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This is more or less tangential to the main point of your post, with which I agree completely, but I wasn't so much defending a more reasonable view of honesty ("don't lie, except to nazis") as I was simply trying to contrast two different views ("don't lie, except to nazis" and "don't lie, ever, or you're a bad person") and trying to see where people thought the best line to draw was.
In response to
You don't need Kant
Sorry about that. I meant something along the lines of "MBlume quotes people who espouse other variants of radical honesty, and incidentally those variants are more feasible than Kant's." Didn't mean to imply that there was only one.
I'll rephrase when I get the chance.
We like our physicists to be heroic figures, and our mathematicians to shut up and multiply.
20th-century physics is taught as a series of historical events, taking you through intermediate steps; because if you taught someone relativity and quantum mechanics without explaining the experimental data and the different ways that were tried of reconciling them that failed, they wouldn't believe you.
"We like our physicists to be heroic figures, and our mathematicians to shut up and multiply."
Ahahahaha! I'll have to remember that one.
In response to
You don't need Kant
"One of the annoying things about philosophy is that the dead simply don't die. Once a philosopher or philosophical doctrine gains some celebrity in the community, it's very difficult to convince anyone afterward that said philosopher or doctrine was flawed. In other words, the philosophical community tends to have problems with relinquishment. Therefore, there are still many philosophers that spend their careers studying, for example, Plato, apparently not with the intent to determine what parts of what Plato wrote are correct or still applicable, but rather with the intent to defend Plato from criticism. To prove Plato was right."
I don't know what kind of background you have in philosophy but in my experience this is just wrong. There is not a single philosopher in my department that fits this description and I have never met anyone who does. I'm not even sure where you get this perception. Its true that past philosophers are routinely referenced but this is just because its sometimes easier to use the concepts of ones predecessors rather than reinvent the wheel. But read any metaphysics written in the last fifty years and and you'll find dead philosophers are only used to refer to common positions or as less wrong theories that make decent jumping off points for better theories.
I used Plato as an example of this because the first example that came to mind was classical philosophy, or at least the parts of it that aren't more properly philology.
I'm generalizing over my experiences at philosophy conferences, mainly in the Midwestern United States, and my reading of various philosophical journals. I'm basing my claim on, among other things, what seems to be the common practice of classifying some philosophers as for example "Kant scholars", "Continentals", etc. It's possible I'm wrong. I'm not a professional philosopher. I still think many philosophers think this way. That's where I get this perception.
You don't need Kant
Related to: Comments on Degrees of Radical Honesty, OB: Belief in Belief, Cached Thoughts.
"Nothing worse could happen to these labours than that anyone should make the unexpected discovery that there neither is, nor can be, any a priori knowledge at all.... This would be the same thing as if one sought to prove by reason that there is no reason" (Critique of Practical Reason, Introduction).
You don't need Kant to demonstrate the value of honesty. In fact, summoning his revenant can be a dangerous thing to do. You end up in the somewhat undesirable situation of having almost the right conclusion, but having it for the wrong reasons. Reasons you weren't even aware of, because they were all collapsed into the belief, "I believe in person X".
One of the annoying things about philosophy is that the dead simply don't die. Once a philosopher or philosophical doctrine gains some celebrity in the community, it's very difficult to convince anyone afterward that said philosopher or doctrine was flawed. In other words, the philosophical community tends to have problems with relinquishment. Therefore, there are still many philosophers that spend their careers studying, for example, Plato, apparently not with the intent to determine what parts of what Plato wrote are correct or still applicable, but rather with the intent to defend Plato from criticism. To prove Plato was right.
Since the community doesn't value relinquishment, the cost of writing a flawed criticism is very low. Therefore, journals are glutted with so-called "negative results": "Kant was wrong", "Hegel was wrong", etc. No one seriously believes otherwise, but writing positive philosophical results is hard, and not writing at all isn't a viable career option for a professional philosopher.
To its credit, MBlume refrains from bringing up Kant in his article on radical honesty, where he cites other, more feasible variants of radical honesty. However, in the comments, Kant rears his ugly head.
Irritatingly, this site now has its own non-standard acronym for the Internet standard "IAWTC".
It's clearly an in-crowd Shibboleth that's used to recognize fellow LWer's.
I dunno if that's irritating or not.
In response to
The Zombie Preacher of Somerset
I agree with your conclusion, but --
"...perfectly empty of all thought, reflection, conscience, and consideration, entirely destitute of the knowledge of God and Christ, unable to look backward or forward, or inward or outward..." (emph, added)
How does someone believe they are empty of all thought when they can't look inward? I smell a rat.
