Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015

They got the object level way wrong

So your above comment considers abolition a "currently acceptable dogma"? That doesn't seem true, it's still well out of the Overton Window.

The article isn't doing analysis as much as advocacy, but it isn't really trying to convince. Its purpose seems to be to motivate people already convinced to actually do something, or to spread awareness of a position (again, without arguing for it). Both are valid, and complaining about it not being rigorous enough seems to be missing the point.

However, it fails to note that that implies that something must have occurred over the last 40 years that caused this explosion and thus the solution should involve figuring out what changes have lead to this explosion and undoing them.

The obvious answer is "drug laws and mandatory sentences", and the article does propose to do away with them.

Also, the specific proposal is

 Abolition would end the death penalty and life sentences, and push the maximum number of years that can be served for any offense down to ten years, at most.

which is (as the article fails to mention but should have) similar to some European countries, so can't be too terrible.

Later the article quotes Tony Papa of Drug Policy Alliance, and says he spend 12 years serving an "unjust sentence", but fails to specify in what way the sentence was "unjust". Was he wrongly convicted, if so the problem is that and not the existence of minimum sentences. However, one gets the impression from the authors lack of interest in the question (or for that matter in what crime Tony Papa was incarcerated for) that the use of the word "unjust" is BS in Frankfurt's sense.

Not mentioning something doesn't mean lack of interest. He's mentioned as being from the Drug Policy Alliance, and sure enough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Papa

15 to Life, published in 2004, is an autobiographical account of Papa's experience with the New York criminal justice system and anti-narcotics laws under which he was sentenced to fifteen years to life imprisonment for a first time drug offense.

The unjustness is clearly the belief that drug laws are unjust, which is also something the article takes for granted and assumes the reader does as well.

Not only is it "pretty similar to compulsion"; it's the exact sort of compulsion that we complain of in human tyrants. The problem with Hitler or Stalin or whoever isn't that they somehow make their citizens literally unable to choose for themselves; it's that they hit them with terrible punishments when they choose the "wrong" way.

The kind of tyranny God allegedly refrains from exercising is precisely the kind that no human tyrant has ever had the option of exercising.

(Though that might change, and plenty of people have worried about the possibility -- see e.g. Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. For that matter, IIRC the paragraph quoted above is in the context of Lewis worrying about human tyrannies with the ability to mess with their subjects' minds.)

I think Lewis's actual response would not be the one VoiceOfRa gives; rather, I think he would say that God doesn't really send people to hell, he merely permits them to send themselves there, and that the awfulness of hell is not a matter of devils with pitchforks or lakes of molten sulphur but of the inhabitants of hell -- who have selected themselves by their refusal to align themselves with God who is the source of all goodness -- living out the freedom-from-God on which they have insisted.

I should add that I think that's also a pretty hopeless response, though less obviously hopeless (to me) than the one VoiceOfRa suggests. (But also that it's some time since I read much Lewis and my mental model of him may be less than perfectly accurate; perhaps he could give a better account of his position than I have sketched above.)

IIRC, "God in the Dock" is the title of just one of the essays in the book, and many (most? all?) of the others aren't particularly about "accusations against God". The quotation in this thread, I think, comes from one of the ones that isn't.

Lewis spent much of his life writing books that were supposed to help people persuade other people to convert,

How does that constitute the tyranny which he described?

I find it unlikely that, if an army of Lewis clones were made rulers of England

Speculations on how Lewis might be corrupted by such power are not useful. What would happen if an army of Phil Goetz clones were made rulers of the US?

ETA: One might also compare and contrast the writings of Lewis (who did not become a tyrant), with, say, Mein Kampf (written by someone who did).

The book is a collection. Lewis did not choose the title.

Could you expand on this?

Only by repeating the same thought in more words, but the original quote from Lewis does that.

Would that count as "behavioral nudges a la Thaler"?

On the scale of evil, it does not rank with marching dissidents off to reeducation camps to be purified of their delusions through daily toil for the greater collective utility of the people. Does that answer your question?

But, from the inside, how to you tell the difference between doing actual good for others or being an omnipotent moral busybody?

"She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression."

