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Marshall comments on Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes - Less Wrong
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Comments (39)
I think the puppies thing was more "while valuable, we may perhaps undervalue various other compassionate causes relative to that specific one due to the 'awwwww, puppies' effect, which we don't necessaraly have for all creatures."
When I read that I understood it as :
"Ooooh cute puppies, I so want to save them" "Hey, there's also a hobo in the alley, he looks like he's dead or in bad condition" "bleh, dirty hobo, I don't even want to have a look"
I understand that it is more pleasant to look upon puppies, that generates a warm feeling, and, my, aren't they just cute ? While a hobo in a dark alley may well just engender repulsion in many people. But putting the wellbeing of a pup before that of a fellow human, including, in ways not quite so obvious as the hobo case, is a fairly repulsive idea in itself too. Beyond the fact that this idea is repulsive, which may not be the main concern of a rationalist, there's the fact that the hobo is likely to have more complex feelings, and more consciousness, that the shades of pain and distress he can feel are just worse than those of the pup; and even beyond that, you're supposed to feel empathy for your fellow human being.
You see we have some machinery up there in the fleshy attic for just that purpose. It helped, to have other human beings care for you and your misery in the environment of adaptation. So if you see something that has some cue traits, shapes, which you think is alive and warm, and in danger, that would trigger those feelings of compassion, love, will to help, secure, protect. Too bad that pups have neotenic traits, that trigger the very same machinery in our brain, without there being a real purpose to that. There would lie the bug, I'd reckon. ( See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness )
Of course that's forgetting the part about someone exploiting a bug for their own gain as is also said. I'd suppose that some people would do such a thing, for instance using puppy-love, but that one didn't strike much. Well, more precisely I never encountered such a case, so that's why it looks as though it is rare to me. I may be wrong, and such misdoing may be prevalent.
I may have to make the dog experience. Note, I've had dogs at home, several, and other pets, including cats, bunnies, pigeons, etc; of course they were my parent's so it's a bit different.
As for hobos, nope, they didn't really "choose" their state. There's a limit to what a human mind can withstand, and possibly it isn't the same set point for everyone, but past a certain amount of hardships, people break down. Then they fall. They fall because they don't have much willpower or love of life left. And they may try to make that pain feel a tad lighter by using drugs, alcohol. Or simply to have a good time, when they can't really expect anything else to cheer them much.
I hesitated before adding that, so please don't take it as a an ad hominem attack or anything, but I think one in your case may have to make the hobo experience for himself to realize how it feels. I don't mean that as in "ironical retribution : now it's your turn", but rather to say that you perhaps won't ever come close to understanding how if feels unless you live it yourself.
And this may indeed just happen to anyone. You included. Some people will choose suicide instead, others won't want to and will simply fall down, irresponsive to most obligations or opportunities, even to get better. I'll remind yourself of some recent case, such as
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/06/ap/business/main4702909.shtml
Finally, I'd rather know that my fellow human would care more for me, than for his pet. I'd try to reciprocate the favor as well, insofar as possible. If I can't even help another human being because I think that my dog or, who knows, my material possession, a book perhaps, has more value than him, then it goes the other way too. I don't want to live in such a world. That I want it or not, may not change the world, and I may be worse off if I care about others in a world where others don't care about me, but I'll be worse off in any of those, than in a world where we each care for each other, with some passion.
I don't believe you. Define "choose".
EDIT: My above objection is unclear. I should have replied ADBOC.
They are presented with situations in which multiple alternatives are possible, and they select one. That is choosing. Their choices may be explained by psychological, environmental and/or chemical factors, but not explained away. See Explaining vs Explaining Away.
That is too easy. When you see "someone choose to X", you'll usually take it to mean that the bloke could've done otherwise, ergo, if he choose to do something that did him wrong, he's responsible and hence, deserves the result he's obtained.
Maybe you can stretch the definition of responsibility too (stretch away http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth ), but the idea that people could do otherwise, or deserve their fate if they chose to do something 'wrong', knowing it was wrong to do it ... even barring the idea of a deserved fate, people often fall back to human nature, resorting to their heuristics and "general feeling about doing this or that".
That's not a choice. That's more like a curse, when your environmental conditions are just right and strong enough to give such processes PREDOMINANCE over your own 'rational' sophisticated mind. In such cases, you won't act rationally anymore; you've already been taken over, even if temporarily. We've been discussing akrasia and ego depletion a bit lately, this falls in the same category. Rationality is but the last layer of your mind. It floats over all those hardwired components of your mind. It is pretty fragile and artificial, at least when it comes to act rationally, as opposed to thinking rationally, or even easier, thinking about rationality.
So whether someone "choose it", or not, whatever meaning is bestowed upon the word choice, is not the most important thing. It's to understand why someone did something of a disservice to himself, and how he could be helped out of it, and if he should be helped out of it in the first place.
This question is totally meaningless for materialists and consequentialists. The entire business of attaching blame and deserts must be abandoned in favour of questions either to do with predictions about the world or to do with what will give the best total effect.
