AmagicalFishy comments on Why do you really believe what you believe regarding controversial subjects? - Less Wrong

7 Post author: iarwain1 04 January 2015 02:32PM

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Comment author: AmagicalFishy 12 January 2015 09:35:37PM 0 points [-]

Trial-and-error.

There are, of course, inconsistencies that I'm unaware of: These are known unknowns. The idea, though, is that when I'm presented with a situation, any such relevant inconsistencies come up and are eliminated (either by a change of the foundation or a change of the judgement).

That is, inconsistencies that exist but don't come up aren't relevant.

An example—extreme but illustrative: Say an element of this foundational set is "I want to 'treat everyone equally'". I interview a Blue man for a job and, upon reflecting, think very negatively of him, even though he's more qualified than others. When I review the interview as if I were a 3rd party [ignorant of any differences between Blue people and regular people], I come to the conclusion that the interview was actually pretty solid.

I now have a choice to make. Do I actually want to treat people equally? If so, then I must think differently of this Blue man, his Blue people, give him this job, and make a very conscious effort to incorperate Blue people into my "everybody" perception. This is a change in judgement. Or, maybe I don't want to treat everyone equally—maybe I want to treat everyone who's not Blue equally. This is a change in foundation (but this change in foundation would have to coincide with the other elements in the foundation-set; or those, too, would change).

But, until now, my perception of Blue people was irrelevant.

Perhaps it would have been best to say: The process by which I make moral decisions is built to maximize for consistency. A lot goes into this. everything from honing the ability to look at a situation as a 3rd party, to comparing a decision with decisions I've made in the past. As a result, there's a very practiced part of me that immediately responds to nigh all situations with "Is this inconsistent?"

(An unrelated note: Are there things in this post I could have eliminated to get the same point across, but be more succint? I often feel as if my responses [in general] are too long.)