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James_Miller comments on Open thread, 11-17 August 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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We have a right to feel morally superior to ISIS, although probably not on genetic grounds.
But is this true? Do some people have genes which strongly predispose them against killing children. It feels to me like I do, but I recognize my inability to properly determine this.
As a free market economist I disagree with this. The U.S. economy does not derive wealth from the killing of others, although as the word "exploit" is hard to define I'm not sure what you mean by that.
The Stanford prison experiment suggests that you don't need that much to get people to do immoral things. ISIS evolved over years of hard civil war.
ISIS also partly has their present power because the US first destabilised Iraq and later allowed funding of Syrian rebels. The US was very free to avoid fighting the Iraq war. ISIS fighters get killed if they don't fight their civil war.
The Stanford prison "experiment" was a LARP session that got out of control because the GM actively encouraged the players to be assholes to each other.
I agree with that interpretation of the experiment but "active encouragement" should count as "not that much."
I am very confident that a college student version of me taking part in a similar experiment as a guard would not have been cruel to the prisoners in part because the high school me (who at the time was very left wing) decided to not stand up for the pledge of allegiance even though everyone else in his high school regularly did and this me refused to participate in a gym game named war-ball because I objected to the name.
I didn't stand for the Pledge in school either, but in retrospect I think that had less to do with politics or virtue and more to do with an uncontrollable urge to look contrarian.
I can see myself going either way in the Stanford prison experiment, which probably means I'd have abused the prisoners.
But you aren't that left wing anyone but go around teaching people to make decisions based on game theory.
I moved to the right in my 20s.
Who is "we"? and are you comparing individuals to an amorphous military-political movement?
Everyone has these genes. It's just that some people can successfully override their biological programming :-/
Killing children is one of the stronger moral taboos, but a lot of kids are deliberately killed all over the world.
By the way, the US drone strikes in Pakistan are estimated to have killed 170-200 children.
"Every computer has this code. It's just that some computers can successfully override their programming."
What does this statement mean?
Suppressing bad instincts. Seems to make sense to me and describe a real thing that's often a big deal in culture and civilization. All it needs to be coherent is that people can have both values and instincts, that the values aren't necessarily that which is gained by acting on instincts, and that people have some capability to reflect on both and not always follow their instincts.
For the software analogy, imagine an optimization algorithm that has built-in heuristics, runtime generated heuristics, optimization goals, and an ability to recognize that a built-in heuristic will work poorly to reach the optimization goal in some domain and a different runtime generated heuristic will work better.
The usual. The decisions that you make result from a weighted sum of many forces (reasons, motivations, etc.). Some of these forces/motivations are biologically hardwired -- almost all humans have them and they are mostly invariant among different cultures. The fact that they exist does not mean that they always play the decisive role.
You appear to be implying that all (or nearly all) motivations that are hardwired are universal and vice versa, neither of which seems obvious to me.
Hm. I would think that somewhere between many and most of the universal terminal motivations are hardwired. I am not sure why would they be universal otherwise (similar environment can produce similar responses but I don't see why would it produce similar motivations).
And in reverse, all motivations hardwired into Homo sapiens should be universal since the humanity is a single species.
Well, about a century ago religion was pretty much universal, and now a sizeable fraction of the population (especially in northern Eurasia) is atheist, even if genetics presumably haven't changed that much. How do we know there aren't more things like that?
I'm aware of the theoretical arguments to expect that same species -> same hardwired motivations, but I think they have shortcomings (see the comment thread to that article) and the empirical evidence seems to be against (see this or this).
Was it? Methinks you forgot about places like China, if you go by usual definitions of "religion". Besides, it has been argued that the pull towards spiritual/mysterious/numinous/godhead/etc. is hardwired in some way.
This is a "to which degree" argument. Your link says "Different human populations are likely for biological reasons to have slightly different minds" and I will certainly agree. The issue is what "slightly" means and how significant it is.
Well, that's a different claim from “all motivations hardwired into Homo sapiens should be universal” (emphasis added) in the great-gradparent.
If you want to split hairs :-) all motivations hardwired into Homo Sapiens should be universal. Motivations hardwired only into certain subsets of the species will not be universal.