The second is that you come across as exceedingly arrogant.
Although I liked the post overall this was my impression, especially when you wrote “I’ve developed the capacity to feel universal love and compassion the way Martin Luther King and Gandhi were able to.”
I’ve developed the capacity to feel universal love and compassion the way Martin Luther King was able to.
I think part of the arrogance is degree of certainty in the presumption that you have a personal insight into what that means. I think what you’re trying to convey is “I’ve developed the capacity to feel universal love and compassion the way I think Martin Luther King was able to.” Which is still brave and direct but doesn’t make me cringe so much :)
I think on Less Wrong of all places people should be able to say things like that if they think they are true. Gandhi and Martin Luther King aren’t really known for their internal experience of universal love and compassion, they are known for the remarkable works they accomplished. The magnitude of their compassion as far as we know is a reflection of the mythology surrounding them. There is absolutely no reason to believe that having the same internal experience as them will lead to accomplishments so grand, and in fact it seems very unlikely to me given the large number of extremely accomplished meditators who claim to have the internal experience of universal loving-kindness. Though they are large in number, very few (potentially = 0) are as well known as Gandhi. Not being able to point to works as remarkable as some of the most remarkable historical figures in our current cultural awareness is very scant evidence that someone does not experience universal love and compassion of the same sort.
I think on Less Wrong of all places people should be able to say things like that if they think they are true.
What’s the prior on understanding the mind of MLK or Gandhi well enough to make a realistic comparison? And why choose people who are practically venerated as modern saints? I don’t think that such a comparison is ever truly innocuous. It’s a common Dark Arts ploy to associate oneself with beloved historical figures in the hope of basking in the light of their greatness.
Not being able to point to works as remarkable as some of the most remarkable historical figures in our current cultural awareness is very scant evidence that someone does not experience universal love and compassion of the same sort.
The objection isn’t whether someone actually experienced compassion similar to that of Gandhi. The objection is that comparing oneself to Gandhi raises the specter of the Association Fallacy.
I don’t think that such a comparison is ever truly innocuous. It’s a common Dark Arts ploy to associate oneself with beloved historical figures in the hope of basking in the light of their greatness.
Yes, so you’re doing what everyone else did throughout my life: you’re attributing unflattering motivations to me that I don’t have. It’s not just you, it’s almost everyone who I’ve interacted with.
My uncharitable interpretation of this sort of thing was
People like Epictetus are uncomfortable about the possibility of me behaving more ethically than they are, because they don’t want to look bad by comparison, and they’re attacking my motivations to nullify the threat (c.f. Robin Hanson’s Looking Too Good)
I never talked about this, because I figured that there was no point: I thought “these people have dug themselves into such a deep epistemic rabbit hole that they can’t out of it – they can’t see me for who I am independently of what I say.
My current hypothesis is that you’re not doing this, you don’t have some sort of evil Hansonian agenda, rather, the situation is instead that you don’t know that it’s possible for humans to rewire their motivations so as to be almost completely unrelated to relative status.
Yes, so you’re doing what everyone else did throughout my life: you’re attributing unflattering motivations to me that I don’t have. It’s not just you, it’s almost everyone who I’ve interacted with.
My point is that comparing yourself favorably to someone like Gandhi is a very common rhetorical tactic. For example, here’s Dan Quayle comparing himself to JFK. While the statement he made was literally true, it was perceived as implying other similarities and his opponent called him on it.
From the other comments it seems that you did not intend to imply other similarities to MLK or Gandhi. I wish to convey that even if you personally don’t have this motive, in common use such comparisons do have this motive. Therefore, for someone hearing such a comparison made, there’s a very high prior that such a motive exists.
My current hypothesis is that you’re not doing this, you don’t have some sort of evil Hansonian agenda, rather, the situation is instead that you don’t know that it’s possible for humans to rewire their motivations so as to be almost completely unrelated to relative status.
The philosopher who provided my username counseled indifference to status. I am familiar with the notion.
