= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
And here I thought using this as a pain management technique only worked because I'm masochistic! It actually is genuinely fascinating to learn this is common to people who don't share that trait. Though, actually, come to think of it, you never explicitly said whether you do or not. If it's not prying, are you?
In response to
So You've Changed Your Mind
Whenever I read something on Less Wrong about how to change my mind, I feel guilty for not immediately changing my mind about everything I believe. This post especially. I've already examined my beliefs and concluded they are absolutely worthy, I've already taken all the advice on how to maintain rational beliefs, but the style of these posts makes me feel so guilty for being as committed as I am to what I am fairly sure are rational beliefs. Of course, I hope this comment doesn't lead anyone to believe that they don't need to relentlessly focus on changing their mind. Recognizing that it is hard and annoying to be constantly vigilant is not an excuse to not be.
On the other hand, it could be that I've just internalized the rhetoric and made myself immune to the Less Wrong style of belief-correction. Reading this post, for example, I noted with satisfaction that I believe that following my "sacred beliefs" is in contradiction with following "animal urges" like enjoying myself or morality. But even asceticism, radicalism can be a defense for some perniciously deep-seated wrong idea. The only genuine defense against irrationality is constant self-examination; the only genuinely problematic beliefs are those that bias or otherwise prevent one's self-examination.
I noted with satisfaction that I believe that following my "sacred beliefs" is in contradiction with following "animal urges" like enjoying myself or morality
Could you expound upon this?
In other words, if my opponent begins to make choices that better optimize their goals, do I gain or lose?
It seems clear that the answer depends on how many of their goals I share, how many I oppose, and how much I value the shared goals relative to the opposed goals.
Suppose we are Swift's Big-Endians and Little-Endians, who agree on pretty much everything that matters (even by their own standards!) and are bitterly divided over a single relatively trivial issue. If one side is suddenly optimized, everybody wins. That is, the vast majority of everyone's current goals are more effectively and efficiently met, including those of the opposition.
Sure, the optimized party gets all of that plus the value of having everyone open their eggs on the side they endorse... which means their opponents suffer in turn the value-loss of everyone opening their eggs on the side they reject. But they will be suffering that value-loss in the context of an overall increase in their value. I'm not saying everyone wins equally, just that everybody wins. Whether they are happy about this or not depends on other factors, but they seem pretty clearly to be better off.
In that scenario, upgrading my opponents means I win, although upgrading my allies means I win more.
(Of course, it's possible that both kinds of Endian conclude that they get more of what they want by self-modifying to stop caring so much about peeling eggs, and then work out ways to do so. One person's "value" is another person's "bias." But that's another discussion.)
By contrast, if instead of Endians we have more fundamentally opposed opponents... say, aliens who want to modify planets like Earth to have cyanide-rich atmospheres so they can colonize, whereas we would prefer to have more oxygen-rich atmospheres which are toxic to the aliens.
In a case like that, optimizing our opponents means they get a larger share of the available worlds (either through better negotiations, or winning wars, or more efficient exploration, or whatever) and in the long run dominate the galaxy. If we're at a point where planetary surfaces really are the most valuable thing in play, then they win and we lose.
(Of course, it's possible we both conclude that we get more of what we want by self-modifying to breathe whatever atmosphere the planet happens to have. But again, that's another discussion.)
Coming back down to Earth, then: I guess the question is, how many existing group-level conflicts among humans are primarily superficial conflicts among groups whose shared goals dwarf their opposed ones ("Endian" conflicts), and how many really are deep conflicts among groups whose opposed goals dwarf their shared ones ("oxygen-cyanide" conflicts)?
I don't know, but I would be surprised if a significant number were non-Endian.
If that's true, then in general optimizing everyone, even my opponents, leads to everyone being better off, even me. Not because everyone immediately realizes that I'm right and they're wrong, but because most of us already agree on the overwhelming majority of our values.
OTOH, that might be false.
I'm not saying everyone wins equally, just that everybody wins.
I really hope that this is the case, but I don't think that it is. I think that the difference between the hypothetical socialist and libertarian are more dramatic than the difference between a Big-Ender and a Little-Ender. Consider this situation:
All of humanity consists of 100 people, starting at utility 10, and a random one of them is given this choice: either keep things the way they are (everyone has 10 utilons, total of 1000) or one person, at random, is given 990 utilons while everyone else loses 9, so one person will have 1000, and everyone else will have 1, for a total of 1099~11 per person. The expected utility of the latter option is higher than the first so every rational being must pick the latter, right? Though I've learned a lot since that conversation and I no longer would make the same points, I still think that an equitable distribution of utility is better than an unequal one. Many people genuinely think it is a wonderful thing to make it so that the world is highly stratified, that there are a whole lot of people who lose in order to have a few people who really, really win. There are also a whole lot of people who genuinely think it is worth sacrificing some amount of "progress" (by which I mean technological innovation, cheapness of consumer goods, whatever) in order to have people's lives be more equitable. I lie closer to the second camp, but I haven't pounded my tentstakes into the ground, and even if I have, I certainly haven't laid a brick-and-mortar foundation, so I can uproot fairly quickly. I understand the logic that comes to the former conclusion; I think it just starts from different premises than the people who come to the latter (though of course there are crazies who come to both but that goes without saying). It does seem to me, however, that the two actually are fundamentally irreconcilable in very important ways. I hope I'm wrong about that, but it really seems like I'm not...
