With all due respect - are you sure you would do so when this really happens? When your safety and maybe that of people around is in mortal danger? When torture is involved?
How are you so sure that you are braver than the people ('cowards') who really were in such a situation? It's easier to be a hero in an LW-post than at gun point.
I'm not going to discuss any fight stories or my military record. I am not an Internet Tough Guy.
I will say this, though - there are times I've stood up, and I'm proud of them; and there are times when fear has filled me, and I'm ashamed of them. One of the ways to avoid the latter is thought experiments: What do I do in situation X? They are extremely useful for optimizing future behaviour.
Also; this is an ad hominem attack. Whether or not I live up to my words is irrelevant. Whether my words make sense or not is the real question.
Hm, I wonder what it says about me, my perceptions of the LW community, and Aurini's prose style that the idea of this sort of hypocrisy never ever crossed my mind while reading the post.
I ask that you look at my reply to PsychoHistorian.
It's easy to be noble when the sun is shining and the weather is warm.
It is even easier to be noble when you're telling other people how they should act. The Last Psychiatrist made a totally different point. He doesn't say they should have not played along. He says they're not heroes for getting captured. Any idiot can get captured. They shouldn't have been given special honors for it, since they didn't actually do anything. They don't deserve credit for simply being a kind of person, or saying they are a kind of person.
This is the real issue: how useless this discussion is. It's very easy to say, sitting comfortably in my chair, that "If it were me, I'd stand by my principles." I may even feel like I'm a better person than they are, because I'd stand by my principles. This is narcissism; I am taking credit for something I have never done, and likely would not do were I actually pressed. If I'm in that position, and I do stand by my principles, then I deserve credit for my actions. To sit here in our armchairs and say men who literally chose their lives over their principles are cowards, while patting ourselves on the back for how principled we are for saying we wouldn't do that, is the very essence of narcissism.
There's also a legitimate argument they did nothing wrong, since only very specific interpretations of Christianity would make their actions wrong; God is supposed to be forgiving, after all. That story sounds more like the commentator wanted to feel superior about how good of a Christian she is, because she can claim she'd die for her principles without actually having to, y'know, die for her principles, or even be mildly inconvenienced for her principles.
"It's very easy to say, sitting comfortably in my chair, that "If it were me, I'd stand by my principles.""
I agree. As much as professionalism and the weight of evidence (which admittedly I have not fully investigated - the morality of these individual men is not particularly of concern to me, the social attitude towards the accepted truth is more important) leads me to believe that these men probably acted in cowardice, I intentionally avoided stating that as truth. It is fully plausible that these men chose the lesser of two evils. I think you might be making the very same mistake I made yesterday: http://lesswrong.com/lw/13i/shut_up_and_guess/yh7?context=1#yh7
But I get the sense that there's a thread of ad hominem present in your post. I'm not going to confront that, I'm more interested in your motivations behind it. Essentially you say that criticizing these men is nothing but Armchair Quarterbacking...
Isn't that precisely the point to these two websites? To review mistakes that were made due to predictable human fallibility, examine them, and then correct them?
If you want to say that I would be just as prone to cowardice as these men - well, that's irrelevant. My point was that they didn't behave rationally given their morals. I was constructing an argument that even us rationalists have deep moral obligations upon us, that we have an integrity to maintain; even if we're not in such scary situations as soldiers, we still have challenges that are frightening and we should be prepared to meet them.
Honestly, you seem to be avoiding the thrust of my argument - which is that you ought to have integrity - and your very manner of undermining my argument [ad hominem, a dark art] undermines your integrity as a rationalist. In some ways you're strongly supporting my point.
As to the debate on whether it was "true Christianity or not" - I'm at a loss. I'm well aware that Theology contains within it an infinite number of twists and turns, and I'd far rather spend my time deconstructing Star Trek (the show that killed science fiction) than any religion. I used her quote because it sent me on a fortnight of thought about Atheism.
