Presumably that’s the first thing dark lords (and their real-life equivalents) convince themselves of, that there is no inherent good and evil. Once that part is over with, anything you do can be classified as good.
Can’t speak to any fictional dark lords, but the real-life equivalent seems more prone to deciding that there is an evil, which is true evil, and which is manifest upon the world in the person of those guys over there.
At least, that’s what the rhetoric pretty consistently says. Either a given dark-lordish individual is a very good liar or actually believes it, and knowing what we do about ideology and the prevalence of sociopathy I’m inclined to default to the latter.
(I wouldn’t say that Oscar Wilde and others with his interaction style particularly resemble dark lords, though.)
Presumably that’s the first thing dark lords (and their real-life equivalents) convince themselves of, that there is no inherent good and evil.
The hell is the real-life equivalent of a dark lord? Can that even be addressed without getting into discouraged topics?
Also, “convince” implies not only intent but that the individual started with a different belief, maybe even that it is universal to start with a belief in good as evil. That sounds like a couple of unwarranted assumptions.
On a personal note, I once expressed the belief that there was no good or evil. I did so privately because I well understood there are undesirable consequences of sharing that belief. Before that time I had spent much thought over much of my young life trying to make sense of the concepts, to define them in ways that were consistent and useful, and was constantly frustrated.
I did not convince myself that there is no inherent good and evil so much as I gave up on trying to convince myself to believe otherwise. I expect a fictional ‘dark lord’ or real-life ‘successful and wildly powerful individual of objectionable character’ could as easily experience the same surrender among a larger number of alternative ways to leave good and evil behind.
(On a further and more indulgently personal note, I’ve since become disinterested in any requirement for good or evil to be ‘inherent:’ good and evil do not need to be applied in a perfectly consistent fashion in order to be useful. And it happens that I am evil and likewise disinterested in being good for goodness’ sake.)
Once that part is over with, anything you do can be classified as good.
I may misunderstand this due to one or more philosophical shortcomings, but if why bother classifying anything as ‘good’ if you’ve left ‘good’ behind?
Yes. Newbs deny the relevance of good and evil; dark lords recognize extraordinarily useful tools when they see them.
I’d be inclined to think along the lines of Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, etc.
I think your list of dark lords is padded. I’m pretty sure there’s at least one well-intentioned idealist in there and Kim Jong Il probably wasn’t much to speak of in the ‘lord’ department.
I suspect they all had good intentions on some level, although they probably thought they were justified in getting personal perks for their great work.
I’d say that being the absolute ruler of a country, subject to practically fanatical hero worship, is enough to qualify one as a “lord” even if it’s a pretty lousy country and you do a crap job of running it. It’s not as if any of them were particularly competent.
As for “padding,” there are plenty of other examples I could have used, but I didn’t expect as many readers to recognize, say, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.
I suspect they all had good intentions on some level, although they probably thought they were justified in getting personal perks for their great work.
I’d say that being the absolute ruler of a country, subject to practically fanatical hero worship, is enough to qualify one as a “lord” even if it’s a pretty lousy country and you do a crap job of running it. It’s not as if any of them were particularly competent.
If you want to claim that intention and ability are meaningless, please come right out and say so. If you please, also describe what is left to a ’”dark lord” if evil intent and the ability to achieve it are -- Waitaminute.
We’re skirting an argument of definition here, so I’ll just skip the quibbling and jump straight to attacks on your character, if you don’t mind:
You are not even trying to contribute, here. You’re just swinging at anything that gets close, assured that the contrarian audience in your imagination will admire the wide, wild arcs your bat carves out of empty space.
Stalin and Mao incompetent? Do you beleive that clawing one’s way to the top of an organization of that size and overseeing it’s operation and—yes, after a fashion—prosperity is something that any chump within one standard deviation of the mean could stumble into like a Lotto winner?
Cold, quiet heavens, no. It takes a special breed with special lessons just to pull that off in a safe, civil environment. Doing so in place where promotions are obtained with obituaries filters for even more specialized aptitudes. Average people, Lotto winners, incompetents don’t even last long on their own.
As for “padding,” there are plenty of other examples I could have used, but I didn’t expect as many readers to recognize, say, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.
Yes, I accused you of namedropping without understanding. I gave you a bit of wiggle room so you could weave a more flattering narrative out of your actions. I threw you a rope but you preferred your shovel.
If you want to claim that intention and ability are meaningless, please come right out and say so. If you please, also describe what is left to a ’”dark lord” if evil intent and the ability to achieve it are—Waitaminute.
We’re skirting an argument of definition here, so I’ll just skip the quibbling and jump straight to attacks on your character, if you don’t mind:
As a matter of fact I do mind, and I’m more than a little insulted. You could just ask what I mean by a Dark Lord if I don’t expect it to entail deliberate evil or competence.
