Having decided that it’s a bad idea for me to continue discussing things with eridu, it might be better for me to avoid discussing the same things with people who are currently engaged in conversation with him. But I think that in this case we have a substantive disagreement.
I think that not only is people feeling bad a powerful moderator of our behavior, and one that it’s useful for other people to know we have, I think deliberately making people feel bad about their actions can be a useful way to motivate them to change their behavior in positive ways. Ideally, nobody should have to feel bad, but then, ideally, nobody should be doing bad things either.
To draw an available example, Ghandi’s efforts to gain independence for India rested almost entirely on making the British colonialists feel bad about themselves, and while giving up their possession of India might have been an economic inevitability, he certainly accelerated it.
I think eridu is overgeneralizing the usefulness of imposing guilt on others though. It appears to me that in order to modify others’ behavior by encouraging them to feel guilty, you need to start with people who have an existing set of moral standards (ones by which they actually operate not simply ones they profess,) which they are not applying in a particular case, and make them feel intuitively that this is a case where they should be applying those standards. For instance, the British citizens mostly had moral standards against attacking civilized, non-resisting people with clubs. If they saw Indian people behaving in a civilized, nonthreatening manner, and being beaten with clubs for challenging colonial rule, the British citizens are going to feel guilty without needing further incitement. On the other hand, if you try to encourage people to feel guilty for, say, stopping women from having abortions, and appeal to them on principles of autonomy, it won’t work because they don’t relate it to anything else they would feel guilty about. You can tell them why they should, but they aren’t going to intuitively put either “women” or “abortion” into a new reference class that completes a preexisting basis for guilt.
I’m not sure whether it’s a separate principle, or an extension of this one, that trying to get people to modify their behavior too radically by appealing to guilt will also backfire. For instance, you can appeal to someone that a consistent application of their principles would lead to them giving away nearly all their money to charity, but most people don’t have preexisting models for guilt whereby they will feel guilty for not giving away nearly everything they own. They can be guilted into “doing their part,” make some contribution, and stop feeling guilty, but if they judge that the person encouraging them to feel guilty is asking too much of them, then they’ll try to avoid the person trying to make them feel guilty, rather than the behaviors that person is trying to encourage them to change.
I suspect the banhammer may be looming over all of this, or the karmic penalty for being under the same bridge as the troll, as eridu’s last ancestor comment has vanished, but I’ll just briefly refer to this reply of mine to eridu, and take up the following:
I’m not sure whether it’s a separate principle, or an extension of this one, that trying to get people to modify their behavior too radically by appealing to guilt will also backfire. For instance, you can appeal to someone that a consistent application of their principles would lead to them giving away nearly all their money to charity, but most people don’t have preexisting models for guilt whereby they will feel guilty for not giving away nearly everything they own. They can be guilted into “doing their part,” make some contribution, and stop feeling guilty, but if they judge that the person encouraging them to feel guilty is asking too much of them, then they’ll try to avoid the person trying to make them feel guilty, rather than the behaviors that person is trying to encourage them to change.
Bingo. People have these fantasies of being able to reach into other people’s heads and tweak some switches to make them do what they (the ones tweaking) want, but things just don’t work like that. People have their own purposes, and nothing you can do to them is any more than a disturbance to those purposes. What they will do to get what they want in spite of someone else’s meddling will not necessarily resemble, even slightly, what the meddler wanted. See also Goodhart’s law.
Having decided that it’s a bad idea for me to continue discussing things with eridu, it might be better for me to avoid discussing the same things with people who are currently engaged in conversation with him. But I think that in this case we have a substantive disagreement.
I think that not only is people feeling bad a powerful moderator of our behavior, and one that it’s useful for other people to know we have, I think deliberately making people feel bad about their actions can be a useful way to motivate them to change their behavior in positive ways. Ideally, nobody should have to feel bad, but then, ideally, nobody should be doing bad things either.
To draw an available example, Ghandi’s efforts to gain independence for India rested almost entirely on making the British colonialists feel bad about themselves, and while giving up their possession of India might have been an economic inevitability, he certainly accelerated it.
I think eridu is overgeneralizing the usefulness of imposing guilt on others though. It appears to me that in order to modify others’ behavior by encouraging them to feel guilty, you need to start with people who have an existing set of moral standards (ones by which they actually operate not simply ones they profess,) which they are not applying in a particular case, and make them feel intuitively that this is a case where they should be applying those standards. For instance, the British citizens mostly had moral standards against attacking civilized, non-resisting people with clubs. If they saw Indian people behaving in a civilized, nonthreatening manner, and being beaten with clubs for challenging colonial rule, the British citizens are going to feel guilty without needing further incitement. On the other hand, if you try to encourage people to feel guilty for, say, stopping women from having abortions, and appeal to them on principles of autonomy, it won’t work because they don’t relate it to anything else they would feel guilty about. You can tell them why they should, but they aren’t going to intuitively put either “women” or “abortion” into a new reference class that completes a preexisting basis for guilt.
I’m not sure whether it’s a separate principle, or an extension of this one, that trying to get people to modify their behavior too radically by appealing to guilt will also backfire. For instance, you can appeal to someone that a consistent application of their principles would lead to them giving away nearly all their money to charity, but most people don’t have preexisting models for guilt whereby they will feel guilty for not giving away nearly everything they own. They can be guilted into “doing their part,” make some contribution, and stop feeling guilty, but if they judge that the person encouraging them to feel guilty is asking too much of them, then they’ll try to avoid the person trying to make them feel guilty, rather than the behaviors that person is trying to encourage them to change.
I suspect the banhammer may be looming over all of this, or the karmic penalty for being under the same bridge as the troll, as eridu’s last ancestor comment has vanished, but I’ll just briefly refer to this reply of mine to eridu, and take up the following:
Bingo. People have these fantasies of being able to reach into other people’s heads and tweak some switches to make them do what they (the ones tweaking) want, but things just don’t work like that. People have their own purposes, and nothing you can do to them is any more than a disturbance to those purposes. What they will do to get what they want in spite of someone else’s meddling will not necessarily resemble, even slightly, what the meddler wanted. See also Goodhart’s law.