I think this is the best answer so far..

For a more complete answer, I would add something about an abused person that has been unable to heal wants to recreate the negative life situations with those closest and most dependent, so they don't feel so isolated, to justify their experiences as 'normal' and also out of spite/anger at the world for not treating them properly.

Of course, abuse of dependents and 'malice' are different things requiring two different explanations, though not mutually exclusive. I suppose malice is more about increasing or experiencing (larger group) 'status' as the other comments have been focusing on.

The set of comments to this post are what I consider another example of the relative social(?) weaknesses the typical population of Less Wrong has compared to the general population.

If this question was asked of a college humanities class, a subset of the answers would be much better than these and the class as a whole would be better at identifying the answers that are more correct.

There are some answers below that are fine, but they're not said with enough confidence, and the 'ev psych' answers are not reliable. Not because ev psych can't hit upon an answer that might be correct, but because it seems that those that rely on them are not able to compare the hypothesis with a lifetime of experience for general plausibility. [On second thought, I retract this last comment to the extent people were explaining petty malice, which was indeed the first and main question of the initial post, rather than abuse of dependents. The difference being the extent to which there is absent verses perverted empathy.] I still think the answers would be better if we quizzed a random population of college students -- the academic setting just to avoid answers like 'people are evil'.

I don't respond to this question because formulating any kind of reductionist answer frames my perspective in a way that is unsettling. However, I'd be happy to identify a more correct answer when I see it. Psychology, generally, is the aspect of science where we've made the least progress with respect to reductionist explanations.

I don't think the phenomenon of 'intrusive thoughts' is relevant. Intrusive thoughts feel differently than what Mark is describing. The difference is that intrusive thoughts are 'intrusive', and almost feel like someone else is having them, whereas fantasizing about being angry is more active and more pleasant.

Thanks! OK, so a classical deontological rule might be, "don't lie" as an absolute. Suppose that a person has this particular rule in their ethical system. It is entirely context and consequence independent.

Since I don't have time to read articles about meta-ethics at the moment, I wanted to guess the gist of the argument that this could be expressed in consequentialist terms.

Is it as simple as if someone tells a lie, then there is something that is now 'bad' about the universe and this is framed as a consequence? For example, something as simple as 'a lie has been told' or perhaps a little bit more subtle, that now a person is in the negative state of being a liar. So that there is a negative 'consequence' of the lie, but it just happens to be an absolutely immediate consequence.

Then the distinction would be that deontologists compute over consequences that are immediate results of an action or state (that is, of the action or state itself), while consequentialists will compute over the consequences of that action or state (where consequence has the usual meaning of second or third or nth effects).

What is a classic or particular illustrative example of the difference between consequentialism and deontological ethics?

Yes, certainly. I hope you don't think I disagree with any of your points.

Well, actually, if I was required to take issue with any of them, it would be with the importance of probability in deciding that the existence of God is not compelling. I don't think probability has much to do with it, especially in that perhaps in a counterfactual reality there ought to be a high probability that he exists. But what is compelling is that once you are detached from the a priori belief he is present, you notice that he isn't. For me, it isn't so much a question of "existence" but failed promise.

So, it's true that all the evidence I use is physical, but I don't even know what it would mean for evidence to be non-physical. My brain is physical, evidence that can interact with my brain is physical, mental events that my brain experiences are physical. If I had some sort of soul [...] I would consider that the soul had to be physical, even if it is a different sort of physical stuff that anything else we know about.

It seems you might have forgotten, if you were ever familiar, with the pre-materialist understanding of the concept of 'non-physical'. Personally, I've forgotten. It's hard to hang on to a concept that is rendered inconsistent. I don't think it was as coarse as 'these thoughts make me happy, so they must be true' or that feelings and 'mental states' are considered to be independent somehow of scientific analysis. Though maybe. Maybe it was the idea that a person could figure stuff out about the world by thinking in a certain way about what "ought" to be, where 'ought' is pulled from some Platonian ideal value system.

Yes ... that you can sit in a chair and decide that circles exist, and would exist even if there didn't happen to be any. That's there another source of knowing.

When I first encountered Less Wrong, two or three years ago, I would have agreed with the Oaksford & Chater quotation and would have found it completely mainstream. The intellectual paradigm of my social circles was that one needed to be self-consistent in their worldview, and beyond that there was room for variation, especially as people would have a lot of different experiences swaying them one way or another.

I thought Less Wrong was extremely, iconoclastically, over-confident in its assertion that people should or must be atheists to be rational. So I positioned for a while (perhaps a week) that one could be religious and still have a self-consistent world view, but then I began to see that wasn't the entire criterion for rationality here.

People most often threw the idea of 'Occam's razor' at me, which I never did find compelling or applied very well to theism, but I eventually identified that the most important secondary criterion for rationality here, which I think is what makes physical materialism different from mainstream rationality, is that belief should only be supported by the positive existence of (physical) evidence.

