Comments on: Prefer Peace

By: Recent Reading: 11 May: The Torture Habit, Alphabet of Morbidity, Surviving Dog, Conflict, Death & Dying, Credit Psychology « Beyond Rivalry

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:50:47 +0000

[...] **Humanity’s ideal: war. Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias writes: “I tried to argue for compromise …. But, most commenters did not want compromise; they instead wanted to take sides and seek better ways for their side to win the war. … It seems that one of humanity’s strongest ideals is actually war, i.e., uncompromising conflict. In our culture we are supposed to oppose ordinary bloody war, preferring peace when possible there. But we do not generalize this lesson much to other sorts of conflicts. We celebrate those who take sides and win far more than we do peacemakers and compromisers. But the principle is the same; every side can expect to get more of what it wants from compromise deals than from all out conflict.” [...]

By: Carl Shulman

Carl Shulman — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 08:04:35 +0000

If deal enforcement was cheap they could flip a coin.

By: gwern

gwern — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:15:49 +0000

Even cultures and religions you would think simply couldn’t fall into this conflict trap – whose every scripture and moral principle is *against* it – still manage to do it.

Let’s take the example of Buddhism; I can’t think of a more peaceful, pacifist religion (except Jainism), and yet Buddhists still regularly managed to become warrior-monks, come up with strange things like the Tantric forms (not talking about the sexual ones), suicide bombers*, kamikaze**, and so on.

Even the primitive cultures aren’t exempt. Think of the murder rates among the !Kung, or the more famous homicides of the Yanomano. Conflict and especially violent conflict certainly seem like human universals…

* I refer here to Sri Lanka; with a 70% Buddhist population, I’m fairly confident that many of the Tamil Tigers’ (the inventors) suicide bombers were Buddhist.
** One could argue that the Japanese kamikaze weren’t ‘really’ Buddhist, that their Buddhism was pro forma and they were really more Shinto or atheistic.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Sun, 10 May 2009 05:07:55 +0000

“students perk up when academic topics are posed as conflicts … But while I’d like to be a POPULAR teacher, I’d rather be HONEST,”

The inescapable irony of what I intuit is our primate aesthetic to pay attention to (and thus frame things as in the attentional marketplace) binary conflicts. Although your post is to a degree managing this fire with fire.

By: Wei Dai

Wei Dai — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:12:13 +0000

Right, I should have known that. Anyway, I’ve created a new post on LessWrong to continue the discussion, since it’s getting off-topic for this post.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:25:55 +0000

Wei, people might well choose to be irrational. This is not my preference, but that hardly makes it “abhorrent.”

By: Wei Dai

Wei Dai — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:50:02 +0000

Robin, in that paper you wrote:

For example, if you learned that your strong conviction that fleas sing was the result of an
experiment, which physically adjusted people’s brains to give them odd beliefs, you might
well think it irrational to retain that belief (Talbott, 1990).

Suppose in the future, self-modification technologies allow everyone to modify their beliefs, and people do so in order to gain strategic advantage (or to keep up with their neighbors), and they also modify themselves to not think it irrational to retain such modified beliefs (otherwise they would have wasted their money). Would such a future be abhorrent to you? If so, do you think it can be avoided?

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:17:32 +0000

Wei, I have in mind this analysis. Once we integrate our knowledge about the origins of our beliefs into such a framework, we can't still embrace beliefs that differ for this reason.

By: Wei Dai

Wei Dai — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:05:50 +0000

Robin, my understanding is that if you take any consistent set of beliefs and observations, you can work backwards and find a prior that rationally gives rise to that set of beliefs under those observations. Given that human beings have a tendency to find and discard inconsistent beliefs, there should have been an evolutionary pressure to have consistent beliefs that give good strategic impressions, and the only way to do that is by having certain priors.

I do not dispute that we also have beliefs that give good strategic impressions and are inconsistent with our other beliefs, and those can certainly be overcome by more rationality. But the better we get at detecting and fixing inconsistent beliefs, the more evolutionary pressure there will be for having consistent strategic beliefs. What can counteract that?

BTW, Eliezer’s idea of achieving cooperation by showing source code, if it works, will probably make this problem even worse. “Leaks” will become more common and the importance of strategic beliefs (and values) will increase. The ability to self modify in the future will also make it easier to have consistent strategic beliefs, or to create inconsistent ones that can’t be discarded.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:44:01 +0000

Wei, yes we probably evolved to have beliefs that give good strategic impressions, assuming they are often leaked. But I don’t think this is well described as having evolved to have certain priors, which are not just any old beliefs. Once we knew about about this source of the origins of our beliefs, we should not rationally retain them, so rationality can overcome disagreements due to this effect.