My objection is not about motivation, but about motivation as perceived by an outside observer. I take it as a general principle that the message one intends to send, the message one actually sends, and the message received need not be the same. Consider Polya’s traditional math professor: “He says a, he writes b, he means c; but it really should be d.” What are the poor students to make of this muddle?
Back to our hypothetical observer. If the observer does not know your mind, all he has to go on are the literal meaning of the words you use and any connotations associated with them via common usage or community standards. It is possible for these connotations to warp the meaning to something altogether different from what you intended, even if the observer is wholly neutral. Real people have their own filters and perceptions, which can further change the meaning. I have a vague hypothesis that much social convention is just a way of standardizing communication to avoid these kinds of problems.
Here are my observations: It’s a common tactic among politicians to favorably compare themselves to famous historical figures. It’s common among cranks to compare their own struggles to the persecution of Galileo. In general, there’s a rhetorical device of people comparing themselves to famous figures in order to imply that they have other characteristics in common. This has led me to assign a very low prior probability to such a comparison being wholly innocuous.
As a result, when I see such a statement made, my reaction is to become more a lot cynical about the piece and to question the author’s motives.
Sure, this makes sense. But sufficiently strong filters will filter out people when they say very unusual things independently of whether or not they’re true :D. Catching diamonds in the rough requires more refined heuristics. How would you be able to tell if somebody actually felt universal love and compassion like MLK?
I don’t think I’d ever reach that conclusion based on someone’s self-reporting. Too prone to bias.
So what would convince me? Well, the same way MLK convinced me: actions. Not in the sense of having to lead a civil rights movement, but rather in the sense of displaying that level of love and compassion when there is a cost to doing so. Are you so committed that you’d risk imprisonment or assassination? There’s really no way for me to tell unless real life tests your mettle. I admit, it’s a high bar. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
How then would I gauge the love and compassion of someone who had to hazard neither life nor liberty? I have on occasion witnessed people perform generous acts which would not have even occurred to me, but upon seeing them I could not doubt their rectitude. More common is just a general pattern of behavior: how an individual interacts with others.
they can’t see me for who I am independently of what I say.
In a text-only medium, what you say is all there is. Even face to face, what you say is a large part of what there is. And in any case, what you say flows from who you are.
Are you actively trying to misinterpret his point?
No. It is possible that I have, nonetheless, misinterpreted his point. However, having reread the context, I see nothing amiss; I am not seeing whatever it is that you are seeing. What are you seeing?
He’s saying, more or less: people take me too literally, they miss the forest for the trees. Your response was to nitpick his statement in a way that missed that point he was trying to make. It seemed ironic, in a way that would irritate me endlessly if I were Jonah.
Ok, yes, I find nitpicking tedious and a great pain also, and far too much of it goes on on LW. But I was not intending a nitpick, but the basic point that what anyone says is their presentation of who they are. Charitable reading and forest and trees and etc. understood, everything that Jonah wants to communicate still has to come through the bottleneck of his words.
Yes, what 9eB1 said: I’m not claiming that I have noteworthy real world accomplishments, or that I’m exceptional in having this capacity.
The Bayesian update that I intended to report on was “it’s possible for lots of people to feel universal love and compassion like MLK and Gandhi,” and I was citing the fact that I learned how to as evidence.
But I’m not pushing back on you in particular: pretty much everyone who I’ve been talking to has been reacting to what I’ve been saying in the same way, and I’d welcome any suggestions for how to convey the relevant information without coming across as arrogant and/or grandiose.
Just as you usually shouldn’t compare your enemies to Hitler, you probably shouldn’t compare yourself or your allies to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These individual’s auras are just too strong, making comparisons mind-kill territory. Also, comparing yourself to both MLK and Gandhi in the same sentence reads like something the character Michael Scott would do.
The strength of the aura is part of the point that I was trying to make:
I understand intuitively that Martin Luther King wasn’t some sort of god, that he was human like you and me, and that the human race has the capacity to shift in his direction, and be much happier than we are now.
