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katydee comments on On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die - Less Wrong
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Comments (465)
I'm curious as to what brought you to these conclusions. Can you explain further?
Well, that line captures a lot of it.
Eliezer's response was to link me to an XKCD comic.
So, thus far, the quality of discourse here has been sociopathic fictional characters and webcomics...
The post by "Voldemort" was an obvious joke/fakepost, though, and Eliezer's comment was on the mark even if he did use a webcomic to illustrate his point...
What makes you so certain that the Voldemort post was a joke, and not simply a sociopath posting on an alternate account to avoid the social consequences of holding such a stance? Certainly, there seem to be quite a few other people here who would pick immortality over saving 28 other lives, if you put the two choices "side by side".
Lots of people choose luxury over saving 28 lives. Doing so may be wrong, but if it's that common, it can't be strongly indicative of sociopathy.
Lots of people let akrasia, compartmentalization, etc. keep themselves from realizing that it's actually a choice. When they're put side by side and the answer is a casual "of course I'd choose my own life", I tend to consider that stronger evidence of sociopathic behavior.
That said, yes, I consider most people to exhibit some degree of sociopathic behavior. LessWrong just demonstrates more :)
I'm inclined to agree with steven0461,
Actually, this is true even for rather low values of "luxury". I, like tens of millions of other people in the developed world, am a homeowner. Yes, the cost of my (rather modest) home would have saved ~100 lives if I had instead donated it to a maximally effective charity. That isn't what I did. That isn't what the other tens of millions of homeowners did. If you want to count that as sociopathic behavior, fine. But that casts a rather wide net for what would count in that category. Is "sociopathic behavior" even a useful category if it is extended so widely? Is there much behavior left that falls outside it?
The Voldemort account is overtly a role-playing character, which are not that uncommon here (see also: Quirinus_Quirrell, GLaDOS, and Clippy).
It still says something about the author of that character, that they (a) went through the effort of writing that reply and (b) there is not a single reply in the empathic/non-sociopathic direction demonstrating an equal amount of effort. I don't really see the relevance of it being a role-playing character at all - it's hardly incompatible that it's both a RP character and a sociopath who has chosen a sane cover for posting their socially unacceptable views (after all, Voldemort has all of 28 karma; he clearly gets down voted a decent amount)
The simple Bayesian evidence is that someone cared enough to write a sociopathic reply that was fairly in depth, and the only non-sociopathic replies were a link to a webcomic and personal preferences of "well, yeah, I'd pick immortality over 28 lives..."
Also, lumping Clippy in with clearly fictional characters is just rude ;)
There are easier ways to avoid the social consequences of holding said stance; one of them is to denounce that stance. Another is to fail to comment on the matter. Logging in to an alternate account in order to say something they don't want to be seen saying has a small prior to begin with.
p(Author is a sociopath | Author chose to RP as Voldemort specifically) > p(Author is a sociopath | Author went with a different pseudonym) is my basic assertion here. People who roleplay sociopaths are more likely to be sociopaths - roleplaying Voldemort is a safe outlet for that tendency.
That the author is writing Voldemort also seems like evidence for the hypothesis that the author agrees with Voldemort (I'd assume possibly not to that extreme, but who knows). Much the same as everyone assumes that the author behind shokwave agrees with shokwave's writing...
Sure, roleplaying as Voldemort may be evidence for sociopathy, but if I had to estimate how much evidence, I'd call it epsilon. Roleplaying, and humour, is fun. And fun is tempting, especially on the internet.
I've been running campaigns for, wow, 16 years now, and I played intermittently even before then. Roleplaying is not something that is unfamiliar to me. One of the things I've noticed is that, for the most part, people play characters that think like they do. It is difficult for most people to play a well-developed character that doesn't largely agree with their own personal philosophy (playing a simple caricature is much easier, but Voldemort does not strike me as such)
If it's only an epsilon of evidence then my life is an absolutely ridiculous statistical anomaly o.o
Far more people play chaotic evil than can be explained by them being fine with killing people for personal gain.
Remember that the point of all this is to substantiate the claim that roleplaying Voldemort is evidence for sociopathy, or lack of empathy. Playing a character that thinks differently isn't quite the same as playing one with different specific moral values, and I don't think the latter is particularly hard. Villains are often portrayed as more rational and driven than the heroes of stories (who usually get most of their wins for free), so it can be easy to identify with them if you're a kind of person who respects those characteristics. That's the "way of thinking" that's attractive. The specific object-level morality is pretty much hot-swappable.
(Plus, we wouldn't want to fall victim to the fundamental attribution error on the basis of a single blog comment, I don't think...)
I play roleplaying games a lot and most of my characters aren't much like me. I've played evil characters, stupid characters, characters who considered violence the first and best answer, religiously devout characters, and a rainbow-obsessed boy-crazy twice-married wizardess who liked to attack her enemies with colors and wear outrageously loud outfits. I'm not evil, stupid, violent, religious, or rainbowy.
I've written fiction with characters of an even greater variety.
Those mostly seem too unlike you, from what I can tell, to be clear examples of someone playing a non-caricature.
The exceptions are the devout characters. Looking back on my experience as a deontologist, I don't think it would be too hard to role play many other deontologists, provided the rules were clear enough. So I think those characters are too like you to prove the point either, unless they were devout non-compartmentalized thinkers, i.e. "devout moderates" who aren't in a moderate religion because of lack of faith or willpower or indeed directly because of any other character flaw.
I will simply take your word you role play characters who neither think like you do nor are caricatures, You have not lowered the amount I would have to believe you to the level of merely having to believe that you role played the listed characters, because I still have to believe that the characters are good examples, which is not self evident.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/6vq/on_the_unpopularity_of_cryonics_life_sucks_but_at/4pas
Why thank you, I do try.
Except for stealing everything that isn't nailed down you mean?
To step out of character, my regular account has 2000+ karma on LW and I don't think I've been acused of sociopathy before. I guess I'm just that good at hiding it.
That's interesting..
If my current wizard ever dies, I think I'm going to try playing a psychopathic psion. I think I'd be able to give it a decent go.
I suppose I may have been unclear. There's often a lot of surface differences - my roommate has played a raver, a doctor, and now an AVON sales lady who fights zombies. But at the same time, there's deeper similarities in conversational style, use of language, decision-making methods, and personal preferences that mean they all play fairly similarly (in her case, she loses her temper quickly - for some characters this makes them very verbally hostile, while others move quickly to combat)
It does also depend on your audience. Playing a "convincing" sociopath is pretty easy if no one in your group knows a real sociopath. And, of course, there ARE some people who have the knack for truly capturing other mindsets. However, half the books on my shelf are from authors that can't even convincingly write characters of the opposite sex.
Maybe Voldemort has sociopathic tendencies. Maybe they're just a good roleplayer. However, I don't think sociopath is really that much rarer than a good, convincing role player.