At Sunday’s meetup, some folks expressed surprise that I seemed nicer, softer, and less cynical in person, relative to my writings. I do often take “cynical” positions, in the sense of assigning low motives to behavior, and
Yet surprisingly many pro-natalists consistently fail to address why it’s ok to create suffering entities without consent (a subset does, by explicitly swallowing some bullets).
For instance, I never understood how libertarians with their strong focus on autonomy and voluntary nature of interactions could support such a severe form of coercion.
What is there to justify? How am I harming someone by creating suffering entities?
"Kami no itte" refers to a move that is so unexpected, so brilliant and so creative that it seems like it would be a move only god can make, changing the flow of the game completely with a single move.
Actually, not even bullies are pure bad guys. There is plenty of evidence that people who bully are just as sad and pathetic as their victims; they're just choosing a different strategy. It's monkeys all the way down.
You're right, I've never been seriously suicidal. I was bullied through grade school and high school, but it wasn't extreme - mostly verbal with threats of physical harm - and I was fortunate enough to have a true friend the entire time. I'm not a good example of a bullying victim.
However, I was responding to your statement about "the purpose and objective of bullying," which is concerned with what the bully is thinking - not what the victim is thinking.
I've never been a bully or a psychologist so I'm not speaking from a position of authority on the motivations of bullies.
I do, however, know something about logic. I know that it's easy to conclude that the results of intentional actions were the purpose of those actions. Life isn't that simple. Unintentional consequences plague us.
This is the point I was trying to make: Bully behavior is more likely to be about what that behavior does for the bully - not about what it does to the victim. Bullies, for the most part, aren't using their bully behavior as a disguise for murder. Bullies need someone to bully. They seem to crave the position of power, and either disregard or feed on the damage done to their victims. This doesn't necessarily mean bullies care whether a victim lives or dies, but not caring what happens is far from death as an objective.
I'm sure it happens, but it's a stretch to say that prompting suicide is the primary or most likely objective of bullying.
I like to compete (such as in board games and conversation),
The 'Go' board of transhumanism is in play. Bostrom has set up his stones, you've set up your stones and so has Yudkowsky. Can the three of you 'make life' and hold off the crushing blitz moves of a cruel entropic universe as it seeks to isolate and kill your stone groups?
To win this game, you must go to 'the level beyond' and play the divine move....
"A divine move is a truly inspired and original move. It should be a non-obvious move which balances strategy and tactics to turn a losing game into a winning game. A divine move is singular—they are of such rarity that a full-time go player might be lucky to play a single such move in his or her lifetime. The term comes from the Japanese 神の一手 Kami no Itte, meaning "hand of god"."
I disagree that good and bad are defined by purposes. Strong physical pain feels bad, even though it has a fitness-improving evolutionary purpose. The badness of pain is not bound to the failure of a purpose, it's a valuation function implemented in a neurological coding of badness (the function itself can have a purpose, of course, e.g. an evolutionary one). Good and bad are informational phenomena in their own right, implemented in systems like brains.
If Robin Hason consistently communicates and behaves like he has mostly good experiences, you are probably wrong by concluding that he has a horrible life. Self-reports are often biased, but together with revealed preference they're a relatively good indicator for the good and bad represented in the respective brains.
Good or bad for what?Good or bad for the sentient entities that (have to) experience it. A life that is predominantly filled with bad experiences without sufficiently good ones to offset them could be meaningfully said to be bad, and vice versa.
"Bad experiences" just pushes the problem further down the line. Say I examine all the facts of Robin Hanson's life, am even privy to his affects and his ideals, and I "conclude," "Man, he's had a horrible life!" Hanson and would ostensibly disagree, but what could possibly resolve the argument? It's a category error because "good" is always conditional. Good for some *purpose*. "The sentient entities..." are harborers of various purposes, but speaking of "sentient entities" does nothing to specify any purpose.
Mark, bullies are making the conscious decision to hurt their victims. No bully is under the delusion that what they are doing is not hurtful to their victim. The only question a bully might have is the degree of hurt.
If a bully is unaware of the degree of hurt that their victim is already under, why would they add to that hurt if the resulting total hurt might cause their victim's suicide? My experience with bullies has always been that they don't care, and if their victim showed a degree of hurt consistent with incipient suicide that bullies would redouble their efforts to increase that hurt.
Maybe a bully doesn't want to be the one who drives the victim to suicide, they just want to be the second-to-last so they have plausible deniability and so don't lose “status” by being the bully that bullied someone to death.