This is exactly the sort of miscommunication that I’ve struggled with throughout my life. I want to convey “I know that people have much better prospects than they believe to become like Martin Luther King, because he’s not a god, he’s a human” and instead it comes across as “Jonah thinks that he’s like a god.”
Here I present you with a technique known as “softening”.
Use case: only when you are presenting yourself as above the average people of a particular context or when you are comparing yourself with someone with a very strong positive status.
When not to use it: when you are presenting others above everyone else, as it’s perceived as a praise although never taken literally (“she is smarter than Einstein”), or when you compare yourself with someone with a very strong negative status, as it’s perceived as irony (“I’m less coordinated than an epileptic”). Never compare yourself with someone with a very strong negative status for real, as it generates strong mistrust.
That said, to soften a comparison: you first bring up everyone else to the positive example, then you compare yourself to that.
You did that correctly with the doctor example and the MLK explanation:
Just as a doctor is required to study 10k hours to become a master of the trade, to become an accomplished rationalist requires that much study, and it’s an effort I’ve undertaken.
Everyone can learn to feel the universal love exemplified by MLK, and I too have learned to do that;
This was a miscommunication. I’m not saying that I exude such an aura. I’m saying that the aura that people attribute to them is misleading, as it carries connotations that they’re super human, when the actual situation is that they were operating within (roughly) the same biology that all humans are.
I’m saying that the aura that people attribute to them is misleading
It seems to me that you say that without having interacted with any such individuals.
Above you speak about having learned that “caring about people” requires not only thinking about their feeling but actually feeling. Other people react towards the emotional states that are in your body.
If your body would actually resonate strongly with the emotion of compassion that’s something that other people can pick up.
It’s produces an aura for someone like Ghandi that makes other people want to follow him.
when the actual situation is that they were operating within (roughly) the same biology that all humans are.
Having the same biology is one thing, acquiring a skill at world class level in weeks or months is another.
I don’t know whether you’re being playful, defeatist, or misreading me. :-)
My point is that it is possible to come close to having his level of compassion: that the difference is apparently to a surprisingly large degree more environmental than genetic.
Are you claiming that communicating this point is hopeless?
I think it is worse than hopeless on multiple fronts.
First problem:
Let’s take another good quality: Honesty. People who volunteer, “I always tell the truth,” generally lie more than the average population, and should be distrusted. (Yes, yes, Sam Harris. But the skew is the wrong way.) “I am awesome at good life quality,” generally fails if your audience has had, well, significant social experience.
So you want to demonstrate this claim by word and deed, and not explicitly make the claim in most cases. Here, I understand the reason for making it, and the parts where you say you want good things to happen to people are fine. (I have on LW said something like, “I have a reputation for principled honesty, says me,” in arguing that game tactics were not dishonest and should not apply to out-of-game reputation.) But the MLK thing is way-too-much, like “I never lie,” is way-too-much.
Second problem:
As others have said, the comparison is political and inapt. You couldn’t find anyone less iconic? Penn Jillette? Someone?
And MLK is known for his actions and risks and willingness to engage in non-violence. I read somewhere that ethnic struggles sometimes end badly. In a world where the FBI was trying to get him to kill himself, he stood for peace. Under those circumstance, his treatment of other humans was generally very good. That’s not a test you’ve gone through.
Third problem:
The confidence of the statement is way, way out of line with where it should be. You have some idea of MLK’s love and compassion for other people, but not all of it. Maybe MLK thought, “Screw all those people in government; hope they die screaming. But I think that war leads to more losses for black people, so despite my burning hatred, I’m putting on a better public face.” (I admit this is unlikely.) He certainly had some personal bad qualities. Maybe you love people more than MLK. (This also seems unlikely, but stay with me.)
We cannot measure love and compassion in kilograms. We also do not know what people are like all the time. I realize that we can put people into general buckets, but I’d caution this sort of precision for others and yourself to a point where you can call people equivalent by this measure. And if we could measure it, there are no infinite values.
