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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Morality is Awesome - Less Wrong
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Whether to use "awesome" instead of "virtuous" is the question, not the answer. This is the question asked by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. If you've gotten to the point where you're set on using "awesome" instead of "good", you've already chosen your answer to most of the difficult questions.
The challenge to awesome theory is the same one it has been for 70 years: Posit a world in which Hitler conquered the world instead of shooting himself in his bunker. Explain how that Hitler was not awesome. Don't look at his outcomes and conclude they were not awesome because lots of innocent people died. Awesome doesn't care how many innocent people died. They were not awesome. They were pathetic, which is the opposite of awesome. Awesome means you build a space program to send a rocket to the moon instead of feeding the hungry. Awesome history is the stuff that happened that people will actually watch on the History Channel. Which is Hitler, Napoleon, and the Apollo program.
If you don't think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation, by saying "I don't know exactly what awesome is, but someone that evil can't be awesome." Hitler was evil, not bad.
That's exactly right. Including "awesome". Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are awesome. A God who will squish you like a bug if you dare not to worship him is awesome, awe-full, and awful.
Saying that it's good because it's vague, because it's harder to screw up when you don't know what you're talking about, is contrary to the spirit of LessWrong.
Awesome already refers to the same things good is supposed to refer to, for those people who have already decided to use "awesome" instead of "good". The "Is this right?" question that invokes virtues and rules is not a confused notion of what is awesome. It's a different, incompatible view of what we "ought" to do.
I sometimes get the impression that I am the only person who reads MoR who actually thinks MoR!Hermione is more awesome than MoR!Quirrell. Of course I have access to at least some info others don't, but still...
Let's say they're different kinds of awesome to me. Overall, I think Quirrell is more awesome... until I remember Hermione is twelve.
Canon!Luna is more awesome than MoR!Hermione too.
However, a universe with MoR!Hermione in it is likely to be far more awesome than a universe with canon!Luna substituted in. MoR!Hermione is a heck of a lot more useful to have around for most purposes, including the protection of awesome things such as canon!Luna.
MoR!Quirrel certainly invokes "Fictional Awesomeness". That thing that makes many (including myself) think "Well he's just damn cool and I'm glad he exists in that fictional universe (which can't have any direct effect on me)". Like Darth Vader is way more awesome than Anakin Skywalker even though being a whiny brat is somewhat less dangerous than being a powerful, gratuitously evil Sith Lord. I personally distinguish this from the 'actual awesomeness' of the kind mentioned here. I'm not sure to what extent others consider the difference.
I didn't, and still don't... but now I'm a little bit disturbed that I don't, and want to look a lot more closely at Hermione for ways she's awesome.
Quirrell scans, to me, as more awesome along the "probably knows far more Secret Eldrich Lore than you" and "stereotype of a winner" axes, until I remember that Hermione is, canonically, also both of those things. (Eldrich Lore is something one can know, so she knows it. And she's more academically successful than anyone I've ever known in real life.)
So when I look more closely, the thing my brain is valuing is a script it follows where Hermione is both obviously unskillful about standard human things (feminism, kissing boys, Science Monogamy) and obviously cares about morality, to a degree that my brain thinks counts as weakness. When I pay attention, Quirrell is unskillful about tons of things as well, but he doesn't visibly acknowledge that he is/has been unskillful. He also may or may not care about ethics to a degree, but his Questionably Moral Snazzy Bad Guy archetype doesn't let him show this.
It does come around to Quirrell being more my stereotype of a winner, in a sense. Quirrell is more high-status than Hermione - when he does things that are cruel, wrong or stupid he hides it or recontextualizes it into something snazzy - but Hermione is more honorable than Quirrell. She confronts her mistakes and failings publicly, messily and head-on and grows as a person because of that. I think that's really awesome.
Yeah, that sounds like either a miscalibrated sense of awe (i.e. very different priorities), or like a reaction to private information.
Well, to a first approximation, on a moral level, Quirrell is who I try not to be and Hermione is who I wish I was, and on the level of intelligence, it's not possible for me to be viscerally impressed with either one's intellect since I strictly contain both. Ergo I find Hermione's choices more impressive than Quirrell's choices.
Quirrel strikes me as the sort of character who is intended to be impressive. Pretty much all his charactaristics hit my "badass" buttons. The martial arts skills, the powerful magical field brushing at the edges of Harry's little one, etc. However, I wouldn't want to be like Quirrel, and I can't imagine being Quirrel-like and still at all like myself. Whereas Hermione impresses me in the sense of being almost like a version of myself that gets everything I try to be right and is better than me at everything I think matters. Hermione is more admirable to me than Quirrel, but my sense of awe is triggered more by badass-ness than admiration.
