satt comments on Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (233)
The furniture was put there by a thoughtless person not following the social rules. The bad car was built by shoddy engineers not living up to your expectations. The bug in the code was put there by a careless programmer not following agreed practice. And so on.
Your examples merely serve to reinforce the notion that what makes us angry is people breaking the (possibly unwritten) rules or violating social cohesion.
That clashes with my introspection, unlike DeVliegendeHollander's account. When I stub my toe in the dark and start swearing, my thoughts are not anything to do with social rules or their violation (at least not at a conscious level); typically no one else is around, no other person enters my mind, and I'm just annoyed that I'm unnecessarily experiencing pain, and that annoyance doesn't feel like it has a moral element to it. It feels like a straightforward reaction to unexpected, benefit-free pain.