Fourth problem:
As infinite love for all humans is not possible… well, it’s not even a good idea. You shouldn’t have compassion and love for all people. The guy who just loves stabbing toddlers needs to be housed away from toddlers even though we’re ruining his life, which was so happy in those delightful toddler-stabbing days. And if you’re using your love and compassion on that guy, well, maybe there are other people who can get some o’ that with better effect.
Because love and compassion isn’t really a meaningful construct if it’s just some internal view of society with no outward effects. Love and compassion is mostly meaningful only in what’s done (like, say, leading life-risking marches against injustices.)
No worries; just say that you’ve “begun to develop” the same capacity, after establishing (as I believe you’ve already done with clarity) that you believe that the whole human race can attain the fullness for which you are also striving.
Unless you really did mean “developed,” as in, you’ve already developed it.
In which case, that’s an extraordinary claim. People will tend to assign it low probability and (seeking an alternate explanation) attribute your claim to it as plausibly resulting from an inflated sense of your own accomplishment, i.e. pride and arrogance, unless you provide extraordinary evidence that you speak truly.
If you really think you’ve already achieved MLK or Ghandi-esque compassion, based on what you’re describing, I wonder if an apter comparison might be the Greek Stoics, a lack of negative reaction resulting from not perceiving an authentic attack, rather than by superhuman dominance of your negative emotions, and a superabundance of positive emotions.
Your description of not feeling insulted because people are only responding naturally to a misunderstanding of you is familiar to me, as is the accompanying lack of offense stemming therefrom.
I don’t doubt you might really have no offense at all in this area, and if it is only in this area that you believe to have Gandhi-esque powers, just clarify that you aren’t referring to mastery of every manifestation of love, only this particular one, and that for you it has come by not perceiving an offense, rather than by overcoming your offense.
What I mean is “what I’ve developed recently is in the same general direction of what they had”, not “my affective disposition is identical with that of MLK’s.” I don’t have strong views how exactly how close the similarity is, I just know that I’m much further in that direction than I was before.
I don’t personally know that MLK had this specific quality. I’ve made explicit what you have implied, that he did. Even if he did have it, I don’t think you could reduce his general capacity for love to this one idea, hence “part of.”
But to avoid apparent arrogance, perhaps the first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph might be written like so.
“This perspective I’m developing is part of what gave Martin Luther King the capacity to feel universal love and compassion.”
How would you differentiate between someone who (1) has shifted in the direction of MLK via compassion, or someone who has (2) reached his level of compassion?
James_Miller has covered the ape-coalition elements of that comparison in a sibling comment. I’ll focus on the skill elements.
The way the claim is worded makes two different unintended (I suspect) claims.
The first is “developed the capacity … the way” ambiguates between “now perceive a skill, and am at the first level” and “have the same skill level.” If I say “I have developed the capacity to swim the way Michael Phelps can,” people will ask me where all my gold medals are. I could have in mind that I can swim at all, and am just using Michael Phelps as an example of what human swimming looks like for people whose only experience of swimming is what they see on TV. (This last sentence is important, and the underlying assumptions might be worth a post if I can figure out the right way to explain them.)
The second is “the way Martin Luther King” claims discernment. If I were to say “I know why Michael Phelps is as good a swimmer as he is,” that implies I am a critic of swimming with at least as much discernment as Phelps has quality as an athlete. It’s not necessarily the claim that I personally could be as good as swimming as he is—perhaps I need different genes to have arms proportioned better for swimming, and to have spent my childhood in a different way. But it is the claim that my model is strong enough that we can use it for correct counterfactual reasoning on extreme cases.
When I read that statement, I inserted qualifiers like “as I understand them.” This is how I would have worded it, with minimal content changes:
This is a tool that creates universal love and compassion; I imagine that mastery over it could turn one into someone like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.
