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OK, so you use virtue ethics (doing one's duty is virtuous) and deontology as shortcuts for consequentialism, given that you lack resources and data to reliably apply the latter. This makes perfect sense. Your wife applies bounded consequentialism, which also makes sense. Presumably your shortcuts will keep her schemes in check, and her schemes will enlarge the list of options you can apply your rules to.
I like that formulation, thank you!
So... you value following duty as a character trait?
So... you value following duty as a character trait?
I guess you could spin it that way - but let me take an example.
For the last couple of weeks, my wife and I have been involved in some drama in our extended family. When we discuss in private and try to decide how we should act, I've noticed my wife keeps starting off with "If we were to do X, what would happen?". She likes to try to predict different outcomes and she wants to pick the action that leads to the best one. So maybe she is a consequentialist through and through.
I tend to see the whole sorry business as too complicated for us to predict, especially since I don't want to neglect consequences 10 or 20 years down the line. So I fall back to trying to apply rules that would be generally applicable. "What is our duty to family member X? What is our duty to family member Y?"
It's not that I would ever say "We should do X, even though it leads to worse outcomes." But I do want to consider the long run and I'd prefer not to destroy useful Schelling points for short term gain.
In response to
Are you a virtue ethicist at heart?
Are you a virtue ethicist at heart?
No, but I'm a deontologist at heart. Only in death does duty end.
Are they real? Are they aware of the distinction?
"Team red" is reactionary gender ideology group, the "reaction" portion being primarily against 3rd wave feminism. It's a segment of the "manosphere" with ties to the Men's Rights movement and Pick Up Artists. The ideas and values of the "Red" side here are rather similar to the views of old fashioned patriarchal conservatism, but more explicitly articulated and framed around the notion that feminism is the dominant culture (similar to how feminist thought often frames patriarchy as the dominant culture). Being reactionaries, they are of course aware of the distinction - in fact, they created the construct describing the distinction.
The notion of there being a Blue side is a construct of the Redpill subculture. While the Red side actively considers itself the "Red" side and uses "blue" to describe feminism, the majority of people who identify as feminists are unaware of this Red/Blue distinction because the "Red" side is primarily an internet subculture.
The "red" / "blue' distinction is a reference to The Matrix. It is meant to imply that 3rd wave feminists, along with Western culture at large, prefers pleasant romantic lies to harsh biological reality when it comes to gender and sexuality.
downvoting for political reasons
At the risk of seeming to take sides, I will say that there seems there are a few highly active users with reactionary ideas on Lesswrong who seem to think this rule is optional. (Which is not meant to imply that all reactionary users are doing this, or that only reactionaries do this, only that there is clearly an active group of reactionaries who is systematically doing this.)
Although, in this particular case, it's also possible that people just thought that shminux's comments would be hurtful for you to hear at this time.
Lots of good points here. In addition to the Matrix analogy (which, as you point out, is hardly a neutral way to frame the divide), keep in mind that in the US, blue and red are also the conventional colors of the left and the right.
We continue to have our little 'reactionary paradox' in that the census results show overwhelming support for feminism, but the discussion on the ground seems oddly 'red'. As you have already suggested this effect might be partially explained by LessWrong's fondness for contrarians.
I wasn't aware of this sub factions. Are they real? Are they aware of the distinction?
I tought downvoting for political reasons (and this is kind of sub-politics here) are looked down upon. Problem is: sub-politics is only possible if you already active and have quite some karma to spend.
To whoever downvoted this: It is not fair to downvote because someone is taking the side/view of the absent party (and balanced so).
Esp. as shminux is right: It was never easy for her.
It's not that people hate your ex and want to downvote all sympathy for her. Rather, this is just one of many manifestations of our ongoing culture war. Roughly speaking, we have two teams:
Team Blue is on board with romantic love and feminism and emphasizes personal autonomy. On this view, a successful love relationship is about finding a person you click with, which could mean any number of quirky things. The problem with your marriage is that your wife was never that into you - which sucked for her. Now that she's found a person she clicks with, the seeds have been sown for more future happiness for all. No-one is really at fault, especially since you have both done your best to minimize disruption for the children.
Team Red is sympathetic to "red pill" advice (Athol Kay etc.), emphasizes biology and is less individualistic. A successful relationship is not primarily about a unique connection between unique individuals - rather it is about acting in accordance with an already existing model of what human males and females desire in each other. A particular necessity is that the male should, where appropriate, display confident and assertive behavior. On this view, our modern society has fallen into a trap (we have some harmful memes floating around, or whatever) where many males become doormats - which makes them unattractive to their wives or potential wives. What ruined your marriage is not that you were somehow inherently the wrong man for your wife - but that society failed to teach you to be assertive when appropriate. (She thought she could bring her lover into your home and you would just conveniently scurry away. This is how little she thought of you.)
You totally could express sympathy to your ex within a Team Red perspective but it would go something like this: "I feel for your wife. She couldn't control her biology and feel attracted to a man who was not displaying sufficient alpha traits." In practice, Team Red views do sometimes come with a certain regrettable bitterness towards women - especially wives who leave their husbands. So a Red-ist may tend to read sympathy to such a woman, if not explicitly framed as Red-ist, as Blue-ist propaganda.
Anyway, the point is that Team Red and Team Blue are locked in a low-grade war on LessWrong. Comments on the relevant issues will often have downvotes as well as upvotes. The comment by shminux is currently at +9, 76% positive, while the comment by Viliam Búr is at +9, 68% positive.
If you are a partisan of this, it is hard not to downvote the opposing team because you feel that they are directly harming people with their counterproductive advice and toxic memes. I don't know if we can work out a downvote ceasefire.
