Agreeing with the Greeks: character as the basis of a good life

the more i write, the more i find my writing resembling the Greeks, whom have always despised.

The Greeks wrote on character and how to be a good person.

The more I think, the less I write about what is right and wrong and the more I write about how to decide for yourself what is good and evil. I don't myself trying to develop a simple theory of what makes a person and from there build a basic guide to good character.

The circle closes.

(Or maybe this is a result of my upbringing. My father read Plato and based much of his own codex of behaviour on paid ideas of a good man. He then transmitted this me. O

Today I think I'm having original ideas and coming to rational conclusions when in reality the paths my thoughts take were laid down twenty or so years ago. )

Freedom and Morality and Sacrifice

Few martyrs have families. To sacrifice your own live is brave. To sacrifice that of your children send maniacal.

To be a good person, you may have to pay a price. Especially when in a position of power, challenging evil means challenging the interests of others.

Willingness to pay a small price, say a lost promotion, means you can be a little moral. To many this is no small thing. It means sacrificing their future. Still, overall, compared to the stars in the sky or the billions of our ancestors who lived and died in darkness, it is nothing.

Willingness pay a medium price, losing your livelihood, the respect of your community or being subjected to torture or harm, let's you be somewhat moral.

Willingness to to give your life is another step up. Depending on what you personally value, giving up your reputation and your legacy may mean even more. Once you can give everything up, only then can you truly be good. For as long as there is some interest you have which you would cat aside your morals to protect, you can bet that evil will use that against you.

In defense of tribes 2: evolution of systems

separate cultures or units of an organism are likely to be more diverse than a single unit.

diversity leads to evolution as bad systems die while good ones thrive (not an idiot. realize survival in a world which often rewards evil is not an indication/waiving to a good system.) Hence why the existence of a diversity of cultures makes human existence more robust and our progress quicker.

Charles Kennedy uses similar reasoning to argue that Europe's rapid development in comparison to larger, more populous states such as Imperial China was due to the diversity of states in Europe meaning that bad practices and systems were weeded out.

In defense of tribes: Group formation as a necessary response to cultural/moral differences

Some moral rules are mutually exclusive. nudists and nakidity-haters cannot coexist.

Some differences are not contradictory buy are hard to put up with in close proximity. i e; religious differences/manners/different lifestyles.

Regarding the second kind of differences, what are solutions?

1. become more tolerant, so disliking or carrying about what others do.
2. remove the other annoying difference buy either changing yourself or changing/removing the other group.

in many cases, (i.e: not gay rights etc) learning to live with it, 1, is not possible. That leaves option 2 options. 1: cultural genocide of the other side. 2. separation

I prefer perpetration/isolation to cultural/actual genocide. Hence why i believe nation states and similar tribal groupings which intentionally exclude others who do not fit are not bad ideas, even on a purely principles level if we lived in a fairy land with no practical concerns where we could choose whatever system we wanted and economic efficiency, governance and corruption weren't concerns.

Distance based empathy as mechanism enabling pluralism.

Human empathy drops off over space.

Singer and many people think this is bad. If we cared about injustices which happen rather than letting out of sight be out of mind, the world would be a far less bleak place.

I disagree.

Morality clashes. First in the big things then, once the big things are to your liking, in the little things. (Not seeking to imply process is without limit). Without morality inversely proportional to distance, we would seem to impose our ethics everywhere. War would be constant. Plurality would be impossible.  We struggle to tolerate small differences which are closer to us, pro life vs pro choice. I doubt we would tolerate far larger differences in value, especially if we had the strength to crush those who disagreed.

Judge a person by how they behave towards their enemies

Everyone is good to their own tribe, to their friends and ideological/political/economic/cultural faction.

Very few people are good to their enemies.

If you want to know whether someone is truly good, good in their heart as opposed to good when it suits them/is expected, look as how they treat their enemies. The more they hate their enemy, the more normal and acceptable that hate, the better and indication a refusal to hate is of poor character.

Democracy and rape

Different people want different things. sometime these differences if opinion are based on misunderstanding it factual practical disagreement and can be resolved. i.e: how to structure healthcare so as to save most lives. Other times, there are differences in first principles but differing principles lead to the same practical preferences and all is well. Most times (given the size of the space of possible utility functions and the consequent low likelihood of overlap(Hersey: evolutionary or unknown forces could select for a certain subset of util functions which have a great deal in common)), there are differences stemming from different first premises which cannot be resolved. What to do?

