= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
GLaDOS comments on Malice, Stupidity, or Egalité Irréfléchie? - 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 (62)
(Parts of this comment were misinterpreted. I have slightly edited this comment to make it clearer; this editing was done after lionhearted replied to it. )
I downvoted this post. The OP describes a phenomenon that everyone knows about, then suggests that "stupidity" (a word mostly left undefined) and "malice" aren't good explanations. (How did "malice" ever seem like a good explanation in the first place?) That's kind of correct, maybe, depending on what class of things the OP is using "stupidity" to refer to. A single word is never a good explanation for an aspect of human psychology. The OP then suggests that the "egalitarian instinct" is an explanation. The OP gives little explanation for this explanation (ETA: I didn't mean explaining what the egalitarian instinct is, which is easily researched by those interested, but explaining more persuasively/effectively how it explains the phenomenon mentioned), no mention of other possible explanations (no acknowledgment of the existence of other possible explanations), and no description of what the world would look like if the OP's explanation were wrong. Thinking up one plausible explanation for an observed phenomenon is fine, I guess, if that's where you want to start, and you don't care too much about the phenomenon in question. Writing a Less Wrong post that looks exactly like that, though, is just wrong. This is not how you go about constructing a model of human psychology.
I would like to complain in more detail about the way "stupidity" and "malice" are brought up and almost immediately dismissed. It causes some part of the the reader's brain to read along and think "Yeah, stupidity doesn't sound like a very good hypothesis, and huh, malice doesn't either... I wonder what a good explanation would be? Oh, the OP suggests the egalitarian instinct, that's comparatively a lot more plausible than stupidity or malice which means it's probably correct." If stupidity and malice had never been brought up, the reader would be a lot more likely to treat the proposed explanation of egalitarianism with a healthier amount of skepticism. Bringing up the red herrings thus misleads.
Why not? Are you saying humans are never systematically glad at another's misfortune or loss under certain conditions? I would say humans often are. LWers probably come from societies and situations where this kind of behaviour is less prevalent than the human norm.
This is a really bad habit. (Specifically the habit of asking or thinking things like "Are you saying completely ridiculous thing #24626772?".)
The answer is yes fairly often, which gives a lot of info cheaply.
You're right, I was imprecise; the bad habit is asking it and halfway-assuming the answer will be 'yes' instead of asking it without the presumption of nonsense.
Yes, being polite is good, and rhetorical questions can easily go the other away.
Perhaps this is so.
But malice never being a good explanation when malice is basically "desiring another misfortune or loss". So malice never being a good explanation is completely ridiculous. I wanted to check if you where really saying what I thought you where saying so I rephrased it in my own words to match how I understood your statement.
That part is of course a good habit. I think the confusion happened because I was asking "how did malice ever seem like a good explanation [for this phenomenon] in the first place?", not "how did malice ever seem like a good explanation [for anything ever in the history of the universe] in the first place?".