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FrameBenignly comments on Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gondolinian 01 June 2015 12:45AM

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Comment author: chaosmage 01 June 2015 07:00:09PM *  7 points [-]

The Elon Musk biography that just came out is quite entertaining, but I didn't any significant actionable knowledge in it.

There's an interesting turn at the end. The author thought at the beginning of the project that Musk was particularly terrible with people. At the end, he says he thinks he gets it: Musk has basically just calculated the work of his companies to be more important that the feelings of its employees, and to go against that calculation would be illogical, which for Musk makes it kind of physically painful. So he'd rather put someone down in 5 seconds than waste another minute that he has a better use for on politeness or common decency. And it isn't that he has no empathy, he just has more empathy for mankind as a whole than for the guy standing in front of him, and he's drawing logical conclusions from that difference.

Now first of all I admire that. But this reminds me that even if I could be that consequentialist, most people would still find it hard to recognize me as one, and comparatively easy to just put me in the asshole category.

Comment author: Benito 03 June 2015 01:06:22PM *  0 points [-]

Being a pure consequentialist will not give off the signals that a socially acceptable person, who leans towards consequentialism, will. To predict someone's ethical behaviour, some stronger signals could be checked e.g. did the guy ask himself how to create the greatest good for humanity and then go and do that in about five different industries? If so, probably high on ethics.

The question about people skills is a good question to ask when you want to predict someone's social behaviour, but that is not the same as ethics, which empathy is often a proxy for.