There are a lot of people who really don't understand the structure of reality, or how prevalent and how destructive sociopaths (and the conformists that they influence) are.
You know, this raises an interesting question: what would actually motivate a clinical psychopath in a position of power? Well, self-interest, right? I can see how there might be a lot of environmental disasters, defective products, poor working conditions as a result ... probably also a certain amount of skullduggery would be related to this as well.
Of course, this is an example of society/economics leading a psychopath astray, rather than the other way around. Still, it might be worth pushing to have politicians etc. tested and found unfit if they're psychopathic.
In fact, there is a blind spot in most people's realities that's filled by their evolutionarily-determined blindness to sociopaths.
I remain deeply suspicious of this sentence.
In fact, virtually everyone who hasn't read Stanley Milgram's book about it, and put in a lot of thought about its implications is in this category [...] you might not be referencing an accurate picture of political thought, political reality, political networks.
This seems reasonable, actually. I'm unclear why I should believe you know better, but we are on LessWrong.
The world still doesn't have much of a problem with the "initiation of force" or "aggression." (Minus a minority of enlightened libertarian dissenters.) ...Especially not when it's labeled as "majoritarian government." ie: "Legitimized by a vote." However, a large and growing number of people who see reality accurately (small-L libertarians) consistently denounce the initiated use of force as grossly sub-optimal, immoral, and wrong. It is immoral because it causes suffering to innocent people.
I ... words fail me. I seriously cannot respond to this. Please, explain yourself, with actual reference to this supposed reality you perceive, and with the term "initiation of force" tabooed.
Talk about the prison industrial complex with anyone, and talk with someone who has family members imprisoned for a victimless crime offense.
And this is the result of ... psychopaths? Human psychological blindspots evolved in response to psychopaths?
Talk with someone who knows Schaeffer Cox, (one of the many political prisoners in the USA).
Well, that's ... legitimately disturbing. Of course, it may be inaccurate, or even accurate but justified ... still cause for concern.
Your statistical likelihood of being murdered by your own government, during peacetime, worldwide.
You know, my government could be taken down with a few month's terrorism, and has been. There are actual murderers in power here, from the ahem glorious revolution. I actually think someone who faced this sort of thing here might have a real chance of winning that fight, if they were smart.
This contributes to my vague like of american-style maintenance-of-a-well-organized-militia gun ownership, despite the immediate downsides.
And, of course, no other government is operating such attacks in Ireland, to my knowledge. I think I have a lot more to fear from organized crime than organized law, and I have a lot more unpopular political opinions than money.
I suggest asking yourself whether the math that created that graph was correctly calculated. A bias against badly illustrated truths may be pushing you toward the embrace of falsehood.
The site appears to be explicitly talking about genocide etc. in third-world countries.
If sociopath-driven collectivism was easy for social systems to detect and neutralize, we probably wouldn't give so much of our wealth to it. Yet, social systems repeatedly, and cyclically fail for this reason, just as the USA is now, once again, proceeding down this well-worn path [...] societies typically fall to over-parasitism, (too many looters, too few producers), we should ask ourselves what part we're playing in that fall.
Citation very much needed, I'm afraid. You are skirting the edge of assuming your own conclusion, which suggests it's a large part of your worldview; am I right?
What if all those law students had become STEM majors, and built better machines and technologies?
I'm going to say "surprisingly little". Eh, it's worth a shot in at least a state-level trial.
If societies don't fall entirely to over-parasitism, then what forces ameliorate parasitism?
And, how would you know how likely you are to be killed by a system in transition? You may be right: maybe the graph doesn't take into account changes in the future that make societies less violent and more democratic. It just averages the past results over time.
Assuming "past" and "future" here are metaphorically referring to more/less advanced societies, absolutely.
But I think R. J. Rummel's graph makes a good point: we should look at the potential harm caused by near-existential (extreme) threats, and ask ourselves if we're not on the same course.
This doesn't seem likely to fall into even the same order of magnitude as X-risks. In fact, I think the main effect would be the possible impact on reducing existential threats.
Have we truly eliminated the variables of over-legislation, destruction or elimination of legal protections, and consolidation of political power? ...Because those things have killed a lot of people in the past, and where those things have been prevented, a lot of wealth and relative peace has been generated.
And you blame these on ... psychopaths?
Truth can come from a poorly-dressed source, and lies can (and often do) come in slick packages.
