Let me give an example to test whether I understand correctly. I am lazy. Laziness belongs to the described category of vices that are expected to be routinely eliminated. Now I can’t value hard work too high and simultaneously be aware of my laziness, since that would violate the self-aggrandising axiom. I am too rational to deceive myself that I am actually not lazy, so I have to adjust my values instead and accept laziness as normal. Perhaps this makes me less virtuous.
Well, if this is what you have meant, I agree that (for me) it actually works like that, but I wouldn’t call it self-deception.
Deceiving yourself about how much you would value hard work in the absence of your laziness leads to predictable mistakes when you then model others with your value of yourself and don’t understand why the others don’t like you (because you are tacitly modeling them as not considering laziness very bad).
These predictable mistakes add up to much worse life performance in aggregate than if they didn’t occur.
I haven’t said that I suppose my values in the absence of laziness would be the same. I also don’t expect others to have the same values as myself. Even if I did, that would be example of the “mind projection fallacy” or “false agreement fallacy” which was discussed here several times. Do you think that the lesswrongers are in tackling these biases substantially worse than they (we) think?
I don’t think that we even think that we are avoiding using ourselves as our default model of other people in many situations, nor that we can do so in principle, but I wasn’t of the impression that people though that they could.
Let me give an example to test whether I understand correctly. I am lazy. Laziness belongs to the described category of vices that are expected to be routinely eliminated. Now I can’t value hard work too high and simultaneously be aware of my laziness, since that would violate the self-aggrandising axiom. I am too rational to deceive myself that I am actually not lazy, so I have to adjust my values instead and accept laziness as normal. Perhaps this makes me less virtuous.
Well, if this is what you have meant, I agree that (for me) it actually works like that, but I wouldn’t call it self-deception.
Deceiving yourself about how much you would value hard work in the absence of your laziness leads to predictable mistakes when you then model others with your value of yourself and don’t understand why the others don’t like you (because you are tacitly modeling them as not considering laziness very bad).
These predictable mistakes add up to much worse life performance in aggregate than if they didn’t occur.
I haven’t said that I suppose my values in the absence of laziness would be the same. I also don’t expect others to have the same values as myself. Even if I did, that would be example of the “mind projection fallacy” or “false agreement fallacy” which was discussed here several times. Do you think that the lesswrongers are in tackling these biases substantially worse than they (we) think?
I don’t think that we even think that we are avoiding using ourselves as our default model of other people in many situations, nor that we can do so in principle, but I wasn’t of the impression that people though that they could.