Followup to:  What Would You Do Without Morality?, Something to Protect

Once, discussing "horrible job interview questions" to ask candidates for a Friendly AI project, I suggested the following:

Would you kill babies if it was inherently the right thing to do?  Yes [] No []

If "no", under what circumstances would you not do the right thing to do?   ___________

If "yes", how inherently right would it have to be, for how many babies?     ___________

Followup to:  Tsuyoku Naritai, But There's Still A Chance Right?

    The Sophisticate:  "The world isn't black and white.  No one does pure good or pure bad. It's all gray.  Therefore, no one is better than anyone else."
    The Zetet:  "Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade.  You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view..."
      —Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

I don't know if the Sophisticate's mistake has an official name, but I call it the Fallacy of Gray.  We saw it manifested in yesterday's post—the one who believed that odds of two to the power of seven hundred and fifty millon to one, against, meant "there was still a chance".  All probabilities, to him, were simply "uncertain" and that meant he was licensed to ignore them if he pleased.

"The Moon is made of green cheese" and "the Sun is made of mostly hydrogen and helium" are both uncertainties, but they are not the same uncertainty.

Everything is shades of gray, but there are shades of gray so light as to be very nearly white, and shades of gray so dark as to be very nearly black.  Or even if not, we can still compare shades, and say "it is darker" or "it is lighter".

Followup to:  Superhero Bias

Yesterday I discussed how the halo effect, which causes people to see all positive characteristics as correlated—for example, more attractive individuals are also perceived as more kindly, honest, and intelligent—causes us to admire heroes more if they're super-strong and immune to bullets.  Even though, logically, it takes much more courage to be a hero if you're not immune to bullets.  Furthermore, it reveals more virtue to act courageously to save one life than to save the world.  (Although if you have to do one or the other, of course you should save the world.)

"The police officer who puts their life on the line with no superpowers", I said, "reveals far greater virtue than Superman, who is a mere superhero."

But let's be more specific.

John Perry was a New York City police officer who also happened to be an Extropian and transhumanist, which is how I come to know his name.  John Perry was due to retire shortly and start his own law practice, when word came that a plane had slammed into the World Trade Center.  He died when the north tower fell.  I didn't know John Perry personally, so I cannot attest to this of direct knowledge; but very few Extropians believe in God, and I expect that Perry was likewise an atheist.

"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution," said Jacques Monod, "is that everybody thinks he understands it."

A human being, looking at the natural world, sees a thousand times purpose.  A rabbit's legs, built and articulated for running; a fox's jaws, built and articulated for tearing.  But what you see is not exactly what is there...

In the days before Darwin, the cause of all this apparent purposefulness was a very great puzzle unto science.  The Goddists said "God did it", because you get 50 bonus points each time you use the word "God" in a sentence.  Yet perhaps I'm being unfair.  In the days before Darwin, it seemed like a much more reasonable hypothesis.  Find a watch in the desert, said William Paley, and you can infer the existence of a watchmaker.

But when you look at all the apparent purposefulness in Nature, rather than picking and choosing your examples, you start to notice things that don't fit the Judeo-Christian concept of one benevolent God. Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits.  Rabbits seem well-designed to evade foxes.  Was the Creator having trouble making up Its mind?

Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:

A few days ago, the Nobel Laureate, Dr. James Watson, made a remark that is now generating worldwide uproar, especially among blacks.  He said what to me looks like a self-evident truth.  He told The Sunday Times of London in an interview that in his humble opinion, black people are less intelligent than the White people...

An intriguing opening.  Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?

I do not know what constitutes intelligence.  I leave that to our so-called scholars.  But I do know that in terms of organising society for the benefit of the people living in it, we blacks have not shown any intelligence in that direction at all.  I am so ashamed of this and sometimes feel that I ought to have belonged to another race...

Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility.  Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless.  But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.

Later in the article came this:

As I write this, I do so with great pains in my heart because I know that God has given intelligence in equal measure to all his children irrespective of the colour of their skin.

This intrigued me for two reasons:  First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction.  And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?

A few years back, my great-grandmother died, in her nineties, after a long, slow, and cruel disintegration.  I never knew her as a person, but in my distant childhood, she cooked for her family; I remember her gefilte fish, and her face, and that she was kind to me.  At her funeral, my grand-uncle, who had taken care of her for years, spoke:  He said, choking back tears, that God had called back his mother piece by piece: her memory, and her speech, and then finally her smile; and that when God finally took her smile, he knew it wouldn't be long before she died, because it meant that she was almost entirely gone.

