Comment on Mistakes repository

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 02:19:40 GMT

most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time

Are you sure you're not being a bit judgmental? Are you positive you're upholding proper value subjectivism when making this statement? What exactly are these people ignorant of, and why does it matter? What purpose are they useless for, and who's utility function contains this purpose? What are you optimizing for socially, and why do you suggest we do the same?

You may say I'm being pedantic, but I don't think so. There are pitfalls everywhere on this subject. Although you might be correct, you shouldn't discount the possibility that you believe that statement only because you makes you feel like you're really awesome. If you changed your mind, you would lose a belief that makes you feel really superior, etc. Using terminology like "wizards" and "muggles" makes me think you've really gone off the deep end here.

Besides believing this statement being a good way to feel superior, it's also a good way to shield oneself from social rejection. As a fundamental fact about how typical human hardware works, we can up-regulate or down-regulate how much we care about success with certain classes of people. If you think someone is really awesome, you feel more enjoyment when they accept you, and more pain when they reject you. If you think they're an idiot, you feel less of both.

People like us tend to make a strong effort to match up our beliefs with reality, but most fundamentally our motivation system rewards us when we change our beliefs so we feel more enjoyment or less pain, not when the map becomes more matched up with the territory. Sometimes feeling better aligns well with updating to truer beliefs, but sometimes it doesn't. In this area, few things are more common than people grasping as straws trying to figure out why all the people who reject them are just idiots. Less pain that way.

So here we are. You made a statement that contains a lot of unpacked information that if unpacked may demonstrate that you're being unfair, and at the same time I've identified two strong non-epistemic reasons to believe it. You get to feel superior, and you get to avoid the pain of social rejection from the "muggles". The moment you realize your beliefs could just be identity trips, you should massively increase the evidence you demand from such a proposition--that is if you want to optimize for true beliefs. This means addressing the questions in my first paragraph, and doing so rigorously.

Discuss