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thomblake comments on Being saner about gender and rationality - Less Wrong
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I agree with the first part - that's pretty obvious from any common conception of rights - it's very hard to support rights about thoughts simultaneously with any right to liberty.
Of course, it wasn't central to the complaint. The main issue is that we might be driving people away, and there are at least a few people for whom it is true.
I disagree. If you take away the 'buttons', there isn't much left. While of course rationality for AIs is relevant here, most of the discussion should be about rationality implemented in humans. And while there are some who think rationality requires denying what it is to be human, I would not be among them.
Whether this is a problem depends on the people being driven away, and why.
In the thread which Alicorn objects to, she makes precisely this argument. Her entire premise is based on a notion of such rights, although she conveniently doesn't mention it in this post.
Arguing that bad feelings give meaning to life or contrast to the good feelings is precisely the same as arguing for death giving meaning to life or contrast to living.
Research has already established that positive and negative feelings are not inherently-linked opposites; in fact, they're largely independent of each other. (It should also be trivially obvious in practice that we can enjoy something without feeling deprived by its absence or reverse. I can enjoy sunny weather without being hurt by it raining, for example.)
No. While a notion of such rights is certainly something she's mentioned believing in, that's not central to the question of whether it's warranted to object to such language. I, for instance, do not hold any such notion of rights, and yet raise the same objection.
My first reaction is "no, it's not", which suggests to me that I'm misreading you.
I'm not sure I'd argue that "bad" feelings give "meaning" to life (I'd generally consider that a category mistake, as life isn't the sort of thing with a meaning). However, "bad" feelings are a part of what it is to be human. I'm not particularly interested in specifically accumulating "positive" feelings, so I don't think the rest of your comment applies.
That death is a part of being human is certainly not something to be discarded out of hand. There is indeed a tension in our nature between the need to preserve ourselves and the facticity of our deaths. Acknowledging this does not entail insisting on people dying, though.
I would be most illuminated if you would share a justification in favor of having ongoing bad feelings (as opposed to a momentary notification of a possible problem), that does not also work as a justification in favor of death.
If one is in a continuing bad situation, a persistent bad feeling encourages one to search for the persistent factor.
Really? Has it been your experience that persistent bad feelings actually motivate you to change something? In my experience, and in the experience of my clients, a persistent bad feeling is usually an alternative to actually doing something about a problem. You want to talk about anosognosiac self-deception? Try bad feelings. It's very easy to deceive yourself into thinking that, say, worrying about work somehow counts the same as working.
People who feel bad don't want to do anything except stop the bad feeling (or in some cases, wallow in it), and the most expedient ways to stop most bad feelings usually do nothing to resolve the problem that created the bad feeling in the first place.
In short, bad feelings do not prime constructive behaviors. Good feelings do.
It's very suspect on the surface that you say people "don't want to do anything except stop the bad feeling" followed by (paraphrasing) "except when it's the exact opposite."
While it seems that people in persistent bad situations often get nothing out of their stress and suffering but additional health problems, I think we'd have even worse failure modes if we really only reacted emotionally to changes in circumstance, and were unable to sustain persistent (dis)satisfaction with our present state. I mean this as a statement about our possible evolutionary "design", not about what's theoretically possible.
I feel oddly like you didn't read the rest of my comment. Are we talking past each other again?
The simplest justification is that they are 'uniquely human', a part of our nature and the human experience. All justifications must follow from what we are, or else what are they to rest on?
On the face of it, this serves as a justification for death. However, death is a one-off problem whose removal would hardly impact the nature and character of one's life. Removing 'bad' feelings would entail scraping out a decent-sized chunk of what it is to be a human.
And don't think the problem of death is so easily solved.
So, if I were to never become depressed again, I'm no longer a human? That doesn't make any sense to me.
Bear in mind, I'm not proposing Superhappy-ness. I'm simply saying that after the initial moment of pain or sorrow or frustration or grief or embarrassment or whatever, the utility of that feeling being continued drops off dramatically. And if something bothers you emotionally for, say, an hour (let alone frequently) the odds are good that you are wasting your time. (And yes, that does mean I've been doing a bit of time-wasting here recently.)
Unless I'm misunderstanding 'utility' as you're using it here, it seems like you're begging the question. To say that "bad feelings don't serve utility" doesn't really seem to be saying much at all; this is part of why I felt the need to put scare quotes around 'bad' above - bad feelings are by definition bad.
Pot, meet kettle. ;-)
If you're going to accuse me of committing a logical fallacy, please do me the service of doing so explicitly, and pointing out where it happened.
Here:
That isn't even remotely a justification for actually having bad feelings.