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As a judoka, this really spoke to me and was a useful analogy - thankyou very much for it!
My own idea of what good mental posture looks like includes some idea of the way you model yourself. One of my biggest failure modes is when I slip into seeing myself as 'random useless seventeen-year-old' and therefore acting as I expect a random useless seventeen year old to act (ineffectively) or waiting to get permission before I do things. When I manage to change into seeing-myself-as-agent mode, my productivity and rationality gets supercharged compared to the aforementioned state. It has funny side effects - for instance, I notice I walk faster and tend to spin on my heels and clap my hands together when I'm being agenty, whereas I stroll and gesture vaguely when I'm being useless. I speak more precisely when I'm in agenty-mode, and replace 'um/er/uh' with silent pauses or 'hmm'. This indicates to me that it's not just a single mental action, but a whole different stance.
I think it's similar to what is spoken about in HPMOR with most people just playing a role and doing what they think someone in that role should do, but others genuinely optimising - but I don't think I've escaped the mode of playing a role, I just sometimes manage to play the role of an agenty person rather than the role of a useless person. It turns out that if you play the role of someone who optimises everything and Gets Stuff Done, you get stuff done. (Sometimes.)
This definitely feels like two very different mental postures. I'm not actually sure how I induce the agenty state from the ineffective state, but I have identified a number of things that might have to do with it, from social pressure, to bright lights, to having a solid idea of what agentyness looks like from observing good role models. The last idea (watching a role model and knowing what agentyness looks like) was reinforced in my mind when I heard a friend saying similar things recently, so to improve my mental posture I'm going to try and watch more awesome people work so I get an idea of what awesomeness looks like, and then try to play that role more and the 'useless kid' role less. I also really like your suggestions!
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Ooh, yay, free knowledge and links! Thankyou, you're awesome!
The linked study was a fun read. I was originally a bit skeptical - it feels like songs are sufficiently subjective that you'll just like what your friends like or is 'cool', but what subjects you choose to study ought to be the topic of a little more research and numbers - but after further reflection the dynamics are probably the same, since often the reason you listen to a song at all is because your friend recommended it, and the reason you research a potential career in something is because your careers guidance counselor or your form tutor or someone told you to. And among people who've not encountered 80k hours or EA, career choice is often seen as a subjective thing. It'd be like with Asch's conformity experiments where participants aren't even aware that they're conforming because it's subconscious, except even worse because it's subconscious and seen as subjective...
That seems like a very plausible explanation. There could easily be a kind of self-reinforcing loop, as well, like, "I didn't learn fluid dynamics in school and there aren't any fluid dynamics Nobel prize winners, therefore fluid dynamics isn't very cool, therefore let's not award it any prizes or put it into the curriculum..."
At its heart, this is starting to seem like a sanity-waterline problem like almost everything else. Decrease the amount that people irrationally go for novelty and specific prizes and "application is for peasants" type stuff, and increase the amount they go for saner things like the actual interest level and usefulness of the field, and prestige will start being allocated to fields in a more sensible way. Fluid dynamics sounds really really interesting, by the way.
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I do think that some kind of organisational cooperative structure would be needed even if everyone were friends - provided there are dragons left to slay. If people need to work together on dragonfighting, then just being friends won't cut it - there will need to be some kind of team, and some people delegating different tasks to team members and coordinating efforts. Of course, if there aren't dragons to slay, then there's no need for us to work together and people can do whatever they like.
And yeah - the tradeoff would definitely need to be considered. If the AI told me, "Sorry, but I need to solve negentropy and if you try and help me you're just going to slow me down to the point at which it becomes more likely that everyone dies", I guess I would just have to deal with it. Making it more likely that everyone dies in the slow heat death of the universe is a terribly large price to pay for indulging my desire to fight things. It could be a tradeoff worth making, though, if it turns out that a significant number of people are aimless and unhappy unless they have a cause to fight for - we can explore the galaxy and fight negentropy and this will allow people like me to continue being motivated and fulfilled by our burning desire to fix things. It depends on whether people like me, with aforementioned burning desire, are a minority or a large majority. If a large majority of the human race feels listless and sad unless they have a quest to do, then it may be worthwhile letting us help even if it impedes the effort slightly.
