Did the oil bird mental exercise. Came to conclusion that I don’t care at all about anyone else, and am only doing good things for altruistic high and social benefits. Sad.
If you acctully think it’s sad (Do you?), then you have a higher order set of values that wants you to want to care about others.
If you want to want to care, you can do things to change yourself so that you do care. Even more importantly, you can begin to act act as if you care, because “caring about the world isn’t about having a gut feeling that corresponds to the amount of suffering in the world, it’s about doing the right thing anyway.”
All I know is that I want to the sort of person who cares. So, I act as that sort of person, and thereby become her.
The biggest thing is just to act like you are already the sort of person who does care. Go do the good work.
Find people who are better than you. Hang out with them. “You become like the 6 people you spend the most time with” and all that. (I remember reading the chapter on penetrating Azkaban in HP:MoR, and feeling how much I didn’t care. I knew that there are places in the world where the suffering is as great as in that fictional place, but that it didn’t bother me, I would just go about my day and go to sleep, where the fictional Harry is deeply shaken by his experience. I felt, “I’m not Good [in the moral sense] enough” and then thought that if I’m not good enough, I need to find people who are, who will help me be better. I need to find my Hermiones.)
I’m trying to find the most Good people of my generation, but I realized long ago that I shouldn’t be looking for Good people, so much as I should be looking for people who are actively seeking to be better than they are. (If you want to be as Good as you can be, please message me. Maybe we can help each other.)
My feeling of moral inadequacy compared to Harry’s feelings towards Azkaban (fictional) aren’t really fair. My brain isn’t designed to be moved abstract concepts. Harry (fictional) saw that suffering first hand and was changed by it, I only mentally multiply. I’m thinking that I need to put myself in situations where I can experience the awfulness of the world viscerally. People make fun of teenagers going to “help” build houses in the third world: it’s pretty massively inefficient to ship untrained teenagers to Mexico to do manual labor (or only sort of do it), when their hourly output would be much higher if they just got a college degree and donated. Yet I know at least one person (someone who I respect, one of my “Hermines”) who went to build houses in Mexico for a month and was heavily impacted by it and it spurred her to be of service more generally. (She told me that on the flight back to the states she was emotionally upset because, while she was homesick and tired of eating beans and rice for every meal (she’s vegan), she knew that life would get in the way, and she would lose the perspective she had in Mexico. The test tomorrow has a way of seeming all important, and she was afraid of losing that perspective of how much worse other people had it, and what the Truly important things are. She got a tattoo that reads “Gratitude” in Spanish, as a permanent and perpetual reminder.)
Maybe you need to go see squalor? I haven’t, so I can’t say. I have thought that I have chose someone concrete to help, perhaps on a weekly basis, so that when I’m considering buying something I don’t need, my thought process isn’t “If I buy this, that’s 4 dollars less that I can give to charity”, but instead, “If I buy this, I Annie won’t get that vaccine.” I haven’t implemented this yet, so I can’t say how effective will be. Social pressure might help: let me know if you want to try something like this with me.
living in pain sent my carometer from below average to full. Seeing squalor definitely did something. I think it probably depends how you see it—did you talk to people as equals or see them as different types of people you couldn’t relate to / didn’t fit a certain criteria? Being surrounded by suffering from a young age doesn’t seem to make people care—its being shocked by suffering after not having had much of it around that is occasionally very powerful—Like the story about the Buddha growing up in the palace then seeing sickness, death and age for the first time?
The difference is that there are many actions that help other people but don’t give an appropriate altruistic high (because your brain doesn’t see or relate to those people much) and there are actions that produce a net zero or net negative effect but do produce an altruistic high.
The built-in care-o-meter of your body has known faults and biases, and it measures something often related (at least in classic hunter-gatherer society model) but generally different from actually caring about other people.
I came to the conclusion that I needed more quantitative data about the ecosystem. Sure birds covered in oil look sad, but would a massive loss of biodiversity on THIS beach effect the entire ecosystem? The real question I had in this thought experiment was “how should I prevent this from happening in the future?” Perhaps nationalizing oil drilling platforms would allow governments to better regulate the potentially hazardous practice. There is a game going on whereby some players are motivated by the profit incentive and others are motivated by genuine altruism, but it doesn’t take place on the beach. I certainly never owned an oil rig, and couldn’t really competently discuss the problems associated with actual large high pressure systems. Does anyone here know if oil spills are an unavoidable consequence of the best long term strategy for human development? That might be important to an informed decision on how much value to place on the cost of the accident, which would inform my decision about how much of my resources I should devote to cleaning the birds.
