lessdazed comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: lessdazed 18 November 2011 02:02:53PM 7 points [-]

People commit altruistic acts, and then act selfishly and inconsiderately later in the day, once they feel that they have been good enough that they've earned the right to be a little selfish. In other words, they estimate that they've been good enough at presenting an altruistic image that a few transgressions won't threaten that image.

  1. It's not about their image to others. People who were assigned environmentally friendly products were more selfish than those assigned other products.
  2. 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?
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: lessdazed 23 November 2011 08:15:37PM 4 points [-]

When my trip to the Dominican Republic was ending, I was waiting for a bus to take me to the airport. I saw a "limpiabota," a shoe-shine boy, and decided it was a good time to get the mud and dirt off of my hiking boots, regular shoes, and dressier shoes.

They typically ask ten pesos for a shine but tourists might be asked to pay a few times that and natives five to ten pesos. In any case these are some of the poorest boys there and people might give them a five peso tip on top of whatever they ask. They are desperate for the money and are selling a 'luxury' good that the purchaser doesn't need to buy so it is possible to negotiate with them. I practiced my spanish talking him down from the asked for 30 pesos for the three pairs, and engaged in a tough negotiation, turning away several times and eventually getting him down to seven pesos for the three pairs. I let him shine the shoes I was wearing and gave him the other two pairs, telling him I put more than seven pesos in the shoe and it was a tip for him to take.

At the airport, everything was sold in dollars, not that I thought I'd much want to buy anything there anyway. i still had a good deal of money left in Dominican Pesos, so I put it all in my shoes. A few thousand pesos. The thought of the huge cut they take at the currency exchange counter galls me.

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