And yeah - I'm not sure that just giving me more processor power and memory without changing my code counts as death, but simultaneously giving a human more processor power and more memory and not increasing their rationality sounds... silly and maybe not safe, so I guess it'll have to be a gradual upgrade process in all of us. I quite like that idea though - it's like having a second childhood, except this time you're learning to remember every book in the library and fly with your jetpack-including robot feet, instead of just learning to walk and talk. I am totally up for that.
You make me suddenly, intensely curious to find out what a Reynolds number is and why it can make streamlining increase drag. I am also abruptly realising that I know less than I thought about STEM fields, given I just kind of assumed that astrophysicists were the official People Who Know About Space and therefore rocketry must be part of their domain. I don't know whether I want to ask if you can recommend any good fluid dynamics introductions, or whether I don't want to add to the several feet high pile of books next to my bed...
Okay - so why do you think quantum mechanics became more "cool" than fluid dynamics? Was there a time when fluid dynamics held the equivalent prestige and mystery that quantum mechanics has today? It clearly seems to be more useful, and something that you could easily become curious about just from everyday events like carrying a cup of tea upstairs and pondering how near-impossible it is not to spill a few drops if you've overfilled it.
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Yup, playing status with accounts would be kinda stupid. (That's why you should stop doing it.)
You know what would be especially stupid? If we lived in a world that accorded me higher status than you because of my general level of aggression, and I could end this entire argument with "I'm high status, you're low status, I'm right, you're wrong, shut up now".
Now, wouldn't that be a really stupid world...?
So tell me again why giving status and prestige to aggressive people is a great idea?
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Um, how exactly do you want to preserve older things while I want to tear everything down and build it back up again? I don't want to tear things down. I want the trends that are happening - everything gets fairer and more liberal over time - to continue. To accelerate them if I can. (To design a whole new State if and only if it seems like it will make most people much happier, and even then I kinda accept that I'd need to talk to a whole lot of other people and do a whole lot of small scale experiments first.) None of those trends are making society end in fire. They're just nice things, like prejudiced views becoming less common, and violence happening less. I'm trying to optimise for making people happy; if you're optimising for something else, then I'm afraid I'm just going to have to inform you that your ethics are dumb. Sorry.
The problem with "life experience" as an argument is that people use "life experience" as a fully general counterargument. If you're older than me, any time I say something you don't like, you can just yell "LIFE EXPERIENCE!" and nothing I can do - no book you can suggest, nothing I can go observe - will allow me to win the argument. I cannot become older than you. This would be fine as an argument if we observed that older people were consistently right and younger people were consistently wrong, but as you'll know if you have a grandparent who tries to use computers, this just ain't so.
Just because you have been made jaded and cynical by your experience of the world, that doesn't mean that jaded and cynical positions are the correct ones. For one thing, most other people of your own age who also experienced the world ended up still disagreeing with you. There's a very good chance that I get to the age you are now, and still disagree with you. And if you observe most other people your own age with similar experiences (unless you're old enough that you're part of the raised-very-conservative generation) most of them will disagree with you. What is magic and special about your own specific experience that makes yours better than all those people who are the same age as you? Why should I listen to your conclusions, backed up by your "life experience", when I could also go and listen to a lefty who's the same age as you and their lefty conclusions backed up by their "life experience"?
Life experience can often make people a lot less logical. Traumatised people often hold illogical views - like, some victims of abuse are terrified of all men. That doesn't mean that, because they have life experience that I don't, I should go, 'oh, well, I actually think all men aren't evil, but I guess their life experience outweighs what I think'. It means that they've had an experience that damaged them, and we should have sympathy and try and help them, and we should even consider constructing shelters so they don't have to interact with the people they're terrified of, but we certainly shouldn't start deferring to them and adopting their beliefs just because we lack their experiences. The only things we should defer to should be logical arguments and evidence.
"Life experience", as a magical quality which you accumulate more of the more negative things happen to you, is pretty worthless. Rationalists do not believe in magical qualities.
