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Kindly comments on Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015 - LessWrong
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Milo Behr, Beowulf: A Bloody Calculus.
To criticize hypocrisy in debate you don't even have to understand the other's argument -- you only have to be able to find a logical contradiction, and you can always find a contradiction, or something you can plausibly claim is a contradiction.
For the debater, it may be very hard to give up. Many of us can find (or generate plausible arguments for) contradictions with 10% of your brain power, thus keeping the other on the defensive, while using the rest of ones mind to search for a deeper argument. But for this reason it makes for tedious unilluminating debate, and ought to be given less encouragement than it gets - that is, if we want more insightful argument.
Hypocrisy does not mean falling short of one's ideals. It means only pretending to hold them.
I think the same point still applies. I might pretend to hold grandiose ideals by accomplishing some small things in their support. Call me out on it, and I have no further reason to continue doing those small things.
Daniel Dennett has a very similar remark in Elbow Room, to the effect that hypocrisy is the clutch of moral motivation. Paraphrasing: Use too much, and you go nowhere, but too little, and you're lugging the engine.
Hypocrisy isn't actually fundamentally wrong, even is deliberate. The idea that it's bad is a final yet arbitrary value that has to be taught to humans. Many religions contain the Golden Rule, which boils down to "don't be a hypocrite", and this is exactly an indicator that is was highly non-obvious before it permeated our culture.
Hypocrisy means that what you are signalling is not reality. It doesn't harm you, directly; but it does, potentially, and in general, harm anyone who relies on your signalling.
Therefore, in a sufficiently large and inter-connected society, the society will be more successful if hypocrisy is given some significant negatives, like social ostracisation for known hypocrites (that also cuts down on the potential damage radius).
Therefore, societies which punish hypocrisy will, on average, be more successful than societies which do not.
So I don't think that the idea that hypocrisy is bad is arbitrary. It might not be obvious, but it's not arbitrary.
It is totally obvious. No-one wants to be lied to, and no-one wants to be found out lying.
Love it -- mainly because it invokes one of my favourite paradoxes.
If you preach hypocrisy, and you are in fact hypocritical, than you're not a hypocrite. And if you aren't a hypocrite, then you are.
The paradox arises only if you aren't hypocritical about anything else.
Hence why Russell's paradox makes reference to the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, rather than just some sets that don't contain themselves.
(Now, of course, mathematicians don't use naive set theory anymore, but ZFC, which solves the problem.)