gwern comments on An attempt to 'explain away' virtue ethics - Less Wrong

2 Post author: lukeprog 09 September 2011 08:49AM

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Comment author: lessdazed 10 September 2011 01:38:36AM *  2 points [-]

If a person's history is to cheat in business, it might be that the person habitually and easily lies whenever on the phone and he or she can't see who is on the other end. The person might be solidly in the middle of the bell curve for everything but predilection to dehumanization. (Scholarship FTW.)

Alternatively, the person might have a unique situation, such as being blind, isolated, and requiring a reader to speak out received emails in Stephen-Hawking voice, that is such that anyone would experience dehumanization sufficient to make them cheaters. (I'm not claiming this is the case, just that some of similarly plausible set-ups would cause actions, just as time since judges ate affects sentencing.)

So either virtue ethics breaks down as people's uniqueness lies in their responses to biases and/or people's being overwhelmingly, chaotically directed by features of their environments.

Either way, cheaters and thieves are likely to cheat or steal again.

Comment author: sam0345 10 September 2011 09:18:40AM 0 points [-]

If I can look someone in the face, can usually detect lying. Voice only, can often detect lying. Text only, can sometimes detect lying.

Thus if a person is honest in proportion to the bandwidth, this requires no more psychological explanation than the fact that burglars are apt to burgle at night.

Comment author: gwern 10 September 2011 09:25:20PM 6 points [-]

If I can look someone in the face, can usually detect lying. Voice only, can often detect lying. Text only, can sometimes detect lying.

Is that by the same way you can divine people's true natures?

  • the Wizards Project tested 20,000 people to come up with 50 who panned out
  • an aggregation of techniques offered no better than 70% accuracy
  • people with no instructions did little better than chance in distinguishing lies and truth

But I suppose these results (and the failings of mechanical lie detectors) are just unscientific research, which pale next to the burning truth of your subjective conviction that you "can usually detect lying".

Comment author: lessdazed 10 September 2011 10:20:52PM 2 points [-]

What was the self-assuredness of the 20,000? What was the self-assuredness of the 50?

What was the ability of the top 100, or 1,000, as against the top 50?

Comment author: gwern 10 September 2011 10:42:24PM -1 points [-]

Does any of that really matter? This is the same person who thinks a passel of cognitive biases doesn't apply to him and that the whole field is nonsense trumped by unexamined common sense. (Talk about 'just give up already'.)

Comment author: lessdazed 10 September 2011 10:44:16PM 2 points [-]

If the top 200 lie-detectors were among the 400 most confident people at the outset, I would think that relevant.

Comment author: gwern 10 September 2011 10:52:41PM -1 points [-]

And how likely is that, really?

This is the sort of desperate dialectics verging on logical rudeness I find really annoying, trying to rescue a baloney claim by any possibility. If you seriously think that, great - go read the papers and tell me and I will be duly surprised if the human lie-detectors are the best calibrated people in that 20,000 group and hence that factoid might apply to the person we are discussing.

Comment author: lessdazed 10 September 2011 11:15:27PM 2 points [-]

Seems like homework for the person making the claim, I'm just pointing out it exists.

I will be duly surprised if the human lie-detectors are the best calibrated people

Nit-pick, they could be the worst calibrated and what I said would hold, provided the others estimated themselves suitably bad at it.