edit: Certainly arguments like "ought gay people/mixed race couples be allowed to get married" seem more like arguments about egg-peeling, and so your strategy hopefully would work there
Tell me about it. A newbie can only get enough karma to post by saying things people agree with, Nett result: groupthink.
I agree it's annoying and probably a problem, but I think there's still less groupthink than on most forums I've seen. I do agree that it can definitely be frustrating; I have a post I want to write up on the value of starting things sooner rather than later, and I was all set to start typing it up back when I had 19 karma (you need 20 to make a full post), but then I started posting in this thread, and my karma score drifted back down to a single digit. It's doubly frustrating because I can't tell if people legitimately think my posts there are without merit or if they're just using it as an agree/disagree button. If they do think my posts are terrible no one has said as such.
Osama bin Laden talks about "defeating the Great Satan for the glory of Allah and Mohammed (pbuh)" for the same reason George Walker Bush talked about "spreading Freedom and Democracy": because it resonates with his intended audience, convinces them that he has similar thought-processes to them and is representative of their interests, or at the very least their team, not because he actually believed that that was what he was doing.
There is a problem with arguments of the form, "The leader of that group clearly doesn't 'really' believe his own rhetoric he's just saying that because it resonates with his followers." This implies that their followers actually believe that stuff, otherwise there would be no point in the leaders' saying it. But you've just admitted that there exist people who really believe that stuff, why is it so absurd for the leader to be one of those people?
I certainly agree that I should not model their minds as being identical to mine, but given that I don't want to kill people, I'm already doing that at least to some degree.
You're still self-anchoring. You observe that they want to kill people, so you try to imagine under what conditions you would be willing to kill people.
That said, I think that you are being overly simplistic in your model of these people.
Well, near as I can tell, your model boils down to "they secretly have to same world-view as I do, and the difference in their rhetoric is because it resonates with their audience".
For the record I should probably mention my model:
They observe that the Islamic world isn't as powerful as it was in its glory days. Furthermore, the West and the United States in particular is influencing their culture in ways they don't like. Solving this problem requires a model of how the world works. Well, the model they turn to is one based on Islam.
There is certainly more that could be added to this model, e.g., a discussion of how feuds work in clan-based societies for starters.
I just remembered the obvious point that I had been forgettig this whole time. Your position seems to me to be basically the position the article we're both commenting on is directly arguing is a silly, untenable one to take.
Osama bin Laden talks about "defeating the Great Satan for the glory of Allah and Mohammed (pbuh)" for the same reason George Walker Bush talked about "spreading Freedom and Democracy": because it resonates with his intended audience, convinces them that he has similar thought-processes to them and is representative of their interests, or at the very least their team, not because he actually believed that that was what he was doing.
There is a problem with arguments of the form, "The leader of that group clearly doesn't 'really' believe his own rhetoric he's just saying that because it resonates with his followers." This implies that their followers actually believe that stuff, otherwise there would be no point in the leaders' saying it. But you've just admitted that there exist people who really believe that stuff, why is it so absurd for the leader to be one of those people?
I certainly agree that I should not model their minds as being identical to mine, but given that I don't want to kill people, I'm already doing that at least to some degree.
You're still self-anchoring. You observe that they want to kill people, so you try to imagine under what conditions you would be willing to kill people.
That said, I think that you are being overly simplistic in your model of these people.
Well, near as I can tell, your model boils down to "they secretly have to same world-view as I do, and the difference in their rhetoric is because it resonates with their audience".
For the record I should probably mention my model:
They observe that the Islamic world isn't as powerful as it was in its glory days. Furthermore, the West and the United States in particular is influencing their culture in ways they don't like. Solving this problem requires a model of how the world works. Well, the model they turn to is one based on Islam.
There is certainly more that could be added to this model, e.g., a discussion of how feuds work in clan-based societies for starters.
There is a problem with arguments of the form, "The leader of that group clearly doesn't 'really' believe his own rhetoric he's just saying that because it resonates with his followers." This implies that their followers actually believe that stuff, otherwise there would be no point in the leaders' saying it. But you've just admitted that there exist people who really believe that stuff, why is it so absurd for the leader to be one of those people?
