= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
VoiceOfRa comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (236)
Sorry, you don't have a right to do silly things and then demand not to be laughed at.
No one's demanding anything. I can't speak for ChristianKI, but I think that
and I see no contradiction between those positions. (What there is is the possibility for values to clash; if people are free to laugh at one another, sometimes they will, even if I think they shouldn't. But there's no avoiding that sort of thing, other than by having no values at all.)
What meaning of "should" are you using there? Also why?
What I said was: "I think that no one should be laughed at [...]" and the meaning of "I think X should happen" is something like "my values prefer X to not-X".
Sometimes when I think X should happen I try to make it happen despite others' preferences. Usually I don't. (Just as: Sometimes when out of self-interest I want X to happen I try to make it happen despite others' preferences, and sometimes not.)
I wouldn't try to stop other people laughing at someone for wearing a dress, with the following kinda-exceptions. 1. I might gently suggest that they were being rude. 2. If the person laughing were some kind of official performing his or her duties, they might well have a stronger obligation not to be rude / discriminatory / etc., and if they were working for me in some sense (e.g., my employee; public servant in a country where I get to vote and pay taxes and so on) then I might require them to stop.
What ethical theory is this based on?
I would suggest you'd be being an obnoxious jerk by doing so.
Ok, so if I was an employer I'd do my best to avoid hiring you, and certainly not let you anywhere near a position where somebody might be reporting to you.
I don't think it's based on any ethical theory, but the ethical theory to which I subscribe is approximately utilitarianism.
It occurs to me that there is an ambiguity about "I think no one should do X". Taken literally it means something like "I prefer a world in which no one does X", but of course one can imagine a lot of different sorts of world in which no one does X. The most probable such world is probably one in which everyone is prevented from doing X, but that isn't what I had in mind (and I think it's very seldom what anyone who says things like "I think no one should do X" has in mind).
Your opinion is noted. I'm not sure to what extent you're seriously stating your position, and to what extent you're attempting a sort of reductio ad absurdum (since "I would suggest you'd be being a jerk" is kinda symmetric with "I'd suggest they'd be being rude", etc.) -- but if you mean what you say, then apparently you think laughing at someone for their choice of clothes is less obnoxious than saying someone's being rude by doing that. I wonder why?
I think I could have predicted that with some confidence a priori.
Less politically-motivated employers, however, might well prefer their employees not to behave in ways that predictably lose them customers and goodwill. If someone comes into your shop and you laugh at them, that is not likely to be good for the business. They might prefer their employees not to behave in ways that prevent effective teamwork. If one of your colleagues comes into work and you laugh at them, you're less likely to be able to work well together, which is also not good for the business.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I did not have in mind cases like the following: X is a software developer; X is sitting at his computer thinking about the design for some code, notices a news article in another window that includes someone wearing a dress, thinks they look silly, and laughs. That might or might not indicate opinions or attitudes I think they'd be better off without, but it's not likely to be rude or discriminatory and it's none of my business.)
I don't know about "seldom". For example, I have a feeling that many people who say "I think no one should be racist" do have in mind a world where others are prevented from being racist.
Not my impression, for what it's worth, but it's probably difficult to tell. (What evidence, if any, would change your mind? E.g., if someone asked a lot of such people and they all said that wasn't what they had in mind, would you believe them?)
Evidence would change my mind. I'm not asserting an article of faith, but a claim about empirical reality. Yes, appropriate polls would count (subject to the usual caveat that poll results are REALLY sensitive to how exactly you formulate the questions). And, of course my position would need to be better delineated and firmed up before it becomes falsifiable, right now it's kinda wiggly and fuzzy :-)
However, that could end up being a tragedy of the commons when it comes to incentives. Each time an employer fires someone for something like this, it personally benefits the employer (since the employer gains in customers and goodwill). But it also creates incentives for more potential customers to reduce their threshold for taking offense, which harms shops in general (and everyone). The magnitude of that effect may mean that overall, we're better off if nobody fired such employees than if everyone did, but since the gain to the employer benefits the employer while the loss is to a generalized group, employers will not stop doing this on their own initiative.
Yup, certainly possible. (How plausible? I don't know. Most people don't encounter many cases of people getting fired -- or nearly getting fired -- for being insensitive and don't get enough details of those cases to justify a change one way or another to their offence thresholds. It's not perfectly obvious, by the way, that having more cases like this creates an incentive to be more easily offended. It might go the other way: "No one is getting fired for being mean to us! We must make more fuss!")
So do you have a calculation why laughing at someone for dressing in a funny way lowers total utility?
The simple answer is because it's not rude. While the choice of clothing in question was funny.
I agree. I don't think this applies to the current example. For example, the "humorless corporate drone" type of employee is widely disliked.
Only in the rather hazy sense in which I do for most other ethical questions. It goes something like this: if X wears a dress and Y laughs at X for it, X gets to feel insulted, belittled and maybe threatened, Y gets the satisfaction of laughing at someone they find risible, and anyone else around maybe gets encouraged to think ill of either X or Y. X's utility loss here looks a lot bigger than Y's utility gain. (From, e.g., my experiences of laughing at other people and being laughed at, and what I've heard of other people's.)
That seems obviously wrong. Maybe we just have a big disagreement as to values, but I'm wondering whether we mean different things by "rude" or are envisaging different scenarios?
The mere fact of not laughing at someone wearing a dress doesn't make a person a humorless corporate drone
That's a universal argument against all humor.
True, however, it goes a good way in that direction and applying your logic consistently certainly would.
It most certainly isn't a universal argument against all humour. It's an argument against laughing at people (in case it isn't clear, btw, what's mostly in view here is laughing at people in their presence) but that's very far from being all humour.
I cannot recall a single instance in which I, or anyone else known to me, formed a bad opinion of a corporate representative because they didn't laugh at someone else. Still less, of course, specifically because they didn't laugh at someone for wearing a dress.