Summary: if they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities.

Eliezer, you seem to say that trying to reduce hypocrisy is good for people who are trying to overcome their biases. That seems a tautology...

"The sort of human being who makes a continual effort to overcome hypocrisy, and who manages to do so, will probably set the slaves free." I don't quite see how this is tautological...

Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity.

Hitler certainly did. Stalin... maybe not, I don't know his case in as much detail. But it is their followers, and the rest of the world, who they managed to confuse. This is what Orwell opposed. He was not speaking to Stalin, but to the people who tried to excuse Stalin.

Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes.

I'm supposed to applaud now, right?

Opening eyes is what I do. It's a lot more complicated than telling your kids, "Suffering is bad, m'kay?"

There's a long, long distance between being told by your parents not to murder, and learning how to actually see a "murder" taking place rather than an "alternative justice process". Morality without logic will be flushed down a toilet by self-deception.

I feel you exaggerate the case here Eliezer. Overcoming bias will not solve all the problems in the world. There's even a chance it could make them worst. Let's look at hypocrisy, for instance:

This is the great case against hypocrisy, that hypocrisy allows us to act contrary to our ideals, and at times our ideals could have prevented holocausts. I suppose on the other side of the ledger must go the various "social graces" where hypocrisy supposedly smooths social interactions and lets us save face. Is there a way to weigh these two sides against each other, or is there a way to distinguish them, so we could have the good hypocrisy without excessive risk of the bad slipping in too?

There's a huge positive chunk of hypocrisy that we're missing there - hypocrisy allows us to have ideals higher than we can (and do) attain in our actions. It can have a tremendously aspirational effect. The phrase "all men are created equal" was written by rich, white slaveowners. Eliezer feels that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have written the same phrase, and set all their slaves free. I fear that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have kept their slaves and instead written "all rich, white men are created equal". And future progress would have been ruled out.

To summarise: hypocrisy is the distance between ideals and actions. Erasing that distance does not tell us whether our actions will rise or if our ideals will fall - especially over several generations. Without hypocrisy, people may just become more tolerant of those "arguments which are too brutal for most people to face".

There's a huge positive chunk of hypocrisy that we're missing there - hypocrisy allows us to have ideals higher than we can (and do) attain in our actions. It can have a tremendously aspirational effect. The phrase "all men are created equal" was written by rich, white slaveowners. Eliezer feels that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have written the same phrase, and set all their slaves free. I fear that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have kept their slaves and instead written "all rich, white men are created equal". And future progress would have been ruled out.

Ah, now there's a powerful argument.

But at the same time, if hypocrisy had not decreased, we would still have rich white slaveowners.

It should be assumed by default that when I talk about the benefits of overcoming bias, I am talking about the sort of human being who comes into existence when they set out to overcome their own biases by acts of mental will and training. Not, necessarily, the sort of entity that you get if you do neurosurgery on a human; nor the sort of entity that would have evolved if deception and self-deception had not been part of the ancestral environment.

The sort of human being who makes a continual effort to overcome hypocrisy, and who manages to do so, will probably set the slaves free.

(Claiming that "ideal Bayesians" would not have sponsored an Inquisition obscures this point, since it launches too great a counterfactual; this was probably a mistake of writing, if not of fact.)

J, that's Tyler quoting a summary of Hanson, not Tyler himself.

Robin, I think it'd be pretty silly to trade off social graces against the Inquisition, especially when some creative thinking could devise alternative social graces.

Seriously, we're trading off social graces against what?

This is the great case against hypocrisy, that hypocrisy allows us to act contrary to our ideals, and at times our ideals could have prevented holocausts. I suppose on the other side of the ledger must go the various "social graces" where hypocrisy supposedly smooths social interactions and lets us save face. Is there a way to weigh these two sides against each other, or is there a way to distinguish them, so we could have the good hypocrisy without excessive risk of the bad slipping in too?

In all human history, every great leap forward has been driven by a new clarity of thought. Except for a few natural catastrophes, every great woe has been driven by a stupidity. Our last enemy is ourselves; and this is a war, and we are soldiers.

Amazing quote.

Copy of my post defending Stalin and Mao from Hopeanon.

Hello, my defense of Stalin and Mao are simple and the links can be found here on the Entitled To an Opinion blog. My argument is simple. Stalin saved far more lives than he took. In fact, Czarism was three times more deadly on a per capita basis than the average for the Stalin years. Plus, Stalin set a world record for the fastest doubling of life expectancy in any land. This amazing feat was only broken by Mao in 1976. Therefore, based on those records, I hold that Stalin and Mao were two of the greatest humanitarians that the world has ever known.

There are plenty of ways to kill a man. You can do it with a bullet, work him to death, or you can kill him with hunger and disease. Dead is dead, one way or another. I liken Stalin and Mao to vaccines that, say, kill 50 people every year, but without the vaccine, 1000 would die. Or the death rate of abortions versus childbirth.

