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Stabilizer comments on Bad Concepts Repository - Less Wrong
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The concept of "deserve" can be harmful. We like to think about whether we "deserve" what we get, or whether someone else deserves what he/she has. But in reality there is no such mechanism. I prefer to invert "deserve" into the future: deserve your luck by exploiting it.
Of course, "deserve" can be a useful social mechanism to increase desired actions. But only within that context.
Also "need". There's always another option, and pretending sufficiently bad options don't exist can interfere with expected value estimations.
And "should" in the moralizing sense. Don't let yourself say "I should do X". Either do it or don't. Yeah, you're conflicted. If you don't know how to resolve it on the spot, at least be honest and say "I don't know whether I want X or not X". As applied to others, don't say "he should do X!". Apparently he's not doing X, and if you're specific about why it is less frustrating and effective solutions are more visible. "He does X because it's clearly in his best interests, even despite my shaming. Oh..." - or again, if you can't figure it out, be honest about it "I have no idea why he does X"
That would work nice if I was so devoid of dynamic inconsistency that “I don't feel like getting out of bed” would reliably entail “I won't regret it if I stay in bed”; but as it stands, I sometimes have to tell myself “I should get out of bed” in order to do stuff I don't feel like doing but I know I would regret not doing.
This John Holt quote is about exactly this.
This is a fact about you, not about "should". If "should" is part of the world, you shouldn't remove it from your map just because you find other people frustrating.
One common, often effective strategy is to tell people they should do the thing.
The correct response to meeting a child murderer is "No, Stop! You should not do that!", not "Please explain why you are killing that child." (also physical force)
It's not about having conveniently blank maps. It's about having more precise maps.
I realize that you won't be able to see this as obviously true, but I want you to at least understand what my claim is: after fleshing out the map with specific details, your emotional approach to the problem changes and you become aware of new possible actions without removing any old actions from your list of options - and without changing your preferences. Additionally, the majority of the time this happens, "shoulding" is no longer the best choice available.
Sometimes, sure. I still use the word like that sometimes, but I try to stay aware that it's short hand for "you'd get more of what you want if you do"/"I and others will shame you if you don't". It's just that so often that's not enough.
And this is a good example. "Correct" responses oughtta get good results; what result do you anticipate? Surely not "Oh, sorry. didn't realize... I'll stop now". It sure feels appropriate to 'should' here, but that's a quirk of your psychology that focuses you on one action to the exclusion of others.
Personally, I wouldn't "should" a murderer any more than I'd "should" a paperclip maximizer. I'd use force, threats of force and maybe even calculated persuasion. Funny enough, were I to attempt to therapy a child murderer (and bold claim here - I think I could do it), I'd start with "so why do ya kill kids?"
Mostly, the result I anticipate from "should"ing a norm-violator is that other members of my tribe in the vicinity will be marginally more likely to back me up and enforce the tribal norms I've invoked by "should"ing. That is, it's a political act that exerts social pressure. (Among the tribal members who might be affected by this is the norm-violator themselves.)
Alternative formulas like "you'll get more of what you want if you don't do that!" or "I prefer you not do that!" or "I and others will shame you if you do that!" don't seem to work as well for this purpose.
But of course you're correct that some norm-violators don't respond to that at all, and that some norm-violations (e.g. murder) are sufficiently problematic that we prefer the violator be physically prevented from continuing the violation.
I can't remember where I heard the anecdote, but I remember some small boy discovering the power of "need" with "I need a cookie!".
I think any correct use of "need" is either implicitly or explicitly a phrase of the form "I need X (in order to do Y)".
To me deserve flows from experiencing the predicatable consequences of one's actions. If the cultural norms for my area is to wait in line at the bank, checkout, restraunt, etc., and I do so, I deserve to be served when I reach the front of it (barring any prior actions towards the owners like theft, or personal connections). Someone who comes in later does not deserve to be served until others in the queue have been. Or, less in a less relative example, if I see dark clouds and go out dressed for warm weather when I have rain clothes at hand, I deserve to feel uncomforable. I do not deserve to be assaulted by random strangers, when I have not personally performed any actions that would initaiate conflict that violence would resolve or done anything which tends to anger other people. Of course, the certainty of getting what one deserves is not 1, and one must expect that the unexpected will happen in some context eventually.
"Deserve" is harmful because we would often rather destroy utility than allow an undeserved outcome distribution. For instance, most people would probably rather punish a criminal than reform him. I nominate "justice" as the more basic bad concept. It's a good concept for sloppy thinkers who are incapable of keeping in mind all the harm done later by injustices now, a shortcut that lets them choose actions that probably increase utility in the long run. But it is a bad concept for people who can think more rigorously.
A lot of these "bad concepts" will probably be things that are useful given limited rationality.
“Are the gods not just?"
"Oh no, child. What would become us us if they were?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
I'd say "justice" is a heuristics; better than nothing, but not the best possible option.
