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Lumifer comments on A discussion of heroic responsibility - LessWrong
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Well, would you like to define it, then? I am not sure I understand your use of this word. In particular, does it involve any specific set of values?
Things done on the basis of cost-benefit analysis are just rational things to do. The "heroic" part must stand for something, no?
Ahem. Most out of which set? Are there temporal or geographical limits?
That's a complicated discussion that should start with what is meant by "good" (we're back to value systems again), maybe we should take it up another time...
I had always assumed it was intended to stand for doing things that are rational even if they're really hard or scary and unanticipated.
If you do a careful cost-benefit calculation and conclude (depending on your values and beliefs) that ...
and if you are a normal person then you shrug your shoulders, say "damn, that's too bad", and get on with your life; but if you are infused with a sense of heroic responsibility then you devote your life to researching AI safety (and propagandizing to get other people thinking about it too), or become a missionary, or live in poverty while doing lucrative but miserable work in order to save lives in Africa.
If it turns out that you picked as good a cause as you think you did, and if you do your heroic job well and get lucky, then you can end up transforming the world for the better. If you picked a bad cause (saving Germany from the Jewish menace, let's say) and do your job well and get lucky, you can (deservedly) go down in history as an evil genocidal tyrant and one of the worst people who ever lived. And if you turn out not to have the skill and luck you need, you can waste your life failing to solve the problem you took aim at, and end up neither accomplishing anything of importance nor having a comfortable life.
So there are reasons why most people don't embrace "heroic responsibility". But the premise for the whole thing -- without which there's nothing to be heroically responsible about -- is, it seems to me, that you really think that this thing needs doing and you need to do it and that's what's best for the world.
("Heroic responsibility" isn't only about tasks so big that they consume your entire life. You can take heroic responsibility for smaller-scale things too, if they present themselves and seem important enough. But, again, I think what makes them opportunities for heroic responsibility is that combination of importantly worth doing and really intimidating.)
If you're a normal person, the fact that you shrug your shoulders when faced with such things is beneficial because shrugging your shoulders instead of being heroic when faced with the destruction of civilization serves as immunity against crazy ideas and because you're running on corrupted hardware, you probably aren't as good at figuring out how to avoid the destruction of civilization as you think.
Just saying "I'm not going to shrug my shoulders; I'm going to be heroic instead" is removing the checks and balances that are irrational themselves but protect you against bad rationality of other types, leaving you worse off overall.
I am inclined to agree; I am not a fan of the idea of "heroic responsibility". (Though I think most of us could stand to be a notch or two more heroic than we currently are.)
Well, here is a counter-example. I can't imagine that was too intimidating :-/
I'll put this in a separate post because it is not to do with heroic responsibility and it has been bugging me. What evidence do you have that your favoured idea of reducing political power does what you want it to do? Are there states which have switched to this method and benefited? Are there countries that have done this and what happened to them? Why do you believe what you believe?
Well, before we wade into mindkilling territory, let me set the stage and we'll see if you find the framework reasonable.
Government power is multidimensional. It's very common to wish for more government power in one area but less in another area. Therefore government power in aggregate is a very crude metric. However if you try to imagine government power as an n-dimensional body in a high-dimensional space, you can think of the volume of that n-dimensional body as total government power and that gives you a handle on what that means.
Government power, generally speaking, has costs and benefits. Few people prefer either of the two endpoints -- complete totalitarianism or stateless anarchy. Most arguments are about which trade-offs are advantageous and about where the optimal point on the axis is located. To talk about optimality you need a yardstick. That yardstick is people's value system. Since people have different value systems, different people will prefer different optimal points. If you consider the whole population you can (theoretically) build a preference distribution and interpret one of its centrality measures (e.g. mean, median, or mode) as the "optimal" optimal point, but that needs additional assumptions and gets rather convoluted rather fast.
There are multiple complicating factors in play here. Let me briefly list two.
First, the population's preferences do not arise spontaneously in a pure and sincere manner. They are a function of local culture and the current memeplex, for example (see the Overton window), and are rather easily manipulated. Manipulating the political sentiments of the population is a time-honored and commonplace activity, you can assume by default that it is happening. There are multiple forces attempting the manipulation, of course, with different goals, so the balance is fluid and uncertain. Consider the ideas of "manufacturing consent" or the concept of "engines of consent" -- these ideas were put forward by such diverse people as, say, Chomsky and neoreactionaries.
