That is, no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure is capable of proving all truths about moral actions. Either moral systems are complete, or they are consistent. Consistency and completeness are requirements for optimization, so the idea of moral optimization is dead on arrival for me. It's simply not possible, and like the author one will drive themselves to insanity over trying.
Edit: I made an unfortunately error in the original version - accidentally mixing up consistent with inconsistent. My apologies for the confusion.
That's a good way to phrase it, and something I agree with. I'd heard the phrase "epistemological modesty" a while back, and it goes nicely with this - I think a great deal of harm is done in this world by people looking at other people suffering and either convincing themselves or being convinced that there's a greater systemic reason why those people need to suffer. Epistemological modesty suggests whatever grand designs we're contemplating are likely wrong, moral incompletionism suggests they can never be fully right, and both together suggest it's immoral to ignore suffering today because of some imagined future for some other people.
> moral incompletionism suggests they can never be fully right
Yes. My conclusions are twofold.
1. Attempting to create a complete and consistent moral framework is a fools errand. There will always be either moral gaps (cases that are outside the moral framework's ability to judge), or moral inconsistencies (cases where we have two incompatible moral conclusions).
2. Attempting to render a moral framework invalid by either pointing out its incompleteness or its inconsistency is not meaningful - since all moral frameworks are susceptible to one or both of these flaws. Therefore our justification for deciding the virtues of a moral framework cannot be that it is consistent nor complete - rather it has to be something else entirely.
We have to accept that there are unknowable or conflicting moral facts and each of these results in moral ambiguity either by absence or excess. This is independent of any particular moral framework (Yes even yours dear reader).
> I think a great deal of harm is done in this world by people looking at other people suffering and either convincing themselves or being convinced that there's a greater systemic reason why those people need to suffer.
Oh wow, this puts words to an insight I've had and lived by for a long time.
I think I'm not just a moral incompletist but also a moral inconsistentist.
My take on the trolley problem is that while it's "best" in some sense to throw the lever, it's not wrong not to. And generally the goal should be "tend towards greater than zero" instead of "maximize morality points". Missed opportunities for moral behavior count as 0 and carry that neutral emotional valence instead of being a negative thing to agonize over.
Those are not moral systems, they're sentences with undefined meaning. "Good" and "bad" need to be defined, they can't exist independently, like some intrinsic property of the universe (say, like the fine-structure constant). One could say that's the essential purpose of any moral system: to define what "good" and "bad" mean.
> "Good" and "bad" need to be defined, they can't exist independently, like some intrinsic property of the universe.
I'd argue the opposite from empirics. The function of a moral framework is to essentialize good and bad so that it appears as an intrinsic property of the universe. All moral frameworks do this.
This is going to get both a bit technical and sociological, but taking a page out of Burger and Luckmann, the idea that good and bad are essential universal properties of actions is definitionally reification. I'd add that even if good an bad aren't directly essentialized, they are grounded in properties that are. Moral facts cannot escape the Münchhausen trilemma.
> Those are not moral systems, they're sentences with undefined meaning.
My biggest gripe (& source of hatred) with this reasoning is that you can do this infinitely without any remorse. It's a black hole, wherein all effort becomes wasted because the other side refuses to pin down definitions, and instead goes "nuh uh, not like that" infinitely.
But fine then. Here's what I think they're trying to do.
Given a universal set encompassing all actions (defined as A):
- All actions within A are permitted without question, and are deemed to be unquestionably positive to everyone, without exceptions.
OR
- All actions within A are forbidden without question, and are deemed to be unquestionably negative to everyone, without exceptions.
> One could say that's the essential purpose of any moral system: to define what "good" and "bad" mean.
Again, refer back to my utter hatred towards universal moral relativism.
> "Good" and "bad" need to be defined, they can't exist independently, like some intrinsic property of the universe (say, like the fine-structure constant).
Side note: Deriving from current physics, the universe deems maximum entropy as a moral imperative, and thus it can be reasoned that the destruction of all matter is morally good from the universe's perspective, including the destruction of all living life. By continuing to expand the universe & increase entropy, the universe has chosen to take such a moral stance.
It can thus be concluded that genocide, in accelerating towards maximum entropy, is deemed morally good by the universe. QED.
> the universe deems maximum entropy as a moral imperative
There is no necessary connection between entropy and morality, it is actually you who has put that connection there, hence proving the parent's point that good and evil are in the eye of the beholder; this is your personal view on entropy, not a universal one.
I see, what you're getting at. Yes. Thank you. Unfortunately, I'm no longer able to edit. I appreciate your patience, and help understanding the difference.
> Either moral systems are complete, or they are inconsistent.
That is interesting. I will be meditating if I can fully subscribe… maybe, but still not sure. What I can say, is that when I was 20 I thought I could clearly say what was right or wrong, then when I was 30, I had to change everything, then with 40… so yeah…
Good point. People tend to say we mellow with age, I think it's that we have more experience that can help us grow more wise. For myself, in my mid-20s, I became a Christian and fell into the trap of religious perfectionism. In my mid-30s I began to see some cracks in what I was being told. (skipping forward) I now understand, in my mid-60s, that God doesn't demand perfectionism, but effort. When I fail, I just get back up and continue to believe that I'll do better next time, knowing there will likely be several more next times.
Hears very very similar to my experience, but still not in the 60's :)
There was a commercial on TV, it was in a barber shop. One guy talking to the barber: "When I was 20 I thought I knew everything, then I got married. At age 30 I thought I knew it, but then I got a baby. With 40 I started to think I was almost there, but then my father died. At 50 again, I thought I was finally understanding life, but then the kids left home. Now I'm almost 60, and finally, this time, I think I know something about life." At that moment an old man on the back stands up and interjects "I'm 85, can you explain it to me, because I still have no idea!"
I like this as a joke, but if your moral questions involve natural numbers in any way and your moral framework does not accommodate Peano arithmetic, then it is incomplete. :)
I am mostly joking, but I do think that if just about any logical framework is provably incomplete, then completeness is a lot to ask of a moral framework. So yes, what you said.
Belief systems generally lack properties of identity to prove anything by logic or rational method.
The first thing you need to prove anything is an objective unique definition, which isn't generally possible in the realm of the mind for all people, because we generally lack knowing or sufficient perception, making comparisons subjective.
There could be optimization towards minimizing objectively destructive acts (evil), and the blindness associated with evil people , through rational objective practices and measures. Evil people being those who commit evil acts while blinding themselves in acts of self-violation, to the consequences of their actions; repeating them.
Quite a lot of people today are no longer capable and fall to delusion because they were indoctrinated with false education and frameworks of thinking following a critical turn.
When the insane are running an insane asylum, everyone in there dies from starvation, its just a matter of time waiting for the right circumstances.
If you spend all your time worrying about how to be a good person, chances are you're not being a good person. Just go do nice things. Volunteer somewhere. Be of service. And stop worrying so much
Last Saturday, myself and two other firefighters managed to find a woman lost in a maze of 40+ miles of trails. Her hip had dislocated, she could not move. The temperatures were in the upper 20s (F) (-3C or so) with serious windchill amidst 35mph/56kph wind gusts. It was extremely dark. We stayed with her and tried to keep her as warm as possible until a UTV arrived to extricate her. I was home by 01:00, after 4hrs outside under the stars.
In the end we didn't really do much at all, but it felt like one of the most meaningful nights of my entire life.
Wouldn’t she have died from exposure if you hadn’t found her?
There’s a beautiful quote from a 2019 episode of the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, Auld Lang Syne. John Green recounts some advice he got while in college and working as a chaplain at a children’s hospital: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”
The FF/EMT who was on our team of 3 felt that she was likely 2hrs from hypothermic death. How accurate that is, I don't know. But basically, yes, she would have died if not found.
That is a epic story. What gear were you in, were you in structural gear or something else? Just the thought of hiking in my structural gear gives me blisters.
No structural gear for 2 of the 3 of us. I had civilian gear on other than my EMS jacket which despite not being "proper outdoor gear" is insanly warm. Thankfully I had also layered a merino wool base layer and my RAB thinsulate-y puffer jacket under that, REI expedition gloves and two layers of hats. One of my colleagues did not do so well, and was really inadequately dressed given that we had to strip down a bit to keep her warm. The 3rd person on the team wore his structural jacket and wildland helmet.
The UTV1 crew had their structural jackets on, but otherwise civilian.
100% ... In my life, I accepted a while back that I don't have to solve world hunger or cure cancer in order to be a good person - just be as courteous to others as I can; focus on the little things. For example, I always park my car in the back of parking lots (or otherwise far away) because I'm perfectly capable of walking, while others might struggle. Is that gonna get me a Nobel prize? Certainly not. But I like to think that, sometimes, maybe once per year, a person who struggles with mobility, like an elderly person or someone with an injury, is gonna struggle just a little bit less because I parked out back. No one's gonna build a statue of me for this, but if it helps just one person, that's a good thing. And it's really not that difficult for me to walk an extra 50 yards. LOL
I selfishly park in the back because I hate circling the lot looking for a spot. It may/nor be more time efficient on average, but I do not have to deal with that frustration just to save a few steps.
I selfishly park back a little ways myself, simply because far too many parking lots aren't designed for a full-size pickup. The extra steps are definitely worth the frustration saved for me, as well.
"Do no harm" is a far better precept than "be courteous". Lots of harm has been done by courteous people that I'm sure were perfectly lovely to their inner circle and local neighborhood.
This is a good habit for any able bodied person to get into. Not only can it help out someone who needs a closer spot, it doesn't even cost you time on average since you're less likely to be held up by traffic getting in or out of the spot. Plus adding a little more walking into the day is healthy.
I always shake my head at healthy people who block the traffic lane for minutes waiting for someone to load groceries and free up a specific spot, when there are dozens of open spots 40 ft away. Their laziness isn't even saving them any time or aggravation.
Why is it that only "doing nice things" or "volunteering your time" makes you a good person? Does a traffic engineer not better the lives of others? What about a farmer? Where does the food served in a soup kitchen come from if not from the sweat of the farmer's brow? The shelter over everyone's head only exists because truckers transported the materials. Simply existing in a way that isn't purely self-serving is often enough to be hugely helpful to others.
I'm somewhat certain that people who worry about whether they're good people are usually better than people who don't think much about it.
I've not met many people who thoughtfully engage with the question of how to live a moral life, only to just not put any of it into practice. I've met plenty of people who barely think about it, and don't consider it a question of much interest.
Exactly. What I take away from that passage is "most of the time it's really not hard to figure out how to be a good person so you're better off actually taking some concrete positive action than spending further time navel-gazing".
Like in TFA. Just be kind to others. Be thoughtful. Be nice to people even when you don't have to be. Try to make life better for those around you. But also be kind to yourself. Don't worry about doing the best thing. Just try to do some good things. Everything will work out ok.
The root of why that doesn't work is because you're mostly thinking about yourself still. "am >>I<< a good person?". Good people spend more time thinking about others, how to make them feel better, how to help. Obviously there's a balance to be had, as you can end up burning out from never taking your own needs into consideration.
i think its the opposite. if you do actions that you consider to be good without considering how to be good more effectively, you probably just like the feeling of thinking of yourself as a good person more than actually being a good person
doing good is less about how happy it makes you feel and more about, well, how much you do good
> Maybe it's me, but I don't think being a good person really requires that much thought.
It doesn't, but some especially sadistic people want to make it so, and similarly chastise & ostracize you for not following their diktats to ( (the letter XOR the spirit) AND (the letter XNOR the spirit) ).
Cynically, the more you think about being a good person, the more superior you can feel to others who don't think about it as much. This interpretation fits with explanations for Trump's win, that intellectuals like Vox readers have become detached from common concerns and also smug.