If there is a version of the "life experience" argument that can be steelmanned, it's "I've lived a long time and have observed many things which caused me to make updates towards my beliefs, and you haven't had a chance to observe that." But that still makes no sense because you should be able to point out the things you observed to me, or show your observations on graphs, so I can observe them too. If you observed someone being a total idiot, and that makes you jaded about the possibility of a system that requires a lot of intelligence to function, then you should be able to make up for the fact that I haven't observed that idiocy by pulling out IQ charts or studies or other evidence that most people are idiots. If you can't produce evidence to convince someone else, consider that your experience may be anecdata that doesn't generalise well.
Perhaps your argument is "I've lived a long time and have observed very many very small pieces of evidence, and all of those small pieces of evidence caused me to make lots of very small updates, such that I cannot give you a single piece of evidence which you can consider which will make you update to my beliefs, but I think mine are right anyway." However, even if you can't give me a single piece of evidence that I can observe and update on, you ought to be able to produce graphs or something. Graphs are good at showing lots-of-small-bits-of-evidence-over-time stuff. If you want me to change my beliefs, you still have to produce evidence, or at least a logical argument. Appeals to "life experience" are nothing more than appeals to elder prestige.
Now, to address your actual argument. It seems to be (correct me if I misunderstand): liberal views are correct and work, but there are many stupid people in the world and liberal views don't work well for stupid people. Stupid people need clear rules that tell them in simple terms what to do and what not to do.
But if I were going to make up a set of really clear simple rules to tell a stupid person what to do and what not to do, they would be something like: 1. Be nice to people and try not to hurt people. 2. Don't try and prevent clever people from doing things you don't understand. Listen to the clever people. 3. Try and be productive and contribute what you can to society.
I cannot see any evidence that adding more rules beyond those three, like, "Defer to males because male-ness is loosely correlated with prestige-wanting and protectiveness" (even though male-ness isn't correlated with prestige-deserving, that seems about equal between genders) would do any good whatsoever. Since there are just as many stupid males as stupid females - male average IQ is actually slightly lower than female average IQ - a rule like that wouldn't do any good, would certainly not prevent people letting young kids have cigarettes or people beating one another or anything like that, and would in fact just lead to a lot of stupid people going "oh, it must be okay to hurt and disparage females and not let them have education then" and going around hurting lots of women.
And the view of mine, that liberal views don't hurt people and sexist/racist views do hurt people... certainly seems to fit the evidence. Liberal views are increasing over time, and crime and violence are decreasing over time. I can't find any studies, but I predict that if we do a study, we'll find that holding the belief "women and men are equal" is strongly correlated with being non-violent and not hurting women, and almost all of the violence and abuse cases committed against women will be by people who don't think they are equal. Similarly, doing stupid things like giving cigarettes to children and giving away products for free will be correlated with holding conservative views - though admittedly that could just be 'cause being uneducated is correlated with holding conservative views. And because men are on average more violent and more likely to hurt people. But then, that's a very good argument against putting them in charge, isn't it...?
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I think there's also definitely a prestige/coolness factor which isn't correlated with difficulty, applicability, or usefulness of the field.
Quantum mechanics is esoteric and alien and weird and COOL and saying you understand it whilst sliding your glasses down your nose makes you into Supergeek. Saying "I understand how wet stuff splashes" is not really so... high status. It's the same thing that makes astrophysics higher status than microbiology even though the latter is probably more useful and saves more lives / helps more people - rockets spew fire and go to the moon, bacteria cells in a petri dish are just kind of icky and slimy. I am quite certain that, if you are smart enough to go for any field you want, there is a definite motivation / social pressure to select a "cool" subject involving rockets and quarks and lasers, rather than a less cool subject involving water and cells or... god forbid... political arguments.
And, hmm, actually, not quite true on the last point - a social scientist could develop an intervention program, like a youth education program, that decreases crime or increases youth achievement/engagement, and it would probably feel awesome and warm and fuzzy to talk to the youths whose lives were improved by it. So you could certainly get closer than "developing some successful self-help book". It is certainly harder, though, I think, and there's certainly a higher rate of failure for crime-preventing youth education programs than for modern bridge-building efforts.