I'll do a post on this when I've composed it, but the start of it is the case of Phineas Gage.
I think this is too extreme. Maybe blame and desert are best dispensed with, but it seems likely that we (our volitions) terminally disvalue interference with deliberate, 'responsible' choices, even if they're wrong, but not interference with compulsions. Even if that's not the case, it also seems likely that something like our idea of responsible vs. compulsive choice is a natural joint, predicting an action's evidential value about stable, reflectively endorsed preferences, which is heuristically useful in multiple ways.
This does not cut it. First, you need to additionally specify that they are fully aware of these multiple possibilities. When a man decides to cross the street and gets killed by junk falling from the sky, he didn't choose to die.
Second, the word "select" fully encapsulates the mystery of the word "choose" in this context.
Third (I didn't originally make this clear), I'm not looking for a fully reductive explanation of choice, so the "explaining away" discussion isn't relevant. The statement "Believe me - they choose" appears to be attempting to communicate something, and I believe the payload is hiding in the connotation of "choose" (because the denotation is pretty tautological: people's actions are the result of their choices).
Belatedly I recall prior discussion of connotation. I've edited my original reply to include the flashy LW keyword "ADBOC".
This isn't an adversarial game. How do you know I will disagree with you? Even if you did know, why avoid it?
You uttered a statement of the form "Believe me - <tautology>" in direct reply to a comment I found fairly insightful. Infotropism laid out the connotation of his use of the word "choose" quite well, IMO, and your statement seems at odds with that.
If you define "choice" to cover this scenario in the context of a "who is worth helping" discussion, I question the value of the definition.
When that is the case for a word, you cannot use it to make a clear point without a supporting explanation. I'm assuming you didn't intend to make a vague point.
I found the above comment to be mostly incoherent, so I'll reply to the meaningful parts.
Infotropism made a comment that essentially said people are more likely to help "cute puppies" than "dirty hobos" due to buggy hardware. You replied that your dog's senses are probably sharper than a hobo's, and that the hobo chose his or her condition. I deem that "participation", even if you didn't understand what was being discussed or implied.
How very condescending. Spare me your posturing.
I severely doubt you've tried extending compassion to any nonhuman things on their own terms rather than on ours. We're smart enough versus a dog to play a kind of "coherent extrapolated volition" game. What ought I to want, if I were a dog, but given what I know as a human? "Intelligence. Urgently. Food can wait, I don't give a damn if I'm cold or have fleas, fix my brain. I'm a fucking cripple."
That is what the starting point of compassion for all life would look like. So, when you consider the puppy-rehomers, it's pretty obvious they are just letting their cuteness instincts hijack their higher minds, and they want to spread the contagion.
"Eliezer you are not creating a posse of rationalists."
Could you please elaborate on this statement.
"I just don't see how another person can create a rationalist. This work you do yourself - with a little help from your friends."
You can lead a brain to data, but you can't make it think. Thinking is a choice you make for yourself. No one else can do it for you.
So, you think we should feel compassion for Fusobacterium necrophorum specimens?
I don't feel any, I'm happy not feeling any, and I'm also happy knowing my immune system doesn't hold back against them.
I strongly expect future versions of humane morality won't include any particular compassion for microorganisms, either.
You are using the Dark Arts. Dogs are not parasitic microorganisms. Marshall did not specify the function that maps organisms into appropriate levels of compassion. His statement does not imply the absurdity you are trying to reduce it to.
It's pretty clear-cut. Bacteria are living things, therefore compassion for all living things implies compassion for bacteria. If it's appropriate to feel compassion for dogs but not bacteria, the property that makes it so is not life, but something else.
It's pretty clear-cut. He spoke of showing a particular level of compassion to a dog. He also spoke of showing some compassion to all living things. He did not say to show the same level of compassion to all living things. I believe you fail to understand that your argument is not logical because you are thinking in terms of binary distinctions. Your mention of that "the property that makes it so" demonstrates this.
Zero or nonzero is a binary distinction. Do you disagree that it's appropriate to feel zero compassion for bacteria?
You're still thinking in binary terms. Zero or non-zero is a distinction that can be made arbitrarily useless.
If someone said that they wanted everyone in the world to have shoes, you would not assume that they also wanted people with no feet to have shoes. If a bacteria qualitatively lacks the feelings that are necessary for you to feel compassion for them, you assume they are not included.
If the universe were colonized by nothing but bacteria, I would not sterilize it, even if that bacteria could never evolve into anything else.
Your use of "parasitic" is also Dark: it serves no purpose other than to trigger the negative emotional associations of the word.
I used the word parasitic because he gave, as his example, a specific parasitic organism.
Is this supposed to mean something? It seems opaque, and quickly checking Google tells me that the phrase "grandeur of delusion" is so uncommon that this comment shows up as result #3. Was it merely a typo? Even if it was, how does one 'gain' anything of the sort?