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Jack comments on Open Thread: December 2009 - Less Wrong
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Remember what I said about "lip service"?
If they want to care about stuff, that's kinda implying that they don't actually care about stuff (yet). Also, based on simple psychology, someone who chooses a spot in the conformist zone that requires giving lip service to something creates cognitive dissonance which easily produces second order desire to want what you claim you want. But what is frightening here is how this choice of values is arbitrary to the ultimate. If you'd judged another spot to be cheaper, you'd need to modify your values in a different way.
On both cases though, it seems that people really rarely move any bit towards actually caring about something.
What is a conformist zone and why is it spotted?
Lip service is "Oh, what is happening in Darfur is so terrible!". That is different from "If I was a better person I'd help the people of Darfur" or "I'm such a bad person, I bought a t.v. instead of giving to charity". The first signals empathy the second and third signal laziness or selfishness (and honesty I guess).
Why do values have to produce first order desires? For that matter, why can't they be socially constructed norms which people are rewarded for buying into? When people do have first order desires that match these values we name those people heroes. Actually sacrificing for moral causes doesn't get you ostracized it gets you canonized.
Not true. The range of values in the human community is quite limited.
People are rarely complete altruists. But that doesn't mean that they don't care about anything. The world is full of broke artists who could pay for more food, drugs and sex with a real job. These people value art.
Both are hollow words anyway. Both imply that you care, when you really don't. There are no real actions.
Because, uhm, if you really value something, you'd probably want to do something? Not "want to want", or anything, but really care about that stuff which you value. Right?
Sure they can. I expressed this as safe zone manipulation, attempting to modify your envinroment so that your conformist behavior leads to working for some value.
The point here is that actually caring about something and working towards something due to arbitrary choice and social pressure are quite different things. Since you seem to advocate the latter, I'm assuming that we both agree that people rarely care about anything and most actions are result of social pressure and stuff not directly related to actually caring or valuing anything.
Which brings me back to my first point: Why does it seem that many people here actually care about the world? Like, as in paperclip maximizer cares about paperclips. Just optical illusion and conscious effort to appear as a rational agent valuing the world, or something else?