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Thankyou - this statement of the idea was much, much clearer to me. :)
It seems like the solution - well, a possible part of one possible solution - is to make the social science research institute that everyone listens to have some funding source which is completely independent from the political party in power. That would hopefully make the scientific community more independent. We now need to make it more powerful, which is... more difficult. I think a good starting point would be to try and raise the prestige associated with a social science career (and thus the prestige given to individual social scientists and the amount of social capital they feel they have to spend on being controversial) and possibly give some rhetoric classes to the social science research institute's spokesperson. Assuming the scientists are rational scientists, this gives them politician-power with which to persuade people of their correct conclusions. (Of course, if they have incorrect conclusions influenced by their ideologies, this is... problematic. How do we fix this? I dunno yet. But this is the very beginning of a solution, but I've not been thinking about the problem very long and I am just one kid with a relatively high IQ. If multiple people work together on a solution, I'm sure much more and much better stuff will be come up with.)
Opponent is a word. Here, it refers to the person advocating the opposite view to mine. If you would like, I can use a different word, but it will change very little. Arguing over semantics is not a productive way to cause each other to update. Though to be honest, I ceased having much hope that you were in this discussion for the learning and updates when you started using ad hominem and fully general counterarguments. (Saying that your opponent is defensive and emotional and "opponentist" is also a fully general counterargument and also ad hominem. "Not even blaming me" for not agreeing with you is another example with an extra dash of emotive condescension. You have a real talent.)
Quite often, people have useful information about themselves because they know themselves quite well. I'm a useful data point when I'm thinking about stuff that affects me, because I know more about myself than I know about other examples. But I could also point out other examples of women in my community who are protectors. For instance, I know a single mother who is not only a national-level athlete but had to rush each of her children to hospital for separate issues four times in the last week. Twice it was because their lives were threatened. She stays strong and protects them fiercely, keeps up with her life and her training, and is frankly astonishingly brave. She is far, far more of a "traditional strong figure" than any man I have ever met. Of course, this is still anecdata. I haven't got big quantitative data because I can't think of a test for protectorness that we could do on a large scale; can you suggest one?
Your idea, as I understood it, was that men can carry out protective roles and therefore they should have high social status and prestige. I think this is a pretty good example of what I've heard called the Worst Argument in the World. I believe that protective and self-sacrificing individuals should be accorded high prestige. I agree that protectiveness can loosely correlate with being male. But protective women exist in high numbers, and non-protective men exist in high numbers, and many women exist who are significantly better at protectiveness than the average male. According protective women low prestige because they are women, and according useless men high prestige because they are men, is an entirely lost purpose. It is irrational sexism, pure and simple. You're doing the same thing as people who say "Gandhi was a criminal, therefore Gandhi should be dismissed and given low social status." You're saying that it would be good if people said, "Individual X is a male, therefore he should be accorded high prestige and conscripted. Individual Y is a female, therefore she should be given low prestige and not conscripted" even if X doesn't fit the protective-and-strong criteria and Y does fit the protective-and-strong criteria. Forcing protective strong women to stop doing that and accept low prestige, and forcing non-protective weaker men to try and fill protective roles, just hurts everyone.
You still haven't answered my question. You want to make a society where men get conscripted (an astonishingly rare event in a modern liberal democracy, by the way...) and protect those around them, and in return get high prestige. I know, and I presume you also know, numerous men who would be unsuitable for conscription and don't protect those around them. Some women would be perfectly suitable for conscription, and protect those around them. Why do those women not deserve the prestige that you want to give all the men?
Can you also tell me why you think "the same stuff the mainstream media, BuzzFeed or Tumblr pouring on day and night" is necessarily uninteresting/wrong? Shouldn't a large number of people agreeing with an ethical position usually correlate with that ethical position being correct? I mean, it's not a perfect correlation, there are exceptions, but in general people agree that murder and rape and mugging are undesirable, and agree that happiness and friendship and knowledge are desirable. Calling a position popular or fashionable should not be an insult and I am intrigued by how you could have come up with the idea that something that is "done to death" must be bad. Has "murder is wrong" been "done to death"?
If this conversation keeps going downhill, I'm just going to disengage. It is rather low utility.
Oh, I definitely have some kind of inbuilt ideology - it's just that right now, I'm consciously trying to suppress/ignore it. It doesn't seem to converge with what most other humans want. I'd rather treat it as a bias, and try and compensate for it, in order to serve my higher level goals of satisfying people's preferences and increasing happiness and decreasing suffering and doing correct true science.
