Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
When, then, is it a lost purpose? Deterrence is a consequentialist mode of punishment.
"I know what's good for you better than you do" is condescending until proven otherwise ;-). To know my good, you must do more than point out that I suffer from cognitive biases. If you say, "The sky is not green", you haven't demonstrated what I would call real knowledge, and you're not entitled to speak of others as ignorant for holding their own views (most of which will usually be, "the sky is blue", since it is blue). You haven't engaged with their views: you've merely stated a particularly obvious negative conclusion (eliminating part of the search space) as if it were a positive conclusion (identifying the portion of the search space where the truth actually lives).
(This may be part of the same underlying complex of ideas that makes me prefer constructive mathematics.)
I'm not seeing it. To me, it seems like you're going to lengths to construe his writing in a way that you can take offense to. I don't actually think you are doing so, but your reframing is so distant from the tone I perceive that I can't understand what you are doing.
I read it as suggesting, in a fairly humble if flowery tone, that a number of other ancestral urges have been coopted for things that are demonstrably not in our best interest, and that desire for punishment is potentially on the same level. It's a suggestion worth investigating, in my view.
Or do you think that discouraging someone from drinking sugary sodas is on the same level? That could explain the disconnect.