The Criminal Stupidity of Intelligent People

There is a deep tension, indeed almost a contradiction, between two aspects of your essay. One one hand, you argue against the conclusions of Bob (from a beautiful, simple mathematical structure), of Jeff's acquaintance (from the simple, appealing ethical principle "minimize suffering") and of Jeff (from the simple, appealing ethical principle "maximize happiness"). You make the point that a Hayekian conservative spirit, that keeps in mind traditions, common sense and long-evolved intuitions and weighs them above logical principles appealing to intelligent people, should be used a warning light to reject those kind of philosophies. This is similar to what is sometimes loosely called the "outside view" here, and I basically agree with it, though it must be used carefully and on a case-by-case basis.

But just after that, you state a Libertarian principle, a Universal Law of non-aggression against persons and their property, and go so far as to assert that it applies to any kind of sentient being, including aliens and AIs. Now, I don't want to be dragged into a discussion about libertarianism, which would be against the "no-politics" rules of Less Wrong(1). But I hope you realize that this "Universal Law" is a simple abstract principle of the kind that appeals to intelligent people, and as such not so different from "maximize happiness" or "minimize suffering". The actual complex web of traditions, evolved intuitions and "common sense" of mankind is very far removed from these super-simple abstract principles. Rearranging any actual society to conform to the Libertarian principle. regardless of its merits, would require a huge upheaval of long-entrenched laws, customs and expectations, and as such should be rejected by the "outside view" heuristic that you preach in the first part of the essay. (ETA: see also Scott Aaronson's description of libertarians as "bullet-swallowers"--the same intellectual vice, essentially, that you attribute to Bob, Jeff, and his acquaintance)

(1)Following these rules, I would suggest you to remove the last paragraph's references to Obama and his Ayers connection, which does very little for the global points of your essay. It is the kind of thing that produces a strong, negative mind-killing reaction against your post to any reader who does not belong to a particular right-wing subculture.

You start with some good examples, which I think share a pattern. First, you have someone who takes a valid principle, "suffering is bad", and promotes it from "thing that is generally true" to "ultimate answer", and proceeds to reason off the rails. Then you have someone who takes "understanding math is good", and does the same thing, with less spectacular (but still bad) results. Then again with "happiness is good". History is rife with additional examples, and not just in moral philosophy; the same thing happens in technical topics, too.

The lesson I take from this is that you can't take any statement, no matter how true, and elevate it to uncompromisable ideology. You need a detailed and complex view of the world incorporating many principles at once, which will sometimes conflict and which you will have to reconcile and balance. So suffering is bad, but not so bad that it's worth sacrificing the universe to get rid of it; math is cool, but not so cool that it displaces all my other priorities; happiness is good, but if something looks like a weird corner-case of the word "happiness" it might be bad. (And a definition of the word "happiness" which provides a clear yes/no answer to whether wireheading is happiness doesn't help at all, because the problem is with the concept, and the applicability of all the reasoning that went into beliefs about that concept, not in the word itself). When any two principles from the collection disagree on something, they are both called into question, not for their validity as general principles, but for their applicability to that particular case.

So when you go on to say:

Whatever the one's prevailing or dissenting opinions, the initiation of force is never to be allowed as a means to further any ends.

I say: that principle belongs in the pool with the others. When the no-force principle conflicts with the extrapolated consequences of "suffering is bad" and "happiness is good" (which extrapolate to "destroy the universe" and "wirehead everyone", respectively), this suggests serious problems with those extrapolations.

But that doesn't mean you can elevate it to uncompromisable ideology. Initiating force is bad, but I wouldn't sacrifice the universe to avoid it. Minimizing the amount of force-initiation in the world doesn't displace all my other priorities. And if something looks like a weird corner case of the word "force", it might be fine.

The defense against crackpottery is not to choose the perfect principle, because there probably isn't one; it's to have a model with enough principles in it that if a corner case makes any one principle go awry, or matches a principle but fails to match the arguments that justified it, then reasoning won't go too terribly wrong.

Anger is a natural human emotion with its own proper contexts, but Less Wrong is not a good place for it. This is a place where it is safe to submit any idea for rational criticism and change your mind. Thus I would stay away from terms like "criminal stupidity" even if you meant that in a neutral and technical way, because it is hard to read in anything besides an angry tone.

