I’m not sure if this was at work in your fundraiser, but I know I tend to see exhortations from others that I give to charitable causes/nonprofits as attempts at guilt tripping. (I react the same way when I’m instructed to vote, or brush my teeth twice a day, or anything else that sounds less like new information and more like a self-righteous command.) For this reason, I try to keep quiet when I’m tempted to encourage others to give to my pet charity/donate blood/whatever, for fear that I’ll inspire the opposite reaction and hurt my goal. I don’t always succeed, but that’s an explanation other than a culture of disagreement for why some people might not have contributed to the discussion from a pro-giving position.
Alicorn
Great post. I think I’d already sort of started trying to do this, although I couldn’t have put it as well. Now what I want to know is how much to tolerate people who are less tolerant than me. I’m not quite sure what to do when I meet someone who is infuriated by patterns of thinking that I consider only trivially erroneous or understandable under certain circumstances.
There’s a question of whether there’s an important difference in kind between sorts of tolerance. Here’s an analogy which might or might not work: assume that, in general, a driver of a vehicle drives as fast as they think it is safe for cars to be driven in general. Only impatience would cause them to not tolerate people who drive slower than they; a safety concern could cause them to be upset by people who drive faster, since they consider that speed unsafe. Say you have two people who each drive at 50 mph. One of them tolerates only slower drivers but wants to ticket faster drivers and the other tolerates all drivers. The first driver could have a legitimate issue with the second one. They don’t disagree about how fast it’s safe to drive—they disagree about whether it is appropriate to expect that safety standard of others. Some kinds of statements are dangerous—perhaps not to the degree or in the way that cars are, but dangerous, like slanderous statements or ones that incite to riot or ones that are lies or ones that betray confidences or ones that mislead the gullible or ones that involve occupied inflammable theatrical venues. Refusing to castigate people who express those kinds of statements might—I’m not confident of this—itself be worthy of censure. Or perhaps I’m missing the point and those aren’t the kinds of statements the tolerators of which should be tolerated?
I used to have the idea that finding flaws in something (a piece of writing or entertainment or an idea or a person) made me better than the person or the creator of the thing I was criticizing. Then I realized two things which got me to stop: 1) Critics are parasites; they don’t generally produce anything that valuable and entertaining themselves, and even beautifully written reviews are pretty low on my list of things to read for edification or fun. 2) When I go around finding flaws in everything, I stop enjoying it, and living a life where I can’t enjoy anything I read or hear or see is not pleasant.
So now my strategy is to like things and people I’m inclined to like, but remain confident in my so-far-unfailing ability to find fault with them if I decide I need or want to do that. Being accused of slavish devotion to something is one of the things that can make me want to turn critic-mode back on, even though that only winds up proving a lack of slavish devotion after the fact (since I will tend not to notice the sorts of flaws I point out in critic-mode until I actually turn on critic-mode).
All of that having been said, Paul Graham is awesome, so is Eliezer, and GEB is overrated (either that or it was ruined for me when I took a class on it with non-philosophers teaching it; I do have a history of hating anything I’m obliged to read for school).
Perhaps part of the reason rationalists can’t be “aimed” at certain charities even by our self-chosen objects of admiration is that we consider their instructions overrideable without moral cost. If Random Catholic X believes that the Pope delivers the infallible will of God, then anything Random Catholic X does that disobeys the Pope—regardless of his specific situation, assuming the Pope doesn’t explicitly exclude people in that situation—is wrong. It’s not necessarily that Random Catholic X is thinking occurently about the possibility that he will go to Hell for disobeying, it’s that he has no avenue out.
Whereas Random Rationalist Y—I present myself as an example—admires other rationalists for at least partially cognized good reasons. If I have better reasons for doing something other than that which is recommended to me by Eliezer or Dawkins or whoever is making requests of me, than I do for listening to the person in the first place, I am unlikely to follow the suggestion. After all, I don’t believe any such person was chosen by God, I don’t believe they’re infallible, and I also think that there are many individual features of my situation which are relevant and of which such people are generally ignorant. In short, if I have reasons to aim myself differently than the leaders of the rationalist community would like to aim me, I can override their authority without feeling bad about it.
For in-person meeting, can I suggest the vehicle of the Ethical Culture Society? If the idea is benevolent output, the fact that its primary shtick isn’t rationalism shouldn’t matter. The trouble is there aren’t very many chapters; I can’t attend one although I want to, because they’re all too far away. But they already exist, and more could be started.
(As a side note, I recommend Kiva for efficient charity. It’s a microloan site instead of a direct donation, so you can recycle the same contribution indefinitely after you get paid back or even withdraw it if you have to. It also contributes in a way that allows long-term sustainability instead of just throwing beans and rice at a population, because the recipients of loans have businesses that they expand and then use the income therefrom to return the money. And paying anything to the overhead of Kiva itself is explicit and optional.)
One thing that might be going on here is that you can put money in the bank for later. You can’t do that with time—if you don’t use all your time doing something, you have wasted it, not saved it. When I consider spending money on charity, I’m not usually weighing it against my other expenses—I’m weighing it against the risk that I will be hit by a cement truck and need as much as I can possibly have put away in my savings account. Perhaps this is only because I’m pretty poor.
Another thing that might also be only me or a group of people similar to me is expense compartmentalization. I’m very reluctant to buy most things. I own exactly one pair of shoes and I’m repairing them with duct tape, but I won’t replace them until I have no choice. However, as soon as I enter the grocery store, anything I want goes in the cart, because I consider food purchases to be non-optional. Similarly, I might care more in some very real sense about five dollars’ contribution to Charitable Goal X than I do about a burrito. However, if the overpriced burrito is the only dinner available (if for some reason I can’t go home and eat leftovers on the cheap), I’ll still buy it, because I don’t consider going without dinner altogether to be a viable option. Money is only a fungible unit of value in a situation where the opportunities to spend it are distributed in a more or less flat way.