If someone is a totalitarian ruler who knowingly and willingly causes the deaths of a large proportion of their citizens and imposes policies that contribute to low levels of civil liberties and standards of living, I think it’s fair to describe them as the real life equivalent of “dark lords,” although I wouldn’t describe them as such in ordinary conversation, and if you look at the context of the conversation there’s nothing to imply that I would.
I think this category carves out a significant body of individuals with related characteristics. I also think that, given what we know about human nature, it’s unlikely that they see themselves as people doing bad things.
Stalin and Mao incompetent? Do you beleive that clawing one’s way to the top of an organization of that size and overseeing it’s operation and—yes, after a fashion—prosperity is something that any chump within one standard deviation of the mean could stumble into like a Lotto winner?
Cold, quiet heavens, no. It takes a special breed with special lessons just to pull that off in a safe, civil environment. Doing so in place where promotions are obtained with obituaries filters for even more specialized aptitudes. Average people, Lotto winners, incompetents don’t even last long on their own.
I was referring to competence at running countries, not competence at climbing social ladders. Clearly they possessed a considerable measure of the latter, but then, all of them instituted policies which could have been predicted as disastrous by people with even an ordinary measure of good sense.
It might be narratively appealing to imagine that our greatest real life villains are like Professor Quirrell, amoral and brilliant, but their actual track records suggest that while they may be good at social maneuvering, they aren’t possessed of particularly good judgment or skills of self analysis.
If you want to argue my points, and get into the actual policies and psychology of these people, feel free to. But if you’re going to skip straight to accusations of poor conduct and character without even bothering to ask me to clarify my point, I’m going to accuse you of being excessively hostile and having poor priors for good faith in this community.
That’s excellent advice for writing fiction. Audiences root for charming characters much more than for good ones. Especially useful when your world only contains villains. This is harder in real life, since your opponents can ignore your witty one-liners and emphasize your mass murders.
I don’t know that you can really classify people as X or ¬X. I mean, have you not seen individuals be X in certain situations and ¬X in other situations?
On the face of it I would absolutely disagree with Wilde on that: to live a moral life one absolutely needs to distinguish between good and bad. Charm (in bad people) and tedium (in good people) get in the way of this.
On the other hand, was Wilde really just blowing a big raspberry at the moralisers of his day ? Sort of saying “I care more about charm and tedium than what you call morality”. I don’t know enough about his context …
Since I can’t be bothered to do real research, I’ll just point out that this Yahoo answer says that the quote is spoken by Lord Darlington. Oscar Wilde was a humorist and an entertainer. He makes amusing characters. His characters say amusing things.
Do not read too much into this quote and, without further evidence, I would not attribute this philosophy to Oscar Wilde himself.
(I haven’t read Lady Windermere’s Fan, where this if from, but this sounds very much like something Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray would say. And Lord Henry is one of the main causes of the Dorian’s fall from grace in this book; he’s not exactly a very positive character but certainly an entertainingly cynical one!)
If your own action is to empower another person, understanding that person’s goodness or badness is necessary to understanding the action’s goodness or badness.
To me at least, it captures the notion of how the perceived Truth/Falsity of a belief rest solely in our categorization of it as ‘tribal’ or ‘non-tribal’: weird or normal. Normal beliefs are true, weird beliefs are false.
It is absurd to divide people into familiar worldviews or unfamiliar worldviews. People either have closer environmental causality or farther environmental causality.
Is it worse to enter a state of superimposed death and life than to die?
I hope not. That’s the state we are all in now and what we are entering constantly. Unless there are rounding errors in the universe we haven’t detected yet.
I think life requires a system large and complex enough to produce decoherence between “alive” and “dead” in timescales shorter than required to define “alive” at all.
Anything not a paperclip, or in opposition to further paperclipping. You might ask, “Why not just say ‘non-paperclips’?” but anti-paperclips include paperclips deliberately designed to unbend, or which work at anti-paperclip purposes (say, a paperclip being used to short-circuit the electrical systems in a paperclip factory).
I brought a box of paperclips into my office today to use as bowl picks for my new bong, if I rebend them after I use them can I avoid becoming an anti-paperclip?
-- Oscar Wilde
Thank you, Professor Quirrell.
That quote is attributed to Oscar Wilde, not Professor Quirrell.
Or is Oscar Wilde the same being as Professor Quirrell?
Oscar Wilde vary most == I was scary Voldemort
It does not make sense, but it still is some evidence pointing at Oscar Wilde.
By such reasoning, Eliezer’s own work shows very clear signs of being sorcerous and/or divinely preordained.
...Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone there if he still wants to pretend that he’s not in a covenant with scary unfathomable mathematical constructs, eh?