For example, a theist has lots of 'evidence' for their faith, including affirming emotional and mental states, the example of the religious conviction of their friends and family, and the authority of religious leaders. However, physical materialism would train us to reject all that as evidence of a personal God -- there are other explanations for these observations.

I think that physical materialism is the natural extension of the scientific worldview. Basically, if you can't distinguish between hypotheses you have to reserve judgment.

So in the end it's not enough to have a self-consistent world view. Your world view must also be "justified", where the criteria for justification is a little different (or at least more strongly applied, since we're already such a strongly science-based culture) than the mainstream. It's closely connected to the idea, "Absence of evidence is evidence of absence," which is also less mainstream.

This is just to analyze the most immediately striking difference, which is the atheism/theism divide with mainstream views.

The concern with existential risk / AI / cryonics divide would also be interesting to analyze. My first proposal would be that it isn't so much that these concerns aren't mainstream, but that for the mainstream there is a lot of positive interest in these things in the "far" mode (we love such themes in science fiction movies) but somehow the LW point of view is to think of these things in much more near mode. I attribute this to a personality or value difference; this paradigm will attract some people naturally, other people like me seem to be immune to considering such things 'near', whereas I expect many people would be waiting for a social phase shift before they altered their views.

I suggest that your Starbucks/Main Street example is a bad one, since these are rather specific details over which a given person's daily experience is likely to produce an accurate posterior distribution.

There's a confusion regarding the example, due to my writing, because I meant to argue that the map of Nashville would not be useful for navigating Memphis. My thesis (however buried) was that a person can use anecdotes (fabricated or not) to evaluate how compelling an idea is. By analogy with the locations of Starbucks in different cities, I don't buy the idea that faith in a map is more important than the information content of the map, even if it somehow played a role in lost soldiers navigating their way out of the mountains.

I nearly always counter-weight my thoughts with counter-arguments, which is the way my brain organizes information, but which makes my writing difficult to follow, I'll work on that. In the original comment of mine above, I spent some time on the idea that to some extent the information of a map is relevant in a distinct but similar context, as for example in my analogy cities have spatial patterns in common (and mountains will too). But that was just a distracting counterpoint...

So in the end I think we agree mostly. My thesis was that a person needs to be critical of the relevance of anecdotes.

Where we might disagree is in the significance of the size of the domain in real life where anecdotes are the best means we have of organizing, extracting and relaying information. For example,

a probability calculation describing the whole chain of propositions necessary for a fictional narrative to be true

is going to be more or less useless in the cases where we are most dependent on narratives. Narratives help us integrate thinking over a non-linear network of ideas developed over a lifetime of experience. If estimating probabilities over a linear chain of propositions is feasible, then its a different kind of problem, one more suited to analytic analysis.

Back to the object level, what was the problem/idea the authors were trying to express with their story about the soldiers? That 'perspective and attitude' matters (more than? sometimes just as much as? can compensate for lack of?) real knowledge about the territory. It's a pretty amorphic, fuzzy idea to begin with. I consider it a success they were able to capture the idea at all, but I wouldn't consider it worth actually quantifying..

Devil's advocate here: fictional 'evidence' can play the same role as a hypothetical; it creates a situation in which you can apply your intuition. If I encounter a story (e.g., an anecdote), it gets weighted to the extent that the story makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, it doesn't get weighted because I'll assume unknown factors or assign a low probability that it can be generalized. It doesn't matter so much, in either case, if the story is true or not.

Claiming that a story is true when it isn't is requesting more serious consideration of the plausibility of the scenario than it deserves, but if it the story is possible, it might as well have happened, since everything can happen once.

For example, with respect to the map anecdote, a person can use their own critical faculty (and experience) to decide the role that luck would have had in the survival of the soldiers. The anecdote certainly expressed the idea that impressions and attitude matter, but I also know that a map of the Starbucks locations in Nashville won't be so helpful in finding the Starbucks in Memphis. (...Except that there often will be one off any interstate exit near the downtown. So I might be lucky if I'm on the interstate and both cities have "Main" streets with a Starbucks. And it helps in any case to drive around.)

And there's another example, because I can't say I've actually ever seen a Starbucks on a street called Main Street, but the entire scenario seems plausible and illustrates the point.

I like that idea.

I expect that this candidate would think very differently from me (perhaps the inferential distance would make communication difficult?) and for some reason be especially detached from social thought patterns. I think I'm somewhat detached, but can't make heads or tails of the patterns. Thus, apart from the possible difficulty in communication, I would trust my judgement of whether they were resolving the questions and would be happy with an individual attempt.

... An example of the type of candidate comes to mind, the Dûnyain Kellhus, but unfortunately he is fictional.