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Wouldn't you, in a perfect world, have everyone go up in status without your status being affected? Wouldn't that be the utilitarian thing to do?
I am not an altruist. I would like my status to be higher than it is. I would like the few people I truly care about to have higher status. Otherwise, I really don't care, except for enjoying when certain high profile d-bags lose a lot of status. But that's just me. My more general point was that even those altruistic sort who do care deeply about others don't seem to generally want to raise others up above themselves, either in terms of status or materially. Can you think of one counter-example? I can't but I'm not trying very hard.
It's almost impossible for one person's morality to be significantly different from the standard. It's more likely that one who thinks themself different is simply confused.
Um, what standard of significance are you using here? Yes, humans are extremely similar compared to the vastness of that which is possible, but that doesn't mean the remaining difference isn't ridiculously important.
The standard implied by the remark I was commenting on. Literally not caring about other people seems like something you may believe about yourself, but which can't be true.
I read the original post as being about the ordinary human domain, implying an ordinary human-relative standard of significance.
This is ambiguous in two ways: which other people (few or all), and what sort of valuation (subjunctive revealed preference, some construal of reflective equilibrium)? I suppose it's plausible that for every person, some appeal to empathy would sincerely motivate that person.
The underlying genetic machinery that produces an individual's morality is a human universal. But the production of the morality is very likely dependent upon non-genetic factors. The psychological unity of humankind no more implies that people have the same morality than it implies that they have the same favorite foods.
Yes, but it's very easy for the actual large scale consequences of a human morality to be very different. We all feel compasion for freinds and fear of strangers; but when we scale our morality to the size of humanity, the difference is huge depending whether the compassion or the fear dominates.
Hitler and Ghandi may not be that different, but the consequences of their actions were.
Like I mentioned in another comment, I would feel bad for lower status people who didn't have an equal opportunity as me for reaching the level of status I have. Like I am thriving in this world for being born lucky. And AFAIK, relatively no one lower status than me had the same opportunity as me to be in the status level I am in now.
That's not possible if status is zero-sum, which it appears to be. If everyone is equal in status, wouldn't it be meaningless, like everyone being equally famous?
Actually, let me qualify. Everyone being equally famous wouldn't necessarily be meaningless, but it would change the meaning of famous - instead of knowing about a few people, everyone would know about everyone. It would certainly make celebrity meaningless. I'm not really up to figuring out what equivalent status would mean.
Equivalent status is not desirable, people would just find ways of going up in status - or at least want to. Which is where the contradicting desires fall in. I guess in any utopia there will always be a status struggle. Maybe what we want is an equal opportunity at going up in status. That way we don't feel bad for going up in status ourselves.