My mistake, wedrifid is correct, I turned my thought into a sentence poorly.
You're still self-anchoring. You observe that they want to kill people, so you try to imagine under what conditions you would be willing to kill people.
I admit to not having considered this bias on this subject. That said, I don't think that this bias is affecting me very significantly here, and I think that because of the direction I approached my current position from: I arrived at it after moving from somewhere near where you are currently. I will consider the possibility that my position is affected by this bias, however. The manner in which I am doing so right now is to reread the wikipedia page that I just linked and follow several of the citations. It seems that the consensus is that perceived western aggression against Muslims and Islam is one of the prime motivators--which would then include what I said, and also perceived aggression against Islam specifically. So a mixture of what we've both been saying.
Well, near as I can tell, your model boils down to "they secretly have to same world-view as I do, and the difference in their rhetoric is because it resonates with their audience".
I don't think that they are attempting to inspire a proletarian revolt across nations. I don't think that they are attempting to engage in a class struggle pitting the poor against the rich. I do think that they perceive themselves and their fellow Muslims as being the victims of exploitation by Westerners, and I think that they perceive a number of dimensions to that exploitation: military, economic, and cultural; perhaps more. Military is fairly obvious. Economic is what I was talking about, I mentioned it specifically because we were discussing the attacks on the World Trade Center. Cultural is what you are talking about. I believe that while it is an important portion of their motivation, it is not the primary piece. Unfortunately their rhetoric focuses on that issue largely (though by no means entirely) which gives an inflated view of its importance.
They observe that the Islamic world isn't as powerful as it was in its glory days. Furthermore, the West and the United States in particular is influencing their culture in ways they don't like. Solving this problem requires a model of how the world works. Well, the model they turn to is one based on Islam.
It might be that we are saying similar things with rather different vocabularies. When you say that the Islamic world isn't as powerful as it was in its glory days, does that include what I talk about when I say they're being economically exploited? For instance, instead of a wealthy semi-equitable (or perhaps merely remembered as such) Caliphate, they are frequently poor or highly segmented populations dependent on natural resource exportation? Where does reaction to the West's military operations fit into your model? That certainly seems to be one of the motivating forces most commonly cited by terrorists themselves.
Out of curiosity, have you been downvoting me? I've been upvoting you. I ask because I notice that every time I post in this thread my karma goes down, and though I do realize it's a silly thing to care about, for some reason I do. Something about human brains enjoying watching numbers go up, I suppose. It's particularly frustrating because I am enjoying the discussion, but seeing that number going down makes me feel like my participation is unwanted (which I am assuming is not the case, but who knows, maybe it is).
Osama bin Laden talks about "defeating the Great Satan for the glory of Allah and Mohammed (pbuh)" for the same reason George Walker Bush talked about "spreading Freedom and Democracy": because it resonates with his intended audience, convinces them that he has similar thought-processes to them and is representative of their interests, or at the very least their team, not because he actually believed that that was what he was doing.
There is a problem with arguments of the form, "The leader of that group clearly doesn't 'really' believe his own rhetoric he's just saying that because it resonates with his followers." This implies that their followers actually believe that stuff, otherwise there would be no point in the leaders' saying it. But you've just admitted that there exist people who really believe that stuff, why is it so absurd for the leader to be one of those people?
The only part I would leave out of bgaesop's paragraph is the "not because he actually believed that that was what he was doing". All of the previous stuff fits fine when both the leader and the intended audience are sincere homo-hypocrites. That is why he is doing it (or equivalently the fact that they do it so well is what made them the leaders). What they believe about the matter can be orthogonal.
Yes, definitely. I meant it that way, but what I actually wrote down is different, I'll correct it. Thanks for saying this.
In response to
Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians
I've been having some sort of half-formed thoughts recently that this has brought back into my foreground that I'm curious to see other people's thoughts on.
It seems to me that the likelihood is quite high that there are people on here who have inherently competing utility functions (these examples were chosen merely because they are fairly common, directly competing, not obviously insane sets of motivations. I intend no value judgment on either of them). Thus, making one of the people whose utility function is dramatically different from yours more rational could be an extremely counterproductive move for you to make in terms of satisfying your own utility function. Imagine a libertarian rationalist accidentally training a socialist guerilla, who goes on to be very successful at fulfilling his own utility function, and thus dramatically harmful to his teacher's. Or perhaps more realistically, a socialist teacher trains a libertarian who goes on to found a company that does business in the Third World in a way that the teacher disapproves of.
How would we avoid this? Should we avoid this?
