Speaking of which, communists were also extreme utilitarians. The problem with utilitarians, really, is that self described utilitarians are not the people who calculate utilities so much better than everyone else. It is the people who think they calculate utilities so much better than anyone else. Throw Dunning-Kruger into the mix, and people who actually have troubles evaluating utility are utilitarians, whereas those who can evaluate utility also process uncertainty and tend to act in more deontological manner due to incorporating empirical knowledge on outcome of strategies, or due to concern for societal values like trust etc. I blogged some about that
Exactly. For a sociopath it is very useful to (pretend to?) be utilitarian—one good rationalization, and anything becomes morally OK.
First, let’s kill all our enemies, or more precisely anyone who refuses to obey us. Then, we will build a paradise with infinite utility, because there will be no one to stop us. Net result: huge positive utility. From utilitarian viewpoint, we are the good guys, which means that anyone who opposes us deserves to be killed.
Add some technical details, and you have communism; add different details and you have something else. Focus the attention of people to those technical details to avoid the outside view comparison.
Exactly. For a sociopath it is very useful to (pretend to?) be utilitarian—one good rationalization, and anything becomes morally OK.
Well I think it is fairly complicated. It may be that the lack of understanding of what it takes to think straight leads to sociopathy in some instances (I see sociopathy as a symptom of a multitude of abnormalities).
I wrote another blog post on that: http://dmytry.com/blog/?p=268 . What I think happens, is that people with strongly deficient utility evaluation—people who do not even see what it takes to evaluate utility, people who will evaluate utility on any partial outcome that popped up in their mind, or was even suggested from outside (without even any explicit assertion that it is complete!) - tend to end up self describing as utilitarian, and in some sense, actually believing that they are, and that they are highly moral (and everyone else is flawed).
Other issue, is that historically it is not in the slightest bit positive when someone pushing a bad idea is not simply being selfish. In practice, to do the most evil, selfishness does not suffice. It takes certain degree of selflessness in the name of a bad idea and sloppy thought. It takes narcissist love with intellectual self. A particular form of incompetence is far superior to malice when it comes to actually doing large scale evil.
Long ago (I don’t remember the source) I read an interesting thought: that people who speak about great ideas or strong emotions are probably intelectually and emotionally pretty weak, and when they get any result in such area, they are overwhelmed by the contrast. (It’s like Dunning-Kruger on steroids.)
For example a smart person will have dozen smart ideas every day, so “having a smart idea” is no big deal for them, it’s life as usual. Even if they find something extraordinarily interesting, they have a large reference class, so instead of greatness of the idea, they will speak about specific details that make this idea interesting.
On the other hand, when a rather dumb person hears a non-trivial idea and understands it, it is a shocking experience, a unique uncomparable thing. So the person will treat it as the greatest idea ever, the dividing line between stupid and smart, and will be obsessed about it.
Analogically, if a person with supressed emotions or mostly negative emotions suddenly falls in love, they will perceive their emotion as overwhelming, unique in the whole universe, unrepeatable. A person with a larger emotional scale would see the same emotion as a point in a continuum, so there is e.g. smaller chance they would do something stupid if their love is not reciprocated. The former person would (by a mind projection fallacy) think that the latter person’s feelings are much smaller, because the reactions are less dramatic.
So maybe the same effect is at play here—people who never thought too much about morality suddenly understand some moral rule, and (their interpretation of) it immediately becomes the moral rule, the dividing line between immoral and moral. (And if the rule is not based on emotions or traditions, it is convenient to label it as “utilitarian”.)
That’s an interesting thought. On the ideas, the other issue is that e.g. with certain fairly advanced mathematics, fuzzy and inaccurate understanding may easily be more amazing than any coherent understanding can ever be; the condition that is normally quite short lived if one has sufficiently thorough understanding of base level concepts and can study the idea formally, but this condition can be perpetual otherwise. Same can happen with morality.
First, let’s kill all our enemies, or more precisely anyone who refuses to obey us.
...add some technical details, and you have communism
U mindkilled, bro. Yes, that was what the people who called themselves “communists” did in the 20th century. But name any other system, no matter which one, that wouldn’t kill everyone who refuses to obey it in certain matters.
E.g. fleeing from a battlefield; every nation that grok’d total war gave its court-martials the powers of swift summary execution in the 20th century. It’s what the “communists” were trying to regulate, and from what perspective, and how much, and what processes this led to—that’s what you have a problem with, not with the fact of enforcement itself.
Everyone has to resort to murder sooner or later, it’s the actual internal details of the system (like the type and amount of murder, and what incentives the “undesirables” have to surrender and avoid it, if any) that make the difference.
You have a good point. But there is a difference between people who see killing others as a regrettable last choice (e.g. in self-defence), and those who see killing others as “no big deal” (sociopaths, and their happy-death-spiralled followers). Although there probably is a continuum.