As a finishing point, I'd just like to say that I am a fan of yours PsychoHistorian. I don't spend much time on the comment threads here, and for me to recognize a name speaks volumes. I couldn't cite your work, but I do have a deep level of respect for it.
I think this post hit a nerve with you. The idea that rationality combined with even the simplest of moralities might require sacrifice of life is deeply repugnant in civilized society, and even more in the Intelligentsia. That is precisely why I wrote this piece.
Related Posts: Prices or Bindings?
On the evening of August 14th, 2006 a pair of Fox News journalists, Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were seized by Islamic militants while on assignment in Gaza City. Nothing was heard of them for nine days until a group calling themselves the Holy Jihad Brigades took credit for the kidnappings. They issued an ultimatum, demanding the release of Muslims prisoners from American jails within a 72 hour time frame. Their demands were not met.
But then a few days later the journalists were allowed to go free... but not before they’d been forced into converting to Islam at gunpoint, and had each videotaped a statement denouncing U.S. and Israeli foreign policy.
The war raged on.
A couple of kidnapped journalists is nothing new (certainly not three years after the fact) and aside from the happy ending this particular case wouldn’t worth mentioning if not for a unique twist that occurred after they returned home. A fellow Fox News contributor, Sandy Rios, openly criticized the two men; she said that no true Christian would convert – falsely or otherwise – merely because they were threatened with death. As she later explained to Bill Maher:*
The cost depends very much on where you live.
I've just been looking on the web, and as far as I can tell, there are no cryonics services currently available in the U.K. On top of that, I'm over 50 and have no life insurance (by deliberate choice, because I have no dependents). I think it would cost me a great deal more than a dollar a day to assure my preservation, beginning with emigrating to another country and finding employment there to finance preservation costs in the region of $100,000. Or alternatively, helping to set up such services here, which would also involve large amounts of time and money.
Quite a lot of us are not from the U.S. I'd be interested to know the state of cryonics facilities in other countries.
Also, a real commitment to cryonics surely involves a lot more than just taking out membership and arranging the finance for the big day. You would presumably want to ensure that wherever you go, you have a plan for a suspension team to reach you if you drop dead, and never go anywhere too far out of reach. No backpacking trips to the wilderness, no travel to less developed countries, etc. U.S. people signed up: what additional steps do you take to ensure that your trip to the future is not merely paid for, but actually happens?
Transmetropolitan has a tragic story about a wife and husband team of investigative journalists (born slightly before you) who signed up together. The wife died of a heart attack, saying "I'll see you in the future," but then the husband died in a third-world dirt country. His last words were, "If you people had learned to clean your toilets..." Her revival was heart-breaking.
I'd like to second Mr Kennaway's question about any international information. I'm in Soviet Canuckistan for now, and I haven't been able to root anything up. Presumably the Cryonics organizations would have that sort of information on a website, that maybe one of you is familiar with?
Ooh, this is interesting. Eliezer says he hopes this wasn't at MIT or somewhere, and now people are remembering the MIT reference and assuming I go to MIT. Reminds me of that bias where you try to debunk a rumor, and all people can remember is that they heard someone talking about the rumor somewhere and believe it more. What's that called? There was an OB article on it somewhere, I think.
I should hire Eliezer to come by and make offhanded MIT references during my job interviews.
Dear lord, I just pooped myself. I'm thoroughly familiar with this bias - and I just fell into it.
Isn't this sort of language manipulation exactly what the PUAs do? Hmm... a potential way of strengthening one's arguments occurs to me. While in conversation with somebody IRL it should be more effective to phrase things as "Well, Eliezer said..." than "According to Eliezer's article on..." so as to give the impression of possible first hand knowledge, or at least thorough familiarity with the relevant material.
This is a dark art no doubt, but with most people I find that this is the only way of dealing with them.
(I am not above name-dropping Eliezer to pick up chicks.)
A year back, I encountered a this kind of a test: binary multiple choice, one point for right answer, minus half a point for a wrong answer, zero points for no answer. (Multiple-choice exams of any kind are very rare in Finnish universities, so that's pretty much the only time in my life when I've been faced with a test like that.) Looking at the scoring, I came to the same conclusion as you: my expected score would be higher if I'd just try guessing each of the questions I wasn't sure on.
