I’m not going to talk about many of those here because I tried before and it went badly.
It sounds dangerously vulnerable to epicyclic adaptation to individual cases that don’t align with it.
As is the other model: the one where you model them as reasoning engines that reason logically from explicitly stated ethical principles. Here, you can just keep varying which of the many principles they are supposed to be following (as human commonsense morality contains so many different and mutually incompatible principles, so many circumstances, weaknesses of will, etc).
There are some solid experiments, e.g. moral dumbfounding, that back this up. Also, as soon as you expose people to a correct contrarian idea, you’ll see the people attack with a torrent of confabulated excuses.
I am quite fond of this model of people: I think it should be used more. Though agreed that we should test it, criticize it, etc.
Why not just set all of your self-beliefs to “strongly positive”, to the extent that you can get away with it? . . . Why not just go the whole hog and believe you’re very kind, very generous, very witty, very honorable, very trustworthy, etc...
Arrogance and a pervasive positive self-image are strong signals of high status. People will respond positively to them.
It would probably be better for our civilization IMHO if individuals were much less arrogant and much less self-confident. Existential risks for example would probably be lower IMHO if the scientists and technologists in certain fields were less confident of the moral goodness of their actions and their skill at avoiding terrible mistakes. And risks would be reduced if their opinion of their own status (which of course is highly correlated with their actual status) were lower since lower-status people spend more time doubting the goodness or rightness of their effects on the world and IMHO are less prone to rationalization. It is hard to change the current over-confident equilibrium however because low-confidence individuals are at a competitive disadvantage at obtaining the resources (e.g., education, jobs, connections) needed to gain influence in our civilization.
[Two sentence that go way off on a tangent deleted because now that the parent comment has been deleted, they make no sense.]
I’m not going to talk about many of those here because I tried before and it went badly.
As is the other model: the one where you model them as reasoning engines that reason logically from explicitly stated ethical principles. Here, you can just keep varying which of the many principles they are supposed to be following (as human commonsense morality contains so many different and mutually incompatible principles, so many circumstances, weaknesses of will, etc).
There are some solid experiments, e.g. moral dumbfounding, that back this up. Also, as soon as you expose people to a correct contrarian idea, you’ll see the people attack with a torrent of confabulated excuses.
I am quite fond of this model of people: I think it should be used more. Though agreed that we should test it, criticize it, etc.
It would probably be better for our civilization IMHO if individuals were much less arrogant and much less self-confident. Existential risks for example would probably be lower IMHO if the scientists and technologists in certain fields were less confident of the moral goodness of their actions and their skill at avoiding terrible mistakes. And risks would be reduced if their opinion of their own status (which of course is highly correlated with their actual status) were lower since lower-status people spend more time doubting the goodness or rightness of their effects on the world and IMHO are less prone to rationalization. It is hard to change the current over-confident equilibrium however because low-confidence individuals are at a competitive disadvantage at obtaining the resources (e.g., education, jobs, connections) needed to gain influence in our civilization.
[Two sentence that go way off on a tangent deleted because now that the parent comment has been deleted, they make no sense.]