It’s not just that the self-reports didn’t fit the story I was building, the self-reports didn’t fit the revealed preferences. Whatever people say about their morality, I haven’t seen anyone who behaves like a true utilitarian.
IMO, this is the source of all the gnashing of teeth about how much % of your salary you need to donate: the fundamental contradiction between the demands of utilitarianism and how much people are actually willing to pay for the status gain. Ofc many excuses were developed (“sure I still need to buy that coffee or those movie tickets, otherwise I won’t be productive”) but they don’t sound like the most parsimonious explanation.
This is also the source of paradoxes in population ethics and its vicinity: those abstractions are just very remote from actual human minds, so there’s no reason they should produce anything sane in edge cases. Their only true utility is as an approximate guideline for making group decisions, for sufficiently mundane scenarios. Once you get to issues with infinities it becomes clear utilitarianism is not even mathematically coherent, in general.
You’re right that there is a lot of variation in human psychology. But it’s also an accepted practice to phrase claims as universal when what you actually mean is, the exceptions are negligible for our practical purpose. For example, most people would accept “humans have 2 arms and 2 legs” as a true statement in many contexts, even though some humans have less. In this case, my claim is that the exceptions are much rarer than the OP seems to imply (i.e. most people the OP classifies as exceptions are not really exceptions).
I’m all for falsifiability, but it’s genuinely hard to do falsifiability in soft topics like this, where no theory makes very sharp predictions and collecting data is hard. Ultimately, which explanation is more reasonable is going to be at least in part an intuitive judgement call based on your own experience and reflection. So, yes, I certainly might be wrong, but what I’m describing is my current best guess.
But it’s also an accepted practice to phrase claims as universal when what you actually mean is, the exceptions are negligible for our practical purpose. For example, most people would accept “humans have 2 arms and 2 legs” as a true statement in many contexts, even though some humans have less.
The equivalent statement would be “In reality, everyone has 2 arms and 2 legs.”
Well, if the OP said something like “most people have 2 eyes but enlightened Buddhists have a third eye” and I responded with “in reality, everyone have 2 eyes” then, I think my meaning would be clear even though it’s true that some people have 1 or 0 eyes (afaik maybe there is even a rare mutation that creates a real third eye). Not adding all possible qualifiers is not the same as “not even pretending that it’s interested in making itself falsifiable”.
I think your meaning would be clear, but “everyone knows what this straightforwardly false thing that I said really meant” is insufficient for a subculture trying to be precise and accurate and converge on truth. Seems like more LWers are on your side than on mine on that question, but that’s not news. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s a strawman to pretend that “please don’t say a clearly false thing” is me insisting on “please include all possible qualifiers.” I just wish you hadn’t said a clearly false thing, is all.
Natural language is not math, it’s inherently ambiguous and it’s not realistically possible to always be precise without implicitly assuming anything about the reader’s understanding of the context. That said, it seems like I wasn’t sufficiently precise in this case, so I edited my comment. Thank you for the correction.
insufficient for a subculture trying to be precise and accurate and converge on truth
The tradeoff is with verbosity and difficulty of communication, it’s not always a straightforward Pareto improvement. So in this case I fully agree with dropping “everyone” or replacing it with a more accurate qualifier. But I disagree with a general principle that would discount ease for a person who is trained and talented in relevant ways. New habits of thought that become intuitive are improvements, checklists and other deliberative rituals that slow down thinking need merit that overcomes their considerable cost.
I haven’t seen anyone who behaves like a true utilitarian.
That looks like a No True Scotsman argument to me. Just because the extreme doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that all of the scale can be explained by status games.
What does it have to do with “No True Scotsman”? NTS is when you redefine your categories to justify your claim. I don’t think I did that anywhere.
Just because the extreme doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that all of the scale can be explained by status games.
First, I didn’t say all the scale is explained by status games, I did mention empathy as well.
Second, that by itself sure doesn’t mean much. Explaining all the evidence would require an article, or maybe a book (although I hoped the posts I linked explain some of it). My point here is that there is an enormous discrepancy between the reported morality and the revealed preferences, so believing self-reports is clearly a non-starter. How do you build an explanation not from self-reports is a different (long) story.
If you try to quantify it, humans on average probably spend over 95% (Conservative estimation) of their time and resources on non-utilitarian causes. True utilitarian behavior Is extremely rare and all other moral behaviors seem to be either elaborate status games or extended self-interest [1]. The typical human is way closer under any relevant quantified KPI to being completely selfish than being a utilitarian.