Different people learn in different ways. I'm really good at textbook learning and hate hands on learning (and suspect that is common among introverted intellectual people). Ideally, why not offer both a university course that qualifies you as a teacher and an apprenticeship system that qualifies you as a teacher, and allow prospective teachers to decide which best suits their learning style? We could even do cognitive assessments on the prospective teachers to recommend to them which program would be best for what their strengths seem to be.
Although, as someone who lives with a teacher - we definitely don't need to reduce the time they spend in the classroom, we need to change the fact that they spend double that time marking and planning and doing pointless paperwork.
Telling your opponent that they are incapable of arguing with you until they are older is a fully general counterargument, and one of the more aggravating and toxic ones.
Even if it wasn't a fully general counterargument, it would be fallacious because it's ad hominem. There are plenty of people 5-10 years older than me who share my ideas, and you could as easily be arguing with one of them as you are arguing with me now; the fact that by chance you are arguing against me doesn't affect the validity/truth of the ideas we're talking about, and it's very irrational to suggest that it should. Attack my arguments, not me.
As for everything being better in "their former selves", do I seriously have to go find graphs? I have the distinct feeling that you won't update even if I show you them, so I'm tempted not to bother. If you've genuinely never looked at actual graphs of crime levels and violence over time and promise to update just a little, I can go dig those up for you. (For now, you're pattern matching to the kind of person who could benefit from reading http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ . I don't like SSC that much, but when the man's right, he's right.)
(As for "people were politer with women", my idea of polite is pretty politically correct, and I can guarantee you that political correctness doesn't increase if we look backwards in time...)
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You know what else is a good way to stop people being killed? Create a liberal democracy where people are equal. So far in history, that has kinda correlated... really strongly... with less people dying. There is both less war and less crime. Forget strength, give them equality and elections. (I don't actually think democracy is the optimal solution, I think I advocate more of an economics-exam-based meritocratic oligarchy, but it is a really good one to put in place while we figure out what the optimal one is. And I need to read lots more books before I actually try and design an optimal society, if I'm ever qualified to try something like that.)
Being "strong" in a meaningful way, in the modern world, means being intelligent. Smart people can use better rhetoric, invent cooler weapons, and solve your problems more easily. Being well-educated and intelligent and academic actually strongly correlates with not being racist or sexist or transphobic or homophobic. Oh, and also liberal democracies seem to have much less prejudice in them.
Find me decent evidence that patriarchal societies are safer for everyone involved than liberal democracies where everyone is equal, and you'll have a valid point. But it kind of looks to me like, as a woman, I'm much safer in the modern Western democracies that prohibit sexism than I am in the patriarchal societies where women have no rights and keep getting acid thrown in their faces for rejecting advances. You say that in the recent years it was abandoned due to being oppressive but we should try and go back and compromise with it, but... why would we want to go back to that when literally everything has been improving ever since we abandoned those social models? To entertain your delusions of being a Strong Tribal Hero Protector Guy? Sorry, no.
I also don't see how we can't have strong protectors who are 100% PC. I'm not straight, male, neurotypical, traditional or even an adult. I try and protect and help those around me and on many occasions I succeed. I am the one in my friendship group who takes the lead down dark alleyways, carrying all the bags, reassuring my friends that it's safe because nobody's going to mug us while I'm there. Why exactly am I a weak and unworthy protector? Because I'm a girl? You're going to have to do an awful lot better than that. Put me in a physical fight with most boys of my age, and I would annihilate them. Every male who has picked a fight with me thinking that he'll be able to beat me because he's male has walked away rather humiliated. On exams and IQ tests I score far higher than your average male. Judging by how much I actually end up doing versus what I observe the boys around me doing, I have higher levels of inbuilt-desire-to-help-and-protect-others than the average male. (I suspect that the latter two facts at least are true of most women whom you might find on this specific website.) Why exactly does the average male, whom I can both outfight and outthink, get to protect me and not the other way around?
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I'm not trying to describe the people who disagree with me as wanting to bring back slavery or supporting burning down the whole Middle East; that isn't my point and I apologise if I was unclear.
As I understood it, the argument levelled against me was that: people who say they're really angry about terrorism are often idiots who hold idiotic beliefs, like, "let's send loads of tanks to the Middle East and kill all the people who might be in the same social group as the terrorists and that will solve everything!" and in the same way, people who say they're really angry about racism are the kind of people who hold idiotic beliefs like "let's ban all science that has anything to do with race and gender!" and therefore it was reasonable of them to assume, when I stated that I was opposed to racism, that I was the latter kind of idiot.