This surprises me, but I'm not sure what I've mismodelled. To my mind, Hermione is trusting about moral rules in a way that I wouldn't have expected you to like that much, but perhaps it's just a trait that I don't like that much.
Harry seems more awesome to me because he has a strong drive to get to the bottom of things-- not the same thing as intelligence, though it might be a trait that wouldn't be as interesting in an unintelligent character. (Or would it be? I can't think of an author who's tried to portray that.)
I would be fascinated to read a character who can Get Curious and think skeptically and reflectively about competing ideas, but is only of average intelligence.
Trying to model this character in my head has resulted in some sort of error though, so there's that...
Arguably Watson is an attempt at this.
Except Watson was intended to be above average intelligence, but below Sherlock level intelligence, so he fails on the last account. He was very intelligent, just not as absurdly inelligent as Sherlock, so he appeared to be of average or lower intelligence.
I can imagine writing this character, because it's the way I feel a lot of the time... Knowing I read some important fact once but not being able retrieve it, lacking the working memory to do logic problems in my head and having to stop and pull out pen and paper, etc. I'm arguably of somewhat higher than average intelligence, but I'm quite familiar with the feeling of my brain not being good enough for what I want to do.
This is exactly what I was trying to describe, and this happens to me as well. If you ever do write such a figure, be sure to let me know, I'd like to read about them. :)
One of my previous novels somewhat touches on this. The main character is quite intelligent, but has grown up illiterate, and struggles with this limitation. If you want to check it out, see here.
Coincidences are funny: my name happens to be Asher.
I'll put this on my reading list.
Those personality traits are not just correlated with intelligence, they almost certainly cause it - thinking is to some degree a skill set, and innate curiosity + introspection + skepticism would result in constant deliberate practice. So those traits + average intelligence can only coexist if the character has recently undergone a major personality change, or suffered brain damage.
That's a dangerous combination.
The Millionaire Next Door may include a bunch of people who can think clearly without being able to handle a lot of complexity.
Amazon link. The primary takeaway from the book is that high consumption and high wealth draw from the same resource pool, and so conflict.
In general, I wonder if this shows up as characters who see virtue as intuitive, rather than deliberative. Harry sometimes gets the answer right, but he has to think hard and avoid tripping over himself to get there; Hermione often gets the answer right from the start because she appears to have a good feel for her situation.
Moving back to wealth, and generalizing from my parents, it's not clear to me that they sat down one day and said "you know how we could become millionaires? Not spending a lot of money!" rather than having the "consume / save?" dial in their heads turned towards save, in part because "thrift => wealth" is an old, old association.
If you model intelligence differences as primarily working memory differences, it seems reasonable to me that high-WM people would be comfortable with nuance and low-WM people would be uncomfortable with it; the low-WM person might be able to compensate with external devices like writing things down, but it's not clear they can synthesize things as easily on paper as a high-WM person could do in their head (or as easily as the high-WM person using paper!).
Maybe Next Door? Or am I missing something?
Just a typo (now corrected) rather than a joke or reference.
Time to taboo intelligence.
Question for those who've tracked MOR more carefully than I have: How much is Harry's curiosity entangled with his desire for power?
That's probably why. For many mere mortals like myself MoR!Quirrell is simply awesome: competent, unpredictable, in control, a level above everyone else. Whereas MoR!Hermione is, while clever and knowledgeable, too often a damsel in distress, and her thought process, decisions and actions are uniformly less impressive than those of Harry or Quirrell. Not sure if this is intentional or not. At this point I'm rooting for Quirrell to win. Maybe there will be an alternate ending which explores this scenario.
Is this simply a case of rooting for whoever looks like they're going to win?
You think that [I think that] Quirrell/Voldemort is going to win? O.O I wish. After all, what's the worst that can happen if he does?
Well, I meant the question as a question, not as a rhetorical statement.
That aside, I do think it's possible to be affected by the tendency to admire what appears currently to be the winning team even if I suspect, or even believe, that they will eventually lose. Human knowledge is rarely well-integrated.
That aside, I haven't read HP:MOR in a very long time, so any estimates of who wins I make would be way obsolete. I don't even quite know what Quirrell/Voldemort's "win conditions" are. So I have no idea what can happen if he does.
That said, I vaguely recall EY making statements about writing Quirrell that I took at the time to mean that EY is buying into the sorts of narrative conventions that require Quirrell to not win (though not necessarily to lose).
I think either Harry will win, or everybody will lose.
Wait, all of her? Including the obnoxious controlling parts?
I'll hazard a guess that your concepts have more internal structure than those of most people. You've probably looked at the interactions between the concepts you've learned, analyzed them, and refined them to be more intensional and less extensional. Whereas for most people, the concept "awesome" is a big bag of all the stuff they were looking at when someone said "Awesome!"