(“one” is the weakest part of that sentence; substituting “me” runs into status issues, substituting “almost anyone” runs into challenges about inherent aptitude / the rivalrous nature of positions like those held by MLK and Gandhi, and so on.)
[edit] I just noticed JRMayne’s comment, which covers much of the same ground. Specifically, their third problem is my problem of discernment, and their first problem is similar to my “same skill level” ambiguated claim.
Although I liked the post overall this was my impression, especially when you wrote “I’ve developed the capacity to feel universal love and compassion the way Martin Luther King and Gandhi were able to.”
I think part of the arrogance is degree of certainty in the presumption that you have a personal insight into what that means. I think what you’re trying to convey is “I’ve developed the capacity to feel universal love and compassion the way I think Martin Luther King was able to.” Which is still brave and direct but doesn’t make me cringe so much :)
I think on Less Wrong of all places people should be able to say things like that if they think they are true. Gandhi and Martin Luther King aren’t really known for their internal experience of universal love and compassion, they are known for the remarkable works they accomplished. The magnitude of their compassion as far as we know is a reflection of the mythology surrounding them. There is absolutely no reason to believe that having the same internal experience as them will lead to accomplishments so grand, and in fact it seems very unlikely to me given the large number of extremely accomplished meditators who claim to have the internal experience of universal loving-kindness. Though they are large in number, very few (potentially = 0) are as well known as Gandhi. Not being able to point to works as remarkable as some of the most remarkable historical figures in our current cultural awareness is very scant evidence that someone does not experience universal love and compassion of the same sort.
What’s the prior on understanding the mind of MLK or Gandhi well enough to make a realistic comparison? And why choose people who are practically venerated as modern saints? I don’t think that such a comparison is ever truly innocuous. It’s a common Dark Arts ploy to associate oneself with beloved historical figures in the hope of basking in the light of their greatness.
The objection isn’t whether someone actually experienced compassion similar to that of Gandhi. The objection is that comparing oneself to Gandhi raises the specter of the Association Fallacy.
Yes, so you’re doing what everyone else did throughout my life: you’re attributing unflattering motivations to me that I don’t have. It’s not just you, it’s almost everyone who I’ve interacted with.
My uncharitable interpretation of this sort of thing was
I never talked about this, because I figured that there was no point: I thought “these people have dug themselves into such a deep epistemic rabbit hole that they can’t out of it – they can’t see me for who I am independently of what I say.
My current hypothesis is that you’re not doing this, you don’t have some sort of evil Hansonian agenda, rather, the situation is instead that you don’t know that it’s possible for humans to rewire their motivations so as to be almost completely unrelated to relative status.
What do you think?
My point is that comparing yourself favorably to someone like Gandhi is a very common rhetorical tactic. For example, here’s Dan Quayle comparing himself to JFK. While the statement he made was literally true, it was perceived as implying other similarities and his opponent called him on it.
From the other comments it seems that you did not intend to imply other similarities to MLK or Gandhi. I wish to convey that even if you personally don’t have this motive, in common use such comparisons do have this motive. Therefore, for someone hearing such a comparison made, there’s a very high prior that such a motive exists.
The philosopher who provided my username counseled indifference to status. I am familiar with the notion.
My objection is not about motivation, but about motivation as perceived by an outside observer. I take it as a general principle that the message one intends to send, the message one actually sends, and the message received need not be the same. Consider Polya’s traditional math professor: “He says a, he writes b, he means c; but it really should be d.” What are the poor students to make of this muddle?
Back to our hypothetical observer. If the observer does not know your mind, all he has to go on are the literal meaning of the words you use and any connotations associated with them via common usage or community standards. It is possible for these connotations to warp the meaning to something altogether different from what you intended, even if the observer is wholly neutral. Real people have their own filters and perceptions, which can further change the meaning. I have a vague hypothesis that much social convention is just a way of standardizing communication to avoid these kinds of problems.
What you’re writing here is very close to what’s been on my mind.
What I was responding to was “I don’t think that such a comparison is ever truly innocuous.”