To which my response is that many people are idiots, both people who are angry about terrorism and people who aren't, people who are angry about racism and people who aren't. There are high levels of idiocy in both groups. Being angry about terrorism and racism still seems perfectly appropriate and fine as an emotional arational response, since terrorism and racism are both really bad things. I think the proper response to someone saying "I hate terrorism" is "I agree, terrorism is a really bad thing", not "But drone strikes against 18 year olds in the middle east kill grandmothers!" (even if that is a true thing) and similarly, the proper response to someone saying "I hate racism" is "I agree, genocide and lynchings are really bad", not "But studies about race and gender are perfectly valid Bayesian inference!" (even if that is a true thing).
There could be solutions to this, I'm sure, or at least ways of minimising the problems. Maybe an independent-from-current-ruling-party research institute that ran studies on all proposed laws/policies put forward by both the in-power and opposition power, which required pre-registration of studies, and then published its findings very publicly in an easy-for-public-to-read format? Then it would be very obvious which parties were saying the same things as the science and which were ignoring the science, and it would be hard for the parties to influence the social scientists to just get them to say what they want them to say.
As advice for others like me, this is good. For me personally it doesn't work too well; my A level subjects mean that I won't be able to take a STEM subject at a good university. I can't do statistics, because I dropped maths last year. The only STEM A level I'm taking is CompSci, and good universities require maths for CompSci degrees. I could probably get into a good degree course for Linguistics, but it isn't a passionate adoration for linguistics that gets me up in the mornings. I adore human and social sciences.
I don't plan to be completely devoid of STEM education; the subject I actually want to take is quite hard-science-ish for a social science. If I get in, I want to do biological anthropology and archaeology papers, which involve digging up skeletons and chemically analysing them and looking at primate behaviour and early stone tools. It would be pretty cool to do some kind of PhD involving human evolution. From what I've seen, if I get onto the course I want to get onto, it'll teach me a lot of biology and evolutionary psychology and maybe some biochemistry and linguistics.
I don't know, maybe because I was randomly listing some things that I'm angry about to explain why I'm motivated to try and improve the world, not making a thorough and comprehensive list of everything I think is wrong?
Could also fit under "war", which I listed, and "death", which I listed.
I think that there's a good chance in general that most people can be led into supporting policies with bad consequences. I don't think higher levels of idiocy are present in people who are annoyed about racism and terrorism compared with those who aren't. The kind of people who say "on average people with black skin are slightly less smart, therefore let's bring back slavery and apartheid" are just as stupid and evil, if not stupider and eviler, than the people who support burning down the whole Middle East in order to get rid of terrorism.
Well, "providing universal healthcare and welfare will lead to a massive drop in motivation to work" is a scientific prediction. We can find out whether it is true by looking at countries where this already happens - taxes pay for good socialised healthcare and welfare programs - like the UK and the Nordics, and seeing if your prediction has come true.
The UK employment rate is 5.6%, the United States is 5.3%. Not a particularly big difference, nothing indicating that the UK's universal free healthcare has created some kind of horrifying utility drop because there's no motivation to work. We can take another example if you like. Healthcare in Iceland is universal, and Iceland's unemployment rate is 4.3% (it also has the highest life expectancy in Europe).
This is not an ideological dispute. This is a dispute of scientific fact. Does taxing people and providing universal healthcare and welfare lead to a massive drop in utility by destroying the motivation to work (and meaning that people don't work)? This experiment has already been performed - the UK and Iceland have universal healthcare and provide welfare to unemployed citizens - and, um, the results are kind of conclusive. The world hasn't ended over here. Everyone is still motivated to work. Unemployment rates are pretty similar to those in the US where welfare etc isn't very good and there's not universal healthcare. Your prediction didn't come true, so if you're a rationalist, you have to update now.
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Eh, I'm not sure I'm an anything-ist. Socialist ideas make a lot of sense to me, but really I'm a read-a-few-more-books-and-go-to-university-and-then-decide-ist. If I have to stand behind any -ist, it's going to be "scientist". I want to do research to find out which policies most effectively make people happy, and then I want to implement those policies regardless of whether they fall in line with the ideologies that seem attractive to me.