From another perspective, its a lot easier to quantify the cost for some outcomes … This makes it genuinely difficult to define genuinely altruistic strategies for entities experiencing scope insensitivity. And along that line giving away money because of scope insensitivity IS amoral. It differs judgement to a poorly defined entity which might manage our funds well or deplorably. Founding a cooperative for the purpose of beach restoration seems like a more ethically sound goal, unless of course you have more information about the bird cleaners. The sad truth is that making the right choice often depends on information not readily available, and the lesson I take from this entire discussion is simply how important it is that humankind evolve more sophisticated ways of sharing large amounts of information efficiently particularly where economic decisions are concerned.
Are you favouring wireheading then? (See hyporational’s comment.) That is, finding it oppressively tedious that you can only get that feeling by actually going out and helping people, and wishing you could get it by a direct hit?
I think he wants to do things for which his brain whispers “this is altruistic” right now. It is true that wireheading would lead his brain to whisper that about everything. But from his current position, wireheading is not a benefit, because he values future events according to his current brain state, not his future brain state.
No, just as I eat sweets for sweet pleasure, not for getting sugar into my body, but I still wouldn’t wirehead into constantly feeling sweetness in my mouth.
Funny thing. I started out expanding this, trying to explain it as thoroughly as possible, and, all of a sudden, it became confusing to me. I guess, it was not a well thought out or consistent position to begin with. Thank you for a random rationality lesson, but you are not getting this idea expanded, alas.
Assuming his case is similar to mine: the altruism-sense favours wireheading—it just wants to be satisfied—while other moral intuitions say wireheading is wrong. When I imagine wireheading (like timujin imagines having a constant taste of sweetness in his mouth), I imagine still having that part of the brain which screams “THIS IS FAKE, YOU GOTTA WAKE UP, NEO”. And that part wouldn’t shut up unless I actually believed I was out (or it’s shut off, naturally).
When modeling myself as sub-agents, then in my case at least the anti-wireheading and pro-altruism parts appear to be independent agents by default: “I want to help people/be a good person” and “I want it to actually be real” are separate urges. What the OP seems to be appealing to is a system which says “I want to actually help people” in one go—sympathy, perhaps, as opposed to satisfying your altruism self-image.
What is the difference between an altruistic high and caring about other people? Isn’t the former what the latter feels like?
If there’s no difference we arrive at the general problem of wireheading. I suspect very few people who identify themselves as altruists would choose being wireheaded for altruistic high. What are the parameters that would keep them from doing so?
If there’s no difference we arrive at the general problem of wireheading.
Yes. Let me change my question. If (absent imaginary interventions with electrodes or drugs that don’t currently exist) an altruistic high is, literally, what it feels like when you care about others and act to help them, then saying “I don’t care about them, I just wanted the high” is like saying “I don’t enjoy sex, I just do it for the pleasure”, or “A stubbed toe doesn’t hurt, it just gives me a jolt of pain.” In short, reductionism gone wrong, angst at contemplating the physicality of mind.
It seems to me you can care about having sex without having the pleasure as well as care about not stubbing your toe without the pain. Caring about helping other people without the altruistic high? No problem.
It’s not clear to me where the physicality of mind or reductionism gone wrong enter the picture, not to mention angst. Oversimplification is aesthetics gone wrong.
ETA: I suppose it would be appropriately generous to assume that you meant altruistic high as one of the many mind states that caring feels like, but in many instances caring in the sense that I’m motivated to do something doesn’t seem to feel like anything at all. Perhaps there’s plenty of automation involved and only novel stimuli initiate noticeable perturbations. It would be an easy mistake to only count the instances where caring feels like something, which I think happened in timujin’s case. It would also be a mistake to think you only actually care about something when it doesn’t feel like anything.
It seems to me you can care about having sex without having the pleasure as well as care about not stubbing your toe without the pain. Caring about helping other people without the altruistic high? No problem.
I was addressing timujin’s original comment, where he professed to desiring the altruistic high while being indifferent to other people, which on the face of it is paradoxical. Perhaps, I speculate, noticing that the feeling is a thing distinct from what the feeling is about has led him to interpret this as discovering that he doesn’t care about the latter.
Or, it also occurs to me, perhaps he is experiencing the physical feeling without the connection to action, as when people taking morphine report that they still feel the pain, but it no longer hurts.