From what you say, I gather you have never been depressed and suicidal. I am happy for you, and hope you never have that experience. Since many bullies have also never been depressed and suicidal, they are unable to appreciate the degree of hurt that it is possible to inflict. Their ignorance is bliss. By never having experienced being depressed and suicidal, they can pretend such things are due to a fault of their victim and that the victim deserves feeling so badly, or wants to feel so badly.
Good or bad for what?Good or bad for the sentient entities that (have to) experience it. A life that is predominantly filled with bad experiences without sufficiently good ones to offset them could be meaningfully said to be bad, and vice versa. It's not an exact science, of course, and the assessments may be subjective, but I don't see a category error. A person who states his or her own life is good (or bad) communicates a meaningful and morally relevant statement about reality to me.
When someone says life is either good or bad, he is likely to be a person more concerned with status than most of us, who thankfully omit such exclamations.This is a relevant questions for practical decisions, however. Should a suicidal person be forced to remain alive? Under what circumstances should people be allowed to create other people without their consent? Very practical questions.
I'm unsatisfied with the whole signalling interpretation, not because it lacks merit, but because I think it's overused. There are some people who will always shout "signalling!" whenever someone thinks about questions of terminal values or tradeoffs or the well-being of anyone or anything. This is daft, it lacks a filter for false positives in the signalling hypothesis.
True: in each case, it is a form of signaling and can scarcely be anything but signaling, since in either case the language lacks any referential content. (Actually, the statements are category errors. Good or bad for what?)
When someone says life is either good or bad, he is likely to be a person more concerned with status than most of us, who thankfully omit such exclamations.
You make it sound like bullies first decide to kill their victims, and then choose bullying as a means to that end.
In most cases bullies aren't making conscious attempts to push their victims to suicide. That is sometimes the outcome, and I don't want to minimize the responsibility of bullies for the results of bullying, but you're stretching to say it's the purpose. In most cases. I have no reason to doubt there are exceptions.
However, what I believe you are implying with this response to my post is correct: I am also the only judge of whether my life is bad. If I believe my life is bad, then my life is bad, even if some objective measurement says otherwise. My subconscious mind chooses how to measure this, and subconscious minds can be irrational in bad ways. Bullying can tip the scale to the point where life is so bad and the future so bleak that dying seems like a better choice than living.
You can't count on anything in this life - not even on Robin Hanson being cynical.
What is there to justify? How am I harming someone by creating suffering entities?Not sure if trolling... or just very stupid.
Yet surprisingly many pro-natalists consistently fail to address why it’s ok to create suffering entities without consent (a subset does, by explicitly swallowing some bullets).
For instance, I never understood how libertarians with their strong focus on autonomy and voluntary nature of interactions could support such a severe form of coercion.
What is there to justify? How am I harming someone by creating suffering entities?
Addendum:
"Kami no itte" refers to a move that is so unexpected, so brilliant and so creative that it seems like it would be a move only god can make, changing the flow of the game completely with a single move.
Kami no itte
Actually, not even bullies are pure bad guys. There is plenty of evidence that people who bully are just as sad and pathetic as their victims; they're just choosing a different strategy. It's monkeys all the way down.
Daedalus2u,
You're right, I've never been seriously suicidal. I was bullied through grade school and high school, but it wasn't extreme - mostly verbal with threats of physical harm - and I was fortunate enough to have a true friend the entire time. I'm not a good example of a bullying victim.
However, I was responding to your statement about "the purpose and objective of bullying," which is concerned with what the bully is thinking - not what the victim is thinking.
I've never been a bully or a psychologist so I'm not speaking from a position of authority on the motivations of bullies.
I do, however, know something about logic. I know that it's easy to conclude that the results of intentional actions were the purpose of those actions. Life isn't that simple. Unintentional consequences plague us.
This is the point I was trying to make: Bully behavior is more likely to be about what that behavior does for the bully - not about what it does to the victim. Bullies, for the most part, aren't using their bully behavior as a disguise for murder. Bullies need someone to bully. They seem to crave the position of power, and either disregard or feed on the damage done to their victims. This doesn't necessarily mean bullies care whether a victim lives or dies, but not caring what happens is far from death as an objective.
I'm sure it happens, but it's a stretch to say that prompting suicide is the primary or most likely objective of bullying.
I like to compete (such as in board games and conversation),
The 'Go' board of transhumanism is in play. Bostrom has set up his stones, you've set up your stones and so has Yudkowsky. Can the three of you 'make life' and hold off the crushing blitz moves of a cruel entropic universe as it seeks to isolate and kill your stone groups?
To win this game, you must go to 'the level beyond' and play the divine move....