But yeah, I do think that it is morally wrong to let people suffer and morally right to make people happy, and I think you can create a lot of utility by taking money from people who already have a lot (leaving them with enough to buy food and maybe preventing them from going on holiday / buying a nice car) and giving it to people who have nothing (meaning they have enough money for food and education so they can survive and try and change their situation). So I agree with taxing people and using the money to provide universal healthcare, housing, food, etc. Apparently that makes me a socialist.
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I am very angry about terrorism. I think terrorism is a very bad thing and we should eliminate it from the world if we can.
Being very angry about terrorism =/= thinking that a good way to solve the problem is to randomly go kill the entire population of the Middle East in the name of freedom (and oil). I hate terrorism and would prevent it if I could. In fact, I hate people killing each other so much, I think we should think rationally about the best way to eliminate it utterly (whilst causing fewer deaths than it causes) and then do that.
There is no connection. I'm not trying to imply a connection. The only connection is that they are both things possibly implied by the word "racism".
I'm trying to say that when I say "I oppose racism", intending to signal "I oppose people beating up minorities", and people misunderstand badly enough that they think I mean "I oppose IQ-by-race studies", it disturbs me. If people know that "I oppose racism" could mean "I oppose genocide", but choose to interpret it as "I oppose IQ-by-race studies", that worries me. Those things are completely different and if you think that I'm more likely to oppose IQ-by-race studies than I am to oppose genocide, or if you think IQ-by-race studies are more important and worthy of being upset about than genocide, something has gone very wrong here.
A sentence like "I oppose racism" could mean a lot of different things. It could mean "I think genocide is wrong", "I think lynchings are wrong", "I think people choosing white people for jobs over black people with equivalent qualifications is wrong", or "I think IQ by race studies should be banned". Automatically leaping to the last one and getting very angry about it is... kind of weird, because it's the one I'm least likely to mean, and the only one we actually disagree about. You seriously want to reply to "I oppose racism" with "but IQ by race studies are valid Bayesian inference!" and not "yes, I agree that lynching people is very wrong"? Why? Are IQ by race studies more important to your values than eliminating genocide and lynchings? Do you genuinely think that I am more likely to oppose IQ-by-race studies than I am to oppose lynchings? The answer to neither of those questions should be yes.
I think that anger at the Bad and hope for the Good are kind of flip sides of the same coin. I have a vague idea of how the world should be, and when the world does not conform to that idea, it irritates me. I would like a world full of highly rational and happy people cooperating to improve one another's lives, and I would like to see the subsequent improvements taking effect. I would like to see bright people and funding being channeled into important stuff like FAI and medicine and science, everyone working for the common good of humanity, and a lot of human effort going towards the endeavour of making everyone happy. I would like to see a human species which is virtuous enough that poverty is solved by everyone just sharing what they need, and war is solved because nobody wants to start violence. I want people to work together and be rational, basically, and I've already seen that work on a small scale so I have a lot of hope that we can upgrade it to a societal scale. I also have a lot of hope for things like cryonics/Alcor bringing people back to life eventually, MIRI succeeding in creating FAI, and effective altruism continuing to gain new members until we start solving problems from sheer force of numbers and funding.
But I try not to be too confident about exactly what a Good world looks like; a) I don't have any idea what the world will look like once we start introducing crazy things like superintelligence, b) that sounds suspiciously like an ideology and I would rather do lots of experiments on what makes people happy and then implement that, and c) a Good world would have to satisfy people's preferences and I'm not a powerful enough computer to figure out a way to satisfy 7 billion sets of preferences.
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In my (admittedly limited, I'm young) experience, people don't disagree on whether that tradeoff is worth it. People disagree on whether the tradeoff exists. I've never seen people arguing about "the tradeoff is worth it" followed by "no it isn't". I've seen a lot of arguments about "We should decrease inequality with policy X!" followed by "But that will slow economic growth!" followed by "No it won't! Inequality slows down economic growth!" followed by "Inequality is necessary for economic growth!" followed by "No it isn't!" Like with Obamacare - I didn't hear any Republicans saying "the tradeoff of raising my taxes in return for providing poor people with healthcare is an unacceptable tradeoff" (though I am sometimes uncharitable and think that some people are just selfish and want their taxes to stay low at any cost), I heard a lot of them saying "this policy won't increase health and long life and happiness the way you think it will".