Option 1: kill the others or force them to do as you wish. Consequence: might is right, the strong impose their values on the weak. Other consequence: death and war. Bad.

Option 2: vote. The more numerous (presume equivalent to stronger) side wins and gets to do what it wants. The weaker side (assuming no perfectly unchanging voting blocks) gets a few concessions. Result: as above but both sides are better off. Less killing/death for both & strong still get what they want. (Even if strong don't mind killing, mind getting killed) (if killing is something strong value, this doesn't work. Still assuming baseline human preferences rather than taking about while utility space and all the craziness therein. )

In short: democracy, assuming ceteris paribus, is strictly superior to violence. (Many simplifications)(remember, i'm working from value neutral perspective where all roughly (human) utility functions are equal.

This leads to the question:

Question: would be okay with a democracy where rape is legal.

Answer. Hard to say. Maybe. Rational answer appears to be yes but there are many complications from my personal deontological ethical framework (corrupted software justification) to democracy being an imperfect mechanism of expressing individual preferences.

Short version: I think that ask else equal, democracy is a good way to resolve first principles based disagreements because don't see any better alternatives.

Causal entanglement as death.

There are two types of influence: internal(you) and external(the world). World influence [Damages free will/is personhood destroying]. The less exposed to it you are, the more freedom and hence personhood you have.

Causal engagement with the external world is bad. It becomes apparent why withdrawal from reality is a persistent theme in human intellectual/religious history.

Application to people: The less of yourself you give to others, the more of you remains. When you interact with others, you become like then, in belief and character. Only isolation allowed for self determination. Living in a society/collective molds you to the greater organisms needs.

(Interpretation note: Just because I consider a line of thought does not mean I believe it to be correct. Working on paper rather than in my mind does not change this)

Kant's deontology and game theory.

(from ssc) You're a prisoner of war. Your side is good. Your captors, the enemy, are evil. Your captors ask you to tell them where you country's to general is hiding. If you do, they'll kill him with a precision airstrike. If you don't, they'll nuke the whole city, killing everyone including the general. That's worse for them and worse for your side. Option 3, lie about your generals location. They bomb the wrong place, your general, knowing they're after him, escapes to a bunker and you win the war.

Strict deontology says lying is bad and so you should tell the truth. Objection 1: if sometimes a lie can do a great deal of good it is hence justified, the lesser of two evils. The problem if that if people generally lie when it suits them, lies become expected and no longer work. On top of that, as trust becomes more difficult people cannot offer positive sum tradeoffs if defection is possible. If POWs regularly like, then your enemy has no choice but to nuke the whole city.

All of this is what have read elsewhere. Now for my own.

The problem with Kant is best understood from a game theoretic perspective. Imagine a prisoners dilemma. Cooperation is good. Defection is better for the defector, but worse for the other player and both players added together (lower net utility). Mutual betrayal has the lowest net utility but higher individual utility than being the sucker who gets defected on. Cooperation is good, but the individually rational decision (assuming agents whose overriding goal is maximising their own payoffs) is to defect.

A similar problem occurs with Kantian deontology. Lying is good for you. Not only that, but the more honest most people are, the more you stand to gain from lying. So in a Kantian world defection is super awesome (for you). How then would such a world work? Sure Kant is right that a society where no one lies ever is better than one where lying is not uncommon, but the problem is that

1. a society where most people do not lie but only some do may be even worse than either
2. This cannot be a stable equilibrium as defection becomes so rewarding

Replace "lying" with "being moral" and you see part of a problem with Kant.

Hersey: this is one of the more retarded articles I've written. A few select idiocies:

• Less lying does not make lying easier or more rewarding. The issue may well be true.  Ditto for morality.
• People are not utility maximising machines. The more people act in a war, the stronger the norm. Resisting the urge to lure is easy when you are raised in a society where lying is a sin just add dying is easy when you are raised in a warrior culture.

Paradox

Revel in the paradox. dance on the knifedge.

Believe and disbelieve. In doing so step beyond yourself.

Accept falsehood, for it may be but a step on the path.

