RichardKennaway comments on Why I haven't signed up for cryonics - Less Wrong
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Should a monk who has taken vows have a sin budget, because the flesh is weak?
You seem conflicted, believing you should not value your own life over others', but continuing to do so; then justifying yielding to temptation on the grounds that you are tempted.
Of course it is. Has it ever been presented as anything else, as "Escape death so you can do more for other people"? Support for cryonics is for the sake of everyone, but signing up to it is for oneself alone.
If that helps them achieve their vows overall.
I did try valuing the lives of others equally before. It only succeeded in making me feel miserable and preventing me from getting any good done. Tried that approach, doesn't work. Better to compromise with the egoist faction and achieve some good, rather than try killing it with fire and achieve nothing.
Once people start saying things like "It really is hard to find a clearer example of an avoidable Holocaust that you can personally do something substantial about now" or "If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent", it's hard to avoid reading a moral tone into them.
The opportunity for self-serving application of this principle casts a shadow over all applications. I believe this hypothetical monk's spiritual guide would have little truck with such excuses, rest and food, both in strict moderation, being all the body requires. (I have recently been reading the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and St John Climacus' "Ladder of Divine Ascent", works from the first few centuries of Christianity, and the rigours of the lives described there are quite extraordinary.)
"It's not me that wants this, it's this other thing I share this body with." Personally, that sounds to me like thinking gone wrong, whether you yield to or suppress this imaginary person. You appear to be identifying with the altruist faction when you write all this, but is that really the altruist faction speaking, or just the egoist faction pretending not to be? Recognising a conflict should be a first step towards resolving it.
These are moral arguments for supporting cryonics, rather than for signing up oneself. BTW, if it's sinfully self-indulgent to sign up oneself, how can you persuade anyone else to? Does a monk preach "eat, drink, and be merry"?
Finally, when I look at the world, I see almost no-one who values others above themselves. What, then, will the CEV of humanity have to say on the subject?
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I'm confused over what exactly your position is. The first bit I quoted seems to imply that you think that one should sacrifice everything in favor of altruism, whereas the second excerpt seems like a criticism of that position.
My position is that (1) the universal practice of valuing oneself over others is right and proper (and I expect others to rightly and properly value themselves over me, it being up to me to earn any above-baseline favour I may receive), (2) there is room for discussion about what base level of compassion one should have towards distant strangers (I certainly don't put it at zero), and (3) I take the injunction to love one's neighbour as oneself as a corrective to a too low level of (2) rather than as a literal requirement, a practical rule of thumb for debiasing rather than a moral axiom. Perfect altruism is not even what I would want to want.
I'm drawing out what I see as the implications of holding (which I don't) that we ought to be perfectly altruistic, while finding (as I do) that in practice it is impossible. It leads, as you have found, to uneasy compromises guiltily taken.
I did say right in my original comment (emphasis added):
I will attempt a resolution: other people are as imortant as me, in pirncipal, since I am not objectively anything special -- but I should concentrate my efforts on myself and those close to me, becuase I understand my and their needs better, and can therefore be more effective.
I don't think that's a sufficient or effective compromise. If I'm given a choice between saving the life of my child, or the lives of a 1000 other children, I will always save my child. And I will only feel guilt to the extent that I was unable to come up with a 3rd option that saves everybody.
I don't do it for some indirect reason such as that I understand my children's needs better or such. I do it because I value my own child's life more, plain and simple.
Important to whom?
You might as well have asked: special to whom>? Even if there is no objective importance or specialiness anywhere, it still follows that I have no objective importance ort specialness.
For the record, you do have a limited supply of willpower. I'm guessing those monks either had extraordinary willpower reserves or nonstandard worldviews that made abstinence actually easier than sin.
It seems they practice that willpower muscle very explicitly for hours every day. Abstinence should actually be pretty easy considering you have very little else to drain your willpower with.
If you think so.
Looking into your link now, but it was my understanding that the effect was weaker if the participant didn't believe in it, not nonexistent (i.e. disbelieving in ego depletion has a placebo effect.)
Wikipedia, Font Of All Knowledge concurrs:
ETA: It seems the Wikipedia citation is to a replication attempt of your link. They found the effect was real, but it only lessened ego depletion - subjects who were told they had unlimited willpower still suffered suffered ego depletion, just less strongly. So yup, placebo.
I'm not sure the word "placebo" makes sense when you are discussing purely psychological phenomena. Obviously any effects will be related to psychology- its not like they gave them a pill.
I ... think it's supposed to be regulated at least partially by glucose levels? So in some of the experiments, they were giving them sugar pills, or sugar water or something? I'm afraid this isn't actually my field :(
But of course, no phenomenon is purely psychological (unless the patient is a ghost.) For example, I expect antidepressant medication is susceptible to the placebo effect.
See here.
If it isn't, you're doing something wrong.
ETA: By which I don't mean that it is easy to do it right. Practicing anything involves a lot of doing it wrong while learning to do it right.