= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on The non-painless upload - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (77)
I fundamentally disagree with your position. I had previously thought your question was one of ironic jest but now it seems like you have a genuine weakness when it comes to abstract thought.
"Outward manifestation of some neurosis" - now that challenges my tolerance for tasteless hyperbole. Personally insulting the entire community you are participating in without provocation? That is something that is a genuine indication of an unhealthy psychological trait. Most stable humans have a strong instinctive aversion to alienating themselves from communities in which they are an ongoing participant.
In the last meetup I went to, there was an obnoxious guy who was dominating the conversation, and somehow got into a relativism-based defense of something, I think just to be contrary.
Several other people jumped on him at this point, and soon the argument swung around to "what about torture? what if you were being tortured?" and he came up with rationalizations about how what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, it'd be a great story, etc. etc., and so they kept piling on qualifications, saying "they torture you for 50 years and then execute you and you have no hope of rescue and blah blah blah", trying to nail down boards over every possible ray of sunshine.
And of course even then, rationalizations were found, and his girlfriend took up the contrarian standard and soliloquized about how she was a survivor of a suicide attempt and believed it was always better to choose life, no matter how painful, and the other participants responded by cranking up the torture even further.
Did anything remotely productive come out of this? No, of course not. It was ugly, it was pointless, and frankly it was embarrassing to be a part of. I left.
I question whether I'm the screwed up one for not swallowing my alienation to this kind of behavior.
Someone was an ass in a conversation you were with. Evidently it affected you personally. But you have generalised that to a general assumption of neurosis for a broad class of people who happen to discuss abstract decision problems with 'torture' plugged in as the extreme case. More to the point you actively declare your smug judgement on the broad class 'you people'. Apart from indicating a clearly defective model of human psychology that is unnecessarily anti-social behaviour.
The appropriate response to having an unpleasant conversation with an ass is not to become obnoxious yourself.
It wasn't just one person, it was three or four. And it wasn't just that they INVOKED torture, it was that they clung to it like a life preserver, like it was the magic ingredient for winning the argument.
This is so far outside the bounds of civil discourse, and yet it's routine in this community. I don't think it's unwarranted to be generally concerned.
Also note that, besides thought experiments, "extreme negative utility" is also observed in religious discourse. I'd say Hell is probably the archetypal example of [someone proposing] infini-torture [to win an argument].
Off of the top of my head, torture and similar very unpleasant things are useful for at least two purposes.
As in this post, you could attempt to quantify how much you value something (in this case, effective immortality) by how long you would be willing to exist in an extremely uncomfortable state (such as being tortured.)
Similarly, if someone is attempting to make certain absolute statements (such as "I would never kill another human being.") regardless of circumstance, such conjecture can be used to quantify how much negative utility they attribute to committing such an act.
If you feel severe discomfort in being in a conversation where someone is using torture as a hypothetical, I suppose that you could either leave the conversation or ask them to use a different hypothetical, but the whole point of using torture as a hypothetical in such a case is because it is extremely unpleasant, so their alternative, if chosen well, maybe be equally discomforting to you.
I agree that if clinging desperately to magic assertions for winning arguments were routine in this community, that would warrant concern.
I don't agree that it is, in fact, routine here.
You are entirely justified in not swallowing your alienation to ugly, pointless, embarrassing, aggravating behavior like what you describe those folks engaging in.
Rejecting that doesn't make you screwed up.
But the conversation you describe doesn't suddenly become less ugly, pointless, embarrassing, or aggravating if these people had instead been being arguing the same way about, say, hypothetically losing billions of dollars, or hypothetically moving from Beverly Hills to Bangladesh, or hypothetically swimming the English Channel.
That is, I don't think the event you're describing justifies the conclusion you're trying to use it to justify.
That said, I also don't think you actually care about that.