"Being a good person" has been a theme in my entire adult life. I'm a member of an organization that stresses personal improvement (amongst other things).
"Being a good person" can vary, by culture and context.
For example, some cultures prescribe brusqueness, and direct communication, while other cultures want us to always "beat around the bush," before coming to the point. Think New York City, versus Richmond, Virginia.
These are just communication styles, but they can be interpreted as attacking, or dishonesty. In either case, it's entirely possible for someone to label the other as "not-nice," when the opposite may actually be the case.
I have found that fundamental Empathy, and reducing my own self-centeredness helps. Accepting others, and always looking for the good, before the bad, has helped me.
And, as has been pointed out, the older I get, the less simple my relationships are, with others.
> For example, some cultures prescribe brusqueness, and direct communication, while other cultures want us to always "beat around the bush," before coming to the point. Think New York City, versus Richmond, Virginia.
> I'm a member of an organization that stresses personal improvement (amongst other things).
Do you mind if I ask what kind of organization? I’ve struggled to find active groups focused on values/principles instead of hobbies. Or maybe by organization, you mean work?
I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness.
Being able to fairly easily put myself in someone else's shoes is pretty much the only thing I actually like about myself. I feel like part of what defines us as a species is learning how to understand people who do not deserve us to understand them.
In 2023 my iPhone was stolen (story is parent to the linked comment). They eventually caught the kid who stole the phone, and I refused to press charges. Pretty much everyone thought I was dumb for doing that, but I didn't see it that way; I didn't see any good coming from throwing a 17 year old kid into jail, and I remember how stupid I was when I was 17.
I doubt he's going to have some Les Misérables moment and turn his life around, but I would hope that if I were caught for something stupid when I was 17 someone else would have extended me the same benefit of the doubt. I don't regret it.
It is not. But also, empathy is not the same thing as kindness.
Empathy, as you mentioned, is the ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes. To imagine what is like to be other.
Fraudsters, cheaters, psycopaths. All of these are great empaths. They understand others in a deep level. But they're not kind, they are ruthless.
> I feel like part of what defines us as a species is learning how to understand people who do not deserve us to understand them.
Here you are talking about kindness. I think similarly.
I also believe this is correlated with creativity and collaboration skills. To me, there is something about the inner act of kind understanding that seems to be a _prerequisite_ for advanced communication. Totally out of my ass, I'm no psychologist.
> I would hope that if I were caught for something stupid when I was 17 someone else would have extended me the same benefit of the doubt
Not only you understood that, but you were able to communicate something to the kid that is remarkably uncommunicable. The kind act is also a kind message, you _meant it_ as a message somehow. Not all empaths want or can do that.
I don't think I disagree with anything you said (though I'm hesitant to call myself creative).
I guess when I say "empathy", I also mean "feeling someone's pain", in addition to the "someone else's shoes".
I think being able to understand someone's situation, and see how they're actually hurting, and how you'd hurt if someone did that to you, is the part of empathy/kindness that is a key ingredient in being a "decent human". I'm not perfect at it, obviously, I've acted selfishly plenty of times and I regret the times that I have, but it's the closest thing I have to a "moral code".
In regards to this kid, I just remember how angry I was at everything when I was 17. I hated going to school, I hated most of my teachers, I hated most of my classmates, I hated girls who wouldn't date me, and I hated guys who wouldn't be my friend. I was an idiot. It's a tough age for anyone, and I think a lot of people (particularly those in charge the US penal codes) forget that fact.
Note the researchers mentioning a "social contagion" that encourages empathy (another one of your kind crying, you cry). The goal of the experiment is to detect an even deeper kind of empathy (the savior rat is also in high stress and must overcome its instincts to save his fellow rat).
The thing you did for the kid required much more sophistication than that. Some of that sophistication comes from or manifests as empathy, in the sense that they're correlated.
I'm also saying it in a broader sense than only biological in rats. But that's the part that science has no data yet, so that's why I say it comes from my conjecturing ass.
Empathy is I feel what you feel. Compassion is I understand what you feel, how can we help? It is usually better to aim for compassion because if a person is having a crisis you don't want to go down in flames with them, compassion gives us emotional space to be helpful rather than affected by emotions that can pull us down.
>I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness.
To put it in a different context, the psychologist Paul Bloom wrote an interesting book titled "Against Empathy." He makes a distinction between "emotional empathy" and "cognitive empathy". He is an advocate of the latter, while acknowledging that the former can lead to many sub-optimal outcomes.
I'm not terribly concerned with optimizing, honestly. I try and make decisions that I'm unlikely to regret, at least not for long term. Hurting someone, or not helping someone that I should have helped, are things that I end up really regretting, and those are the things that keep me up at night.
I don't lose a lot of sleep for doing something that I genuinely thought was right. If someone takes advantage of my empathetic nature and exploits me, I'm not exactly slap-happy about it, but I can go to bed knowing that I did the right thing, and that person is just an asshole.
Pretty much every single bad thing I've done that I lose sleep over has come as a direct result of me trying to "override" my natural empathy. I'm done doing that.
An economists perspective would be that your utility function can be whatever you want. According to what you said above, you would be minimizing regret, which is an optimization goal (although it sounds overly dry in that context).
Blooms point is that when we take on the emotions of someone else, it has the ability to override our rational decision making and that rational decisions tend to lead to objectively better outcomes.
There's probably some truth to this, and I suppose you can define "objectively better" as "maximizing your optimization goal" or "minimizing the bad stuff" or something, quantifying that however you want.
That said, I'm not 100% convinced that my "rational brain" actually is better at making decisions that minimize regret than just relying on emotions. My rational brain is very good at rationalizing shit to where I can convince myself that something that's very obviously bad is "actually ok when you think about it like this...", and then I regret it afterwards.
At least for me, that doesn't really happen when I just rely heavily on my emotional brain.
We typically make decisions with our emotional mind, and justify it with our rational mind after the fact. I believe Bloom is in the camp that we can override that initial emotional impulse, but there are people who disagree with him. In any event, if the end goal is emotional ("minimize regret") I'm not sure there's much to be gained by bringing the rational into it.
The biggest takeaway I had from his book is that being overly emotionally empathetic can make us biased and lose out on the bigger picture, like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs. (There are other biased aspects, like the fact that we tend to empathize more with people who are similar to us, that can lead to obvious less-than-great outcomes.)
> like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs
Yeah, that's fair.
In my previous apartment, there was a guy named Julius. I really liked him, he was very pleasant to talk to, funny, charming, and just very nice.
We were in that apartment for three years, and nothing too remarkable happened, but the last year, Julius fell into some kind of lifestyle that I'm unsure of the details of, but ended up with him constantly stoned, missing teeth, and evicted from the apartment.
He was still in my neighborhood (homeless as far as I could tell), and he would still talk to me, always really polite, but with increasingly-yellow eyes, and it made me really sad, because I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone, let alone someone who was always kind to me.
My wife and I discussed maybe giving him some money to try to get back on his feet, but we decided against it because we were confident that if we did it would likely go to drugs. We really wanted to help, but we were afraid, like you said, it would be a short-term want overshadowing a long term gain.
If I had genuinely thought that writing him a check for $1,000 would dramatically improve his life, I would have done it in a heartbeat, but I didn't, and I felt like there was a good chance it would fuel a bender that would lead to an overdose.
I would occasionally buy him lunch at the nearby Wendy's, and I offered to try and help him fix up his resume to maybe make him more employable, but nothing ever came of that.
We eventually moved from that apartment and I'm not sure what happened to Julius. I hope he's ok, but I suspect that he's probably dead now, from an overdose or alcohol poisoning. A part of me wishes I had given him some money to dig himself out, but I think I made the right choice.
I don't lose sleep over my actions on that one; there wasn't really anything I could have done much different. Sometimes sad shit just happens, and it's no one's fault.
Do they throw 17 yos in jail, where you live? If so, do they do that over stealing a phone? If so... maybe it would be more moral in stepping into a political career and try to change some laws?
Yeah. He never got specific, but I think so. However, this was also "Down South," where the rich folks literally have the prosecutors and police on their payroll.
I can't even imagine how much prison would fuck me up.
Between potential sexual abuse, being around a lot of violent people, the general disregard Americans have for prisoners and convicted felons and their well-being, and the "doing what you have to to survive" mentality that seems to scar incarcerated people, it would be hard for it not to change you as a person.
I really hate how the US handles prisons, and I really hate the "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality we have here. I hope it's obvious, that's not something I agree with.
But he did burgle a house, so obviously he had some pre-existing behavioral issues, right? And those are probably not gone.
> Most of the anger came from prison, and from being screwed over, to be thrown in there.
That clearly illustrates that he didn't progress at all in his understanding of life. I'd be afraid to live within few kilometers of him let alone having him work at my company if I had one
I have, however, been dealing with after-incarceration folks for a few decades, and there's a particular type of attitude that is absolutely required to survive, inside, and that must be completely stripped away, once they get out, as it is pure poison, outside the wall.
Tons of factors in the US for this stuff; which state you're in, how they stole the phone (e.g. violent vs. just grabbing it off a table when the owner isn't looking), prior history, if they're tried as a child vs adult, and (let's be honest) if they can afford a good lawyer.
It definitely wouldn't be "weird" to throw a 17 year old in jail for stealing an iPhone, particularly in my case it would likely have been tried as a "mugging" and I suspect classified in the "violent" category (even though I was unharmed).
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to throw the book at this kid, it did kind of cause a bit of frustration and trauma that I still haven't completely worked through, but I still think I made the right choice, even if everyone else in my life disagrees.
A friend of mine got life in prison with no parole at 17.
I myself got 6 months jail time at 17 after being subject to a highly illegal and corrupt legal racket in a small town, when a meth-dealing police officer planted weed on me at the scene of an accident. I was also homeless. Good times.
I really resonate with this sentiment and want to share a similar story.
Where I live, supermarkets have a reception where you can leave your belongings while you're shopping. The employee in charge gives you a numbered card that matches the drawer in which they stored your things (all of this is handled by the employee) and off you go. No keys or anything, only a drawer with a card.
A few months ago I left my backpack at a one of these. 20 minutes later, as I was about to leave, I went to return the card in order to retrieve my stuff and to my surprise they gave me someone else's backpack.
I kindly asked what happened and after the manager had gone to check the CCTV footage they told me they gave my backpack to another customer. The problem? The numbered card didn't match the drawer and no one had realised. And there I was with the stranger's backpack and no way to contact him.
I agreed to wait until this man came back to return my stuff so we could switch backpacks (he had to; his work ID was on his backpack). I went home, told my family what happened, and they asked me what I told the supermarket staff. "Nothing, I'm just gonna wait" I said, and they rambled on about how I should have yelled at them and made a scene and maybe even made them fire the employee that grabbed my backpack.
I didn't do any of that because I precisely didn't want them to fire the poor minimum wage worker. Besides, I understood all of this happened because the system of numbered card/open drawer is completely broken. It wasn't relly the employee's fault; although it was his mistake not checking the numbers not matching. Yelling wouldn't have fixed anything.
I got my backpack back the next morning. No one was fired. The supermarket manager didn't even apologize for the inconvenience though, but ok.
I think you did the right thing. Mistakes happen, and very little good would come out of demanding that this person gets fired as a result of one (though the employee probably did deserve a bit of embarrassment). The manager probably should have apologized, but it's not the end of the world.
I will admit that I get a bit paranoid with those bag-check things at the stores here. At the stores in my neighborhood, they know me well enough to where they almost never even check my card, it would be super easy for me to grab someone else's bag. I've never done it, I don't want to do it, but I could...that's why I usually don't go directly before or after work, because I don't want my bag with an expensive Macbook to get stolen.
Those with a lot of introspection can do this, and it can be a benefit to yourself and others when used correctly.