A zombie's behavior will be identical to that of a conscious counterpart; see "Zombies" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):
Zombies are exactly like us in all physical respects but have no conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness.
The "zombie" preacher clearly has some sort of psychological disorder, which is precisely your conclusion. Having a psychological disorder doesn't exclude him from being a zombie, of course -- if zombies are possible, it's possible that some of them have mental disorders, or even believe that they have problems with their consciousness -- but it sounds like in the first part of your essay you are trying to explain the preacher's condition with his decent into zombiehood.
There's no empirical way to determine whether someone is a zombie or not. That's the whole problem with zombies.
Sheldon Solomon, one of the big names behind terror management theory, was the one who conducted the WTC study. He also did a related experiment in the same study where he made people think about their own deaths and found they were more likely to vote Bush afterwards. I think there's a description at the same link. Good catch.
That's unfortunate. I was hoping for more than one clique, but it looks like my half-remembered study "Evidence for terror management theory, part II" (annoyingly not free) is by roughly the same group of people as the WTC study you cited.
In response to
Never Leave Your Room
There's a relatively new branch of psychology called Terror Management Theory that specializes the general phenomena cited above for instances where one is reminded of one's mortality. I've only read a couple journal articles in the field, and I'm not a psychologist, but one experimental design in particular struck a cord in me.
I'm no longer certain of the study, but they primed their candidates with a short story about either life insurance policies or (for the control group) the imports and exports of a certain country. Then, they had the subjects try to complete a list of partially-spelled words specifically chosen so that they had two interpretations -- one morbid, the other benign. The only pair I remember was skull and skill, both derivable from S**LL.
Then, to get the cross-cultural study, they found these word pairs in modern Hebrew! How cool is that! I should dig that study up again. I wonder if they used the truth/death similarity exploited by the story of the Golem.
In response to
Rational Me or We?
An attempt to even find Einsteins is doomed unless the number of them is large enough as a fraction of the population. (cf: Eliezer's introduction to Bayes.)
On the other hand, a purely aggregate approach is a dirty hack that somehow assumes no (irrational) individual is ever able to be a bottleneck to (aggregate) good sense. It's also fragile to societal breakdown.
It seems evident to me that what's really urgent is to "raise the tide" and have it "lift all boats". Because then, tests start working and the individual bottleneck is rational.
I predict that aggregate approaches are going to be more common in the future than waiting around for an Einstein-level intelligence to be born.
For example, Timothy Gowers recently began a project (Polymath1) to solve an open problem in combinatorics through distributed proof methods. Current opinion is that they were probably successful; unfortunately, the math is too hard for me to render judgment.
Now, it's possible that they were successful because the project attracted the notice of Terence Tao, who probably qualifies as an Einstein-level mathematician. If you look at the discussion, Tao and Gowers both dominate it. On the other hand, many of the major breakthroughs in the project didn't come from either of them directly, but from other anonymous or pseudo-anonymous comments.
The time of an Einstein or Tao is too valuable for them to do all the thinking by themselves. We agree that raising the tide is absolutely necessary for this kind of project to grow.
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Did anyone say that they believed in Kant?
Actual comment thread (with context intact!): (http://lesswrong.com/lw/6w/degrees_of_radical_honesty/4jn?context=1#4jn)
We were talking about never lying; I copied a quotation from Constant's critique of Kant (they were explicitly discussing a version of the "Tell-the-Murderer" thought experiment) and then summarized Kant's negative response to Constant.
I'm not really sure why one wouldn't bring it up? We had two different conceptions of why you shouldn't lie in the main post. Eliezer's sounded a lot like Kant's, but then he said that you don't have to include everyone in the group of people you would never lie to. Kant specifically addresses this argument.
Next step....
Bring up Kant.
I would probably just add a comment that you disagree with Kant's assumptions to the chain and go on to state that this makes his argument of no use to us in the modern day and age.
I threw in the point that you could reconstruct his arguments as utilitarian critiques in the hope that someone might not just discount Kant and be done with it...c'est la vie.
For interested partires, there's plenty more out there (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lying-definition/), but Kant is still relevant.
I didn't intend to imply that you yourself believe in Kant. Sorry.
As for why one shouldn't bring him up, it's because it might prime others in the argument to treat the original variants as similar or equivalent to Kant's position. I think this could be a common problem, and I felt others should be more aware of it.
I don't discount Kant completely. The Kant-Laplace hypothesis is probably correct.