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> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. There is an implication from this one that the article

by roenxi 2mo ago

> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard. IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous. > The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic. He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment. It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.

jaggederest 2mo ago
I always phrase this as "Do you want to play zero-sum or negative sum games? Or would you rather play positive sum games where the world is better off even if you personally aren't 'the winner'?" > Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start I'm just going to quote that because it's a great statement of a truly astounding idea. Most people do not think like you do. Even inside the HN bubble, most people don't think like you do. The diversity in humanity is enormous, and I wish I'd known sooner how fallible and narrow a single person's view is, even when it's your own. Making the best choices you can possibly make does not guarantee success, and even if you succeed, there's no guarantee that it was the best idea or even a good idea.
altmanaltman 2mo ago
> IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous. Basically what Nietzsche said on morality. However, there is a counterfactual to this line of thinking as well and it doesn't map as easily. > We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment. This is where Immanual Kant's categorial imperative comes into play. Kant thinks there is absolutely an evidence-based principle to be moral. And he grounds it in reason and human beings themselves. His ideas make sense when you start thinking "okay lets say I am free to make my own values and must have a good relationship with my values, what is an objective way to evaluate this so I can be morally good?" Kant becomes a good starting point and he claims that you don't need any external objective way/method of evaluation other than the reason afforded to you by nature as a human being and then he spends a lot of pages elucidating how this type of a system would work. Both Nietzsche and Kant are worth reading if you want to understand morality in general, even though Nietzsche fundamentally disagreed with Kant that there can be an objectively correct mode of evaluation.
SuoDuanDao 2mo ago
That is a great point. We have such a 'bias for action' in popular culture, especially in places like Hacker News, that we overlook how much energy successful cultures have put into 'bias for restraint'. I very much like the bias for action mindset, but I don't have a great answer for the problem of 'what if the things you want are bad for the world?' Your mention of destructive people makes me think there might be an angle with bias for action being helpful if it's building - some people will build the torment nexus, but newly built things are so inherently fragile that maybe we can absorb a certain amount of harmful building without serious damage, in a way we can't absorb much harmful destruction. Does that ring true?

by roenxi 2mo ago

jaggederest 2mo ago

I always phrase this as "Do you want to play zero-sum or negative sum games? Or would you rather play positive sum games where the world is better off even if you personally aren't 'the winner'?" > Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start I'm just going to quote that because it's a great statement of a truly astounding idea. Most people do not think like you do. Even inside the HN bubble, most people don't think like you do. The diversity in humanity is enormous, and I wish I'd known sooner how fallible and narrow a single person's view is, even when it's your own. Making the best choices you can possibly make does not guarantee success, and even if you succeed, there's no guarantee that it was the best idea or even a good idea.

altmanaltman 2mo ago

> IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous. Basically what Nietzsche said on morality. However, there is a counterfactual to this line of thinking as well and it doesn't map as easily. > We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment. This is where Immanual Kant's categorial imperative comes into play. Kant thinks there is absolutely an evidence-based principle to be moral. And he grounds it in reason and human beings themselves. His ideas make sense when you start thinking "okay lets say I am free to make my own values and must have a good relationship with my values, what is an objective way to evaluate this so I can be morally good?" Kant becomes a good starting point and he claims that you don't need any external objective way/method of evaluation other than the reason afforded to you by nature as a human being and then he spends a lot of pages elucidating how this type of a system would work. Both Nietzsche and Kant are worth reading if you want to understand morality in general, even though Nietzsche fundamentally disagreed with Kant that there can be an objectively correct mode of evaluation.

SuoDuanDao 2mo ago

That is a great point. We have such a 'bias for action' in popular culture, especially in places like Hacker News, that we overlook how much energy successful cultures have put into 'bias for restraint'. I very much like the bias for action mindset, but I don't have a great answer for the problem of 'what if the things you want are bad for the world?' Your mention of destructive people makes me think there might be an angle with bias for action being helpful if it's building - some people will build the torment nexus, but newly built things are so inherently fragile that maybe we can absorb a certain amount of harmful building without serious damage, in a way we can't absorb much harmful destruction. Does that ring true?