This could be connected with their beliefs about probability of successfully reforming the criminal. I guess the probability strongly depends on the type of crime and type of treatment, and even is not the same for all classes of criminals (e.g. sociopaths vs. people in relative rare situation that overwhelmed them). They may fear that with a good lawyer, "reform, don't punish" is simply a "get out of jail free" card.
To improve this situation, it would help to make the statistics of reform successes widely known. But I would expect that in some situations, they are just not available. This is partially an availability heuristics on my part, and partially my model saying that many good intentions fail in real life.
Also, what about unique crimes? For example, an old person murders their only child, and they do not want to have any other child, ever. Most likely, they will never do the same crime again. How specifically would you reform them? How would you measure the success of reforming them? If we are reasonably sure they never do the same thing again, even without a treatment, then... should we just shrug and let them go?
The important part of the punishment is the precommitment to punish. If a crime already happened, causing e.g. pain to the criminal does not undo the past. But if the crime is yet in the future, precommiting to cause pain to the criminal influences the criminal's outcome matrix. Will precommitment to reforming have similar effects? ("Don't shoot him, or... I will explain you why shooting people is wrong, and then you will feel bad about it!")
Actually, I think that's some of what they are keeping in mind and find motivating.
If they were able to keep it in mind separately, they could include that in their calculations, instead of using justice as a kind of sufficient statistic to summarize it.
Would you also two box on Newcomb’s problem?
You can still use precommitment, but tie it to consequences rather than to Justice. Take Edward Snowden. Say that the socially-optimal outcome is to learn about the most alarming covert government programs, but not about all covert programs. So you want some Edward Snowdens to reveal some operations, but you don't want that to happen very often. The optimal behavior may be to precommit to injustice, punishing government employees who reveal secrets regardless of whether their actions were justified.
International espionage is probably one of the worst examples to attempt to generalize concepts like justice from. It's probably better to start with simpler (and more common) examples like theft or murder and then use the concepts developed on the simpler examples to look at the more complicated one.
So you're saying we like thinking about a moral property, but we're wrong to do so, because this property is not reliably instanciated? Desert theorist do not need to disagree - there's no law of physics that means people necessarily get what they deserve. Rather, we are supposed to be the mechanism - we must regulate our own affairs so as to ensure that people get what they deserve.
Perhaps the bad concept here is actually "karma", which I understand roughly to be the claim that there is a law of physics that means people necessarily get what they deserve.
I think around here we can call that the just-world fallacy.
Upvoted, but I would note that it's interesting to see a moral value listed in a (supposedly value-neutral) "bad concepts repository". The idea that "deserve" in the sense in which you mention is a harmful and meaningless concept is a rather consequentialist notion, and seeing this so highly upvoted says something about the ethics that this community has adopted - and if I'm right in assuming that a lot of the upvoters probably thought this a purely factual confusion with no real ethical element, then it says a bit about the moral axioms that we tend to take for granted.
Again, not saying this as a criticism, just as something that I found interesting.
E.g. part of my morality used to say that if I only deserved some pleasures in case I had acted in the right ways or was good enough: and this had nothing to do with a consequentialist it-is-a-way-of-motivating-myself-to-act-right logic, it was simply an intrinsic value that I would to some extent have considered morally right to have even if possessing it was actively harmful. Somebody coming along and telling me that "in reality, your value is not grounded in any concrete mechanism" would have had me going "well, in that case your value of murder being bad is not grounded in any concrete mechanism either". (A comment saying that "the concept of murder can be harmful, since in reality there is no mechanism for determining what's murder" probably wouldn't have been upvoted.)
On the flipside, egalitarian instincts (e.g. "justice and liberty for all", "all men are created equal") are often deemed desirable, even though many a times "deserve" stems from such concepts of how a society should supposedly be like, "what kind of society I want to live in".
There is a tension between decrying "deserve" as harmful, while e.g. espousing the (in many cases) egalitarian instincts they stem from ("I should have as many tech toys as my neighbor", "I'm trying to keep up with the Joneses", etc.).
The concept of "deserve" is only harmful to the extent people apply it to things they don't in fact deserve. In this respect, it's no different from the concept of "truth".
I think this is a different flavor of deserving. Stabilizer is using deserve to explain how people got into the current situation while you're using it to describe desirable future situation. The danger is assuming that because we are capable of acting in a way that gives people what they deserve, that in all situations someone must have already done so, so everyone must have acted in such a way that they have earned their present circumstances through moral actions.
It's part of a larger pattern of mistaking your interpretations of reality as reality itself. There's no ephemeral labels floating around that are objectively true - you can't talk too much, work too hard, or be pathetic. You can only say things that other people would prefer not to hear, do work to the exclusion of other objectives, or be pitied by someone.
If excessive work causes an overuse injury or illness then "worked too hard" would seem to be a legitimate way to describe reality. (Agree with the other two.)
I agree with that. I also suspect many people treat deserving of rewards and deserving of punishments as separate concepts. As a result they might reject one while staying attached to the other and become even more confused.