In response to
Dealing with a Major Personal Crisis
I like that you didn't move out and I like that you took up fencing.
In response to
Tell Culture
Tell culture seems pretty close to ask culture. I think guess culture is superior to both of them, even though guessing can go too far sometimes, obviously. (I should tell (!) you though that I am a guesser by inclination/personality so I might be doing motivated cognition).
In my view, the defences of both ask and tell culture are based on a defect picture of human cognition. You more or less always imply things by asking them or telling them things. The reason for this is that there are so many things you could ask and so many things you could tell so that by asking or telling someone something you are thereby implying that this is a reasonable thing to tell/ask. In many cases, it is not. Tellers/askers seem to think that we can somehow magically do away with those implications. The situations is analogous to those who think that we can define our words any way we like. As Yudkowsky pointed out in some post, in defining a word in a certain way, we are thereby implying that the definiens is important. These ideas are both old-style rationalist ideas. We ought to know by now that our minds don't function in that way but that we're always looking for implications from all kinds of actions.
My guess is that while many people would like to be able to ask others whatever they like or tell other whatever they like, they don't like when others do the same to them. But that's just a hunch.
It would seem to me that the guess vs ask distinction is pretty close to the previously discussed wait vs interrupt culture. In a wait culture people typically have to guess whether others think they've spoken for too long. Interrupters on the other hand tend to be more direct askers.
One reason to be suspicious of interrupt/ask cultures is that (I'm speculating here) countries with these cultures seem to be doing worse in other areas. Eg in Europe Northerners have a wait/guess culture and are doing better on all sorts of metrics than pushier Eastern and Southern Europeans. I think the common cause for this is that there is more of mutual trust and respect in Northern Europe, something that leads to more guessing/waiting but also to less corruption and all sorts of other positive effects.
I realize this last argument is not a knock-down argument for guess culture but prima facie it seems to me to have some force.
My instinct is to agree with this. I spent decades learning the intricacies of North-European politeness and I think I've finally more or less got it. Now that I've learned it, I might be motivated to think that there is some actual point to all this dancing around!
I like Stefan's idea of connecting guess/ask with wait/interrupt. We might also want to bring the guilt/shame axis into this.
It sounds like ask/interrupt/shame should make for a more honest and efficient society. The guess/wait/guilt stuff sounds pretty frakked up when it is described. But in practice it seems to be correlated with the best places to live in. Maybe this is one of those Chesterton's fence things:
If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Or for a more recent version, xkcd on drama.
I feel overworked, desperate, and very happy.
The desperation: This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there's no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it's easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction). It's not rare that I doubt that anything I'm writing is valuable work. Since I'm at the (early) dissertation stage, these kinds of big picture worries play an important daily role.
The overwork: This is exacerbated by the fact that I have a family. I have much more to do than I can do, and I often have to cut something important. I grade papers on a 3 min per page clock, and that almost feels unethical. I just recently got a new dissertation advisor who wants to see work every two weeks.
The happy: I have a family! It makes this whole thing much, much easier. Most of my problem with being a grad student in the before time was terrible loneliness. Some people do well under those conditions, but I didn't. Also, I do philosophy, which is like happiness distilled. When everyone is uploaded, and science is complete, and a billion years or so have gotten all the problems and needs and video games and recreational space travel out of our system, we'll all settle into that activity that makes life most worth living: talking about the most serious things in the most serious way with our friends. That's philosophy, and I'm very happy to be able to do it even if I don't get a job out of it.
I haven't published anything, but someone recently footnoted me in an important journal. Small victories. I have a paper I'd like to publish, but it's a back-burner project. As to my career, I will take literally anything they can give me, so long as I can be around my family (my wife is a philosopher too, so we need to both get jobs somewhere close). Odds are long on this, so my work has to be good.
This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there's no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it's easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction).
I think you're right that philosophy is particularly difficult in this respect. In many fields you can always go out, gather some data and use relatively standard methodologies to analyze your data and produce publishable work from it. This is certainly true in linguistics (go out and record some conversations or whatever) and philology (there are always more texts to edit, more stemmas to draw etc.). I get the impression that this is also more or less possible in sociology, psychology, biology and many other fields. But for pure philosophy, you can't do much in the way of gathering novel data.
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What you effectively mean is that most people don't reach the edge described very nicely visually here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-illustrated-guide-to-a-phd-2012-3
While I do like that visualization a lot, I think it is misleading in some ways. It is trivial to add to the sum of human knowledge. Go and count the coins in your wallet. I don't know how many are in mine so I'll go and check. Okay, there are 18 coins in my wallet. Now we know something we didn't know before.
"Oh, but that's not knowledge, that's just data - and just one datum at that. By 'knowledge' we mean stuff you can get published in research papers - something containing analysis and requiring insight." Bah, I tell you. You totally could get a coins-in-wallet study peer-reviewed and published. You just have to look in more wallets. Imagine you gathered a sample from 100 people in your city. Take 100 people from another city. Add cities in other countries. Do it all again in a year. Keep doing it for 10 more years. Now you have lots of data. Go and write your paper. It won't require any insight or genius - it will practically write itself. Just present your data in some legible way with nice graphs and you will find someone interested enough to publish it. Maybe not a top journal but definitely a legitimate journal in a relevant field.
The boundary of knowledge isn't hard and doesn't require years until you come up with some "breakthrough". You can just start right away, collecting information no-one currently has.
Or if you'd like to define 'human knowledge' so restrictively that the coins-in-wallet study wouldn't count, then the average PhD won't count either. Look at this zombie. Isn’t it racist and sexist? Yes, it is.