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Ghatanathoah comments on Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place? - Less Wrong
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I recently became aware of some news stories that shed some additional light on this debate:
Ultra-Orthodox Shun Their Own for Reporting Child Sexual Abuse
Sex abuse victim driven out of shull
Yeshiva U sex abuse extended beyond high school for boys, probe Finds
This is also relevant to the discussion Vladimir_M and and JoshuaZ had about whether or not the community had the ability to control social pathologies better than mainstream society (specifically it supports JoshuaZ's position).
My own view on the overall debate is that it doesn't matter if Kiryas Joel is happy or not. Happiness that comes from having mistaken beliefs isn't valuable. The majority of Ultra-orthodox Jews hold a false belief that they are giving up a normal life in order to serve a supernatural creature. Since the creature they are serving isn't real, their lives are much, much worse than they think they are. An analogous situation might be a person who gains happiness from donating money to help starving refugees, without knowing that the refugees were made up by a con-man who is really lining his own pockets with the donations.
This sex-abuse scandal means that the inhabitants of Kiryas Joel are even worse off than I previously thought. It's bad enough they're denying themselves the pleasures of mainstream out of fealty to a fiction. If they're allowing themselves to be tortured, or to allow torturers to get away with their crimes, they are truly leading terrible lives. To use the fake refugee analogy again, suppose the donor starts mugging people to get more money to donate to the fictional refugees.
Why not? Or, rather, in which sense do you use the word "valuable" here?
I mean that people in general do not value happiness that comes from mistaken beliefs. For instance, people generally want to know the answer to questions like "Is my spouse cheating on me?" "Has my child been kidnapped?" and "Do the refugees I'm donating money to really exist?" They want to know the answer to these questions even if the answer will make them unhappy.
There are people who engage in acts of denial. But when encountering and reading about these people I am not given the impression that they are acting out of a rational and coherent desire to feel good by holding false beliefs. Rather, they are acting out of an irrational and incoherent desire to somehow stop the bad things from happening by denying their existence.
Of course, it would be theoretically possible to create some sort of creature that did value the happiness caused by mistaken beliefs. But it seems to me that creating such a creature would be a bad thing. Creatures with such inhuman, ignoble desires should not come into existence (although it may be wrong to kill one if you screw up and create it).
I am also not saying there is never any reason to believe comforting falsehoods. If a mad scientist threatened to torture me for decades unless I pressed a button that would cause me to believe some comforting falsehood I'd do it. The disvalue of the torture, in that case, outweighs the disvalue of holding a mistaken belief.
Similarly, it may be that some people cannot properly control their emotional responses to certain knowledge, and will end up an emotional wreck who cannot function if they find out some horrible truth. In that case it may be better to believe a comforting falsehood. However, that is not because the happiness from the falsehood is valuable, rather it is because the disvalue of becoming an emotional wreck who cannot function outweighs the disvalue of having a mistaken belief. This is analogous to the torture situation, except in this case the torturer is your own emotional systems, rather than another person.
And, of course, while happiness from having mistaken beliefs is bad, sadness from having mistaken beliefs is even worse. If I had a choice between telling someone a comforting lie and a distressing lie, all other things being equal I'd pick the comforting one.
Mistaken from whose point of view? For example, you think religious people don't value their happiness that comes from their religious beliefs? I would think that they do, very much so. Would you say that they all engage in denial?
I am not speaking of the cases where you deliberately close your eyes and, basically, block off certain truths from your mind. I am speaking of sincerely believing things which other people think are mistaken or wrong.
This doesn't seem to follow. Ghatanathoah says that "...people in general do not value happiness that comes from mistaken beliefs." A religious person will not consider their religious beliefs mistaken, and will therefore value any happiness that comes from them; even if they do not value happiness that comes from mistaken beliefs.
If they, at some point, decide that those beliefs were mistaken, then that will of course change; but in making that decision, the person no longer holds those beliefs in any case.
