TimS comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: katydee 02 January 2013 05:23PM

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Comment author: TimS 07 January 2013 04:46:26PM *  1 point [-]

Drawing from Attack of the Clones:

The proximate emotion that leads to Anakin's fall is love. Even if we ignore the love-of-mother --> Tusken raiders massacre, the romance between Anakin and Padme is expressly forbidden because of the risk of Anakin turning evil.

If any strong emotion has such a strong risk of turning evil that the emotion must be forbidden, we aren't really talking about a moral philosophy that bears any resemblance to one worth trying to implement in real humans.

I'm not saying that strong emotions don't have a risk of going overboard - they obviously do. But the risk is maybe in the 10% range. It certainly isn't in the >90% range.


Immediately. Where did this come from?

That's probably an overstatement by Brin. But evil (Sith-ness) is highly likely from feeling strong emotions (in-universe), and that's not representative of the way things work in the real world. It's roughly parallels the false idea that we rationalists want to remove emotions from human experience.