buybuydandavis 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: buybuydandavis 08 April 2012 12:17:02AM *  2 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.

I'm unconcerned with theorizing on the earnestness of Hitler and Stalin, because I don't think it matters. The power they had was lent to them by millions who were conceptually confused. Let me take Marx, who I've read more of. His materialist conception of history is riddled with the worst kind of idealistic piffle - the kind that mistakes itself for reality.

On the more pragmatic, prescriptive side, how many believers in Marxism had a clear idea what the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would in fact be? I doubt many. There was just a fuzzy collective "We" that would be in charge, which left the simple minded to project their own values onto "We", and since their values were consistent with their values, the Dictatorship would be a wonderful thing.

People committed to clarity of thought would have wanted to know how that Dictatorship of the Proletariat was going to work in reality, as opposed to a political slogan. "Let's empower some subset of primates to control the rest without limit." Yeah, that'll work out well.