27chaos 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: DanielLC 27 August 2011 05:53:33AM 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.

I disagree. They managed to convince themselves that the people they were killing weren't really people.

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.

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.

Comment author: 27chaos 09 February 2015 04:43:46AM -2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: DanielLC 09 February 2015 06:31:34AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Jiro 09 February 2015 06:28:25PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: DanielLC 09 February 2015 07:44:46PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: 27chaos 10 February 2015 02:27:35AM 0 points [-]

I agree with this, but this is a more nuanced position than what Yudkowsky's above words express.

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