In my opinion, you were dumb for doing that, but I can't say I haven't done something similar. Given my experience, I wouldn't do this again.
My experience involved a crazed homeowner in their 40s shooting at me standing on the public sidewalk for taking pictures of the neighborhood for a realtor, this was around 2009. They thought I worked for their mortgage lender who was foreclosing.
The wood fence took most of the damage, but there were kids playing in the paved cul-de-sac right behind where I was standing. No serious injuries, thankfully, and the police confiscated the firearm. I didn't press charges, because I empathized as my family had people who lost their entire retirements in the fallout from the market and that was real fresh.
I would press charges today having had that experience (and others). Very few people change themselves unless they are forced to through isolated introspection or negative circumstance. Being young, or stupid, or a victim, isn't a defensible justification. Its letting them off the hook for their actions without consequence.
I would press charges, too. Shooting is a lot different from stealing.
I might not let people off the hook, because I think it might change them, but it might change someone else who saw it happen, or, maybe, a family member that depends on them.
This goes doubly true, these days, with everything being live-streamed.
I get a little nauseous, though, at some of the staged crap, out there.
It is different from stealing, but crimes can escalate quickly and without warning.
What people don't realize is when these type of things happen, if you haven't experienced it before, its surreal, and it can take a moment to realize, recognize and react. Even after the fact, with close calls there's a lot of processing and grappling with your own mortality.
All you really see in the moment is a white, old rundown wood fence that suddenly becomes a cloud of flying splinters and wood chips. It is very different from how its portrayed in the media.
I'm now a big believer that proper firearm safety and handling training should be mandatory for everyone by 18. You recognize the sounds, you see the effect, you can react much quicker with the experience imparted by training than without.
I totally agree about the staged stuff. Anything like that muddies the reality.
It's certainly violating and I was pretty upset to have my phone stolen, but there's always a risk of someone fucking you over for doing nearly anything. I said it in a sibling response; I don't lose sleep for doing something that I genuinely thought was right. I might be a bit more cautious now, but I cannot imagine a scenario where, if a 17 year old said he needed to call his mom, that I don't try and help somehow, though I'd probably point him to the nearest police station nowadays (it's NYC, they're everywhere).
Things would definitely be different if it were an armed robbery, however. The reason I didn't feel the need to press charges is because I genuinely don't think I was ever in any "danger". As far as I'm aware, the kid wasn't armed, outside of a light shove that was clearly not meant to hurt me, there wasn't even physical contact, so I think it was just some idiot teenager who snatched a phone.
If they had had a gun or a knife or physically assaulted me, I would probably have pressed charges, since that's a more-direct public safety issue at hand there.
> I didn't see any good coming from throwing a 17 year old kid into jail, and I remember how stupid I was when I was 17.
For example, being forced to confront the consequences of their actions at 17 when the punishment is lesser and likely to include diversion or similar might have prevented them from committing a similar crime when older and receiving a harsher penalty — which in your empathy, you ensured would happen by refusing to punish them. Their practice and willingness to use force, as described in your referenced comment, indicates this isn’t their first time committing such a crime. By normalizing that crime wouldn’t be punished, you created a worse situation.
You can see similar unfolding at scale in major US cities, where crime (particularly theft) skyrocketed — and intensified, eg the recent subway burnings in NYC. Without enforcing norms, they break down.
A good heuristic for me is “what happens when everybody behaves that way?” In this case, it leads to society degrading.
Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that this would go to grownup court and they’d be given the full consequences.
“Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away.
I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison. I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive.
I don’t know which stats you’re referring to, but I highly doubt that “yuppies not pressing charges against children stealing two year old iPhones” is a significant cause of a crime uptake.
the irony in calling someone "extremely naive" while talking about a 17 year old getting prison time for snatching a phone. on top of the rest of the posts
> “Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away.
People call it “toxic empathy” not because empathy is inherently wrong, but because it leads to people such as yourself minimizing the use of force in a crime (which you admit this was) while showing selective empathy only for the perpetrator and not their future victims.
> Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”.
> I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison.
These both sounds like you’re rationalizing an emotive decision, post hoc.
> I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive.
They likely would’ve negotiated a plea for a misdemeanor and treatment on a first offense, in the US. Even first time lower felonies result in supervised probation and mandatory treatment, eg, the recommended outcome for drug felonies.
Again, you seem to be focusing entirely on your feelings — without an honest account of either the likely outcome of prosecution, the criminal’s future (having normalized violent robberies), or their future victims.
This is why it’s called “toxic empathy”: because you’re soothing your own feelings without engaging in rational analysis nor true empathy, eg, by understanding that sometimes criminals turn their lives around because they’re punished or that future victims deserve your care also.
No, you’re making a lot of assertions here that are not founded.
> while showing selective empathy only for the perpetrator and not their future victims.
Actually that’s not what I did. I didn’t really concede them “using force”, a light shove really isn’t “force” any more than an asshole pushing his way onto the subway is “using force”, and I said in sibling comments that I would have pressed charges if I genuinely thought that there was any real risk of danger on my end.
And again, I absolutely do not concede that putting a kid through the system is automatically going to lead to better results.
> These both sounds like you’re rationalizing an emotive decision, post hoc.
I am not rationalizing a decision “post hoc”, because that was literally the decision making process that was being employed when I was given the option to press charges. You can say it was dumb, that’s fine, but it’s not “post hoc”, because it’s not “post”.
> you’re soothing your own feelings without engaging in rational analysis nor true empathy, eg, by understanding that sometimes criminals turn their lives around because they’re punished or that future victims deserve your care also.
That can happen, but that’s not usually what happens when people get put through the system. You have no reason to think that bureaucratically punishing a child is going to force them to turn their life around. You’re asserting it.
I do not agree with your characterization of my character as “toxic empathy”.
Frankly I find this line of thinking pretty tiring, with people pretending that they care about abstract “future victims”, that may or may not exist, as a means of LARPing empathy.
You ignored the expected outcomes to emphasize your emotional rationalization based on “jailing a child”. That was never likely to happen, based on how US law works. For theft, even felony theft, you’re usually talking about supervised probation on a first offense — the same as felony drug offenses. There’s a whole chart of proscribed sentences based on offense and contributing factors.
> That can happen, but that’s not usually what happens when people get put through the system.
But that’s not the relevant question, eg, you’re ignoring the fact most thieves don’t stop because someone declined to prosecute them, either. You’re holding me to standards you didn’t apply to yourself.
The relevant question is — “for serial criminals who later stopped, what caused them to?”
In many cases, being jailed does stop their repeated criminality or stop the pathway of escalation. By contrast, there’s also many people who because they’re not punished, continue to escalate until they commit a violent offense and the state is forced to jail them.
> Frankly I find this line of thinking pretty tiring, with people pretending that they care about abstract “future victims”, that may or may not exist, as a means of LARPing empathy.
We’re discussing practiced criminals who likely offended before and will again — and who were physically aggressive with their victim.
You’re accusing me of “LARPing” empathy, but you’re showing time after time you’re not engaging in empathy (either understanding the thieves nor concern about victims), but soothing your emotions. That you don’t think future victims matter or people are genuinely concerned about them speaks to your own lack of empathy — both in general (ie, you can’t imagine how the person who stole from you might harm someone else and that person might be hurt) and in particular (ie, you can’t imagine how I’d genuinely be concerned about other victims, because that’s not how you feel).
You’re the one LARPing empathy to cover for your toxic emotionally driven conduct.
First, calling my conduct “emotionally driven” really doesn’t work as an insult for me.
I still don’t consider what I have done as “toxic”. I used discretion to not press charges because I don’t think that pushing a kid through the system was going to lead to anything good.
Let’s say grant that a stolen iPhone wouldn’t lead to jail time, let’s say I am wrong about that. Even if that’s the case, if I genuinely believed that jail time was in the picture, are you saying that my decision here was “rational”?
Also, no, you’re the one LARPing. You’re inventing future victims that you do not have any reason to think exist as a means of dismissing my point.
> they can be interpreted as attacking, or weakness
I think a more constructive way to look at it is one style puts a higher cost on wasting time than and the other style puts a higher cost on appearing unsympathetic. I call it "country style" (putting more value on appearing empathetic than being time-efficient) and "city style" (the opposite). People who grow up in one environment or the other often have trouble transitioning to the other simply because they don't understand that there are different quality metrics in play.
But both of those are unnecessarily uncharitable readings. Country style is neither weak nor dishonest, it's just different. A lot of country-style people consider city-style to be "rude" but it's not, it's just more efficient than they're used to.
I was raised very loosely Lutheran (Christian). We barely went to church and stopped entirely after I was confirmed. I practice it exactly 0% now and have never in my adult life.
However I feel like something got cooked into me, and maybe even my parents, that gives me a bit of guidance here. I can't explain it but I feel like I have a foundation that is preventing me from feeling the empty nihilism that plagues a lot of folks.
Christianity teaches we are all children of God, brothers and sisters with equal dignity and respect and heirs to a heavenly kingdom.
We reject the Trolley problem. We reject the idea of starving sailors on a deserted island should draw lots and eat one of their own.
To argue otherwise is to agree with what we decried about ancient societies. Sacrificing children/prisoners/slaves to Moloch for own benefit is the sure path to hell.
"I feared I’d just lost my optimal soulmate and was now doomed to a suboptimal life, one that wouldn’t be as meaningful as it could be, one that fell short of its potential" definitely resonates.
This mindset is such a trap. It leads to worse outcomes.
Out of all the people you can pair-bond with, and for some definition of soulmateness, one person is the greatest.
In the space of all the decisions you could’ve made in your life, there are some paths that would’ve indeed led you to that person.
But that person’s identity, and that path, are simply unknowable. Even if they were knowable, odds are you’d screw up somewhere down the line, and know that you did so, and that could destroy a person.
Similarly, your life definitely isn’t as meaningful as it could possibly have been (for some definition of meaning), and it definitely has fallen short of its potential. Your life is suboptimal. Everyone’s is.
This is human. This is ok.
To be clear: it’s up to you to decide whether this is ok. If you decide it’s not ok, then as you agonize over the delta between your hypothetical maximized self and your actual self, you will miss your life.
That hypothetical maximized self doesn’t exist. Fuck ‘em. You exist. You’re the only version of you that matters.
I could not disagree more. There are 1000s of examples of people becoming better people after forgetting. See "Regarding Henry" and Heidegger "Being and time."
I always tell my daughter to be a kind person because there is currently an oversupply of assholes. I try to compliment someone on something whenever I go out and about. I like your hair, I like your shirt, etc. It's the simple things.
The author and their anecdotes seem like compulsive behavior/thinking. They'll hopefully get over it once life beats them down a bit more. Just be good to people, don't over think it.
> I always tell my daughter to be a kind person because there is currently an oversupply of assholes.
I'm sorry to hear that. I don't want to come across as harsh, but your approach/wording seems condescending, egotistical, and ultimately an empty way to live. Wise people learn by observing others (as the saying goes), but allowing others to dictate who you are reflects a lack of character IMO.
I'm guessing from your reply that you don't think its important to emphasise kindness as part of supporting your childrens' growth. If that is the case, what do you emphasise if anything?
Kindness has a merit on it's own and ultimately it's a good idea for a person to decide what they want to be and take responsibility for their choices.
Being kind "because there are too many unkind people out there" sounds wrong. I have no idea how they measured the "too many unkind people out there" but lets assume for a moment this balance shifts - then what? They should be unkind because there are too many kind people out there? Is this is a simple act of balancing the two sides?
I think the sentiment is that it feels like theres a lot of unkindness in the world and that makes it a worse place and you can either be part of that or you can make the world a better place by striving to be kind. Thats my interpretation anyway.
It sounds bad because the root comment is priming a negative perspective of the world.