That sounds like it’s about your perceptions as opposed to other people’s perceptions. :-). Did I misunderstand?
That specific line was my perception, yes.
The bit that followed it was intended as a general statement.
Ok, so can you help me understand your own perception?
Sure.
Here are my observations: It’s a common tactic among politicians to favorably compare themselves to famous historical figures. It’s common among cranks to compare their own struggles to the persecution of Galileo. In general, there’s a rhetorical device of people comparing themselves to famous figures in order to imply that they have other characteristics in common. This has led me to assign a very low prior probability to such a comparison being wholly innocuous.
As a result, when I see such a statement made, my reaction is to become more a lot cynical about the piece and to question the author’s motives.
Sure, this makes sense. But sufficiently strong filters will filter out people when they say very unusual things independently of whether or not they’re true :D. Catching diamonds in the rough requires more refined heuristics. How would you be able to tell if somebody actually felt universal love and compassion like MLK?
I don’t think I’d ever reach that conclusion based on someone’s self-reporting. Too prone to bias.
So what would convince me? Well, the same way MLK convinced me: actions. Not in the sense of having to lead a civil rights movement, but rather in the sense of displaying that level of love and compassion when there is a cost to doing so. Are you so committed that you’d risk imprisonment or assassination? There’s really no way for me to tell unless real life tests your mettle. I admit, it’s a high bar. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
How then would I gauge the love and compassion of someone who had to hazard neither life nor liberty? I have on occasion witnessed people perform generous acts which would not have even occurred to me, but upon seeing them I could not doubt their rectitude. More common is just a general pattern of behavior: how an individual interacts with others.
In a text-only medium, what you say is all there is. Even face to face, what you say is a large part of what there is. And in any case, what you say flows from who you are.
What would you have people do instead?
Are you actively trying to misinterpret his point?
No. It is possible that I have, nonetheless, misinterpreted his point. However, having reread the context, I see nothing amiss; I am not seeing whatever it is that you are seeing. What are you seeing?
He’s saying, more or less: people take me too literally, they miss the forest for the trees. Your response was to nitpick his statement in a way that missed that point he was trying to make. It seemed ironic, in a way that would irritate me endlessly if I were Jonah.
Ok, yes, I find nitpicking tedious and a great pain also, and far too much of it goes on on LW. But I was not intending a nitpick, but the basic point that what anyone says is their presentation of who they are. Charitable reading and forest and trees and etc. understood, everything that Jonah wants to communicate still has to come through the bottleneck of his words.
Yes, what 9eB1 said: I’m not claiming that I have noteworthy real world accomplishments, or that I’m exceptional in having this capacity.
The Bayesian update that I intended to report on was “it’s possible for lots of people to feel universal love and compassion like MLK and Gandhi,” and I was citing the fact that I learned how to as evidence.
But I’m not pushing back on you in particular: pretty much everyone who I’ve been talking to has been reacting to what I’ve been saying in the same way, and I’d welcome any suggestions for how to convey the relevant information without coming across as arrogant and/or grandiose.
Just as you usually shouldn’t compare your enemies to Hitler, you probably shouldn’t compare yourself or your allies to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These individual’s auras are just too strong, making comparisons mind-kill territory. Also, comparing yourself to both MLK and Gandhi in the same sentence reads like something the character Michael Scott would do.
I removed reference to Gandhi.
The strength of the aura is part of the point that I was trying to make:
This is exactly the sort of miscommunication that I’ve struggled with throughout my life. I want to convey “I know that people have much better prospects than they believe to become like Martin Luther King, because he’s not a god, he’s a human” and instead it comes across as “Jonah thinks that he’s like a god.”
Any suggestions for how to rephrase?
Here I present you with a technique known as “softening”.
Use case: only when you are presenting yourself as above the average people of a particular context or when you are comparing yourself with someone with a very strong positive status.