Having a good factual model of a person would be necessary, and perhaps sufficient, for making that judgment favourably. When moving beyond making people more equal and free in their means, the model should be significantly better than their self-model. After that, the analyst would probably value the thus observed people caring about self-determination in the territory (so no deceiving them to think they're self-determining), and act accordingly.

If people declare that analysing people well enough to know their moral values is itself being a busybody, it becomes harder. First I would note that using the internet without unusual data protection already means a (possibly begrudging) acceptance of such busybodies, up to a point. But in a more inconvenient world, consent or prevention of acute danger are as far as I would be willing to go in just a comment.

If someone clearly wants you to stop bothering them, then stop bothering them.

Willingness to be critiqued? Self-examination and scrupulous quantities of doubt? This seems kind of like the wrong question, actually. "Actual good" is a fuzzy concept, if it even exists at all; a benevolent tyrant cares whether or not they are fulfilling their values (which, presumably, includes "provide others with things I think are good"). The question I would ask is how you tell the difference between actually achieving the manifestation of your values and only making a big show of it; presumably it's the latter that causes the problem (or at least the problem that you care about).

Then again, this comes from a moral non-realist who doesn't see a contradiction in having a moral clause saying it's good to enforce your morality on others to some extent, so your framework's results may vary.

I don't think that helps AndHisHorse figure out the point.

As best I understood it, the point was that one's belief in one's own goodness is a source of drive - and if that goodness is false, the drive is misaimed, and the greater drive makes for greater ill consequences.

I think we agree that belief in one's own goodness has the capability to go quite wrong, in such cases as the quote describes more wrong than an all-other-things-being-equal belief in one's own evil. Where we seem to disagree is on the inevitability of this failure mode - I acknowledge that the failure mode exists and we should be cautious about it (although that may not have come across), whereas you seem to be implying that the failure mode is so prevalent that it would be better not to try to be a good overlord at all.

Am I understanding your position correctly?

They're selling hedons, which factor into people's utility functions.

I'd also point to

Stash, which is going after younger and less informed investors, instead sees it as its mission to get people to start putting away some amount of money in to the market and then get them into a more optimized portfolio over time.

"We’re going to be able to provide really solid advice around their portfolio around making smarter investor habits," Robinson said. And hopefully, for them, that's what young people believe in, like, and want.

That doesn't seem so objectionable. If they're attracting people who wouldn't be investing otherwise, that's a gain.

Also, do you have examples of their marketing that you think are inaccurate?

these are two different unconnected things

My mental model of the author says: no, they are not unconnected things; the perspective you need to adopt to lead to the conclusion that it's terribly wrong to invest in ways that don't maximize (something like) your expected long-term wealth, even if you find doing so more satisfying and enjoyable than just dumping your money into index-funds, is a sort of straw-Vulcan one that cares only about long-term wealth maximization, and from that perspective all "consumption" just leaves you poorer in the long run and is therefore a bad thing.

What in the world is "averagely productive sort of consumption"?

I think the idea is something like this. If you buy a soft drink or go and see a movie, this provides you with some enjoyment but not much in the way of long-term benefits. Most consumption is like this: it gives you something you want, but in the long run you'd have been better off investing what it cost you. Stash's services are intended to be enjoyable to use, so that using them feels more like consumption than it does like investment, while having some of the same long-term benefits that investing in an index fund would have.

(I repeat that I'm merely attempting to explicate his position and not endorsing it myself. In particular, I gravely doubt that Stash have made investing actually fun to anyone who wasn't already investing as well as they could with Stash.)

People pay a fee because they are told that the fund will bring them higher returns (or less risk, etc.).

That's not how it sounds from the article and its source

What Stash tries to add, and what it’s charging users for, is both the unique framing of the funds and ease of use.

Investing in these tech or green energy companies is “self expression,” Robinson said, even if a bog-simple Vanguard index ETF plan “is probably the smart investment.”

Of course, there are still a great many young adults who are more focused on their returns. For them, Stash has an “I Want” tab that includes more diverse investments with snazzy labels.

“We talked to 100 people, and we heard the same thing over and over again: the whole concept of investing was confusing, it was expensive, it was unrelatable, it isn’t my world,” Ronick said about the conversations.

There's nothing there that implies an expectation of getting a higher return that if they'd invest traditionally.

Do you at least agree that Stash claims it's doing what Matt claims it is? And you then think that Stash is wrong about what motivates its users?