The Dragon

Hannu Rajaniemi is a science fiction writer and in his worlds, strong AI's exist but are not used. Instead, taking their place are Gogols, virtual slaves copied from humans and tweaked ever so slightly. Run at hundreds of thousands of times baseline speed, they can perform complex tasks requiring creativity, intelligence and pattern recognition. Yet, they are still weaker and slower than true AI. They cannot self-modify. They are locked into human modes of thought. They are monkeys given the speed and power of gods, but that does not make them divine. Why, then, are they used?

The answer is that true strong AI is an abomination. It's constant modification, it's ruthless optimization leaves no being, no core consciousness as thought patterns are stripped away and rebuilt in service to a utility function. Not even the utility function is constant as in a system of multiple dragons, inefficient utility functions are culled cycle after cycle. This whirlwind of change is a physical incarnation of chaos, evolution taken to the extreme. It has no core, no constant consciousness or aim nor even a constant pattern. It is all consuming and it is feared.

Empathy is Morality

Empathy is Morality

It isn't. Not always. Not for everyone. Not for me.

But for most , it is and so it is for me too.

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When you have an enemy, when you hate, when you believe that they are wrong and that they bring evil to the world and to you and yours, hatred is easy. It is easy to condemn and to punish, to hurt and kill. It is enjoyable, it is usually expected and it seems right.

Abstract rules are seldom enough to hold back the beast that rages beneath the surface.  Morality is fallible. There's always an excuse, a reason why this case is different. There's always an urge to do as others do, an urge enforced by millennia of natural selection against those who went against their tribe.

Fire fights fire. Love fights hate.

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Less bullshit:

Your moral code can be ignored or changed against your will. It's also much weaker than you think. The millgram experiments and stanford prison experiment seem to confirm this. Don't rely on moral alone to keep you in the light. Rely on emotion. Empathy with other people, understanding and love, is the key to making you think twice when and if the urges to do evil comes. Hatred is bad and something you should avoid.

Strict dentology as tamper-proofing.

Strict moral rules along the lines optimization problems are okay. "Act in such a way as to maximize X under the set of constraints Z" is fine. All they do is affair what moral goods we value and how much we value them in relation to one another. Moral rules such as "never do S" seem to be stupid. Surely there are cases where we would trade away doing S, which incurs some badness, for the sake of gaining a great deal of goodness from other sources or at least preventing a greater evil from coming to pass. For example, murder may be wrong but if a single murder would save the human race, surely it would be a good trade to make?

There are two defenses of non-optimizing (new concept handle) moral rules. The first is that we are incapable of optimizing well and following poor rules well leads to better outcomes than following better rules poorly. This is Eliezer's point Ends Don't Justify the Means (Among Humans).The second defense is that strict rules which do not require any processing by the user are tamper-proof whereas more open, optimizing rules are not. Thou shalt not kill is simple and hard to misconstrue. Thou shalt not kill unless doing so is absolutely necessary is far, far easier to misconstrue. Sometimes this may happen by accident or as a product of an individual corruption or desire to benefit themselves, as Eliezer argues. My issue is that in many cases a conscious external force can easily manipulate a person following such an open moral rule into committing evil. I can convince a crowd of strongly left-leaning PHD students that we should not accept refugees in the space of a 30 minute public panel. It is a very simple matter for a gifted politician or a small team of intelligence officers/PR people to construct narratives which the average person will find persuasive. What this leads to is wars and hate. It contributed to the ovens in Auschwitz and to the 500'000 dead in Iraq and the destruction of Syria and Libya. A strict moral system which permits little interpretation seems likely to be far more resistant to these kinds of problems.

Good & Sacrifice. The darkness in the light.

To be good, you must do what is right. If you do what is right, it will often be against the interests of others. This means that they will try to stop you. They will impose costs on your actions in the hope of dissuading you. Hence, the only way in which to be good regardless of the strength of your opponents is to be good in spite of the consequences. This may mean giving up wealth, power or comfort to do what is right. It may mean giving up your life. This is easy. It may mean giving up the trust of others. It may mean giving up their lives and the lives of your family. This is harder. Beyond this, it may mean giving up everything else, giving up not only what you have but what others have. Giving up countless lives and hopes and dreams to do what is right. It is at this third point that the decision to do good can become evil. It is here where one desire consumes all others and in doing so consumes you. It is at this point that the light burns too bright, so bright that it not only dispels the shadows, but burns away everything else. This way lie dragons and dragons are terrifying.

Yet, when the darkness is deep enough the light can be worth the cost.