A few months I ago I was roundly, and rightly, rebuked for suggesting that rationality will lead you to certain political positions. On the other hand, people have also presented the idea that being rational will lead you to value various "instrumental ethics" I believe was the term? I can't find the article right now, unfortunately. Do you (this is directed at everyone) believe that simply by making people more rational, we'll make them more likely to do things we approve of, in the sense that they further our utility functions?
Do you really, truly think that the only motivations in choosing to do an attack against America (heck, picking America as the target in the first place) and picking the WTC and Pentagon as the targets of that attack, was because the attackers were Muslim while the ones being attacked were not?
No, not the only one, but if one were to ask them why they picked the targets they did, they'd describe it religious terms (talking about infidels, jihad and the great Satan) not in Marxist terms (i.e., economic oppression). In fact judging by the fact that most of the hijackers were from wealthy families, I'd guess they didn't really care about the economic dimension except as part of a general attitude that our decadence is sinful and is spreading to the middle east.
Piece of advice: just because you see the world in purely Marxist terms, doesn't mean everyone else does.
That's not so much a piece of advice as a snipe at what you perceive to be the dialectic I'm using to interpret this. It seems to me that you didn't say that to enlighten me, but to reduce my status in the eyes of what you (and I) assume is a mostly capitalist readership.
I stand by my advice as good advice. If you want to successfully model others' behavior, you shouldn't assume they see the world the same way you do.
No, not the only one, but if one were to ask them why they picked the targets they did, they'd describe it religious terms (talking about infidels, jihad and the great Satan) not in Marxist terms (i.e., economic oppression).
Just as an aside, "economic oppression" isn't a uniquely Marxist term, nor am I even aware of a specific Marxist definition of it. Are you thinking of "economic exploitation", perhaps? The latter means the difference between the amount of wealth generated by labour and the amount that labourer is paid.
I am pretty darn thoroughly convinced (though of course I am open to changing my mind) that the idea "religion made them do it!" is overly simplistic. I used to hold the position you do, but over the course of several years of examining the issue, I have come to the conclusion that the use of religious terminology and phrasing and all the general trappings of Islam are, while perhaps truly believed, are for the most part merely a rhetorical device constructed to take maximum advantage of the society they are recruiting, living, and (typically) acting in. I'm hesitant to say this next sentence, politics being the mind killer and all that, but I shall anyways (I have noticed I am in a hole. Hypothesis: if I dig long enough I'll get to China!). Osama bin Laden talks about "defeating the Great Satan for the glory of Allah and Mohammed (pbuh)" for the same reason George Walker Bush talked about "spreading Freedom and Democracy": because it resonates with his intended audience, convinces them that he has similar thought-processes to them and is representative of their interests, or at the very least their team, not because he (edit: necessarily) believed that that was what he was doing.
In fact judging by the fact that most of the hijackers were from wealthy families, I'd guess they didn't really care about the economic dimension except as part of a general attitude that our decadence is sinful and is spreading to the middle east.
Most people who have had impact in the world have come from wealthy (or at least not working-class-poor) families, including probably every Socialist Revolutionary you've heard of (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Che, et cetera), not to mention almost every politico in general. If anything, being middle class (inasmuch as that term makes sense) makes you more likely to simultaneously see the degradation of the poor and have the education to see what (at least seem to you) like plausible explanations for it. And then if you're an engineer or what have you, you have access to abilities that can actually do something about this (build bombs, fly planes, whatever), or the funds to support yourself while you learn them, or whatever. The point is, being middle class is not likely to make you less politically aware and active than being poor, and it is likely to increase your free time and ability to do things politically, including but not limited to committing acts of terrorism.
I stand by my advice as good advice. If you want to successfully model others' behavior, you shouldn't assume they see the world the same way you do.
When phrased this way it seems much more like actual advice and much less like an insult. I'm not sure how much of this is my inference and how much is your implications, but it's kind of moot. No hard feelings are taken, hopefully none were intended. Friends? I certainly agree that I should not model their minds as being identical to mine, but given that I don't want to kill people, I'm already doing that at least to some degree.
That said, I think that you are being overly simplistic in your model of these people. Again I link to this page. Could you please explain, or link me to someone else who has, what makes you think that your model of their minds and motivations is more accurate than mine?
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Skill: An accurate and functional awareness of time.
By this I mean to include noticing that pre-established dates and times have arrived, predicting the amount of time things will take you or other people, not carrying through with schedules or plans inflexibly when real surprises should cause updates, understanding how to effectively communicate about time with people about time management in ways that respect the listener's time management skills, and so on.
Suggested exercise: guess what time it is, then check a clock. Guess how long it's been since you last checked the clock, ie not only "it is 4:30" but also "it is 35 minutes since I last checked the time (at 3:55)"