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James_Miller comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong
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What if you are Jewish and are trying to stop a Hitler from coming to power and the best means would be to spread a deliberate lie about him. Are you saying that the worse the outcome would be, the less likely you would be to lie?
Nobody in this discussion is confronting a present or potential totalitarian state bent on murder so this feels like a tangent. In fact, this is a hypothetical that very few people are ever confronted with and therefore it isn't relevant to a question of practical ethics. Very few people are skilled enough at predicting the future to know when the situation is dire or whether dishonesty will work; very few people are skilled enough manipulators to pull it off.
For the range of social issues the participants in this conversation are likely to confront, I think it's a good policy to be more careful and honest the higher the stakes. Among other things, the higher the stakes, the likelier a lie or mistake is to be caught. And being caught lying doesn't generally achieve any goal of the liar.
Obamacare only became law because Obama lied by saying that under the law "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." PolitiFact made this their lie of the year.
I suspect that many on the left knew at the time Obama was lying about this but kept quiet because they really wanted the law to pass. They won.
[upvoted for giving a crisp recent, and plausible example of people getting away, at least in the short term, with dishonesty. I was a little squeamish about the politicization of the topic but I think it's hard to avoid giving a real political example in a conversation about political dishonesty]
I take the point that there's a complicated collective-action problem here where if enough people repeat something they wish were true, it can become relatively accepted, at least for a while.
The catch is that, as happened here, people often get caught having been dishonest. And we will see how painful the consequences are for those people personally and politically.
Obama doesn't use truth as a strategy but that doesn't change the fact that Cato was a very successful politician when it comes to people respecting his positions.
The didn't lose but they also didn't get the single payer health care they wanted.
I think US politics is ready for someone like Cato to come up and take it over. You don't win in politics by telling a bit less lies than your opponents. On the other hand actually being honest has it's advantages.
If I lie about him, then the most likely consequence is that Hitler will have verified proof that "Jews are lying about me". So the consequence is that I would end up helping cause the holocaust, not stopping it.
More generally what's the point of using a hypothetical scenario where the assumption is that the best means would be to spread a lie, when that's exactly what I'm contesting (that lying is the best means)? That's begging the question. Tell me in what exact way I'd be in an epistemic position to know that lying is the best means?
The set of things you could say is vastly larger than the set of true things you could say so unless lying is observed and punished you should assume that you are probably better off at least occasionally lying.
I'm a game theorist and think that wearing makeup or acting more confident than you really are, are forms of lying that frequently benefit individuals.
I think I spent to much attention at optimizing things like the clothing I'm wearing and the way the background is arranged at my first TV interview.
Being busy with tactics takes mental resources and builds anxiety. I would have probably done better if I would have spoken from a more relaxed state of mind that doesn't worry that much about the background of the image.
Do you in fact wear makeup on a regular basis?
No makeup, but I do fake confidence.
Why no makeup? It's possible to use makeup as a man in a way that accentuates manly features.
I'm open to the idea, I do dye my hair.
I think that if you really look at the makeup question you will find that's not cost effective.
A quick googling gives me the number that woman spent on average 91 hours per year applying makeup ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2175077/Women-spend-43-weeks-life-applying-make-perfecting-face-night-out.html ).
I think that a woman who rather spends the same amount of time in daily meditation sessions will get a higher return on her time investment.
In a world full of superficial people there's not much comparative advantage at trying to be better at being more superficial than everyone else. I think it's a better strategy to compete based on personal depth.
If you are open about who you are, that will make you more confident than if you walk around all the time with a mask.
Comparative advantage doesn't mean you can neglect something entirely. Personal attractiveness has large consequences on how people evaluate & treat you, and equally so for men and women, it looks like (Langlois et al 2000 (excerpts) claim gender is not a large moderator of beauty effects). Even if Miller goes beyond just dying his hair, he could still be well below optimal.
You can get personal attractiveness through different ways.
I went in three years from being told that I never smile while dancing to being asked why I smile while dancing without being able to give a reason.
It's not because I specifically worked on my smile but because I did emotional work on a deep level.
At a family event yesterday someone told me that I look taller then when we last meet a while ago and I probably do appear taller than I was a year ago because my body language changed as a result of deeper work.
If you become a more happy person who doesn't get anxiety because of all sorts of things that are happening around you, you will appear to be more attractive in any face to face encounter and even on photos.
If I want to connect with another person I care about perceiving the reactions that the words that I speak have on the other person. If the women with whom I'm talking doesn't show any facial reactions because she's on botox that makes it a lot harder for me to connect with her.
A good quote in the CBT book "The feeling good handbook" is "You can never be loved for your successes-only for your vulnerabilities. People may be attracted to you and may admire you if you are a great success. They may also resent and envy you. But they can never love you for your success."
Being vulnerable is useful. If all of your bodylanguage is fake and further signals are hidden by makeup than you aren't vunerable and you make it hard for other people to love you.
gwern in my you in my mind one of the few individuals who usually walks his talk. Do you think it's useful to use makeup? Do you use it yourself? Especially if you cite a paper that gender isn't very important when it comes to the effects of beauty,
Given the nature of the subject it might be hard to speak openly*, but do you do other black hat stuff to manipulate the people you interacts with into finding you more attractive?
