because she can claim she’d die for her principles without actually having to, y’know, die for her principles, or even be mildly inconvenienced for her principles.
“It’s very easy to say, sitting comfortably in my chair, that “If it were me, I’d stand by my principles.”″
I agree. As much as professionalism and the weight of evidence (which admittedly I have not fully investigated—the morality of these individual men is not particularly of concern to me, the social attitude towards the accepted truth is more important) leads me to believe that these men probably acted in cowardice, I intentionally avoided stating that as truth. It is fully plausible that these men chose the lesser of two evils. I think you might be making the very same mistake I made yesterday: http://lesswrong.com/lw/13i/shut_up_and_guess/yh7?context=1#yh7
But I get the sense that there’s a thread of ad hominem present in your post. I’m not going to confront that, I’m more interested in your motivations behind it. Essentially you say that criticizing these men is nothing but Armchair Quarterbacking...
Isn’t that precisely the point to these two websites? To review mistakes that were made due to predictable human fallibility, examine them, and then correct them?
If you want to say that I would be just as prone to cowardice as these men—well, that’s irrelevant. My point was that they didn’t behave rationally given their morals. I was constructing an argument that even us rationalists have deep moral obligations upon us, that we have an integrity to maintain; even if we’re not in such scary situations as soldiers, we still have challenges that are frightening and we should be prepared to meet them.
Honestly, you seem to be avoiding the thrust of my argument—which is that you ought to have integrity—and your very manner of undermining my argument [ad hominem, a dark art] undermines your integrity as a rationalist. In some ways you’re strongly supporting my point.
As to the debate on whether it was “true Christianity or not”—I’m at a loss. I’m well aware that Theology contains within it an infinite number of twists and turns, and I’d far rather spend my time deconstructing Star Trek (the show that killed science fiction) than any religion. I used her quote because it sent me on a fortnight of thought about Atheism.
As a finishing point, I’d just like to say that I am a fan of yours PsychoHistorian. I don’t spend much time on the comment threads here, and for me to recognize a name speaks volumes. I couldn’t cite your work, but I do have a deep level of respect for it.
I think this post hit a nerve with you. The idea that rationality combined with even the simplest of moralities might require sacrifice of life is deeply repugnant in civilized society, and even more in the Intelligentsia. That is precisely why I wrote this piece.
The post reads more like, “Yay, self sacrifice!” than it does, “If you ascribe to moral philosophy X, Action(self-sacrifice) yields a more desirable output than Action(Not-self-sacrifice).” If you’d written the latter successfully, that might have struck a nerve. As it is, you struck a nerve by (A) quoting TLP out of context (his post is unrelated to your conclusion) and (B) claiming moral superiority for something you’ve never and (P~=.99999) will never do.
I think it’s pretty easy to hypothesize accurately what we’d do if Omega showed up with a couple of boxes. I do not think it’s possible to hypothesize accurately what we would do with the world burning and a gun to our head. The mind estimates the future off our present emotional state, and no one here is in that emotional state, and almost everyone here never has nor will be. I have no problem with you claiming it’s the right thing to do (well, except that I think you failed to support that claim), but it does bother me that you end the post by basically patting yourself on the back for your opinion.
This was a long response, but I changed it to a simple few questions. More interesting this way, I think.
What if you were ordered to convert to Islam or watch someone else be shot? 10 people? 10,000 people? When do you convert, if ever? After all, he’s the crazy person killing people, not you. If you do convert, why does it make such a difference who the gun is pointed at? Why is it more moral to sacrifice your own life to a madman than it is to sacrifice someone else’s?
Hm, I wonder what it says about me, my perceptions of the LW community, and Aurini’s prose style that the idea of this sort of hypocrisy never ever crossed my mind while reading the post.
I ask that you look at my reply to PsychoHistorian.