Comment on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:16:35 GMT

I agree on the cause of genetic obesity, but my answer may be different for the case of an extremely impoverished childhood. Part of my response is reflected in the fact that neither I (nor anyone I personally know) grew up in that level of poverty so that in imagining the poverty situation I have to counter-factually modify the world and I'm not sure how to do it.

In one imaginary scenario I would find someone facing facing malnutrition, violently abusive parents, mental retardation, in an environment with no effective police services in the actual world and imagine myself helping them from a distance as a stranger. This is basically "how to help the comprehensively poor as an external intervention". There are a lot of people like this on the planet and helping them is a really hard problem that is not very imaginary at all. I don't think I have any kind of useful answer that fits in this space and meshes with the themes in the OP.

A second imaginary scenario would be that I am also in the same general situation but only slightly better off. Perhaps there is rampant crime and poverty but my parents gave me minimally adequate nutrition and they weren't abusive (yet I magically have the same planning capacities that grow from really having been well fed and then spending decades in personal learning).

In this case there are no substantial resources with which to help and my resources probably will mostly be devoted to my own survival and marginal improvement. However talk is cheap, so I could probably follow some sort of "talk strategy". Within that scope, I would try to avoid a "blaming strategy" because those are generally counter productive. Instead I would probably do my best to help my neighbor engage in mindfully pro-social conscientiousness because that's something that predicts positive life outcomes even assuming low IQ and it hooks you into social processes that generate and distribute positive externalities which are in desperately short supply in this scenario.

I think I might try to find a "large raft" buddhist temple or a christian church that was focused on acts rather than faith... or really basically any philosophically organized pragmatic self help community that implements what Nietzsche might criticize as a "slave morality". Picking the pragmatically best church from among those available would probably be the largest opportunity for a value add by myself (I'd be looking, pretty much, for long term members who started poor but became rich and generous due to the community, its doctrines, and its practices).

In any case, it would be relatively cheap to be part of this community for my own benefit and I could invite the tragic young man along every week as a way of exposing him to useful memes and opportunities to be socially reprocessed into a relatively moral and productive person and perhaps be given a slightly challenging job by someone in the church as an act of partial charity.

On the other hand, imagine that the young man had learned hostility and violence as a life coping strategy (from being surrounded by it). I could be subject to this violence. If I had body guards, or a mech suit, or a magic ring, I might still be able to safely help him without exposing myself to costs larger than the benefits I was trying to bring into his life... but in that case I could probably do more good for other people and in the meantime we were stipulating general poverty, so I wouldn't have any "self protecting wealth" in the first place.

Thus if his personality was so broken that he was dangerous to try to help, and I was so poor that I couldn't change contexts to avoid him, I'd probably follow just enough of a "social blaming" strategy to drive him away from me and recruit allies in protection if case he starts engaging in predatory rent-seeking as a survival strategy. If he tried to do this to me, and I didn't have enough allies to drive him off, and he didn't have too many allies to seek revenge, I might kill him as a way of avoiding victimization for myself and others (prison would lead to less aggregate harm, but its way more expensive). Hopefully I would be able to do that without malice or making excuses or otherwise damage to my ability to see the world clearly. Perhaps I could self-medicate with a "talking cure" like apologizing to his dead body or "confessing my sins" to a priest and maybe trying to do something good for his mother as an act of contrition?

In practice, for most of the evolutionary history of humanity, it appears that a substantial portion of the female population has been in precisely the nightmare scenario I've ignored so far where there are basically no options. For much of evolutionary history a substantial fraction of women were a variation of chattel slave called a "wife", held in bondage by an "abused and abusive" man who grew up in enormous material poverty but had the strong loyalty of his male relatives, with alliances to other slave holding groups of men, where the women lacked the ability to leave or to find any kind of better context. Remembering this helps me understand why early libertarians and early radical feminists were in such strong agreement. It also helps to explain why people seem evolved to get such pleasure from blaming common enemies (and are biased towards being systematically insane when it comes to sex differences and romantic relationships).

Talking about this kind of stuff can be really gut churning and I imagine it triggers all kinds of (currently) obsolete instincts in a way that the abstractions of meta-morality do not... but to not talk about it seems likely to ignore some pretty major causal factors when it comes to understanding and debugging human craziness in our present state of enormous wealth.

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