EDIT: The difference is that a non-sociopathic utilitarian considers a possibility of running on a corrupted hardware, if they are a rationalist, or simply deflect the thought by an “ugh field” if they aren’t.
Speaking of which, communists were also extreme utilitarians. The problem with utilitarians, really, is that self described utilitarians are not the people who calculate utilities so much better than everyone else. It is the people who think they calculate utilities so much better than anyone else. Throw Dunning-Kruger into the mix, and people who actually have troubles evaluating utility are utilitarians, whereas those who can evaluate utility also process uncertainty and tend to act in more deontological manner due to incorporating empirical knowledge on outcome of strategies, or due to concern for societal values like trust etc. I blogged some about that
Exactly. For a sociopath it is very useful to (pretend to?) be utilitarian—one good rationalization, and anything becomes morally OK.
First, let’s kill all our enemies, or more precisely anyone who refuses to obey us. Then, we will build a paradise with infinite utility, because there will be no one to stop us. Net result: huge positive utility. From utilitarian viewpoint, we are the good guys, which means that anyone who opposes us deserves to be killed.
Add some technical details, and you have communism; add different details and you have something else. Focus the attention of people to those technical details to avoid the outside view comparison.
Well I think it is fairly complicated. It may be that the lack of understanding of what it takes to think straight leads to sociopathy in some instances (I see sociopathy as a symptom of a multitude of abnormalities).
I wrote another blog post on that: http://dmytry.com/blog/?p=268 . What I think happens, is that people with strongly deficient utility evaluation—people who do not even see what it takes to evaluate utility, people who will evaluate utility on any partial outcome that popped up in their mind, or was even suggested from outside (without even any explicit assertion that it is complete!) - tend to end up self describing as utilitarian, and in some sense, actually believing that they are, and that they are highly moral (and everyone else is flawed).
Other issue, is that historically it is not in the slightest bit positive when someone pushing a bad idea is not simply being selfish. In practice, to do the most evil, selfishness does not suffice. It takes certain degree of selflessness in the name of a bad idea and sloppy thought. It takes narcissist love with intellectual self. A particular form of incompetence is far superior to malice when it comes to actually doing large scale evil.
Long ago (I don’t remember the source) I read an interesting thought: that people who speak about great ideas or strong emotions are probably intelectually and emotionally pretty weak, and when they get any result in such area, they are overwhelmed by the contrast. (It’s like Dunning-Kruger on steroids.)
For example a smart person will have dozen smart ideas every day, so “having a smart idea” is no big deal for them, it’s life as usual. Even if they find something extraordinarily interesting, they have a large reference class, so instead of greatness of the idea, they will speak about specific details that make this idea interesting.
On the other hand, when a rather dumb person hears a non-trivial idea and understands it, it is a shocking experience, a unique uncomparable thing. So the person will treat it as the greatest idea ever, the dividing line between stupid and smart, and will be obsessed about it.
Analogically, if a person with supressed emotions or mostly negative emotions suddenly falls in love, they will perceive their emotion as overwhelming, unique in the whole universe, unrepeatable. A person with a larger emotional scale would see the same emotion as a point in a continuum, so there is e.g. smaller chance they would do something stupid if their love is not reciprocated. The former person would (by a mind projection fallacy) think that the latter person’s feelings are much smaller, because the reactions are less dramatic.
So maybe the same effect is at play here—people who never thought too much about morality suddenly understand some moral rule, and (their interpretation of) it immediately becomes the moral rule, the dividing line between immoral and moral. (And if the rule is not based on emotions or traditions, it is convenient to label it as “utilitarian”.)
That’s an interesting thought. On the ideas, the other issue is that e.g. with certain fairly advanced mathematics, fuzzy and inaccurate understanding may easily be more amazing than any coherent understanding can ever be; the condition that is normally quite short lived if one has sufficiently thorough understanding of base level concepts and can study the idea formally, but this condition can be perpetual otherwise. Same can happen with morality.
U mindkilled, bro. Yes, that was what the people who called themselves “communists” did in the 20th century. But name any other system, no matter which one, that wouldn’t kill everyone who refuses to obey it in certain matters.
E.g. fleeing from a battlefield; every nation that grok’d total war gave its court-martials the powers of swift summary execution in the 20th century. It’s what the “communists” were trying to regulate, and from what perspective, and how much, and what processes this led to—that’s what you have a problem with, not with the fact of enforcement itself.
Everyone has to resort to murder sooner or later, it’s the actual internal details of the system (like the type and amount of murder, and what incentives the “undesirables” have to surrender and avoid it, if any) that make the difference.
You have a good point. But there is a difference between people who see killing others as a regrettable last choice (e.g. in self-defence), and those who see killing others as “no big deal” (sociopaths, and their happy-death-spiralled followers). Although there probably is a continuum.
EDIT: The difference is that a non-sociopathic utilitarian considers a possibility of running on a corrupted hardware, if they are a rationalist, or simply deflect the thought by an “ugh field” if they aren’t.