This post is comprised partly of my own ideas, and partly of the ideas of Scott Alexander. Part of what I am doing here is just explaining my interpretation of his post. It is my first post, and it’s essentially just an experiment. I’d be highly appreciative of feedback and constructive criticism. I’m not 100% sure I’ve completely expressed what I want to, but I think I’ve at least made a reasonable start. In the spirit of writing quickly, I decided not to my doubts hold me back. My point might seem quite obvious/self-evident, but I do feel emotionally like it’s a point I need to make.
A lot of us have people... (read 1308 more words →)
And there I was, convinced I had already looked this up and found that it was 'dessert'. Thanks.
Strongly disagree. If you think of Virtue-with-a-capital-V as a Hellenic deity or a Platonic essence, then sure, Virtue doesn't exist. But if "virtue" is like "honesty", ie. a name for a particular pattern of action that is observable and which can be somewhat-objectively evaluated, then virtue absolutely exists, even if we might disagree about its identification.
I could rephrase my claim here by saying that utility is what actually matters, and that there isn't actually a thing called virtue that matters in and of itself. I agree that virtue can still be a useful concept for generating utility. But it seems wrong to me to say 'virtue can be a useful concept for... (read more)
From the perspective of the collective, the point of awarding Virtue Points is so that people know what traits to signal to remain in good graces with the community. From the perspective of the individual, a lot of the time that will feel like doing the Right Thing and not getting rewarded, due to phenomena discussed here.
I think with my post I'm pointing to something quite specific - a collection of ideas I expect to be somewhat useful in some not-particularly-well-thought-through way, by making sure that, to the extent that people think 'person X deserves recompense', they think so in a way that is fair. Basically, I think I'm trying to make... (read 407 more words →)
Thanks! :)
I said 'something akin to Virtue Points', because I agree that someone getting hit is not actually more virtuous than someone not getting hit. I can understand why you would be very surprised if I thought that.
I think perhaps the whole post could be rewritten and framed in terms of suffering (or pain, or something of that nature), because I think that's essentially what I'm getting at, and I feel it might be what Scott is getting at as well. I think it's a highly common intuition that suffering is bad, and people often think that those who suffer deserve some kind of compensation, regardless of whether it was voluntary or not.
For... (read more)
Yeah so on the question of the effects of mentally assigning Virtue Points, I think the extent to which the ideas of my post should change behaviour, and whether that change would be good, is unclear. I wrote the post under the assumption that it's be better for us to have this fairer understanding of how the amount of suffering involved in a task can be drastically different for different people depending on their existing abilities. I feel like it's important for society to realise this, and I feel like we've only partially realised it at the moment. But possibly this isn't the case, and I need to think about it more.... (read more)