In reality, everyone’s morality is based on something like the status game (see also: 123)
… I really wanted to say [citation needed], but then you did provide citations, but then the citations were not compelling to me.
I’m pretty opposed to such universal claims being made about humans without pushback, because such claims always seem to me to wish-away the extremely wide variation in human psychology and the difficulty establishing anything like “all humans experience X.”
There are people who have no visual imagery, people who do not think in words, people who have no sense of continuity of self, people who have no discernible emotional response to all sorts of “emotional” stimuli, and on and on and on.
So, I’ll go with “it makes sense to model people as if every one of them is motivated by structures built atop the status game.” And I’ll go with “it seems like the status architecture is a physiological near-universal, so I have a hard time imagining what else people’s morality might be made of.” And I’ll go with “everyone I’ve ever talked to had morality that seemed to me to cash out to being statusy, except the people whose self-reports I ignored because they didn’t fit the story I was building in my head.”
But I reject the blunt universal for not even pretending that it’s interested in making itself falsifiable.
Kind of frustrating that this high karma reply to a high karma comment on my post is based on a double misunderstanding/miscommunication:
First Vanessa understood me as claiming that a significant number of people’s morality is not based on status games. I tried to clarify in an earlier comment already, but to clarify some more: that’s not my intended distinction between the two groups. Rather the distinction is that the first group “know or at least suspect that they are confused about morality, and are eager or willing to apply reason and deliberation to find out what their real values are, or to correct their moral beliefs” (they can well be doing this because of the status game that they’re playing) whereas this quoted description doesn’t apply to the second group.
Then you (Duncan) understood Vanessa as claiming that literally everyone’s morality is based on status games, when (as the subsequent discussion revealed) the intended meaning was more like “the number of people whose morality is not based on status games is a lot fewer than (Vanessa’s misunderstanding of) Wei’s claim”.
I think it’s important and valuable to separate out “what was in fact intended” (and I straightforwardly believe Vanessa’s restatement as a truer explanation of her actual position) from “what was originally said, and how would 70+ out of 100 readers tend to interpret it.”
I think we’ve cleared up what was meant. I still think it was bad that [the perfectly reasonable thing that was meant] was said in a [predictably misleading fashion].
But I think we’ve said all that needs to be said about that, too.
This is a tangent (so maybe you prefer to direct this discussion elsewhere), but: what’s with the brackets? I see you using them regularly; what do they signify?
I use them where I’m trying to convey a single noun that’s made up of many words, and I’m scared that people will lose track of the overall sentence while in the middle of the chunk. It’s an attempt to keep the overall sentence understandable. I’ve tried hyphenating such phrases and people find that more annoying.
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.
… I really wanted to say [citation needed], but then you did provide citations, but then the citations were not compelling to me.
I’m pretty opposed to such universal claims being made about humans without pushback, because such claims always seem to me to wish-away the extremely wide variation in human psychology and the difficulty establishing anything like “all humans experience X.”
There are people who have no visual imagery, people who do not think in words, people who have no sense of continuity of self, people who have no discernible emotional response to all sorts of “emotional” stimuli, and on and on and on.
So, I’ll go with “it makes sense to model people as if every one of them is motivated by structures built atop the status game.” And I’ll go with “it seems like the status architecture is a physiological near-universal, so I have a hard time imagining what else people’s morality might be made of.” And I’ll go with “everyone I’ve ever talked to had morality that seemed to me to cash out to being statusy, except the people whose self-reports I ignored because they didn’t fit the story I was building in my head.”
But I reject the blunt universal for not even pretending that it’s interested in making itself falsifiable.
Kind of frustrating that this high karma reply to a high karma comment on my post is based on a double misunderstanding/miscommunication:
First Vanessa understood me as claiming that a significant number of people’s morality is not based on status games. I tried to clarify in an earlier comment already, but to clarify some more: that’s not my intended distinction between the two groups. Rather the distinction is that the first group “know or at least suspect that they are confused about morality, and are eager or willing to apply reason and deliberation to find out what their real values are, or to correct their moral beliefs” (they can well be doing this because of the status game that they’re playing) whereas this quoted description doesn’t apply to the second group.
Then you (Duncan) understood Vanessa as claiming that literally everyone’s morality is based on status games, when (as the subsequent discussion revealed) the intended meaning was more like “the number of people whose morality is not based on status games is a lot fewer than (Vanessa’s misunderstanding of) Wei’s claim”.
I think it’s important and valuable to separate out “what was in fact intended” (and I straightforwardly believe Vanessa’s restatement as a truer explanation of her actual position) from “what was originally said, and how would 70+ out of 100 readers tend to interpret it.”
I think we’ve cleared up what was meant. I still think it was bad that [the perfectly reasonable thing that was meant] was said in a [predictably misleading fashion].
But I think we’ve said all that needs to be said about that, too.
This is a tangent (so maybe you prefer to direct this discussion elsewhere), but: what’s with the brackets? I see you using them regularly; what do they signify?
I use them where I’m trying to convey a single noun that’s made up of many words, and I’m scared that people will lose track of the overall sentence while in the middle of the chunk. It’s an attempt to keep the overall sentence understandable. I’ve tried hyphenating such phrases and people find that more annoying.
Hmm, I see, thanks.
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.