Second, the government, as an organization, has its own incentives, desires, and goals. The primary among them is to survive, then to grow which generally means become more powerful. Governments rarely contract (willingly), most of the time they expand. This means that without a countervailing force governments will "naturally" grow too big and too powerful past that optimal point mentioned above. Historically that has been dealt with by military conquests, revolutions, and internal coups, but the world has been quite stable lately...
I'll stop before this becomes a wall of text, but does all of the above look reasonable to you?
All of it looks reasonable to me apart from the last paragraph. I can see times when governments do willingly contract. There are often candidates who campaign on a platform of tax cuts, the UK had one in power from 1979-1990 and the US had one in power from 2001-2009.
Tax cuts necessarily require eventual reductions in government spending and thus the power of government, agreed?
If they're sustained long enough, yeah. But a state has more extensive borrowing powers than an individual does, and an administration so inclined can use those powers to spend beyond its means for rather a long time -- certainly longer than the term in office of a politician who came to power on a promise of tax cuts. The US federal budget has been growing for a long time, including over the 2001-2009 period, and the growth under low-tax regimes has been paid for by deficit spending.
(Though you'd really want to be looking at federal spending as a percentage of GDP. There seems to be some disagreement over the secular trend there, but the sources I've found agree that the trend 2001-2009 was positive.)
Yeah, the "starve the beast" strategy looked appealing in theory but rather spectacularly failed in practice...
Yes, I was going to comment on how a clever politician could spend during their own term to intentionally screw over the next party to take power, but I wanted to avoid the possible political argument that could ensue.
So, how much did the government actually contract under Maggie or under Ronnie? :-) Did that contraction stick?
Oh, not at all. You just borrow more.
Besides, spending is only part of the power of the government. Consider e.g. extending the reach of the laws which does not necessarily require any budgetary increases.
And/or authorize the police to steal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture
It works best if you let the cops keep part of their robbery hauls :-/
There does come a point when the bill must be paid though, even if it is over a long time. Even if it's over 40 years as you pay back the interest on the debt.
Before we go further, I think we need to be sure we're talking about the same thing when we say power. See, when you said a reduction in government power, what I heard was essentially less money, smaller government. I'm getting the feeling that that is not entirely what you meant, could you clarify?
That too, but not only that. There is nothing tricky here, I'm using the word "power" in its straightforward meaning. Power includes money, but it also includes things like the monopoly on (legal) violence, the ability to create and enforce laws and regulations, give or withhold permission to do something (e.g. occupational licensing), etc. etc.
Even if the tax cut are funded by reduction in government spending why would that imply a reduction of government power?
They don't necessarily have to, but generally do. For instance during austerity measures spending is generally reduced in most areas. Police forces have less funding and thus lose the ability to have as great an effect on an area, that is they have less power. Unless you're talking about power as a state of laws instead of a state of what is physically done to people?
Do you think UK had an austerity period recently?
Well, yes, it was all over the news. This feels like a trick question. Are you about to tell me that spending went up during the recession or something?
You have good instincts :-) Yes, this was a trap: behold.
Then what was all that stuff on the news about cutting government jobs, trying desperately to ensure frontline services weren't effected and so on about?
Edit: I knew it! No wonder I felt so confused. It would seem the reduction in spending just took a while to come into effect. Take a look at the years after 2011 that your chart is missing. Unfortunately it's not adjusted for inflation but you still get the idea. If you change category to protection and the subcategory to 'police', 'prisons' or 'law courts', you can see the reduction in police funding over the course of the recession.