In the case of the "fictional refugees" that I mentioned earlier the person donating money to the conman certainly valued the happiness it gave him very much. But he was mistaken to value that happiness, because it came from a mistaken belief (namely, that the money he was giving the conman was benefiting refugees). It's possible to attach a mistaken value to something, if you hold mistaken beliefs about it.
There are some teachings of religion that are good things to follow regardless of whether or not you believe in the religion, these being basic moral lessons like "don't hurt people." But there are other teachings religions have that are only justified by the belief that there exists a supernatural creature who wants us to follow them, and we have a duty to obey that creature.
The lifestyle the people of Kiryas Joel lead is based on the second type of teachings. I explicitly think these teachings are wrong, that such a supernatural creature doesn't exist, and that we wouldn't necessarily be obligated to obey it if it did exist. If these precepts are false, than any happiness those people derive from their piety is based on mistaken beliefs.
In that case it would be better to call their beliefs mistaken or deluded than in denial. But yes, I basically do believe that all religious beliefs are mistaken, deluded, or in denial. How could I believe otherwise without becoming religious myself?
I am still confused.
Let's take a person, say, Alice. Alice believes in Jesus. In fact, she believes in Jesus with all her heart and Jesus' love is the bright spot in her otherwise dreary life of quiet desperation. She gets a lot of happiness from her religious beliefs.
You think that she is mistaken and deluded, Christianity's teachings are wrong, and her happiness is based on mistaken beliefs.
Given all this, what does your phrase "happiness that comes from having mistaken beliefs isn't valuable" mean in this context?
One thing it could mean is that if Alice came to believe her beliefs were mistaken, she would no longer value the happiness that they engendered; she would not willingly choose to return to her old confidence in those beliefs, for example, in exchange for getting that happiness back.
That said, I expect this is simply false for most Alice.
First, this is true regardless of whether Alice's original beliefs were mistaken or not. It's quite possible for Alice to hold true beliefs and then wrongly decide they were not correct.
Second, the phrase says "is not" using unconditional present tense. It does not say "might not be in the future".
Re: first point, yes, that's true. "we don't value happiness that comes from having mistaken beliefs" does not imply "we always value happiness that comes from having true beliefs".
Re: point 2... I'm probably misunderstanding you.
Consider the following dialog: A: "Drinking poison isn't valuable"
B: "But if I give Alice poison and she believes that it's medicine, then she will value drinking poison"
A: "Well, I suppose, but if she knew what it was, she wouldn't"
B: "But you didn't say 'Drinking poison might not be valuable if you know it's poison.' You just said 'Drinking poison isn't valuable.'"
I don't mean to put words in your mouth here... if that's not analogous what you're saying, that's great! I'm misunderstanding you, and hopefully we can identify and address the causes of that misunderstanding.
As it is, though, I'm at a loss for how to move forward. What I'm hearing you say is very much analogous to B's position here, which I think is just goofy. We don't value drinking poison, and the fact that we can be mistaken about whether we're drinking poison or not doesn't change that fact.
(In local parlance, this is sometimes referred to as the distinction between "desire" and "volition"... Alice might desire to drink poison in this case, but her volition is to drink medicine. I'm not crazy about that language choice, but the distinction itself is important, whatever words we use.)
"Drinking poison" is an action with clear and unambiguous consequences. "Happiness" is a personal emotional state. I don't feel the analogy works well.
Consider someone looking at his newborn daughter and feeling great happiness that she is the best, prettiest, most awesome child in the world. Oh, hey, that's technically a mistaken belief, the happiness is not valuable!
Consider a medieval European society where life is nasty, brutal, and short, not to mention muddy and itchy. But on Sundays you go to the cathedral, a beautiful building with awe-inspiring stained glass windows and open your heart to unconditional love, forgiveness, and promise of eternal happiness. It makes life worth living -- but, sorry, that's not valuable, your beliefs are wrong even though you don't really have a choice about them (remember, medieval Europe).