They could have said:
"Most people are kind. Be kind and most people will be kind back." Or something with positive intent. Instead they seem to be priming a superiority trip.
I have a number of criticisms of the article and wish that the author of the article had a bit more philosophical training.
While the author doesn't explicate it, the author is operating within a particular moral framework that has certain conclusions on what actions are moral in certain situations, and in this framework, moral actions can bring the agent suffering. The article focuses on one category of moral action. The author observes that it is possible for a person who continually internally contemplates and "tries" to externally act according to that moral calculus to do so in a way that brings them to a psychological suffering. (My description is more general; the author uses 'optimization' to describe their) Hereafter, we shall to 'continual internal contemplation and "trying" to externally act according to that moral calculus to do so in a way that brings one psychological suffering.' by Practice.
They want to argue that this Practice is not itself morally good (the first paragraph) I find the author's argument incomplete. They seem to implicitly make the additional reasoning steps: because the Practicioner may themself suffer greatly, this Practice is not moral. This step needs support. After all, if I fracture a leg to save a healthy baby from a car accident, that's probably a moral act even though it brings me suffering.
I shall provide an argument for this step that works in most cases (and in exactly the cases that I think it should work for). Observe that most parents recognize that it is probably good to stay healthy, because a healthy parent has the capacity to contribute more to their children's happiness. But a parent would still fracture a leg to save their child from a car accident. Here, the moral calculus is more visible because we are substituted in the more visible physical health rather than psychological safety, and the more proximate children for the remote person. Similarly, a Practicioner should desist to the extent that they can sustain their psychological health that they have the capacity to contribute more to good. And there are cases where that psychological health ought to be sacrificed, because the external situation is sufficiently critical.
I will also talk about the psychology in the analogy that I have given. There are frequently times where parents don't see that their health is important to the well-being of their children, and allow themselves to abuse their health for unimportant reasons/causes. Analogically, a Practicioner like the author and their peers pursuing 'optimization' likely allowed their psychological well-being to suffer for unimportant reasons/causes.
Another point: a parent who has made a visible sacrifice for their child(ren) often feels good about it. But this psychological response to a sacrifice is conditional on the situation being simple enough to be "emotionally recognizable". As an analogy, suppose that through a charity you have donated money to fund a life-saving operation of a distant child, and despite paper and institutional guarantees, you do not so much even see a photo of the person whose life you have saved. That emotionally hits very different as spending the same amount for a relative that you meet often, and also for one's own child; after all, direct sense-perception provides very good evidence. As a methodological point, I think it helps to explore cognitively building the infrastructure so that you feel the psychologically appropriate reward to sacrifices for sufficiently certain good, but remote, causes.
Finally, note that there are moral frameworks for which this argument is completely irrelevant. For example, Aristippus argues that one should practice instant gratification, in which case such deliberation on methods seems irrelevant.
While you cant optimise your way to bieng a good person, there are companys with the right conections and skills to do it for you. Reputaion cleaning or some simlar term, for the do it yourselfers, the newspaper and publishing industry
offers indidvuals the option of having articles including there criminality, etc, pulled, deleeted.
The Great(est) Command(ment) is to love God with all our being, and then to love our neighbors as ourself, not more, not less.
Being kind, generous, forgiving, helpful, and compassionate are some of the ways we can love people, and should, in order to be a good person who reaps happiness in their life. God does not force us to do this, and freely allows us to choose each virtue's corresponding vice, if we wish, instead.
God would, however, prefer us to treat each other well and form loving societies, but our ignorance of what good even is, as well as or selfishnesses that rebel against lovingly curious attitudes and behaviors, are preventing our moving towards such positive self-evolution.
We all have the choice to embark on becoming filled with love towards each other; a person does not need God's help to choose to be good by embracing a more virtuous life that cares for others, but the Creator just might be essential for our becoming actually transformed into a really, really good person. In fact, connecting with the Ultimate Loner just might be an integral part of what is possible in the human experience.
And I'm using "just might" as a big ol' hint that that is actually the truth of our reality, which is exactly what it is, my friends.
The choice to seek, learn, and believe the truth is everyone's human right. We each exercise that right every moment of every day, for good or ill, in loving care or selfish callousness.
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There's so much evil in this world (the UK rapes scandal which implicated countless men comes to mind [1]) that simply by being not evil and by denouncing evil you're already way better than many.
Doing no harm to anyone is being good enough.
The absolute worst, to me, are those who always seek to pardon evil. For example those who look for excuses to explain the behavior of child rapists and why we should give them a second chance etc.
These people, who pretend to be good, are actually complicit of the pure evil that exists and persists on earth.
Compassion, when it comes at the expense of victims, becomes evil.
You can be a good person by minimizing being objectively evil. If you can't see things you can't optimize things, which the title suggests, but the content itself is lacking in proper support while not covering certain obvious aspects, not lacking in volume. They were quite mistaken about a number of things.
Objectively, evil people (at least in the past) is characterized by a willful blindness to the consequences of said person's evil actions. Evil acts being objectively destructive acts.
Altruism and its derivatives as belief systems are evil.
They are value systems where a person's worth is only based upon what they give up to others. Under such belief systems, if you aren't selfless, you are evil and have no worth.
People use false claims and false justification under these systems, of all sorts, to blind themselves and by extension result in destructive acts towards the ideal of what the system considers good.
To be selfless, and impose that on others, eventually to the point of destruction (others), and eventual self-destruction (self). Its all quite wrong.
You can't optimize towards truth or beneficial outcomes, if you don't recognize the truth or those outcomes. Generally speaking, there are far more things that you can do that are destructive, than there are those that are beneficial.
Its also of primary important to retain an objective grip on reality. Blindness leads to delusion.
Accept that you are evil and just try to do some good every now and then. It's what Christians are told. But somehow everybody seems to be missing the point.
Bro, effective altruism is a simple thing: if you have some altruistic goal, you’ll get better results if you choose things that are good at getting the goal. It doesn’t require that your utility function matches anyone else’s.
For instance, I don’t think life (including human) is inherently worth anything so it’s not a big deal if a bunch of kids somewhere die of guinea worm. But for my objectives my charitable giving yields better outcomes. I’m happy with that.
Effective Altruism is a scam. Sam Bankman Fried's guru tried to distance itself from the fraud that happened, tweeting he needed to "reflect" on what happened but... He hasn't handed back the 15 million GBP property bought in England with stolen funds donated by SBF. Now even to this day there are still funds being clawed back from the Enron scam (or at least there was still a few years ago) so that mansion may be clawed back from the Effective Altruism movement, even if it take years.
Sadly, "therapy speak" entering in to someone's life can be its own form of getting worse.
Still, I think your point is largely fair and correct. Easy to agree with the headline, in that you likely won't optimize your way to being a good person. But you can use optimization ideas to remove things that are making you not a good person. Indeed, the main optimization idea is to measure something, and then take action to move it in the direction you prefer. If what you are doing isn't moving in that direction, you aren't optimizing for it anymore.
therapy will generally recommend removing the need to optimize entirely, in order to achieve an emotional homeostasis (particularly given that the need to optimize often leads to obsessive/compulsive behavior).
I think you are overestimating how much an average person can change itself. I’ve seen therapy helping to surmount some hurdles, but completely changing a person, in a positive way, rarely. Again keyword: average.
If you imagine therapy as a way to condition some sort of gradient descent on emotions and awareness you can already see the problem.
The implication of your statement is you eventually reach some global optima. The reality is you become over-aware of some things and under-aware of others. This is the local optima and you've been caught in a bowl. Therapy "works" when your local optima is "good enough" for your own definition of done. However, it can often take several "bumps" out of those local optima to find it and once again you haven't really "optimized" like you are implying.
I would think the focus on optimization of emotional and awareness skills would simply lead to more, not less, anxiety. It sounds like the same problem people have with always being online and being a good "global citizen". In this example, like your example, when you feed your learning algorithm data about some war in a far off land you necessarily reduce the weight on your immediate surroundings.
Therefore, I believe it's impossible to "optimize" such things without making significant learning losses. Better to succumb to the brownian motion of life - imo.
I read 5 vaguely written paragraphs of generalities and then am being told about the sham "effective altruists" who gave us Scam Bankman Fraud as their best known adherent.
This article doesn't say anything afaict.
Maybe it should start with "don't be a fake altruist"?
I'm a moral incompletist.
That is, no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure is capable of proving all truths about moral actions. Either moral systems are complete, or they are consistent. Consistency and completeness are requirements for optimization, so the idea of moral optimization is dead on arrival for me. It's simply not possible, and like the author one will drive themselves to insanity over trying.
Edit: I made an unfortunately error in the original version - accidentally mixing up consistent with inconsistent. My apologies for the confusion.
That's a good way to phrase it, and something I agree with. I'd heard the phrase "epistemological modesty" a while back, and it goes nicely with this - I think a great deal of harm is done in this world by people looking at other people suffering and either convincing themselves or being convinced that there's a greater systemic reason why those people need to suffer. Epistemological modesty suggests whatever grand designs we're contemplating are likely wrong, moral incompletionism suggests they can never be fully right, and both together suggest it's immoral to ignore suffering today because of some imagined future for some other people.
> moral incompletionism suggests they can never be fully right
Yes. My conclusions are twofold.
1. Attempting to create a complete and consistent moral framework is a fools errand. There will always be either moral gaps (cases that are outside the moral framework's ability to judge), or moral inconsistencies (cases where we have two incompatible moral conclusions).
2. Attempting to render a moral framework invalid by either pointing out its incompleteness or its inconsistency is not meaningful - since all moral frameworks are susceptible to one or both of these flaws. Therefore our justification for deciding the virtues of a moral framework cannot be that it is consistent nor complete - rather it has to be something else entirely.
We have to accept that there are unknowable or conflicting moral facts and each of these results in moral ambiguity either by absence or excess. This is independent of any particular moral framework (Yes even yours dear reader).
> I think a great deal of harm is done in this world by people looking at other people suffering and either convincing themselves or being convinced that there's a greater systemic reason why those people need to suffer.
Is that the "just world hypothesis" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy ?
I’d argue most attempts aren’t actually attempts to do good — they’re justifications for doing wrong.
Eg, DIE as a justification for systemic antisemitism in employment and education.
Oh wow, this puts words to an insight I've had and lived by for a long time.
I think I'm not just a moral incompletist but also a moral inconsistentist.
My take on the trolley problem is that while it's "best" in some sense to throw the lever, it's not wrong not to. And generally the goal should be "tend towards greater than zero" instead of "maximize morality points". Missed opportunities for moral behavior count as 0 and carry that neutral emotional valence instead of being a negative thing to agonize over.
>Either moral systems are complete, or they are inconsistent.
So you mean "incomplete or inconsistent"? It sounds like this is what you meant.
Then I disagree. Two examples of a complete and consistent (and computable) moral system:
* everything is good
* everything is evil
Those are not moral systems, they're sentences with undefined meaning. "Good" and "bad" need to be defined, they can't exist independently, like some intrinsic property of the universe (say, like the fine-structure constant). One could say that's the essential purpose of any moral system: to define what "good" and "bad" mean.
> "Good" and "bad" need to be defined, they can't exist independently, like some intrinsic property of the universe.
I'd argue the opposite from empirics. The function of a moral framework is to essentialize good and bad so that it appears as an intrinsic property of the universe. All moral frameworks do this.
This is going to get both a bit technical and sociological, but taking a page out of Burger and Luckmann, the idea that good and bad are essential universal properties of actions is definitionally reification. I'd add that even if good an bad aren't directly essentialized, they are grounded in properties that are. Moral facts cannot escape the Münchhausen trilemma.
> Those are not moral systems, they're sentences with undefined meaning.