"Is this tradeoff worth it?" is, indeed, a values question and not a scientific question. But scientific questions (or at least, factual questions that you could predict the answer to and be right/wrong about) could include: Will this policy actually definitely cause the X% decrease in inequality? Will this policy actually definitely cause the Y% slowdown in economic growth? Approximately how large is X? Approximately how much will a Y% slowdown affect the average household income? How high is inflation likely to be in the next few years? Taking that expected rate of inflation into account, what kind of things would the average family no longer be able to afford / not become able to afford, presuming the estimated decrease in average household income happens? What relation does income have to happiness anyway? How much unhappiness does inequality cause, and how much unhappiness do economic recessions cause? Does a third option (beyond implement this policy / don't implement it) exist, like implementing the policy but also implementing another policy that helps speed economic growth, or implementing some other radical new idea? Is this third option feasible? Can we think up any better policies which we predict might decrease inequality without slowing economic growth? If we set a benchmark that would satisfy our values, like percentage of households able to afford Z valuable-and-life-improving item, then which policy is likely to better satisfy that benchmark - economic growth so that more people on average can afford Z, or inequality reduction so that more poor people become average enough to afford an Z?
But, of course, this is a factual question. We could resolve this by doing an experiment, maybe a survey of some kind. We could take a number of left-wing policies, and a number of right-wing policies, and survey members of the "other tribe" on "why do you disagree with this policy?" and give them options to choose between like "I think reducing inequality is more important than economic growth" and "I don't think reducing inequality will decrease economic growth, I think it will speed it up". I think there are a lot of issues where people disagree on facts.
Like prisons - you have people saying "prisons should be really nasty and horrid to deter people from offending", and you have people saying "prisons should be quite nice and full of education and stuff so that prisoners are rehabilitated and become productive members of society and don't reoffend", and both of those people want to bring the crime rate down, but what is actually best at bringing crime rates down - nasty prisons or nice prisons? Isn't that a factual question, and couldn't we do some science (compare a nice prison, nasty prison, and average-kinda-prison control group, compare reoffending rates for ex-inmates of those prisons, maybe try an intervention where kids are deterred from committing crime by visiting nasty prison and seeing what it's like versus kids who visit the nicer prison versus a control group who don't visit a prison and then 10 years later see what percentage of each group ended up going to prison) to see who is right? And wouldn't doing the science be way better than ideological arguments about "prisoners are evil people and deserve to suffer!" versus "making people suffer is really mean!" since what we actually all want and agree on is that we would like the crime rate to come down?
So we should ask the scientific question: "Which policies are most likely to lead to the biggest reductions in inequality and crime and the most economic growth, keep the most members of our population in good health for the longest, and provide the most cost-efficient and high-quality public services?" If we find the answer, and some of those policies seem to conflict, then we can consult our values to see what tradeoff we should make. But if we don't do the science first, how do we even know what tradeoff we're making? Are we sure the tradeoff is real / necessary / what we think it is?
In other words, a question of "do we try an intervention that costs £10,000 and is 100% effective, or do we do the 80% effective intervention that costs £80,000 and spend the money we saved on something else?" is a values question. But "given £10,000, what's the most effective intervention we could try that will do the most good?" is a scientific question and one that I'd like to have good, evidence-based answers to. "Which intervention gives most improvement unit per money unit?" is a scientific question and you could argue that we should just ask that question and then do the optimal intervention.
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"So what we really want is interventions that are very well-thought out, with a lot of care towards the likely consequences, taking into account the lessons of history for similar interventions."
That is exactly why I want to study social science. I want to do lots of experiments and research and reading and talking and thinking before I dare try and do any world-changing. That's why I think social science is important and valuable, and we should try very hard to be rational and careful when we do social science, and then listen to the conclusions. I think interventions should be well-thought-through, evidence-based, and tried and observed on a small scale before implemented on a large scale. Thinking through your ideas about laws/policies/interventions and gathering evidence on whether they might work or not - that's the kind of social science that I think is important and the kind I want to do.
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