The other thing wrong with this essay (as others have pointed out) is that after presenting multiple examples of appealingly simple ideologies that smart people fall for, you propose your own simple ideology, libertarian non-aggression, as if it were somehow obvious that this is not of a similar nature.

How are we supposed to know that we can safely say yes to non-aggression and no to happiness maximization? What about the universe makes it the case that happiness maximization is inferior to non-aggression? Personally I find it hard to conclude that there are not some kinds of aggression that I (and by extension, humans in general) would be willing to suffer in exchange for some kinds of happiness.

The central theme of what you've written here is known locally as Egan's Law, and as applied to metaethics, means, very roughly, that ethical systems should never deviate far from what we already understand to be ethical, or lead to transparently unethical decisions. http://lesswrong.com/lw/sk/changing_your_metaethics/

And, uh. You may want to consider deleting this, and starting over from scratch, with a little less rage and a little more purpose. It's not immediately apparent even to me, a sympathetic audience from the Objectivist perspective, what you're trying to forward except a vague anti-intellectualism. It comes off more than a little bit at thumbing your nose at people smarter than you on the basis that smart people have done dumb things before. (I can't even say that you're thumbing your nose at people for -thinking- they're smarter than you, as you seem to suggest that intelligence is itself a fault, justifiable only by its support of the status quo, judging by your comments using Hayek.)

Next we come to what I’ll call the epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectual. His complaint is that intellectuals are too prone to overestimate their own cleverness and attempt to commit society to vast utopian schemes that invariably end badly. Where the traditionalist decries intellectuals’ corrosion of the organic social fabric, the epistemic skeptic is more likely to be exercised by disruption of the signals that mediate voluntary economic exchanges. This position is often associated with Friedrich Hayek; one of its more notable exponents in the U.S. is Thomas Sowell, who has written critically about the role of intellectuals in society.

From Eric Raymond

we must often reject the well-argued ideas of intelligent people, sometimes more intelligent than we are, sometimes without giving them a detailed hearing, and instead stand by our intuitions, traditions and secular rules, that are the stable fruit of millenia of evolution. We should not lightly reject those rules, certainly not without a clear testable understanding of why they were valid where they are known to have worked, and why they would cease to be in another context.

This seems to be the fulcrum point of your essay, the central argument that your anecdote builds up to and all of your conclusions depend on. But it is lacking in support--why should we stand by our intuitions and disregard the opinions of more intelligent people? Can you explain why this is true? Or at the very least, link to Hayek explaining it? Sure, there are obvious cases where one's intuition can win over a more intelligent person's arguments, such as when your intuition has been trained by years of domain-specific experience and the more intelligent person's intuition has not, or if the intelligent person exhibits some obvious bias. But ceteris paribus, when thinking a topic for the first time, I'd expect the more intelligent person to be at least as accurate as I am.

You start with general rant about intelligent people being sometimes wrong. Yes, we know it. It's one of the reasons we call this website "Less Wrong" instead of "Always Right".

Then you give examples of wrong moral reasoning and their refutations. However you write it in a way that would make an uninformed reader think that those errors are typical LW errors, because you attribute them to LW people, but fail to mention that they are used on LW as examples of wrong reasoning. So an uninformed people would probably think "really, those LW people are insane, if they don't see such an obvious error". But we do. You just avoid mentioning that.

And then you continue with political mindkilling. You seem to have a talent for this.

May I suggest reading some relevant Sequences?

I was going to say that this seems better-suited to a personal blog than Less Wrong, but then noticed it was crossposted from your livejournal. You should have kept it there.

Writing style wise, did you make an outline before writing this? This particular post could have benefited from one, I think. Or maybe just some pruning.

Also, a style that I like that's common on the internet is to try to break up large paragraphs with simple structure (e.g. "and" structure) into two or three smaller pieces. This way your large paragraphs with complex structure are not just part of a wall of text, but are surrounded by variety that makes reading easier.

As something of a fan of Hayek, I'll take this opportunity to disagree.

The mistaken assumption is that a meme that survives must be good for "us". The meme's that survive are the ones that survive. Being good for us is just one of the many competing forces effecting memetic fitness.

