Eliezer_Yudkowsky 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: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 September 2007 02:45:37PM 12 points [-]

There's a huge positive chunk of hypocrisy that we're missing there - hypocrisy allows us to have ideals higher than we can (and do) attain in our actions. It can have a tremendously aspirational effect. The phrase "all men are created equal" was written by rich, white slaveowners. Eliezer feels that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have written the same phrase, and set all their slaves free. I fear that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have kept their slaves and instead written "all rich, white men are created equal". And future progress would have been ruled out.

Ah, now there's a powerful argument.

But at the same time, if hypocrisy had not decreased, we would still have rich white slaveowners.

It should be assumed by default that when I talk about the benefits of overcoming bias, I am talking about the sort of human being who comes into existence when they set out to overcome their own biases by acts of mental will and training. Not, necessarily, the sort of entity that you get if you do neurosurgery on a human; nor the sort of entity that would have evolved if deception and self-deception had not been part of the ancestral environment.

The sort of human being who makes a continual effort to overcome hypocrisy, and who manages to do so, will probably set the slaves free.

(Claiming that "ideal Bayesians" would not have sponsored an Inquisition obscures this point, since it launches too great a counterfactual; this was probably a mistake of writing, if not of fact.)