Hmm. Have you considered dressing better? Because those youtube documentaries are borderline unwatchable, and I am right only barely motivated enough to watch them because I would feel bad at potentially neglecting a source of info. (If they continue to consist of facts I already know and raw, unsupported declarations I will, in fact, stop watching them.)
Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold.1 There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.
I was just making a factual observation. Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?
On questions of simple fact (for example, whether Earthly life arose by natural selection) there’s a legitimate expectation that the argument should be a one-sided battle; the facts themselves are either one way or another, and the so-called “balance of evidence” should reflect this. Indeed, under the Bayesian definition of evidence, “strong evidence” is just that sort of evidence which we only expect to find on one side of an argument.
But there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property. Why do people seem to want their policy debates to be one-sided?
Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.
One should also be aware of a related failure pattern: thinking that the course of Deep Wisdom is to compromise with perfect evenness between whichever two policy positions receive the most airtime. A policy may legitimately have lopsided costs or benefits. If policy questions were not tilted one way or the other, we would be unable to make decisions about them. But there is also a human tendency to deny all costs of a favored policy, or deny all benefits of a disfavored policy; and people will therefore tend to think policy tradeoffs are tilted much further than they actually are.
If you allow shops that sell otherwise banned products, some poor, honest, poorly educated mother of five kids is going to buy something that kills her. This is a prediction about a factual consequence, and as a factual question it appears rather straightforward—a sane person should readily confess this to be true regardless of which stance they take on the policy issue. You may also think that making things illegal just makes them more expensive, that regulators will abuse their power, or that her individual freedom trumps your desire to meddle with her life. But, as a matter of simple fact, she’s still going to die.
We live in an unfair universe. Like all primates, humans have strong negative reactions to perceived unfairness; thus we find this fact stressful. There are two popular methods of dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance. First, one may change one’s view of the facts—deny that the unfair events took place, or edit the history to make it appear fair.2 Second, one may change one’s morality—deny that the events are unfair.
Some libertarians might say that if you go into a “banned products shop,” passing clear warning labels that say THINGS IN THIS STORE MAY KILL YOU, and buy something that kills you, then it’s your own fault and you deserve it. If that were a moral truth, there would be no downside to having shops that sell banned products. It wouldn’t just be a net benefit, it would be a one-sided tradeoff with no drawbacks.
Others argue that regulators can be trained to choose rationally and in harmony with consumer interests; if those were the facts of the matter then (in their moral view) there would be no downside to regulation.
Like it or not, there’s a birth lottery for intelligence—though this is one of the cases where the universe’s unfairness is so extreme that many people choose to deny the facts. The experimental evidence for a purely genetic component of 0.6–0.8 is overwhelming, but even if this were to be denied, you don’t choose your parental upbringing or your early schools either.
I was raised to believe that denying reality is a moral wrong. If I were to engage in wishful optimism about how Sulfuric Acid Drink was likely to benefit me, I would be doing something that I was warned against and raised to regard as unacceptable. Some people are born into environments—we won’t discuss their genes, because that part is too unfair—where the local witch doctor tells them that it is right to have faith and wrong to be skeptical. In all goodwill, they follow this advice and die. Unlike you, they weren’t raised to believe that people are responsible for their individual choices to follow society’s lead. Do you really think you’re so smart that you would have been a proper scientific skeptic even if you’d been born in 500 CE? Yes, there is a birth lottery, no matter what you believe about genes.
Saying “People who buy dangerous products deserve to get hurt!” is not tough-minded. It is a way of refusing to live in an unfair universe. Real tough-mindedness is saying, “Yes, sulfuric acid is a horrible painful death, and no, that mother of five children didn’t deserve it, but we’re going to keep the shops open anyway because we did this cost-benefit calculation.” Can you imagine a politician saying that? Neither can I. But insofar as economists have the power to influence policy, it might help if they could think it privately—maybe even say it in journal articles, suitably dressed up in polysyllabismic obfuscationalization so the media can’t quote it.
I don’t think that when someone makes a stupid choice and dies, this is a cause for celebration. I count it as a tragedy. It is not always helping people, to save them from the consequences of their own actions; but I draw a moral line at capital punishment. If you’re dead, you can’t learn from your mistakes.
Unfortunately the universe doesn’t agree with me. We’ll see which one of us is still standing when this is over.
1Robin Hanson et al., “The Hanson-Hughes Debate on ‘The Crack of a Future Dawn,’” 16, no. 1 (2007): 99–126, http://jetpress.org/v16/hanson.pdf.
2This is mediated by the affect heuristic and the just-world fallacy.