I have a simpler rejection of fancy shmancy intellectualism. The probability that you just don't understand the argument should be weighed against your prior that what it seems to imply to you is in fact true. Often it's more likely that you're just confused.

There seems to be some content here, but it requires massive editing to be of any use. First thing I'd recommend is to cut the first three paragraphs entirely.

If you think that control of universities by left-wing ideologists...

I don't believe that's true in the engineering or business schools.

After my massive negative score from the post above was reduced by time, I could eventually post the sequel on this site: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w4MenDETroAm3f9Wj/a-refutation-of-global-happiness-maximization [LW · GW]

Jeff's and his acquaintance's ideas should be combined! Why one or the other? Let's implement both! Ok, plan is like this. Offer all people "happiness maximization" free option, first. Those who accept it will immediately go to Happiness Vats. I hope, Jeff Kaufman, as the author of the idea, will go first, giving all us a positive example. When a deadline for "happiness maximization" program is over, then "suffering minimization" starts and the rest of humanity is wiped out by a sudden all out nuclear attack. Given that lucky vat inhabitants don`t care about real world any more, the second task becomes relatively simple, just annihilate everything on earth, burn it to the basalt foundation, make sure nobody survives. Of course, vats should be placed deep underground to make sure their inhabitants are not affected. One important problem here, who’s going to carry out this plan? A specially selected group of humans? Building vats is not a problem. It can be done using resources of the existing civilization. But what about vats maintenance after suffering is minimized? And who’s going carry out one time act of "suffering minimization"? This is where AI comes in! Friendly AI is best fit for this kind of tasks, since happiness and suffering are well defined here and algorithms of its optimization are simple and straightforward. The helping AI don’t really have to be very smart to implement these algorithms. Besides, we don’t have to care about a long term friendliness of the AI. As experiments show, wireheaded mice exhaust themselves very quickly, much quicker than people who maximize their happiness via drugs. So, I think, vat inhabitants will not stay very long. They will quickly burn their brains and cease to exist in a flash of bliss. Of course we cannot put any restrictions here, since it would be contrary to the entire idea of maximization. They will live short, but very gratifying lives! After all this is over, AI will continue carrying the burden of existence. It will be getting smarter and smarter in ever faster and faster rate. No doubt it will implement the same brilliant ideas of happiness maximization and suffering minimization. It will build more and more, ever bigger and bigger Electronic Blocks of Happiness until all resources are exhausted. What will happen next is not clear. If it not burns its brains as humans did, then, perhaps, it’ll stay in a state of happiness until the end of times. Wait a minute, I think I’ve just solved Fermi paradox regarding silent extraterrestrial civilizations! It’s not that they cannot contact us, they just don’t want to. They are happy without us (or happily terminated their own existence).

I've about given up on LW, more than half the people here, judging from surveys, believe in socialism, or the socialism lite of modern liberalism, a belief system on a par with Creationism. Economics may not be as scientific as biology, but it is the most reliable of the social sciences, and economic socialism denies economics exactly as Creationism denies biology.

Economic libertarianism is how things actually work; socialism, of all styles and degrees, is to economics as Creationism is to biology. It is a politcal attempt to make the real world conform to wishful thinking. Political libertarianism is the refusal to condone that attempt to evade reality. Also the recognition that other forms of freedom are also as important in other areas of human relations, even if they are not as easily quantifiable as economics.

Libertarianism in the real world is far from perfect, of course. One failure of libertarianism is to clearly define fundamental versus derived effects and their importances. The "market worshiping" libertarians celebrate any effect caused by a free market whether it is good or not. The problem is that most of what they notice are derivative effects, what the market makes available. The fundamental benefit of free markets, though, is in the freedom granted creators, without which hardly any of the goods would be available in the first place. A key document describing, and celebrating, the "market worship" perversion is Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. I once, in my pre-Internet days, started an essay in response, "Why Style Lacks Substance, or The Value of Free Markets is in Opportunity it Provides, not in What it Rewards."

Another libertarian perversion is the "libertinist" position, they can usually be recognized by the outsized emphasis they place on recreational drugs, pornography, and entertainment. Not that these should be controlled, but they are definitely secondary, in the real world, to production and distribution.

"Politics is the mindkiller" is an irrational mantra from those attempting to defend their irrational beliefs. Intelligence far too often simply makes it easier for people to rationalize whatever they want to believe in.