Okay, my definition of sane is essentially: rational enough to take actions that generally work towards your goals and to create goals that are effective ways to satisfy your terminal values. It's a rather high bar. Suicide bombers do not achieve their goals, cultists have had their cognitive machinery hijacked to serve someone else's goals instead of their own. The reason I think this would be okay in aggregate is the psychological unity of mankind: we're mostly pretty similar and there are remarkably low numbers of evil mutants. Being pretty similar, most people's goals would be acceptable to me. I disagree with some things China does for example, but I find their overwhelming competence makes up for it in aggregate wellbeing of their populace.
gjm gives some good examples of heroic responsibility, but I understand the term slightly differently. Heroic responsibility is to have found a thing that you have decided is important, generally by reasoned cost/benefit and then take responsibility to get it done regardless of what life throws your way. It may be an easy task or a hard task, but it must be an important task. The basic idea is that you don't stop when you feel like you tried, if your first attempt doesn't work you do more research and come up with a new strategy. If your second plan doesn't work because of unfair forces you take those unfair forces into account and come up with another plan. If that still doesn't work you try harder again, then you keep going until you either achieve the goal, it becomes clear that you cannot achieve the goal or the amount of effort you would have to put into the problem becomes significantly greater than the size of the benefit you expect.
For example, the benefit for FAI is humanities continued existence, there is essentially no amount of effort one person could put in that could be too much. To use the example of Eliezer in this thread, the benefit of a person being happier and more effective for months each year is also large, much larger than the time it takes to research SAD and come up with some creative solutions.
The definition you give sounds like a pretty low bar to me. The fact that you're calling the bar high means that there are implied but unstated things around this definition -- can you be more explicit? "Generally work towards your goals" looks to me like what 90% of the population is doing...
Is it basically persistence/stubborness/bloodymindedness, then?
Persistence is a good word for it, plus a sense of making it work even if the world is unfair, the odds are stacked against you. No sense of having fought the good fight and lost, if you failed and there were things you possibly could done beforehand, general strategies that would have been effective even if you did not know what was coming, then that is your own responsibility. It is not, I think, a particularly healthy way of looking at most things. It can only really be useful as a mindset for things that really matter.
Ah, sorry, I insufficiently unpacked "effective ways to satisfy terminal values". The hidden complexity was in "effectively". By effectively I meant in an efficient and >75% optimal manner. Many people do not know their own terminal values. Most people also don't know that what makes a human happy, which is often different from what a human wants. Of those that do know their values, few have effective plans to satisfy them. Looking back on it now, this is quite a large inferential distance behind the innocuous looking work 'sane'. I shall try to improve on that in the future.
Is there an implication that someone or something does know? That strikes me as awfully paternalistic.
It's a statement of fact, not a political agenda. Neuroscientists know more about people's brains than normal people do, as a result of spending years and decades studying the subject.
Huh? Neuroscientists know my terminal values better than I do because they studied brains?
Sorry, that's nonsense.
Not yours specifically, but the general average across humanity. lukeprog wrote up a good summary of the factors correlated with happiness which you've probably read as well as an attempt to discern the causes. Not that happiness is the be-all and end-all of terminal values, but it certainly shows how little the average person knows about what they would actually happy with vs what they think they'd be happy with. I believe that small sub-sequence on the science of winning at life is far more than the average person knows on the subject, or else people wouldn't give such terrible advice.
Aren't you making the assumption that the average applies to everyone? It does not. There is a rather wide spread and pretending that a single average value represents it well enough is unwarranted.
There are certainly things biologically hardwired into human brains but not all of them are terminal values and for things that are (e.g. survival) you don't need a neurobiologist to point that out. Frankly, I am at loss to see what neurobiologists can say about terminal values. It's like asking Intel chip engineers about what a piece of software really does.
I don't know about that. Do you have evidence? If a person's ideas about her happiness diverge from the average ones, I would by default assume that she's different from the average, not that she is wrong.
Really, last time I checked there is now a Caliphate in what is still nominal Iraq and Syria.
Not quite. A collection of semi-local militias who managed to piss off just about everyone does not a caliphate make.
P.S. Though as a comment on the grandparent post, some suicide bombers certainly achieve their goals (and that's even ignoring the obvious goal to die a martyr for the cause).
But not enough for "everyone" to mount an effective campaign to destroy them.
Achieved almost entirely by fighting through normal means, guns and such so I hardly see the relevant. Suicide bombing kills a vanishing small number of people. IED's are an actual threat.
Their original goal as rebels was to remove a central government and now they're fighting a war of genocide against other rebel factions. I wonder how they would have responded if you'd told them at the start that a short while later they'd be slaughtering fellow muslims in direct opposition to their holy book.