I didn't follow my own advice. I now wish I had, as I failed that exam. I was under a pretty heavy workload at the time, so I never ended up retaking it. I suspect I'd have passed if I'd just shut up and multiplied.
Why didn't I follow my own advice? I did have some kind of a conscious reason, but in retrospect it seems so flimsy that I have difficulty even formulating it here. It went something along the lines of "I might as well take all the questions I have absolutely no clue on and mark them all as 'true', which gives me a 50-50 chance to be right on each one assuming there are as many true as there are false questions. But what if the lecturer, forseeing that somebody would reason this way, wrote the questions in such a way that one alternative is more frequently correct than the other, and there isn't a 50-50 chance for all questions to be 'true'? Then my expected return calculation would be off, possibly costing me points!"
Yes, I'm aware of all the flaws in that line of thought, no need to point them out. I really didn't think it through properly. That implies that the very thing you suggest happened to your friends, happened to me - I instinctively disliked the idea, and then rationalized myself a (bad) reason not to do it.
TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
That's still a better justifcation of your behaviour than the MIT students [edit: Yvain did not actually say MIT!] used - not to mention that you're able to look back in retrospect and acknowledge the error of your decision.
This sort of suspicion is a good heuristic, if not the best heuristic. Scam artists (by which I mean casinos and carnies) are skilled at making things appear as if you've found the loophole in their game, and when you don't have enough time to examine the loophole thoroughly you're generally better off assuming it to be false. From the sound of things you were too busy to do this, not to mention that - being unfamiliar with multiple choice tests in general - it caught you with your pants down. You would have had to devote twice the analysis time as a typical North American, who is familiar with these sorts of exams.
Don't discount the TANSTAAFL heuristic - you made a rational choice based on limited data and available processing time. Your error is wholly different from the errors at MIT.
This... absolutely sickens me. It's bad enough when I hear my family members argue morals/politics/economics that they subscribe to for proximate lifestyle purposes - but when University students pull this, and then ignore the eminent Yvain when he councils them otherwise?
My only comforts are the harsh cold truth of schadenfreude, that such beings don't deserve an extra 5%, and that at least I only wasted three years and $20 000 at post-secondary.*
*(My degree was non-technical; Humanities students who don't want a PhD should drop out in second year, spend a year reading, and then lie on their resume.)
P.S. Excellent break down of the reasoning process, Yvain. I think you hit the nail on the head.
Further, if you don't think you would give Omega the $100 in that situation, I'm afraid this article will mean next to nothing to you.
Surely you mean something more like, "...if you don't understand the reasoning by which one would be inclined to give Omega the $100..."
I've seen this sort of thoroughly unnecessary divisiveness in several LW posts, and it really puzzles me. Have we really fallen so far into confirmation bias and ingroup/outgrouping that we're actually telling those who disagree to stay away?
No offence, but I'm getting worried about how you and a few other people keep trying to force ingroup/outgroup concerns on the rest of us. It's unnecessary and it sows dissension; you really ought not to be doing this.
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I'm going to toss out a general reply to most of the comments right here (I hope all of you stumble across it at some point).
First of all - thanks for all of the feedback. Especially those of you who went into depth about where I went wrong with my post. You've given me a lot to think about.
In response to Dustin's question of whether I'd changed my mind - well, not exactly. What I was trying to do with this post was elaborate on the SAS motto "He who dares, wins." My old sensei used to call it "The Look of the Samurai" - the idea that, if you're ready to give it your all (even if it costs you your life), then usually you won't have to. The "never negotiate with terrorists" mentality; it's not the sort of thing that can be faked.
I'm going to try reading up on some game theory (beyond the basics of prisoner's dilemma, particularly focussing on Hawk and Dove) and give it another shot in a couple of months.
Thanks again for the input - I'm really frustrated I didn't do it right - but hell, that's what learning curves are all about, ain't it?