A game of angels and devils

Well, step one would be to convince a team of rationalists to come up with ideas to maximize misery... :P

I think that when choosing examples of misery causing things, your mind went first to examples of misery causing things which you come across in daily life. The reason i reach this conclusion is that your "devil" isn't nearly evil enough. There have been actual, real-world devils who have done worse than your imaginary one. If you had lived in a society more plagued by real-world devils, you might have imagined something more sinister.

It is an interesting game though.

it occurred to me that the best way to discourage education might be to make it a chore.

Even a dreary educational system generally results in literacy. And how will you crush the next education reformer who comes along?

In the real world, the most effective ways to discourage education have been to replace education with propaganda, randomized violence against schools and schoolchildren, and economic conditions which make education impossible. The first two have been employed on purpose by various groups. Although, I suppose the first method does require that the "devil" be some sort of position of political power, all the second method requires is a small band of decentralized thugs. As for the third method, a reasonably wealthy person could probably economically unbalance a small third world country if they were smart about it.

These methods aren't even targeted for misery maximization - they are just means to an end. If your goal is specifically to cause misery, there are even more effective ways. If anyone comes up with anything that seems truly effective, I suggest not sharing it online on the off-chance that someone happens upon it and tries!

I have heard biologists speak of the "illusion of design," that is, features that we all know developed naturally but reached so elegant a state that they make you feel they were made with a purpose in mind. The evolution of social attitudes and customs appears to follow a similar pattern, but it raises the question of why our society didn't evolve to maximize happiness instead of maximizing oppression, which appears to have been the designer's aim all along.

This is cute, but, as you admit, not actually true and probably not very useful either.

There are fairly easy ways to screw things up that people don't do; the "Beltway Sniper" created a huge disruption and lots of fear with relatively little effort, but there haven't been any copycats that I know of. For some reason, terrorists insist on using bombs instead, which are flashier but don't actually produce as much actual fear.

You might like C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters which are written as a series of letters from a Senior Tempter to his apprentice. It takes the same approach as your thought experiment, but in the context of day to day moral life of an individual. And, as in your example, a lot of the best parts for me was in recognizing the cleverness/efficiency of a devilish technique and then realizing I was currently doing it to myself!

As per Hanlon’s razor you mention, malice and stupidity look very much alike from the outside, so your musings do not count as evidence. You have to analyze each case from the inside. For example, the Libor scandal is an example of malevolence, while the much more harmful subprime lending crisis was due to poor decision-making. Similarly, the continuing copyright extension was largely due to the Disney's lobbying (I'm simplifying here), while the unwieldy patent system just happened. You can find similar examples in technology, politics, culture and everywhere else you look.

And it’s not just the western educational system that gives off the impression of fiendish design. If the march of reason is my greatest enemy, then surely I in my role as devil would want to impede progress as much as possible by creating a mental framework that actively hinders any progress from occurring. What better invention for this purpose than faith?

Yet somehow it didn't stop science from being invented by Christians.

The current education system in Europe does a much better job at making education unpopular than at actually preventing those who may positively impact technology and society in the future from acquiring the necessary education to do so. Turning education into a chore is merely an annoyance for anyone involved, but doesn't actually hold back technological advance in any way.

If I was the devil, I would try to restrict internet access for as many people as possible. As long as you have internet, traditional education isn't really needed for humanity to advance technologically.

Also, does the devil win if humanity goes extinct? Because in that case I would instead try to make the best education available for free to all children, and focus on getting a few Satanists in positions where you get to push red buttons. Since the devil is traditionally displayed as persuasive and manipulative to the point that intelligent and well-educated people tend to more receptive to his offers than normal folk, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. Just imagine a few Hitlers with modern nuclear ICBMs.

Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Never heard of Hanlon's razor before, but I think it makes much more sense if you replace stupidity with indifference.

I feel as though if you want to make more (posts, discussion, what have you) out of this thought experiment you need to define the goals and powers of the angel and devil much more exactly.

The examples you've given of the things that strike you as similar to an imaginary devil's manipulations don't seem so to me. Your devil is interested in slowing down humanity's progress (why? Shouldn't it be steering us off a cliff instead of applying the breaks?) and it's able to modify human thought. If I think of what the world would look like with such a creature I don't think of the modern world, I think of an uninhabited wasteland. Instead of mucking around with faith and nationalism it installed a time delayed urge to suicide.

