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Sengachi comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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For you, I'll walk this endless maze...
The only ones to love a martyr's actions are those who did not love them.
That isn't true. If I love someone and they martyr themselves (literally or figuratively) in a way that is the unambiguously and overwhelmingly optimal way to fulfill both their volition and my own then I will love the martyr's actions. If you say I do not love the martyr or do not love their actions due to some generalization then you are just wrong.
Agreed... but also, this gets complicated because of the role of external constraints.
I can love someone, "love" what they do in the context of the environment in which they did it (I put love here in scare quotes because I'm not sure I mean the same thing by it when applied to an action, but it's close enough for casual conversation), and hate the fact that they were in such an environment to begin with, and if so my feelings about it can easily get confused.
Ding, rationalist level up!
Unfortunately, most people don't view things this way. I figured that so long as we were discussing a show based on how humans try to rationalize away and fight against the truly rational optimum, I might as well throw out a comment on how such people react to truly rational optimizers (martyrs).
Yeah, if the English language had any words for feelings that aren't hopelessly vague, we wouldn't have those silly arguments about catchy proverbs.
I suspect this is because of large psychological differences between humans. Specifically, not all humans experience all feelings; thus when a human hears a word referring to a feeling he hasn't experienced he assumes it refers to the closest feeling that he has.
Other theories: people just don't introspect much, people like being vague because "I love you" pleases someone who wants to hear "I want to work to make you happy" when you mean "I have lots of fun on dates with you", people before the advent of self-help books had a taboo against discussing (and generally expressing) feelings qua feelings and used preference-revealing actions instead.