Why did I find this so amusing?
Presumably that’s the first thing dark lords (and their real-life equivalents) convince themselves of, that there is no inherent good and evil. Once that part is over with, anything you do can be classified as good.
Can’t speak to any fictional dark lords, but the real-life equivalent seems more prone to deciding that there is an evil, which is true evil, and which is manifest upon the world in the person of those guys over there.
At least, that’s what the rhetoric pretty consistently says. Either a given dark-lordish individual is a very good liar or actually believes it, and knowing what we do about ideology and the prevalence of sociopathy I’m inclined to default to the latter.
(I wouldn’t say that Oscar Wilde and others with his interaction style particularly resemble dark lords, though.)
The hell is the real-life equivalent of a dark lord? Can that even be addressed without getting into discouraged topics?
Also, “convince” implies not only intent but that the individual started with a different belief, maybe even that it is universal to start with a belief in good as evil. That sounds like a couple of unwarranted assumptions.
On a personal note, I once expressed the belief that there was no good or evil. I did so privately because I well understood there are undesirable consequences of sharing that belief. Before that time I had spent much thought over much of my young life trying to make sense of the concepts, to define them in ways that were consistent and useful, and was constantly frustrated.
I did not convince myself that there is no inherent good and evil so much as I gave up on trying to convince myself to believe otherwise. I expect a fictional ‘dark lord’ or real-life ‘successful and wildly powerful individual of objectionable character’ could as easily experience the same surrender among a larger number of alternative ways to leave good and evil behind.
(On a further and more indulgently personal note, I’ve since become disinterested in any requirement for good or evil to be ‘inherent:’ good and evil do not need to be applied in a perfectly consistent fashion in order to be useful. And it happens that I am evil and likewise disinterested in being good for goodness’ sake.)
I may misunderstand this due to one or more philosophical shortcomings, but if why bother classifying anything as ‘good’ if you’ve left ‘good’ behind?
I’d be inclined to think along the lines of Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, etc.
I think Nornagest’s comment provides a more accurate characterization.
Yes. Newbs deny the relevance of good and evil; dark lords recognize extraordinarily useful tools when they see them.
I think your list of dark lords is padded. I’m pretty sure there’s at least one well-intentioned idealist in there and Kim Jong Il probably wasn’t much to speak of in the ‘lord’ department.
I suspect they all had good intentions on some level, although they probably thought they were justified in getting personal perks for their great work.
I’d say that being the absolute ruler of a country, subject to practically fanatical hero worship, is enough to qualify one as a “lord” even if it’s a pretty lousy country and you do a crap job of running it. It’s not as if any of them were particularly competent.
As for “padding,” there are plenty of other examples I could have used, but I didn’t expect as many readers to recognize, say, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.
FTFY. :-)
If you want to claim that intention and ability are meaningless, please come right out and say so. If you please, also describe what is left to a ’”dark lord” if evil intent and the ability to achieve it are -- Waitaminute.
We’re skirting an argument of definition here, so I’ll just skip the quibbling and jump straight to attacks on your character, if you don’t mind:
You are not even trying to contribute, here. You’re just swinging at anything that gets close, assured that the contrarian audience in your imagination will admire the wide, wild arcs your bat carves out of empty space.
Stalin and Mao incompetent? Do you beleive that clawing one’s way to the top of an organization of that size and overseeing it’s operation and—yes, after a fashion—prosperity is something that any chump within one standard deviation of the mean could stumble into like a Lotto winner?
Cold, quiet heavens, no. It takes a special breed with special lessons just to pull that off in a safe, civil environment. Doing so in place where promotions are obtained with obituaries filters for even more specialized aptitudes. Average people, Lotto winners, incompetents don’t even last long on their own.
Yes, I accused you of namedropping without understanding. I gave you a bit of wiggle room so you could weave a more flattering narrative out of your actions. I threw you a rope but you preferred your shovel.
TL;DR: I see you trollin’.
As a matter of fact I do mind, and I’m more than a little insulted. You could just ask what I mean by a Dark Lord if I don’t expect it to entail deliberate evil or competence.
If someone is a totalitarian ruler who knowingly and willingly causes the deaths of a large proportion of their citizens and imposes policies that contribute to low levels of civil liberties and standards of living, I think it’s fair to describe them as the real life equivalent of “dark lords,” although I wouldn’t describe them as such in ordinary conversation, and if you look at the context of the conversation there’s nothing to imply that I would.
I think this category carves out a significant body of individuals with related characteristics. I also think that, given what we know about human nature, it’s unlikely that they see themselves as people doing bad things.
I was referring to competence at running countries, not competence at climbing social ladders. Clearly they possessed a considerable measure of the latter, but then, all of them instituted policies which could have been predicted as disastrous by people with even an ordinary measure of good sense.