[1] - Investing in your family/friends is in a way selfish, from a genes/alliances (respectively) perspective.
It’s not just that the self-reports didn’t fit the story I was building, the self-reports didn’t fit the revealed preferences. Whatever people say about their morality, I haven’t seen anyone who behaves like a true utilitarian.
IMO, this is the source of all the gnashing of teeth about how much % of your salary you need to donate: the fundamental contradiction between the demands of utilitarianism and how much people are actually willing to pay for the status gain. Ofc many excuses were developed (“sure I still need to buy that coffee or those movie tickets, otherwise I won’t be productive”) but they don’t sound like the most parsimonious explanation.
This is also the source of paradoxes in population ethics and its vicinity: those abstractions are just very remote from actual human minds, so there’s no reason they should produce anything sane in edge cases. Their only true utility is as an approximate guideline for making group decisions, for sufficiently mundane scenarios. Once you get to issues with infinities it becomes clear utilitarianism is not even mathematically coherent, in general.
You’re right that there is a lot of variation in human psychology. But it’s also an accepted practice to phrase claims as universal when what you actually mean is, the exceptions are negligible for our practical purpose. For example, most people would accept “humans have 2 arms and 2 legs” as a true statement in many contexts, even though some humans have less. In this case, my claim is that the exceptions are much rarer than the OP seems to imply (i.e. most people the OP classifies as exceptions are not really exceptions).
I’m all for falsifiability, but it’s genuinely hard to do falsifiability in soft topics like this, where no theory makes very sharp predictions and collecting data is hard. Ultimately, which explanation is more reasonable is going to be at least in part an intuitive judgement call based on your own experience and reflection. So, yes, I certainly might be wrong, but what I’m describing is my current best guess.
The equivalent statement would be “In reality, everyone has 2 arms and 2 legs.”
Well, if the OP said something like “most people have 2 eyes but enlightened Buddhists have a third eye” and I responded with “in reality, everyone have 2 eyes” then, I think my meaning would be clear even though it’s true that some people have 1 or 0 eyes (afaik maybe there is even a rare mutation that creates a real third eye). Not adding all possible qualifiers is not the same as “not even pretending that it’s interested in making itself falsifiable”.
I think your meaning would be clear, but “everyone knows what this straightforwardly false thing that I said really meant” is insufficient for a subculture trying to be precise and accurate and converge on truth. Seems like more LWers are on your side than on mine on that question, but that’s not news. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s a strawman to pretend that “please don’t say a clearly false thing” is me insisting on “please include all possible qualifiers.” I just wish you hadn’t said a clearly false thing, is all.
Natural language is not math, it’s inherently ambiguous and it’s not realistically possible to always be precise without implicitly assuming anything about the reader’s understanding of the context. That said, it seems like I wasn’t sufficiently precise in this case, so I edited my comment. Thank you for the correction.
The tradeoff is with verbosity and difficulty of communication, it’s not always a straightforward Pareto improvement. So in this case I fully agree with dropping “everyone” or replacing it with a more accurate qualifier. But I disagree with a general principle that would discount ease for a person who is trained and talented in relevant ways. New habits of thought that become intuitive are improvements, checklists and other deliberative rituals that slow down thinking need merit that overcomes their considerable cost.
That looks like a No True Scotsman argument to me. Just because the extreme doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that all of the scale can be explained by status games.
What does it have to do with “No True Scotsman”? NTS is when you redefine your categories to justify your claim. I don’t think I did that anywhere.
First, I didn’t say all the scale is explained by status games, I did mention empathy as well.
Second, that by itself sure doesn’t mean much. Explaining all the evidence would require an article, or maybe a book (although I hoped the posts I linked explain some of it). My point here is that there is an enormous discrepancy between the reported morality and the revealed preferences, so believing self-reports is clearly a non-starter. How do you build an explanation not from self-reports is a different (long) story.
I agree that there is an enormous discrepancy.
If you try to quantify it, humans on average probably spend over 95% (Conservative estimation) of their time and resources on non-utilitarian causes. True utilitarian behavior Is extremely rare and all other moral behaviors seem to be either elaborate status games or extended self-interest [1]. The typical human is way closer under any relevant quantified KPI to being completely selfish than being a utilitarian.
[1] - Investing in your family/friends is in a way selfish, from a genes/alliances (respectively) perspective.