My biggest gripe (& source of hatred) with this reasoning is that you can do this infinitely without any remorse. It's a black hole, wherein all effort becomes wasted because the other side refuses to pin down definitions, and instead goes "nuh uh, not like that" infinitely.
But fine then. Here's what I think they're trying to do.
Given a universal set encompassing all actions (defined as A):
- All actions within A are permitted without question, and are deemed to be unquestionably positive to everyone, without exceptions.
OR
- All actions within A are forbidden without question, and are deemed to be unquestionably negative to everyone, without exceptions.
> One could say that's the essential purpose of any moral system: to define what "good" and "bad" mean.
Again, refer back to my utter hatred towards universal moral relativism.
> "Good" and "bad" need to be defined, they can't exist independently, like some intrinsic property of the universe (say, like the fine-structure constant).
Side note: Deriving from current physics, the universe deems maximum entropy as a moral imperative, and thus it can be reasoned that the destruction of all matter is morally good from the universe's perspective, including the destruction of all living life. By continuing to expand the universe & increase entropy, the universe has chosen to take such a moral stance.
It can thus be concluded that genocide, in accelerating towards maximum entropy, is deemed morally good by the universe. QED.
> the universe deems maximum entropy as a moral imperative
There is no necessary connection between entropy and morality, it is actually you who has put that connection there, hence proving the parent's point that good and evil are in the eye of the beholder; this is your personal view on entropy, not a universal one.
d'oh. Thank you, You're right. Edited to reflect what I was trying to say.
It's actually still not exactly right - should be "Either moral systems are incomplete, or they are inconsistent".
Here's an example of a both incomplete and inconsistent Moral system: - Petting dogs is good - Petting cats is bad - Petting dogs is bad
I see, what you're getting at. Yes. Thank you. Unfortunately, I'm no longer able to edit. I appreciate your patience, and help understanding the difference.
> Either moral systems are complete, or they are inconsistent.
That is interesting. I will be meditating if I can fully subscribe… maybe, but still not sure. What I can say, is that when I was 20 I thought I could clearly say what was right or wrong, then when I was 30, I had to change everything, then with 40… so yeah…
Good point. People tend to say we mellow with age, I think it's that we have more experience that can help us grow more wise. For myself, in my mid-20s, I became a Christian and fell into the trap of religious perfectionism. In my mid-30s I began to see some cracks in what I was being told. (skipping forward) I now understand, in my mid-60s, that God doesn't demand perfectionism, but effort. When I fail, I just get back up and continue to believe that I'll do better next time, knowing there will likely be several more next times.
Hears very very similar to my experience, but still not in the 60's :)
There was a commercial on TV, it was in a barber shop. One guy talking to the barber: "When I was 20 I thought I knew everything, then I got married. At age 30 I thought I knew it, but then I got a baby. With 40 I started to think I was almost there, but then my father died. At 50 again, I thought I was finally understanding life, but then the kids left home. Now I'm almost 60, and finally, this time, I think I know something about life." At that moment an old man on the back stands up and interjects "I'm 85, can you explain it to me, because I still have no idea!"
As if there could be a complete moral framework without the power to express Peano arithmetic.
I like this as a joke, but if your moral questions involve natural numbers in any way and your moral framework does not accommodate Peano arithmetic, then it is incomplete. :)
I am mostly joking, but I do think that if just about any logical framework is provably incomplete, then completeness is a lot to ask of a moral framework. So yes, what you said.
Belief systems generally lack properties of identity to prove anything by logic or rational method.
The first thing you need to prove anything is an objective unique definition, which isn't generally possible in the realm of the mind for all people, because we generally lack knowing or sufficient perception, making comparisons subjective.
There could be optimization towards minimizing objectively destructive acts (evil), and the blindness associated with evil people , through rational objective practices and measures. Evil people being those who commit evil acts while blinding themselves in acts of self-violation, to the consequences of their actions; repeating them.
Quite a lot of people today are no longer capable and fall to delusion because they were indoctrinated with false education and frameworks of thinking following a critical turn.
When the insane are running an insane asylum, everyone in there dies from starvation, its just a matter of time waiting for the right circumstances.
If you spend all your time worrying about how to be a good person, chances are you're not being a good person. Just go do nice things. Volunteer somewhere. Be of service. And stop worrying so much
Last Saturday, myself and two other firefighters managed to find a woman lost in a maze of 40+ miles of trails. Her hip had dislocated, she could not move. The temperatures were in the upper 20s (F) (-3C or so) with serious windchill amidst 35mph/56kph wind gusts. It was extremely dark. We stayed with her and tried to keep her as warm as possible until a UTV arrived to extricate her. I was home by 01:00, after 4hrs outside under the stars.
In the end we didn't really do much at all, but it felt like one of the most meaningful nights of my entire life.
Wouldn’t she have died from exposure if you hadn’t found her?
There’s a beautiful quote from a 2019 episode of the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, Auld Lang Syne. John Green recounts some advice he got while in college and working as a chaplain at a children’s hospital: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”
The FF/EMT who was on our team of 3 felt that she was likely 2hrs from hypothermic death. How accurate that is, I don't know. But basically, yes, she would have died if not found.
That is a epic story. What gear were you in, were you in structural gear or something else? Just the thought of hiking in my structural gear gives me blisters.
No structural gear for 2 of the 3 of us. I had civilian gear on other than my EMS jacket which despite not being "proper outdoor gear" is insanly warm. Thankfully I had also layered a merino wool base layer and my RAB thinsulate-y puffer jacket under that, REI expedition gloves and two layers of hats. One of my colleagues did not do so well, and was really inadequately dressed given that we had to strip down a bit to keep her warm. The 3rd person on the team wore his structural jacket and wildland helmet.
The UTV1 crew had their structural jackets on, but otherwise civilian.
For that person, the security of having help might be as useful even medically as the parts that other medics did later.
Woooooooooowwww
100% ... In my life, I accepted a while back that I don't have to solve world hunger or cure cancer in order to be a good person - just be as courteous to others as I can; focus on the little things. For example, I always park my car in the back of parking lots (or otherwise far away) because I'm perfectly capable of walking, while others might struggle. Is that gonna get me a Nobel prize? Certainly not. But I like to think that, sometimes, maybe once per year, a person who struggles with mobility, like an elderly person or someone with an injury, is gonna struggle just a little bit less because I parked out back. No one's gonna build a statue of me for this, but if it helps just one person, that's a good thing. And it's really not that difficult for me to walk an extra 50 yards. LOL
(Edit to correct spelling: Nobel, not Noble. LOL)
I selfishly park in the back because I hate circling the lot looking for a spot. It may/nor be more time efficient on average, but I do not have to deal with that frustration just to save a few steps.
I selfishly park back a little ways myself, simply because far too many parking lots aren't designed for a full-size pickup. The extra steps are definitely worth the frustration saved for me, as well.
"Do no harm" is a far better precept than "be courteous". Lots of harm has been done by courteous people that I'm sure were perfectly lovely to their inner circle and local neighborhood.
This is a good habit for any able bodied person to get into. Not only can it help out someone who needs a closer spot, it doesn't even cost you time on average since you're less likely to be held up by traffic getting in or out of the spot. Plus adding a little more walking into the day is healthy.
I always shake my head at healthy people who block the traffic lane for minutes waiting for someone to load groceries and free up a specific spot, when there are dozens of open spots 40 ft away. Their laziness isn't even saving them any time or aggravation.
Why is it that only "doing nice things" or "volunteering your time" makes you a good person? Does a traffic engineer not better the lives of others? What about a farmer? Where does the food served in a soup kitchen come from if not from the sweat of the farmer's brow? The shelter over everyone's head only exists because truckers transported the materials. Simply existing in a way that isn't purely self-serving is often enough to be hugely helpful to others.
> Simply existing in a way that isn't purely self-serving is often enough to be hugely helpful to others.
You’re basically saying the same thing. “Doing nice things” just gets you in the mindset of helping others, which many people don’t actively do.
And obviously it’s possible to be a bad person who still works in a job that does some good in the world.
I'm somewhat certain that people who worry about whether they're good people are usually better than people who don't think much about it.
I've not met many people who thoughtfully engage with the question of how to live a moral life, only to just not put any of it into practice. I've met plenty of people who barely think about it, and don't consider it a question of much interest.
In “Meditations”, his personal journal, Marcus Aurelius wrote “Stop wasting time thinking what it means to be a good man. Be one.”
That sounds like “step 2: draw the rest of the owl”.
Sometimes, it's not that hard to draw the rest of the owl.
Exactly. What I take away from that passage is "most of the time it's really not hard to figure out how to be a good person so you're better off actually taking some concrete positive action than spending further time navel-gazing".
Like in TFA. Just be kind to others. Be thoughtful. Be nice to people even when you don't have to be. Try to make life better for those around you. But also be kind to yourself. Don't worry about doing the best thing. Just try to do some good things. Everything will work out ok.
The root of why that doesn't work is because you're mostly thinking about yourself still. "am >>I<< a good person?". Good people spend more time thinking about others, how to make them feel better, how to help. Obviously there's a balance to be had, as you can end up burning out from never taking your own needs into consideration.
i think its the opposite. if you do actions that you consider to be good without considering how to be good more effectively, you probably just like the feeling of thinking of yourself as a good person more than actually being a good person
doing good is less about how happy it makes you feel and more about, well, how much you do good
This is where most effective altruism people go wrong. All the money in the world won’t fix anything if no one acts on the problem.
Most effective altruism people very specifically put money in places that are doing things and can prove they are effective.
So no, I don't think this is where a lot of EAs go wrong.
This whole article just feels like analysis paralysis. Maybe it's me, but I don't think being a good person really requires that much thought.
> Maybe it's me, but I don't think being a good person really requires that much thought.
It doesn't, but some especially sadistic people want to make it so, and similarly chastise & ostracize you for not following their diktats to ( (the letter XOR the spirit) AND (the letter XNOR the spirit) ).
This was my impression as well, not sure who the article is for but it's not me, I don't like feeling patronized.
Absolutely correct
Cynically, the more you think about being a good person, the more superior you can feel to others who don't think about it as much. This interpretation fits with explanations for Trump's win, that intellectuals like Vox readers have become detached from common concerns and also smug.
"Being a good person" has been a theme in my entire adult life. I'm a member of an organization that stresses personal improvement (amongst other things).
"Being a good person" can vary, by culture and context.
For example, some cultures prescribe brusqueness, and direct communication, while other cultures want us to always "beat around the bush," before coming to the point. Think New York City, versus Richmond, Virginia.
These are just communication styles, but they can be interpreted as attacking, or dishonesty. In either case, it's entirely possible for someone to label the other as "not-nice," when the opposite may actually be the case.
I have found that fundamental Empathy, and reducing my own self-centeredness helps. Accepting others, and always looking for the good, before the bad, has helped me.
And, as has been pointed out, the older I get, the less simple my relationships are, with others.
> For example, some cultures prescribe brusqueness, and direct communication, while other cultures want us to always "beat around the bush," before coming to the point. Think New York City, versus Richmond, Virginia.
Askers vs. Guessers - a fun spectrum to think about, once you realize it exists: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/askers-...
That's a great thread[0]!
[0] https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...
> I'm a member of an organization that stresses personal improvement (amongst other things).
Do you mind if I ask what kind of organization? I’ve struggled to find active groups focused on values/principles instead of hobbies. Or maybe by organization, you mean work?
Won't go into detail. Recovery fellowship.
I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness.
Being able to fairly easily put myself in someone else's shoes is pretty much the only thing I actually like about myself. I feel like part of what defines us as a species is learning how to understand people who do not deserve us to understand them.