Did the oil bird mental exercise. Came to conclusion that I don’t care at all about anyone else, and am only doing good things for altruistic high and social benefits. Sad.
If you acctully think it’s sad (Do you?), then you have a higher order set of values that wants you to want to care about others.
If you want to want to care, you can do things to change yourself so that you do care. Even more importantly, you can begin to act act as if you care, because “caring about the world isn’t about having a gut feeling that corresponds to the amount of suffering in the world, it’s about doing the right thing anyway.”
All I know is that I want to the sort of person who cares. So, I act as that sort of person, and thereby become her.
Would you care to give examples or explain what to look for?
The biggest thing is just to act like you are already the sort of person who does care. Go do the good work.
Find people who are better than you. Hang out with them. “You become like the 6 people you spend the most time with” and all that. (I remember reading the chapter on penetrating Azkaban in HP:MoR, and feeling how much I didn’t care. I knew that there are places in the world where the suffering is as great as in that fictional place, but that it didn’t bother me, I would just go about my day and go to sleep, where the fictional Harry is deeply shaken by his experience. I felt, “I’m not Good [in the moral sense] enough” and then thought that if I’m not good enough, I need to find people who are, who will help me be better. I need to find my Hermiones.)
I’m trying to find the most Good people of my generation, but I realized long ago that I shouldn’t be looking for Good people, so much as I should be looking for people who are actively seeking to be better than they are. (If you want to be as Good as you can be, please message me. Maybe we can help each other.)
My feeling of moral inadequacy compared to Harry’s feelings towards Azkaban (fictional) aren’t really fair. My brain isn’t designed to be moved abstract concepts. Harry (fictional) saw that suffering first hand and was changed by it, I only mentally multiply. I’m thinking that I need to put myself in situations where I can experience the awfulness of the world viscerally. People make fun of teenagers going to “help” build houses in the third world: it’s pretty massively inefficient to ship untrained teenagers to Mexico to do manual labor (or only sort of do it), when their hourly output would be much higher if they just got a college degree and donated. Yet I know at least one person (someone who I respect, one of my “Hermines”) who went to build houses in Mexico for a month and was heavily impacted by it and it spurred her to be of service more generally. (She told me that on the flight back to the states she was emotionally upset because, while she was homesick and tired of eating beans and rice for every meal (she’s vegan), she knew that life would get in the way, and she would lose the perspective she had in Mexico. The test tomorrow has a way of seeming all important, and she was afraid of losing that perspective of how much worse other people had it, and what the Truly important things are. She got a tattoo that reads “Gratitude” in Spanish, as a permanent and perpetual reminder.)
Maybe you need to go see squalor? I haven’t, so I can’t say. I have thought that I have chose someone concrete to help, perhaps on a weekly basis, so that when I’m considering buying something I don’t need, my thought process isn’t “If I buy this, that’s 4 dollars less that I can give to charity”, but instead, “If I buy this, I Annie won’t get that vaccine.” I haven’t implemented this yet, so I can’t say how effective will be. Social pressure might help: let me know if you want to try something like this with me.
Does that help?
I have seen squalor, and in my particular case it did not recalibrate my care-o-meter at all. YMMV, of course.
living in pain sent my carometer from below average to full. Seeing squalor definitely did something. I think it probably depends how you see it—did you talk to people as equals or see them as different types of people you couldn’t relate to / didn’t fit a certain criteria? Being surrounded by suffering from a young age doesn’t seem to make people care—its being shocked by suffering after not having had much of it around that is occasionally very powerful—Like the story about the Buddha growing up in the palace then seeing sickness, death and age for the first time?
What is the difference between an altruistic high and caring about other people? Isn’t the former what the latter feels like?
The difference is that there are many actions that help other people but don’t give an appropriate altruistic high (because your brain doesn’t see or relate to those people much) and there are actions that produce a net zero or net negative effect but do produce an altruistic high.
The built-in care-o-meter of your body has known faults and biases, and it measures something often related (at least in classic hunter-gatherer society model) but generally different from actually caring about other people.
I came to the conclusion that I needed more quantitative data about the ecosystem. Sure birds covered in oil look sad, but would a massive loss of biodiversity on THIS beach effect the entire ecosystem? The real question I had in this thought experiment was “how should I prevent this from happening in the future?” Perhaps nationalizing oil drilling platforms would allow governments to better regulate the potentially hazardous practice. There is a game going on whereby some players are motivated by the profit incentive and others are motivated by genuine altruism, but it doesn’t take place on the beach. I certainly never owned an oil rig, and couldn’t really competently discuss the problems associated with actual large high pressure systems. Does anyone here know if oil spills are an unavoidable consequence of the best long term strategy for human development? That might be important to an informed decision on how much value to place on the cost of the accident, which would inform my decision about how much of my resources I should devote to cleaning the birds.
