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DanielLC comments on Human Evil and Muddled Thinking - Less Wrong
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Comments (138)
I regret that I have to disagree with the post, even though I am a great fan of Orwell.
Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity. They knew exactly what they were doing, knew why they were doing it, and were glad of the outcome. More logic and better writing would simply have helped them be even more effectively evil. Teaching clear thinking is important; but it will not stop evil people from having evil intentions or acting evil. Evil emerges from the heart and soul, not the head. Intellectuals who supported, and support, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Osama, Saddam, and so forth, knew what they doing. They got a vicarious thrill from the results, even if they did not get their hands dirty. Yes, they may have used wretched writing to hide the consequences from others, but they knew what they wanted. I might add that Orwell's hands were not clean; he fought with the Communists in Spain, he advocated hard-line total socialism in England of a type that would make George Mason economists gag.
Maybe you suffer from "intellectualist bias." Academics commonly do. That is a bias, that might go all the way back to Socrates, that the world only needs education to be good. A few courses in logic, rhetoric, and good writing, and everthing will be okay. So, sorry, but intellectualist bias may be the hardest to overcome.
So, in a sense, I am with Tyler on this one. It is good to overcome confirmation bias, or attribution bias, and so forth, but they are not at the top of my list.
Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes. Maybe that is just my bias.
I disagree. They managed to convince themselves that the people they were killing weren't really people.
Helping people open their eyes means making them stop lying to themselves. People lying to themselves is one of the largest causes of bias. That is a very good example of why overcoming bias is important.
It's imaginable that Hitler might have discovered that Jews are people after all, if he had been just slightly more rational and spotted a flaw in his racist ideology. It's also imaginable that Hitler might have been tricked into believing that his racial ideas were wrong, if he had been just slightly less rational and unable to spot the fallacy in the ideas of someone who objected to his racist policies.
It's important that we recognize both of these as realistic possibilities.
If someone is insufficiently rational to spot the problems in an argument against genocide, they'll also be insufficiently rational to spot the problems in an argument in favor of genocide.
How does that follow? Certainly, "if someone is insufficiently rational to spot the problems with an argument for ~X, they are insufficiently rational to spot the problems with an argument for X" is not true in the general case.
It's possible that being more intelligent will make you go from a true position to a false position, but it's not something that will happen consistently. If you want someone to be more likely to believe a true thing, it's better to make them smarter rather than stupider.
I agree with this, but this is a more nuanced position than what Yudkowsky's above words express.
How do you know that to be true? Especially as I'm not sure which German word you are referring to when you speak of 'people' if you are referring to any at all.
I generally don't like "taboo this word" but you could make a good case for tabooing "people" here.
If by "people", DanielC meant "entities which have rights and whose rights deserve to be respected", then of course Hitler thought he wasn't killing people, but that is just vacuously true.
That assumes that Hitler believed in the principle of respecting rights in the first place. I don't think that's true.
You have an attractor for "rube" and "blegg". If something is "really a blegg", that means that, once you know everything about it, you'd sort it as a blegg. You might currently sort it as "unknown", but since you would sort it as a blegg, it's really a blegg.
You also have an attractor for "person". You feel empathy for people. You care if they die. If you know everything about a human, they are sorted into "person". It's not really rational. They obviously have a name, and every name sorts them into "person", but somehow they only get sorted into there if you know what it is. Nonetheless, since everyone would get sorted into "person" if you knew enough about them, they're all people.
If Hitler personally knew the people he was killing, he wouldn't be okay with killing them.
I think that's wrong for Hitler. It's my impression that Hitler was willing to kill anyone he considered a traitor whether or not he knew the person personally. He didn't killed as much people he knew personally as Stalin but I think he was capable of that feat.
??? Knowing people doesn't mean you like them.