[SEQ RERUN] Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
Today’s post, Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, was originally published on 26 June 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
People want to think that the Enemy is an innately evil mutant. But, usually, the Enemy is acting as you might in their circumstances. They think that they are the hero in their story and that their motives are just. That doesn’t mean that they are right. Killing them may be the best option available. But it is still a tragedy.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we’re going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order, so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Correspondence Bias, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
This and the last rerun leaves me wondering what you should do in case you experience yourself to be an evil mutant mostly acting on inherent dispositions and only doing good or sane things due to improbable strong situational influences?
There’s a sequence post for that as well.
Its basically the same thing that JoshuaZ says, but longer.
What I mean is that “I” indeed want to be moral, as somehting internal to me and not imposed from outside. However, I have a rather abstract and indirect understanding of what it means (things like “Maximize utility according to the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity” rather than things like “Killing is yucky, don’t do it!”), and more importantly unless this brain had not encountered just the right lesswrong writings at just the right time, it would have become the kind of agent “restrained from being a serial killer only out of a cold, calculated fear of punishment” instead of becoming me.
...I think that counts as saving a soul. LW 1 − 0 Vatican.
You might in fact be a sociopath (rare, but not as rare as winning the lottery), though many people say things like “I have no objection against doing $socially_disapproved_action” but never do $socially_disapproved_action. But among people in general, goodness and sanity are hard enough that you shouldn’t expect to approximate them well under anything but extraordinary circumstances. Most people set out to do good and end up slaying heathens or forcing rape victims to marry their rapist or something.
(The general cure for problems everyone fails horribly at is to try and actually get it right. We’ll probably still get it wrong, but at least we make new mistakes that people can learn from rather than say “Failure mode 42, occurence 2.7e6”.)
Yea, looks like reading that sequence post gave me a momentary idea of “everyone except me is a saint” and some other harder to articulate thing, by now my above posts sound like just as much bull** to me as they presumably do to everyone else. Shouldn’t have tried to actually think when I were to tired to do it properly, my brain broke.
You don’t think Roman Catholicism has saved any souls? I mean, you can argue it does more harm than good, mostly due to lowering the sanity waterline, but … none at all?
I’ll resort to the lazy argument: anyone nowadays who stays in the Catholic Church pays for their personal salvation by supporting an organization that shields child rapists, and is therefore thrice-damned. Of course this doesn’t apply to people who lived before the scandal broke out.
Catholicism probably did in fact save some souls, though not the way it tries to.
Excellent comment. However …
Living, as I do, in Ireland, I feel obliged to correct a common misconception: that priests are more likely to be pedophiles has been general knowledge since long before this recent wave of scandals. The same is true of boy scout leaders, primary school teachers and so on, of course; you can find jokes floating around from that period, on this topic, that can have various roles swapped in . But if you went to anyone about abuse, then you were told to shut your lying mouth. This was due, basically, to the low status of children and high status of the accuser; Catholic priests had abnormally inflated status at the time the abuse that is now coming to light. Of course, this high status was due to … the low sanity waterline! As embodied by the frankly insane culture of the time.
Hmm, I didn’t expect that rant to come around to my original comment. *shrugs*
Not claiming either you are or aren’t ware of all this, of course. Just addressing the most common view I encounter, which is both wrong and compatible with your statement. Doing my bit for the sanity waterline :)
Oh, and it’s more “creating” than “saving”, really.
This question seems similar to an issue that comes up in Jon Ronson’s recent book “The Psychopath Test” about worrying if one is a psychopath- if one is worrying about it one probably doesn’t have a problem.
Do you mean psychopaths don’t mind the idea of having psychopathy, or something else?
EDIT: such as that psychopaths don’t worry about such things, or that they already know, even if they don’t know what it’s called.
The rough idea is that when people first learn about psychopathy or read about what the warning signs are, worrying that one might be psychopath isn’t that uncommon. But if one does have such worries then one almost certainly isn’t a psychopath because it doesn’t bother a psychopath to find out that they are lacking empathy and manipulate people.
Thank you for clarifying.
I don’t think that’s what you meant, but this comment sounds like a typical description of how psycopaths experience the world.
That’s what scares me about it...
-Black Heart, which came on the radio as I was reading this. Seems like a pretty good way to sum up the bias in question, doesn’t it?