Telling the truth is an expression of trust, in addition to being a way to earn it: telling someone something true that could be misused is saying “I trust you to behave appropriately with this information”. The fact that I would lie to the brownshirts as convincingly as possible shouldn’t cause anyone else to mistrust me as long as 1) they know my goals; 2) I know their goals and they know that I do; 3) our goals align, at least contextually; and 4) they know that I’m not just a pathological liar who’ll lie for no reason. The Nazis will be misled about (1), because that’s the part of their knowledge I can manipulate most directly, but anyone with whom I share much of a trust relationship (the teenage daughter playing the piano, perhaps) will know better, because they’ll be aware that I’m sheltering Jews and lying to Nazis.
The fact that I would lie to save the world should only cause someone to mistrust my statements on the eve of the apocalypse if they think that I think that they don’t want to save the world.
- 16 Aug 2010 15:06 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Existential Risk and Public Relations by (
That’s an interesting case because, if the Nazi is well-informed about my goals, he will probably be aware that I’d lie to him for things short of the end of the world and he could easily suspect that I’m falsely informing him of this risk in order to get him not to blow up people I’d prefer to leave intact. If all he knows about my goals is that I don’t want the world to end, whether he heeds my warnings depends on his uninformed guess about the rest of my beliefs, which could fall either way.
I live in Amherst, MA.
Should we also be posting how mobile we are? I rely on the bus system and the goodwill of my roommate to get around. I couldn’t attend an event in, say, Boston unless there was carpooling.
The bus is less friendly on weekends, but I could get as far as Amherst Center (and back) without spending unduly long waiting for multiple buses.
Rationalists are the ones who win when things are fair, or when things are unfair randomly over an extended period. Rationality is an advantage, but it is not the only advantage, not the supreme advantage, not an advantage at all in some conceivable situations, and cannot reasonably be expected to produce consistent winning when things are unfair non-randomly. However, it is a cultivable advantage, which is among the things that makes it interesting to talk about.
A rationalist might be unfortunate enough that (s)he does not do well, but ceteris paribus, (s)he will do better. Maybe that could be the slogan—“rationalists do better”? With the implied parenthetical “(than they would do if they were not rationalists, with the caveat that you can concoct unlikely situations in which rationality is an impediment to some values of “doing well”)”.
I don’t assume underemployment, I assume that employment isn’t usually traded on a direct fungible-time-for-fungible-money basis (unless one is employed as some kind of freelancer). Most jobs come with an expectation of a long-term commitment, or at least constraints on when the work is done. It’s well and good in theory to toss around the idea that people who are volunteering time to a charity could have just gotten second jobs and donated the money, but the odds that they could have gotten second jobs that would conveniently fill the empty time they had to offer—scattered piecemeal around their schedules—are negligible.
I don’t think the abandon with which I purchase groceries is the same phenomenon as that kind of mental accounting, because I’m very conservative about non-food purchases in a similar price range, not just with major expenses.
I’ve heard “hedons” as units of pleasure (“dolors” for units of pain), although I suppose if we aren’t being hedonists then it might be a misleading term.
This was my reason too. In addition to the lack of clarity about why the topic should be interesting, it had numerous style errors.
Why did you do that?
I’m female. Why is this a matter of interest?
Since it’s unlikely that you are employed as a harem guard or castrato, that only makes sense, but why did you find the goal of lowering testosterone sufficiently motivating to take this action?
As long as we’re being completely off topic and talking about our interests, is it cool for me to plug my side projects? I have:
A fantasy prose serial, Elcenia
A food blog, Improvisational Soup
I should probably mitigate the self-aggrandizement with links elsewhere, so:
Money, game theory, etc: Mind Your Decisions
Politics and culture and some scantily clad persons: The 1585
Unintentional comedy: Chick tracts
I used to play. My cards are in boxes, collecting dust; I plan to sell them when I have the time and inclination.
I wish I had read Momo by Michael Ende as a child instead of at age twenty. I think it has good messages about listening and quality of life.
However, I think the winning strategy—if you can devote enough time to it or are willing to trust your kids enough to let them do it themselves—is to just saturate children with stories of every kind from every source. Almost any story has things you really wouldn’t want to take to heart and most of them have at least a few good things to be taken from them (even if it’s “look, the author wants to promote X, but he does a terrible job at it because even when an author who likes X can control all the variables in a scenario, X still looks really dumb!”).
This is more or less what happened to me growing up—my parents made a modest effort to steer me away from books that were just plain badly written (Animorphs and similar), but otherwise, I read everything that came within arm’s reach and was still interesting after a fair shake of twenty pages or so. This has been a boon not only to my factual knowledge (I know more about history and science, in particular, from fiction than I do from my official education) but also to what I take to be a well-roundedness and openmindedness in my outlook. Although in isolated instances, you get stories that can pull off deep falsehoods without sacrificing highly obvious artistic quality, if you are exposed to enough stories they’ll start to stick out as anomalous.
I think it would also help the saturation method if there were less prejudice towards certain broad types of media. I know a lot of people have blind spots towards, say, comics or video games what have you—for my parents, it was television. I was fond of TV in my younger years and would watch just about anything that was on, but instead of using this proclivity to expose me to well-done TV, they arbitrarily limited my access to the point where I went several years without watching any at all and only now have come to appreciate such informative and provocative shows as House, Babylon 5, the works of Joss Whedon, etc. There is at least some good work being done in any medium.