Further, the notion of the worst killers of all time is simply insane. Over his time, Stalin killed maybe 4 million. Yet he saved so many lives that at the end, he had saved a net 35 million lives, NET. In contrast, the transition to capitalism with its collapsing life expectancy may have killed up 15 million, NET. I suggest we look at net losses and gains of life when making lists of these "killers". Increase in life expectancy is not a given. Near the end of Stalin's rule, life expectancy was still about 35 in both Albania and China. There are places now that have life expectancy that low.

Let us look at China and India. They had similar figures in 1949. Since India took the capitalist road over the socialist one, we can compare nations by life expectancy and death rate. India is killing 4 million Indians per year, compared to China. That is the penalty for India not taking the Chinese path to development. Further, 14 million starve to death every year in the world, mostly in South Asia - India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan. I do not understand why killing 14 million a year is not chalked up to the worst killers of all, but S and M are? Figuring over time, we can see that compared to China, Indian capitalism has killed about 170 million Indians. And that comparison INCLUDES all of those killed by Mao (maybe 20 million).

I will also argue that there were really no deliberate famines in Ukraine or China. China's famine in 1958 was caused by gross stupidity. The one in the Ukraine had many causes, but deliberate starvation was not really among them.

Stalin's victim toll has been exaggerated. It is really 4 million instead of 20 or 40 or 60 or 120 or however many million.

Mao's looks the same - maybe 20 million as opposed to 40, 60, 80 or however many million.

Indian capitalism kills 4 million a year, minimum. I would argue that replacing it with a killing system that killed a lot less people would be a net good.

I really do not support most of the killing that Stalin and Mao did, but many of those killed by Stalin had taken up arms against the state, or were trying to overthrow the government, so they were not totally innocent. The initial killing of 3 million landlords, not by Mao, but by the outraged peasants themselves, was not a killing of innocents either. Almost of those landlords were serious criminals with a ton of blood on their hands.

David Brin has a nice analysis in his book The Transparent Society of what makes open societies work so well (no doubt distilled from others). Essentially it is the freedom to criticize and hold accountable that keeps powerful institutions honest and effective. While most people do not care or dare enough there are enough "antibodies" in a healthy open society to maintain it, even when the "antibodies" themselves may not always be entirely sane (there is a kind of social "peer review" going on here among the criticisms).

Muddled thinking affects this process in several ways. It weakens the ability to perform and react to criticism, and may contribute to reducing the signal-to-noise ratio among whistleblowers by reducing the social "peer review". This is how muddled thinking can promote the loss of openness, democracy and accountability, in the long run leading to non-accountable leaders that have little valid feedback or can just ignore it.

But are biases the main source of muddled thinking? I think muddle is the sum of many different factors: biases, lack of knowledge, communications problems etc. In any situation one or a few factors are the most serious causes of muddle, but they may differ between issues - the biases we have discussed relating to new technology are different from the biases in conspiracy theory or everyday political behavior. To reduce muddle in a situation we ought to reduce the main muddling component(s), but that may be very different in different situations. Sometimes biases are the main problem, sometimes it might just be lack of communication ability. It might be more cost-effective giving people in a developing country camera cellphones than teaching them about availability biases - while in another country the reverse may be true. But clearly overcoming biases is a relevant component in attacking many forms of societally dangerous muddle.

:The German text of the taped police examination, each page corrected and approved by EIchmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist - provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann's heroic fight with the Germna language, which invariably defeats him. It is funny when he speaks, passim, of "winged words" (geflugelte Worte, a Gemran colloquialism of famous quotes from the classics) when we means stock phrases, Redensarten, or slogans, Schlagworte....

Dimly aware of a defect that much have plagued him even in school, he apologized, saying "Officialese [Amtssprache] is my own language. But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche...

Eichmann's mind was filled to the brim with such statements.....his memory proved to be quite unreliable about what had actually happen; the [reason], of course, was that Eichmann remembered the turning points in his own career rather well, but they did not necessarily correspond to the turning points in the Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with a lot of the turning points in the history....

But the point of the matter is that he had not forgotten a single one of his sentences that at one time or another had served to give him 'elation'. Hence, whenever, during the cross-examination, the judged tried to appeal to his conscience, they were met with 'elation,' and they were outrage and disconcerted when they learned that at his disposal he had a different elating cliche for each period of his life and each of his activities..." (Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt, Chapter III)

Tiiba, I've always considered this bible quote

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

to be a paradigm of bad writing. The nasty trick it exemplifies is using a paradox to get one up on the reader without committing to a specific meaning.

If the race is not to the swift, who does win? The lucky? Contrast two aphorisms "the race is to the swift" and "the race is to the lucky". The second of these is useless. You cannot assess some-one's luck ahead of time, you have to discover who is lucky by waiting to see who wins and then say smugly "see I told you the lucky one would win."

This passage irritates me because the writer forces the reader to create the meaning of the passage from nothing and then the writer appropriates the readers efforts. There is something important to be said on this theme:

The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, but the odds are never quite so short as the book maker offers and the greatest number are drowned when the sea takes the unshinkable ship with no lifeboats.