In 2023 my iPhone was stolen (story is parent to the linked comment). They eventually caught the kid who stole the phone, and I refused to press charges. Pretty much everyone thought I was dumb for doing that, but I didn't see it that way; I didn't see any good coming from throwing a 17 year old kid into jail, and I remember how stupid I was when I was 17.
I doubt he's going to have some Les Misérables moment and turn his life around, but I would hope that if I were caught for something stupid when I was 17 someone else would have extended me the same benefit of the doubt. I don't regret it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906469
> I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness.
It is not. But also, empathy is not the same thing as kindness.
Empathy, as you mentioned, is the ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes. To imagine what is like to be other.
Fraudsters, cheaters, psycopaths. All of these are great empaths. They understand others in a deep level. But they're not kind, they are ruthless.
> I feel like part of what defines us as a species is learning how to understand people who do not deserve us to understand them.
Here you are talking about kindness. I think similarly.
I also believe this is correlated with creativity and collaboration skills. To me, there is something about the inner act of kind understanding that seems to be a _prerequisite_ for advanced communication. Totally out of my ass, I'm no psychologist.
> I would hope that if I were caught for something stupid when I was 17 someone else would have extended me the same benefit of the doubt
Not only you understood that, but you were able to communicate something to the kid that is remarkably uncommunicable. The kind act is also a kind message, you _meant it_ as a message somehow. Not all empaths want or can do that.
I don't think I disagree with anything you said (though I'm hesitant to call myself creative).
I guess when I say "empathy", I also mean "feeling someone's pain", in addition to the "someone else's shoes".
I think being able to understand someone's situation, and see how they're actually hurting, and how you'd hurt if someone did that to you, is the part of empathy/kindness that is a key ingredient in being a "decent human". I'm not perfect at it, obviously, I've acted selfishly plenty of times and I regret the times that I have, but it's the closest thing I have to a "moral code".
In regards to this kid, I just remember how angry I was at everything when I was 17. I hated going to school, I hated most of my teachers, I hated most of my classmates, I hated girls who wouldn't date me, and I hated guys who wouldn't be my friend. I was an idiot. It's a tough age for anyone, and I think a lot of people (particularly those in charge the US penal codes) forget that fact.
I meant creativity in a broader sense. Like "using stone tools", not "painting and dancing" (but not excluding it!).
Kind empathy has been demonstrated in some rats (a highly intelligent animal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyolz2Qf1ms
Note the researchers mentioning a "social contagion" that encourages empathy (another one of your kind crying, you cry). The goal of the experiment is to detect an even deeper kind of empathy (the savior rat is also in high stress and must overcome its instincts to save his fellow rat).
The thing you did for the kid required much more sophistication than that. Some of that sophistication comes from or manifests as empathy, in the sense that they're correlated.
I'm also saying it in a broader sense than only biological in rats. But that's the part that science has no data yet, so that's why I say it comes from my conjecturing ass.
Empathy is I feel what you feel. Compassion is I understand what you feel, how can we help? It is usually better to aim for compassion because if a person is having a crisis you don't want to go down in flames with them, compassion gives us emotional space to be helpful rather than affected by emotions that can pull us down.
> Fraudsters, cheaters, psycopaths. All of these are great empaths. They understand others in a deep level.
No, psychopathy is clinically defined in part by a lack of empathy.
As I said, I'm no psychologist. I am also not a psychiatrist or neurologist.
If you are one, I'm sure there's more to it than just "lack of empathy", and I would love to hear more.
I encounter stuff like that, almost every day.
It's really important for me to feel empathy for others. It is not the same as weakness.
I was always told that it's really important to understand our enemies, and that often includes admitting that they are human, and have human motives.
That's not the same as being weak.
I've also been told "If you want to understand rats, talk to an exterminator."
>I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness.
To put it in a different context, the psychologist Paul Bloom wrote an interesting book titled "Against Empathy." He makes a distinction between "emotional empathy" and "cognitive empathy". He is an advocate of the latter, while acknowledging that the former can lead to many sub-optimal outcomes.
I'm not terribly concerned with optimizing, honestly. I try and make decisions that I'm unlikely to regret, at least not for long term. Hurting someone, or not helping someone that I should have helped, are things that I end up really regretting, and those are the things that keep me up at night.
I don't lose a lot of sleep for doing something that I genuinely thought was right. If someone takes advantage of my empathetic nature and exploits me, I'm not exactly slap-happy about it, but I can go to bed knowing that I did the right thing, and that person is just an asshole.
Pretty much every single bad thing I've done that I lose sleep over has come as a direct result of me trying to "override" my natural empathy. I'm done doing that.
An economists perspective would be that your utility function can be whatever you want. According to what you said above, you would be minimizing regret, which is an optimization goal (although it sounds overly dry in that context).
Blooms point is that when we take on the emotions of someone else, it has the ability to override our rational decision making and that rational decisions tend to lead to objectively better outcomes.
There's probably some truth to this, and I suppose you can define "objectively better" as "maximizing your optimization goal" or "minimizing the bad stuff" or something, quantifying that however you want.
That said, I'm not 100% convinced that my "rational brain" actually is better at making decisions that minimize regret than just relying on emotions. My rational brain is very good at rationalizing shit to where I can convince myself that something that's very obviously bad is "actually ok when you think about it like this...", and then I regret it afterwards.
At least for me, that doesn't really happen when I just rely heavily on my emotional brain.
I think this is all true, with an added nuance:
We typically make decisions with our emotional mind, and justify it with our rational mind after the fact. I believe Bloom is in the camp that we can override that initial emotional impulse, but there are people who disagree with him. In any event, if the end goal is emotional ("minimize regret") I'm not sure there's much to be gained by bringing the rational into it.
The biggest takeaway I had from his book is that being overly emotionally empathetic can make us biased and lose out on the bigger picture, like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs. (There are other biased aspects, like the fact that we tend to empathize more with people who are similar to us, that can lead to obvious less-than-great outcomes.)
> like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs
Yeah, that's fair.
In my previous apartment, there was a guy named Julius. I really liked him, he was very pleasant to talk to, funny, charming, and just very nice.
We were in that apartment for three years, and nothing too remarkable happened, but the last year, Julius fell into some kind of lifestyle that I'm unsure of the details of, but ended up with him constantly stoned, missing teeth, and evicted from the apartment.
He was still in my neighborhood (homeless as far as I could tell), and he would still talk to me, always really polite, but with increasingly-yellow eyes, and it made me really sad, because I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone, let alone someone who was always kind to me.
My wife and I discussed maybe giving him some money to try to get back on his feet, but we decided against it because we were confident that if we did it would likely go to drugs. We really wanted to help, but we were afraid, like you said, it would be a short-term want overshadowing a long term gain.
If I had genuinely thought that writing him a check for $1,000 would dramatically improve his life, I would have done it in a heartbeat, but I didn't, and I felt like there was a good chance it would fuel a bender that would lead to an overdose.
I would occasionally buy him lunch at the nearby Wendy's, and I offered to try and help him fix up his resume to maybe make him more employable, but nothing ever came of that.
We eventually moved from that apartment and I'm not sure what happened to Julius. I hope he's ok, but I suspect that he's probably dead now, from an overdose or alcohol poisoning. A part of me wishes I had given him some money to dig himself out, but I think I made the right choice.
I don't lose sleep over my actions on that one; there wasn't really anything I could have done much different. Sometimes sad shit just happens, and it's no one's fault.
I guess i would have done the same.
Do they throw 17 yos in jail, where you live? If so, do they do that over stealing a phone? If so... maybe it would be more moral in stepping into a political career and try to change some laws?
I knew someone that spent about 18 years in Maximum Security adult prison, from 17, because he burgled the house of an important person.
One of the smartest people I ever knew. Probably had an IQ of 140. He was an HVAC tech, and had trouble staying employed.
It totally wrecked his life, and he ended badly.
Yes, we do that stuff in the US.
Sounds really unusual for a first offense at that age even for burglary. So I assume there’s more to the story.
Yeah. He never got specific, but I think so. However, this was also "Down South," where the rich folks literally have the prosecutors and police on their payroll.
Was his "trouble staying employed" because HVAC bored him out of his mind, or attention span issues, or other factors?
The world has plenty of people who are really smart, yet are really not "good employee" material.
He was angry. I mean, really angry.
He was also very big and intimidating. That didn't help.
Most of the anger came from prison, and from being screwed over, to be thrown in there.
That can make it difficult to get along with others, and those who don't play well with others, have trouble staying employed.
But it's also possible to transcend that kind of thing. I see it regularly. It just takes a lot of work. Painful, humbling, work.
I can't even imagine how much prison would fuck me up.
Between potential sexual abuse, being around a lot of violent people, the general disregard Americans have for prisoners and convicted felons and their well-being, and the "doing what you have to to survive" mentality that seems to scar incarcerated people, it would be hard for it not to change you as a person.
I really hate how the US handles prisons, and I really hate the "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality we have here. I hope it's obvious, that's not something I agree with.
But he did burgle a house, so obviously he had some pre-existing behavioral issues, right? And those are probably not gone.
> Most of the anger came from prison, and from being screwed over, to be thrown in there.
That clearly illustrates that he didn't progress at all in his understanding of life. I'd be afraid to live within few kilometers of him let alone having him work at my company if I had one
Yup. He never adjusted. He was always acting as if he was still in The Yard.
My point was, he might have already been acting as if he was in The Yard before they put him in The Yard.
Maybe, but I didn't know him, before.
I have, however, been dealing with after-incarceration folks for a few decades, and there's a particular type of attitude that is absolutely required to survive, inside, and that must be completely stripped away, once they get out, as it is pure poison, outside the wall.
> He was also very big and intimidating.
I'll bet that was unhelpful at age 17, when our <cough/> justice system was deciding his fate.
Tons of factors in the US for this stuff; which state you're in, how they stole the phone (e.g. violent vs. just grabbing it off a table when the owner isn't looking), prior history, if they're tried as a child vs adult, and (let's be honest) if they can afford a good lawyer.
It definitely wouldn't be "weird" to throw a 17 year old in jail for stealing an iPhone, particularly in my case it would likely have been tried as a "mugging" and I suspect classified in the "violent" category (even though I was unharmed).
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to throw the book at this kid, it did kind of cause a bit of frustration and trauma that I still haven't completely worked through, but I still think I made the right choice, even if everyone else in my life disagrees.
A friend of mine got life in prison with no parole at 17.
I myself got 6 months jail time at 17 after being subject to a highly illegal and corrupt legal racket in a small town, when a meth-dealing police officer planted weed on me at the scene of an accident. I was also homeless. Good times.
[dead]
Sure. Though politician more likely to win would be one who's hardliner on crime and propose tough laws not compassionate ones.
I really resonate with this sentiment and want to share a similar story.
Where I live, supermarkets have a reception where you can leave your belongings while you're shopping. The employee in charge gives you a numbered card that matches the drawer in which they stored your things (all of this is handled by the employee) and off you go. No keys or anything, only a drawer with a card.
A few months ago I left my backpack at a one of these. 20 minutes later, as I was about to leave, I went to return the card in order to retrieve my stuff and to my surprise they gave me someone else's backpack.
I kindly asked what happened and after the manager had gone to check the CCTV footage they told me they gave my backpack to another customer. The problem? The numbered card didn't match the drawer and no one had realised. And there I was with the stranger's backpack and no way to contact him.
I agreed to wait until this man came back to return my stuff so we could switch backpacks (he had to; his work ID was on his backpack). I went home, told my family what happened, and they asked me what I told the supermarket staff. "Nothing, I'm just gonna wait" I said, and they rambled on about how I should have yelled at them and made a scene and maybe even made them fire the employee that grabbed my backpack.