"A divine move is a truly inspired and original move. It should be a non-obvious move which balances strategy and tactics to turn a losing game into a winning game. A divine move is singular—they are of such rarity that a full-time go player might be lucky to play a single such move in his or her lifetime. The term comes from the Japanese 神の一手 Kami no Itte, meaning "hand of god"."
I disagree that good and bad are defined by purposes. Strong physical pain feels bad, even though it has a fitness-improving evolutionary purpose. The badness of pain is not bound to the failure of a purpose, it's a valuation function implemented in a neurological coding of badness (the function itself can have a purpose, of course, e.g. an evolutionary one). Good and bad are informational phenomena in their own right, implemented in systems like brains.
If Robin Hason consistently communicates and behaves like he has mostly good experiences, you are probably wrong by concluding that he has a horrible life. Self-reports are often biased, but together with revealed preference they're a relatively good indicator for the good and bad represented in the respective brains.
Good or bad for what?Good or bad for the sentient entities that (have to) experience it. A life that is predominantly filled with bad experiences without sufficiently good ones to offset them could be meaningfully said to be bad, and vice versa.
"Bad experiences" just pushes the problem further down the line. Say I examine all the facts of Robin Hanson's life, am even privy to his affects and his ideals, and I "conclude," "Man, he's had a horrible life!" Hanson and would ostensibly disagree, but what could possibly resolve the argument? It's a category error because "good" is always conditional. Good for some *purpose*. "The sentient entities..." are harborers of various purposes, but speaking of "sentient entities" does nothing to specify any purpose.
this is some kind of "about this blog" post. thanks for it =)
Mark, bullies are making the conscious decision to hurt their victims. No bully is under the delusion that what they are doing is not hurtful to their victim. The only question a bully might have is the degree of hurt.
If a bully is unaware of the degree of hurt that their victim is already under, why would they add to that hurt if the resulting total hurt might cause their victim's suicide? My experience with bullies has always been that they don't care, and if their victim showed a degree of hurt consistent with incipient suicide that bullies would redouble their efforts to increase that hurt.
Maybe a bully doesn't want to be the one who drives the victim to suicide, they just want to be the second-to-last so they have plausible deniability and so don't lose “status” by being the bully that bullied someone to death.
From what you say, I gather you have never been depressed and suicidal. I am happy for you, and hope you never have that experience. Since many bullies have also never been depressed and suicidal, they are unable to appreciate the degree of hurt that it is possible to inflict. Their ignorance is bliss. By never having experienced being depressed and suicidal, they can pretend such things are due to a fault of their victim and that the victim deserves feeling so badly, or wants to feel so badly.
Amen!
I can, however, say that it can be lonely just to have a sufficiently different perspective on the world from what most people verbalize.
Good or bad for what?Good or bad for the sentient entities that (have to) experience it. A life that is predominantly filled with bad experiences without sufficiently good ones to offset them could be meaningfully said to be bad, and vice versa. It's not an exact science, of course, and the assessments may be subjective, but I don't see a category error. A person who states his or her own life is good (or bad) communicates a meaningful and morally relevant statement about reality to me.
When someone says life is either good or bad, he is likely to be a person more concerned with status than most of us, who thankfully omit such exclamations.This is a relevant questions for practical decisions, however. Should a suicidal person be forced to remain alive? Under what circumstances should people be allowed to create other people without their consent? Very practical questions.
I'm unsatisfied with the whole signalling interpretation, not because it lacks merit, but because I think it's overused. There are some people who will always shout "signalling!" whenever someone thinks about questions of terminal values or tradeoffs or the well-being of anyone or anything. This is daft, it lacks a filter for false positives in the signalling hypothesis.
True: in each case, it is a form of signaling and can scarcely be anything but signaling, since in either case the language lacks any referential content. (Actually, the statements are category errors. Good or bad for what?)
When someone says life is either good or bad, he is likely to be a person more concerned with status than most of us, who thankfully omit such exclamations.
Daedalus2u,
You make it sound like bullies first decide to kill their victims, and then choose bullying as a means to that end.
In most cases bullies aren't making conscious attempts to push their victims to suicide. That is sometimes the outcome, and I don't want to minimize the responsibility of bullies for the results of bullying, but you're stretching to say it's the purpose. In most cases. I have no reason to doubt there are exceptions.
However, what I believe you are implying with this response to my post is correct: I am also the only judge of whether my life is bad. If I believe my life is bad, then my life is bad, even if some objective measurement says otherwise. My subconscious mind chooses how to measure this, and subconscious minds can be irrational in bad ways. Bullying can tip the scale to the point where life is so bad and the future so bleak that dying seems like a better choice than living.
^^