This post seems to contain a lot of rationalist applause lights. ( are not just wrong, they are EVIL. If those individuals who believed in the devil were right they'd be his patsies...nyuk nyuk nyuk.) But I think the base premise needs more refinement.

So what I’d need, clearly, is some system that justifies hurting others. Politics are great for this! Just have some people like Ayn Rand spread ideas like unmitigated greed being good, and presto! You get a whole bunch of people who now feel justified in spending all of their combined human ingenuity to hurting each other in an attempt to get ahead in society.

Somehow displays of Ayn Rand Derangement Syndrome still surprise me. And it still surprises me that no one else will call anyone on it around here.

The author should be ashamed to have written this, and the rest of you should be ashamed to have let it pass without comment.

I officially don't understand how less wrong rates articles. I have done my best to write an intelligent, thought provoking post, and spent quite a few hours on it. As far as I can tell it is well written, well founded with references to other material, I don't make any obvious logical errors as far as I can see... and yet I get zero karma for it. Why? Plenty of people have commented on it, so it is not as if the topic is uninteresting.

I mean, I get that it's not a perfect post, I suppose I could work it out some more, but is Less Wrong really trying to tell me that they are indifferent as to whether I continue posting articles or not? As in, this article provides zero value? Because that seems... extremely harsh. I spent several hours doing my best on writing a high-level post and get zero points while a single off-handed post saying that Soviet Russia wasn't a haven of critical thinking gets at least one point. Polymathwannabe writes a short comment on there being an illusion of design (interesting but nothing new) and gets seven points while I get zero for a well written article that took up a big chunk of my day... WHY? I don't get it.

Am I missing something here? Is there some glaring flaw in my post that makes it useless and I am not seeing it? Or is Less Wrong just ridiculously negative about articles to the point where getting as many downvotes as I get upvotes is not unusual for what is surely a well written and at least somewhat thought provoking post?

This is all hindsight; pointing out the greatest sources of misery in the world, whatever they happen to be, and calling them a devious plot.

It seems to me that you could write the same article whether we were living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ("what better way to cause ceaseless misery than ZOMBIES?") or in a near-utopia ("perfect bliss ruined by dust specks? how wonderfully efficient!").

am I merely cherry picking examples and interpreting them to suit my needs?

Yes :-)

What evils would you commit as devil?

10 seconds of thought produced this: make it so goodness/pleasure/happiness in the world is a zero-sum game -- the only way you can get happier is by making someone else unhappier. And make the total pool of goodness/happiness slowly decrease over time.

Please don't take this post too literally. Of course a Yudkowsky styled creative devil would be... Worse. Much worse. I merely meant to highlight how things like faith on the surface really look designed to be maximally awful, though of course they arise from natural processes. It's a thought experiment meant to make you consider things in a different light, and to make you gain sympathy for those who attribute these things to malicious forces.

It's all mind projection. If you examine the world, you can find all shades of good and evil, and indifference in between.

Honestly, I don't feel like the game has enough constraints to be interesting.

A related game is to think of ways you could accomplish maximal harm not as some kind of puppetmaster who choses educational, philosophical, or political ways-people-do-things, but as who you actually are in real life. I have a few terrible ideas, I'm not going to share them though.

I think it's a lot easier to break things in real life than to protect or fix them. I don't think it would take that many effective anti-altruists to destroy the world. In fact, I bet one could do it.

I think you're cherry-picking. Faith is undergoing an unprecedented decline, and has been for the last century or so; society takes time to adjust, but it's happening. There are countries without compulsory education, but it seems to leave them worse off overall. Zero-sum competition is a commonsense outcome of evolution, but politics has matured to the point where we in the west can largely ignore it and get on with their lives (end of history). And there are enough areas where we seem luckier than one would reasonably expect. Above all, progress is happening.

As a devil I would probably try and associate more good things with atrocities, to get people to stop trying them. The holocaust puts people off reasonable eugenics; I'd make sure there was a holocaust committed by e.g. a culturally integrated organization. Or maybe try and fragment language more. Once you get people to divide into in-groups and out-groups they do the rest of the work for you.

The world is a process of elimination, whether it be planets outside the habitable zone, animals without enough positive adaptations to stay alive long enough to make more offspring than their peers, or factors in the contradictions in human psychology that result in us harming each others: The things you identify as evil are precisely the most effective methods on account of having survived up until now; they have not yet been eliminated. You might think of adaptation as random (stupid) in basis, with elimination processes getting rid of the bad bits bit by bit.

The truth is, you're not more evil than the margin of chance. ;)