It might be narratively appealing to imagine that our greatest real life villains are like Professor Quirrell, amoral and brilliant, but their actual track records suggest that while they may be good at social maneuvering, they aren’t possessed of particularly good judgment or skills of self analysis.
If you want to argue my points, and get into the actual policies and psychology of these people, feel free to. But if you’re going to skip straight to accusations of poor conduct and character without even bothering to ask me to clarify my point, I’m going to accuse you of being excessively hostile and having poor priors for good faith in this community.
You might be overestimating how much an ‘ordinary’ measure of good sense is. (Half the human population have IQs below 100.)
That seems true… Interesting.
That’s excellent advice for writing fiction. Audiences root for charming characters much more than for good ones. Especially useful when your world only contains villains. This is harder in real life, since your opponents can ignore your witty one-liners and emphasize your mass murders.
(This comment brought to you by House Lannister.)
The scary thing is how often it does work in real life. (Except that in real life charm is more than just witty one-liners.
I don’t know that you can really classify people as X or ¬X. I mean, have you not seen individuals be X in certain situations and ¬X in other situations?
&c.
On the face of it I would absolutely disagree with Wilde on that: to live a moral life one absolutely needs to distinguish between good and bad. Charm (in bad people) and tedium (in good people) get in the way of this.
On the other hand, was Wilde really just blowing a big raspberry at the moralisers of his day ? Sort of saying “I care more about charm and tedium than what you call morality”. I don’t know enough about his context …
Since I can’t be bothered to do real research, I’ll just point out that this Yahoo answer says that the quote is spoken by Lord Darlington. Oscar Wilde was a humorist and an entertainer. He makes amusing characters. His characters say amusing things.
Do not read too much into this quote and, without further evidence, I would not attribute this philosophy to Oscar Wilde himself.
(I haven’t read Lady Windermere’s Fan, where this if from, but this sounds very much like something Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray would say. And Lord Henry is one of the main causes of the Dorian’s fall from grace in this book; he’s not exactly a very positive character but certainly an entertainingly cynical one!)
But is it necessary to divide people into good and bad? What if you were only to apply goodness and badness to consequences and to your own actions?
If your own action is to empower another person, understanding that person’s goodness or badness is necessary to understanding the action’s goodness or badness.
But that can be entirely reduced to the goodness or badness of consequences.
And many charming people are also bad.
I like it, but what’s it got to do with rationality?
To me at least, it captures the notion of how the perceived Truth/Falsity of a belief rest solely in our categorization of it as ‘tribal’ or ‘non-tribal’: weird or normal. Normal beliefs are true, weird beliefs are false.
We believe our friends more readily than experts.
It is absurd to divide people into charming or tedious. People either have familiar worldviews or unfamiliar worldviews.
It is absurd to divide people into familiar worldviews or unfamiliar worldviews. People either have closer environmental causality or farther environmental causality.
(anyone care to formalize the recursive tower?)
It’s absurd to divide people into two categories and expect those two categories to be meaningful in more than a few contexts.
It is absurd to divide people. They tend to die if you do that.
It’s absurd to divide. You tend to die if you do that.
It’s absurd: You tend to die.
It’s absurd to die.
It’s bs to die.
Be.
“To do is to be”—Nietzsche
“To be is to do”—Kant
“Do be do be do”—Sinatra
Nobody alive has died yet.
It will be quick. It might even be painless. I would not know. I have never died.
-- Voldemort
At least not in worlds where he is alive.
Is it worse to enter a state of superimposed death and life than to die?
I hope not. That’s the state we are all in now and what we are entering constantly. Unless there are rounding errors in the universe we haven’t detected yet.
I think life requires a system large and complex enough to produce decoherence between “alive” and “dead” in timescales shorter than required to define “alive” at all.
Sorry, that was a Schrodinger’s Cat joke.
“Males” and “females”. (OK, there are edge cases and stuff, but this doesn’t mean the categories aren’t meaningful, does it?)
What about good vs bad humans?
Or humans who create paperclips versus those who don’t?
I thought I just said that.
Can’t their be good humans who don’t create paperclips and just destroy antipaperclips and staples and such?
Destroying antipaperclips is creating paperclips.
I didn’t know humans had the concept though.
What is an antipaperclip?
Anything not a paperclip, or in opposition to further paperclipping. You might ask, “Why not just say ‘non-paperclips’?” but anti-paperclips include paperclips deliberately designed to unbend, or which work at anti-paperclip purposes (say, a paperclip being used to short-circuit the electrical systems in a paperclip factory).
I brought a box of paperclips into my office today to use as bowl picks for my new bong, if I rebend them after I use them can I avoid becoming an anti-paperclip?