prase comments on Rationality Quotes September 2012 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 03 September 2012 05:18AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 02 September 2012 10:28:28PM *  25 points [-]

We're talking about a person who, along with her partner, gives to efficient charity twice as much money as she spends on herself. There's no way she doesn't actually believe what she says and still does that.

Comment author: prase 03 September 2012 12:09:24AM 4 points [-]

That she gives more than most others doesn't imply that her belief that giving even more is practically impossible isn't hypocritical. Yes, she very likely believes it, thus it is not a conscious lie, but only a small minority of falsities are conscious lies.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 September 2012 05:31:51AM 19 points [-]

Yeah, but there's also a certain plausibility to the heuristic which says that you don't get to second-guess her knowledge of what works for charitable giving until you're - not giving more - but at least playing in the same order of magnitude as her. Maybe her pushing a little bit harder on that "hypocrisy" would cause her mind to collapse, and do you really want to second-guess her on that if she's already doing more than an order of magnitude better than what your own mental setup permits?

Comment author: prase 03 September 2012 06:41:41PM *  6 points [-]

I am actually inclined to believe Wise's hypothesis (call it H) that being overly selfless can hamper one's ability to help others. I was only objecting to army1987's implicit argument that because she (Wise) clearly believes H, Dolores1984's suspicion of H being a self-serving untrue argument is unwarranted.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 September 2012 08:10:17AM 2 points [-]

There's an Italian proverb “Everybody is a faggot with other people's asses”, meaning more-or-less ‘everyone is an idealist when talking about issues that don't directly affect them/situations they have never experienced personally”.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 September 2012 08:01:35AM 1 point [-]

You're using hypocritical in a weird way -- I'd only normally use it to mean ‘lying’, not ‘mistaken’.

Comment author: prase 03 September 2012 06:26:51PM *  5 points [-]

I use "hypocrisy" to denote all instances of people violating their own declared moral standards, especially when they insist they aren't doing it after receiving feedback (if they can realise what they did after being told, only then I'd prefer to call it a 'mistake'). The reason why I don't restrict the word to deliberate lying is that I think deliberate lying of this sort is extremely rare; self-serving biases are effective in securing that.

Comment author: Exiles 04 September 2012 07:58:16AM -2 points [-]

especially when they insist they aren't doing it after receiving feedback

You underestimate force of habit, prase.

Comment author: prase 04 September 2012 04:14:48PM 1 point [-]

Can you explain?

Comment author: juliawise 11 September 2012 03:26:11PM *  0 points [-]

I don't believe it's practically impossible to give more than I do. I could push myself farther than I do. I don't perfectly live up to my own ideals. Given that I'm a human, I doubt any of you find that surprising.