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ChristianKl comments on Human Evil and Muddled Thinking - Less Wrong
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Comments (138)
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.
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.