I think ultimately what ticked me off was the readiness to judge the value of other people's subjective emotional experiences. I am not a fan of such approaches.
Formulated another way: happiness that comes from mistaken beliefs is not only unstable, it also prevents you from attaining greater happiness elsewhere.
The idea of reflective consistency is relevant, here. If you possessed all relevant true beliefs, you would not be happy in that situation.
(And if you disagree, please note that wireheading is very similar to this situation: you've taken control of your reward button and are pushing it without much change to your actual situation. If your utility system doesn't exclude solutions like this, you're going to have trouble when someone figures out a harmless euphoric...)
Do you imply "always prevents", "sometimes prevents", or "could possibly prevent"?
Hm. So the equivalent statement would be "Happiness produced by wireheading is not valuable". Two things pop into my head: first, happiness and pleasure are different, wireheading produces the latter but not the former; and second, I still don't understand what does "is not valuable" mean.
I read your entire discussion the TheOtherDave and everyone else before replying. He said pretty much everything I would have said in these replies.
Reading further through the discussion I found this statement by you:
Remember that here I argued that, while happiness based on false beliefs isn't valuable, it isn't necessarily as bad as other negative things. For instance, I pointed out that if a mad scientist offered me a choice between decades of torture, or pressing a button that would alter my memory to make me hold a false belief, I would pick the button. Similarly, if the act of worship prevents someone's life from being utterly miserable (or from being tortured by the Inquisition), it may be the lesser of two evils.
I'm pretty sure most people don't literally believe that their child is the best child ever by some objective measure. I think that those are phatic statements, they are meant to express emotions rather than convey factual information. In this case the emotion being expressed is "I really love my daughter."
I certainly understand the tremendous moral hazard that comes with attempting to judge how much other people value things. But I don't think I'm out of line in stating that people generally don't place value on happiness that comes from falsehoods. Pretty much all people hate being lied to.
People generally don't place value on happiness that they believe comes from falsehoods.
Just to make sure I understand your position... consider two hypothetical instances of happiness, H1 and H2:
* H1is my happiness at believing my relationship with my husband is a loving, honest, open one in which we don't deceive one another, which it in fact is.
* H2 is my happiness at believing my relationship with my husband is a loving, honest, open one in which we don't deceive one another, which it in fact isn't.
The following seems clear, given that context:
* H1 is happiness that comes from truth.
* H2 is happiness that comes from falsehood.
* Neither H1 nor H2 is happiness that I believe comes from falsehoods... in both cases, my happiness comes from believing the proposition "my relationship with my husband is a loving, honest, open one in which we don't deceive one another" to be truth.
Would you disagree with any of the above?
If so, we can stop here and address the disagreement.
If not, continuing...
Suppose hypothetically that I don't value happiness that comes from falsehood, but I otherwise value happiness.
In this case, it follows that I value H1 but don't value H2.
For example, in this case if after ten years I discovered he'd been lying to me all along, I might feel cheated... I've spent ten years enjoying this happiness that I thought was valuable, when it turns out it wasn't valuable at all, since it came from falsehood. At that point, I'd regret those ten years, and wish I'd known how valueless my happiness was so I could make informed choices about it.
Yes? (Again, if you disagree, we can stop here and address it.)
Conversely, suppose hypothetically I don't value happiness that I believe comes from falsehood, but I otherwise value happiness.
In this case, it follows that I value both H1 and H2.
For example, in this case if after ten years I discovered he'd been lying to me all along, I might feel relieved that I hadn't discovered that sooner, because that would have ruined ten years of perfectly valuable happiness.
Yes? (Again, if you disagree, we can stop here and address it.)
So, to put that differently:
* If I don't value happiness that I believe comes from falsehood, I should prefer to remain deceived, since that way I can keep getting valuable happiness.
* If I don't value happiness that comes from falsehoods, I should prefer to know the truth, since that way I can correctly evaluate whether the happiness I'm getting is valuable.
...and your position is that the former, but not the latter, is generally true of people.
Yes?