I didn't do any of that because I precisely didn't want them to fire the poor minimum wage worker. Besides, I understood all of this happened because the system of numbered card/open drawer is completely broken. It wasn't relly the employee's fault; although it was his mistake not checking the numbers not matching. Yelling wouldn't have fixed anything.
I got my backpack back the next morning. No one was fired. The supermarket manager didn't even apologize for the inconvenience though, but ok.
Be kind.
I think you did the right thing. Mistakes happen, and very little good would come out of demanding that this person gets fired as a result of one (though the employee probably did deserve a bit of embarrassment). The manager probably should have apologized, but it's not the end of the world.
I will admit that I get a bit paranoid with those bag-check things at the stores here. At the stores in my neighborhood, they know me well enough to where they almost never even check my card, it would be super easy for me to grab someone else's bag. I've never done it, I don't want to do it, but I could...that's why I usually don't go directly before or after work, because I don't want my bag with an expensive Macbook to get stolen.
Those with a lot of introspection can do this, and it can be a benefit to yourself and others when used correctly.
In my opinion, you were dumb for doing that, but I can't say I haven't done something similar. Given my experience, I wouldn't do this again.
My experience involved a crazed homeowner in their 40s shooting at me standing on the public sidewalk for taking pictures of the neighborhood for a realtor, this was around 2009. They thought I worked for their mortgage lender who was foreclosing.
The wood fence took most of the damage, but there were kids playing in the paved cul-de-sac right behind where I was standing. No serious injuries, thankfully, and the police confiscated the firearm. I didn't press charges, because I empathized as my family had people who lost their entire retirements in the fallout from the market and that was real fresh.
I would press charges today having had that experience (and others). Very few people change themselves unless they are forced to through isolated introspection or negative circumstance. Being young, or stupid, or a victim, isn't a defensible justification. Its letting them off the hook for their actions without consequence.
I would press charges, too. Shooting is a lot different from stealing.
I might not let people off the hook, because I think it might change them, but it might change someone else who saw it happen, or, maybe, a family member that depends on them.
This goes doubly true, these days, with everything being live-streamed.
I get a little nauseous, though, at some of the staged crap, out there.
It is different from stealing, but crimes can escalate quickly and without warning.
What people don't realize is when these type of things happen, if you haven't experienced it before, its surreal, and it can take a moment to realize, recognize and react. Even after the fact, with close calls there's a lot of processing and grappling with your own mortality.
All you really see in the moment is a white, old rundown wood fence that suddenly becomes a cloud of flying splinters and wood chips. It is very different from how its portrayed in the media.
I'm now a big believer that proper firearm safety and handling training should be mandatory for everyone by 18. You recognize the sounds, you see the effect, you can react much quicker with the experience imparted by training than without.
I totally agree about the staged stuff. Anything like that muddies the reality.
It's certainly violating and I was pretty upset to have my phone stolen, but there's always a risk of someone fucking you over for doing nearly anything. I said it in a sibling response; I don't lose sleep for doing something that I genuinely thought was right. I might be a bit more cautious now, but I cannot imagine a scenario where, if a 17 year old said he needed to call his mom, that I don't try and help somehow, though I'd probably point him to the nearest police station nowadays (it's NYC, they're everywhere).
Things would definitely be different if it were an armed robbery, however. The reason I didn't feel the need to press charges is because I genuinely don't think I was ever in any "danger". As far as I'm aware, the kid wasn't armed, outside of a light shove that was clearly not meant to hurt me, there wasn't even physical contact, so I think it was just some idiot teenager who snatched a phone.
If they had had a gun or a knife or physically assaulted me, I would probably have pressed charges, since that's a more-direct public safety issue at hand there.
This depends on the kid, doesn’t it?
> I didn't see any good coming from throwing a 17 year old kid into jail, and I remember how stupid I was when I was 17.
For example, being forced to confront the consequences of their actions at 17 when the punishment is lesser and likely to include diversion or similar might have prevented them from committing a similar crime when older and receiving a harsher penalty — which in your empathy, you ensured would happen by refusing to punish them. Their practice and willingness to use force, as described in your referenced comment, indicates this isn’t their first time committing such a crime. By normalizing that crime wouldn’t be punished, you created a worse situation.
You can see similar unfolding at scale in major US cities, where crime (particularly theft) skyrocketed — and intensified, eg the recent subway burnings in NYC. Without enforcing norms, they break down.
A good heuristic for me is “what happens when everybody behaves that way?” In this case, it leads to society degrading.
Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that this would go to grownup court and they’d be given the full consequences.
“Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away.
I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison. I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive.
I don’t know which stats you’re referring to, but I highly doubt that “yuppies not pressing charges against children stealing two year old iPhones” is a significant cause of a crime uptake.
the irony in calling someone "extremely naive" while talking about a 17 year old getting prison time for snatching a phone. on top of the rest of the posts
> “Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away.
People call it “toxic empathy” not because empathy is inherently wrong, but because it leads to people such as yourself minimizing the use of force in a crime (which you admit this was) while showing selective empathy only for the perpetrator and not their future victims.
> Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”.
> I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison.
These both sounds like you’re rationalizing an emotive decision, post hoc.
> I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive.
They likely would’ve negotiated a plea for a misdemeanor and treatment on a first offense, in the US. Even first time lower felonies result in supervised probation and mandatory treatment, eg, the recommended outcome for drug felonies.
Again, you seem to be focusing entirely on your feelings — without an honest account of either the likely outcome of prosecution, the criminal’s future (having normalized violent robberies), or their future victims.
This is why it’s called “toxic empathy”: because you’re soothing your own feelings without engaging in rational analysis nor true empathy, eg, by understanding that sometimes criminals turn their lives around because they’re punished or that future victims deserve your care also.
No, you’re making a lot of assertions here that are not founded.
> while showing selective empathy only for the perpetrator and not their future victims.
Actually that’s not what I did. I didn’t really concede them “using force”, a light shove really isn’t “force” any more than an asshole pushing his way onto the subway is “using force”, and I said in sibling comments that I would have pressed charges if I genuinely thought that there was any real risk of danger on my end.
And again, I absolutely do not concede that putting a kid through the system is automatically going to lead to better results.
> These both sounds like you’re rationalizing an emotive decision, post hoc.
I am not rationalizing a decision “post hoc”, because that was literally the decision making process that was being employed when I was given the option to press charges. You can say it was dumb, that’s fine, but it’s not “post hoc”, because it’s not “post”.
> you’re soothing your own feelings without engaging in rational analysis nor true empathy, eg, by understanding that sometimes criminals turn their lives around because they’re punished or that future victims deserve your care also.
That can happen, but that’s not usually what happens when people get put through the system. You have no reason to think that bureaucratically punishing a child is going to force them to turn their life around. You’re asserting it.
I do not agree with your characterization of my character as “toxic empathy”.
Frankly I find this line of thinking pretty tiring, with people pretending that they care about abstract “future victims”, that may or may not exist, as a means of LARPing empathy.
You ignored the expected outcomes to emphasize your emotional rationalization based on “jailing a child”. That was never likely to happen, based on how US law works. For theft, even felony theft, you’re usually talking about supervised probation on a first offense — the same as felony drug offenses. There’s a whole chart of proscribed sentences based on offense and contributing factors.
> That can happen, but that’s not usually what happens when people get put through the system.
But that’s not the relevant question, eg, you’re ignoring the fact most thieves don’t stop because someone declined to prosecute them, either. You’re holding me to standards you didn’t apply to yourself.
The relevant question is — “for serial criminals who later stopped, what caused them to?”
In many cases, being jailed does stop their repeated criminality or stop the pathway of escalation. By contrast, there’s also many people who because they’re not punished, continue to escalate until they commit a violent offense and the state is forced to jail them.
> Frankly I find this line of thinking pretty tiring, with people pretending that they care about abstract “future victims”, that may or may not exist, as a means of LARPing empathy.
We’re discussing practiced criminals who likely offended before and will again — and who were physically aggressive with their victim.
You’re accusing me of “LARPing” empathy, but you’re showing time after time you’re not engaging in empathy (either understanding the thieves nor concern about victims), but soothing your emotions. That you don’t think future victims matter or people are genuinely concerned about them speaks to your own lack of empathy — both in general (ie, you can’t imagine how the person who stole from you might harm someone else and that person might be hurt) and in particular (ie, you can’t imagine how I’d genuinely be concerned about other victims, because that’s not how you feel).
You’re the one LARPing empathy to cover for your toxic emotionally driven conduct.
First, calling my conduct “emotionally driven” really doesn’t work as an insult for me.
I still don’t consider what I have done as “toxic”. I used discretion to not press charges because I don’t think that pushing a kid through the system was going to lead to anything good.
Let’s say grant that a stolen iPhone wouldn’t lead to jail time, let’s say I am wrong about that. Even if that’s the case, if I genuinely believed that jail time was in the picture, are you saying that my decision here was “rational”?
Also, no, you’re the one LARPing. You’re inventing future victims that you do not have any reason to think exist as a means of dismissing my point.
> they can be interpreted as attacking, or weakness
I think a more constructive way to look at it is one style puts a higher cost on wasting time than and the other style puts a higher cost on appearing unsympathetic. I call it "country style" (putting more value on appearing empathetic than being time-efficient) and "city style" (the opposite). People who grow up in one environment or the other often have trouble transitioning to the other simply because they don't understand that there are different quality metrics in play.
Yup.
I live in New York, and have a friend from Atlanta. He has that "meandering" style, where it can take him a while, to get to the point.
I swapped "weakness" for "dishonesty," because that's what a lot of New Yorkers think of that style.
He's a really decent chap, but he seems to get a lot of New Yorkers pissed at him.
> I swapped "weakness" for "dishonesty,"
But both of those are unnecessarily uncharitable readings. Country style is neither weak nor dishonest, it's just different. A lot of country-style people consider city-style to be "rude" but it's not, it's just more efficient than they're used to.
I was raised very loosely Lutheran (Christian). We barely went to church and stopped entirely after I was confirmed. I practice it exactly 0% now and have never in my adult life.
However I feel like something got cooked into me, and maybe even my parents, that gives me a bit of guidance here. I can't explain it but I feel like I have a foundation that is preventing me from feeling the empty nihilism that plagues a lot of folks.
Christianity teaches we are all children of God, brothers and sisters with equal dignity and respect and heirs to a heavenly kingdom.
We reject the Trolley problem. We reject the idea of starving sailors on a deserted island should draw lots and eat one of their own.
To argue otherwise is to agree with what we decried about ancient societies. Sacrificing children/prisoners/slaves to Moloch for own benefit is the sure path to hell.
[flagged]
"I feared I’d just lost my optimal soulmate and was now doomed to a suboptimal life, one that wouldn’t be as meaningful as it could be, one that fell short of its potential" definitely resonates.
This mindset is such a trap. It leads to worse outcomes.
Out of all the people you can pair-bond with, and for some definition of soulmateness, one person is the greatest.
In the space of all the decisions you could’ve made in your life, there are some paths that would’ve indeed led you to that person.
But that person’s identity, and that path, are simply unknowable. Even if they were knowable, odds are you’d screw up somewhere down the line, and know that you did so, and that could destroy a person.
Similarly, your life definitely isn’t as meaningful as it could possibly have been (for some definition of meaning), and it definitely has fallen short of its potential. Your life is suboptimal. Everyone’s is.
This is human. This is ok.
To be clear: it’s up to you to decide whether this is ok. If you decide it’s not ok, then as you agonize over the delta between your hypothetical maximized self and your actual self, you will miss your life.
That hypothetical maximized self doesn’t exist. Fuck ‘em. You exist. You’re the only version of you that matters.
If you think you can't optimize your way into something, your objective function or constraints are simply wrong. You can always optimize.
Au contraire, I wear very large shoes, so my step size becomes a limiting factor at some point.
There's always a bigger gradient.
