Logos01 comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong

121 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 17 November 2011 07:28PM

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Comment author: Gabriel 19 November 2011 02:01:48AM 5 points [-]

The obvious solution is to commit acts of selfishness and inconsiderateness that seem worse than they really are. Any ideas on how to do slight/no/negative evil but feel very evil? Pulling wings from flies, maybe?

There's a danger of simply getting used to being evil. And it seems quite likely to me, based on analogy between morality and conscientiousness. When I spend some time doing useful work (good), the resulting feeling of satisfaction makes me much more tempted to start wasting time (evil), because I 'earned' it. However, procrastinating mostly causes me to want to procrastinate even more.

Comment author: Logos01 21 November 2011 06:49:14AM 1 point [-]

There's a danger of simply getting used to being evil.

One need only feel "evil", rather than actually be "evil". Hypothetical: try to imagine yourself as a demonic being, wearing human skin. Hold yourself to the silly superstitions that people believe of them; they cannot enter homes uninvited, are always out to make "bargains", etc... limit yourself to the harmless categories of these sorts of behaviors, and see how it affects your behavior and thinking.

The point of this being that it magnifies your personal feelings of "wickedness" without actually producing those results.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 21 November 2011 03:44:14PM 4 points [-]

Of course, this very easily backfires - either you dislike feeling evil, so feeling evil takes up energy and doesn't leave you any to spare for altruistic acts. Alternatively, it might twist your self-image so that you think you actually are evil and start to commit evil acts and become less interested in good ones... or you think that you aren't doing things that are making you feel bad enough yet, so you start doing things that are actually evil.

I expect that getting this to work would require quite an intricate web of self-deception, and most who tried this would simply fail, one way or another.

Comment author: Logos01 21 November 2011 03:51:02PM 3 points [-]

I expect that getting this to work would require quite an intricate web of self-deception, and most who tried this would simply fail, one way or another.

Eh. I suspect you're over-thinking it. Capturing the feeling in order to cultivate a proper emotional balance as to achieve an outcome is a measurably useful phenomenon. If it doesn't work, stop doing it.