I heard this and was puzzled, because it was an unthinkably horrible thing to happen to anyone, and therefore I would not have expected my grand-uncle to attribute it to God.  Usually, a Jew would somehow just-not-think-about the logical implication that God had permitted a tragedy.  According to Jewish theology, God continually sustains the universe and chooses every event in it; but ordinarily, drawing logical implications from this belief is reserved for happier occasions.  By saying "God did it!" only when you've been blessed with a baby girl, and just-not-thinking "God did it!" for miscarriages and stillbirths and crib deaths, you can build up quite a lopsided picture of your God's benevolent personality.

Hence I was surprised to hear my grand-uncle attributing the slow disintegration of his mother to a deliberate, strategically planned act of God. It violated the rules of religious self-deception as I understood them.

And the child asked:

Q:  Where did this rock come from?
A:  I chipped it off the big boulder, at the center of the village.
Q:  Where did the boulder come from?
A:  It probably rolled off the huge mountain that towers over our village.
Q:  Where did the mountain come from?
A:  The same place as all stone: it is the bones of Ymir, the primordial giant.
Q:  Where did the primordial giant, Ymir, come from?
A:  From the great abyss, Ginnungagap.
Q:  Where did the great abyss, Ginnungagap, come from?
A:  Never ask that question.

Consider the seeming paradox of the First Cause.  Science has traced events back to the Big Bang, but why did the Big Bang happen?  It's all well and good to say that the zero of time begins at the Big Bang—that there is nothing before the Big Bang in the ordinary flow of minutes and hours.  But saying this presumes our physical law, which itself appears highly structured; it calls out for explanation.  Where did the physical laws come from?  You could say that we're all a computer simulation, but then the computer simulation is running on some other world's laws of physics—where did those laws of physics come from?

At this point, some people say, "God!"

The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.

The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it - quite a novel concept in those days!  The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah's bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice.  The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah - the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god.  Then Elijah pours water on his altar - ruining the experimental symmetry, but this was back in the early days - to signify deliberate acceptance of the burden of proof, like needing a 0.05 significance level.  The fire comes down on Elijah's altar, which is the experimental observation. The watching people of Israel shout "The Lord is God!" - peer review.

And then the people haul the 450 priests of Baal down to the river Kishon and slit their throats.  This is stern, but necessary.  You must firmly discard the falsified hypothesis, and do so swiftly, before it can generate excuses to protect itself.  If the priests of Baal are allowed to survive, they will start babbling about how religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.

I have so far distinguished between belief as anticipation-controller, belief in belief, professing and cheering.  Of these, we might call anticipation-controlling beliefs "proper beliefs" and the other forms "improper belief".  A proper belief can be wrong or irrational, e.g., someone who genuinely anticipates that prayer will cure her sick baby, but the other forms are arguably "not belief at all".

Yet another form of improper belief is belief as group-identification—as a way of belonging.  Robin Hanson uses the excellent metaphor of wearing unusual clothing, a group uniform like a priest's vestments or a Jewish skullcap, and so I will call this "belief as attire".

In terms of humanly realistic psychology, the Muslims who flew planes into the World Trade Center undoubtedly saw themselves as heroes defending truth, justice, and the Islamic Way from hideous alien monsters a la the movie Independence Day.  Only a very inexperienced nerd, the sort of nerd who has no idea how non-nerds see the world, would say this out loud in an Alabama bar.  It is not an American thing to say.  The American thing to say is that the terrorists "hate our freedom" and that flying a plane into a building is a "cowardly act".  You cannot say the phrases "heroic self-sacrifice" and "suicide bomber" in the same sentence, even for the sake of accurately describing how the Enemy sees the world.   The very concept of the courage and altruism of a suicide bomber is Enemy attire—you can tell, because the Enemy talks about it.  The cowardice and sociopathy of a suicide bomber is American attire.  There are no quote marks you can use to talk about how the Enemy sees the world; it would be like dressing up as a Nazi for Halloween.

I once attended a panel on the topic, "Are science and religion compatible?" One of the women on the panel, a pagan, held forth interminably upon how she believed that the Earth had been created when a giant primordial cow was born into the primordial abyss, who licked a primordial god into existence, whose descendants killed a primordial giant and used its corpse to create the Earth, etc. The tale was long, and detailed, and more absurd than the Earth being supported on the back of a giant turtle. And the speaker clearly knew enough science to know this.

I still find myself struggling for words to describe what I saw as this woman spoke. She spoke with... pride? Self-satisfaction? A deliberate flaunting of herself?