From another perspective, its a lot easier to quantify the cost for some outcomes … This makes it genuinely difficult to define genuinely altruistic strategies for entities experiencing scope insensitivity. And along that line giving away money because of scope insensitivity IS amoral. It differs judgement to a poorly defined entity which might manage our funds well or deplorably. Founding a cooperative for the purpose of beach restoration seems like a more ethically sound goal, unless of course you have more information about the bird cleaners. The sad truth is that making the right choice often depends on information not readily available, and the lesson I take from this entire discussion is simply how important it is that humankind evolve more sophisticated ways of sharing large amounts of information efficiently particularly where economic decisions are concerned.
Because I wouldn’t actually care if my actions actually help, as long as my brain thinks they do.
Are you favouring wireheading then? (See hyporational’s comment.) That is, finding it oppressively tedious that you can only get that feeling by actually going out and helping people, and wishing you could get it by a direct hit?
I think he wants to do things for which his brain whispers “this is altruistic” right now. It is true that wireheading would lead his brain to whisper that about everything. But from his current position, wireheading is not a benefit, because he values future events according to his current brain state, not his future brain state.
No, just as I eat sweets for sweet pleasure, not for getting sugar into my body, but I still wouldn’t wirehead into constantly feeling sweetness in my mouth.
I find this a confusing position. Please expand
Funny thing. I started out expanding this, trying to explain it as thoroughly as possible, and, all of a sudden, it became confusing to me. I guess, it was not a well thought out or consistent position to begin with. Thank you for a random rationality lesson, but you are not getting this idea expanded, alas.
Assuming his case is similar to mine: the altruism-sense favours wireheading—it just wants to be satisfied—while other moral intuitions say wireheading is wrong. When I imagine wireheading (like timujin imagines having a constant taste of sweetness in his mouth), I imagine still having that part of the brain which screams “THIS IS FAKE, YOU GOTTA WAKE UP, NEO”. And that part wouldn’t shut up unless I actually believed I was out (or it’s shut off, naturally).
When modeling myself as sub-agents, then in my case at least the anti-wireheading and pro-altruism parts appear to be independent agents by default: “I want to help people/be a good person” and “I want it to actually be real” are separate urges. What the OP seems to be appealing to is a system which says “I want to actually help people” in one go—sympathy, perhaps, as opposed to satisfying your altruism self-image.
If there’s no difference we arrive at the general problem of wireheading. I suspect very few people who identify themselves as altruists would choose being wireheaded for altruistic high. What are the parameters that would keep them from doing so?
Yes. Let me change my question. If (absent imaginary interventions with electrodes or drugs that don’t currently exist) an altruistic high is, literally, what it feels like when you care about others and act to help them, then saying “I don’t care about them, I just wanted the high” is like saying “I don’t enjoy sex, I just do it for the pleasure”, or “A stubbed toe doesn’t hurt, it just gives me a jolt of pain.” In short, reductionism gone wrong, angst at contemplating the physicality of mind.
It seems to me you can care about having sex without having the pleasure as well as care about not stubbing your toe without the pain. Caring about helping other people without the altruistic high? No problem.
It’s not clear to me where the physicality of mind or reductionism gone wrong enter the picture, not to mention angst. Oversimplification is aesthetics gone wrong.
ETA: I suppose it would be appropriately generous to assume that you meant altruistic high as one of the many mind states that caring feels like, but in many instances caring in the sense that I’m motivated to do something doesn’t seem to feel like anything at all. Perhaps there’s plenty of automation involved and only novel stimuli initiate noticeable perturbations. It would be an easy mistake to only count the instances where caring feels like something, which I think happened in timujin’s case. It would also be a mistake to think you only actually care about something when it doesn’t feel like anything.
I was addressing timujin’s original comment, where he professed to desiring the altruistic high while being indifferent to other people, which on the face of it is paradoxical. Perhaps, I speculate, noticing that the feeling is a thing distinct from what the feeling is about has led him to interpret this as discovering that he doesn’t care about the latter.
Or, it also occurs to me, perhaps he is experiencing the physical feeling without the connection to action, as when people taking morphine report that they still feel the pain, but it no longer hurts.
Brains can go wrong in all sorts of ways.