When not to use it: when you are presenting others above everyone else, as it’s perceived as a praise although never taken literally (“she is smarter than Einstein”), or when you compare yourself with someone with a very strong negative status, as it’s perceived as irony (“I’m less coordinated than an epileptic”). Never compare yourself with someone with a very strong negative status for real, as it generates strong mistrust.
That said, to soften a comparison: you first bring up everyone else to the positive example, then you compare yourself to that.
You did that correctly with the doctor example and the MLK explanation:
Just as a doctor is required to study 10k hours to become a master of the trade, to become an accomplished rationalist requires that much study, and it’s an effort I’ve undertaken.
Everyone can learn to feel the universal love exemplified by MLK, and I too have learned to do that;
you just didn’t know it was necessary.
Thanks, this is really helpful.
Do you have the social feedback from other people that they feel such an aura from you? If you do, you should probably share that information.
If you don’t you are overrating your abilities. Given what you wrote elsewhere about your level of social skill I think that’s likely to be the case.
This was a miscommunication. I’m not saying that I exude such an aura. I’m saying that the aura that people attribute to them is misleading, as it carries connotations that they’re super human, when the actual situation is that they were operating within (roughly) the same biology that all humans are.
It seems to me that you say that without having interacted with any such individuals.
Above you speak about having learned that “caring about people” requires not only thinking about their feeling but actually feeling. Other people react towards the emotional states that are in your body.
If your body would actually resonate strongly with the emotion of compassion that’s something that other people can pick up. It’s produces an aura for someone like Ghandi that makes other people want to follow him.
Having the same biology is one thing, acquiring a skill at world class level in weeks or months is another.
Add something like “of course I know I personally will never come close to having his level of compassion.”
I don’t know whether you’re being playful, defeatist, or misreading me. :-)
My point is that it is possible to come close to having his level of compassion: that the difference is apparently to a surprisingly large degree more environmental than genetic.
Are you claiming that communicating this point is hopeless?
I think it is worse than hopeless on multiple fronts.
First problem:
Let’s take another good quality: Honesty. People who volunteer, “I always tell the truth,” generally lie more than the average population, and should be distrusted. (Yes, yes, Sam Harris. But the skew is the wrong way.) “I am awesome at good life quality,” generally fails if your audience has had, well, significant social experience.
So you want to demonstrate this claim by word and deed, and not explicitly make the claim in most cases. Here, I understand the reason for making it, and the parts where you say you want good things to happen to people are fine. (I have on LW said something like, “I have a reputation for principled honesty, says me,” in arguing that game tactics were not dishonest and should not apply to out-of-game reputation.) But the MLK thing is way-too-much, like “I never lie,” is way-too-much.
Second problem:
As others have said, the comparison is political and inapt. You couldn’t find anyone less iconic? Penn Jillette? Someone?
And MLK is known for his actions and risks and willingness to engage in non-violence. I read somewhere that ethnic struggles sometimes end badly. In a world where the FBI was trying to get him to kill himself, he stood for peace. Under those circumstance, his treatment of other humans was generally very good. That’s not a test you’ve gone through.
Third problem:
The confidence of the statement is way, way out of line with where it should be. You have some idea of MLK’s love and compassion for other people, but not all of it. Maybe MLK thought, “Screw all those people in government; hope they die screaming. But I think that war leads to more losses for black people, so despite my burning hatred, I’m putting on a better public face.” (I admit this is unlikely.) He certainly had some personal bad qualities. Maybe you love people more than MLK. (This also seems unlikely, but stay with me.)
We cannot measure love and compassion in kilograms. We also do not know what people are like all the time. I realize that we can put people into general buckets, but I’d caution this sort of precision for others and yourself to a point where you can call people equivalent by this measure. And if we could measure it, there are no infinite values.
Fourth problem:
As infinite love for all humans is not possible… well, it’s not even a good idea. You shouldn’t have compassion and love for all people. The guy who just loves stabbing toddlers needs to be housed away from toddlers even though we’re ruining his life, which was so happy in those delightful toddler-stabbing days. And if you’re using your love and compassion on that guy, well, maybe there are other people who can get some o’ that with better effect.
