Incorrect comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong
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-- Oscar Wilde
That's excellent advice for writing fiction. Audiences root for charming characters much more than for good ones. Especially useful when your world only contains villains. This is harder in real life, since your opponents can ignore your witty one-liners and emphasize your mass murders.
(This comment brought to you by House Lannister.)
The scary thing is how often it does work in real life. (Except that in real life charm is more than just witty one-liners.
Thank you, Professor Quirrell.
On the face of it I would absolutely disagree with Wilde on that: to live a moral life one absolutely needs to distinguish between good and bad. Charm (in bad people) and tedium (in good people) get in the way of this.
On the other hand, was Wilde really just blowing a big raspberry at the moralisers of his day ? Sort of saying "I care more about charm and tedium than what you call morality". I don't know enough about his context ...
Since I can't be bothered to do real research, I'll just point out that this Yahoo answer says that the quote is spoken by Lord Darlington. Oscar Wilde was a humorist and an entertainer. He makes amusing characters. His characters say amusing things.
Do not read too much into this quote and, without further evidence, I would not attribute this philosophy to Oscar Wilde himself.
(I haven't read Lady Windermere's Fan, where this if from, but this sounds very much like something Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray would say. And Lord Henry is one of the main causes of the Dorian's fall from grace in this book; he's not exactly a very positive character but certainly an entertainingly cynical one!)
But is it necessary to divide people into good and bad? What if you were only to apply goodness and badness to consequences and to your own actions?
If your own action is to empower another person, understanding that person's goodness or badness is necessary to understanding the action's goodness or badness.
But that can be entirely reduced to the goodness or badness of consequences.
And many charming people are also bad.
I don't know that you can really classify people as X or ¬X. I mean, have you not seen individuals be X in certain situations and ¬X in other situations?
&c.
It is absurd to divide people into charming or tedious. People either have familiar worldviews or unfamiliar worldviews.
It is absurd to divide people into familiar worldviews or unfamiliar worldviews. People either have closer environmental causality or farther environmental causality.
(anyone care to formalize the recursive tower?)
It's absurd to divide people into two categories and expect those two categories to be meaningful in more than a few contexts.
It is absurd to divide people. They tend to die if you do that.
It's absurd to divide. You tend to die if you do that.
It's absurd: You tend to die.
It's absurd to die.
It's bs to die.
Be.
Nobody alive has died yet.
“Males” and “females”. (OK, there are edge cases and stuff, but this doesn't mean the categories aren't meaningful, does it?)
What about good vs bad humans?
Or humans who create paperclips versus those who don't?
I thought I just said that.
Can't their be good humans who don't create paperclips and just destroy antipaperclips and staples and such?
Destroying antipaperclips is creating paperclips.
I didn't know humans had the concept though.
What is an antipaperclip?
I like it, but what's it got to do with rationality?
To me at least, it captures the notion of how the perceived Truth/Falsity of a belief rest solely in our categorization of it as 'tribal' or 'non-tribal': weird or normal. Normal beliefs are true, weird beliefs are false.
We believe our friends more readily than experts.