sam0345 comments on Human Evil and Muddled Thinking - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 September 2007 11:43PM

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Comment author: B.H. 14 September 2007 03:32:44PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: sam0345 30 August 2011 01:06:58AM *  5 points [-]

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.

Hitler had a plausible argument that doing dreadful things was urgent, right, and necessary. Stalin had a plausible argument that he was not doing evil things. The overwhelming majority of American intellectuals before 1956 believed that Stalin was saintly, superhuman, and distinctly godlike, and if they doubted, were careful not to express such doubts, therefore it is probable that Stalin plausibly believed himself at least somewhat saintly.

Pol Pot clearly believed that he was a saint, and everyone who had personal contact with him, as a child or as an adult either believed in his saintliness, or believed that he suffered from delusions of saintliness.

If it is so obvious that Stalin was consciously and intentionally evil, why is it that no respectable person in the US could express this view before 1946, and no respectable properly academic public intellectual could express this view before 1956?