multifoliaterose comments on Making your explicit reasoning trustworthy - Less Wrong
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I agree that the there are reasons to question the accuracy of Ron Jones' account.
I think that Jones was not suggesting that the consequences of the students' actions are comparable to the consequences of Nazis' actions but rather was claiming that the same tendencies that led the Germans to behave as they did were present in his own students.
This may not literally be true; it's possible that the early childhood development environment in 1950's Palo Alto were sufficiently different from the environmental factors in the early 1900's so that the students did not have the same underlying tendencies that the Nazi Germans did, but it's difficult to tell one way or the other.
Right, this is what I was getting at. I think that there are several interrelated things going on here:
•High self-esteem coming from feeling that one is on the right side.
•Desire for acceptance / fear of rejection by one's peers.
•Desire to reaping material & other goods from the oppressed party.
with each point being experienced only on a semi-conscious level..
In the case of the Catholic Church presumably only the first two points are operative.
Of course empathy is mixed in there as well; but it may play a negligible role relative to the other factors on the table.
Add in desire for something more interesting than school usually is.