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gjm comments on Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015 - Less Wrong
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Suppose you are by nature lazy and selfish and cautious, and you see someone drowning in a lake. Is it more courageous to leap in and try to save them (despite the risk and the cost to yourself and the danger), or to sit idly by and watch them drown (giving priority to living out your own nature more authentically)?
That's an interesting question.
In practical terms, I would choose the latter since I would be interested in signalling heroism and reaping the associated awards.
In idealised terms (see brackets in gjm's post) I believe that the second choice - authenticity over self sacrifice is the dominant choice. However, once again in practice the deservingness of those particular labels (lazy, etc) is dubious. It would be a false dilemma to me since I'm not only lazy, selfish and cautious, but daring and altruistic (paradoxes are ok and natural). Since the feeling of heroism is highly desiring, I would predict my behaviour to be jumping in.
Given the confluence on my predicted and normative behaviour, and the projection of my mind onto you, I wonder why you ask the question?
You mean the former, right? (Former was heroism, latter was laziness.)
I wonder whether there's a misunderstanding here. I was not accusing you of being lazy and selfish and cautious. I was suggesting a hypothetical situation. (Being "daring and altruistic" was not part of that hypothetical situation; it flatly contradicts it.)
Because the statement about courage you quoted appears to me to be badly wrong, and the thought experiment I describe is intended to show what I think is wrong about it.
If courage is "to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart" then someone who is lazy, selfish and cautious will show "courage" by being consistently, visibly and unashamedly lazy, selfish and cautious. There may be some virtue in that, but it doesn't seem to me to have much to do with what is usually called courage.