*While I do promote openness I'm also willing to treat information that's marked as private privately and my commitment to openness, doesn't mean that I have a problem of protecting the secrets of other people.
I'm not so sure. Women who don't wear makeup are much less attractive, which significantly reduces their social status and their dating market value. These are things people greatly value.
I think confidence depends mostly on practice and genetics and situational factors. If anything, I think the superficiality-confidence connection is the other way round - being confident makes people see you as more genuine, because of the halo effect, i.e. because everybody loves to hate low-status people. People without masks are weirdos, because what people call "being normal" is a learned behavior, a mask.
This is true for certain subcultures. It is NOT true for other subcultures. And this is, of course, before we go into individual differences -- some girls are very pretty with a freshly-scrubbed look.
You will get less real practice if you are walking around with a mask. If you worry what other people think about your looks to the extend that you spent 30 minutes to look presentable that will effect your confidence.
Why do you believe that there a difference between men and woman in that regard? I think the fact that you separate genders has a lot to do with status quo bias.
That depends a lot on the environment in which you are moving. There are corporate environments where you are expected to wear a mask and where you can't drop it completely. Yet Steve Job who was a Buddhist who meditated a lot did very well while wearing a sweater instead of dressing in a suit.
Steve Job wore no makeup with is not typical for people who go in front of the camera and on big stages and have the budget for makeup stylists.
For all the talk about game theory, strategy matters. If you want to play Steve Job's strategy that's not compatible with spending a lot of effort on looking attractive but instead sitting a lot and meditate.
Getting bogged down in tactics isn't good.
... depending on the eye of the beholder.
This crossed my mind as well, but for me spending 3-5 minutes on makeup in the morning is enough to make a substantial difference in my appearance. One has probably reached a point of diminishing returns by the time one makes it to 91 hours per year.
The best means to stop a Hitler would be to show the actual, ugly truth of where he'll lead us. Very few lies about Hitler could match the real horror.
To credibly show the truth. Claims of Hitler-equivalent societal doom are a dime a dozen. Almost all of them are false.
Almost all isn't that reassuring given the scope of the potential harm. Hitler democratically acquired power in an advanced civilized Western Christian nation while being fairly open about his terminal values. Fear of this pattern repeating is worth continually emphasizing.
The analogy isn't effective (outside the ingroup where it originates) unless it's credible; throwing it around in situations where it isn't in no way guards against the possibility of a recurrence of Nazism, or one of its less famous but often equally nasty companions in 20th-century totalitarianism. In fact, I'd say it's probably actively detrimental, as it makes the accusation less punchy when and if we do start seeing a totalizing popular movement that openly preaches extreme prejudice against an unpopular group of scapegoats.
That's not to say that these kinds of mass movements aren't worth studying or analogies to modern movements can't be made; they absolutely are and can. But crying Nazi without commensurately serious justification can only cheapen the term once everyone catches on. Who cares about having one more political slur?
I think it's somewhere in Sun Tzu's Art of War. Often things are well hidden in plain sight.
Hitler's biggest advantage was that nobody took him seriously.
And yet the German military didn't overthrow Hitler when he started messing up military strategy in Russia.
By that time Hitler did put people he trusted into central positions of military power. Everybody who Hitler considered to be untrustworthy was already removed from power.
Nobody succeeded in running a coup against him but people did try at such dates as the 20 of July. The military didn't follow Hitlers orders when it comes to subjects such as burning brides in Germany.
A few tried, even specifically operating under the theory that the failures in Russia would make a post-assassination coup politically possible, in Operation Spark.
I don't think this much affects your point, though; by the time a sufficiently evil person and/or group is in power, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of political and psychological mechanisms they can use to entrench there.
In a world with rational voters, yes. In our world you might want to start a false rumor such as Hitler's Jew hating is just a false cover for his true desire to reduce social welfare payments
That rumor wouldn't spread. It's to complicated to be a good story that's believable to the average person in that time period. I think Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction is quite brilliant at illustrating how such principles work.
I was making an analogy to Bill Clinton's false claim that Bob Dole wanted to cut medical benefits to senior citizens. When confronted with his lie by Dole, Clinton reportedly said "You gotta do what you gotta do."
It's confusing to talk about history of the 1930's with examples that come from the 1990's and which aren't marked that way.
It prevents you from learning the historic lessons that the 1930's do provide.
In Tea-Party constituencies, that'd be an argument in his favor.
No, smarter voters would see the purpose of the lie and vote against Hitler. (As a tea party person I'm disassociating with Hitler.)
The Tea Party would probably support a candidate who they had reason to think wants to cut down welfare programs, even if there are some unnerving rumors about him.
I think the relevant axis may be short-term/specific vs. long-term/broader consequences rather than unimportant vs. important. I think defecting is usually a long-term bad strategy but a short-term good one. If you're pretty sure there's not going to be a long-term unless you fix your short-term problems immediately, defecting might be a good idea for you or your chosen cause - not sure about for the world at large.