In response to a tweet of mine, someone pointed me to the thought-provoking 2001 paper Bad is Stronger Than Good: Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. … There appear to be more words for negative than positive emotions. … bad [news] events are more newsworthy and attract more reader attention.
Right; if you put a spoonful of spaghetti sauce in a pot of sewage, you have a pot of sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a pot of spaghetti sauce, you have a pot of sewage.
"...only immoral people do bad things, whereas both moral and immoral people do good things." Isn't this naive? Often moral people end up doing bad things by not fully understanding the situation, or in the belief that their choice is the moral one.
What does this even mean? If I tried to define what 1 unit of good deeds were from first principles it would be the amount of good needed to cancel 1 unit of bad deeds (a la utility function existence proof). Ok, but under that definition it's straightforwardly impossible for bad to be more powerful than good since we've defined the units to be what makes them equally important.
Ok, maybe on this metric the claim is that more bad happens than good? But the world is getting better and more moral. Or is the claim that the median/mean bad act is more bad than the corresponding median/mean good act? First, why not describe that as good being easier than bad (far more good acts must occur to balance no)? Second, what evidence is there it's true? I see lots of assholes inflicting small harms and a few people who make huge positive contributions.
I suspect that what's going on is that when we think of bad we don't include all those small kinds of bad acts. This is just reflection of fact we are reluctant to call the people who are just a bit too strict/unsuprortive/distant bad parents because the benefit from criticism wouldn't be worth the cost. Socially that's a good policy, but I don't see a deeper truth. If there is one can someone spell it out?
If the world is overall getting better and that's the result of people's actions it must be true that most people end up doing more good in the world than they do harm. And when it comes to outliers I see more people who have had huge positive effects on the world (eg improving agriculture, inventing things with huge impacts..or just working to support those inventions) than similarly outsized villains (the worst genocides are in the tens of millions but using the stat value of a life many people have increased world GDP by more).
“The strength of an attacker can in a way be gauged by the opposition he requires; all growth makes itself manifest by searching out a more powerful opponent — or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike challenges problems to duels, too. The task is not to master all resistances, but only those against which one has to pit one’s entire strength, suppleness, and mastery-at-arms — opponents who are equal.” -- Friedrich Nietzsche
"We likely underestimate how important are bad things to our systems of values" - I don't see the support for that in your quotes. What I see from your quotes is that people like to *talk* in positive terms, especially when it comes to self-reporting, but like to *think* (listen, read, judge) in negative terms.
The positive talking is likely an attempt to fool others into thinking we're happier and better than we know we are. Also to avoid giving too much offense. And it's not very successful because the listeners compensate for it.
Interesting post this with relevance to the formation of political opinions and postures. I think that the psychology underlying political opinions can often be best understood by viewing the ostensible subject matter of the 'opinion' (race, gender, inequality etc etc) as actually a proxy for something else. That 'something else' can be an essentially narcissistic desire to feel more positive about oneself and a corresponding visceral desire to vent-by-proxy a dislike or contempt for some other social group. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Right; if you put a spoonful of spaghetti sauce in a pot of sewage, you have a pot of sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a pot of spaghetti sauce, you have a pot of sewage.
"...only immoral people do bad things, whereas both moral and immoral people do good things." Isn't this naive? Often moral people end up doing bad things by not fully understanding the situation, or in the belief that their choice is the moral one.
What does this even mean? If I tried to define what 1 unit of good deeds were from first principles it would be the amount of good needed to cancel 1 unit of bad deeds (a la utility function existence proof). Ok, but under that definition it's straightforwardly impossible for bad to be more powerful than good since we've defined the units to be what makes them equally important.
Ok, maybe on this metric the claim is that more bad happens than good? But the world is getting better and more moral. Or is the claim that the median/mean bad act is more bad than the corresponding median/mean good act? First, why not describe that as good being easier than bad (far more good acts must occur to balance no)? Second, what evidence is there it's true? I see lots of assholes inflicting small harms and a few people who make huge positive contributions.
I suspect that what's going on is that when we think of bad we don't include all those small kinds of bad acts. This is just reflection of fact we are reluctant to call the people who are just a bit too strict/unsuprortive/distant bad parents because the benefit from criticism wouldn't be worth the cost. Socially that's a good policy, but I don't see a deeper truth. If there is one can someone spell it out?
If the world is overall getting better and that's the result of people's actions it must be true that most people end up doing more good in the world than they do harm. And when it comes to outliers I see more people who have had huge positive effects on the world (eg improving agriculture, inventing things with huge impacts..or just working to support those inventions) than similarly outsized villains (the worst genocides are in the tens of millions but using the stat value of a life many people have increased world GDP by more).
I have previously learned that one negative interaction has the same potency as 7 positive interactions. Bad is far more impactful than good.
“The strength of an attacker can in a way be gauged by the opposition he requires; all growth makes itself manifest by searching out a more powerful opponent — or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike challenges problems to duels, too. The task is not to master all resistances, but only those against which one has to pit one’s entire strength, suppleness, and mastery-at-arms — opponents who are equal.” -- Friedrich Nietzsche
This is concordant with my intuition that the biggest personal motivator is fear, not love or any other 'positive' affect driver.
Is near processing for bad? What about the arrangement of eyes on predators and prey animals? Which is doing focused vs holistic processing?
The theme also relates to my vicious-tail interpretation here:
https://dklein780.medium.com/the-tail-that-wagged-the-party-f3be6e89b891
Thanks for alerting us to the 2001 paper and to the nice post. I agree.
And so does Adam Smith, particularly pp. 27–50 of TMS. Representations of some ideas are Figure 34 and 23 here:
https://adamsmithprogram.org/figures/
"We likely underestimate how important are bad things to our systems of values" - I don't see the support for that in your quotes. What I see from your quotes is that people like to *talk* in positive terms, especially when it comes to self-reporting, but like to *think* (listen, read, judge) in negative terms.
The positive talking is likely an attempt to fool others into thinking we're happier and better than we know we are. Also to avoid giving too much offense. And it's not very successful because the listeners compensate for it.
Interesting post this with relevance to the formation of political opinions and postures. I think that the psychology underlying political opinions can often be best understood by viewing the ostensible subject matter of the 'opinion' (race, gender, inequality etc etc) as actually a proxy for something else. That 'something else' can be an essentially narcissistic desire to feel more positive about oneself and a corresponding visceral desire to vent-by-proxy a dislike or contempt for some other social group. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/