I've no doubt that the author of Ecclesiastes would say "that's it, you have got my meaning exactly" but that would be a lie; it is my meaning, I said it and he didn't.

Confucius on the Rectification of Names written some 2500 years ago.

"Tzu-lu asked 'If the Lord of Wei entrusts the government to you, what will you do first?"

"Correct names, surely!" the Master said.

"How can you stray so far from the point! What would that correct?"

"Tzu-lu, you are a boor. On matters of which he is ignorant a gentleman expresses no opinion. If names are incorrect, it is impossible to speak. When it is impossible to speak, work is not done. When work is not done, society breaks down and punishment is misapplied. When punishment is misapplied, the people do not know how to act. Therefore what the gentleman names is sure to be accurate, and what he says is sure to be actionable. It is simply that the gentleman is never careless in what he says."

Analects 13/3. Adaptation of A.C. Graham's translation in Disputers of the Tao.

"Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes."

'Cause no one ever thought that Che Guivera or Lenin were acting out of a compassionate desire to end suffering. Nobody EVER claimed that.

"persist as subjective conscious entities. What actions that the 4 of us take will maximize our persistence odds? I think every ideal should be subordinated to that."

I'm not entirely sure I know what that means, but it SOUNDS like "each of us wants to be different -- it's more important than anything else that we be different from each other."

If my reading is correct, I fail to see why I would want to consider that my overriding priority. Particularly in placing over, say, the truth.

And Eliezer, it just keeps getting better and better. I had to stop reading Marginal Revolution precisely because, brilliant as Tyler is, he really does try to be too clever for his own good. It becomes frustrating to watch.

I really dislike this post. It is essentially propaganda. It claims (without providing any kind of evidence based assessment!) that all the good things in human history are the result of rational thinking, while all the bad things in human history are the result of stupidity. I think that's quite clearly false.

First, most deaths in human history could not have been avoided, only delayed at best. No one person could have created an industrial society on their own, no matter how clever they might have been. If Da Vinci couldn't save the world and stop death, then no one else should be perceived as having failed. They did what they could, mostly, even if their lives were not lived perfectly.

Second, stupidity has caused some good things. Many humans are prone to naivety. They trust strangers to handle their wealth, or decide to cooperate in one shot instances of the prisoner's dilemma even when there are large rewards that might await them. The effect of such stupidity is on the whole good for our society. Rational, highly intelligent beings cannot take the same kinds of shortcuts that more limited beings can. Thus, they can sometimes face heightened transaction costs.

Third, intelligence has caused some bad things. The United States would never have atomically bombed Japan if no scientist ever invented nuclear weapons, for example. Every major evildoer in history was only able to do evil due to certain ideas which entered their minds. Ultimately, knowledge is simply power, and power is neither totally safe nor totally dangerous. We are not soldiers in a war against evil irrationality; we are human beings simply trying to live and evil is hard to identify or fight without looking at specifics and context.

Of course, there is an imaginable utopia in which every single human being is perfectly rational and everyone cooperates and there is perfect happiness. But envisioning utopias is a bad way to decide which causes to support, as utopias of all types are very easy to imagine. A conservative might claim that if everyone perfectly adhered to conservative principles the world would be better off, and a progressive might claim that if everyone perfectly adhered to progressive principles the world would be better off, but such assumptions of perfection are so unrealistic that they don't help us to decide which principles we should actually believe in or support.

Clearly, Winston was just an actor, and O'Brien was being tested by a researcher at Miniluv, whose name was Stanley Milgram.

mtraven, You're ignoring concepts like inquiring empirically whether situationally employed torture can reduce net torture in the world. I brought it up in the torture thread and I think every commenter ignored the concept. Also, I'm unconvinced that the desire to label indivuduals as "good" and "evil" comes from a good faith attempt to accurately model reality, or even optimally solve existential challenges we face. It seems to come more from a desire to use morality to create status heirarchies, although in some cases it could also create representational heirarchies privileging both the people framed as "good" and as "evil", to the detriment of those that embody neither archetypes.

I'm surprised no one else in engaging me on these ideas of moral and representational heirarchies as ends in and of themselves.

"For example, if he used it as a way to illustrate a point, clarifying his meaning, then it was not improperly used. If he used it as evidence of Orwell's own well-thought-out views on the subject, then again, it was not improperly used. There are many ways to use fiction that are not improper."

What his intentions were doesn't matter; what matters is the expected reaction of the audience, which in this case is going to see a vivid example supporting Eliezer's claim that human evil sets out to muddle thinking. This happens to be true, but it doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with Winston Smith or O'Brien, both of whom were made up by Orwell with (I suspect) one of Orwell's intentions being exactly that their fake historical authority would be used to support Orwell's (true) opinions. I wish we could all just agree on a norm banning references to fiction from any serious discussion about the real world. People seem completely incapable of handling the stuff.

Flynn,

Egoist!=egotist.

Flynn, HA is a near-total egoist who wants to live forever.