'Mess'-iah Complex(ity)
I could not disagree more. There are 1000s of examples of people becoming better people after forgetting. See "Regarding Henry" and Heidegger "Being and time."
How does forgetting relate to the article?
I always tell my daughter to be a kind person because there is currently an oversupply of assholes. I try to compliment someone on something whenever I go out and about. I like your hair, I like your shirt, etc. It's the simple things.
The author and their anecdotes seem like compulsive behavior/thinking. They'll hopefully get over it once life beats them down a bit more. Just be good to people, don't over think it.
> there is currently an oversupply of assholes.
My grandpa used to say, "There are more horses' asses than there are horses."
Looks like there's a history around that quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/11/15/horses-ass/
> I try to compliment someone on something whenever I go out and about.
And if you can't do that, just ask people how are they doing.
> there is currently an oversupply of assholes.
I say always that, and also of stupids, and the 2 are extremely difficult to tell apart.
> I always tell my daughter to be a kind person because there is currently an oversupply of assholes.
I'm sorry to hear that. I don't want to come across as harsh, but your approach/wording seems condescending, egotistical, and ultimately an empty way to live. Wise people learn by observing others (as the saying goes), but allowing others to dictate who you are reflects a lack of character IMO.
I'm guessing from your reply that you don't think its important to emphasise kindness as part of supporting your childrens' growth. If that is the case, what do you emphasise if anything?
You're guessing wrong.
Kindness has a merit on it's own and ultimately it's a good idea for a person to decide what they want to be and take responsibility for their choices.
Being kind "because there are too many unkind people out there" sounds wrong. I have no idea how they measured the "too many unkind people out there" but lets assume for a moment this balance shifts - then what? They should be unkind because there are too many kind people out there? Is this is a simple act of balancing the two sides?
I think the sentiment is that it feels like theres a lot of unkindness in the world and that makes it a worse place and you can either be part of that or you can make the world a better place by striving to be kind. Thats my interpretation anyway.
It sounds bad because the root comment is priming a negative perspective of the world.
They could have said:
"Most people are kind. Be kind and most people will be kind back." Or something with positive intent. Instead they seem to be priming a superiority trip.
Agreed.
Or they could said:
"Be kind because it's the right thing to do."
This. This is good enough reason to be kind. So let’s do that :-)
>Being kind "because there are too many unkind people out there" sounds wrong. I have no idea how they measured the "too many unkind people out there"
This sounds wrong because you feel we need more assholes out there, or you feel we have the proper amount?
>> I always tell my daughter to be a kind person because there is currently an oversupply of assholes.
>I don't want to come across as harsh
Found one!
What? Deciding to stop writing a book because no one will read is the furthest one can get from a moral decision.
I have a number of criticisms of the article and wish that the author of the article had a bit more philosophical training.
While the author doesn't explicate it, the author is operating within a particular moral framework that has certain conclusions on what actions are moral in certain situations, and in this framework, moral actions can bring the agent suffering. The article focuses on one category of moral action. The author observes that it is possible for a person who continually internally contemplates and "tries" to externally act according to that moral calculus to do so in a way that brings them to a psychological suffering. (My description is more general; the author uses 'optimization' to describe their) Hereafter, we shall to 'continual internal contemplation and "trying" to externally act according to that moral calculus to do so in a way that brings one psychological suffering.' by Practice.
They want to argue that this Practice is not itself morally good (the first paragraph) I find the author's argument incomplete. They seem to implicitly make the additional reasoning steps: because the Practicioner may themself suffer greatly, this Practice is not moral. This step needs support. After all, if I fracture a leg to save a healthy baby from a car accident, that's probably a moral act even though it brings me suffering.
I shall provide an argument for this step that works in most cases (and in exactly the cases that I think it should work for). Observe that most parents recognize that it is probably good to stay healthy, because a healthy parent has the capacity to contribute more to their children's happiness. But a parent would still fracture a leg to save their child from a car accident. Here, the moral calculus is more visible because we are substituted in the more visible physical health rather than psychological safety, and the more proximate children for the remote person. Similarly, a Practicioner should desist to the extent that they can sustain their psychological health that they have the capacity to contribute more to good. And there are cases where that psychological health ought to be sacrificed, because the external situation is sufficiently critical.
I will also talk about the psychology in the analogy that I have given. There are frequently times where parents don't see that their health is important to the well-being of their children, and allow themselves to abuse their health for unimportant reasons/causes. Analogically, a Practicioner like the author and their peers pursuing 'optimization' likely allowed their psychological well-being to suffer for unimportant reasons/causes.
Another point: a parent who has made a visible sacrifice for their child(ren) often feels good about it. But this psychological response to a sacrifice is conditional on the situation being simple enough to be "emotionally recognizable". As an analogy, suppose that through a charity you have donated money to fund a life-saving operation of a distant child, and despite paper and institutional guarantees, you do not so much even see a photo of the person whose life you have saved. That emotionally hits very different as spending the same amount for a relative that you meet often, and also for one's own child; after all, direct sense-perception provides very good evidence. As a methodological point, I think it helps to explore cognitively building the infrastructure so that you feel the psychologically appropriate reward to sacrifices for sufficiently certain good, but remote, causes.
Finally, note that there are moral frameworks for which this argument is completely irrelevant. For example, Aristippus argues that one should practice instant gratification, in which case such deliberation on methods seems irrelevant.
Define good person, vox. Define good person and claim your prize
While you cant optimise your way to bieng a good person, there are companys with the right conections and skills to do it for you. Reputaion cleaning or some simlar term, for the do it yourselfers, the newspaper and publishing industry offers indidvuals the option of having articles including there criminality, etc, pulled, deleeted.
The Great(est) Command(ment) is to love God with all our being, and then to love our neighbors as ourself, not more, not less.
Being kind, generous, forgiving, helpful, and compassionate are some of the ways we can love people, and should, in order to be a good person who reaps happiness in their life. God does not force us to do this, and freely allows us to choose each virtue's corresponding vice, if we wish, instead.
God would, however, prefer us to treat each other well and form loving societies, but our ignorance of what good even is, as well as or selfishnesses that rebel against lovingly curious attitudes and behaviors, are preventing our moving towards such positive self-evolution.
We all have the choice to embark on becoming filled with love towards each other; a person does not need God's help to choose to be good by embracing a more virtuous life that cares for others, but the Creator just might be essential for our becoming actually transformed into a really, really good person. In fact, connecting with the Ultimate Loner just might be an integral part of what is possible in the human experience.
And I'm using "just might" as a big ol' hint that that is actually the truth of our reality, which is exactly what it is, my friends.
The choice to seek, learn, and believe the truth is everyone's human right. We each exercise that right every moment of every day, for good or ill, in loving care or selfish callousness.
Why write so much about a problem nobody have? Just be normal for fuck sake.
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There's so much evil in this world (the UK rapes scandal which implicated countless men comes to mind [1]) that simply by being not evil and by denouncing evil you're already way better than many.
Doing no harm to anyone is being good enough.
The absolute worst, to me, are those who always seek to pardon evil. For example those who look for excuses to explain the behavior of child rapists and why we should give them a second chance etc.
These people, who pretend to be good, are actually complicit of the pure evil that exists and persists on earth.
Compassion, when it comes at the expense of victims, becomes evil.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
You can be a good person by minimizing being objectively evil. If you can't see things you can't optimize things, which the title suggests, but the content itself is lacking in proper support while not covering certain obvious aspects, not lacking in volume. They were quite mistaken about a number of things.
Objectively, evil people (at least in the past) is characterized by a willful blindness to the consequences of said person's evil actions. Evil acts being objectively destructive acts.
Altruism and its derivatives as belief systems are evil.
They are value systems where a person's worth is only based upon what they give up to others. Under such belief systems, if you aren't selfless, you are evil and have no worth.
People use false claims and false justification under these systems, of all sorts, to blind themselves and by extension result in destructive acts towards the ideal of what the system considers good.
To be selfless, and impose that on others, eventually to the point of destruction (others), and eventual self-destruction (self). Its all quite wrong.
You can't optimize towards truth or beneficial outcomes, if you don't recognize the truth or those outcomes. Generally speaking, there are far more things that you can do that are destructive, than there are those that are beneficial.
Its also of primary important to retain an objective grip on reality. Blindness leads to delusion.
Accept that you are evil and just try to do some good every now and then. It's what Christians are told. But somehow everybody seems to be missing the point.
Bro, effective altruism is a simple thing: if you have some altruistic goal, you’ll get better results if you choose things that are good at getting the goal. It doesn’t require that your utility function matches anyone else’s.
For instance, I don’t think life (including human) is inherently worth anything so it’s not a big deal if a bunch of kids somewhere die of guinea worm. But for my objectives my charitable giving yields better outcomes. I’m happy with that.
The selfish gene pro social aptitude x morals x decisions
Why it doesn't matter bhdbchasbcahdchjaschabsh
[dead]
Effective altruism says otherwise
Effective Altruism is a scam. Sam Bankman Fried's guru tried to distance itself from the fraud that happened, tweeting he needed to "reflect" on what happened but... He hasn't handed back the 15 million GBP property bought in England with stolen funds donated by SBF. Now even to this day there are still funds being clawed back from the Enron scam (or at least there was still a few years ago) so that mansion may be clawed back from the Effective Altruism movement, even if it take years.
They're simply a scam. Like most sects.
A little, but they have the hottest, most unhinged, culty women at my university so I can't complain
You can. It's called therapy.
Sadly, "therapy speak" entering in to someone's life can be its own form of getting worse.
Still, I think your point is largely fair and correct. Easy to agree with the headline, in that you likely won't optimize your way to being a good person. But you can use optimization ideas to remove things that are making you not a good person. Indeed, the main optimization idea is to measure something, and then take action to move it in the direction you prefer. If what you are doing isn't moving in that direction, you aren't optimizing for it anymore.
therapy will generally recommend removing the need to optimize entirely, in order to achieve an emotional homeostasis (particularly given that the need to optimize often leads to obsessive/compulsive behavior).
so, no
It does not lead to obsessive/compulsive behaviour if you simply optimize your emotional and awareness skills first.
I think you are overestimating how much an average person can change itself. I’ve seen therapy helping to surmount some hurdles, but completely changing a person, in a positive way, rarely. Again keyword: average.
> It does not lead to obsessive/compulsive behaviour if you simply optimize your emotional and awareness skills first.
I don't think you understand what optimizing entails.
Optimization is inherently antithetical to balance, in principle.
Optimization is looking for local/global maxima. Balance is releasing the need from seeking local/global maxima entirely.
I mean, you could try to seek balance through optimization. Good luck with that.
Surfing really helps. And maybe if you get it on a physical/body level then "going with it" seeps into your mind somehow?
If you imagine therapy as a way to condition some sort of gradient descent on emotions and awareness you can already see the problem.
The implication of your statement is you eventually reach some global optima. The reality is you become over-aware of some things and under-aware of others. This is the local optima and you've been caught in a bowl. Therapy "works" when your local optima is "good enough" for your own definition of done. However, it can often take several "bumps" out of those local optima to find it and once again you haven't really "optimized" like you are implying.
I would think the focus on optimization of emotional and awareness skills would simply lead to more, not less, anxiety. It sounds like the same problem people have with always being online and being a good "global citizen". In this example, like your example, when you feed your learning algorithm data about some war in a far off land you necessarily reduce the weight on your immediate surroundings.
Therefore, I believe it's impossible to "optimize" such things without making significant learning losses. Better to succumb to the brownian motion of life - imo.
I read 5 vaguely written paragraphs of generalities and then am being told about the sham "effective altruists" who gave us Scam Bankman Fraud as their best known adherent.
This article doesn't say anything afaict.
Maybe it should start with "don't be a fake altruist"?