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Benito comments on Open Thread, May 12 - 18, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: eggman 12 May 2014 08:16AM

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Comment author: Benito 12 May 2014 03:20:18PM *  9 points [-]

I've been reading Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" and it seems to me that people don't need to be psychopaths to have difficulty feeling empathy and concern for other people. If you've read HPMOR, the villagers that used to enjoy cat burning are a good example, which Pinker uses. He suggests that our feelings of empathy have increased over time, although he's not sure for what reason. So earlier, a couple of people in their better moments might have claimed caring about others was important, but generally people were more selfish, so that the two did become out of sync.

I mean, even today when you say you care about other people, you don't suddenly donate all of the money that isn't keeping you alive to effective charities, because of the empathy you don't feel with every single other person on this earth. You don't have to be a psychopath for that happen.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 12 May 2014 09:38:39PM *  5 points [-]

This reminds me of this part from "The Failures of Eld Science":

"A woman of wisdom," Brennan said, "once told me that it is wisest to regard our past selves as fools beyond redemption—to see the people we once were as idiots entire. I do not necessarily say this myself; but it is what she said to me, and there is more than a grain of truth in it. As long as we are making excuses for the past, trying to make it look better, respecting it, we cannot make a clean break. It occurs to me that the rule may be no different for human civilizations. So I tried looking back and considering the Eld scientists as simple fools."

"Which they were not," Jeffreyssai said.

Maybe, analogically, it would be wise to regard the former civilizations as psychopaths, although they were not. This includes religions, moral philosophies, etc. The idea is that those people didn't know what we know now... and probably also didn't feel what we feel now.

EDIT: To be more precise, they were capable of having the same emotions; they just connected it with different things. They had the same chemical foundation for emotions, but connected them with different states of mind. For example, they experienced fun, but instead of computer games they connected it with burning cats; etc.

(Of course there are differences in knowledge and feelings among different people now and in the past, etc. But there are some general trends, so if we speak about sufficiently educated or moral people, they may have no counterparts in the past, or at least not many of them.)

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