Because love and compassion isn’t really a meaningful construct if it’s just some internal view of society with no outward effects. Love and compassion is mostly meaningful only in what’s done (like, say, leading life-risking marches against injustices.)
OK, that’s it. Hope it helps.
No worries; just say that you’ve “begun to develop” the same capacity, after establishing (as I believe you’ve already done with clarity) that you believe that the whole human race can attain the fullness for which you are also striving.
Unless you really did mean “developed,” as in, you’ve already developed it. In which case, that’s an extraordinary claim. People will tend to assign it low probability and (seeking an alternate explanation) attribute your claim to it as plausibly resulting from an inflated sense of your own accomplishment, i.e. pride and arrogance, unless you provide extraordinary evidence that you speak truly.
If you really think you’ve already achieved MLK or Ghandi-esque compassion, based on what you’re describing, I wonder if an apter comparison might be the Greek Stoics, a lack of negative reaction resulting from not perceiving an authentic attack, rather than by superhuman dominance of your negative emotions, and a superabundance of positive emotions.
Your description of not feeling insulted because people are only responding naturally to a misunderstanding of you is familiar to me, as is the accompanying lack of offense stemming therefrom. I don’t doubt you might really have no offense at all in this area, and if it is only in this area that you believe to have Gandhi-esque powers, just clarify that you aren’t referring to mastery of every manifestation of love, only this particular one, and that for you it has come by not perceiving an offense, rather than by overcoming your offense.
Thanks, this is fine.
What I mean is “what I’ve developed recently is in the same general direction of what they had”, not “my affective disposition is identical with that of MLK’s.” I don’t have strong views how exactly how close the similarity is, I just know that I’m much further in that direction than I was before.
I don’t personally know that MLK had this specific quality. I’ve made explicit what you have implied, that he did. Even if he did have it, I don’t think you could reduce his general capacity for love to this one idea, hence “part of.” But to avoid apparent arrogance, perhaps the first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph might be written like so.
“This perspective I’m developing is part of what gave Martin Luther King the capacity to feel universal love and compassion.”
Thanks.
I misread you.
How would you differentiate between someone who (1) has shifted in the direction of MLK via compassion, or someone who has (2) reached his level of compassion?
James_Miller has covered the ape-coalition elements of that comparison in a sibling comment. I’ll focus on the skill elements.
The way the claim is worded makes two different unintended (I suspect) claims.
The first is “developed the capacity … the way” ambiguates between “now perceive a skill, and am at the first level” and “have the same skill level.” If I say “I have developed the capacity to swim the way Michael Phelps can,” people will ask me where all my gold medals are. I could have in mind that I can swim at all, and am just using Michael Phelps as an example of what human swimming looks like for people whose only experience of swimming is what they see on TV. (This last sentence is important, and the underlying assumptions might be worth a post if I can figure out the right way to explain them.)
The second is “the way Martin Luther King” claims discernment. If I were to say “I know why Michael Phelps is as good a swimmer as he is,” that implies I am a critic of swimming with at least as much discernment as Phelps has quality as an athlete. It’s not necessarily the claim that I personally could be as good as swimming as he is—perhaps I need different genes to have arms proportioned better for swimming, and to have spent my childhood in a different way. But it is the claim that my model is strong enough that we can use it for correct counterfactual reasoning on extreme cases.
When I read that statement, I inserted qualifiers like “as I understand them.” This is how I would have worded it, with minimal content changes:
(“one” is the weakest part of that sentence; substituting “me” runs into status issues, substituting “almost anyone” runs into challenges about inherent aptitude / the rivalrous nature of positions like those held by MLK and Gandhi, and so on.)
[edit] I just noticed JRMayne’s comment, which covers much of the same ground. Specifically, their third problem is my problem of discernment, and their first problem is similar to my “same skill level” ambiguated claim.